Hampton Style - May 9, 2008

with all of the high-profile options available to him on Long Island, Anderson Cooper's choice to make his weekend home in Quogue comes as little surprise to those who know of the CNN anchor's aversion to personal notoriety. The quiet hamlet aptly mirrors his desire for seclusion, a much taller order in the bustling town of Southampton where he spent childhood summers at his mother's house, or on the North Shore, where a century's worth of Vanderbilts created early infrastructure for the moneyed edifices and social pursuits. This is Anderson's heritage to be sure, but as a thoroughly modern incarnation of his family tree, he's also free to cut his own path. It's the kind of freedom that he complains about having lost in his work-life now that he's spending more time behind a pristine, expensive desk than in front of gritty, messy wars-in-progress. Fame makes it hard to get out in front of a breaking story without becoming part of the story yourself. It's a deal with the devil that has netted him much success-copious amounts of it-but he's the first one to tell you it comes with a price. Perhaps it's not so dissimilar to the gilded cage his mother Gloria Vanderbilt found herself in during the 1930s when the young media darling, "Little Gloria," was caught up in a very public custody battle that landed her within the strict care of her Aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney at the dowager's 634-acre Old Westbury estate. The house was designed by New York architects Stewart, Walker & Gillette and included a mural by Maxwell Parish. Formal English gardens surrounded the house (as did guards) and a nurse was always at Gloria's side. While she and her aunt went on to forge a strong relationship, it is little wonder that the 17-year-old still leapt at the first offer of marriage, a key to freedom that would prove as complicated (four marriages) as did her former gilded cage.

When she finally had the chance to raise her own children, Anderson and his older brother Carter, Gloria chose the less formal sandbox of Southampton, a community that was certainly social, but not bogged down with the same familial expectations. She turned the home there into a whimsical idyll for her sons. It was decorated in her characteristically "maximalist" style, with decoupaged floors, fabric covered walls, and every spare inch hung with collages or paintings of her own creation. Artistic expression came naturally to Gloria thanks to the influence of Aunt Gertrude, who went on to establish the Whitney Museum of Art.

But Gertrude wasn't Anderson's only forebearer to leave a formidable, enduring legacy: William K. Vanderbilt, a great-grandson of Commodore Vanderbilt, was yet another one of his eccentric relatives to make a mark on Long Island. It was in the 1880s that "Willie K." first stepped behind the wheel of a motor car, in Monte Carlo, while traveling with his father at age 11. At the turn of the century his love for car racing had reached its maturity, unnerving his well-heeled neighbors in Newport and prompting his move to the North Shore of Long Island, where he felt the locals would be more understanding of his freewheeling hobby. According to the reports in Newsday, the reception was not quite as he'd expected. After careening into Hempstead Village "at just over 6 mph," the town began to enforce its first speed limit. In 1902 it was said that "Nassau residents were living in fear of being run over by Vanderbilt and his 'Red Devil' Mercedes motorcar." Two years later, in October of 1904, Willie K. inaugurated the first Vanderbilt Cup Race which took place in the environs of Levittown and drew crowds of thousands. The prize was a Tiffany Cup and The Vanderbilt races that ensued were hair-raising affairs which occasionally proved fatal for bystanders, but they nonetheless marked a new era in American life, one that required robust roads. Vanderbilt, passionately obsessed with driving, was integral in creating the first toll road on Long Island, the Long Island Motor Parkway. In 1912, Vanderbilt purchased a seven-room house on Northport Harbor, "Eagle's Nest," and began relentlessly expanding it to contain his Renaissance interests. There was a six-hole golf course with holes named for his yachts (the Hard-Boiled Egg, the Tarantula, and the Alva, named for his mother) as well as a living museum filled with Vanderbilt's collections of taxidermy, aquatic and safari finds, and even an Egyptian mummy said to be 3,000 years old. Eventually, Eagle's Nest developed into a Spanish-Moorish fantasia, packed with 23 rooms on 43 acres. Strangers were allowed to drop by to peruse the ephemera; they need only first send a postcard inquiry to its owner.

It's the kind of open-door policy that would surely make Anderson cringe today-ironic since the urbane news anchor himself enters so many American homes for two hours in the evening. But when the cameras aren't rolling, the bookish, daredevil journalist retreats to Quogue where he spends long afternoons cracking open a few of the hundreds of books that line his walls and perhaps researching his next far-flung assignment. In many ways, his choice to move on from the glamorous social sandboxes colonized by his people isn't so unlike what Willie K. must have been thinking when he left Newport for the North Shore, or when Gloria uprooted from Old Westbury and headed to Southampton. Each of these headstrong Vanderbilts had their own colonizing to do, a unique path to cut. That Anderson's trajectory led him to our East End colonies, even a quiet one, seems like a good idea to us. The North Shore has the august vestiges of Vanderbilts past: out east in the Hamptons, we're going to do just fine with the one we've managed to entreat.