Tiaras, Trunks and the Last Dollar Princesses
An Exclusive Interview with a Vanderbilt Descendant
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It’s a Tuesday of pure 21st-century chaos: Zoom won’t behave, the archive heater is definitely off, and I’m in my customary fingerless gloves – so vintage that I look like an underfunded Dickens extra.
When I finally join the call, slightly breathless and a few minutes late, Rupert Finch Hatton is already onscreen, calm, amused and surrounded (off camera) by about 150 years of transatlantic history.
He is, as it happens, the great-grandson of Gladys Moore Vanderbilt – the youngest child of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his formidable wife Alice Claypoole GwynneVanderbilt – and he has spent the past year and a half quietly unpicking a jewel-box mystery that leads from Newport to Paris, from Cartier to Harry Winston, and from a family safe in Sussex to an auction room filled with Gilded Age obsessives.
At the heart of it all is a tiara.
The Breakers Girl
We start, as all good Gilded Age conversations must, in Newport.
