Gloria vanderbilt biography youtube kids

She was born into incredible wealth, but socialite Gloria Vanderbilt’s 95 years were tumultuous. Donna Fleming says the fascinating heiress remained down to earth, with her chin up and her heart open.

They are wise words shaped by a life full of extraordinary experiences. On her 95th birthday, Gloria Vanderbilt wrote on her Instagram account, “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.”

Four months later, when the American heiress turned designer and author died, her own words proved to be one of the most fitting summaries of her astonishing life. But her son, CNN journalist Anderson Cooper, also hit the nail on the head when he said, “Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman who loved life and lived it on her own terms.”

Gloria certainly had more than her fair share of tragedies and traumas, including being the subject of one of the 20th century’s most sensational trials, and later witnessing one of her sons take his own life. But as devastating as they were, she accepted the bad things in her life along with the good.

“I think that without pain, we can’t know what joy is,” she once said. “It is part of living to go through tragedy and if we don’t have pain, we don’t know we’re alive.”

No matter what happened to her, a sense of optimism always shone through.

“I like the idea of showing that you can go through a lot and still be on your feet, still be working, and still be positive about life. And that you can still think the best thing is around the corner, which I really do. I think something wonderful is going to happen to me.”

Indeed, it seemed like Gloria Laura Morgan Vanderbilt was destined for a wonderful life of privilege when she was born on February 20, 1924. Her father, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, was a great-grandson of railroad and

Gloria Vanderbilt was considered the last daughter of the America's Gilded Age. The heir to the Vanderbilt railroad fortune, she spent most of her life in the public eye, sometimes to her chagrin. Nevertheless, Vanderbilt's life, in so many ways, revolved around her family; from the inheritance and custody battles that dogged her childhood, to her tabloid-crowning marriages, to the tragedies and triumphs that followed her into motherhood.

With her passing at age 95 in 2019, Vanderbilt left behind a legacy of family, with all of its ups and downs. Here's everything you need to know about the men who filled her life as both a wife and a mother.

Her Children

Anderson Cooper

The youngest of Vanderbilt's sons, and also the best known, Anderson Cooper was born in 1967 to Vanderbilt and Wyatt Emory Cooper. As a young man he attended Dalton School in New York City and later studied political science at Yale University. He briefly interned at the CIA, later joking that "It was less James Bond than I hoped it would be."

Anderson was still in college when his older brother Carter committed suicide, which, combined with the tragedy of his father's death during heart surgery ten years earlier, helped inspire Anderson to pursue journalism. "I became interested in questions of survival: why some people survive and others don't," he once said.

Though he began his career as a fact-checker for Channel One News, Anderson's drive quickly earned him the coveted spot of chief international correspondent for the channel following his self-produced coverage of the political turmoil in Burma. From 1994 to 2000 he served as a reporter for ABC on several of its news programs including World News Tonight before taking a break from journalism to serve as host for the reality show The Mole.

Gloria Laura Vanderbilt was only 10 when she became an unwilling tabloid sensation. It was 1934, and she was the subject of a nasty custody battle between her widowed mother and her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Depression-era Americans eagerly read about the acrimonious trial, which was open to the press until the day a maid accused Gloria’s mother of having an affair with a relative of the British Royal Family in court. Newspapers dubbed Gloria “the poor little rich girl,” kicking off a wave of media attention that followed her until her death on June 17, 2019.

Gloria, a society heiress who later launched a fashion empire built on designer jeans, was born on February 20, 1924, to Gloria Morgan and Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, great-grandson of the famous railroad tycoon. Reginald was a heavy drinker and gambler who was 24 years older than the teenage Gloria Morgan. By the time Reginald died from cirrhosis of the liver, he had blown through his money and racked up lots of debt. His 18-month-old daughter Gloria stood to inherit part of a family trust fund when she reached age 21, but until then, she and her mother would live on interest payments.

Over the next several years, Gloria Morgan lived in opulent style on those payments. The Swiss-born socialite went back to Europe, where her twin sister lived as mistress to Edward, Prince of Wales. Gloria Morgan moved in the same royal circles and briefly became engaged to the German prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. When her daughter got tonsillitis, she took Gloria back to the U.S. for an operation, then left the girl to recover with her aunt Gertrude on Long Island while she went back to Europe for several months.

This is where things started to come to a head. The Vanderbilt family and Gertrude in particular already disapproved of Gloria Morgan’s lifestyle, and now that she wasn’t living with her daughter, the family cut her interest payments in half. The mother returned to New York City and tried to ge