Gloria Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper Discuss Suicide of Cooper’s Brother

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper is well-known for his insistence on not “being the story,” keeping his personal life under wraps as he reports from locations all over the world on every conceivable newsworthy event.

But the newsman and his famous fashion designer mom, Gloria Vanderbilt, recently spoke publicly about the ripple effects of the suicide of Cooper’s brother, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper. Cooper discussed the event with his 87-year-old mother in an interview, and both were visibly moved when discussing the tragedy of two decades ago.

Vanderbilt cited her younger son, Anderson, who was 21 at the time, as her reason for not succumbing totally to the loss. She recalls the moment when her older son plunged from the family’s 14th floor penthouse- an event she happened to witness.

“He was sitting on the wall with one foot hanging over and he kept looking down and I kept begging him [to come back]. When he went … I thought he was going to come back, but he didn’t… He let go, and there was a moment when I thought I was going to jump over after him.”

She adds:

“I thought of you and it stopped me from [following]… There’s never closure on something that happens like this.”

Anderson is 44 now, and has some recollections of his own on lighter topics. While the newsman deals with a range of stories each day, he admits they can be a bit odd when they involve your mother:

“What’s amazing, my mom has written a dozen books—one of them was a romance memoir about some of the gentleman callers I guess that she had over the years,… She asked me to proofread and I was like ‘Really? Really?’ So I did, and it was funny because I used to watch old movies with my mom when I was a kid, and there’s like Frank Sinatra in some movie and I would turn and be like, ‘Oh, did you ever know Frank SInatra?’ She would look at me and be like, ‘Oh yes.’ “

The interview aired this afternoon on Cooper’s talk show, Anderson.