A Glorious Life 'Without Pain, We Can't Know Joy'

'Poor Little Rich Girl' Gloria Vanderbilt Turns 95

When Gloria Vanderbilt celebrated a milestone birthday a few weeks ago, she marked the occasion with a heartfelt post on Instagram.

Alongside a picture of herself when she was a teenager, the heiress and fashion designer wrote, “Today I turn 95. It feels like yesterday that I was 16 and posing for my first picture for Harper’s Bazaar. There is so much I wish I had known then.” She added, “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.”

There has certainly been more than her fair share of tragedy – and also scandal. Gloria, best known these days as the mother of CNN journalist Anderson Cooper (51), was born into one of America’s richest families.

Her father, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, an heir to a fortune amassed from railways and shipping, was 42 when he married her mother, 17-year-old Gloria Morgan, a diplomat’s daughter.

Baby Gloria was born a year after the pair wed. When she was only 15 months old, alcoholic Reginald died of cirrhosis of the liver. He’d blown most of his money, leaving around $4 million to his daughter in a trust fund, which was administered by her mother.

The widow lived the high life with the money, travelling around Europe and partying with the rich and famous. For much of her childhood, Gloria accompanied her, cared for by a nanny, but as she got older, she was left with her Vanderbilt relatives for long periods.