Inside the true lives and scandals of socialites that inspired HBO’s season two of The Gilded Age

In a country without landed aristocracy, the Vanderbilts, Morgans, Astors and Rockefellers, were as close to royalty that America will ever get – with the titles and palaces to prove it. 

These tycoons made fortunes in oil, steel, railroads and banking during the latter half of the 19th century; interrupting the staid respectability of the old guard with their lavish lifestyles, yachts, priceless art and palatial mansions on Fifth Avenue. 

Bursting onto the scene, these new money arrivistes used their fortunes to buy prestige and reputability, enjoying lavish lifestyles that have been immortalized on-screen in hit HBO period drama The Gilded Age.

But within a few generations, the money was all but gone, depleted by heirs who only knew how to live well, marry well and spend abundantly. After all, the Gilded Age – as coined by Mark Twain – was really an era defined by its patina of splendor that hid the corrupt foundations that undergirded their vast accumulation of wealth.

Today, their legacy today remains on buildings, universities, foundations and street names throughout the country. 

With filming for season two of HBO’s period drama, The Gilded Age underway, DailyMail.com raises the velvet curtain on the private lives, immense tragedies, and enormous glamour of the storied and scandalous American dynasties that inspired the smash hit series. 

THE VANDERBILT DYNASTY BUILT ON A MASSIVE RAILROAD AND SHIPPING EMPIRE

The Vanderbilt wealth began with Cornelius ‘Commodore’ Vanderbilt, an upstart from Staten Island who quit school at the age of 11 and began working in his father’s ferry business. Born into poverty in 1794, Cornelius’ dizzying rise from hardscrabble rural obscurity has become central in the American mythos of bootstrapping reinvention.

Cornelius turned a small-scale ferry business into a massive shipping, steamboat, transportation, and railroad empire that launched his descendants into stratospheric wealth. 

At his time of death in 1877, Cornelius was the richest man in the world, with more money than the entire US Treasury.

Railroads were a natural extension of his transportation business, by 1873 he had consolidated three lucrative railroad lines into one empire and commissioned a new station as their home. Today the iconic Grand Central Terminal is the beating heart of New York City, and receives over 750,000 visitors and passengers per day.

Another Vanderbilt legacy is Vanderbilt University in Tennessee which was founded thanks to the Commodore’s $1 million endowment in 1873. 

The donation was made under the persuasion of his much younger second wife, Frank Crawford, who was an avowed Confederate sympathizer and distant cousin of her husband.

Cornelius left the bulk of his $100 million fortune – roughly $2.7 billion in today’s money – to his son William Henry Vanderbilt. He was the only Vanderbilt who was able to double the family fortune. 

By the time William died in 1885, he amassed a staggering $200 million ($6.2 billion today), but all of it would be squandered within a few generations by heirs who only knew how to ‘live well, marry well’ and spend lavishly.’

Third generation Vanderbilts were keen to use their inheritance to infiltrate the gilded gates of New York Society. Until that point, they were considered nouveau riche vulgarians by the old guard. It would be their astonishing life of excess for which the family would become famous.  

Cornelius II, wasted no time throwing his inheritance into building an enormous palace on Fifth Avenue which featured 100 rooms and filled an entire city block. It was demolished in 1926, but it still holds the record for the largest private residence ever built in New York City to this day. 

His wife, Alice Vanderbilt, became known in Newport, Rhode Island as ‘Alice of The Breakers’ for her lavish summer house inspired by Versailles. Today the opulent home is on the National Register of Historic Places and is considered the epitome of Gilded Age excess. 

They managed to score some Patriarchs invitations, only because the sheer size of the Vanderbilt fortune meant their social triumph was inevitable, but most polite society hostesses kept the Vanderbilts at arm’s length through the 1870s. No one was willing to ‘take them on,’ as it were, before Caroline Astor indicated that she was ready for them to be included. So, they waited. 

Meanwhile Willie Kissam was a known party boy who indulged whose primary purpose ‘was to consume’ and spend. Willie and his socially ambitious wife, Alva, would use their considerable wealth to lay siege to the cloistered parlor rooms of old money. 

Her opening gambit was a grandiose masquerade costume ball to celebrate the completion of a grandiose gothic-style mansion on Fifth Avenue. Alva invited 1,200 of New York’s crème de la crème to her ‘housewarming’ party. 

After a power struggle with Caroline Astor, (the closest thing America had to landed aristocracy at the time), Alva would change the entire face and trajectory of society in one evening. 

Alva and Willie Vanderbilt’s daughter Consuelo, would captivate the public in 1895 with her much-anticipated marriage to the 9th Duke of Marlborough (a first cousin of Winston Churchill), however Consuelo would later state that her wedding was ‘the worst day of her life.’ 

The unhappy marriage was arranged through her socially ambitious mother, Alva, who had long hoped to secure an aristocratic match for her daughter.

Perhaps the greatest temple of the Vanderbilt’s ambition and excess is the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Using the inheritance from his father, the Commodore’s youngest grandchild, George, built the colossal 175,000 square foot retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The Biltmore remains America’s largest home to this day. With 250 rooms, 35 bedrooms, and 43 bathrooms, the French Renaissance chateau and its 8,000 acre property are still family owned and operated by George’s relatives.

However, by the time Gloria Vanderbilt was born in 1924, the family inheritance was spread thin among the five generations of descendants. She was dubbed ‘the poor little rich girl.’ 

Meanwhile, the railroad empire built by Cornelius had changed, and the family’s once-dominant role in American industry would continue to dwindle until the 1970s when it would go bust. Eventually, the family could no longer afford to maintain their sumptuous lifestyle, nor could they afford their mansions. 

Many of them were torn down by the 1920s, and the remaining few are now run by the National Park Service.  

When Gloria was just 10 years old, she became the center of a sensational custody lawsuit that was heard and reported around the world as ‘The Trial of the Century.’ 

Today the most notable Vanderbilt descendent is Gloria’s son, Anderson Cooper, a journalist and political commentator for CNN. 

‘The dynasty ended with Gloria,’ he said, in his 2021 book, which explored his family’s legacy.

‘She was the last to be born before the Depression, when the Vanderbilt riches seemed as limitless and eternal as the stars in the sky,’ he says in the book.

THE ASTORS: OLD MONEY FAMILY FORTUNE MADE ON FUR TRADING AND NEW YORK REAL ESTATE

From Astoria, Queens, to Astor Place, and The Waldorf-Astoria, the Astor family name has been synonymous with American success for hundreds of years, influencing the very shape of New York City through their legacy of real estate development.

Born in Germany in 1763, John Jacob Astor moved to America after the Revolutionary War and became one of its first multimillionaires with his monopoly in the fur trade. 

He started diversifying his assets and purchased his first building by the time he was 26 years old, continuing to add to his real estate portfolio by snapping up neglected orchards and farmland along the Hudson River until until his death at age 84 in 1848. 

At 40 years old, Astor purchased 70 acres of prime Manhattan real estate that later became Times Square, running from 42nd and 46th Streets between Broadway and the Hudson River.

By his time of death, John Jacob Astor was said to be worth $30 million — over $1 billion in today’s dollars.

His money would cement his grandchildren into the old money guard of American aristocracy. 

Most notably was his grandson, William Backhouse Astor Jr., who married a prominent Dutch socialite of staid respectability named Caroline Schermerhorn Astor. 

She was the epitome of ‘old money’ and ruled over New York society’s ‘Four Hundred’ during the Gilded Age as its primary gatekeeper, alongside an established dandy named Ward McAllister. 

Caroline Astor recognized early of the importance of money in a country without landed aristocracy. She wielded her social influence as a kingmaker and arbiter of taste with liveried servants, French art, French chefs and imported china. 

She divided society into two categories: old money pedigrees (like her own) were called ‘nobs.’ While the nouveau riche arrivistes like the Vanderbilts were ‘swells,’ those who were ready to lavish their fortunes on social climbing.

In 1862, Mrs. Astor and her husband built a fashionable townhouse at 350 Fifth Avenue, hastening the movement of fashionable New Yorkers northward from their old world strongholds around Washington Square. 

When Murray Hill was the very vanguard of New York society, Caroline Astor became its reigning monarch.

Later, when her nephew, Waldorf Astor, tore down the house next door to hers and erected a 13-story hotel called The Waldorf — Caroline called it a ‘glorified tavern’ and decamped to the Upper East Side, to build her own Richard Morris Hunt-designed palace on Fifth Avenue and 65th Street.

Caroline’s son, John Jacob Astor IV continued the family feud with his cousin, building a competing hotel (four stories taller) right next to The Waldorf, naming it The Astoria. Eventually they combined the two hotels and it became the Waldorf = Astoria (the equal sign was later swapped for a dash). It stood on the future site of the Empire State Building.

Adding to his own real-estate holdings, John Jacob Astor IV also built the luxurious Knickerbocker Hotel and St. Regis. Both of which still exist today. 

His life was cut short in 1912, when he perished in the Titanic, but not before leaving his wife of 18 years, with whom he’d had two sons, for an 18-year-old debutante.

In 1931, the legendary hotel moved to Midtown Manhattan, where it remains today. The hotel was purchased by Conrad Hilton (grandfather of Paris Hilton) in 1949 and was later sold to a Chinese conglomerate in 2014.

Eventually Waldorf Astor, (proprietor of the original Waldorf hotel) got so fed up with his aunt, that he moved to England where he became the progenitor of a famous Astor Family of his own, not to be confused with the American branch.

The Astor lineage has been diluted in the years since its heyday of the Gilded Age. Through multiple marriages per generation, the wealth has also watered down. 

In 2013, one distant relative named Alexandra Aldrich who lived in a dilapidated 43-room estate in Barrytown, New York said: ‘I lived a double life. Our poverty was the big secret.’

The last reigning queen of New York was Brooke Astor, an American socialite and philanthropist who died at the age of 105 in 2007. 

Brooke was the third wife of William Vincent Astor (son of the man who died in the Titanic). Their marriage was set-up by his second wife, Mary ‘Minnie’ Cushing, who promised to find him a replacement wife before they divorced. 

William Vincent was known for having a difficult personality. ‘Of course she married Vincent for the money,’ said Brooke’s friend Louis Auchincloss, ‘I wouldn’t respect her if she hadn’t. Only a twisted person would have married him for love.’

The bulk of Brooke’s $100 million fortune was divided among various charities and and cultural institutions. Her only son, Anthony Marshall’s inheritance was cut down to $14.5 million from $31 million after he was convicted of elder abuse and stealing from her in 2004. 

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER BECAME ‘THE WEALTHIEST AMERICAN OF ALL TIME’ AS AN OIL BARON

Unlike most Gilded Age dynasties that were plagued by scandal, feuds, lawsuits and bankruptcy, the Rockefellers are one of the few to maintain their wealth which is now spread among 200 descendants of John D. Rockefeller. 

The family billions began with a shrewd 16-year-old bookkeeper from Cleveland, Ohio, whose only formal training was a single business course and a hustler father who said: ‘I cheat my boys every chance I get. I trade with the boys and skin ’em and I just beat ’em every time I can. I want to make ’em sharp.’ 

By the time he was 25, Rockefeller was one of the wealthiest men in America. He founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870 with a monopoly that controlled 90 per cent of all oil in the United States. 

Standard Oil was dismantled in 1911, with a Supreme Court ruling that it violated anti-trust laws. It was broken up into separate entities, which later turned into today’s most powerful oil companies like ConocoPhillips, BP, Chevron, and Exxon-Mobil.

At his time of death in 1937, Rockefeller’s was worth $1.4 billion ($30 billion in today’s money). His assets equaled 1.5% of America’s GDP. As a comparison, it would require $315 billion today – twice the net worth of Jeff Bezos to even come close to that percentage.

After a long controversial career in the oil industry, Rockefeller devoted his life to philanthropy. He founded the Rockefeller foundation and gave away $550 million of his own fortune primarily to education and public health causes. 

He gave $80 million to the University of Chicago and turned it into a world-class institution, later describing it as ‘the best investment I ever made.’ As an ardent abolitionist, he made a large contribution to the historical black women’s college. Spelman University (named after his wife, Laura Spelman).

He also founded Rockefeller University in New York City, dedicated to medical research in 1901. 

His fortune was divided through a web of charitable foundations and trusts for his five children. Most notable among the siblings was, John D. Rockefeller Jr. who was responsible for building Rockefeller Center, a complex of 19 skyscrapers in Midtown Manhattan. 

He purchased and donated the land that Cloisters Museum is located in upper Manhattan, as well as the 16 acre plot of land that is currently home to the United Nations headquarters in New York City with an $8 million donation made in 1946.

John Jr.’s wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller whom he married in 1901, amassed a collection of revolutionary European and American art, including works by Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, which would later become the foundation of what is today New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

Raised as heirs to a legacy, John Jr.’s children lived a life of splendor and privilege at their opulent country estates, or in Manhattan, when the brothers would roller skate along Fifth Avenue trailed by a limousine in case they grew tired. 

Her collection of revolutionary European and American art, including works by Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse, among others, was the foundation of what would become New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. 

In addition to their own strong sense of noblesse oblige, John Jr.’s children also went on to have their own standalone successes. 

Nelson Rockefeller was elected as the governor of New York for four terms between 1953 and 1973. He later served as Vice President between 1974 and 1977 under President Gerald Ford’s administration. 

Nelson’s son, Michael has been missing for 60 years and is now presumed dead. He shot to notoriety in 1961 for having disappeared in 1961 while on an expedition in New Guinea. There has been speculation that the 23-year-old scion had been killed and eaten by cannibalistic tribespeople in the region. 

Nelson’s brother, David, also had a high-profile career as the President of Chase Manhattan Bank. He declined an offer to fill Robert F. Kennedy’s seat as Governor of New York after he was assassinated in 1968 and also refused an offer from President Jimmy Carter as Secretary of the Treasury. 

Nonetheless, David remained politically connected and often met with foreign rulers and US presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev. A New York Times article from 2006, estimated that his total charitable donations amounted to $900 million over his lifetime. 

David died in 2017, at age 101, worth $3 billion. His will left behind an additional $700 million to various non-profits.

Now entering its seventh generation today, the Rockefeller family today remains largely united. Their fortune is spread out among more than 170 heirs. According to Forbes in 2020, they were worth an estimated $8.4 billion in 2020.

JOHN PIERPONT MORGAN’S BANKING DYNASTY

One of the most powerful bankers dealmakers of the Gilded Age, John Pierpont (J.P.) Morgan dominated corporate banking on Wall Street and helped finance railroads, US Steel, General Electric and other major corporations. 

Born in 1837, the Connecticut native hailed from a distinguished family. One of his maternal relatives, James Pierpont, was the founder of Yale University, while his paternal grandfather was a founder of the Aetna Insurance Company. 

J.P. followed his wealthy father into the banking business in the late 1850s, and in 1871 formed a partnership with Philadelphia banker Anthony Drexel. In 1895, their firm was reorganized as J.P. Morgan & Company, a predecessor of the modern-day financial giant JPMorgan Chase. 

In 1861, Morgan married Amelia Sturges, the daughter of a prominent New York businessman, but she died, just four months after the wedding from tuberculosis. In 1865, Morgan married Frances Louisa Tracy, the daughter of a New York lawyer, and the pair eventually had four children, but he became a serial philanderer as he accumulated wealth and power.

As railroads expanded throughout America, Morgan consolidated a number of financially troubled railroad companies, eventually controlling one-sixth of rail lines.   

He invested in Thomas Edison and the Edison Electricity Company; helped create General Electric, International Harvester and AT&T. In 1901, Morgan bought out Andrew Carnegie to create U.S. Steel, the first corporation in the world with a market capitalization of over $1 billion.

Morgan became so rich and powerful that he saved the federal government from default twice. First in 1895, when he allowed the government to purchase his vast gold supplies to stop the spiral of deflation, and again during the Panic of 1907.

With a lifelong passion for art, Morgan was the president of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1904 to 1913. 

When he died, Morgan left behind a personal art collection, of manuscripts, printed books, prints, drawings, and ancient artifacts. Housed in what is now known as the Morgan Library and Museum, his former mansion on Fifth Avenue and 36th Street, is home to a trove worth over $900 million. 

By one estimate, J. P. Morgan is believed to have been the 24th richest American in history, inflation adjusted. His fortune is believed to have grown to about $38 billion (2007 USD). 

Jack, J.P. Morgan’s son, became chairman of J.P. Morgan & Co. and his grandson Harry Morgan founded the investment bank Morgan Stanley and Co. 

However, most of the Morgans have slipped into obscurity. As for their family fortune, it diminished during the Great Depression and through family’s penchant for philanthropy. Most of the fortune was in art and property, which has depreciated with time.

Perhaps the most recognizable member of the family today is reality star Sonja Morgan, who married into the family when she tied the knot with Morgan Stanley founder Harry’s son John Adams Morgan in 1998. The couple had one child together, daughter Quincy, now 21, before they divorced in 2006. 

But while Sonja only joined the Morgan dynasty through marriage, she has maintained the name – and helped to keep it in the spotlight through her long-running appearance on the hit Bravo reality series The Real Housewives of New York City.

ANDREW CARNEGIE’S COLLOSSAL FORTUNE AMASSED THROUGH A STEEL EMPIRE

Scottish-born Andrew Carnegie was an American industrialist who epitomized the Gilded Age ideal of the self-made man, rising from rags to riches to become one of the wealthiest individuals in the history of the world. 

With no formal education, Carnegie found employment as a bobbin boy at a Pittsburgh cotton factory, earning $1.20 a week before taking a job with the Pennsylvania Railroad at age 18.   

Carnegie continued his ascent in the business world. With the US railroad industry entering a period of rapid growth, he seized an opportunity to invest in the steel business, recognizing that it would replace iron rails. 

By the time he was in his early 30s, Carnegie had become a very wealthy man. 

He then formed Carnegie Steel and sold it to JP Morgan in 1901 for $480 million (what today would be nearing $16 billion). 

The steel tycoon did not want to marry during his mother’s lifetime, instead choosing to take care of her in her illness towards the end of her life. After she died in 1886, the 51-year-old mogul married Louise Whitfield, who was 21 years his junior. 

They had one daughter named Margaret, who died in 1990. 

To house his family, Carnegie built the grandest of all Gilded Age Fifth Avenue mansions on the corner of 91st Street. Today it is the location of the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt museum. 

Yet unlike many Gilded Age dynasties, Carnegie did not leave his descendants with a stake in the company he helped build. It now trades on the New York Stock Exchange.

He devoted the rest of his life to giving away his entire fortune. ‘The man who dies rich, dies disgraced,’ he once said. 

Among his philanthropic activities, he funded the establishment of more than 2,500 public libraries around the globe, donated more than 7,600 organs to churches worldwide and endowed many organizations such as Carnegie Hall (an iconic concert venue in New York that opened in 1891). As well as Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. 

Barely anything is left of Carnegie’s fortune, which was once valued on par with the oil tycoon Rockefellers and the banking Morgan family. The fourth-generation members of Andrew Carnegie’s lineage now have the self-made wealth of white collar professionals. Their children and grandchildren make up a large fifth generation and a growing sixth. 

Linda Thorell Hills, one of Andrew Carnegie’s great granddaughters, told Forbes that her family has ‘lived conservatively and privately,’ and noted that it’s easier to blend in since they are all descendants of his only daughter and none live with the Carnegie last name. 

There is a small but diminishing branch of Carnegies that hail from the industrialist’s brother, Thomas. Unlike his brother, Thomas divvied up his fortune among his children. Some of them continue to live on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia, which he purchased in 1880.   

‘We had the island and that’s it,’ said fifth-generation descendant Lucy Foster Flight to Forbes.com. ‘There’s this misnomer that we’re this really rich family and feel that we’re owed the right to be on the island. It’s really hard because that’s our home.’ 

HENRY CLAY FRICK WAS A COKE-FUEL PIONEER BEFORE HE JOINED CARNEGIE’S STEEL EMPIRE

Henry Clay Frick, born in Pennsylvania in 1849, began amassing the fortune that would get him to New York at age 21, when he founded the Frick Coke Company, which supplied the fuel used in Pennsylvania’s steel mills. 

Ten years later, already a millionaire, he entered into a partnership with steel baron Andrew Carnegie, vaulting him into the ranks of America’s richest men. 

Around the same time, Frick paid a visit to William H. Vanderbilt’s resplendent mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue, which inspired him to begin collecting art himself. The Vanderbilt palace, with its French Louis XVI furniture, Italian tapestries and masterpiece-filled galleries made such an impression on Frick, that according to his biographer (and great-granddaughter) Martha Frick Symington Sanger, Frick remarked, ‘It’s all I shall ever want.’ 

He was dogged by multiple controversies during his time. In 1889, 2,209 people in Johnstown, Pennsylvania died when the dam broke of his private fishing and hunting club. He modified the reservoir to suit his recreational needs, most fatally was that he lowered the dam that got overburdened during a storm, causing a 40 foot wave that crashed through the town downstream. It was considered the worst disaster in American history at the time. 

Another scandal followed Frick in 1892 when his attempt to break the union at Carnegie Steel turned into a battle between the steelworkers and the Pinkerton security agents he hired to protect the mill. Three Pinkertons and nine union members were killed in the clash.

Frick survived an assassination attempt two weeks later, when an aggrieved anarchist burst into his office and shot him twice at close range.   

In 1905, Frick moved his growing collection of high art to New York City, where he stayed at the Sherry Netherland Hotel, briefly while building his enormous mansion on Fifth Avenue and 70th Street. 

He left Pittsburgh, allegedly because the pollution from his own coke ovens and Carnegie’s mills was damaging the art. This was the beginning of what would become the Frick Collection.

In New York, Frick began to collect paintings that ‘reflected the high society into which he was moving,’ including a few Rembrandts, a trio of Vermeers, El Greco’s Saint Jerome and a series of Fragonard panels called ‘The Progress of Love’ that he purchased from J.P. Morgan.   

Today, the Frick Collection is housed in his former Fifth Avenue palace and is home to one of the finest collections of European paintings in the United States. It contains many works of art dating from the pre-Renaissance up to the post-Impressionist eras, in addition to a large collection of carpets, porcelain, sculptures, and period furniture.

As a throwback to its Gilded Age glory, every year, the Frick Museum hosts the Young Fellows Ball, which is a charity event attended by all of the glitziest and most fashionable modern day socialites.