Spat Over Vanderbilt Family Mansion Gets Public And Nasty

NEWPORT, R.I. (AP) — The Vanderbilt family, once synonymous with American wealth and power, has fallen into a full-blown public spat with the organization that now owns their spectacular Rhode Island mansion. The conflict includes intimations that the group might sue, or that it might evict the two Vanderbilts who still summer on the third floor of the house, called The Breakers; even family member Anderson Cooper has not been spared from the fray. In the late 1940s, her grandmother, Countess Szechenyi, agreed to lease the downstairs for $1 per year to the Preservation Society of Newport County, then a fledgling group that was trying to save the city's famous but vacant Gilded Age mansions from the wrecking ball. The society said it would be tucked in a little-used portion of the 13-acre estate and would provide a sheltered and handicapped-accessible place to buy tickets, use the bathroom, and purchase snacks and sandwiches. Last month, 21 members of the Vanderbilt family, including CNN journalist Cooper's mother, designer Gloria Vanderbilt, decided to take public action. The president of the Preservation Society's board fired back in a memo that the signers had contributed only $4,000 to the group in recent years, and that most of the family members' items displayed at The Breakers were not very important, or even "minor," such as hairbrushes or wastebaskets. Soon after, the Preservation Society's lawyer threatened to sue a group the Szaparys belong to called Preservation Society Friends, which opposes the visitor center and is otherwise critical of the society's management. The lawyer accused the group of "collaboration with the Vanderbilt family" to try to stop the visitor center "at any cost."

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