Gloria Vanderbilt dies at age 95
Gloria Vanderbilt — the glamorous Manhattan socialite from one of the nation's wealthiest families who was as well-known for her eponymous brand of jeans as her genes — died Monday after a battle with stomach cancer, CNN reported.
She was 95.
Vanderbilt is the mother of CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.
"Earlier this month, we had to take her to the hospital," Cooper said. "That's where we learned she had very advanced cancer in her stomach and that it had spread."
The TV news anchor called his mother "the coolest and most modern" person he knew.
"Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman who loved life and lived it on her own terms. She was a painter, a writer and designer but also a remarkable mother, wife and friend," he said.
"She was 95 years old, but ask anyone close to her and they’d tell you, she was the youngest person they knew, the coolest and most modern. She died this morning the way she wanted to — at home, surrounded by family and friends."
The socialite lived a life that raised many eyebrows in the high society circles from which she came, starting with a tabloid-made, acrimonious custody battle over her between her mother and her aunt when she was 10.
Born in New York City on Feb. 20, 1924, Vanderbilt arrived to much fanfare as the daughter of railroad empire heir Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt and his second wife, Gloria Morgan.
Gloria Vanderbilt's great-great-grandfather was rail and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, once America's richest man. In 1873, he made a gift of is $1 million (about $21 million in today’s value) to educators in Tennessee to found what is now Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
At only 18 months of age, Gloria Vanderbilt became a millionaire in her own right, courtesy of a trust fund in the wake of the death of her father from cirrhosis of the liver. Her older half-sister, Cathleen, received a trust fund of an equal amount.
But the elder Gloria didn't seem suited to adapting to a single parent lifestyle, heading off to Europe to spend her own inheritance. After a few years of living with her mother in Paris, the 8-year-old Vanderbilt was first shipped to her maternal grandmother in Rhode Island.
Two years later, the now infamous custody battle flared between Vanderbilt's mother and her paternal aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a legal fight that would fill gossip headlines for two years.
The legal tumult would resonate for decades, even inspiring a popular 1982 TV miniseries, "Little Gloria... Happy at Last."
In the end, the court ruled that Morgan was an unfit mother and that Vanderbilt would live with her aunt, a sculptor and the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Those formative years would nurture in Vanderbilt a passion for making art that would last a lifetime.
Her biggest passion over the coming decades, however, would be men; the stylish beauty connected with enough bold-faced names to keep the gossip columnists busy typing for decades.
She also inspired the character of Holly Golightly in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and made news in her own right as an actress, artist and author.
"I like the idea of showing that you can go through a lot and still be on your feet, still be working, still be positive about life," Vanderbilt told Interview Magazine in 2014. "And that you can still think the best thing is around the corner."
Vanderbilt's romances began when she visited her mother in Hollywood in the summer of 1941, a stay that launched a career as a sometimes actress and more frequent model. Her first high-profile paramour was eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes, then 36 and not yet in his paranoid reclusive phase.
Vanderbilt professed to having love for many of the men who passed through her life — with the exception of her first husband, Pat DiCicco, a Hollywood agent with alleged mob connections, whom she married when she was 17. Their tumultuous marriage ended in divorce four years later, not swiftly enough for the young wife.
"He would take my head and bang it against the wall," Vanderbilt told England's Telegraph newspaper in 2004. "I had black eyes."
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Gloria Vanderbilt dies at age 95
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