A new HBO documentary about Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, Anderson Cooper, premieres this Saturday.
"Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper," which airs on April 9 at 9 p.m. ET, explores the life of the 92-year-old heiress, artist, and entrepreneur and her relationship with her 48-year-old son, a CNN anchor.
You'll learn plenty about them if you watch the film, but not as much — according to some reviews — about their family, one of the wealthiest in this nation's history.
Here's some supplementary context, to shed light on a dynasty that put its name on much more than designer jeans:
The Vanderbilts, who emigrated from Holland, had settled in New York — then the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam — by the mid-17th century.
The evidence is a 1651 Dutch Reformed Church baptismal record for Aris Van Der Bilt, the first of four children born to Jan Van Der Bilt and his wife Dierber Cornelis. Jan was a farmer, purchasing land for agriculture in what is now Flatbush in 1667.
Credit: Wikimedia
But the story of one of New York's wealthiest families really starts on Staten Island.
The clan's founding patriarch, Cornelius Vanderbilt, was born in Port Richmond, Staten Island in 1794. He joined the crew on his father's barge in New York Harbor at age 11.
A millionaire by 1846, Vanderbilt made his fortune in transportation. The business tycoon, who started with one boat shuttling passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan, established a fleet of steamboats transporting goods and people between the East and West coasts by way of Cape Horn, earning the nickname "Commodore."
He went on to build a railroad empire, unifying the New York lines and connecting them to other cities in the Northeast and the Midwest.
Cornelius Vanderbilt (credit: New York Public Library)
By the end of Cornelius Vanderbilt's life, he was the richest man in New York City and he'd ultimately earn the distinction of second richest American ever.
That's according to CNNMoney's calculations, which adjusted his fortune of more than $100 million for the size of the economy at the time of his death in 1877, pegging it at $205 billion in today's dollars.
Cornelius may have been extraordinarily wealthy, but he wasn't classy.
"Unkempt and ill-mannered, he was routinely shunned by polite society, as much for his lack of decorum as for his lack of benevolence," biographer Edward J. Renehan writes. He spit his tobacco all over the place, drank heavily, and cheated regularly on his wife with maids and sex workers. The only unsolicited donations he ever made were $50,000 to the Free Church of the Strangers in Greenwich Village and $1 million to Central University in Tennessee, which, as a result, became Vanderbilt University. On his deathbed in 1877, his last words to his family were "Keep the money together," according to a relative.
The Vanderbilts did a terrible job of obeying that imperative.
Cornelius' offspring split his fortune and only his son William Henry made any money.
His children and especially his grandchildren lived opulent lives. William Henry's daughter-in-law Alva, for example, commissioned and furnished palatial mansions in New York City, Long Island and Newport. The Marble House in Rhode Island, which contained more than half a million cubic feet of the stone, cost her husband $11 million, a sum equivalent to $260 million today. (He deserved to foot that bill, though: he was a philanderer, and Alva divorced him in 1895.)
The Marble House (Credit: Wikimedia)
When the family held a reunion in the 1970s, there wasn't a millionaire among the 120 members attending.
The sole Vanderbilt building that still stands in New York City today is Grand Central Terminal.
In 1869, Cornelius Vanderbilt bought 23 acres of land on 42nd Street to build a rail depot for his New York Central Railroad in a location that was then 45 minutes away from the heart of the city.
The railroad's coal locomotives would prove problematic as New York expanded above 42nd and pedestrians complained about the smoke, cinders, noise, and noxious fumes coming from Grand Central's tracks.
After an accidental collision of two trains killed 17 passengers and injured 36 in 1902, the tide of public opinion forced New York Central to electrify its rail yard.
When it came to designing the building that housed Grand Central's main concourse, the Vanderbilts urged the railroad company to hire architect Whitney Warren. The New York Times called his executed vision, which endures to this day, "not only the greatest station in the United States, but the greatest station, of any type, in the world.”
