The Vanderbilt family is an American family of Dutch origin prominent during the Gilded Age.
It started off with the shipping and railroad empires of Cornelius Vanderbilt, and expanded into various other areas of industry and philanthropy.

Cornelius Vanderbilt's descendants went on to build great Fifth Avenue mansions, Newport, Rhode Island summer cottages, the famous Biltmore House and various other exclusive homes.

Anderson Cooper and Chevy Chase had graduated in the same school, the Dalton school in Manhattan. Anderson Hays Cooper is an American journalist, author, and television personality.

He is the primary anchor of the CNN news show Anderson Cooper 360, while Chevy Chase is a fourteenth-generation New Yorker, and was listed in the Social Register at an early age.

The name Chevy was a nickname bestowed by his grandmother, derived from the medieval English Ballad of Chevy Chase. As a descendant of the Scottish Clan Douglas, the name Chevy seemed appropriate to her.
Anderson Cooper and mom, Gloria Vanderbilt, discuss family suicide: Anderson Cooper to discuss the suicide of their brother and son Carter in 1988. According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Vanderbilt opened up on Cooper’s talk show “Anderson” this week.

“When he went…I thought he was going to come back, but he didn’t,” said the 87-year-old former fashion designer. “He let go, and there was a moment when I thought I was going to jump over after him.”


Carter Cooper took his life by jumping from the 14th-floor terrace of his family’s New York City penthouse apartment. He was 23 years old at the time. Vanderbilt said it was Anderson Cooper, who was then 21, who stopped her from going after Carter. “I thought of you, and it stopped me from [jumping],” she told her son.

Vanderbilt and Cooper rarely speak publicly of the family loss, though Vanderbilt wrote a book in 1997 called “A Mother’s Story.” She explained that she believes the Princeton graduate killed himself because of a medicine allergy. She told her son, “You never get over it, but you learn to live with it.”

Cooper responded, “You have survived so many things…It hasn’t hardened you. You’re still open to experience and open to new loss and open to new heartbreak and to new love.”

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