Fashion designer, actress, heiress, artist and socialite Gloria Vanderbilt has died. She was 95.
Earlier this month, doctors discovered “very advanced cancer” in Vanderbilt’s stomach, her son Anderson Cooper said in a video that aired Monday morning on CNN.
Readers can watch Cooper eulogize his mom via the video below, which was posted to Twitter by Cooper’s CNN colleague Brian Stelter.
Watch @AndersonCooper's obituary for his mother Gloria Vanderbilt. "What an extraordinary life. What an extraordinary mom. And what an incredible woman." pic.twitter.com/YXz66LOr7W
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 17, 2019
Vanderbilt, born in 1924, was married four times, and had four children, including Cooper.
The Vanderbilts were an extremely powerful and wealthy family. Gloria’s father, Reginald Vanderbilt, was the heir to the family’s railroad fortune, though he gambled much of that away and died when Gloria was a baby.
When Gloria was elementary-school aged, her Aunt Gertrude sued to gain custody of her. At the end of the Great Depression-era “Trial of the Century,” the 10-year-old Vanderbilt was taken from her mom and given to her aunt, whom she barely knew.
“Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, her mother, was not ready to be a mom — or a widow,” Cooper says in the video eulogy.
Gloria Vanderbilt would first marry at 17. Her fourth husband, Wyatt Cooper, is Anderson’s dad.
“What an extraordinary life. What an extraordinary mom. And what an incredible woman,” Cooper concluded his cable news tribute.