“People would have looked at her more like she really was'' instead of what they assumed. “I sometimes think if she didn't have the Vanderbilt name, she would have been better off,” he said. When she died, there wasn't much left in her estate beyond the apartment she owned, Cooper said. His mom's inheritance was gone by the time he was born, but she had success on her own: Most Americans today associate Gloria Vanderbilt with the designer jeans line she launched in 1977. “No one,” Cooper and Howe write, 'can make money evaporate into thin air like a Vanderbilt.” Bored with the screens six months later, she asked if Cooper had room for them in his basement. He tells about his mother, who died in 2019 at age 95, calling him once because she desperately needed two screens for her apartment made of valuable wallpaper - wallpaper she once had and sold. This was Gloria Vanderbilt, given the hated nickname “the poor little rich girl” during a sensational custody trial in 1934, who inherited $4 million when she turned 21. It's startling to read Cooper describe taking on extra shifts at CNN to help pay for his mother's nurses when she recuperated from a fall. Researching the family “was like opening a door and discovering this whole history that I consciously avoided knowing about,” he said. I really worked hard not to do anything that would associate me with that.” “I didn't think any good could come of it, personally or professionally. “Certainly, when I started working in news, I didn't want to show up on stories and have people say, ‘Oh, this guy is a Vanderbilt’ or whatever,” Cooper said.

Yet that obsession damaged those around him, and succeeding generations of Vanderbilts, fairly and unfairly, became symbols of the “idle rich” and frittered away a fortune. The Commodore was obsessed with making money, and left behind $100 million - real coin back in those days. Now 54 and a father himself, Cooper has taken a second look and, with historian Katherine Howe, written the book “Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty” that explores the family's complicated legacy. For much of his life, the CNN personality shunned his lineage.

Are there any empires left