Gloria Vanderbilt, Billionaire Heiress who Built a Fashion Empire and Mother of Anderson Cooper, Has Died at 95

Her son, Anderson Cooper, the CNN journalist, confirmed her death in a broadcast.

Cooper and Vanderbilt were both featured and talked about their lives in the 2016 HBO documentary Nothing Left Unsaid.

“The last few weeks, every time I’d kiss her good-bye, I’d say ‘I love you mom.’ She would look at me and say, ‘I love you too. You know that.’ And she was right. I did know that. I knew it from the moment I was born and I’ll know it for the rest of my life. And in the end, what greater gift can a mother give to her son?” Cooper said in his broadcast this morning.

 “Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman who loved life and lived it on her own terms. She spent a lot of time alone in her head during her life, but when the end came she was not alone. She was surrounded by beauty and by family and by friends….What an extraordinary life. What an extraordinary mom. What an incredible woman.”

From The New York Times:

Gloria Vanderbilt, the society heiress who stitched her illustrious family name into designer jeans and built a $100 million fashion empire, crowning her tabloid story of a child-custody fight, of broken marriages and of jet-set romances, died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 95.

She married and divorced three men — a mobster who beat her; the conductor Leopold Stokowski, who was 42 years older and preoccupied with his own career; and the film director Sidney Lumet. She had two sons with Stokowski and two with her fourth husband, Wyatt Cooper. One son was Anderson Cooper of CNN; another son, Carter Cooper, fell to his death from her Manhattan penthouse.

READ THE FULL NY TIMES OBITUARY HERE.