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 The network said Vanderbilt died at home among family and
friends. Cooper said she had learned this month that she had
stomach cancer.
Vanderbilt became a fashion icon in the 1970s and '80s with an
eponymous line of tight-fitting blue jeans that bore her
signature and trademark swan logo. They were a must-have for any
woman with aspirations to style.
"If you were around in early 1980s it was pretty hard to miss
the jeans she helped create but that was her public face - the
one she learned to hide behind as a child," Cooper said on CNN.
"Her private self, her real self - that was more fascinating and
more lovely than anything she showed the public."
Vanderbilt wrote that as a girl she had considered becoming a
nun, which would have been an incredible loss to the chroniclers
of high society and celebrity tumult. Instead of a nunnery, she
went on to a life that could have provided storylines for dozens
of soap operas, romance novels, Broadway musicals and
tear-jerker movies.
Vanderbilt was born into wealth on Feb. 20, 1924, in New York
City. She was the great-great-granddaughter of Cornelius
Vanderbilt, the 19th century railroad and shipping magnate who
amassed one of the greatest fortunes of the time.
She was not yet 2 years old when her father, Reginald Claypoole
Vanderbilt, died and she spent many of the following years
living in Europe with her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, on
her trust fund, which was estimated at $2.5 million - the
equivalent of at least $33 million today.
Gloria's aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who founded the
Whitney Museum of American Art, said Gloria's mother was
misusing the trust fund on a free-wheeling lifestyle that
included a female lover, and went to court. Whitney won custody
of the child in an acrimonious, sensationalized case that
eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
The custody battle featured high-society character witnesses for
both sides and testimony so sensitive that courtroom spectators
were barred at times. The public closely followed the fate of
"Little Gloria," who was protected at the time by 12 bodyguards.
Whitney eventually won custody of Gloria with one judge
reproaching the girl's mother for living a lifestyle that was
"calculated to destroy her health and neglectful of her moral,
spiritual and mental education."
Vanderbilt said being taken from her mother started her on a
lifelong quest for love and approval. This led her to marry a
32-year-old Hollywood agent, Pat DiCicco, when she was only 17.
They divorced in 1945, when at the age of 21, Vanderbilt married
conductor Leopold Stokowski, who was 63.
The couple had two sons and by the time they separated in 1955,
Vanderbilt was being seen around New York with singer Frank
Sinatra. After another divorce, Vanderbilt found herself in
another custody fight - this time with Stokowski claiming that
she was an unfit mother who spent too much time in
psychotherapy.
From 1956 to 1963 Vanderbilt was married to Sidney Lumet,
director of the acclaimed films "12 Angry Men," "Dog Day
Afternoon," "Serpico" and "Network."
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She was married to her fourth husband, writer Wyatt Cooper, until
his death during heart surgery in 1978. They had two sons, Anderson
and Carter.
In 1988, in the greatest tragedy of Vanderbilt's life, Carter, aged
23, killed himself by jumping from the family's 14th-floor apartment
in New York, in spite of his mother's attempts to stop him.
She later wrote a memoir, "A Mother's Story," in which she reflected
on her painful upbringing and blamed Carter's suicide on psychosis
brought on by an anti-asthma drug.
Vanderbilt called her son's death "the final loss, the fatal loss
that stripped me bare," and said she did not think she could survive
it.
In a 2012 television interview with her son Anderson, she said she
thought about the tragedy every day and that she had considered
jumping after her son.
"There was a moment when I thought I was going to jump after him but
then I thought of you ... and it stopped me from doing that," she
told Anderson.
Vanderbilt dabbled in acting, painting, poetry and modeling before
the Hallmark greeting card company bought some of her artwork for a
line of paper goods in the early 1970s. Her work also graced a
collection of scarves before she started the line of jeans and
expanded to perfume, shoes, leather goods and accessories. In 1978
she sold her Gloria Vanderbilt brand and started another fashion
company.
Vanderbilt won a $1.5 million judgment in 1993 against her lawyer
and psychiatrist, claiming they had stolen from her. Because the
lawyer had not paid her taxes for several years, she owed the
Internal Revenue Service so much money she had to sell a summer home
in Southampton and a New York City home.
Sex, Vanderbilt said, was a subject she found endlessly fascinating.
One of her memoirs told of her romances with Hollywood figures such
as Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Gene Kelly and Howard Hughes (she was a
teenager at the time), as well as various married men. In 2009 at
age 85 she published an explicit erotic novel, "Obsession."
Vanderbilt also challenged racial standards of the times by dating
black photographer-filmmaker Gordon Parks in the 1950s.
"I embrace it all - the pain and the pleasure, the drama and the
disappointments," Vanderbilt wrote in summing up her life in the
romantic memoir, "It Seemed Important at the Time."
(Reporting by Bill Trott in Washington; Editing by David Brunnstrom
and Matthew Lewis)
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