The Brutal Downfall Of The Vanderbilt Family

No one lived quite like the stupidly rich Vanderbilt family, spending millions on mansions, yachts, fashion, and lavish parties that made their lives seem like a fairytale on the surface, though the reality was far darker than anyone realized. The dynasty began when a man named Yan erun arrived in America from the Netherlands in 1650 as a servant working for a wealthy family known as the van covens, which eventually led him to adopt a new name. Taking the Dutch word van, meaning from, and combining it with his hometown of de built, he created the surname that would become one of the most recognized in history.

It took generations for the family to gain its infamous reputation, starting with Yan’s great-great-great-great-grandson, Cornelius Vanderbilt, also known as The Commodore. Rising from a lower-class existence on Staten Island, Cornelius amassed a massive fortune in the shipping and railroad industries during the mid-1800s and moved his family to Manhattan into a grand house in what is now Greenwich Village. By 1877, a sickly Commodore found himself restricted by his ailments, rarely leaving his house for eight months, and by the time he was on his deathbed, he had amassed over $100 million, equivalent to over three billion dollars today.

Before his death, the Commodore faced the crucial decision of how to distribute his immense riches, starting by donating a million dollars to build Vanderbilt University in Nashville. For the remainder of his fortune, he shocked everyone when the will was read, leaving almost everything to just one heir, his eldest son William Henry Vanderbilt, known as Billy. Naturally, the rest of the family was furious and suspicious, especially since another son and nine daughters received nothing, prompting three of Billy’s siblings to go to court and accuse him of hiring a spiritualist to dupe their father. Wanting to spare his family the public humiliation of a trial, Billy settled with his siblings, though he offered them very little.

Billy had precious little time to enjoy his grand inheritance, dying of a stroke in 1885 just eight years after his father, yet in that short span, he had managed to double the money left to him. Although Billy was talented at amassing wealth, he had little need for it, frequently stating that money made him anxious and blaming his poor health on being wealthy while feeling envious of his poorer neighbors. Most of Billy’s fortune went to his two oldest sons, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, whose great generosity prevented him from increasing the family wealth, and William Kissam Vanderbilt, who cared far more for horses than accumulating a fortune.

William had married Alva Esin Smith in 1875, a woman of extravagant tastes who enjoyed collecting yachts and mansions, eventually boasting nine of them, yet she still craved something money could not buy. New York high society refused to accept the Vanderbilts because their fortune was newly made rather than inherited, so Alva decided to buy her way in through architecture by spending three years and $3 million building a grand home. By this time, William and Alva had a daughter named Consuelo, whom Alva disciplined strictly, sometimes striking her with a riding crop and forcing her to wear a steel rod to correct her posture. Desperate for a regal title to match her lifestyle, Alva orchestrated a marriage between Consuelo and Charles Spencer Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, who had ulterior motives to save his dukedom from financial ruin. Although neither Consuelo nor the Duke wanted to be together, the marriage took place, granting Alva her connection to royalty and providing the Duke with access to the Vanderbilt fortune, and surprisingly, the union lasted twenty-six years.

Just before Consuelo’s wedding, Alva announced she wanted a divorce from William on the grounds of adultery, a virtually unheard-of move in high society at the time, though some believed William had not actually cheated but instead hired a woman to act as his mistress simply to escape their tumultuous marriage. William eventually remarried, moved to France, and dedicated himself to his beloved horses, maintaining the belief that inherited wealth was a real handicap to happiness that left him with nothing to hope or strive for.

While Cornelius II gave much of his wealth away and William remained focused on horses, their younger brother George had different ambitions and wanted a massive estate no matter the cost. George Washington Vanderbilt II purchased 125,000 acres in North Carolina, hiring an architect to design a home with 250 rooms covering over 175,000 square feet, making the Biltmore Estate the largest house in America to this day. Building such a colossal structure severely drained the Vanderbilt fortune, and maintaining it proved equally expensive, leaving George and his wife Edith overwhelmed. Their lives took a tragic turn in 1914 when George died during a routine appendectomy, leaving Edith alone with the monumental house and its overwhelming financial responsibilities. Eventually, the family turned to a solution most Vanderbilts would have scorned, as Edith’s daughter Cornelia opened the Biltmore Estate to the public in 1930 to give visitors a glimpse into elite Vanderbilt life.

Lavish homes continued to define the family when Gladys Vanderbilt inherited a summer residence called The Breakers in 1934, a 70-room, 138,000-square-foot palace built in 1895 for Cornelius Vanderbilt II, which Gladys eventually leased to the Preservation Society of Newport County for one dollar per year. Meanwhile, Gladys’s brother Reginald Claypool Vanderbilt gained a notorious reputation for gambling away the family fortune and womanizing, while another brother, Cornelius Vanderbilt III, known as Neely, spent heavily just to maintain appearances in high society and proudly claimed to be the first heir to decrease the family fortune. In 1896, Neely fell in love with Grace Gamm Wilson, and when his father opposed the relationship, they eloped, resulting in his disinheritance and leaving him with only half a million dollars while his brother Alfred received nearly $70 million.

Alfred Gwyn Vanderbilt seemed level-headed, apart from a tumultuous personal life that led his wife Ellen to move out seven years into their marriage due to alleged infidelity. Despite his flaws, Alfred became a hero in 1915 when he boarded the RMS Lusitania for a business trip to Liverpool, and when a German U-boat torpedoed the ship off the coast of Ireland, causing it to sink rapidly, he valiantly gave his life vest to a terrified woman clutching her baby. Alfred was among the more than one thousand people who lost their lives that day, further reducing the ranks of the family.

As the generations multiplied and showed little interest in managing the family businesses, the fortune dried up rapidly, especially as America changed and railroads were no longer the sole means of transportation. The Great Depression of the 1930s hit the Vanderbilts hard, and with Reggie Vanderbilt having died early due to his drinking, his wife and young daughter, both named Gloria, were left with very little since Reggie’s wife was not born a Vanderbilt and could not claim family money. Little Gloria, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the Commodore, stood to inherit a colossal sum when she turned twenty-one, triggering a bitter custody battle between her mother, Gloria Morgan, and Reggie’s sister Gertrude, which quickly became a media circus. During the sensational trial, nurses and maids testified about a filthy, rodent-infested home and alleged cruelty and misconduct, and even little Gloria herself stated she was afraid of her mother after being coached by her aunt Gertrude, who ultimately won custody of the child.

Left with little connection to her mother and an emotionally distant aunt, Gloria turned to her nanny for maternal comfort, eventually channeling her troubled childhood into a successful career in the arts. She appeared on Broadway and television dramas, started modeling at age fifteen, and became a skilled painter whose work was featured on scarves before launching a revolutionary line of extremely tight designer blue jeans with Indian designer Mohan Murjani that became a massive success. After marriages that included director Sidney Lumet, Vanderbilt married Wyatt Emory Cooper, with whom she had two sons and finally found lasting happiness, spending fifteen years with him until he died on the operating table at age fifty. Tragically, on July 22, 1988, her twenty-three-year-old son Carter jumped from their fourteenth-floor penthouse apartment in New York.

Unlike some of his relatives, Vanderbilt’s other son, Anderson Cooper, forged his own path through hard work after his mother assured him early on that there would be no trust fund, rising to prominence without ever using the Vanderbilt name. Cooper stands as living proof that the grand Vanderbilt fortune has completely run its course, a decline rooted in several factors, starting with a family reunion in 1973 where relatives realized not a single person in the room was a millionaire. Some believe the Commodore failed to teach his heirs how to preserve wealth, neglecting to establish protective trusts like fellow patriarch John Jacob Astor did to ensure generations held onto their money. Furthermore, the family’s obsession with building empty, extravagant summer and city homes that nobody wanted to inherit or maintain drained their resources until properties like their New York mansions were reduced to rubble by the 1940s. Even in death, the family maintained their expensive flair through monumental architectural landmarks like their Staten Island mausoleum designed by Richard Morris Hunt, ensuring that though the fortune faded, the legendary footprint of the Vanderbilt family remains etched in history forever.