Here’s my book review of The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss by Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt.
Memoir is perhaps the most frequently attempted book genre, but unless there’s a celebrity photo on the cover, these manuscripts rarely find a mainstream publisher, much less become bestsellers. But in this case, there are two smiling portraits on the cover and two famous brands – television journalist Anderson Cooper and his fashion designer mother Gloria Vanderbilt.
However, until recently anyway, the general public may not have been aware of the family relationship. For his part, Cooper has assiduously avoided the association. His mother, for her part, has been anything but shy about using and exploiting the name. Her signature jeans and fragrances have been her single most commercially successful venture, and other than lending cachet to the brand, this was a self-made fortune among several she has attained and lost. And without trading on the name Vanderbilt, Cooper has made his reputation on his own as a media phenomenon. He is today one of the most credible names in broadcasting, and not because he carried the famous name.
The Rainbow Comes and Goes is an exchange of intimate personal correspondence conducted via email while the 92-year-old Vanderbilt stayed mostly in her luxury apartment in Manhattan and Cooper jetted around the globe covering news assignments, mostly in locales ravaged by war or natural disaster. Cooper says he took the initiative to get closer to her, and the lessons learned in the book prove the wisdom of his intentions.
One trait these two share is a dogged ability to withstand profound loss – and not just survive, but become the stronger for it. They share two huge untimely wounds. First, her third husband and Cooper’s father Wyatt Emory Cooper died of open-heart surgery at age 50. He left two young sons, Carter and Anderson. The second blow came when Carter committed suicide at age 23.
Gloria Vanderbilt is open about the intimate and sometimes sensational details of her life story. Cooper relates these to his own personal struggles, but details of his personal relationships are not included. Vanderbilt could have owned to four surnames from a succession of celebrity husbands: Pat Dechico, presumed mobster and former husband as well as rumored murderer of actress Thelma Todd; Leopold Stokowski, brilliant orchestra conductor and then crusty older man; Cooper’s father Wyatt, a small-town boy from a poor rural family who became a Hollywood screenwriter; and legendary movie director Sidney Lumet. And we also learn from this book that had she been so inclined, she could have added other names to the list – including Howard Hughes and Frank Sinatra.
Cooper says he set out on a career as a war correspondent because he wanted to see how people who had no advantages coped with sudden and profound loss. He told the story of his early career in another book, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival.
A significant portion of Vanderbilt’s confession centered on her difficult and mostly estranged relationship with her mother, the glamorous widow Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt. Cooper’s mother summarizes the humiliating custody battle and trial as her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sued to make the child a ward of the court on the grounds that her mother was unfit. This story was widely publicized at the time and is a major episode in the daughter’s autobiography, Once Upon a Time: A True Story, and in Barbara Goldsmith’s biography, Little Gloria Happy at Last, which was made into a TV miniseries. Perhaps surprisingly, the sedate “Aunt Gert” – that’s Gertrude Vanderbilt – comes across in this account as the girl’s well-meaning benefactor and ardent protector, but never one who was demonstrative with her affections.
Little Gloria was cherished by her nanny and her maternal grandmother, but she never really knew her father. Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, who died from his alcoholism just a year before she was born.
The main takeaway from Rainbow is clear from its stated intention to have an intimate exchange with a loved one. As the generation of Boomers must face the challenges of caring for parents whose faculties may be diminishing, here’s an example that it may not be too late to talk frankly. As Cooper explains, “I know now that it’s never too late to change the relationships you have with someone important in your life – a parent, a child, a lover, a friend. All it takes is a willingness to be honest and shed your old skin. Let go of the long-standing assumptions and slights you still cling to.”
But between the lines of The Rainbow Comes and Goes is another powerful truth, one so fundamental to the national debate. The Vanderbilts were the one-percenters of yesteryear. When Cooper’s great grandfather Cornelius Vanderbilt II split the family inheritance with his brother William in the mid-19th century, between them they controlled the largest personal fortune in the world. But by the standards of today’s multibillionaires, that money and its power have all but dissipated.
As a society, we may fear the overweening influence of the rich and powerful, but in America at least, their personal empires often don’t survive more than a few generations.
Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt both learned how to reinvent themselves. It didn’t hurt that they were both born to comfort, but their achievements and any happiness they’ve gained have come not from their presumed advantages, but from personal resilience in the face of anguish.
Update: Gloria Vanderbilt passed away after the book was published.
Here’s my review of The Map and the Territory by contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq.
A hundred-year-old secret locked is in a painting. The painting’s owner, Los Angeles Museum of Art, refuses to admit I got it right. But, hey, it’s fiction, the art historians say. Why should anyone take it seriously? What, according to my decades-long research into this painting that obsessed me so, did Cornelius Vanderbilt II not want you to know? Hint: Vanderbilt and his reputed mentor, banker J. P. Morgan, were rivals in the Episcopal Church hierarchy, each claiming to be more righteous than the other.