The TV presenter and war reporter Anderson Cooper knows all about trauma. Now he’s the host of a hit podcast about grief — and Prince Harry’s go-to interviewer.
When Anderson Cooper was a boy, his parents had a quiet word with him about his relatives.”It was just like, ‘We want to be very upfront,’ " he says.
He knew that his father’s family, the Coopers, hailed from a line of hardscrabble farmers in Mississippi.
His mother called herself Mrs Cooper but she was actually a Vanderbilt, part of a family that once had more money than the US Treasury. It was really nothing to be ashamed about. But also, he should not get his hopes up. The money was gone. “They wanted me to know that there wasn’t a pot of gold waiting for me,” he says. “They said, ‘You’re going to have to make your own way.’ "
For most of his life he tried not to mention his connection to one of the great dynasties of New York’s Gilded Age. “I worked very hard not to have any association with that,” he says. “I was very glad that most people did not know.”
He became a war correspondent and a broadcaster with a nightly show on CNN. Now 56, he is speaking to me from his home in Greenwich Village on a weekday afternoon. In a few hours he will be on prime time, dressed in a dark suit and a crisp white shirt. Besides the nightly show, he does investigative pieces for the CBS series Sixty Minutes and showpiece interviews, such as the one with Prince Harry earlier this year in which he got the prince to retell, in graphic detail, what it was like walking behind his mother’s coffin as a child and of journeying alone to the Queen’s deathbed to say goodbye.
Cooper did tell Harry about his Vanderbilt connections and his great-aunt, Thelma, who had lived for a while in London and dated Prince Edward, the future King Edward VIII. “At a certain point she had to go back to New York, so she asked her good friend to take care of him while she was gone,” he says.”Her good friend was Wallis Simpson,” the American divorcee for whom Edward would forsake the crown, leave Britain and make way for Harry’s great-grandfather, George VI.
Usually, in his professional life — and he is relentlessly professional — Cooper has kept that sort of thing to himself. It is only quite recently, as his mother neared the end of her life and as Cooper himself became a father for the first time in his fifties, with the aid of a surrogate, that he began to talk about the dynasty and his immediate family.
Cooper’s father, Wyatt, died when he was 10. When he was 21, his older brother, Carter, took his own life by jumping from the balcony of his mother’s house in front of her. When Cooper’s mother died in 2019, he felt like the last man standing.
“My mum had a very fractured relationship with the Vanderbilt family,” he says. “It was only really after she died, and after I had kids, that I realised there was a lot I didn’t know about that branch of the family.”
So he wrote a book, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, with the novelist and historian Katherine Howe.
It did well, and she persuaded him to do another about one of the other great families of the Gilded Age, titled Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune. If he’s not careful, he will become one of those old duffers in a smoking jacket fixated on old houses and the aristocracy.
“Yes, very much so,” he says. “How many white, Waspy families does everyone need to know about? I’m not sure… But I do find the characters really fascinating.”
He has also recorded a podcast, All There Is, about grief and about his immediate family, in which you can hear him sorting through his mother’s possessions. It is an incredibly powerful series. I would recommend it to anyone who has lost a loved one.
“I never talked about any of this stuff and I did not realise the extent to which I had never allowed myself to grieve for my dad or my brother,” he says.
He goes after the subject of bereavement like an investigative journalist, looking at it from all angles. But also, you hear him cry.
“I deny that,” Cooper says. “I think I had allergies.”
This is what I mean, I say. He’s tough.
“Yeah,” he says. “I was not somebody who cried.” Making the podcast, and going through more than 46 hours of voicemails left for him by listeners, “I just had many realisations,” he says. “I’m still not sure exactly how, but I know something has shifted in some way.”
He is now working on a second series. He is one of those people who seems to do a thousand things at once. This must be why we are meeting not in person but over a video link, Cooper coming to me live from his home while his two sons are having their afternoon nap.
He lives in an old fire station, he says when he pops onto my screen. I ask if it has a pole. It had three when he bought it, with hatches for each one on every floor, he says. “I cut it down to one pole,” he says. “Thinking, how many poles does one actually need?”
At this point, I realise I am not recording. He waits patiently and then repeats everything he has just said about fire poles, as if it were the top two minutes of his show. “Now that I have kids, I’ve put a metal grate over the holes around the pole,” he says. “So to slide down, you actually have to lift up the grate.”
Still, it all fits more or less with my view of him as an action man of journalism.
“Yes,” he says. “I’ve never had to use them to get to a story quickly, but I like where you’re going with it.”
Cooper is wearing a dark V-necked T-shirt and is sitting on a brightly patterned sofa with his back to a shelf of books. “This used to be the captain’s office,” he says. “This is my library.”
Most of the books belonged to his parents. “My mum never graduated from high school, so she educated herself by reading,” he says. “She read every one of these books. It’s cool because a lot of them have notes in them.”
Gloria Vanderbilt had a famously tumultuous childhood, trailing after her mother around Europe, looked after by a nurse and a grandma who was obsessed with Napoleon until, after a dramatic custody battle, she was placed instead with an aunt. Newspapers named her “the poor little rich girl”.
At 17, she dropped out of school and went to join her mother in Hollywood. She married a mobster, then a conductor 42 years her senior and then the film director Sidney Lumet. She had affairs with Errol Flynn, Gene Kelly, Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra. She was an actress, a writer and a painter, a friend of Truman Capote and the model, by some accounts, for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. All this was before she even met Cooper’s father. And, “She kept everything,” Cooper says. “There are boxes.”
Four years after her death, he is still going through them. He found notes from Marilyn Monroe and Joan Didion and a postcard from Truman Capote, sent from Fort Riley in Kansas. “He’s writing In Cold Blood and he’s talking about this novel that he’s working on and how it’s going,” he says. He found a file marked “FS”, for Frank Sinatra, full of telegrams. “I’m on my way, darling,” said one sent from San Francisco airport on January 14, 1955.
“I miss you and wish you were sharing the seat with me. Will cable along the way. Stay well. It’s a bright new shiny day. Love, the fella on the white horse.” Another, from 1959, says, “I think of you more than I should. Much love, Francis.” Cooper says, “My life seems incredibly dull by comparison.”He recently came across a box of Christmas cards. “You would think, OK, I can just toss these out,” he says. “But as you start to go through them it’s like, Charlie and Oona Chaplin’s Christmas card, with a family photo.” Oona Chaplin was one of his mother’s closest friends.
In 1972, when Chaplin returned to the United States for the first time in 20 years to receive an Academy Award, Cooper’s parents threw a party for him at their townhouse on the Upper East Side. Cooper would have been nearly five at the time and he chose to wear, for the occasion, a bullfighter costume that one of his mother’s aunts had sent him from Mallorca. A photographer took a picture of him shaking hands with Chaplin, who was dressed rather plainly by comparison, in a dark coat and fedora.
“I was terribly disappointed,” Cooper says. “My parents had shown me a lot of his old films in advance of this and I expected the guy in the bowler hat with the cane, and he was of course an elderly man who looked nothing like what I imagined Charlie Chaplin to be.”
Mixed up with his mother’s stuff were the clothes, letters and plays of Cooper’s father, Wyatt. Her marriage to him — they wed in 1963 — was the happiest of her life. Wyatt was besotted with his two boys.
“I see myself in my two sons,” he wrote of Carter and Anderson in his book Families: A Memoir and a Celebration, published in 1975. “In their youth, their promise, their possibilities, my stake in immortality is invested.” In December 1977, at the age of 50, he suffered a heart attack. He died in January the next year while undergoing open-heart surgery.
“My dad’s death, when I was 10, was the signal event in my early life and completely changed who I was,” Cooper says. “After he died, very quickly I knew we’re not on a great trajectory here.”
His mother lived in some style and he thought it would ruin them. He remembers hearing her talking on the phone, saying, “I’ll always be able to make money.” He says, “That was when I knew we were fed.”
He would lie in bed at night, unable to sleep, “doing calculations in my head about how much I thought I would need to earn to live and support my mum and my nanny, May, whom I really cared about.”
May McLinden hailed from a village near Glasgow. “May, in many ways, was my mother and was the most important…” He pauses. “Was right up there with my mum and dad in terms of importance in my life.”
She was the one who taught him “not to sit around, to make decisions and to make things happen”. And, “After my dad died, she was the person I could depend on more than anyone,” he says on his podcast. “My mum was hurt by the closeness of my relationship with May and one day she fired her without any warning. I came home and May was packing her things, trying not to cry in front of me… There was nothing she or I could do.”
Wondering how to make enough money to take care of everyone, Cooper discovered, at the age of 12, a way to start earning. “There are a lot of things you can’t do as a child, but child modelling you can,” he says. “Every day, when school was done, I’d use the payphone in school and call the modelling agency for whatever the auditions were that day and I would go along. They were called go-sees. And yeah, I would book jobs. I was a steady model for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren.”
He would go to Ralph Lauren’s office as a fittings model, standing in front of the designer and his brother, Jerry. “We’d be standing there, me and three other kids who were various sizes and they would be looking at the clothes from the new season on us… The whole thing was just surreal.”
At 15, “I was propositioned by a photographer and really disturbed by it,” he says. So he quit and found a job as a waiter at a high-society restaurant frequented by his mother.
I ask why he thought it fell to him to make money and keep the family afloat. What about his older brother, Carter?
“To my great sadness, my brother and I never spoke about this,” Cooper says. “I think I had a practical bent that my brother did not. And I mean, I wish I had been more mature. Had I not been 12 or 13 years old, I should have… talked about it [to him]. But obviously, when you’re a kid, you can only do so much.”
Cooper was 21 and in Washington DC when his mother called. “Carter jumped off the balcony,” she said. She had tried to stop him. “It was extraordinarily shocking and disturbing to me,” he says. “And the fact that he killed himself in front of my mum… It obviously then made me incredibly concerned about her and her survivability and her happiness, and it did sort of propel me.”
“Survivability” had been one of his obsessions in his teens. He had done wilderness survival courses. But after Carter’s death, “I became really focused on questions of survival and why some people survive and others don’t,” he says. “And the idea of why two people growing up in the same house with the same influences and were very similar would… If that happened to him, why wouldn’t it happen to me?”
He decided, eventually, to pursue these questions by travelling to a war zone. “I’d always been interested in wars and military history and Africa,” he says. And so, while working as a fact checker at a TV channel that made programmes for schools, “I came up with this idea: I’ll just go to places that are really dangerous and I’ll learn about survival and try to shoot some stories and maybe it’ll lead to something. Even if it doesn’t, I will learn a lot about how people survive.
“I don’t think it was a death wish or adrenaline-seeking, because I was terrified. I was in Somalia by myself and in Sarajevo. I had no real organisational back-up or support. I got arrested in Iran and there was no one to call.”
He and two producers were shuttled between police stations until, “I think they realised we hadn’t done anything really wrong and we were released and then had to leave the country.”
It must have been hard for his mother, to have lost one son while the other embarked on these adventures. Cooper says he was glad that the educational channel he was working for was only shown in schools.
After he started at CNN, in 2001, she could see what he was up to. He remembers calling her from Cairo during the 2011 Egyptian revolution and trying to assure her that, “I might just hang out by the pool today.” Of course, he did not. That day he was attacked by a mob in Tahrir Square. “I got punched around a bit,” he says. “I did think they were going to kill us.” He kept on videotaping during the attack, “because I could get a piece out of it if they didn’t kill us or, even if they did kill us, at least somebody else could get a piece out of it,” he says. “There’d be this tape.” They escaped and that night, “right before I went live, I had to call [my mother] and be like, ‘Hey, so I didn’t stay at the pool. I went to Tahrir Square and this stuff happened and you’re going to see a video of it and it looks bad, but we’re fine.’ "
His mother “was really amazing about it”, he says. “I think she was clearly very lonely and in all sorts of financial problems, and she never would say to me, ‘Don’t do this.’ "
In the last years of her life he made a documentary with her, partly based on the idea that she was the last member of his family and, “I don’t want there to be anything left unsaid between us.”
He wanted to “have this intentional conversation with her”, he says. “I have so many unanswered questions about my dad and my brother, and not to have that with my mum is really a great blessing.”
Talking about his parents and sibling on a podcast proved helpful too, he says. “You hear about people who get a deal for a podcast for millions of dollars,” he says. “This is not one of those things. I’m not paid extra for this. This was just something I started doing on my own, recording myself while going through my mum’s stuff, because that’s how I sort of deal with things. I do it as a correspondent. I was just trying to make sense of it in my head.”
In one of the most affecting episodes he talks about May McLinden. In adulthood he took her on trips to Los Angeles and Rome, but by the time he was able to buy her a house, she had begun to suffer from dementia, he says. On the phone from Scotland, she would tell him she was taking care of a child. Once, struggling to reach her, he called a local minister who rang back to say May had been found wandering the streets, clutching a small ceramic dog.
“It turned out that was the child she had been telling me about,” he says on the podcast. “The dog was a present I’d given her for her birthday when I was maybe 12 years old. ‘There’s one more thing,’ the minister told me. ‘The dog she was holding, the one she thought was a child. She thought it was you.’ "
Cooper flew to Scotland and, with her sister, helped get May a place in a nursing home. When she died, in 2014, “Her death didn’t make headlines,” he says. “The world kept spinning, but for me on that day, it stopped.”
May is who he thinks about most of all now while parenting his sons, he says. Becoming a father was also something his mother had urged him to do before she died. She even offered to serve as a surrogate for Cooper and his partner at the time, Benjamin Maisani. “I was like, ‘Mum, that is the craziest, most Oedipal weird thing. Please! Even for you, Mum, that’s fed up,’ " he says. She was 85 at the time. “We would have been on the cover of the New York Post for the next 18 years. Are you kidding me?” he says.
Instead, Cooper found a surrogate, a married woman with kids of her own, who was not 85, and in April 2020, 10 months after his mother died, he announced on his CNN show the arrival of his son, Wyatt, named after his father. It was the height of the pandemic in New York. “I think my voice cracked at some point,” he says. “I don’t know that I’d even said the words, ‘I’m a dad,’ until then.”
He had felt ready to become a father when he hit 40 but “I was convinced I would die at 50,” he says. “My dad died at 50, and his dad died at 50.” Both succumbed to heart conditions. “I was like, ‘Well, if I die at 50, which I’m pretty sure I’m going to, that means the kids will be 10 when I die.’ Which was the age I was when my dad died.” When he hit 51, “I was like, ‘Oh!’ " he says. “And I talked to my doctor and he said, ‘You’re an idiot. You’re going to be fine. You’ve been taking statins… Medicine has changed a lot.’ "
In February last year he had a second child, Sebastian. He and Maisani are no longer a couple, but they still live together in the old fire station and co-parent the kids.
“Yeah,” Cooper says. “There should be a sitcom.”
Recently he took the children to a smoothie place and the server said to them, " ‘Oh, out with your grandad?’ " he says. “Of course, the server was, like, 19, so everybody looks like Grandad, I guess. At least, that’s how I was able to sleep that night.”
He still looks in pretty good shape.
He does not like to waste a second thinking about something as mundane as the food he eats so for weeks and sometimes months at a time, he would eat the same chicken burrito or the same chicken sandwich for lunch. Now that he has children, he has hired his mum’s old cook to come in one day a week and prepare a week of meals for the kids. “I’m basically just eating whatever they have left over,” he says. “So I’m eating a greater variety of things. I’m much healthier.”
He recently resumed weightlifting and jogging. “But I’m doing it now more for health”, he says. “As opposed to just trying to get dates.”
He is not dating at the moment, nor is he sure how he would go on a date if asked. “I mean, it would probably be at night, so I wouldn’t be taking time away from my kids, but I’m exhausted at night,” he says. “I never used to wake up before 10am. I wake up now at 6am and get the kids’ milk and porridge ready. I want to be there and I want to wake them up and there’s nothing better.”
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London