Amy Vanderbilt claimed descent from Jan Aertson van der Bilt, who immigrated to the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1650 and was also the ancestor of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the 19th-century railroad magnate and millionaire, a distant cousin of Amy's.
[1] She was born in Staten Island, the daughter of Joseph Mortimer Vanderbilt, an insurance broker, and Mary Estelle Brooks Vanderbilt, and worked as a part-time reporter for the Staten Island Advance when she was 16 while attending Curtis High School.
[1][2] She was educated in Switzerland and at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn before attending New York University.
[1][3][4] On December 27, 1974, she died from multiple fractures of the skull after falling or jumping from a second-floor window in her townhouse at 438 East 87th Street in New York.
[1][5] It remains unclear whether her fall was accidental (perhaps due to her hypertension medication, which friends and relatives said caused severe dizzy spells) or suicide.