"Vanderbilt" by Anderson Cooper

you know him from television but anderson cooper is also an author and his latest book is about his family a family with a name once synonymous with the word wealth he talks with our morocca about the rise and fall of the vanderbilts so all this is this just a small amount of like stuff from my mom's storage units for the past 15 years cnn anchor and 60 minutes correspondent anderson cooper has been sorting through his mother's treasures she was a completely different person then cooper's mother was gloria vanderbilt my new stretch denim jeans known for her designer jeans and as the so-called poor little rich girl at the center of an infamous depression-era custody battle between her own mother also named gloria and aunt gertrude vanderbilt whitney yeah this i just found recently this was the headline the daily news july 4th 1935 gloria loses child uh custody after the trial this is her she's the age that my son is right now this is the day her father died oh now she's with her father yeah because do you look at that guy and go wait hold on a second he's my grandfather i know it's like it's crazy it's completely different it's another yeah it's another world another world where the vanderbilt name was synonymous with enormous wealth and privilege a name that cooper says he didn't want to be associated with i felt like no good could come of me paying attention to them the vanderbilts when i was a kid seemed kind of like layabouts i knew they had all these houses and they were museums now but it had no reality in my life but after his mother's death in 2019 and then the birth of his son wyatt in 2020 cooper decided to delve into that side of his family history documenting it in a new book the vanderbilts came to the new world from holland in the 17th century the first generations here were farmers is it kind of funny to you that you've ended up living not so far it's weird i will say i had when i started doing research on the book i had no idea that the commodore had lived right here then came cornelius aka the commodore so commodore vanderbilt was a really extraordinary person i mean he grew up on a farm in staten island cornelius left school at age 11 and made his first fortune in shipping he built from one small little boat to of moving supplies he built an empire of steamships and steamships are basically just the first chapter of his career right well that's what's so crazy is he built two massive empires it was late in life uh when he decided steamships were the past and railroads were the future and he started buying up small railroads around the northeast and eventually he formed a railroad company that basically was the all rail service on the eastern seaboard to chicago yet cooper also discovered some unflattering aspects of his great-great-great-grandfather's character when i read that you described him as avaricious and pitiless i thought that's um that's blunt well yeah i mean he was i actually started out thinking maybe he was a psychopath which then i came away after doing a lot of research on i was like you know that's a little harsh like who can say really i mean who knows what's in someone's mind right there's no mri that we have of him but he himself said he did have a mania for money and other people have described it as a pathology and i i do think it was it was his sole reason for being when the commodore died in 1877 he'd amassed 100 million dollars he had more money than the u.s treasury one out of every 20 in circulation belonged to the vanderbilts by 1885 the commodore son william henry managed to more than double the family coffers to about 230 million dollars close to 6.5 billion in today's dollars but it was the next generation of vanderbilts whose ambitions had nothing to do with making money cornelius vanderbilt ii and his brother william k vanderbilt their wives decide they're going to get the vanderbilts to take over new york society and then the spending begins yes the spigots are turned on and the yeah the spending begins craving respectability this generation of wealthy vanderbilts spent lavishly on mansions that dotted manhattan's fifth avenue and palatial summer cottages in newport rhode island pop quiz what was the vanderbilt family's least favorite constitutional amendment yes anything to do with texas yes the 16th amendment to the constitution ushered in the federal income tax in 1913. estate and inheritance taxes soon followed but the vanderbilt spending habits continued unabated i view the money as a kind of a a pathology that infected subsequent generations because i think that they all grew up with this idea that there would always be money there and and there was no need for them to actually work when cooper's mother gloria was born in 1924 her inheritance was much diminished and she was given little guidance on how to maintain it this book helped me understand my mom in ways i never really even imagined because once you see the world she was born into and the life her father led and that the life her mother dreamed of leading and the life that her grandfather led you see why it was that she you know grew up just spending money and and thinking nothing of it in 1978 cooper's father wyatt died from the time i was a kid i viewed myself as my mom's protector after my dad died when i was 10 my mom was a remarkable lady but i knew she did not have a plan and she had never had a plan when it came to money matters anderson assumed an almost parental role with his own mother and i would talk to her at you know 13 about you know there's there's you know you can get a bank account and you should put money in savings and saving money is making money and i just stupid things i had read about you would say that it's 13 years old to her she just never had a plan she just felt like i once heard i think i was like 14 or 15 i remember i was going up the stairs in the house and i heard her on the phone saying to a friend of hers well i'll always be able to make money and i remember stopping and freezing when i heard that and thinking we are doomed and that for me was a huge factor in i just i started working as much as i could i i got a job as a child model because when you're 13 14 there's not a lot you can actually do they're the upper stratos gloria vanderbilt did make her own fortune with those jeans but anderson cooper never stopped working i'm anderson cooper work for me has been breaking news the thing which has gotten me through work has always been the one constant in my life from the time i was you know going as to working as a child model as a kid it was something that was reliable that helped me calm myself and you know know that i was building a foundation of for a life a life that now includes his son 16 month old wyatt to whom the book is dedicated i thought i want to write a book for my son that kind of explains part of his past or his family's past and it's an honest view i think at this remarkable family which remarkable in good ways and also bad

Channel: CBS Sunday Morning

Views: 1,220,478

Keywords: CBS Sunday Morning, CBS News, news, CNN, anchor, anderson cooper, 60 minutes, vanderbilt, family dynasty, the vanderbilts, great great great grandfather, cornelius vanderbilt, commodore vanderbilt, richest man in america, steamships, railroads, gloria vanderbilt, mother, family, fortune, socialite, wealth, privilege, generations

Id: QpEl5Xt2250

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021