Expertly researched and timed perfectly to coincide with viewing of The Gilded Age on HBO, Vanderbilt dissects new versus old money and new versus old New York scenarios from that time period in American history. Along the way it leaves the reader baffled at how and why a family fortune was lost in just a few generations. Starting with Anderson Cooper's great great great grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt, referred to as the Commodore, who initially built his fortune off the waves of Manhattan's shores, through the Gilded Age 5th Avenue mansions, yachts, and summer cottages in Newport, to the Gloria Vanderbilt custody "trial of the century" and Truman Capote swan years, the bulk of the book details the high cost of society living. The epoch legacy culminates with the CNN journalist paying for his mother's nursing care out of pocket during her final years until her death at the age of 95 in 2019.
Both Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe are intimately immersed in Vanderbilt history, Cooper because his mother was one, and Howe because her mother curated the exhibit Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, that included Vanderbilt furniture. Howe was a teen at the time the exhibit opened and learned firsthand that the Vanderbilt name meant more than designer blue jeans. That the Vanderbilts were real people, famous and flawed, and to have their story told with a historian's skill and a journalist's eye for facts makes the unbelievable saga read like fiction. It's hard to believe, but there it is. A cautionary tale for living beyond one's means and an American story if ever there was one.