'A mania for making money': The sordid lives of the Vanderbilt family

In a new book titled, , CNN anchor Anderson Cooper, turns a journalistic eye on his own family by raising the velvet curtain on the private lives, immense tragedies, and enormous glamour of the storied and scandalous American dynasty.  

Anderson Cooper is the great-great-great grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, a poor farmer from Staten Island who became the richest self-made man in America with a ‘pathological obsession for money.’

The magnate’s vast shipping and railroad empire launched his family and multiple generations into stratospheric wealth, cementing their position as American royalty, ‘with the titles and the palaces to prove it,’ he writes.

By the time he died in 1877, Cornelius had amassed a $100 million fortune – roughly $2.6 billion in today’s money – and more than the entire US Treasury at the time. 

But within a few generations, the money was all but gone, depleted by heirs who only knew how to ‘live well, marry well’ and spend lavishly.

‘This is the story of the greatest American fortune ever squandered,’ writes Cooper. ‘The story of the extraordinary rise and epic fall of the Vanderbilt dynasty.’ 

It’s like ‘The Crown on steroids,’ he told CNN in a later interview. 

Cornelius Vanderbilt, the first tycoon:

Anderson Cooper’s earliest ancestor was an undistinguished  indentured farmer named Jan Aertsen, who arrived in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (modern-day New York City) during the 1650s. Aertsen was from the village of Bilt in the Utrecht region of Holland and his name was recorded ‘van der Bilt,’ or ‘from the Bilt’ –  which evolved later to ‘Vanderbilt.’    

The family fortune wasn’t made until the nineteenth century when Cornelius ‘Commodore’ Vanderbilt, an upstart from Staten Island who quit school at the age of 11 began working in his father’s ferry business. He was born into poverty in 1794, and known as a headstrong, stubborn and manipulative child who was willing to risk almost anything to make money.     

When he was 15, Cornelius used a $100 loan from his mother to buy his own boat for piloting passengers through the rough currents between Staten Island and Manhattan. Within six months, he had run his own father out of the ferry business. 

‘The wharves were the crucible in which Cornelius Vanderbilt’s acquisitive hunger was forged,’ wrote Cooper. ‘He drank and whored and didn’t stand down from a fight.’

Cornelius married his first cousin, Sophia Johnson Vanderbilt when he was 19 years old and together they had 13 children, 12 of which would survive into adulthood.

He expanded into steamboats and made a fortune in shipping by monopolizing the waterways around New York during the 1830s. Then he shifted attention to trains when he bought up local railroads and merged them into a vast transportation network that stretched across the United States. 

‘His rise was dizzying,’ said Cooper of his great-great-great grandfather. ‘He possessed a genius and a mania for making money, but his obsession with material wealth would border on pathological, and the pathology born of that wealth would go on to infect each successive generation in different ways.’ 

Despite his enormous wealth, money did not buy Cornelius respectability among the old guard in Washington Square Park. The Knickerbockers, Schermerhorns and Lorillards found the tobacco chewing, philandering, profanity-prone, illiterate as vulgar.

‘Money was his sole concern: making it, spending it, and making more. New York society could ignore him, but in the end, they couldn’t ignore his money. No one could,’ w door to the Triple Palace stood William ‘Willie’ Kissam and Alva’s ‘Petit Chateau’ at 660 Fifth Avenue. Determined to upstage her sister-in-law down the street, Alva designed her grandiose mansion after the gothic castles she saw during her childhood in France. The palatial residence made of limestone featured pointed turrets out of a fairy-tale castle.  

‘The Vanderbilts must have homes which represent originality, art, and beauty,’ said Alva. Boasting about the Petit Chateau she said, ‘My house was the death of brown stone fronts.’ A developer bought the house in 1926 and bulldozed it within a year. In its place today stands a 41-story office building that was owned by Jared Kushner until 2018. 

Still in the grips of a society power struggle, Alva Vanderbilt endeavored to build a summer ‘cottage’ (as she called it), that would outshine Caroline Astor’s Newport mansion with 500,000 square feet of imported Italian marble. The home would come to be known as The Marble House. Completed in 1888, the mock Petit Trianon cost $11 million to build, ($310million in today’s money).  

Perhaps the greatest temple to Vanderbilt ambition and excess is the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Using the inheritance from his father, the Commodore’s youngest grandchild, George, built a colossal 175,000 square foot retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains.  

The Biltmore remains America’s largest home to this day. With 250 rooms, 35 bedrooms, and 43 bathrooms, the French Renaissance chateau and its 8,000 acre property is still family owned and operated by George’s relatives.  

Gloria Vanderbilt, the ‘end of a dynasty’: 

By the time Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt (Gloria’s father and Anderson Cooper’s grandfather) was born on January 14, 1880, the family’s inheritance was spread thin among the many descendants. Meanwhile, the railroad empire built by Cornelius was changing, and the family’s role would continue to dwindle until the 1970s when it would go bust.

Reggie was the profligate son of Cornelius II and Alice Vanderbilt. 

Scandal defined Gloria’s early life. Her father was a philandering drinker and gambler who frittered away his $7.3 million inheritance and died when Gloria was just 15 months old. He made the news not for what he built but rather what he spent.

He had a daughter named Cathleen from his first marriage, which ended in divorce in 1920. By then he had taken an interest young Cathleen’s teenage friend from the debutante circuit. Her name was Gloria Morgan and they were married three years later. Reggie Vanderbilt was 24 years Morgan’s senior, she was only 18 when they married.

The night before announcing their engagement, Reggie hosted a costume ball for Cathleen at which Gloria Morgan appeared as Marie Antoinette. Cathleen resented their nuptials and didn’t meet her baby half-sister until Little Gloria was a 15-year-old teenager. 

Cathleen wasn’t the only person who disagreed with the May-December romance. His mother Alice, ‘always a walking contradiction with her extravagant consumption and her Puritanical comportment’ worried that Gloria Morgan had ‘been around.’ Her fears were assuaged when Gloria agreed to be examined by Alice’s physician who attested to her ‘intact virginity.’

On February 20, 1924, Gloria Morgan gave birth to Gloria Laura Morgan Vanderbilt. ‘It is fantastic how Vanderbilt she looks,’ beamed Reggie. ‘See the corners of her eyes, how they turn up?’ He would be dead within months from cirrhosis of the liver.

Cooper writes: ‘Reggie hemorrhaged blood so explosively out of his mouth at the moment of his death that when his wife arrived two minutes too late to see him, Alice wouldn’t let her in the room. It was painted with Reggie’s blood.’

He was flat broke by the time he died and owed money all over town to lenders who had been all too willing to give him credit because of his famous name. In an age when a newspaper cost pennies, he owed $269 to his local newsstand. $4,000 to B. Altman booksellers, $712 to a laundress, $9,000 to Tiffany and Company. And thousands in back taxes.

At the age of 20, Gloria Morgan was a widow and single-mother, she was legally (and emotionally) still a minor. 

To cover his debts, Gloria was forced to auction their plush New York City town house, his Sandy Point Farm, all his horses, all the cars, the furniture, linens, and even a stuffed elephant belonging to the baby.

The only value left in his estate was the $5 million trust fund that Cornelius II, Reggie’s father, had established for the benefit of Reggie’s children. That sum would be split between Little Gloria and her half-sister Cathleen. 

Gloria Morgan filed a petition to be awarded an allowance from her daughter’s trust. These expenses amounted to $4,160 per month (about $60,000 today). The included $925 for servants, plus an additional $250 for the servants’ food. ‘Baby Gloria was now the piggy bank for her entire household, and she couldn’t even talk.’   

Leaving little Gloria in the care of her governess, Gloria Morgan spirited away to Europe and stayed up all hours of the night attending soigne dinner parties, nightclubs and glamorous cocktail events – pilfering her daughter’s $2.5 million inheritance to fund her extravagant lifestyle.  

According to the book, Gloria’s twin sister Thelma became the ‘fast friend’ and ‘favorite dancing partner’ of Edward, the Prince of Wales. His circle of friends known as ‘the Palace set’ were a cast of fast-living, decadent aristocrats. Thelma is also credited with, (or blamed for), introducing the prince to Wallis Simpson after asking her to ‘take care of him’ while she was away.

‘My mom would see her as this very glamorous figure disappearing down the hallway,’ Cooper says. ‘It sounds very elegant now, on the outside, but she’s an 8-year-old child being moved from hotel rooms, and her mother’s going out to parties every night and having all sorts of people through the house. It really was not a stable upbringing.’  

In 1934, 10-year-old Gloria became the center of a sensational custody lawsuit that was heard and reported around the world, it was dubbed, ‘The Trial of the Century.’

Gloria’s paternal aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (founder of the Whitney Museum) disagreed with Morgan’s carefree gallivanting lifestyle and conspired with little Gloria’s beloved nanny and maternal grandmother to prove that Morgan was an unfit mother.  

She sued for custody of little Gloria citing ‘neglect and immoral influence’ of her mother as cause. 

Salacious details from behind the curtain of America’s richest family captivated the poverty-stricken public during the Great Depression. Newspapers dubbed Gloria, ‘the poor little rich girl.’ 

Gloria Morgan’s French maid testified that she saw ‘Mrs. Vanderbilt was in bed reading a paper, and there was Lady Milford Haven beside the bed with her arm around Mrs. Vanderbilt’s neck and kissing her just like a lover.’ Lady Milford Haven was the daughter of a Russian grand duke and was married to a Mountbatten, cousin to the king of England. 

The nanny testified that she found graphic pornography books: ‘Flogging, and nuns, and naked men with women’s tongues—left out where the child could easily see them.’ 

Gossip columnists decried that Morgan was ‘a cocktail-crazed dancing mother, a devotee of sex erotica, and the mistress of a German prince.’

Meanwhile the defense argued that Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s work as a celebrated sculptor featured nudes. It’s true that aunt Gertrude wasn’t so virtuous either. She had two lives: one as a respectable pearl-laden grand-dame of society and the other as a bohemian downtown artist, ‘who took whatever lovers she wanted, men or women,’ writes Cooper.    

Custody was eventually awarded to Gertrude Whitney, but Gloria was left traumatized and even more isolated from the event. The New York Journal American composed the ditty: ‘Rockabye baby/Up on a writ/ Monday to Friday, Mother’s unfit/As the week ends she rises in virtue/Saturdays, Sundays, Mother won’t hurt you.’     

As an adult, Vanderbilt would have a string of epic romances with some of the 20th century’s most celebrated men: Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra, Errol Flynn and Marlon Brando. Vanderbilt was married four times and had four children, most famously her son Anderson Cooper, 54, who has devoted his life to chronicling his mother and in his words, ‘I always felt it was my job to try to protect her.’

‘My mom had a very fractured relationship with the family she was born into,’ said Cooper to CNN. ‘She never really connected to any of them, so she never told me stories about her childhood growing up, she never really spoke about it.’ 

Like her ancestors, Gloria spent lavishly, ‘almost heedlessly, on anything that might bring pleasure: on houses and furnishings, gifts for friends, charities, and fine clothes.’

‘I think of my mother as the last Vanderbilt,’ writes Cooper. ‘She was the last living Vanderbilt who’d slept at The Breakers when it was still a private home, owned by her grandmother Alice…She was the last child to ride in cars driven by liveried chauffeurs, guarded by private detectives in overcoats and fedoras.’

‘She was the last to be born before the Depression, when the Vanderbilt riches seemed as limitless and eternal as the stars in the sky,’ he says in the book.  

The dynasty ended with Gloria.