This is the story of the extraordinary rise and epic fall of the Vanderbilt dynasty. This is the story of the greatest American fortune ever squandered.
We are not meant always to be happy, and who would want to be? Happiness would become meaningless if it were a constant state. If you accept that, then you will not be surprised when something bad occurs, you will not gnash your teeth and ask, “Why me? Why has this happened to me?” It has happened to you because that is the nature of things. No one escapes. The rainbow comes and goes. Enjoy it while it lasts. Don’t be surprised by its departure, rejoice when it returns.
Does one ever know what another person is really like, even someone very close to us? Do we know what we are like ourselves? What we are today may not be what we are tomorrow.
Health is your most treasured gift. As long as you have it, you are independent, master of yourself.
The world has many edges, and all of us dangle from them by a very delicate thread. The key is not to let go.
Money gives you independence; but when you start chasing it, it is never enough.
Someone recently said to me that it is easier to be clever than it is to be kind, and I think that is very true. So I add to my list of regrets the times I have not been kind, choosing instead to be clever, usually at someone else’s expense.
Remember, whenever money is involved it brings out horrific things in people. It has the power not only to split families apart but to destroy the foundation of one’s life. Never lose sight of this. Take time and be certain you place your trust in those whose interest and goals mirror your own.
The benefit of thinking you will die at fifty is that it can spur you to accomplish a lot of things at a young age, which is what I have attempted to do, but now the prospect of living longer makes me uncertain about the plans I’ve made.
From the time we were little, you treated us as if our ideas mattered.
How can my body betray me when there is so much still to be done? You see, it isn’t age itself that betrays you; it is your body, and with its deterioration goes your power. You end up obsessed, entirely focused on your health, paying attention to every nuance, every ache and pain. Instead of working or living your life, you waste your time on appointments with doctors.
The money I inherited never belonged to me.
Perhaps someday it will be pleasant to remember even this. VIRGIL.
A few central myths appear again and again in Americans’ popular imagination: that success is available to anyone who is willing to work hard, for example, and that success is worthier of celebration if it is achieved without help.
The Vanderbilt story somehow manages to be both unique and also, deeply, universally American.
They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.
Hard to imagine that the man who made the Gilded Age according to his whims and who died on the cusp of the twentieth century had a great-grandfather born the same year as the Salem witch trials, but such are the long spans of generations.
I began going through dozens of boxes stored away in her apartment and her art studio. They were filled with journals, and documents, and letters. She saved everything. Handwritten notes from her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and schoolbooks my grandfather Reginald Vanderbilt doodled in as a child. I found old wills and financial records, and as I read the contents of these files stained by time and mold, I began to hear the voices of those people I never knew.
The ideology of New York City was, is, and probably always will be profit.
Gilded sin is so much more interesting than ragged sin,” she reflected. “Scandal dressed in ermine and purple is much more salacious than scandal in overalls or a kitchen apron.