Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

Endpapers

Right-hand page, clockwise from top left: © Archive Farms Inc/Alamy Stock Photo; © Painters/Alamy Stock Photo; © Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo; José María Mora

Left-hand page, clockwise from left: Courtesy of the author; Herbert Gehr; Toni Frissell Collection/Library of Congress; © IKE EDEANI/the New York Times/Redux.

Dedication

To Wyatt.

—A. C.

To my mother, Katherine S. Howe, and to Charles.

—K. H.

Epigraph

Poor Vanderbilt! How I pity you; and this is honest. You are an old man, and ought to have some rest, and yet you have to struggle, and deny yourself, and rob yourself of restful sleep and peace of mind, because you need money so badly. I always feel for a man who is so poverty ridden as you. Don’t misunderstand me, Vanderbilt. I know you own seventy millions; but then you know and I know, that it isn’t what a man has, that constitutes wealth. No—it is to be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth.

—MARK TWAIN, PACKARD’S MONTHLY, MARCH 1869

Contents

Cover

Endpapers

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Vanderbilt Family Tree

Introduction

Prologue: The Breakers: March 30, 2018

Part I: Rise

1.The Tycoon: January 4, 1877

2.Van der Bilt: c. 1660

3.The Blatherskite and the Namesake: April 2, 1882

4.Society as I Have Found It: October 22, 1883

5.Venetian Princesses: March 26, 1883

6.American Royalty: November 6, 1895

Part II: Fall

7.Failure Is Impossible: May 4, 1912

8.Down with the Ship: May 1915

9.Standing in a Cold Shower, Tearing Up Hundred-Thousand-Dollar Bills: September 15, 1934

10. Living a Roman à Clef: November 21, 1934

11. Gloria at La Côte Basque: November 28, 1966

12. The Last Vanderbilt: October 28, 1978, and June 17, 2019

Epilogue: Christmas Eve, 1930

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Index

Photo Section

About the Authors

Also by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe

Copyright

About the Publisher

A Partial Genealogy of the Vanderbilt Family

Introduction

For, as William Dean Howells once noted, Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself, and it is only a step from this to arrive at something which passes muster for a Society definition of America: that all men may be born equal but most of us spend the better part of our born days in trying to be as unequal as we can.

—Cleveland Amory, Who Killed Society?

When I was six, my father took me to Grand Central Terminal in New York to see the imposing bronze statue of my great-great-great-grandfather Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. It stands high on a pedestal on the south side of the train terminal he founded, within sight of Vanderbilt Avenue and a hotel that, back then, was also named after him.

I knew little about the Vanderbilt dynasty. My mom, Gloria Vanderbilt, rarely talked about her tumultuous childhood or the fractious family she was born into in 1924. My father, Wyatt Cooper, grew up on a small farm in Mississippi during the Depression, about as far from the palatial homes of the Vanderbilts as you can imagine. But he wanted me to understand my mom’s extraordinary history and her complicated feelings about it.

When we went to see the statue, my dad told me that the Commodore was a tough businessman and an unforgiving father and that, when he died, he was the richest person in America. I’m sure he said more, but I can’t remember. I was, after all, only six. I do recall, however, that for weeks after our visit, I was convinced that all grandparents turned into statues when they died.

For much of my life, I wanted nothing to do with the Vanderbilts. I very much like the few Vanderbilt cousins I’ve met, but I never wanted to look too closely at the history of the family. I felt it had no bearing on my life. The Vanderbilt dynasty disappeared long ago, and my parents had made sure I understood early on that there was no Vanderbilt money or trust fund I’d be inheriting when I became an adult. They wanted me to be my own person, and I am grateful to them for that. I don’t think I would have been as driven as I have been if I had grown up believing there was a pot of gold somewhere waiting for me.

I’ve always gone out of my way to avoid mentioning my relation to the Vanderbilts. When someone would find out and ask me, What was it like to grow up a Vanderbilt? my response was always the same. I don’t know, I’d say. I’m a Cooper. That is how I viewed myself, and still do. I look to my father’s large family, with its deep roots in the Mississippi earth, and I’ve taken their American story as my own.

But my mom’s death in 2019 and the birth of my son, Wyatt, in 2020 began to change my perspective. In the weeks after she died, I began going through dozens of boxes stored away in her apartment and her art studio. They were filled with journals, and documents, and letters. She saved everything. Handwritten notes from her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and schoolbooks my grandfather Reginald Vanderbilt doodled in as a child. I found old wills and financial records, and as I read the contents of these files stained by time and mold, I began to hear the voices of those people I never knew. They were more than just characters in a history book, more than just one-dimensional members of an American dynasty. They were complex, flush with desire, their inner lives far more compelling than their public personae would have us believe.

When my son was born, I began to wonder, what will I tell him about them? What do I hope he learns from the lives they led, and the choices they made? In order to answer those questions, I began researching these people I had avoided for so long. This family. My family.

The Vanderbilt story somehow manages to be both unique and also, deeply, universally American. It is a saga of wealth and success and individualism, but as it turns out, those aren’t necessarily the universal goods our culture likes to believe they are. A few central myths appear again and again in Americans’ popular imagination: that success is available to anyone who is willing to work hard, for example, and that success is worthier of celebration if it is achieved without help. (As if any success were truly achieved alone: even the self-made Commodore got a crucial early loan from his mother when he was sixteen.) We still catch ourselves subscribing to this Horatio Algeresque celebration of entrepreneurship, of individualism, and, by extension, of wealth. We somehow, simultaneously, believe that we are all the same, all created equal, and yet we secretly suspect that the rich are somehow more special, that they have something figured out that the rest of us don’t know. We see this embedded assumption play out every day in our modern celebrity culture and in our politics.

In writing this book, my coauthor, Katherine Howe, and I wanted to explore how some of the Vanderbilts—people with personalities and weaknesses and foibles, who found themselves living the ultimate American myth—actually felt as their lives were unfolding. The personal stories we recount focus on a few individuals rather than on the grand sweep of the Vanderbilts’ business empire or the expansion of railroads into the wilderness.

Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt founded a dynasty that would rule the Gilded Age, and his rise was dizzying. He possessed a genius and a mania for making money, but his obsession with material wealth would border on the pathological, and the pathology born of that wealth would go on to infect each successive generation in different ways. A family story about wealth and triumph becomes, in some respects, a story about sadness and isolation. But it’s also a story of unexpected poignancy and truth that shifts our understanding and expectations about this name Vanderbilt that we imagine we already know.

The Vanderbilts were the original new-money arrivistes who burst on the scene, used their wealth to buy prestige and respectability, and churned through their fortune not in the cause of making lasting change, but on massive outlets for conspicuous consumption. Vanderbilt millions bought palatial houses, astonishing yachts, cars in the hundreds, and jewels both magnificent and rare.

But under the buckets of ink spilled on their exploits by newspapers and behind the magnificent, and temporary, marble walls constructed of the Commodore’s money, unfolded private lives both messy and insecure, nuanced and complicated, sometimes irredeemable, but always fascinating. This is the story of the extraordinary rise and epic fall of the Vanderbilt dynasty. This is the story of the greatest American fortune ever squandered.

Prologue

The Breakers

March 30, 2018

Whether a servant or the host or some other member of the family sees a guest to the door, the door is never closed until the guest is actually underway, by foot or by car.

—Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette: A Guide to Gracious Living, Part III, Home Entertaining [1952]

Gladys had to be out of The Breakers by four o’clock. That was the deadline they’d given her. Four p.m., Good Friday. She wasn’t being evicted exactly. There had been no court proceedings, no sheriff serving her notice, nothing embarrassing like that. But she was being kicked out.

Her great-grandparents, Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife, Alice, built the seventy-room mansion in 1895, and a Vanderbilt had lived there ever since. Gladys would be the last. She worked as a nurse, but she had always dedicated herself to preserving the house and its history, just as her mother had, and, before that, her grandmother. Gladys served on advisory committees for the Preservation Society of Newport County and, over the years, kept an eye out for whatever needed repairs and maintenance.

No one’s identity was as closely entwined with The Breakers as Gladys’s. After all, the grand palace with the velvet ropes and the precious artwork and the polished floors wasn’t just a museum to her, an abstract symbol of a vanished age, one that now tolerated the prying eyes of a half million visitors each year. The Breakers was a home. Her home. Her history. Gladys knew every crack in the ceilings. She knew every creaking floorboard. As children, she and her brother, Paul, had clattered down the sweeping marble staircase on trays borrowed from the kitchen, something her mother had learned as a child from her own father. Every corner of their spacious third-floor apartment was full of such memories.

There weren’t many visitors at the house that March day. Summer is the high season, and the crowds thin out in wintertime, as though the Newport mansions remembered that winter was for slumbering, their grand furnishings shrouded under white sheets. Those who do come to get a glimpse of a gilded past have to brave the cold winds whipping off the Atlantic Ocean as they walk toward the mansion’s grand entrance. Anyone waiting for a tour of the house or walking the grounds that Good Friday probably wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual. Gladys’s apartment was off-limits to visitors, so no one would have seen her, Paul, and the few friends who’d been helping box things up for months, loading the old Otis elevator with heavy-duty black garbage bags and descending to the basement level. Before they made their final trip down, they went out on the terrace overlooking the ocean and toasted The Breakers with a bottle of champagne, remembering family and friends and a life now ending.

The Breakers is the grandest and most opulent of Newport’s Gilded Age mansions, and it remains the most popular tourist attraction in the state of Rhode Island. During the summer, buses roll up Ochre Point Avenue, one after the other, disgorging visitors who crunch over the pea gravel drive that winds across grounds perched on cliffs facing the Atlantic. Hidden behind thirty-foot-tall wrought-iron gates set in limestone, like the bulwarks in European capitals designed to guard against civil unrest, The Breakers pretends to be an Italianate palace, though, unlike the real palaces of the aristocrats of Europe on which it was modeled, The Breakers is new. Ish.

When Cornelius Vanderbilt II built the house, he was president and chairman of the New York Central Railroad, the company his grandfather, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, had founded after making his first fortune in shipping. Cornelius II and Alice hired architect Richard Morris Hunt to build them a summer retreat in Newport after the original house on the same site burned to the ground in 1892. Stonecutters from England labored with beelike urgency over marble imported from Italy. In two short years, The Breakers, named after the waves that crash ashore at the base of the cliffs behind the property, rose from the ashes of its former self, a temple to Vanderbilt money and ambition.

The house was small compared to Cornelius II and Alice’s mansion in New York City, and in letters and calendars they referred to it simply as home, but of course, they knew full well the grandness of what they had built.

The sheer size of The Breakers is hard to contemplate: Seventy rooms comprising square footage better measured in acreage than in feet—nearly three times as big as the White House. The morning room walls are paneled in platinum. The first floor alone sprawls with room upon room built on a scale more suited to grand city hotel lobbies than to a house meant solely to escape the heat in the drowsy days of summer. There are separate reception rooms for gentlemen and ladies, as befitting Victorian notions of propriety; a great hall ringed by a gallery with sculptured personifications of Art, Science, and Industry like those one might find in a university library, its ceiling painted with a trompe l’oeil sky; a music room with a gilded ceiling; a billiards room modeled in the style of ancient Rome, a civilization that never heard of billiards; and a dining room with a table designed to seat thirty-four. A library features a bust of William Henry Vanderbilt II, the owner’s son, who died while a student at Yale, in bronze; one of his father, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, in marble; and a fireplace pried from a sixteenth-century French château to lend its historical cachet to the New World and its new wealth, with the inscription, I laugh at great wealth, and never miss it; nothing but wisdom matters in the end.

Until recent years, tourists eager for a look inside this secret gilded world bought tickets in a tent situated near a row of Porta Potties; now most visitors reserve their tickets in advance online. They tour The Breakers in shifts. The summer sun is bright in Newport, but the sea air is soft, which makes the wait easier. Visitors to the great Gilded Age houses are no longer announced, as they would have been only a generation or two ago. They observe the rooms—with their ornate furnishings, walls studded with semiprecious stones, and bathtubs filled by hot and cold fresh or salt water piped directly from the sea—from behind velvet ropes. They are allowed to take pictures inside, but tour guides admonish those caught using a flash. A single ticket to tour The Breakers now costs twenty-six dollars, or about one dollar in 1913 money—just about what a scullery maid employed in the Vanderbilts’ kitchen could have expected to be paid for a month of work. The Breakers has never been shy about its relationship with money.

Cornelius Vanderbilt II had been closely involved with every detail of its construction, but he didn’t get to enjoy The Breakers for very long. He died of a stroke in 1899, just four years after the house was completed. He was fifty-five years old. Alice continued to use the house every summer until she died in 1934, bequeathing it to one of her daughters, Gladys Vanderbilt, who had married a Hungarian count, Laszlo Széchényi, in 1908, thereby becoming Countess Gladys Széchényi.

As is often the case with many things designed to impress, The Breakers proved to be an enormous financial burden. The house alone was challenging enough to maintain, but there was also a large stable and thirteen acres of meticulously landscaped grounds, as well as two capacious greenhouses for the palm trees and flowers needed for décor in The Breakers as well as in their mansion in New York. The house and grounds required a rotating staff of servants and workers—housekeepers, gardeners, maids, stable hands, and, if every seat at the dining table was filled, one footman to serve every three guests—who labored behind the scenes to keep it all going, and they all had to be paid. When The Breakers was first built, there was no federal income tax. After the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, the great fortunes of the Gilded Age were exposed for the first time to taxation from the government, and Alice Vanderbilt was no exception. Then there were the property taxes and estate taxes, all of which ate away at the Countess’s inheritance, as did the cost of the constant repairs and maintenance. The Countess loved The Breakers and had inherited an estimated $12.5 million, about $340 million today. But even that fortune wasn’t enough. During World War II she had assets and property seized in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and in 1948, running low on funds and desperate to find a solution that would keep The Breakers in the family, she arranged to lease the house for one dollar a year to the Preservation Society of Newport County, which began offering tours to the public. She moved out of the grand rooms on the first and second floors and decamped with her family into third-floor rooms that her brothers had occupied as children. They installed a small gate on the grand staircase, to stop any curious visitors from sneaking onto the floor, and converted a servant’s room into a kitchen.

The deal with the Preservation Society helped the Countess by lowering taxes on the property, but she was still responsible for paying them and for covering the cost of most major repairs. She managed to hold on to the house until she died in 1965, but her children couldn’t afford to keep it for long, and two generations after it was built, it passed out of family hands for good. In 1972 they gave much of the furniture to the Preservation Society as a gift, and sold them the house for $365,000, or about $2.3 million today. By contrast, Cornelius Vanderbilt II spent $7 million building the house in 1895, the equivalent of more than $220 million today. In its 77 years of existence, The Breakers saw the equivalent of nearly $218 million evaporate into thin air.

The Preservation Society’s board of directors promised that one of Countess Széchényi’s daughters, Sylvia Szápáry, could live on the third floor of the house for the rest of her life. Sylvia, who was called Syvie by her intimates, spent every summer at The Breakers along with her children, Gladys, who was named after her grandmother, and Paul. Syvie watched over the house with an eagle eye, trying to ensure it was cared for with love. She personally gave or loaned the Preservation Society hundreds of family heirlooms and photographs so they could be put on display for visitors.

The secret Vanderbilts still living in The Breakers, on an unseen floor no less, set the house apart from the other Gilded Age mansions of Newport overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, which, like The Breakers, had largely passed out of private hands by the mid-twentieth century, when they proved far too expensive to maintain. Tour guides made a point of mentioning that there were Vanderbilts still living upstairs, preserved, like rare specimens under glass. Sometimes tourists would catch a glimpse of Gladys walking her dogs on the grounds, or see someone peering over the third-floor banister and get excited, believing they’d had a sighting of one of the mysterious Vanderbilts rattling around, ghostlike, in the house. When Syvie died in 1998, the Preservation Society sent Gladys and Paul a letter allowing them to remain on the third floor, mentioning that it will be helpful to us to be able to tell our visitors that the original owners’ great-grandchildren continue to live in the house.

Gladys Szápáry wanted to make sure tourists—or guests, as her mother had insisted they be called—had a good experience. True, she wasn’t shy about speaking up when she saw things that could be improved upon, and yes, she was at times critical of the way the Preservation Society was running things. She complained about the shrinking budgets for repairs and maintenance, since something always needed restoration or protection from the ravages of time: the front gates, the Belgian tapestry over the stairwell, leaking windows, and family photographs bleaching away unprotected from direct sunlight. Gladys was chatelaine of the infinite list of minutiae that go into the running of a grand house, the very same minutiae that led to the house’s sale a generation before.

Tensions started to bubble in 2013, when the Society proposed building a new visitor center on The Breakers’s grounds to replace the drafty ticket tent and Porta Potties. Gladys preferred that it be built across the street, so it wouldn’t alter the original Bowditch landscape design or intrude on the fantasy that visiting The Breakers meant stepping into another era. Whenever possible, in Newport, unpleasant matters are dealt with behind closed doors, in hushed voices, but this disagreement turned into a very public battle, fought in newspaper pages, in boardrooms, and before judges. The New York Times remarked that Newport on the whole resists change: its residents didn’t like the America’s Cup leaving their waters, they didn’t like Bob Dylan going electric at the 1965 Folk Festival, and they certainly didn’t like the idea of prepared food for sale at The Breakers. But the Preservation Society pointed out that the visitor center would be wheelchair-accessible. Change was coming. Change must come. In 2015, in a written statement, the Preservation Society pointed out that Gladys and Paul’s use of the third floor can be ended at any time. The threat was clear.

I’m waiting for them to throw my clothes out the window, Gladys dryly told a reporter.

Those in Newport who followed such matters knew all that Gladys had done for The Breakers. She was smart and kind and well liked locally. As a teenager she was all over The Breakers, Eloise-like, working in the Children’s Cottage gift shop, hanging out with the guides, visiting with the security guards, polishing the brass hinges on the oak doors before they opened every morning. But now some Preservation Society board members viewed her as a nuisance, and they wanted her out. The battle over the visitor center was the final straw. Gladys’s efforts to stop construction failed. The Preservation Society got what it wanted. The visitor center would be built on the grounds of The Breakers. It would even sell sandwiches.

Gladys was summoned to a meeting at the Preservation Society in October 2017. She was told it was no longer safe for her to live on the third floor. Knob-and-tube wiring posed a fire hazard. The plumbing was antiquated, and a leak could destroy the showpiece rooms on the second floor below. The fire codes would not permit year-round habitation in the rooms where she and her family had always lived. Gladys had offered years before to get things up to code, but her suggestions had fallen on deaf ears. There wasn’t much she could do. She was a guest in what she thought of as her family home, living there at the pleasure of strangers.

The statement put out by the Preservation Society was matter-of-fact:

A year-long study by a preservation architect and an engineer concluded that the ventilation, electrical, and plumbing systems, while completely safe for museum use, were dangerously outdated for residential use, putting the structure and collections at risk. In view thereof, elements of the historic building’s 120-year-old plumbing and electrical systems are being decommissioned on the upper floors. . . . The residential occupancy of the Vanderbilt family apartment on the third floor by Paul and Gladys Szapary, the children of Countess Anthony Szapary, has been voluntarily discontinued.

It was the final act of a years-long opera about the struggle for control over what The Breakers should mean and whom it should be for. Gladys was told she could stay until the end of the year. After that, she would be allowed in only to remove family property, accounting carefully for any historical items to prove that they did not belong to the Preservation Society. Over the decades, the boundary between what the family owned and allowed the Society to display and use and what the Society itself owned had blurred, waxed, and waned. Somewhere along the line, The Breakers had gone from a private family enclave into which the public was allowed a privileged view to something effectively owned by the public.

Gladys moved out at the end of December of that year, as ordered, but she was allowed back during the next few months to pack up. Every weekend, early on chilly mornings, half a dozen friends and preservationists from out of town would turn up to help her pack and label and hoist and move and store. Staff members from the Preservation Society had placed blue tags on furniture and whatever else they believed had already been given to the Society. Gladys had been preparing for this. She had gone through old files and carefully gathered documents and receipts for the loans she and her mother had generously made to the Society—photographs and furniture, baby carriages and christening clothes. Gladys always planned to one day make the loans permanent, but now she was reconsidering. There were other museums and historical societies that would happily take them. She and Paul and their friends bought hundreds of boxes from U-Haul and spent months carefully packing four generations of family history. Their grandmother’s Louis Vuitton trunks were taken from the attic, as well as some children’s sleds from the early 1900s. They shivered while they worked, as the Preservation Society had already turned off the heat on the third floor. Sheets of ice formed on the windowpanes inside, and as the sun warmed them each day, pools of water trickled down the glass to the floor.

On her last day, Gladys spent her final hours in The Breakers mopping the floors, shutting off lights, closing doors, and then packing her car with the help of her friend, preservationist Jason Bouchard-Nawrocki. Before getting into the elevator that final time, she took one last look around the rooms where she had spent so much of her life, now empty enough that her footsteps echoed over bare wood floors.

Finally, as the thin afternoon sun faded from the windows of the third-floor apartment, she rode down to the basement. She strode past the gift shop, whose staffers had been instructed not to speak to her—some even averted their eyes—and left through the service door, the only door she had ever used, rather than the grand front entrance. The service door was how, at age two, she had first entered the house her great-grandfather built, and it’s how she wanted to leave it. She was tired. Her face was stiffened from the cold and by her determination not to show the anger and sadness she felt.

The chief of staff of the Preservation Society, Terry Dickinson, a sturdy former navy man, was waiting by the back door. Gladys marched over to him and put out her hand.

Terry, thank you and good-bye, she said as they shook.

Gladys climbed into her car, pulled out of the small rectangular parking area, inched down the winding driveway past the Children’s Cottage, and left through a side gate.

She never looked back. The Breakers now belonged to the Preservation Society of Newport County and to the public—perhaps to history as well.

There is something uniquely American about this faux palace, with its décor and fixtures ripped out of the ancient homes of European royalty. At first blush, a tour of The Breakers might feel like roaming the halls of an American Versailles, if