An Extraordinary Life
I see that Gloria Vanderbilt died at the ripe old age of 95. It was said on Morning Joe that she had led an extraordinary life. I’m sure that is true in that she is a bit of a household name, mostly because of her designer jeans made popular in the 1970’s and 1980’s. It isn’t lost on many that her son, white-haired Anderson Cooper, can be seen every night on CNN. Her life was truly the stuff of pulp novels in that she was a poor little rich girl, the beneficiary of a trust fund from her great-great-grandfather, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the man who brought us the Staten Island Ferry among many other things that created vast wealth for him and his scions.
In reading her obituaries I was surprised to learn that she was the model for Holly Golightly from the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a role made famous by Audrey Hepburn, who could reasonably be said to be a Gloria Vanderbilt look-alike. Truman Capote, who wrote the novella on which the movie is based was a friend of Vanderbilt’s and was born the same year. They were pals in New York in the 1940’s and his childhood friendship with Harper Lee (of To Kill a Mockingbird fame) made him the sort of literary magnet that fit perfectly into the broad social set Vanderbilt attracted.
Certainly, Gloria Vanderbilt at 95 deserves the footnote to her life that she had led an extraordinary life. Her circle of family and friends are broadly interesting to many of us because of their notoriety and accomplishment. I note with a tip of my commercial hat that she built a personal fortune of $200 million and of that had only ever inherited $2.5 million. Please don’t comment that such a large inheritance 75 years ago would surely grow to $200 million because with living costs (and a socialite’s living costs in New York City at that). Even if she never spent a dime of that bequest and lived, like Blanche Dubois, from the kindness of strangers or like Holly Golightly from the kindness of flirtatious men, she would have accumulated less than half that amount on a compounded basis.
Gloria Vanderbilt did something with her God-given talents of socializing and fashion-consciousness. She built a fashion empire and turned her iconic status into a brand that has some enduring value even today. Compare that to the sullied and bankruptcy-scarred Trump brand with it’s $400 million starting bequest and you get my point about the quality of her accomplishment in this regard.
Please understand, I have little regard for fashion or for the social life of the New York Knickerbocker elite, but I do admire accomplishment. That is the basis for my agreeing that Gloria Vanderbilt led an extraordinary life. That makes me want to recount a story about lifetime accomplishment.
Harry Reasoner, that avuncular and recognizable CBS newsman who we watched for years on 60 Minutes said it best in his musings. He spoke of the distress at the age of thirty that he had so much to do and so many options to pursue. At forty he was overwhelmed with work and was in the prime of life trying his best not to miss any of his many opportunities. By fifty he was panicking because he felt he had watched so much time go by and had so much yet to accomplish within a horizon which looked to be quickly approaching. By sixty he had reached a calm that he was secure in his accomplishments and knew he had a limited time left and a limited list of things yet to accomplish. His story ended there (he had just turned sixty when he wrote this) and he lived another eight years, never quite making it to the biblical three score ten mark of seventy years. He died three months after retiring (another dangerous retirement story) from a fall in his home.
When I told my mother that story she was in her mid-80’s and said that it continues like this: when you get to your seventies people are mad at you for being retired and for being a drain on society’s resources, but that when you get to eighty, they are just so surprised that you’re still alive that they go back to respecting you. My mother lived to five months past her 100th birthday. I would adjust her theory by saying eighty is an age where people now feel we should all get to and are less surprised at the achievement and that ninety is the new eighty in that people are just amazed that you’re still alive. And 100 remains a hallmark of endurance. Only 0.0173% of the population makes it to 100. That is less than one in 5,000. In 1950 that percentage was almost negligible as almost no one made it that long. Today on the West Side Highway there’s a sign that says that the first person to live to 150 is alive today (that may be wishful thinking by the life insurer who owns the ad).
We have to adjust our way of life to meet this increased longevity. The armed forces has always allowed people to retire after twenty years on half pay. That means most military people have two careers in their working life. My brother-in-law has twenty with the Navy and twenty as a teacher. We will probably have to start thinking about a working lifespan of sixty years or so rather than forty years, and that probably means planning on at least two careers if not three. In Psalms we are told that we have three score ten or seventy years of life. Given that the average age in the time of Christ was probably under thirty-five, that was likely meant for the scholarly class of people who stayed out of harm’s way. As recently as 1945 the average age for me was under 65 years. The point is that with longer lifespans come an obligation for more time in work fulfillment. Living thirty or forty years past our useful employment is simply not a good thing. Long life needs to be accompanied by even longer work life. My guess is that few centenarians have laid idle for forty years on the porch or hammock. Hopefully they don’t slip and fall like poor Harry Reasoner, right after retirement either.
Gloria Vanderbilt is less exceptional for living ninety-five years and more exceptional for her accomplishments during that life. Live like Gloria. Rest in peace for sure, but only rest in peace when your time is done and not before.