A Hundred Years to Spend a Treasury: Six Generations of Vanderbilts

March 30, 2018, was Good Friday. By four in the afternoon, Gladys Szapary had to have the last of her things out of The Breakers.

Downstairs the house kept its hours, tourists following the velvet ropes through the gilded rooms, while one floor up, boxes rode down in the old Otis elevator. Gladys was a great-granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II; as children she and her brother had sledded down the marble staircase on kitchen trays, as their mother had before them. After their mother died in 1998 they kept the third floor, closed to visitors: four generations of photographs, a pram, christening gowns, ordinary furniture. On the last day she and a few others opened a bottle of champagne on the terrace above the sea. She wiped the floors, switched off the lights, and left by a side door.

In 1877 the founder of the fortune, the first Cornelius Vanderbilt, died leaving about one hundred million dollars. The historian T. J. Stiles has estimated that, counting bank demand deposits, this equaled roughly one-twentieth of all the money in the United States; counting only the greenbacks and coin in circulation, close to one-ninth. Over the next century it flowed into universities, museums, forests, mansions, yachts, and the ordinary bills of more and more households. Start in New York harbor.

A Hundred Dollars from a Grandfather Clock

Cornelius Vanderbilt’s father farmed on Staten Island and sailed a wide-bottomed boat to Manhattan with timber, produce, and passengers; the son worked the boat from eleven. The family always told the story of his first one. At sixteen, Cornelius asked his mother, Phebe, for a hundred dollars. She told him to clear a field of rocks and roots before his birthday; he brought in friends, finished on time, and she took the money out of the grandfather clock. He bought a small sailboat and went into the ferry trade.

In November 1817, at twenty-three, Thomas Gibbons hired him to run steamboats against New York’s state-granted steam monopoly, on a federal coasting license. The quarrel climbed the courts until March 2, 1824, when Gibbons v. Ogden settled it: Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that interstate commerce belonged to Congress, and the New York–Albany fare dropped from seven dollars to three.

Gibbons died in 1826; three years later Vanderbilt struck out on his own, cutting fares until rivals paid him to leave. In time he sold most of his shipping and put the money into rails, taking the New York & Harlem, the Hudson River, and the New York Central, merging the last two in 1869 and opening the first Grand Central Depot in 1871. Much of the fortune was tallied in a notebook he carried on him.

Clause Eight

His eldest son, William Henry, mild and often unwell, was judged unfit early and sent to farm on Staten Island. When William mortgaged the land for six thousand dollars, his father told him to his face he would disgrace the family, then sent a check for the sum next day, to clear the debt at once. Only after he had turned around the bankrupt Staten Island Railroad, three locomotives, six cars, thirteen miles of track, was he let near the real ones. The second son, Cornelius Jeremiah, Corneel at home, had epilepsy from boyhood and gambled all his life; his father paid the debts, twice had him committed, kept him on a hundred dollars a month, and never gave him a job. The daughters were provided for and shut out, their father fearing stock would follow husbands out of the name. In 1873, urged by his second wife, he put up a total of one million dollars for a university in Nashville that took his name. He never went to see it.

On the snowy morning of January 4, 1877, Cornelius Vanderbilt died at eighty-two at 10 Washington Place. The day after the funeral, the family heard the will read. The widow received a house, cash, and bonds; the daughters, railroad bonds, cash, or trust income; Corneel, a trust managed by his brother. Then Clause 8: everything that remained went to William Henry. The residue was estimated at ninety to ninety-five million dollars and included stock enough to control the New York Central. Before the reading was over, three of the children were preparing to sue.

Corneel and his sisters Ethelinda and Mary alleged an unsound mind, undue influence, a defective signing. The trial opened in November 1877, Corneel in a worn brown overcoat, William in black with a silk hat, and ran more than a year. William’s lawyers walked him through the gambling, the borrowing, the bad checks. Asked how gambling had become a habit, he said it was nothing unusual in the family; his father, he said, had demanded a life worthy of the Vanderbilt name and never given him work that could pay for one. In March 1879 a stack of the old man’s earlier wills came into evidence, all confining Corneel the same way; William settled with Corneel and Mary, and the will stood.

On April 2, 1882, in room 80 of the Glenham Hotel, Corneel took a Smith & Wesson from the bureau and shot himself. He died that evening, leaving no note.

Four Words on a Train

William Henry inherited in the summer of 1877, straight into the first railroad strike in America to sweep across state lines. The Central had cut wages ten percent like the other roads; he called for no troops, put up a hundred thousand dollars for the men who stayed at work, and had the old wages fully restored by February 1880.

In October 1882, on his private car to Chicago, two reporters asked whether a fast mail train that ran at a loss, and was about to be cut, should be judged only by its ledger. The next day’s papers printed four words: “The public be damned.” He denied them; the reporters stood by their notes; nothing had been recorded. The one settled fact is that he meant to drop the train. Cartoonists drew him with a dollar sign on his waistcoat and workmen under his boots.

In 1879 he had J. P. Morgan place a block of Central stock with British investors, three hundred thousand shares for about thirty-five million dollars by the family biography’s count, the proceeds moved into four percent government bonds, Morgan’s syndicate seated on the board. At his death his fortune was commonly put near two hundred million, double what he had inherited eight years before. Two hundred million had broken his body, he felt, and he would not lay it whole on one son. In six years he revised his will at least nine times.

On December 8, 1885, mid-conversation in his study at 640 Fifth Avenue, his face flushed, his words blurred, and a stroke killed him at sixty-four. The last will, signed September 25, 1884, gave his widow the house and an annuity, and put bonds in trust for all eight children, with direct bequests besides; Clause 22 split the residue between the two sons who ran the railroads, with the elder, Cornelius II, at the family’s center. The father’s eighth clause had sent everything to one son; the son’s twenty-second divided it, and no one sued.

A Card in a Silver Tray

On Monday night, March 26, 1883, carriages queued outside 660 Fifth Avenue, the new house of William Kissam Vanderbilt and his wife, Alva, for a costume ball: some thirteen hundred invitations, about twelve hundred guests by the papers’ count, the flowers reported at eleven thousand dollars and the whole night at a quarter million, with no ledger left to check them. The presiding hostess of old New York, Caroline Astor, Mrs. Astor with no further address required, came as a Venetian princess; so did Alva.

The story told ever after is that Mrs. Astor’s daughter Carrie had rehearsed the Star Quadrille for days without an invitation, because Mrs. Astor had never called on Alva, and one could not invite the daughter over the mother’s head; that a footman carried Mrs. Astor’s card to number 660 and laid it in the silver tray of the Vanderbilts’ man; that Alva returned the visit and the invitation followed. No record from that week preserves the exchange. What is certain is that both Astors came, and that Carrie danced the Star Quadrille with a small electric light on her forehead.

An Eighteen-Inch Waist

Alva’s daughter Consuelo, born in 1877, was named for Alva’s closest friend, an American who married the Duke of Manchester. Consuelo never went to school. At eight she read and wrote English, French, and German. At her lessons she wore a steel rod strapped along her spine with a band around her forehead, so the book stayed high and the head could not bend; later a whalebone collar and corset brought her waist to eighteen inches. It is all in her memoir of 1952.

In 1895 Alva divorced William Kissam, keeping custody, and Newport closed to her. That spring Consuelo secretly promised herself to Winthrop Rutherfurd. Her letters were intercepted, he was turned from the door, and finally an aunt told her that if she kept resisting, her mother’s next heart attack might be fatal. On November 6, at St. Thomas Church, she married the ninth Duke of Marlborough, in Brussels lace and heavy white satin, eight bridesmaids of her mother’s choosing, her eyes swollen from a morning of crying. The marriage carried a settlement: two and a half million dollars of railroad stock in trust, its income the duke’s for life.

She bore two sons, separated from the duke in 1906, divorced in 1921, and married the French aviator Jacques Balsan. Of the second marriage she wrote, in old age, “complete freedom.” A photograph of Winthrop stayed with her all her life.

A Dollar a Year

The Breakers that Gladys left in 2018 replaced a house that burned in 1892: Cornelius II had Richard Morris Hunt rebuild in stone, seventy rooms in three years, at a cost usually given as seven million dollars. Running it took thirty-three servants, thirteen grooms, twelve gardeners, and a hundred and fifty tons of coal each winter to protect the art. After 1913 the taxes came in layers, income, war, estate, state, property, and the Depression cut the securities income beneath them; his widow Alice, with this house and one in New York, took to opening only one a year, then only one wing. In 1948 the family leased the two lower floors to the Preservation Society for a dollar a year and moved to the third, a servant’s room for a kitchen, a small door at the head of the grand staircase. The 1972 sale, at $365,000, covered the furniture and the family’s right to stay on upstairs.

Holdings in the railroad had been dividing through wills and sales since William Henry’s day, and by 1954 no branch of the family could sway the board alone. That year Harold Vanderbilt, Consuelo’s brother, still sat on the Central’s board when the financier Robert Young solicited shareholders’ proxies to remake it. Harold led the resistance; the vote went to Young; the family’s last seat went with him.

The Plush Elephant

In September 1925, Reginald, youngest son of Cornelius II, died at forty-four with unpaid bills on his desk. Reggie had never worked for the railroad; by the family biography’s account, on the night of his twenty-first birthday he lost seventy thousand dollars at Canfield’s gambling house. His creditors ran from the corner newsstand, owed $269, to a bookseller owed nearly four thousand, a laundress owed over seven hundred, and Tiffany, owed close to nine thousand. The auction inventory ran from the New York house to Sandy Point Farm, horses, cars, bed linen, and, in the nursery, his one-year-old daughter’s plush elephant. His mother came to the sale and bought back her son’s riding trophies and two ancestor portraits that had always passed with the headship of the family.

Five million dollars stayed off the list. The trust his father had built paid Reggie income only; the principal lay beyond the creditors and split between his daughters, Cathleen and one-year-old Gloria, two and a half million each.

Gloria’s mother had married Reggie before she was twenty and was widowed at twenty-one with almost nothing of her own; every household expense was petitioned out of the child’s trust income. In 1934, when Gloria was ten, her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney sued for custody. Servants and doctors testified; the papers chased bedrooms, Europe, drink, and the mother’s intimacies with women, much of it never confirmed. The judge cleared the courtroom and questioned the ten-year-old alone; she said she was afraid of her mother, could not say why, and remembered mostly that her mother went out to parties. On November 21 custody went to the aunt, and the papers found the name that stuck: the poor little rich girl.

A Savings Passbook

At twenty-one Gloria took control of the money. She acted, modeled, painted, wrote, married four times. In the 1970s she had her name and a swan stitched on the back pocket of a pair of jeans and sent them into ordinary stores; the brand ran hot, the first big money of her life earned outside the trust, though lawsuits with advisers and tax trouble followed.

In 1967 she and her fourth husband, Wyatt Cooper, had a second son, Anderson. When the boy was six, his father took him to the bronze statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt outside Grand Central Terminal and told him the man had died the richest in America. His father also told him no Vanderbilt inheritance was waiting, and at eight Anderson had a savings account, each deposit and withdrawal entered in a passbook. Wyatt died in heart surgery in 1978, when Anderson was ten; at thirteen he was riding the bus alone to modeling jobs. He went out to wars as a reporter and came home an anchor, under his father’s name; told he is a Vanderbilt, he tends to answer first that he is a Cooper.

Gloria died in June 2019, at ninety-five, having joked with Anderson that people would be surprised when the number came out. She left paintings, photographs, letters, personal things, and no vault. In his book Anderson called her the last Vanderbilt, not by the family tree: she had lived in The Breakers while it was still a private house and watched that world go out piece by piece.

Where the Money Went

In 1973 the descendants came to lunch at Vanderbilt University’s centennial: about eighty by the university’s photo caption, a hundred and twenty counting spouses by the family’s biographer, Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, who added the line quoted ever since: not one millionaire among them. He published no accounting behind it. The lunch was eaten inside the ancestor’s million-dollar gift of 1873, at a school he never visited.

The fortune of 1877 was never mostly cash; it was a railroad. The will that concentrated the stock said nothing about keeping it concentrated, and each generation’s wills, sales, and household bills carried it outward, through the income tax of 1913 and the estate taxes behind it, the Depression, the highways and airlines that drained the traffic. No single disaster spent the money. It reached more and more people, fewer and fewer of whom ran a railroad.

George Washington Vanderbilt, William Henry’s youngest, bought land near Asheville until the estate ran to between 120,000 and 140,000 acres; the 250-room Biltmore House opened at Christmas 1895 over one of America’s early trials of scientific forestry, and never covered its costs. He died in 1914, and his widow sold more than eighty thousand acres to the federal government, land now part of Pisgah National Forest. The house began selling tickets in 1930; one year of the next thirty made money. In 1960 his grandson William A. V. Cecil came home to manage it, and the books at last came up positive: he remembered the year as 1968, the estate’s timeline says 1969, and both record the same profit, sixteen dollars and thirty-four cents. Vines, then a winery, inns, and shops followed; George’s descendants run it still.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sculptor daughter of Cornelius II, offered her collection of the American artists the great museums ignored to the Metropolitan, with money for a new building. The Metropolitan declined. In 1931 she opened the Whitney Museum of American Art. The money did not all disappear. It never again came back to one ledger.

At Christmas 1930 the New York papers reported a break-in at the family mausoleum in the Moravian Cemetery on Staten Island: two or three men by one paper’s guess, five or six by another’s. The outer door was forced, the bronze reliefs bore hammer marks, the inner door held. For years Pinkerton men had patrolled the tomb day and night, punching clocks on their rounds; by 1930 the watch had lapsed, and the family hired guards again.

The papers noted one thing more. On Christmas night, two uniformed watchmen stood before the tomb, and deep into the night they kept pacing outside its door. From a distance, all that showed was the tips of their cigarettes brightening and dimming, and every little while there came the sound of hands clapped together against the cold.