OPINION:
THE RAINBOW COMES AND GOES: A MOTHER AND SON ON LIFE, LOVE, AND LOSS
By Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt
Harper, $27.99, 290 pages, illustrated
This is a book like no other I have ever read: a dialogue between mother and son, both public figures in their different ways, who have chosen to share an intensely private attempt to get to know one another before it is too late. After all, perennially youthful and energetic though she is, Gloria Vanderbilt is 92 years old and Anderson Cooper, although still under 50, is the author of “Dispatches from the Edge.” Given all the baggage this pair brings to the table, it is a remarkable undertaking, but it seems to have been a resounding success, for as Mr. Cooper writes, the email his mother wrote him on the morning of her 91st birthday, “ended up changing our relationship, bringing us closer than either of us had ever thought possible.”
This pair is an odd couple in so many ways, yet one of their discoveries in the course of this exchange is how similar they are as well as how different, one of many surprises along the way. They manage this most intimate of exercises with consummate tact and grace, always showing the utmost respect for each other. Indeed, in another, more gracious age, one would unhesitatingly have referred to them as a lady and a gentleman. And that is what they show themselves to be, something which has far less to do with ancestry and birth than with the innate qualities they reveal that they possess. It is no mean feat to delve so fearlessly, while remaining so obviously caring and concerned for one another.
It should be added that this exquisite courtesy and tact extend to others in their lives. They may be unflinching in what they reveal about themselves, but they are careful not to make revelations, let alone dig dirt, about people ranging from Miss Vanderbilt’s husbands and her two older sons by one of them, conductor Leopold Stokowski, to Frank Sinatra, briefly her lover and a lifelong friend thereafter. About Mr. Cooper’s father Wyatt, who died when he was 10, there are only the tenderest of memories on both sides, as they probe this agonizing loss and its rolling consequences, not least the suicide of older son Carter, actually carried out in front of his mother. There are many moving moments in these pages, but none more so than the authors’ shared memories of holidays so painful in the wake of such devastating loss that conventional celebrations were unbearable. Those long days had to be spent in movie theaters, silently sharing popcorn and so much else less tangible, as they sought escape and some measure of balm.
As a seasoned journalist as well as a naturally curious son, Mr. Cooper is fascinated by the fact that his mother has literally been famous since the moment she was born to a scion of one of America’s most famous families who drank himself to death when she was little more than a year old. The custody battle between her hapless mother and powerful aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, played out in tabloid and newsreel when she was only eight years old, made her the original “Poor Little Rich Girl.” It is clear from Mr. Cooper’s sympathetic but firm effort to get Miss Vanderbilt to tell him what it felt like to be the girl he has seen on film that it seemed to her then that she was “at the still point of the turning world” (to borrow T.S. Eliot’s phrase). It is equally clear this experience in the eye of a storm raging all around her — and that would continue to deprive her of the support of much-loved figures and turn her into a kind of shuttlecock between warring family factions — determined the maelstrom that would characterize the rest of her life.
On this voyage of discovery between mother and son, there are a lot of surprises along the way. How literary both are, particularly Miss Vanderbilt, who will reach for quotes ranging from Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne to a contemporary like Susan Sontag. There is no doubt of just how meaningful these are for her, necessary lifelines. And Mr. Cooper has a gift for dealing with those (rare) occasions when subjects veer too close to the line of Too Much Information with a nice touch of humor:
“Perhaps the only thing more embarrassing than hearing about your sex life was discovering it was more interesting than my own,” he informs his mother.
Although the authors have named their book from “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,”which contains many lines appropriate to their quest, it is the title of another Wordsworth poem which to me sums them up: “Resolution and Independence.” It is natural to think of them in terms of that particular poet for, after all, he invented the “Wordsworthian Crisis Poem,” which seeks to reconcile contrarieties by confronting them. And if any two people have lived through way more than their share of crises, singly and collectively, it is Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt. Their brave engagement with what they confront so staunchly in this extraordinary dialogue leaves me quite simply awestruck.
• Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.
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