YouSaid · the spoken record

Anderson Cooper

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2016-05-09

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2016-05-09

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1. “I wasn't. I was working actually in Washington for the summer. I was doing an internship. And it was incomprehensible to him. And it was unthinkable. My brother had had in the months before, I mean, he'd shown some signs of probably depression. He seemed to suddenly be kind of scared or not himself. His thoughts sometimes seemed to race. And he'd started seeing a therapist. And later on, I met with the therapist and talked to him. And it turns out my brother hadn't really confided in him anything and hadn't really discussed a lot of the issues that he should have. And I don't think he really confided in anybody because I've talked to all my brother's friends about this. And so, you know, it was completely, to me, it was just so unthinkable. And to this day, it's sort of unthinkable. You know, I never know how to answer that question.”

   2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Yeah, I mean, particularly for my mom. I mean, my brother, my dad died in 1978 when I was 10. And it was pretty unexpected. Certainly to me at 10 years old. And”

   2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “I did one year. Based on your visible. Unfortunately, when I met him, he looked nothing like I expected. He was not the little tramp. By then, probably in his 80s. I was kind of disappointed that I was like, that's him.”

   2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Did you have friends when you were growing up? Yeah, I mean, I had friends But I had one or two probably very close friends, but I go for trick or treating with them and stuff like that. But they were also, you know, when they were in our house, they were also seated at the grown-ups table. And I think it just.”

   2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Not really it was just seemed normal. I mean, you know, when you grow up in a forest, you think everybody grows it up in a forest. So to me, this just seemed completely normal. I remember going over occasionally to some parent, you know, my parents' friends' houses for, you know, Thanksgiving meal or something. And sometimes they'd have a kid's table. And I'd be like, what? I'm not sitting at the kids' table. And we would generally, my mom, usually my parents would check in advance to make sure that there wasn't a kid's table, that we were going to be seated with everybody else because they just thought it was so weird that we wouldn't come along with them and we wouldn't be. And so to me it seemed very normal. I didn't, in fact, what seemed abnormal was going to kids parties and I had no interest in hanging out with kids really until, yeah, really never.”

   2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “In our rooms watching television, we were expected to be at the dinner table with them conversing with them. So we would be expected when Charlie Chapman came, you know, we had watched a lot of his movies in advance so we would know who he was. And we were expected to make conversation about what we were reading or what, you know, about and ask questions. And there was never a kid's table. We were always seated. That sounds both.”

   2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “You know, it was a lot of theater directors and writers and actors and producers and just people involved in the arts. And my parents had this amazing circle of friends and Charles Adams, the famous cartoonist, you know, the Adams family and Al Hirschfeld, the cartoonist for New York Times. And my brother and I were expected to not we weren't.”

   2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “There were a lot of really interesting people. I mean, that's what made it kind of compelling. So it sort of didn't matter for me. It didn't matter like, oh, we're moving again. This seems normal. But, you know, you'd have Trum Capote over to the house a lot before he sort of betrayed my mom and then she stopped talking to him and in a sort of a famous article he wrote Charlie Chaplin came to the house there's a photograph of me in the New York Times when I was five or six welcoming him back to America because he was in exile for most of his life”

   2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “It was interesting. I mean, you know, my mom is never satisfied and never content, and that's one of the things she and I share, that we both have this drive. And part of that drive is while she's for much of her life wanted to have a house with a white picket fence and a family and children that drive makes it impossible for her to find that fulfilling or find it enough. So every time she would have that, she would blow it up. We would move every four years because she would she just can't, it's just her surroundings are so important to her that she's constantly needing to change them. And it's like living in a caravan. Who would pass?”

   2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “I think probably people imagine her as like a lady who lunches and goes out to society balls and in my lifetime she hasn't done that and so she's a far more interesting person and I think that's what the documentary reveals.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Yes, well, I'm a tipper as a cooper, thankfully. But yeah, about what kind of a person you're going to be and what you kind of a life. And it's one of the reasons I wanted to make this documentary because the life my mom has led while I've been alive is so completely different and kind of antithetical to what probably many people believe her life is. I mean, she has been working as an artist for, you know, really my entire life. It's what she does every single day. And she lives this life sort of”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Oh my god, yeah, totally. It comes with such baggage and you walk into a room, people have expectations about what you're like or assumptions about.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Although she heard a lot, but yes, but I didn't really know much about the Vanderbilts. None of that really held much interest or fascination for me. I mean, my dad grew up very poor in Mississippi. That seemed a lot more interesting to me. I wanted to be on a farm. I love that idea. And you, you, you, you, you,”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Not really much. I mean, I knew she, you know, I would hear, she would mention little things like she didn't finish high school and I thought that was weird. And I remember watching Robin Hood with Earl Flynn one time in it and saying to her, oh, did you ever know Earl Flynn? And I remember her sort of saying, oh yes, and drifting off. But she never went into details of, you know, oh yeah, I hooked up with Marlon Brando. And yeah, I had an affair with Harold Flynn and Frank Sinatra. Find out the thing.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Right, when she was 17, she moved out to Hollywood and wanted to date movie stars, and she certainly did that. I mean, it was like Errol Flynn, and she had a very serious relationship with Howard Hughes, who she wanted to marry, like attractive hot Howard Hughes, not Desert. Right, not the long fingernail and toenail and Howard. That would come. And, you know, all these sort of movie actors, and she ended up in the succession of marriages over the course of her life. She was married four times. And, you know, when she was, her first marriage was this disastrous marriage to like one of the henchmen for Howard Hughes. And then she married this conductor, Leopold Stukovsky, who was 43 years her senior. He was 63 when she was 21 when they married. Then Sidney Lemaire, a great film director. And then my dad, who was a writer. She's lived the sort of...”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “This was a huge, I mean, there were 100 reporters in the courtroom the first day of the trial and remained that number all throughout the trial. And it was made global headlines every single day in papers around the country. My mother's mother was revealed to be a lesbian in the trial, which at the height of the Depression was a huge scandal turned much of the country against her, helped my mother be taken away from her own mother. And for the rest of her life, Their tabloids would refer to the poor little rich girl and would sort of follow her throughout her entire childhood when she was confirmed in church. There was the equivalent of paparazzi following her up to the altar to take pictures of her confirmation”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Yeah, Stros is the liver. Yeah. He drank himself to death. And his brother had died on the Lusitania, which was torpedoed by the Germans before World War I, and he gave up his life jacket to a lady and went down with the ship. But so they basically came up with this scheme and my mother was taken away from her mother by the courts and she was the subject of this custody battle. Her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, got custody of her and my mother's raised until she was 17 by her aunt.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “It was an unthinkable amount of wealth. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was the one in the family who really created the empire, when he died, he had more money than the U.S. Treasury. And he built not only a fortune with steamships, but then with railroads on the East Coast, there was some, I don't know, I can't even remember how much money he had, but it was, I mean, just an ungodly amount of money. I think the equivalent of like $2 billion today. But back then, there were very few people who now, there are plenty of billionaires around. Back then, in the late 1800s, there were not many people who had that sort of wealth. So my mom, anyway, her grandmother and her governess teamed up and with her dead father's sister, Gertrude Vanderbilt, when he was...”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “Yeah, beyond. I mean, we're now in an age where we're used to families with huge wealth. I mean, the Vanderbilts for their time were...”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Over the years her mother's mother and her nurse decided that she wasn't being that her mother wasn't fit and that she should be brought back to America and that she should be raised by somebody in the Vanderbilt family because my mom had never met anybody in the Vanderbilt family didn't know who these people were but her grandmother was obsessed with the kind of social status of the Vanderbilt family.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Right. Yeah. At the height of the Depression in 1932, she was the subject of a custody battle. People referred to it as the trial of the century before the OJ trial became the trial of the century. And she was, I mean, it's so sort of Byzantine and bizarre to even try to figure out and explain it. But basically she had been, her father had died when she was an infant. Her mother moved to Europe and kind of lived this very glamorous life going out to parties and not really being a parent at all. My mom was raised by a nurse she called Dodo and by her mother's mother.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “I know it's one of those things. When somebody dies so many little things you know about a person that you're not even aware you know the sound they make when they step through the front door, when they come home, the sound they make of putting their keys on a table, the way their feet make as they are walking the apartment, they close the door. All these things, the smell of a person, all these things we think we're going to always remember. And we sort of tell ourselves, I want to always remember this. But then, I mean, that's the terrible thing about loss, obviously, is that in time those things just start to slip away. And suddenly I don't remember the sound my brother made when he came home, although it was very distinctive when I used to remember it. And all those little things, I always wish there was a way to kind of hold on to them. It's one of the nice things I think for people today to have video of a loved one and stuff.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “I didn't. I didn't recognize his voice at all. And it's strange. I sent it to my mom and she did not recognize it at all either. Part of it was they had sort of been an actor for a while, and I think maybe in the interview, he was kind of using kind of an actorly voice a little bit.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Yeah, I mean, honestly, whenever I see a stack of mail, there is a fleeting fantasy for a second. And my dad wrote a book actually about Graham, Mississippi and about his belief in family. And a lot of it has stories about my brother and I in it. And so that is really like a letter that he wrote two years before he died. And I have the book in my office and I read it once or twice a year. And so that is very much like getting a letter from him. And then I recently did a radio interview to promote that book in 1976, and it was a public on public radio. And some organization called Clock Tower Radio, I guess they find old radio interviews and they kind of restore them and put them online. And so I got an email from them saying that they had restored this interview my dad did. So I heard his voice for the first time since I was 10 years old.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Own experience with you. She was very able to talk about things, but I could not talk about it. It was so painful to me. It was so overwhelming to me that, I mean, I was 10. I don't know that I really discussed it with anybody. I had a nurse who I was like a nanny who I was really like my mom in many ways because my mom was working and always traveling and working. But I never really discussed with my brother. I think I talked about it with my, her name was May a little bit. But I don't think I respond very differently to in those kind of situations where there's a lot of people talk I don't. I get very quiet. And even now in difficult circumstances, I get very quiet and I have a big internal sort of internal monologue going on in my head and I work things through in my own head, but I rarely express things out loud.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “To me, that was there's something very eye-opening and thrilling to discover that because then once you see the patterns that you're doing and where they come from, that there's sort of some sort of weird biological or historical root to them, you can start to change those patterns.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Yeah. And so it was amazing to me that, I mean, her father died when she was 15 months old, and she used to, she still to this day imagines that there's a letter out there. And so to me, the thing that I found so interesting about doing this book, and then we did a documentary that's on HBO as well, is that we all follow these patterns that patterns that our parents followed and that they followed from their parents. Even without knowing the patterns exist, we're sort of repeating the patterns of those who came before us. And sometimes those are good patterns to repeat, sometimes they're very negative patterns to repeat. But I just think time and time again in the writing of this book, it discovered that how similar my mom and I are, and I never considered us at all alike. I mean, we're very opposite in a lot of different ways, but we've sort of repeated these similar patterns sometimes to great detriment.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “When I was 10 years old, my dad died in 1978 of heart disease, and he was being operated on a bypass surgery. And I used to have this fantasy when I was 11 and 12 and 13. And frankly, even a little bit still to this day, of that maybe he wrote me a letter and that letter would show up someday. Maybe when I was a kid, I thought maybe when I turned 18 or 21 or when I get my first job at important points in my life, a letter would show up telling me kind of what to do next and also what he hoped for my life and also telling me about himself and of course there wasn't a letter and in the course of writing this book I discovered my mom had the exact same fantasy which we had never talked about her father her father died when she was 15 months old”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Well, I mean, I think that's so important. I mean, frankly, it's the reason we ended up deciding, okay, we'll make this will be a book. We're going to put this out there, is that I really do think, I mean, but one of the things I learned about my mom is that she and I shared a similar fantasy. And the fantasy was that, in my case, my fantasy was that my dad had maybe had ridden me a letter after he died, I used to imagine when I was dad.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Ocean, only you would get a response. And so, yeah, so that's, I don't know, I just found it, if I had to sort of be face to face with my mom asking her some of the questions I asked her, I think I would have done it in a different way, or maybe I wouldn't have even asked the questions. But there was something about doing over email that was very kind of freeing. And I think for her as well, you know, she's said to me that she enjoyed like hitting the send button and having it go and you can't get it back.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “Right, yes. The book is called The Rainbow Comes and Goes, and it's basically a conversation between my mom and I. And it's a conversation that began on her 91st birthday after she had gotten sick and really for the first time. And I started to think about her potential death and thinking about that I didn't want there to be anything left unsaid between us before she dies. And I wanted to ask her all the questions that I wish I'd asked my dad before he died when I was 10. And so from her 91st birthday to her 92nd birthday, we spent a year having kind of a new sort of conversation, a conversation that would change the way that I saw her and that she saw me and that, and frankly, that I saw myself, which I didn't realize going into it. And so the book, we didn't intend it to be booked. We had this conversation actually over email because my schedule, and there was something about doing it over email that made it easier because it wasn't, there was no embarrassment. It was like putting a message in a bottle and throwing it.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Brutally honest. And I do think I grew up, my dad was a writer, my mom has written, and I grew up believing writing was sort of the highest thing you could achieve, that writing a book would be like the greatest achievement you could accomplish. And so the first book I wrote in 2005, dispatches from the edge, when I wrote that, I mean, I'd been writing it in my head for about 10 years. So that I wrote very quickly. And then this also, you know, this book with my mom, it just seemed like a very personal thing and if you're going to do that, I don't know. I think you have to be honest and well, this was really.”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “No, I mean, yeah, one of the interesting things, particularly after Hurricane and Katrina, a lot of people started writing about me saying that I was sort of this emotional anchor. I wore my heart on my sleeve, which I always found interesting because I always feel like I'm one of the least kind of emotional or emotive people around. I sort of, you know, wasp. I push all my emotions deep down inside. But I do think there's something about writing, which I think if you're going to write you have to be”

    2016-05-09 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 48 - Anderson Cooper · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source