#RIP: Anderson Cooper Announces His Mother, Gloria Vanderbilt Has Died on CNN

Gloria Vanderbilt‘s life spanned the 20th and into the 21st century and was SO fantastic, you’d think it was fiction. She was thrust into the spotlight as a child heiress before going on to establish herself as an actress, artist, author, fashion icon and socialite. She has died.

Her son Anderson Cooper in an on-air eulogy on CNN Monday morning said,

“Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman who loved life and lived it on her own terms. What an extraordinary life. What an extraordinary mom. What an incredible woman.”

Vanderbilt died at home Monday morning surrounded by family and friends.

Vanderbilt appeared together on her son’s program Anderson Live and were the focus of Liz Garbus‘ 2016 HBO documentary Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper, which featured a series of candid conversations.

Anderson says in the documentary.

“My mom has lived many different lives and has inhabited many different skins. She has this public face, but the reality of her life is so different than what the public face is.”

Vanderbilt was so prolific, it prompted Life magazine to dub her “a feminine version of the Renaissance Man” in 1968. As many as she traversed, she never let her travails define her but managed to create her own identity through her many artistic endeavors and life dramas. There are so many, I’ll just bullet-point the highlights:

• Born in New York City on Feb. 20, 1924, Gloria Laura Vanderbilt was the daughter of railroad heir Reginald Vanderbilt and Gloria Morgan, his second wife.

• When her father died (drinking himself to death) Gloria was only 18 months old, and she inherited half of a $5 million trust fund.

• Gloria’s mother used her child’s money to traveling through Europe with the Prince of Wales (not Whales) who was having an affair with Gloria’s twin sister.

• Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (a sculptor and patron of the arts who founded NYC’s Whitney Museum in 1931), sued for custody of the Gloria and the newspapers called her “the poor little rich girl”. The judge award Whitney custody. The 1982 NBC miniseries Little Gloria … Happy at Last recreated the story for TV.

• Gloria married Stanley DiCicco but claimed he had abused her emotionally and physically but before the marriage was officially over, Vanderbilt was already in love with conductor Leopold Stokowski, and they wed in 1945. She was 21, he was 63. During their 10-year marriage, they had two sons, Stanley and Christopher.

• In her teens when she appeared in a photo spread for Harper’s Bazaar. and went to Hollywood and developed a fondness for older men; Errol Flynn and Howard Hughes were among those she dated. After reported flings with Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando, Vanderbilt married director Sidney Lumet in 1956, and they stayed together until 1963.

• The 1950s also saw Vanderbilt try her hand at acting studying with Sanford Meisner with stage debut in 1954 in The Swan. 1955 marked the beginning of her writing career with the publication of Love Poems.

• Vanderbilt married writer Wyatt Cooper in 1963. The marriage produced two sons, Carter and Anderson. (In the late 80s, Carter, just 23, committed suicide by jumping from his mother’s 14th-floor New York penthouse terrace while she watched helpless.)

• During the 1950s, Vanderbilt studied art and her first solo exhibit opened in 1952. In 1969, a collection of collages were exhibited at the Hammer Galleries. Dream Boxes, Vanderbilt’s macabre, doll-filled installations, debuted in 1996 at KS Art with one-woman shows in in 2001, 2002 and 2007.

• One constant companion, Truman Copote, is said to have based Breakfast at Tiffany‘s Holly Golightly on her.

• Vanderbilt broke into fashion in 1976 when she partnered with Mohan Murjani. While working at his blouse company, “He said, ‘Murjani’s, they’ve got all this denim fabric stored away in Hong Kong.’ So I said, ‘Why don’t we make jeans, a really great fit jean?‘ ” Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans were an immediate hit, the success fueled by acting as spokesperson. Vanderbilt’s name could be also be found on perfume, shoes, linens, blouses, sheets, leather goods — even a dessert.

• Vanderbilt partnered with L’Oreal on a series of fragrances between 1982 and 2002. The first scent, signature Vanderbilt for women, was a popular mass-market perfume in the 1980s.

• In 1985, her memoir, Once Upon a Time: A True Story, was released. She wrote works of fiction — The Memory Book of Starr Faithfull (1994), Obsession (2009), The Things We Fear the Most (2011) — and nonfiction, including It Seemed Important at the Time: A Romance Memoir (2004), in which she offered details of her real-life loves, and A Mother’s Story (1997), where she wrote about her son’s suicide.

• In 2016, she and her son Anderson collaborated on the book The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love and Loss. The title was inspired from a Wordsworth poem. On Charlie Rose she explained.

“I’m fascinated by Anderson’s interpretation of what the title means. The rainbow comes and goes … it goes, that’s the end of it, [he believes]. My interpretation is it comes back again.”

Cooper said,