Obituary: Gloria Vanderbilt

Gloria Vanderbilt with son Anderson Cooper

The proverbial "poor little rich girl," Gloria Vanderbilt, who later became a noted fashion designer, has died at the age of 95 of stomach cancer.  She was also known as the mother of CNN broadcaster Anderson Cooper.

Vanderbilt was the center of a messy 1930s custody scandal, and that is where she got labeled the "poor little rich girl."

'What an extraordinary mom and what an incredible woman,' Cooper said through tears during an emotional obituary package which aired on CNN on Monday a little after 10am.

Cooper said that over the last few weeks, every time he left his mother he told her that he loved her.

'She said, "I love you too. You know that." And she was right. I've known it from the moment I was born and I'll know it for the rest of my life,' he said.

In a statement afterwards, he said: 'Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman, who loved life, and lived it on her own terms.

'She was a painter, a writer, and designer but also a remarkable mother, wife, and friend.

She was an accomplished woman despite her old money background.

Vanderbilt built a $100 million fashion design business that was famous all over the world.

New York Times:

She was America’s most famous non-Hollywood child in the Roaring Twenties and Depression years, the great-great granddaughter of the 19th-century railroad-steamship magnate Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. In infancy, she inherited a $2.5 million trust fund, equivalent to $35 million today, which she could not touch until she was 21, though her mother gained access to nearly $50,000 a year.

Newspapers called her a poor little rich girl. Her alcoholic father died when she was a baby. Her mother left her with a nanny and partied across Europe on her money for years. When Gloria was 10, her mother and a wealthy aunt sued each other in the era’s most sensational child-custody case. The aunt exposed her mother’s escapades and won custody of a child left traumatized.

Growing up in her aunt’s mansions in New York City and on Long Island, with servants, chauffeurs, lawyers, tutors, private schools and trips abroad, Ms. Vanderbilt searched for fulfillment as an artist, a fashion model, a poet, a playwright and an actress of stage, screen and television. She had affairs with Errol Flynn, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Howard Hughes and Marlon Brando.

In other words, she led a colorful life.