Anderson Cooper has paid tribute to his late mother Gloria Vanderbilt with an emotional obituary during which the CNN anchor struggles to fight back tears.
Vanderbilt passed away at home on Monday morning after a short battle with stomach cancer. The New York socialite and fashion designer was 95.
Cooper announced the somber news in a seven-minute obituary package that combined archival photos and videos with clips from an interview between the pair earlier this year.
The anchor recounted his mother’s vibrant life before describing her final days on earth with an unsteady voice thick with heartache.
‘Gloria Vanderbilt was 95 years old when she died. What an extraordinary life. What an extraordinary mom. And what an incredible woman.’
Anderson Cooper fought back tears as he paid tribute to his mother Gloria Vanderbilt in a touching obituary aired hours after she passed away aged 95. The CNN anchor and New York socialite are pictured together in April at the premiere of Nothing Left Unsaid
The seven-minute obituary package combined archival photos and videos from Vanderbilt’s life with clips from an interview between her and Cooper earlier this year. The mother and son are pictured with Cooper’s older brother Carter (left) in March 1976
After the video ended, CNN cut back to anchors Poppy Harlow and Jim Sciutto in the studio.
Overcome with emotion, Harlow and Sciutto pause briefly after hearing Cooper’s heartfelt words.
Sciutto praises his colleague for sharing ‘the most personal story there is, the story of losing your mother’.
Harlow wipes away a tear before saying: ‘And now we see where he [Cooper] got that laugh, from his mom.’
Cooper’s CNN colleagues Poppy Harlow and Jim Sciutto were visibly upset after the obituary aired on Monday morning. Sciutto praised Cooper for sharing ‘the most personal story there is’
Cooper revealed in the obituary that his mother was hospitalized earlier this month, at which point doctors discovered her advance-stage stomach cancer.
‘When the doctor told her she had cancer she was silent for a while,’ Cooper narrated. ‘And then she said: “Well, it’s like that old song. Show me the way to get out of this world because that’s where everything is.”‘
The package cuts to a video of Vanderbilt lying in her hospital bed in the middle of a fit of laughter as Cooper says: ‘Later, she made a joke and we started giggling. I never knew that we had the exact same giggle. I recorded it and it makes me giggle every time I watch it.’
His voice begins to crack as he says: ‘Joseph Conrad wrote that we live as we die, alone. He was wrong in my mom’s case. Gloria Vanderbilt died as she lived, on her own terms. I know she hoped for a little more time, a few days or weeks at least, there were paintings she wanted to make, more books she wanted to read, more dreams to dream but she was ready. She was ready to go.
‘She spent a lot of time alone in her head during her life, but when the end came, she was not alone. She was surrounded by beauty and family and friends. The last few weeks, every time I kissed her goodbye, I’d say: “I love you mom.”
‘She would look at me and say: “I love you too, you know that.” And she was right. I did know that.
‘I knew it from the moment I was born and I’ll know it for the rest of my life and in the end, what greater gift can a mother give to her son.’
Cooper’s voice cracked as he spoke of how his mother told him she loved him in the days before her death. Vanderbilt is seen chasing her two son’s from her fourth marriage, Anderson (left) and Carter (right) down the street in New York City in the 1970s
Wyatt Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt are seen playing with sons Anderson and Carter at their Long Island home in 1972. Wyatt passed away in 1978 and Carter died by suicide at 23 in 1988
Cooper spent a large portion of the video recounting his mother’s upbringing, which was much more unstable than his own.
‘Gloria Vanderbilt, my mom, lived her entire life in the public eye,’ the video begins as gray-scale childhood images flash across the screen. ‘Born in 1924, her father Reginald was heir to the Vanderbilt railroad fortune but gambled away most of his inheritance and died when my mom was just a baby.
‘Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, her mother, wasn’t ready to be a mom or a widow.
‘My mom grew up in France not knowing anything about the Vanderbilt family or the money that she would inherit when she turned 21. She had no idea the trouble that money would create.
‘When she was 10, her father’s sister sued to have my mom taken away from her own mother. It was a custody battle the likes of which the world had never seen .
‘It took place during the height of the depression, making headlines every day for months. The court awarded custody of my mom to her aunt Gertrude who she barely knew. The judge also fired the one person my mom truly loved and needed, her nanny whom she called Dodo.
‘As a teenager, she tried to avoid the spotlight but reporters and cameramen would follow her everywhere.
‘She was determined to make something of her life and find the love and family that she so desperately craved.’
Vanderbilt is seen at one year old with her parents, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt and Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt
Cooper later describes his mother’s work as a painter, writer, actor and designer, along with the modeling career that saw her ‘photographed by all the great photographers’.
‘If you were around in the early 1980s it was pretty hard to miss the jean she helped create, but that was her public face. The one she learned to hide behind as a child,’ Cooper says.
‘Her private self, her real self, that was more fascinating and more lovely than anything she showed the public.
‘I always thought of her as a visitor from another world, a traveler stranded here who’d come from a distant star that burned out long ago. I always felt it was my job to try to protect her. She was the strongest person I’ve ever met but she wasn’t tough.
‘She never developed a thick skin to protect herself from hurt. She wanted to feel it all. She wanted to feel life’s pleasures as well as its pains. She trusted too freely, too completely and suffered tremendous losses but she always pressed on, always worked hard, always believed the best was yet to come.’
‘I always thought of her as a visitor from another world, a traveler stranded here who’d come from a distant star that burned out long ago. I always felt it was my job to try to protect her,’ Cooper said in the obituary. His mother is pictured in 1964
Cooper continues: ‘She was always in love. In love with men or with friends or books and art, in love her children and then her grandchildren and then her great grandchildren. Love is what she believed in more than anything.’
He describes how Vanderbilt got married to Hollywood agent Pat DiCicco at 17 years old, against her aunt’s wishes. ‘She knew it was a mistake from the get go,’ Cooper narrates.
Vanderbilt and DiCicco split four years later in 1945, and within weeks of the divorce being finalized the 21-year-old married her second husband, legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski.
The couple had two sons together before divorcing 10 years later in 1955.
Cooper and Vanderbilt opened up about their relationship in their 2017 memoir The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss.
The following year Vanderbilt met and married director Sidney Lumet, whom she divorced in August 1963.
Four months later she married her fourth and final husband, writer Wyatt Cooper. They were together for 15 years before he died in 1978 while undergoing open heart surgery.
Two years before Anderson was born in 1967, the couple welcomed another son, Carter. He died by suicide at age 23 when he jumped off the family’s 14th-story balcony in 1988.
Cooper and Vanderbilt opened up about the stunning loss of their brother and son in their 2017 memoir The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss.
At the beginning of the book, Cooper wrote: ‘My father died in 1978, when I was ten; and my brother, Carter, killed himself in 1988, when I was twenty-one, so my mom is the last person left from my immediate family, the last person alive who was close to me when I was a child.’
The memoir described how Vanderbilt’s health deteriorated over her final years, revealing that her son thought she would die more than once.
Cooper recalled one occasion when he was due to go abroad for work in 2015 but opted to stay home because Vanderbilt was sick.
She spent the next several months battling a respiratory infection, at one point telling Cooper: ‘I’d like to have several more years left. There are still things I’d like to create, and I’m very curious to see how it all turns out. What’s going to happen next?’
Recounting the conversation, Cooper wrote in the memoir: ‘I didn’t want there to be anything left unsaid between my mother and me, so on her ninety-first birthday I decided to start a new kind of conversation with her, a conversation about her life.
‘Not the mundane details, but the things that really matter, her experiences that I didn’t know about or fully understand.’