Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt

For the Vanderbilts lived in a day when flaunting one’s money was not only accepted but celebrated. What may have started as playacting, as dressing up as dukes and princesses for fancy dress balls in fairytale palaces, soon developed into a firm conviction that they were indeed the new American nobility.

GENTLEMEN You have undertaken to cheat me. I won’t sue you, for the law is too slow. I’ll ruin you. C. Vanderbilt

If ever Scott Fitzgerald needed evidence to substantiate his aphorism that “the very rich…are different from you and me,” it was here in spades in this portrait gallery of extravagant crazies that is the unique saga of the Vanderbilt family.

The secret of my success is this: I never tell what I am going to do till I have done it.”62

A dinner invitation once accepted is a sacred obligation. If you die before the dinner takes place, your executor must attend.

In the hidden reaches where memory probes lie sorrows too deep to fathom.