Born: 20 February 1924, United States
Died: 17 June 2019
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Gloria Vanderbilt-Cooper, Mrs. Wyatt E. Cooper
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Socialite and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt had a rough start in life despite her wealth. Born in 1924 to the obscenely wealthy Vanderbilt family, her alcoholic, gambling addict father had managed to throw away most of the $40 million he inherited by the time he married a 17-year-old when he himself was 42. He promptly died 15 months after his daughter was born, leaving no money for his 20-year-old widow, who spent the almost $50,000 annual stipend from the toddler’s $4 million trust on international partying with her identical twin sister while leaving her shy, lonely, and sickly daughter with a nanny for months on end. Her aunt, the sculptor and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, took custody of the girl in 1932, resulting in the much-publicized and sensationalized “Trial of the Century” when mummy dearest sued to get her daughter—or rather, the child support stipend—back. Yet her mother losing the trial wasn’t a happy ending—Vanderbilt had been separated from the beloved nanny who had raised her and sent to boarding school, where she was bullied.
In her teen years, she began modeling and performing in plays, dropping out of high school and going to live with her mother in Los Angeles, where she got caught up in the Hollywood party scene and married, like her mother, at 17, to a man who could charitably be called “not a good choice”—an agent and producer twice her age, who was also an alleged mobster suspected of killing his first wife and who proved to be physically and psychologically abusive. The marriage cost her four years of her life and a $350,000 payoff to get him to agree to the divorce. Only weeks later, the 21-year-old was married to a domineering, 63-year-old conductor with whom she would have two children and another unhappy marriage. She stayed with him for a decade and then repeated her pattern, marrying a controlling film director only three weeks after meeting him. That marriage lasted seven years. The same year they divorced, she once again remarried quickly, but this time, the now-39-year-old Vanderbilt married a writer and editor three years her junior and they were married for 15 years until his death in 1978. They had two sons, one of whom is award-winning television journalist Anderson Cooper.
It was around the time of her last husband’s death that Vanderbilt was garnering acclaim for her work as a fashion designer. She’d started by printing paintings that she’d done onto scarves before producing hugely successful jeans tailored for women’s figures. The jeans led to a multimillion-dollar business, expanding into skirts, sweaters, jackets, and perfumes. The business also gave Vanderbilt the satisfaction of earning her own money, after having been a trust fund baby her entire life. She said in 1985, “I’m not knocking inherited money, but the money I’ve made has a reality to me that inherited money doesn’t have.”
Vanderbilt was also a successful artist, achieving both critical success and several exhibitions. As a writer, she produced a variety of articles and poetry, and published several books, including an autobiography, The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother’s Story about her son’s suicide, and several novels, including Obsession, an erotic novel written when she was 85.
On her 95th birthday, only months before she passed away, Vanderbilt wrote, “I do believe that it is only once you accept that life is a tragedy that you can start to live … and oh, how I have lived! So many lives, so much work, so much love. It is incalculable.”