GLORIA Vanderbilt, the "poor little rich girl" who lived a life at the highest levels of American fashion, society and wealth as heir to one of the greatest family fortunes in US history, has died at the age of 95.
Vanderbilt was the great-great-granddaughter of financier Cornelius Vanderbilt and the mother of CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper, who announced her death via a first-person obituary that aired on the network on Monday morning.
Cooper confirmed his mother died at home with friends and family at her side. She had been suffering from advanced stomach cancer.
"Gloria Vanderbilt was an extraordinary woman, who loved life, and lived it on her own terms," Cooper said in a statement.
"She was a painter, a writer, and designer but also a remarkable mother, wife, and friend. She was 95 years old, but ask anyone close to her, and they'd tell you, she was the youngest person they knew, the coolest, and most modern."
Vanderbilt became a fashion icon in the 1970s with an eponymous line of tight-fitting blue jeans that bore her signature and trademark swan logo. They were a must-have for any woman with aspirations to style.
Born into wealth on February 20, 1924, in New York City, Vanderbilt's father died before she was two and her aunt was later granted custody of her in a high-profile court battle.
She married a 32-year-old Hollywood agent, Pat DiCicco, when she was only 17. They divorced in 1945, when at the age of 21, Vanderbilt married conductor Leopold Stokowski, who was 63.
The couple had two sons and by the time they separated in 1955, Vanderbilt was being seen around New York with singer Frank Sinatra.
From 1956 to 1963 Vanderbilt was married to Sidney Lumet, director of the acclaimed films 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico and Network.
She was married to her fourth husband, writer Wyatt Cooper, until his death during heart surgery in 1978. They had two sons, Anderson and Carter, who took his own life at 23.
Vanderbilt dabbled in acting, painting, poetry and modelling before the Hallmark greeting card company bought some of her artwork for a line of paper goods in the early 1970s.
Her work also graced a collection of scarves before she started the line of jeans and expanded to perfume, shoes, leather goods and accessories.
Sex, Vanderbilt said, was a subject she found endlessly fascinating. One of her memoirs told of her romances with Hollywood figures such as Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Gene Kelly and Howard Hughes (she was a teenager at the time), as well as various married men.
"I embrace it all - the pain and the pleasure, the drama and the disappointments," Vanderbilt wrote in summing up her life in the romantic memoir, It Seemed Important at the Time.
Australian Associated Press
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