Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

This chapter is about Truman Capote’s friendship with Gloria Vanderbilt. It opens with a description of Capote’s Black and White Ball, which took place at the Plaza Hotel in New York in 1966. He had just published his masterpiece, In Cold Blood (1966), earlier that year and was at the height of his fame professionally and socially. For years, he had hobnobbed with the cream of New York society, acting as a latter-day Ward McAllister. As he was an openly gay man, society ladies considered Capote safe to be seen with alone without raising the prospect of having an affair. Capote invited 500 people to his November 1966 ball, all hand-chosen for the event from the international jet set. Everyone was to arrive wearing only black-and-white outfits and masks—and to keep their masks on until midnight. It was a huge success and media event.

Capote had come to New York from the South in the 1930s, when his mother remarried. In the 1940s, he began writing and published short stories in prominent magazines. He also met Gloria Vanderbilt, who became his conduit to high society. His novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) was published to acclaim, and it was made into a movie starring Audrey Hepburn three years later. He held dual roles as author and socialite, which rose in tandem through most of the 1960s. After In Cold Blood, he promised that his next novel would be “a Proustian magnum opus about social life in New York City” (245). He planned to title it Answered Prayers.

Capote’s fame and taste for alcohol caught up with him, however. As the 1970s dragged on, no novel appeared. He became more socialite than author: He worked the talk show circuit and drank heavily, both of which affected his writing. In 1975, Esquire magazine published a chapter from Answered Prayers called “La Côte Basque, 1965.” The title referred to a fashionable New York restaurant where the wealthy went to see and be seen.

Into his story he poured tales that his socialite friends had told him in confidence, thinly disguising the characters—or not disguising them at all, as in Gloria Vanderbilt’s case. All his friends could identify themselves and others in the story, which presented them as equal parts amoral and immoral. The characters had no shame, no conscience, and no empathy. It was received poorly, as people felt betrayed, and Capote was completely cut out of New York society. He never recovered his former standing, nor did he finish his novel. He died in 1984, at age 59. 

The last chapter discusses the later years of Gloria Vanderbilt’s life from Cooper’s own “insider” perspective as her son. He thinks of her as the last Vanderbilt, since she was the last to be born before the Great Depression at a time when the Vanderbilts were still seen as towering, impossibly wealthy people by the public. She was the last representative of an era when the press reported every detail about the Vanderbilts.

The authors frame the chapter by opening with an event related to the Vanderbilt fame, which Cooper experienced. In October 1978, he and his family had attended the premier of the film The Wiz, which one of his mother’s former husbands, Sidney Lumet, had directed. Afterward, they all went to celebrate at the famous disco and nightclub Studio 54. Cooper remembers riding there in a limousine behind another limo carrying Michael Jackson, one of the film’s stars. It was kind of a surreal moment, what he calls an “exceptional moment” that the outside world focuses on. These moments make the papers, but he notes that real life is so much more and so different. In their most introspective moments, he observes that people do not remember exceptional moments; they remember things like lazy summer days with their families, which Gloria once wrote about in her diary.

From there, Cooper talks about his relationship with his mother. She always seemed to need protecting, even as he needed his own protection as a child. His father died in 1978, when he was 11, and his older brother Cooper died by suicide 10 years later. From then on, it was just Cooper and Gloria. They moved around a lot, and she blew through money even when there was none. Once, after he had become a CNN correspondent, Gloria found some screens made from antique wallpaper that had been in one of her previous apartments. They cost $50,000, but her tastes exceeded her funds. Knowing Cooper had just gotten a new contract with a healthy raise at work, she implored him to get them for her. Although he knew what the outcome would be, he did so. Six months later, he was not surprised when she asked if he had room for them because they no longer “worked.”

As she got older, the two talked more openly about her past. When Gloria was 91, they wrote a book together, The Rainbow Comes and Goes (2017), which was simultaneously adapted into a documentary called Nothing Left Unsaid (2016). She enjoyed promoting these projects, but it tired her out. Afterward, her health took a downward turn, and she became depressed. Cooper helped her show and sell her artwork on Instagram, which gave her renewed spirit and purpose. Then when she was 95, she learned she had advanced cancer. They spent the last two weeks of her life together at her home, reminiscing, which Cooper writes “were among the best times we ever had together” (272).

In the Epilogue, the authors use an event from 1930 to discuss the legacy of the Vanderbilt family. On Christmas Eve of that year, someone tried to break into the Vanderbilt mausoleum in Staten Island. The attempt was unsuccessful, but the family hired guards the next day to protect the property. Cooper and Howe speculate about possible motives, one being that the vandals were after copper coffin lining or other metals to be sold as scrap. It was, after all, the early years of the Great Depression, and the same New York Times edition that reported on the mausoleum attack ran a story on long breadlines in the city.

The mausoleum was built by the Commodore’s son Billy between 1885 and 1886. On one side, the farm that the Commodore’s family had owned and where he was raised was visible, and beyond is a view of New York Bay and lower Manhattan, where he began his path to grand fortunes. The authors then list some of the places in Manhattan where the “ghosts” of the Vanderbilt family can be seen. At the southeast corner of Central Park, for example, is Bergdorf Goodman, on the block where Cornelius II and Alice Vanderbilt’s huge mansion once stood, “which still holds the record for the largest private residence ever built in New York City” (286). When Alva Vanderbilt married her second husband, Oliver Belmont, they lived in a mansion at Madison Avenue and 51st Street, which had a gallery 85 feet long just to display some of their collections. All these temples to mammon, the authors note, have long since been demolished. One reminder of the Vanderbilts that remains is a statue of the Commodore outside of Grand Central Station.