Poor Little Gloria Vanderbilt Is Dead... WHO GETS THE MONEY?

sad.

^It depends upon who is or isn't in the will.

Anderson Cooper lost the two most important male figures in his life, his dad and older bro, before the age of 21. I imagined he and he and his mom have been very close this past quarter century. Prayers to him.

From Town & Country (of course!)

Early this morning, heiress and fashion icon Gloria Vanderbilt passed away. Her son, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper confirmed the news, sharing that she died at home surrounded by loved ones following a short battle with stomach cancer. She was 95-years-old.

The great-great-granddaughter of railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, Gloria was a chameleon, who successfully reinvented herself multiple times. Over the course of her life, she tried her hand at everything from painting to designing denim, and in her latter years, she even became an Instagram sensation in her own right. In total, the 95-year-old was reportedly worth $200 million, likely thanks to a sizable inheritance bolstered by her successful jeans business.

TWO HUNDRED MILLION!

But Cooper says he won't see any of it.

"My mom's made clear to me that there's no trust fund," Cooper once told Howard Stern in a radio interview first reported by Business Insider. "There's none of that."

"I don't believe in inheriting money," Cooper explained. "I think it's an initiative sucker. I think it's a curse."

Who would turn down 200 million?

Are there any grandchildren?

Little Gloria dead at last.

R3 What a horrible gay stereotype! Jfchrist!!

She had 5 grandchildren.

OH, MY GOD! THE APARTMENT!!!

Who will get and handle the sale of the apartment???

Anderson has two half brothers from his mother's earlier marriage to Leopold Stokowski.

Has Murjani issued a statement yet? Will they do a quick run of jeans in memoria of our dear Gloria?

SHIT! All the artwork....

GONE!

R7, you beat me to it! I wonder if she's happy at last!

So young!

I don't think there is anywhere near $200 million. They will probably have one hell of an estate sale, but don't forget Gloria lost pretty much everything in the 90s. She had to sell her New York townhouse and her house at the beach.

I'm not even sure she owns the place she died in.

Great! Just great! Now where the hell am I going to get my jeans?!

From China, like you always did.

[quote]I don't think there is anywhere near $200 million. They will probably have one hell of an estate sale, but don't forget Gloria lost pretty much everything in the 90s. She had to sell her New York townhouse and her house at the beach.

They called her the "come back" gal!

Who will inherit the estate ?

[quote]They called her the "come back" gal!

Ironic since they called her son the same thing, with a slightly different spelling.

Debbie Harry Gloria Vanderbilt Murjani Jeans Commercial

I do thilly !! AND I get all of fab clothes, furs and jewels.

ps I'm changing my name to Fiona gurls

There's no money...

"How the World’s Richest Family Went Broke"

Anderson has supported Gloria for years.

Gloria definitely inherited a lot of money and then achieved a remarkable feat of her own by building on it through her fashion house. If she’s not leaving it to Anderson, where will it go? And if we can’t figure out where that much wealth is headed, how sure are we that it exists at all?

Scenario 1: All in the Family. Anderson Cooper is by far the highest-profile of the Vanderbilt heirs but despite the media’s somewhat lazy tendency to focus on the famous one, Gloria had other sons. Stan Stokowski is now in his late 60s and running a Long Island landscaping company. He only makes headlines when a family wedding runs in the society pages, and that seems to be the way he likes it. Chris Stokowski famously stays off the radar entirely after a big fight with mom close to four decades ago. Gloria apparently tracked him down in Massachusetts, but even that reference is now pushing 35 years old. While both seem well out of the Vanderbilt loop, they may still be in the will because Gloria wants to make sure they get their share of the legacy – or because they never got rich on their own. Anderson Cooper is raking in $11 million a year from CNN and routinely donates book and appearance fees to charity. He doesn’t really need a massive trust fund to set him up for the rest of his life. If anything, rumors of nepotism have been enough of a drag on his professional reputation that it’s probably worth a lot more to him to refuse the Vanderbilt wealth he might have otherwise had coming to him. In that event, Gloria might not have needed to disinherit Cooper at all. All he would have needed to do is refuse the money when her executors hand it over. Stan and Chris, of course, are under no such obligation.

Scenario 2: Everything Goes to Charity. If Gloria doesn’t have a trust fund set up for any of the boys, her assets will eventually have to go somewhere. She might have friends or staff members she’d like to reward with a monetary bequest. And of course, she might follow the family tradition of philanthropy. If almost all the money goes to charity, she dies with something like a clean slate as far as the IRS and public opinion are concerned. One red flag here, however, is that Gloria is not known for her passionate support of any particular cause. Like Anderson Cooper, her advocacy is a lot more diffuse, so it’s anybody’s guess what charity or charities she would favor in her estate plan. We know, however, that she hasn’t signed Warren Buffett’s “giving pledge” and so is not under any public commitment to give her money away instead of leaving the bulk of it to relatives or other people she may like. Not all philanthropically minded rich people have joined Buffett – most of the 175 people on the list are bona fide billionaires and quite a few are self made – but if Gloria feels so strongly about making a difference, she could give the movement added cachet. After all, previous Vanderbilts managed to amass vast multi-generational wealth as well as fund universities, churches and artistic institutions. Gloria inherited some of that money and parlayed it into a high-fashion empire in the 1970s. Leaving that augmented fortune to charity would be in line with Buffett’s creed as well as Cooper’s own view of the Vanderbilt family as “believing in working.” But again, in the absence of known philanthropic passions, what organizations end up with the money, and why isn’t she lending them her celebrity now?

Scenario 3: The Money’s Not There. Gloria inherited the equivalent of $33 million in 1925 and family wrangling over the trust eventually accelerated her control of a bigger share. A lifetime of artistic and business pursuits presumably helped her independent cash flow, but unless she stopped taking distributions long ago, nine decades is a long time for a traditional trust to run. People have muttered that the trust was actually empty by the 1950s. And it’s unclear how much money the designer jeans and perfume actually made her. Like a lot of fashion people more interested in the creative end than the business, she sold the licensing rights to her name early on. In her late ‘70s heyday, Gloria was only earning $1.2 million or so a year on the clothes.

By the time the perfume came out, she was already fighting her partners over a relatively insignificant $1.3 million. A few years later, a Manhattan court ruled that her lawyer and psychiatrist had colluded to misappropriate a whopping $1.4 million from her accounts. In the meantime, the IRS seized and liquidated her assets to pay a $2.5 million tax bill. While the patterns should be familiar to all Trust Advisor readers, the figures are tough to reconcile with Gloria’s image as someone worth hundreds of times the amount of money in dispute in either case.

Maybe she lives quite nicely on $1 million a year plus the occasional check from a family trust. Maybe she had other investments that panned out extremely well over time. But I have yet to see detailed evidence that she was ever worth $200 million beyond vague references to her grandfather leaving that much wealth behind when he died in 1899, a quarter century before she was born.

Unless anyone can come forward and document Gloria Vanderbilt’s current net worth, it’s quite possible that Anderson Cooper is not in line for a vast trust fund because the money itself is just not there.

This makes me very sad. She was an amazing woman.

I'm happy she had such a special relationship with Anderson. He was her protector.

It is common knowledge that she was broke in the 90s and had to sell both her homes to satisfy the IRS and other debts. There is no way she could accumulate $200 million since then.

It's option #3. The money is not there. Either Forbes or Fortune did a detailed article about how she was wiped out by the IRS. She was allowed to keep her apartment in Manhattan and some art and jewels. She has written books and made a few bucks in the meantime, but most likely she is selling off art and jewels from this enormous storage facility she has. I had forgotten about the two other boys. I hope they get whatever she has left.

R30, hopefully Anderson's expenses come off the top of whatever was left. He's the one that took care of her, not the other sons. And it was multiple storage units. She was a hoarder.

Maybe there will be a big TV movie about the fighting over the estate like we got in a previous century! How exciting! They could show the first TV movie as a warm-up!

DLs hearts will be a-flutter with anticipation! Oh all of the battling threads that will be started!

Could it be a six-hour premiere event? Sow it over three Sunday evenings, starting at 9:00PM?

The comments about her wealth being less than imagined are accurate. She went through her inheritance long before she started making money. Most of her businesses up to 2000 failed and as I posted on another thread- she was unable to purchase an apartment in the early 80s (at the supposed height of her success) due to the fact that she did not meet the financial requirements! The press on this incident at the time as all wrong- she participated in the telling a wopper of a lie. My guess is that she was well off at the end of her life- still selling stuff on line etc, but no where near 200 million. In any case an interesting women who I have no doubt was very much the person her son describes.

I’m tempted to watch that TV movie again, I wonder how well it holds up. Lucy Gutteridge was so divine-looking as poor Gloria’s poor mother.

Let's say the Excrement-In-Chief is, for some reason, asked to make a statement. What percentage will be kind words about Gloria, and what percentage would be "her loser son with Fake News, failing CNN, who reports nasty things about me, blah blah blah"?

[quote]Gloria definitely inherited a lot of money

Yes, but not as much as you might think. Her grandparents' generation infamously squandered most of the original real Vanderbilt fortune.

[quote]Her grandparents' generation infamously squandered most of the original real Vanderbilt fortune.

But, you will NEVER forget us!

( Still owned by George Vanderbilt's descendants)

She didn't even have $20 million. But Sotheby's is probably licking their chops for her stuff.

LOL R37! I've been there, and the multiple video presentations they offer will emphasize that the grand kids got nothing! NOTHING!!!!! But they're not bitter about it or anything... even though there are dozens of them and apparently only 3 or 4 of them give a shit about keeping this place open and their ideas for doing so included installing a fucking strip mall in the courtyard. Seriously.

I can't even imagine the fabulous art and furniture she has in all those storage units. Anderson should do a special in which he empties out her things and documents their worth before selling that shit for a major coin!

Great clip R22!

r8, Its not a stereotype your inconsolable cunt. It is reality. Who the fuck do you think you are to come at me like that.

Interesting....

Old people.... They're so endearing....

Anderson Cooper Learns About Mom's 'Lesbian Relationship' | People

Anderson has been working on clearing out his mother's storage units for years. I'm sure he's documented everything- he seems like the type.

Who will get the auction? Christie's of Sotheby's?

^ Which leads me to believe that there isn't any money. As someone noted up thread, he has probably been taking care of his mother for years now but understands the value of her name and all things associated with her. The book and documentary were done to cash in on the name--besides being historical. Maybe Anderson is creating an estate for his brothers and their children that will come from their mother and grandmother.

[quote]Who will get the auction? Christie's of Sotheby's?

Who had the bigger dick?

Magnum Photos Verified account @MagnumPhotos

Artist, heiress and socialite Gloria Vanderbilt has died, aged 95: http:(slash)bit(dot)ly(slash)2ImxE0f

This leads to a sell for profit business. I believe everyone will come out of the woodwork in attempts to make a buck off of our poor little Gloria. Isn't she the last of the debutante heiresses?

I love how Anderson shit talks inheritance as if he you know started in the CNN mail room.

r50, you are such a hater. So what if he had a head start. He is a phenomenal journalist and anchor.

Anderson did start on his own, you cretin. You think anyone at CNN cared about a broke heiress to give him a job?

Did Gloria's pussy stink?

[quote]Anderson Cooper Learns About Mom's 'Lesbian Relationship'

I fucking told you bitches!

^ Yeah... but, let's not dismiss that he did grow up privileged, R52. He went to the better schools, traveled, etc. He has the background of a very wealthy scion of the very wealthy. He may not of lived at The Breakers but he has spoken quite frequently about visiting the house and staying there for a few days. If he really wanted to see and/or experience anything Vanderbilt it would only require his mother to make a call. Who would really deny her?

I think the 200 million is wildly wildly exaggerated. She only ever inherited a 1 million trust as a vanderbilt like 75 years ago. She lost a ton of money in a scam from a former business partner in the jeans business. Anderson said she basically made money flipping apartments over the decades. I suspect there isnt much money to be inherited, but Anderson doesnt need the money anyway. The last of his family is gone and I am sure it must be devastating for him.

[quote] [R50], you are such a hater. So what if he had a head start. He is a phenomenal journalist and anchor.

I'm not saying he isn't, but the way he talks about inheritance as though he did not inherit A TON of connections from his name is a bit absurd.

Three threads on GV death and not a one of them used the correct format when someone dies

DL is Dead To ME and going to hell.

r57, I stand corrected. Apologies.

Anderson, a couple of half-siblings, cousins at the funeral. Sad, but she lived a fulfilling and long life—though it probably seemed short to her, as it does to everyone by the time the end arrives.

After reading the history this family is cursed.

[quote]Three threads on GV death and not a one of them used the correct format when someone dies

Who cares about correct formatting we she died? Shit, she's dead! This thread is about the beneficiaries, thank you kindly!

[quote]She only ever inherited a 1 million trust as a vanderbilt like 75 years ago.

It was $5MM which is equivalent to $33MM in today's dollars

The Anderson/Gloria situation is very similar to Carrie/Debbie. Kids that kept their parents in the public eye. Both were basically broke and supported by their children. Debbie was smart enough to sell off her costume collection, and work enough to pay Carrie back for the house.

Gloria was loathe to sell anything but her own artwork. I can't wait for the auction. Between the art, jewelry and memorabilia (she kept everything) I'll bet it rakes in millions.

I hope we get to paw over and bid on her stuff.

Shhhh.... keep this hush-hush...

But, I'm told that.... that she... that she was (ahem...)

...intimate with a Black man.

Love her quirky apt.. She was a treasure.

R65 she referred to him as “that Ni...”, oh I better not

Anyone ever read her books? I tried “The Memory Book of Starr Faithfull,” about the real-life Gloria Wandrous, but it was a lot of jibber-jabber.

[quote][R65] she referred to him as “that Ni...”, oh I better not

Or, BIG Daddy!

[quote] Poor Little Gloria Vanderbilt Is Dead... WHO GETS THE MONEY/

^OH! New character!!! Now, the plot thickens....

Who is that? Could it be Ben? Her once future son in-law?

Another thing about Gloria, she never married wealthy men. First was a loser she had to pay to get rid of, 2 and 3 made decent money but certainly not the way Gloria liked to live. Anderson's father basically made nothing.

Didn't they break up? R70

Cornelius was a hard-driving, rough character. A book written in the 1980s by a Vanderbilt descendant said he was “illiterate, bad-tempered and foul-mouthed, and inclined, when trapped into a social event, to spit streams of tobacco juice and fondle the maids.”

She looked lovely at R49.

Yes, R73, but at what price?

While the others had Truman our Gloria had Bobby!

I am inspired to redecorate in homage to Gloria. I love her style. I need some larger paintings.

[quote] Who will get the auction? Christie's of Sotheby's?

Yes.

Some lovely photos of Gloria through the years.

I feel for Anderson. They had an amazing relationship. They had a tremendous rapport. She was very proud of him.

She had real lips before injections became popular.

[quote] Did Gloria's pussy stink?

Yesh.

R77 why is she wearing “white face”?

[quote] I feel for Anderson. They had an amazing relationship. They had a tremendous rapport. She was very proud of him.

Wasn't she the reason he was closeted for so long?

No r(85). He says she knew that he was gay in college. She could not have cared less. She just loved everything about him, she thought he was exactly like his Father.

Some advertisement execs should be shot....

[quote] she thought he was exactly like his Father.

His father was gay too?

Glo let Anderson's boyfriends sleep over. That's pretty cool.

I had several pairs of her jeans - the most uncomfortable things I've ever worn. And the colors? Red denim? Violet cords (actually those were less uncomfortable)?

No one cares about fraus and their opinion of fashion. Just be thankful she made a size 18, honey.

Anderson is already trying to capitalize on his womb's death. He is a rotten cantaloupe tumbling down the hill of irrelevance so he's grasping for leverage as he goes down.

Has anyone called Kathy Griffin to let her know the sad news? I know they were close.

Has Andy posted his condolences on Instagram? Have Kelly and Mark tweeted their grief?

R90, are you a woman?

GLORIA'S EUPHORIA

Gloria Vanderbilt has written her memoirs and has finally exorcised the demons of her lonely childhood and its shattering custody battle, as she tells DOMINICK DUNNE in an intimate conversation

APRIL 1985 DOMINICK DUNNE

At the window table in Mortimer's on New York's Upper East Side, Jerry Zipkin, the First Lady's close friend, was celebrating his seventieth birthday with a group of social figures that included Nan Kempner, Chessy Rayner, Mica and Ahmet Ertegun, and Carolina and Reinaldo Herrera, all of whom were passing elaborately wrapped gifts to him. Mica Ertegun's present, which Zipkin opened and held up, was a nineteenth-century painting of a boar, with the name Zip on a small brass plate attached to the frame, and the joke was greeted with hoots and screams from the assembled company.

At a nearby table, faced away from the merriment, sat Gloria Vanderbilt, alone, waiting for her luncheon companion. And at the bar, all the people waiting for tables were staring at her, not at the riotous party behind her.

"She looks wonderful," said a lady in a feathered hat.

"Marvelous," her friend replied.

They spoke with that proprietary tone New Yorkers reserve for a cherished celebrity—a survivor as well, in this case, against all odds of being one—who continues to cast a magic spell.

"No one told me you were here!" she cried, greeting me at the door of her red library. "Have you been waiting long?" She was contrite. She always rises before six, and at that hour, shortly after nine, she had been about the business of her life for several hours.

Gloria Laura Madelaine Sophia Vanderbilt di Cicco Stokowski Lumet Cooper is, like the Queen of England and Elizabeth Taylor, a lifetime celebrity, famous from childhood. She was wearing brown cashmere, and she settled elegantly into the corner of a chintz sofa. The great-great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who founded the family railroad and shipping fortune, lives in a penthouse on Gracie Square with her two teenage sons by her last husband, writer Wyatt Cooper, who died in 1978. Outside, beyond the terrace, tugboats lumbered by under the Triborough Bridge on the sundappled East River—that magical view you see so often in movies about rich people in Manhattan.

She speaks in a breathless, whispery, society-girl voice, and there is a trace of a stammer, under control and attractive. Her much photographed flour-white face, so prominent at theatrical and social parties in New York, was scrubbed and clear. Her hair, no longer black and severe, is now chestnut-colored, and it moved freely as she talked and gestured. She looked healthy and fresh and much younger than her well-documented age of sixty-one.

That morning a gossip column had announced that she might be on the verge of marrying again, and she giggled luxuriously over the item, her dimples deepening, her eyes sparkling, at the same time dismissing and enjoying it. She was, even in the morning, decidedly glamorous. She held a gold cigarette case with a sapphire clasp that she had bought at auction. Inside, engraved, were the words "To Gertie from Noel' and the notes to the opening phrase of "Some Day I'll Find You."

"Isn't it divine?" she asked. She had bought it specially for her great friend Bill Blass, the dress designer, and had intended to leave it to him in her will, but Blass, a constant smoker, had recently lost his own cigarette case, which had been left to him by the late Billy Baldwin, the interior designer, so she had decided to give it to him when they met for lunch later that day, rather than leave it to him after she was dead.

Vanity Fair

Behind her on a red lacquered wall was a photograph of a painting of Vanderbilt ancestors, the original of which hangs at Biltmore, the massive French chateau in Asheville, North Carolina, built by her great-uncle George Vanderbilt. She said she had spotted the painting in the background of a scene in the film Being There, which was shot in that house, and had had it reproduced. Beneath the photograph was an etching depicting all the great Vanderbilt mansions, both town and country, erected in the early years of the century, when the Vanderbilt family was busily establishing itself as the grandest in the land.

Her large apartment on two floors has the feeling of a country house in the city. Her library and bedroom are memorabilia-filled, with heirlooms, oil portraits, and family photographs in silver frames everywhere. There is a sense of roots and permanence and of ancestors having lived in these rooms before her, but it is a permanence created by Vanderbilt herself. The poor little rich girl of the thirties, who was the central figure in the most sensational child-custody case in the history of the United States, never had a room of her own until she was fifteen years old. Left fatherless before she was two, on the death of the alcoholic Reginald Vanderbilt, she was shunted from hotel to hotel, from rented house to rented house, from continent to continent, by her beautiful, thoughtless, pleasure-bent, widowed young mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt. When, finally, she secured a degree of permanence of location, in her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's vast country house, Wheatley Hills, in Old Westbury, Long Island, her assigned room, next to her aunt's, was the former room of her late uncle, the sportsman Harry Payne Whitney, which had been left intact since his death. Nothing was changed to accommodate a girl of ten, and for five years she lived with her uncle's horse prints and brown carpets, his curtains and chairs.

The dining room of Gloria Vanderbilt's apartment is dominated by a full-length portrait of her mother, painted in Paris when she was the child bride of the already dying Reginald Vanderbilt. Another painting of her mother occupies a wall of the guest room. There are photographs of her mother taken by Dorothy Wilding, the society photographer of an earlier time, and a drawing by Cecil Beaton of her mother with her equally beautiful twin sister, Thelma, Lady Furness, once the mistress of the Prince of Wales. There is, throughout the apartment, a sense of hommage to the woman the courts found unfit to be her mother.

She said, confidentially, about women like her mother, "You know, the kind of social strata they were in—they really in a sense were not meant to be mothers, because their instincts were not in that direction." She quotes her late husband Wyatt Cooper on her mother, when he first met her, in the final years of her life, living quietly with her twin sister in a small bungalow in Beverly Hills crammed with furniture that had once graced larger rooms: "This woman does not understand one thing that ever happened to her."

As a person living in North Carolina, you will see Biltmore Estate commercials every year to get people to visit the tourist attraction. I'll let you know if they flood the air waves with triple the ads upon Gloria's death.

Vanity Fair (This article was republished today by the magazine)

Five years ago Barbara Goldsmith wrote a highly successful book based on the Matter of Vanderbilt, as the custody case was legally called, entitled Little Gloria. . .Happy at Last. Alden Whitman, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, called it "a Proustian picture of the American upper class and the international society of which it was a part." It was a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and for four months remained on the New York Times best-seller list. It was a well-known fact in New York at the time that the book greatly distressed Vanderbilt. She had refused to be interviewed by Goldsmith. "She called me, which fascinated me, and said, 'I'm ready to interview you.' I said, 'From one professional writer to another, why should I give you material? Someday I'm going to write my own book.' " She claims never to have read Goldsmith's book, saying, "I have rarely read anything about myself." She implored her friends not to read it, declined an invitation to one of hostess Alice Mason's dinners when she found out Goldsmith would be present, and even stopped speaking to one of her friends, Maureen Stapleton, for playing the role of Dodo, her beloved nanny, in the four-hour television mini-series based on Goldsmith's book. The story, Vanderbilt felt, was hers to tell, and the time would come when she would be ready to tell it.

Now, five years later, she has told it, in a seeringly personal memoir entitled Once Upon a Time, subtitled "A True Story." It is the account of the celebrated lonely child who figured at the center of the custody trial rather than the story of the trial itself. In it she records the events of her extraordinary childhood, as she remembers them, in the language of the age she was at the time of the events—a series of long-suppressed memories finally come to life. "This is the way I have chosen to tell it," she said, "because this is the way I experienced it." It is an interesting twist that the book has been brought out by the same publishing house, Knopf, that issued Goldsmith's book, and that the same editor, Bob Gottlieb, has worked on both and managed to retain the good graces of both authors.

Even the genesis of writing the book has elements of the phantasmal quality of Vanderbilt's life. A discarded baby picture of Gloria Vanderbilt and a cousin, Emily Vanderbilt, taken in Central Park nearly sixty years ago, was saved by the maid of a relative and sent to Vanderbilt. And that picture inspired her book.

R91, These were size 0. Size 18 is for you. The denim was so stiff. Loved Levi's soft stonewashed jeans and pegging the cuffs!

Vanity Fair

"Fate is so extraordinary," she said. "I looked at that picture of the baby in the carriage and I thought, 'I know this person. Me. I'm going to sit down and write about her.' And I did. I started writing just before the new year, just after Christmas, and I couldn't stop writing. It was like being obsessed with it. And I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, and I finished it by April." Some days she wrote without stop for eight hours.

Throughout the book there is the sense of longing of the child for her mother. "Sometimes our hands touched," writes Vanderbilt. "But then she would go away, down the long corridors of hotels, down staircases, along avenues in her pale furs, snow-sprinkled, disappearing into the velvet caverns of waiting cars and borne away, away, away, away... .Would I ever see her again?"

Vanderbilt's Grandmother Morgan, her mother's mother, a curious, strong-willed woman who disapproved of her daughter's flagrant life-style, and Vanderbilt's nanny, Dodo, were the people most important to her in her early life. 'No father anywhere reachable, and Mother who was always coming in and then going out—mostly going out," she writes. When her father died in Newport before her second birthday, her mother, who was only nineteen years old, was at the theater in New York City. That night the little girl was taken to the Breakers, her paternal grandmother Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt's Newport mansion.

Early on in life the susceptible child was manipulated to be frightened of her mother, principally by her nanny and her maternal grandmother, Laura Morgan, who feared that the young widow, who was in love with Prince Friedel Hohenlohe, nephew of Queen Marie of Romania, would take the child to live in Germany. The grandmother persuaded the immensely rich and powerful sculptress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sister of Reginald and founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, to go to court and fight with her sister-in-law over Gloria's custody. "You must show your Aunt Gertrude how much you love her," Vanderbilt quotes her grandmother as telling her. "You must hug her more and kiss her a lot."

She described arriving at the courthouse, at the age of ten, in the backseat of her aunt's gray Rolls-Royce limousine as hundreds of spectators peered in the windows and jostled the car, and then her passage up the steps as photographers took her picture and a crowd surged around her.

"Was there any thrill to that?"

"What a question! Are you mad? It was terrifying," she answered. "They were screaming, 'You treat your ma good, Little Gloria! Stick to your ma! You be nice to your ma!' "

On one occasion during the trial, when the judge allowed her mother to visit her at her aunt's house in Old Westbury, she locked herself in her room and hid the key in the bottom of a powder box so as not to have to see her. She believed mistakenly that if she were put in the custody of her Aunt Gertrude, she would have Dodo with her forever, and Dodo was the only person in the world with whom she did not feel she was an impostor. The irony of the case is that in awarding the custody of Little Gloria to her aunt instead of her mother the judge imposed as a condition of the verdict that the nanny be discharged. Gloria was not allowed to maintain any contact with her. To further the isolation caused by the verdict, Vanderbilt writes, her favorite Whitney cousin, Gerta Henry, who also lived on the estate in Old Westbury, was told by her father that she could no longer play with or be friends with Gloria, because Gloria was a bad influence, who would grow up to be exactly like her mother.

When I asked her which was better, inherited or earned wealth, she did not hesitate to reply, "Oh, darling, the money you make is better."

I'm not a woman- there is no size 18.

Gloria pushed her special needs son out a window. Why celebrate her?

Vanity Fair

"All those people took this child and made mashed potatoes out of her, and when it was all over, everyone was back on square one," observed Vanderbilt a half-century later about the proceedings. Her mother was allowed to see her on weekends and for one month during the summer, but their meetings were strained, and most of their time together they spent going to movies. The rest of the time Vanderbilt lived in Old Westbury at her aunt's house, but once the trial was over, contact with Gertrude Whitney was minimal. "There was the time we looked at a magazine together," she remembered. "Oh, I think she loved me, but I think the tragedy of her was that she couldn't express her love."

Expressions of love were equally difficult between her and her mother in the years following the trial. In her book she writes about a July visit to her mother in Los Angeles during her early teenage years. At one point they are in the backseat of a limousine, driving up the coast of California to spend a weekend at San Simeon, the castle of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies. "Long before we reached Santa Barbara," Vanderbilt writes, "my mother ran out of conversation, and when she ran out of conversation, I ran out of conversation too."

Looking out the windows to the East River, Vanderbilt explained that they went through their lives without ever once discussing the trial together, although it was the thing that had changed them all. Then she corrected herself. "Thelma did say one thing to me, actually, now that I come to think of it." Thelma, which she pronounces Telma, was her mother's twin. "She said, 'Probably Mrs. Whitney believed all those things Mama said about your mother.' Thank God my mother had Thelma, because they really were like a mirror image of each other, and not only that, but so supportive of each other. It was as if my mother and Thelma were married. When you think of it, imagine, from birth, being in a room with someone who looks exactly like you and is just there as an extension of yourself. I almost never saw my mother really alone. Thelma was always there, and I realized later that my mother was as frightened of me as I was of her. Did I tell you how Thelma died? She dropped dead on Seventy-third and Lexington on her way to see the doctor. In her bag was this miniature teddy bear that the Prince of Wales had given her, years and years before, when she came to be with my mother at the custody trial, and it was worn down to the nub."

She has, in adulthood, made her peace with her Vanderbilt and Whitney relations, from whom she felt so alienated while she was growing up. The word impostor keeps coming into her conversation; she felt as a child that she was in their midst under false pretenses and would be found out and banished. "I couldn't wait to grow up," she said. This past Thanksgiving, she and her sons spent the day with eighty Whitney relations in Westbury.

Toured "Breakers" in Newport. What a place to be from! How can you not come from there and think of yourself as a princess (not in a good way).

The house, the grounds... it was all amazing. It was like a modern day tour of an Edith Wharton novel.

"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." (Hartley)

Vanity Fair

"The estate is all chopped up now," she said. "It's amazing what's happened to it. My cousin Pam lives in Aunt Gertrude's studio now. The house where I lived, my aunt's house, is where Flora Miller lives, who is Pam's mother. And Sonny Whitney's house and the indoor pool and the stables are a country club now. Sonny sold the estate right out from under them, and they don't speak now because of that. I mean, the golf club comes right up to my cousin Flora's front lawn. From her bedroom, which was my aunt's room, she looks out and there are people in Bermuda shorts walking around."

Vanderbilt shook her head and twisted one of the three signet rings she was wearing on her fingers. "You know," she said, remembering back to the old days in Westbury, "it seemed as if it would last forever. It seemed to just happen. Effortlessly. You never saw people with vacuums or anything, and flowers would be changed overnight by unseen hands. It was just. . .perfect."

About the Vanderbilt side of the family, she said, "I'm very friendly now with all of them. In fact, every summer we go up to Newport and stay at the Breakers. I hadn't been back to the Breakers since I was a child, and of course now it's a museum, with hordes of people going through. My cousin Sylvie, Countess Szapary, the daughter of my Aunt Gladys, who was my father's other sister, lives on the top floor, and I always stay in what was my father's room. It's sort of fascinating. Everything is exactly the way it was, except the tubs, those incredible bathtubs. Nothing comes out of the tap for hot salt water piped in from the sea anymore."

Once Upon a Time ends when Vanderbilt is seventeen, racing down the beach away from a Fourth of July party in Malibu, six months before the first of her four marriages to such wildly different types as actors' agent Pat di Cicco, conductor Leopold Stokowski, film director Sidney Lumet, and writer Wyatt Cooper. She was reluctant to talk about her first three marriages or her unsuccessful reunion with her nanny, Dodo, whom she hired as a nurse for the two sons of her second marriage, to Stokowski, for these are things she will be dealing with in the remaining five, or possibly six, volumes of her memoirs. The second volume, almost finished, takes her from age seventeen to twenty-one, and the third from twenty-one to twenty-nine. "I intend to live a very long life. My Grandmother Vanderbilt lived to ninety-five, and my Grandmother Morgan to a hundred and five. Of course, she lied about her age, but we knew. People say to me that I have total recall, but everything is a relative thing. I'm also a natural-born writer. It's how you perceive it, how you invent it, how you choose to tell it."

On several occasions the late Truman Capote wrote about her. In Breakfast at Tiffany's, her stutter, "genuine but still a bit laid on," was supposedly the inspiration for the model Mag Wildwood, Holly Golightly's best friend. In "La Cote Basque, 1965," the most celebrated chapter of Capote's never completed novel, Answered Prayers, published in Esquire in 1975, Vanderbilt appeared as herself, together with her chum Carol Marcus Saroyan Saroyan Matthau. In the story, Vanderbilt fails to recognize her first husband, Pat di Cicco, when he stops by her table to chat.

Vanity Fair

Her close friendships with women, especially Carol Matthau and Oona Chaplin, tend to be lasting. At one time all three married much older men. Carol Matthau married writer William Saroyan twice. Oona Chaplin, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill, married Charlie Chaplin. And Vanderbilt wed Leopold Stokowski, who was forty years her senior. For the last few years the two women closest to her have been New York socialites Judy Peabody and Isabel Eberstadt. Like Vanderbilt, they are artistically inclined. Judy Peabody is chairman of the board of directors of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and Isabel Eberstadt is a novelist. "I really trust women," said Vanderbilt. "And I believe they trust me."

She has been at various times in her life an actress, a painter, a collagist, a playwright, and a poet, each time baring herself to public criticism. In the late fifties she co-starred with Ginger Rogers in an all-star television special of Noël Coward's Tonight at 8:30, acted opposite television star Gardner McKay in an episode of Adventures in Paradise, and toured in Molnar's play The Swan. Her paintings have been exhibited, and a book of her collages has been published. She has written two plays, which are both under option but which have not been produced. In recent years Vanderbilt has achieved spectacular financial success, earning more money than she inherited, by signing a licensing agreement with Murjani International, which put her name on its line of blue jeans at the peak of the designer-jeans craze. The label reportedly took in $500 million a year, and Vanderbilt's face, in Murjani television commercials, became familiar to a whole new generation of Americans. She is also a designer of home furnishings, luggage, and handbags, all of which bear her name. Currently she is producing a perfume called Vanderbilt, which her business manager, Tom Andrews, claims is "far and away the biggest seller in American perfume." She has recently made her entry into the food area with Gloria Vanderbilt tofu glace, a frozen dessert manufactured by the Dolly Madison company, and the Danbury Mint has just introduced the Gloria Vanderbilt bride doll, the first designer doll in its series. When I asked her which was better, inherited or earned wealth, she did not hesitate to reply, "Oh, darling, the money you make is better."

Copies of Wyatt Cooper's book, Families: A Memoir and a Celebration, are everywhere in her apartment. "Wyatt was the most extraordinary father," said Vanderbilt. "From the beginning he treated our children as persons. It was something I never had growing up." Everything she did not have as a child, in the way of love and family and emotional security, her sons by Cooper have had, and the affection that exists between mother and sons is evident. Carter is a sophomore at Princeton, and Anderson will graduate from the Dalton School in June. Last summer Anderson worked as a waiter at Mortimer's. "Of anything I have achieved in my life, really, to be the parent that I feel I am is for me the greatest thing that I could ever possibly achieve," she said.

Vanity Fair

When I asked her if she would ever remarry, she answered, "I tell you, it's seven years now since Wyatt has gone. It's only now that I'm really not numb. My boys are getting older. They're going to be really gone soon. And I would like to live with somebody. Now we don't have those pressures of getting married. But I'm not going to settle for anybody. I'm very, very fussy. Listen, in a strange way my book has become another person. I want to finish the other books, and all my direction is going toward that. But, of course, one wants to share things with one person."

It was time to go to lunch and give Bill Blass the cigarette case Noël Coward had once given Gertrude Lawrence. After that she had a meeting at Knopf to go over the final placement of the photographs in her book. The poor little rich girl of the thirties is very much in control of her life in the eighties. As she stood looking down on Gracie Square, a thought occurred to her, something Wannsie, her mother's maid for forty years, once said to her about the trial: "It was all a terrible misunderstanding."

Anderson said a couple of years ago that he will not inherit her money. He doesn't want it. I think it all go to her charitable foundation? I'm pretty sure I remember this right.

Anderson't tribute to his mother.

Jesus did he have it already prepared? People have no grace or tact anymore.

What will happen to her twee 'n cheesy artistic output?

She was the perfect mother for a gay son. I'm so goddam envious.

R112 I agree

[quote]I believe everyone will come out of the woodwork in attempts to make a buck off of our poor little Gloria.

As she died in New York State which has no post-death rights of publicity, technically her image becomes public domain. Same as Marilyn Monroe.

I'd love it if they opened all of Gloria's legendary vaults and just found piles and piles of unsold 1980s jeans.

[quote]Jesus did he have it already prepared? People have no grace or tact anymore.

His mother was 95 with advanced stomach cancer. She is/was a notable figure. Why wouldn't he have it prepared?

Yes, he knew months ago that she was dying. Why not make the video? I'm sure he won't feel like cutting together a tribute in the immediate aftermath of her death.

He sounds like he's really trying to hold it together at the end. It seems like he did that voiceover of his statement very recently.

I don't think Anderson has any connection to the Vanderbilt family today. He's always been a loner since he's gay.

This was a very touching tribute to his mom.

The auction will be a TREASURE TROVE!

Gloria Vanderbilt’s Glorious Instagram Account Let the 95-Year-Old Write Her Own Obit

She joined at the urging of her son, Anderson Cooper.

Can we discuss the “art” she made and , somehow, sold? It was not good, looked like a grade school student’s after school art.

That tribute was really sweet. When he got all gravelly voiced toward the end it got to me and I feel really sorry for him, even if she was 95.

R122, it’s not that bad but it’s certainly derivative.

Wow, love the Instagram account, makes me wish I'd known about it before.

[quote]Can we discuss the “art” she made and , somehow, sold? It was not good, looked like a grade school student’s after school art.

And this is my naive question; How do you reach such a conclusion? What are all of the factors that go into making such a conclusion? How is her work grade school versus a Matisse?

God I can't stand Anderson and yet, that was a lovely, well-prepared and honest tribute to his mother.

The woman lived a long, glorious life, filled with more love and heartbreak than the majority of us will ever know. She seemed to keep a clear head about who she was and how she lived. I don't think we could expect more.

Perhaps we should all put our bitterness aside or keep in check moving forward, using her as an example of how to live a full life.

There might be some money somewhere. Otherwise Kathy Griffin wouldn’t have tried to hard to ingratiate herself.

How does one put paintings in a shower? Don't they get ruined?

I remember when he did an episode of his talk show and they went through her 'storage unit'. It was like it was an entire warehouse in Queens.

Side note: Anderson's talk show will always hold a special place in my heart. The very first time I went to NYC, I pretty much went from the airport to the filming at the Time Warner Center. It was the Madonna episode and I fell asleep listening to her blab on.

Gloria Vanderbilt looked amazingly like her father, Reggie Vanderbilt, who was a hopeless drunk. He drank himself to death. He spent money like water and died broke, leaving his teenage widow essentially penniless. The only money left was Gloria's trust fund, which was considerable.

Her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, or "Big Gloria", was really no different from other women from the upper classes back then. She never abused her child, but she was rarely around. Still very young she spent her time traveling and partying. After Reggie's death she fell in love with Prince Friedel Hohenlohe, and could have been a member of a royal family, but didn't marry him because by that time she was completely embroiled in the custody battle to regain her child. After the lurid trial, in which she was smeared and her reputation ruined, she was a physical and emotional wreck and essentially had nothing to show for all her efforts to get her child back.

Little Gloris was surrounded by awful people growing up. There was her mother's mother, who was crazy. Her nurse Dodo was equally nuts. They filled her head with the notion that she would be kidnapped and killed like the LIndbergh baby and they told her her mother wanted her dead so that she could get all of her money. What a thing to do to a child.

Her Aunt Gertrude Whitney got custody of her but ignored her as much as her mother did. Gertrude Whitney was totally self-absorbed, totally useless as a guardian to a child. And although Big Gloria was deemed immoral for having a lesbian affair (she may or may not have had one) Gertrude Whitney had lesbian affairs and supposedly slept with guys, too. "Little Gloria, Happy at Last" talks of her "fabulous' lovers but it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to have sex with her, unless it was for her money. Gertrude Whitney was homely as a horse's ass.

It's a good thing Gloria Vanderbilt never read "Little Gloria, Happy at Last" because it's very uncomplimentary to her. It describes her as, at least as a young adult, totally selfish and cruel as hell to her mother, who was by then almost destitute and going blind. When her mother was in the hospital seriously ill, Little Gloria came to the hospital and spoke to Thelma, her mother's twin sister. She said she was going on a trip with her husband "Stokie" and asked what would clothes would be suitable for her to take with her on the trip. Thelma exploded, saying that her mother might be dying, and if that's all she had to say maybe she ought to just leave. I don't know if Little Gloria and Big Gloria ever reconciled before Big Gloria's death. I think only her twin sister was with her when Big Gloria died, forgotten and alone.

Beautiful WWD tribute....

Listen to Leopold Stokowski on Spotify to celebrate the life of a 21 year-old who would marry a 63 year-old.

....

I enjoyed seeing her art on Instagram. She was very charming.

MONEY!

The long lost heir. This is actually a very nice story. After nearly 40 years of being estranged from the family, Christopher reconnected with his mother because he saw the documentary that Anderson did with his mother.

Gloria Vanderbilt's Estranged Sons, Anderson Cooper and Christopher Stokowski, Finally Reconnect

The two reportedly have Nothing Left Unsaid, the HBO documentary about Vanderbilt and Cooper, to thank for their reconciliation.

When Nothing Left Unsaid, the HBO documentary consisting of conversations between Anderson Cooper and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, premiered earlier this year, critics pointed out that the film stayed mum about Christopher Stokowski, Cooper's estranged half-brother.

Now, Cooper (above left, with his mother and late brother Carter, in 1976) has confirmed to the New York Post that he and Stokowski have reconciled after 38 years of estrangement. Stokowski, the newspaper reports, disappeared and became a recluse in 1978 following a dispute with Vanderbilt's therapist about his love life.

The release of the documentary "sparked renewed interest in his missing brother, who contacted the family through [April] Sandmeyer," Stokowski's former fiancée.

"I'm very happy for them and glad to have played a part in them being back in touch," she tells the Post, which reports that Cooper and his half-brother—the son of conductor Leopold Stokowski—three times since the film was released in April.

(He came back for his piece of the action)

There is at least one line of the Vanderbilt family that did not squander their money and are still living off a huge trust fund as we type...

Dear god, did DVF know Gloria in the biblical sense as well?

Andy Cohen in a black Civil War era veil.

Poor Little Glory, she died so young.

She could have been somebody, she could have been a contender....

she was born beautiful and rich fucked the hottest men and lived till 95 most of it in good health....such a tough life

[quote]He may not of lived at The Breakers but he has spoken quite frequently about

Oh, dear!

[quote]Gloria was loathe to sell anything but her own artwork.

Oh, DEAR!

DL HOMOS did any of you ever see LITTLE GLORIA HAPPY AT LAST (1982) the mini series. It was really good.

Very nice write up and overview of her life.

[quote]DL HOMOS did any of you ever see LITTLE GLORIA HAPPY AT LAST (1982) the mini series. It was really good.

I saw it. Angela Lansbury as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Bette Davis as Gloria's grandmother.

Who is going to play the young albino boy?

PLAY GLORIA!!!!

There isn’t much money.

[quote]Bette Davis as Gloria's grandmother.

For me, the BEST acting scene in movie by Davis is when she is sitting at the foot of her son's Reggie's bed as he lay dying. She is very stoic and then as she hears him struggle with his very last breath you see the fear in her eyes as if she is saying, "NO, not yet", but he dies and she returns back to her stoic demeanor and moves on. The camera is totally focused on her face and the expression of her eyes. A fantastic performance, in my opinion.

From what I have read, it seems as if she was very active until just this last month when she was rushed to the hospital. You have Anderson's clip which showed her alert and laughing. At least it was fast. What a long and fulfilling life!

All this ridiculous botty licking of her by the media. She wasn’t a revoltionary. She was merely a dilettante rich bitch who blew a fortune. Anyone can start a business when they have millions to pay start up costs and business advisers.

Anderson is cute but her other Carter was super handsome.

r152, would you like some cheese with your wine?

I pray Anderson doesn't get the nervous high squealing giggles while reading his mother's eulogy.

Did Gloria get to ride Rubirosa pinga?

Heiresses have their pick of horse cocks.

Kathy Griffin Verified account @kathygriffin

1) I lost a friend today. The one and only Gloria Vanderbilt. I loved her so much. She let me call her “Glo Vandi” and I would be so flattered when she would refer to me as her daughter. When we would have our alone time, we would sit on this sofa and talk for hours.

Kathy Griffin Verified account @kathygriffin

2) No topic was ever off-limits and believe it or not I would even shut up for a while because, oh the life that woman lived. I’d always plan on wearing something ridiculous to get her to laugh from the moment she opened the door.

Wonder if Kathy and Anderson have made up?

Kathy Griffin Verified account @kathygriffin

3) She would invite me to a book event, where I know I would be surrounded with so many intellectuals, I would always get overdressed and try to learn a new big word for the occasion!

Kathy Griffin Verified account @kathygriffin

4) The dinner parties! I was so thrilled to be invited and spend more time with her. Often at these events I would be quite intimidated and Glo knew what to do. She would stop the conversation and say “Kaaaathy, WHAT is going on with the Lohans?”

5). She would open up about her early life. The trauma she went through as a little girl & a grown woman. The ups, downs of her life. Her candor was extraordinary. I have no photos of those private conversations. “Kathy, there’s always more and we’re never done”. I love you Glo💔

Once again, Kathy manages to make this all about herself while failing to express any condolences for Anderson. Self-involved and petty as always.

Kathy needn't have mentioned Anderson by name but yeah, should have offered condolences to "her family"

[quote] Once again, Kathy manages to make this all about herself while failing to express any condolences for Anderson. Self-involved and petty as always.

It sounds like she had a relationship with Gloria independent of Anderson. He's not even in that group photo with Phil Donahue and Gloria Steinem. I think the tribute is very nice and obviously it's an awkward situation given Kathy and Anderson's falling out. Stop trying to start shit.

R151- yes!

R152, I love you. You're the gay Che Guevara! Let's storm the palace together, or in this case, Gloria's townhouse. There, we can slash the portraits of her and her mother with our bayonets. We can appropriate her jewelry, clothes, china, and other riches for the masses. and then we can make love in her boudoir where she conspired to keep the masses down by creating slavish devotion to her jeans that hugged our derrières!

New York Socialites and ancestry buffs help us out here. How was her mother Gloria Morgan related to Real Housewife of New York SonJa Morgan? I'm assuming Sonja Morgan's ex-husband was related to Gloria in someway. I haven't seen the show for years but I believe Sonja referenced the Vanderbilts once or twice.

What was on her ipod?

I'm too sexy for this shroud, too sexy for this shroud, I'm too sexy

[quote] Anderson did start on his own, you cretin. You think anyone at CNN cared about a broke heiress to give him a job?

Calm down, stangurl.

First of all, his mother knew EVERYONE through her connections as both a celebrity-heiress (abnd a ncie one at that) and then as a famous jeans designer.

Second of all, they are Vanderbilts, which gave them all kinds of connections. Anderson spent his teenage years being taken to Studio 54 and working as a busboy at Mortimer's (where famous people would know him and say, "Oh look, it's Gloria's son!"). He got to go to Dalton and then Yale, where there is a beautiful suite of rooms in one of the colleges specifically reserved for any Vanderbilt who attends the university as an undergraduate.

If any rich kid in history benefited in terms of his eventual career from his family connections, it would be Anderson Cooper. Why do you think Channel One and then CNN would otherwise hire a reporter (and then anchor) who always stammers on camera?

Maybe family connections got him his first job, but Anderson worked his ass off. CNN isn't giving anyone millions a year because he is a Vanderbilt, that's just rubbish.

[quote]CNN isn't giving anyone millions a year because he is a Vanderbilt, that's just rubbish.

CNN is giving him millions because he is a harmless metrosexual who fraus can feel safe with.

^No one never said that he didn't work hard, R170.

It was implied.

Will Ben *dare* show his face at the funeral?

Since Ben is one of the very few people Gloria followed on her Instagram account, I believe there is a very good chance that he will “dare show his face at the funeral” as r174 so elegantly puts it.

Such bitter resentment on this thread. Its dam sickening. Die in a grease fire.

R152- that's just it- she did not have millions to start a business. She had long gone through her inherited wealth. She did have fame and a certain "brand" (although no such application of the word at the time.) Any way she harnessed her fame to her ideas about design and art. Most of it failed, but she sure was interesting in the process. I think she was talented although not much of a businesswoman.

I remember they had to change her jeans commercial in the 1970s. The commercial talked about fitting nicely in the derriere. And then a few weeks later, they changed it and Glo was saying "fits nicely back there."

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

She had a name and she used it to her advantage as she should have. Americans (or humans in general) have this fascination with the rich. I was reading the article posted above and at a certain section my eyes and mind just went into a glaze. I was imagining only how beautiful it must have been;

[quote]"The estate is all chopped up now," she said. "It's amazing what's happened to it. My cousin Pam lives in Aunt Gertrude's studio now. The house where I lived, my aunt's house, is where Flora Miller lives, who is Pam's mother. And Sonny Whitney's house and the indoor pool and the stables are a country club now. Sonny sold the estate right out from under them, and they don't speak now because of that. I mean, the golf club comes right up to my cousin Flora's front lawn. From her bedroom, which was my aunt's room, she looks out and there are people in Bermuda shorts walking around."

[quote]Vanderbilt shook her head and twisted one of the three signet rings she was wearing on her fingers. "You know," she said, remembering back to the old days in Westbury, "it seemed as if it would last forever. It seemed to just happen. Effortlessly. You never saw people with vacuums or anything, and flowers would be changed overnight by unseen hands. It was just. . .perfect."

In buying her name we felt as if we were buying a piece of the above. Why do you think the Trump mystique works? "He's a millionaire."--although in reality it is very likely that a blue collar worker is more liquid than Trump

Ben showed up to the funeral in Khakis? How tacky!

Nice casket. It's worthy of a Vanderbilt. She'll probably be interred at on the the Vanderbilt mausoleums in Staten Island.

Both exes showed up. But that was a fast funeral.

R181, Anderson was wearing black jeans and Cesar wasn’t even wearing a jacket, so clearly the dress code was informal.

Interesting that neither Andy Cohen nor Kathy Griffin were invited. This was obviously a very private affair.

[quote]Both exes showed up. But that was a fast funeral.

Had to get her in the ground quick so I could start selling the merch in storage. Girl's gotta eat.

Vanderbilt Mausoleum

[quote]But that was a fast funeral.

She's dead. Repast at one of Ben's bar.

What more is needed?

[quote]Interesting that neither Andy Cohen nor Kathy Griffin were invited.

While the funeral was going on, Kathy was at the house, rooting through Glo's possessions to see what she could pilfer.

I'm glad Anderson is not making a Kardashian-like spectacle of his mother's burial but why so quickly? I assumed he would have a viewing, and then the burial. It's been 24 hours ( that we know of) since she passed for goodness sake.

Andy was flouncing around in her ballgowns & high heels!

^^^ That’s offensive!

[quote]I'm glad Anderson is not making a Kardashian-like spectacle of his mother's burial but why so quickly?

What more should he have done? Have you seen the numerous memorials all over the place for his mother? Maybe there will be a memorial service down the road but the tributes have already been massive. Is a red carpet fashion show needed that shows who came to the Gloria Vanderbilt funeral and what they were wearing?

Besides... short and sweet saves money! (Back to the topic of this thread)

Usually religious Jewish people bury their dead within 24 hours. Was Glo any part Jewish?

[quote]. Was Glo any part Jewish?

Maybe by injection.

Gloria Vanderbilt To Be Buried With Husband Wyatt Cooper & Son Carter

Viewers of their joint documentary, Nothing Left Unsaid, learned that Vanderbilt had planned to be buried with her husband, Wyatt Cooper, and next to her son, Carter Cooper, who died in 1988 at the age of 23. On the website Find A Grave, it was confirmed that Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper is to be buried at the Vanderbilt Family Cemetery and Mausoleum in Staten Island, New York, in the crypt with her husband and alongside her son. A photo of Wyatt Cooper’s crypt already has her name inscribed as Gloria V. Cooper, February 20, 1924, with a note underneath.

[quote]“Gloria and Wyatt Together Without Fear, Trusting In God, In Ourselves, In Each Other, With Faith, Hope, and Love.”

In the documentary, Nothing Left Unsaid, Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper visit the cemetery where Wyatt and Carter Cooper are interred and talk about the grief of losing a father, a child, and a brother, reports The Daily Mail.

[quote]“Gloria and Wyatt Together Without Fear, Trusting In God, In Ourselves, In Each Other, With Faith, Hope, and Love.”

How pretentious. Only a rich person could afford to put that many letters on a tombstone.

Dam, AC's papa was hot.

R191, as I wrote in my post it's only been 24 hours. Did she not have any relatives who may have liked to pay their respects but don't reside in NYC? They didn't even have time to book a flight. Same goes for her friends.

I'm glad Anderson's two exes managed to be there to support him but where are HER mourners?

R196, it's a good thing the DL doesn't charge you per word. You'd have to substitute the word "pretentious" for another word with fewer letters.

[quote]Dam, AC's papa was hot.

Not really. He looked like a used car salesman.

[quote] Did she not have any relatives who may have liked to pay their respects but don't reside in NYC? They didn't even have time to book a flight. Same goes for her friends.

Many of her relatives (of which many she did not know or were close with) can't afford a plane ticket anyway. Her friends? Of her peers, she's probably the last one. Younger friends paid their respects via instagram, photo essays, etc I think the GREATEST tribute is the film documentary that Anderson did with her ""Nothing Left Unsaid" and the numerous interviews (available on YouTube for your enjoyment) that they both did together.

Now I've heard it all. A tweet or a quick upload of a photo is now considered paying your respects.

[quote]Now I've heard it all. A tweet or a quick upload of a photo is now considered paying your respects.

She's dead. Will Gloria know? Do you know something that we don't? Anderson, (and other close family members and friends) have come to terms with her death. They don't need the "LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION!"

I'm not certain that was the funeral. After reading the article it seemed that this was just the transfer of the body from the funeral home to Staten Island. I would imagine a more formal funeral or memorial service might be held there.

r203, Thats exactly what it was. Posters on here be posting shit of which they know nothing about.

JFC, R202, it doesn't have to be a goddamn circus as I'm sure Anderson is more than capable of giving his mother a low-key and tasteful sendoff. As R203 said maybe a service at the burial site.

[quote] I'm glad Anderson's two exes managed to be there to support him but where are HER mourners?

Dead. She lived to be 95--she outlived everyone.

Anderson Cooper works very hard, and he's very intelligent. But he never would have been given an "in" at Channel One or at CNN (especially with that stammer) had he not been a Vanderbilt. That's just a fact.

r207, It is your fact, bitch. It is not the fact or an objective truth. May I ask, what do you do for a fkin living?

Enough the the "stammer", you tired queen.

[quote] Enough the the "stammer", you tired queen.

I see what you did there. Clever!

Well, was Maria Shriver so brilliant that NBC just couldn't continue to function without hiring her?

The plot

[quote] May I ask, what do you do for a fkin living?

Sure--I'm a college professor.

Now it's your turn, since you asked me. What do you do for a living?

^^^ Tenured?

I knew William Vanderbilt, grandson of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt who went down on the Luisitania, back in the 70s. His comment about the family money was that there was enough to generate a middle class salary so he didn't have to work if he didn't want to and could pursue the things he wanted to but that he wasn't really rich. The name did open doors. He was teaching high school at the time.

I would kill all of you right now if I could get my hands on a pair of Purple Gloria Vanderbilt cords.

Thought she was quite broke as well and that Anderson and she had fairly difficult lives (divorces, Wyatt’s suicide). Anderson Cooper may be weird but he’s always seemed pretty upfront about growing up very unhappy and channeling it into work. I don’t begrudge him success. He traded on the family name, but it’s not like he files his nails all day.

[quote] ^^^ Tenured?

Yep.

Good for you, on to gossip.

r213, I am active duty military.

Can't we say that this one DIED instead of "passed away" with cute little angel wings?

Poor Gloria got dead. She snuffed it. RIP, Gloria.

Anderson brought his fk-buddies to his Mom's funeral? Tacky.

They were in long-term relationships, not fuck buddies.

I thought we would, at the very least, be treated to one of Sarah Jessica’s ridiculous hats!

R222, Anderson invited Cesar (with whom he was for several years) and Ben (whom he dated for at least 10 years and might be still dating since they still live together) to the funeral because those relationships are important to him. The only one that qualifies as a fuck buddy was that that thirsty doctor from Texas, but since Anderson appears to have dropped him like a hot potato as soon as his IG pics got picked up by the Enquirer, he was never going to get an invitation in the first place.

R224 Like maybe 2 gay squirrels mounting each other amid some confusing fauna?

And some other slutty, highly inappropriate dresses from the ladies who lunch & lush!

Seem to remember from the 60s and 70s and from someone-in-the-know that Daddy Wyatt was GAY.

How old is Anderson Cooper? Was she already in her late 40s when she had him?

Will Gloria have an over the top funeral like Joan Rivers or more subdued like Lee Radziwill?

R228, he's 52 so his mother had him when she was 43.

You can't much more subdued than the Princess. Hell, they hauled her out of the church in a wicker basket from Pier One although I guess that's all Tina could afford.

BUMP!

Perhaps it was Gloria’s request to be buried quickly without fanfare. Most people have a preference and make it known, ahead of time. My mother requested cremation and no service. And prepaid everything - didn’t have to do a thing.

My sister went ahead and did a memorial service (against mother’s express wishes) because my sister wanted it. If it were solely up to me, I would have done what my mother planned. But my sister worried about what people would think. Apparently if you don’t do a big expensive show, people think you didn’t love the dead person.

You raise a very good point, R233. Here was a woman who basically lived her whole life in public and was a notable public figure. Maybe she did request to have something done that would be private, simple, and without any fanfare.

Below:

One of Gloria's grand daughters and great grand children

[quote]"I don't believe in inheriting money," he said. "I think it’s an initiative sucker, I think it’s a curse. Who's inherited a lot of money that has gone on to do things in their life? From the time I was growing up, if I felt like there was some pot of gold waiting for me, I don't know if I would have been so motivated."--Anderson Cooper

Cooper also pointed out that his mom made more money by herself than she inherited.

"We believe in working," he noted. "She's the coolest person I know. She really is."

In a 2016 interview with CBS This Morning, Cooper said that both he and his mother didn't have much of a connection to the wealthy Vanderbilts.

"That name Vanderbilt has such baggage with it, such history, and I'm very glad I don't have that name, and my mom never felt much connection to the Vanderbilt family and I certainly didn't," Cooper said, noting that he always identified more with his late father, writer Wyatt Emory Cooper's, more down-to-earth roots in Mississippi. "One of the happiest days for my mom, she called me and said, 'Somebody just referred to me as Anderson Cooper's mom.' Very happy that she's reached that stage of life."

She seemed like a cool lady, but Gloria will be worth much more in death. Trash like the Kardashians will be salivating to buy paintings and anything with a Vanderbilt connection.

Did Gloria still, if ever, own any important art? I mean is there much of a collection? I got the impression there was a fair amount of decorative art in storage. Real valuable art would have been an insurance nightmare and perhaps sold long ago.

I DO

I recall reading somewhere that in the 1870's, the Vanderbilts were one of the richest families in the United States. By the 1970's, not one of the Vanderbilts had a million dollars (I've no idea if this actually true).

Cool lady? She was severely damaged and a slut on top of that.

R239, see R24

And, read the article linked

[quote]Editor’s note: Gloria Vanderbilt died on June 17, 2019, at the age of 95. Here is a look at her family's famous fortune, and how they largely squandered it.

How The Vanderbilts Blew Their Fortune And Went From American Royalty To Flat-Out Broke

The fashion industry has a filthy disgusting track record when it comes to pollution, sweatshops, and waisting natural resources - particularly clean water.

Nothing to glorify. Purely shameful.

If Diane Arbus was around taking pictures of the kids, Glo had some decent art. She's been photographed by most of the big names. I'll bet that portrait of her mother is worth big money as well.

Wonderful tribute.

R245 bipolar anorexia nervosa Ripa

R50, are you for real? Phenomenal journalist and anchor. Well he is not.

Anderson Cooper is good at his job. In my opinion. I really don't care if he got a leg up to attend Yale or make it as a journalist, because he seemed to work hard all those years. I think he's a hard worker and responsible. He's not a journalist or anchor for the history books but he is no slouch and not even a lightweight.

I think some of you are having a ridiculous argument. Anderson's name and background might have opened some doors for him, or offered some opportunities, but he would not have lasted nearly this long if he wasn't competent in what he does.

He had no control of where and to whom he was born to just like all of us. It is what it is.

I Iike hard workers, which is obviously what Gloria became, as well as Anderson.

Anderson is the stereotypical gay mummy's boy. Gloria stayed around this long to keep the precious petal company as he had no family. Carter probably jumped because he felt alienated and ostracised because of their weird incestuous relationship. I don't know why we're celebrating someone whose only contribution to society was putting her name on the arse of Jeans.

According to her memoir, Gloria was still enjoying having her pussy eaten at the age of 90.

[quote]According to her memoir, Gloria was still enjoying having her pussy eaten at the age of 90.

Was Anderson her pimp?

"Hey Michael Douglas, when you're in town, my Mom needs some."

who was eating it?

R254, Kirk Douglas?

R10 the apartment is divine!

Correction, she was 85, not 90.

"In the book, she describes someone she was dating at 85 as 'the Nijinsky of cunnilingus,'" Anderson told Howard Stern. "I had to look up Nijinsky ... a ballet dancer, very limber, I assume," he joked. "My mom just thought it was funny, I was like, 'oh jeez, Mom, I don't need to hear this.'"

At least it was fast....

“I wanted to take a few moments to thank all of you who have reached out to me about the death of my mom,” Cooper, 52, said as he began the nearly five-minute tribute. “Your cards and emails, your texts and DMs on Instagram, and tweets, have truly meant a lot. My mom would be stunned by all the attention and the kind words that have been written and spoken about her.” He went on to share an anecdote about her joining Instagram at the age of 92. “It tickled her beyond belief,” he said of her 221,000 followers.

Anderson revealed that the Vanderbilt family heiress found out on June 8 that she had an advanced form of stomach cancer, a mere nine days before she passed away. During that time, she was visited by friends and family. “She laughed a lot,” Cooper recalled. “It was the best end possible to her remarkable life.” As his voice began to crack, Cooper added that her final nine days were “a great, great blessing … they were the most extraordinary days of my life and I am grateful.”

what shocks me more is Anderson Cooper didn't know who Nijinsky was

the apartment is divine if you're a circus clown!

R260 is one of those cunts who thinks everything should be tasteful neutral colours and clean lines.

Bitch was an artist who lived to be 95. If she isn't entitled to have a colourful space filled with treasures then we are all visually poorer for it.

oh yes, and who would be buying her artwork and singing its praises if she weren't Gloria Vanderbilt?

and who under 50 would even know who she was if it weren't for her son being on tv and pushing their incestuous relationship ever chance he got? Clothing designer my arse, all she ever did was have her signature embroidered on the back pocket of jeans.

[quote] Clothing designer my arse, all she ever did was have her signature embroidered on the back pocket of jeans.

And, what's your name R263? What have you accomplished?

You don't have to personally buy her art to find her home a fanciful treat.

No, I'm a realist, I live in the real world where accolades are earnt based on merit and not because of who your grandfather was but we all know you archaic queens like to fawn over old school society matrons in order to fulfil your inner feminine desires to be kept women.

R266 Thank you. I've been wondering about those desires. Now I can stop seeing my therapist.

Whatever will I do with that extra cash? Hmmm

why, you could buy a Gloria Vanderbilt finger painting, although they've probably increased in value since Monday.

My Grandmother has vinyl GloVandi placemats

R268 You're an interior decorator, therapist and now an art advisor. Is there anything you can't do?

don't you know it's hip and chic to start sentences without capital letters? clearly not. but we already know you're stuck in the years of your youth at the height of the Gloria Vanderbilt custody hearings. her passing must have been quite nostalgic for you, perhaps you're questioning your own mortality now, no?

More free therapy R271? You spoil me.

what I lack in grammatical correctness I make up for with charity

R251 Carter's suicide was likely the result of psychosis brought as side effects of Theophylline, an allergy inhaler. It has drastic effects on some individuals. The days before the incident Carter had not slept for several days, was feeling cold even though it was July, and was making nonsensical comments and behaving irrational and delusional.

Carter was the cuter of the two sons by Cooper.

Anderson has done well for himself

No memorial service for Glo?

[quote]No memorial service for Glo?

Nope, they just shoved her body into a pair of tight jeans and through her in the mausoleum.

Tissue.... I NEED TISSUE!!!

Anderson Cooper says he's feeling ‘lonely’ since death of mom Gloria Vanderbilt

In his first live show back on CNN Thursday night, Anderson Cooper opened up about his heartache and loneliness surrounding the death of his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt.

After thanking viewers for their outpouring of love, adding that his mom would “be stunned by all the attention and kind words spoken about her,” he touched on her sudden stomach cancer diagnosis and the days they spent together just before she passed at the age of 95.

“Being able to spend those nine days and nights with her was a great, great blessing. They were the most extraordinary days of my life, and I’m very grateful,” he shared. “Though I was holding her hand and her head when she took her last breath, it’s still a little hard for me to believe that she’s gone.”

Cooper visibly blinked back tears as he told viewers that his immediate family is now "all gone," mentioning his father's death and older brother's suicide.

"My dad died when I was 10, and my brother when I was 21. She was the last of my immediate family, the last person who knew me from the beginning," he confessed. "They’re all gone and it feels very lonely right now. I hope they are at least together."

Personal and career success aside, the news anchor admitted that he is most proud of being there for his mom, who was a well-known fashion designer and socialite, during the final years of her life.

"I'm happy that I was able to make the latter years of her life comfortable and fulfilling. When I die, that might be the thing I am most proud of. I'm happy that we left nothing unsaid between us."

"She was determined to make something of her life, determined to make a name for herself and find the love and family that she so desperately craved," Cooper declared in the seven-minute video. "Over the course of her life, my mom was photographed by all the great photographers. She worked as a painter, a writer, an actress and designer. If you were around in the early 1980s it was pretty hard to miss the jeans she helped create."

Vanderbilt was married four times — to PatDiCicco (1941 to 1945), Leopold Stokowski (1945 to 1955), Sidney Lumet (1956 to 1963), and to Wyatt Cooper (1963 to 1978). She was mom to four sons: Christopher and Leopold Stokowski and Anderson and Carter Cooper, the latter of whom committed suicide at age 23 in 1988.

It must be hell to be orphaned at the tender age of 52.

R276-Anderson Cooper makes about $12 million per year.

There’s no way she’s worth 200 mil. She had her apartment and that’s about it. Vanderbilts haven’t had money for decades. And AC makes me laugh with his absurd disbelief in inheritance. You inherited the name, darling, and it gave you every single thing you have now. He’d be NOWHERE without his family name.

[quote]He’d be NOWHERE without his family name.

Not nowhere. He'd be doing the 6:00 pm local news in Tupelo, Mississippi

I'm Anderson Cooper, and tonight we have a very special report on cow feed. We'll be asking the question, "Is corn really good for your cattle?" You can join me and Misty Darknight here at 6:00 pm tonight. Back to you, Wendi Jo.

Laugh all you want, but Anderson wasn't born in Shitsville USA.

Nah, he wouldn’t even have been in broadcasting. Not with that face, he would never have even gotten in the door.

I think Anderson is quite handsome.

The problem with Anderson is that he's albino. Pasty skin and white hair. His actual face is nice looking, it's the whiteness of it that is a turn off.

He is awfully fair, but he has a great body for his 50s.

R279, I found the clip in which he says he feels alone now.

Please pass the tissues this way when you’re done with them.

I guess no memorial for Glo? I've read nothing. Were there no paps around for the burial either?

^I think Anderson handled this beautifully. Here was a woman who had spent ALL of her life in the public's eye and at the very least she wanted to be buried without any fanfare in peace. He may have upped the value of her holdings too by playing into the Vanderbilt mystique whatever.

Get out more R286.

Gloria Vanderbilt left her Midtown home to her eldest son, Leopold Stokowski, and the rest of her estate to youngest son, Anderson Cooper — but nothing to estranged middle son, Chris Stokowski, according to her will.

The document, filed Monday in Manhattan surrogate court, says Leopold will get 210 shares in the late socialite fashion icon’s pad in a co-op at 30 Beekman Place, while “all the rest” of her property goes to her CNN anchor scion.

Chris, Vanderbilt’s younger son with conductor Leopold Stokowski, cut himself off from the family 40 years ago after a psychiatrist allegedly influenced his relationship with his ex-fiancée April Sandmeyer.

Vanderbilt died June 17 at age 95 after being diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer.

Gloria should've split her estate equally amongst her surviving children, from what I've read, she wasn't much of a mother to her two eldest sons.

Vivien Leigh was a notoriously indifferent parent, however, she left most of her estate to her only child.

[quote]Gloria should've split her estate equally amongst her surviving children, from what I've read, she wasn't much of a mother to her two eldest sons.

On whom would she pattern herself after? Her own mother? Her Aunt? It was because of her own awful experiences with inherited money that she became so against it. Anderson has been able to make his own money and what he will probably do is set up some type of charitable trust. The grand daughters have been modestly successful in opening up their own businesses. I believe her oldest son is/was a landscaper. So, although he did well for himself, I guess she wanted to give him something to top it off. Why give anything to the middle son who purposely estranged himself from her and the family for 40 years?

R295, if you can't understand why favoring one child over the rest is wrong.... Obviously, you're too much of a fan gurl of Little Glory's to grasp this.

That was actually very touching, R279; thank you for posting it!

I'm not a fan gurl of our Gloria but I am a realist. I should leave you a quarter after you don't speak with me for 40 years? Anderson became our Gloria's "ride and die". He was there for her. She knows that he doesn't need her money (if there is money) and he knows her wishes. She trusts him to execute her wishes.

You know R296/294, not every family is like the "Brady Bunch" or "Ozzie & Harriett". In fact, most are not.

She was the best looking 95 year old there ever was.

I like Anderson, go on and hate me. Prayers to and thinking of him during a probably difficult time right now.

Anderson and Stan will be paying major NY estate taxes, as high as 16%.

Not if the estate is valued at under 11 million, which I think is the trigger for the estate tax.

The top New York estate tax rate is 16%. The top rate only applies when the New York taxable estate is over $10,100,000 million. Dollars below that amount are subject to tax at graduated rates, starting at 3.06% for the first $500,000.

A16% rate isn't all that high, as taxes go. I'm sure that Anderson can handle it.

As for the son, Anderson's half brother who cut himself off from the family 40 years ago, I can't imagine he'd expect any inheritance nor should he receive one.

As to what kind of parenting leads one child to suicide and another to cut the parent off for 40 years? No idea and assume that everyone was very touchy. Maybe Papa Stokowski left him something.

Anderson has said in recent interviews that the estranged son and Gloria reconciled after the book and HBO documentary she and Anderson did together. She may have just not updated her will. Anderson and Stan could always gift their brother with money from Gloria's estate.

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Does anyone have any idea the value of the estate?

R308, It has been reported to be as much as $200 million, but that seems doubtful.

[quote][R308], It has been reported to be as much as $200 million, but that seems doubtful.

I doubt it too (see someone's posting up thread). This is a reported amount and probably something Anderson wants to keep going in order to maintain the mystery and wealth images of his mother and the Vanderbilt family. I think only certain aspects of the will were released to maintain and support that aura. But, aren't wills publicly filed and can be inspected by anyone?

R310, My widowed mother died two years ago in Massachusetts and her will, her realty trust and her death certificate were put online for anyone to read. My lawyer told me that was standard procedure.

We're getting closer!

[quote]Vanderbilt, who died June 17 of stomach cancer at age 95, was estimated by Page Six to be worth $200 million, though a source close to the family said that number was “wildly inaccurate” and that the value of the estate was closer to $1.5 million. When she turned 21, the heiress-socialite-fashion entrepreneur inherited north of $4 million — the remainder of a trust fund that had already been tapped a bit by her mother. Cooper told Howard Stern in 2014 that he didn’t expect to inherit anything. Cooper’s net worth before the inheritance has been estimated at more than $100 million.

So "ANDERSON COOPER" does get the money.

So, I wonder what will happen to all of our Gloria's beautiful garments? She comes across to me, (and I think that Anderson would agree), as a Housing Works sort of gal.

[quote]Housing Works is a New York City based non-profit fighting AIDS and homelessness. The charity is well known for its operations, which have recently included outreach to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. As of March 2017, the organization has served 30,000 clients.

[quote]Thrift shops: Housing Works is well known in New York City for its chain of upscale thrift shops. The New York Times frequently mentions the shops in its neighborhood reviews.

I guess the art would be trying to donate the clothing without it getting out who exactly the donee is.

I am surprised Gloria only got 4 or 5 million when she came of age. Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, son of Cornelius V. the II - who was many times a billionaire in today's dollars. Reginald was an alcoholic and he must have squandered a great deal of money. Yet he built nothing of significance.

Cornelius II himself inherited over 75 million in by the 1870s.

Just joining the discussion to point out that saying someone had a big advantage in terms of social connections and social and economic capital does not mean that they don't also work hard or that they are not also good at their jobs.

To imagine it is one or the other is to fall into the, particularly American, trap of imagining that hard work will get you anywhere and that it is always enough on its own. It overlooks all the other people who worked just as hard, and were just as good, as Anderson, and didn't get anywhere near his fame and fortune. Some people do 'pull themselves up by their bootstraps', but a completely self-made person. who has had no advantages in life, is very rare.

There is a scale of advantages vs disadvantages that most of us fall somewhere towards the middle on, on a bell curve - not fabulously wealthy parents with rooms at a top college, nor literally being brought up on the street (at the the two extremes).

To say someone had significant advantages is not an insult to them and to their competence.

Seems like a family that knew how to blow through fortunes. Bling bling!

But, I put the family's name on the social map!

[quote]Seems like a family that knew how to blow through fortunes. Bling bling!

But, DAMN was it fun!

Alva Vanderbilt reproached a friend: "Someone told me that you said I look like a frog!"

Friend: "Why, I never said any such thing!"

'"I said you look like a toad."

Could you ever imagine being one of the earlier Vanderbilts who were told;

"There isn't anymore money"

The use of the word 'toots' on this board annoys me every time I see it. I suspect it is the same poster who uses it in comments on other threads. It has a smug and patronising air to it, and, in cases where the gender of the recipient is known or suspected, it seems to be used disproportionately to or about women.

^Okay, Gloria Steinham... there are many other threads where you can take your "We Shall Overcome" feminist attitude to. I'm not he that you seek.

I'm not seeking anyone R325. I just find the tone a bit smug and annoying, the gender thing is secondary really.

Our Gloria's daddy. No one ever really speaks of Gloria's older sister. Did they know each other?

NY Post (7/8/2019) reports Anderson inheriting $1.5 million. Not clear if that includes the contents of the warehouses. Surely they will bring in money. And her artwork has to be worth something now that she is gone.

That would sound about right, R328. We have to all remember that Our Gloria went bust after monies was stolen from her and she had to pay massive back taxes and penalties. For her to have that amount of money, given all that she had been through, was pretty good.

WHAT AN OPPORTUNISTIC BITCH!!! And, she SHOULD have reached out to Anderson by simply sending flowers, a card, or a voice message, conveying her condolences. What a dried up old cunt that even KY Jelly can't help! Our poor little Gloria! She's being used and taken advantage of even in her death! Just to sell a book!

Kathy Griffin Said She Hasn’t Reached Out To Anderson Cooper Since His Mom, Gloria Vanderbilt, Died

Griffin revealed she hasn’t reached out to her former friend since the death of his mother last month.

Following her very public falling out with Anderson Cooper, comedian Kathy Griffin said Wednesday that she knew the CNN anchor’s late mother, the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, better than he did.

“I really was in love with Anderson’s mom, the great Gloria Vanderbilt, and she let me call her ‘Glo Vandy,’” Griffin told BuzzFeed News’ Twitter morning show AM to DM. “And she gave me so many life lessons.”

“We would chat, and I actually kind of knew her better than Anderson in a way,” she said.

Griffin revealed she hasn’t reached out to Cooper since the death of his mother last month, reasoning that “Anderson is not really wired that way.”

R330, from what I've read, Anderson dropped Kathy after the Trump head thing. If someone cuts you out of their life, you have no choice other than to stay away from him or her. Contacting someone who clearly wants no contact with you is nutty & criminal behavior.

I disagree, R331. A simple message;

"Anderson, I'm so sorry for your loss. Gloria was a beautiful and wonderful woman.

Kind regards, Kathy"

She should expect no type of response but at least she conveyed her condolences. This is much better than a headline; "I knew your mother better than you did..."

WHAT A CUNT!

No memorial service for Gloria?

See Inside: Gloria Vanderbilt's $50 Million New York City Childhood Home For Sale

The upper east side townhouse where late fashion mogul/heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, who died on June 17 from cancer at age 95, lived briefly before her mother took her to Paris, is on the market with the hefty price tag of $50 million, according to toptenrealestatedeals.com.

Originally built in 1891 by Robert B. Lynd, the townhouse is still known as the Vanderbilt Mansion, and is located on East 72nd Street between Madison and Park Avenues, one block from Central Park.

The 18,408-square-foot townhouse is seven stories and is currently divided into three luxury condos with multiple options for reconfiguration. The three units can be purchased together or purchased separately.

TV TODAY See Inside: Gloria Vanderbilt's $50 Million New York City Childhood Home For Sale AUGUST 2, 2019 – 10:05 AM – 0 COMMENTS 8 Paulette Cohn By PAULETTE COHN @paulette49 Gloria Vanderbilt's Childhood Home (Photo credit: Douglas Elliman Real Estate) The upper east side townhouse where late fashion mogul/heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, who died on June 17 from cancer at age 95, lived briefly before her mother took her to Paris, is on the market with the hefty price tag of $50 million, according to toptenrealestatedeals.com.

Originally built in 1891 by Robert B. Lynd, the townhouse is still known as the Vanderbilt Mansion, and is located on East 72nd Street between Madison and Park Avenues, one block from Central Park.

The 18,408-square-foot townhouse is seven stories and is currently divided into three luxury condos with multiple options for reconfiguration. The three units can be purchased together or purchased separately.

There is a total of 12 bedrooms, 11 full bathrooms, three powder rooms, and 1,500 square feet of outdoor space on the rooftop terrace.

The townhouse was restyled and updated in 2018 by CetraRuddy using marble and many elegant finishes, flooring, lighting and the best appliances, as well as featuring 12-foot ceilings throughout.

The listing agent is Lauren Muss of Douglas Elliman Real Estate, Madison Avenue office.

I guess what they say about old money types is true. If you look at 39 East 72nd Street on google street view, the exterior is very, very plain.

There really isn't anything distinguishing about the property. It's all been redone. It seems as if there was never any attempt to preserve anything of any architectural uniqueness or anything historical about the place. Gloria Vanderbilt lived there? So, what?

I like the art in the kids bedroom.

What are Gloria Vanderbilt's ties to the Biltmore Estate?

Fashion icon, actress, and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt has died at the age of 95, her son Anderson Cooper confirmed.

Asheville residents — and visitors — may wonder how closely related she was to the local branch of the Vanderbilt dynasty.

George Washington Vanderbilt, who commissioned the Biltmore House in 1882, was Gloria Vanderbilt's great-uncle. Gloria Vanderbilt's grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and George Washington Vanderbilt were brothers. And those brothers were grandsons of railroad and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Bill Cecil Jr., Asheville native and CEO of the Biltmore Co., is Gloria Vanderbilt's third cousin (they share great-grandfather William Henry Vanderbilt I).

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Because I don't think this Victor Lopez queen is up to snuff to do the job.

Is Anderson an albino?