Gloria Made Me Late For Work

Anderson & Glo

Second Wind by Barbara C. Gonzalez
(The Philippine Star) Updated January 14, 2012 12:00 AM

Finally, I caught it — Anderson’s show that focused solely on his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. It was Monday morning and it made me late for work but it was well worth it.

Anderson Cooper is that handsome hunk who currently dominates American TV. He is an anchor at CNN and now has a talk show about life, which began after Oprah stopped her talk show. Something tells me he will be the next Oprah because of the approach he takes. Whoever would have dreamed he would do a show on his mother and that they would discuss their family’s tragedies so openly? Traditionalists would say that was totally improper. But Gloria Vanderbilt and a singer (who sang Amazing Grace) said secrets can be evil. It is best to discuss them because you help other people. Gloria Vanderbilt had helped the singer when she was grief-stricken over her son’s suicide.

Once upon a time they were a happy family of four. The father was Wyatt Cooper, a Southern novelist, whom Gloria Vanderbilt remembers as her soul mate. When he was 50, he had a heart attack and died, leaving her alone to raise her two sons, Carter and Anderson, who was then 10 years old.

In 1988 Carter decided to jump to his death from the terrace of their 13th-floor apartment. Gloria said for a moment she thought of jumping after him but then she thought of Anderson and stayed. It took her six years to write a book about Carter’s suicide, six years of attempting to find her balance and find the words to describe her sorrow, and to this day she still thinks about it daily. But she has learned to live with the grief even if she knows she will never be over it.

Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper’s sorrows began when she was a little girl. Her father died when she was 18 months old and she grew up with her mother, who was a socialite, her grandmother and her nurse, whom she loved like her mother. But then her aunt, a Vanderbilt, sued her mother for custody and won. She then lost her nurse and was put in boarding schools. She did not finish high school because she was afraid of algebra but she was a gorgeous, fashionable, very creative young woman, who married and divorced a few times until she met Wyatt Cooper.

Once upon a time she designed and produced the Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. I remember having a pair of those that fitted me perfectly. She was also a writer, who has written about 12 books, one of them a romance memoir of all the men in her life. On top of that she was and continues to be a painter who paints her apartment, her tiles, her canvases — she paints almost everything. She is a woman who has seen much grief but it has not made her bitter. And she always reaches out to help others, especially mothers whose sons committed suicide.

“We are here not to see through each other but to see each other through,” she says and Anderson quotes. Through the show you can see the love between this mother and her son, this son and his mother. If I were giving a show an award, this one would take the prize. It is real, genuine, very touching. It is about parenthood that works.

Parents in the Philippines could and should learn a lot from this show. First, Gloria Vanderbilt is not the clingy Filipino mother who weeps when her son is in Egypt during the revolution. She worries about him. She tapes all his shows. But she does not call him demanding for his immediate return home. She tells herself — he can take care of himself.

Obviously, also, she makes no demands about having lunch together every Sunday. Once upon a time when he was small she painted him, writing text about him on the painting — intelligent, witty, brave heart, strong, growing. He was embarrassed by this painting, he said, and always rushed his friends who came past it. Today she has a life-size photograph of him in her apartment because, she says, she likes to see him and she doesn’t see him often enough though she makes no demands. And she says she will love him always, bringing a tear to his eye.

Mother and son discuss the hurts in their lives but with empathy for others. You see that where they have suffered together they also know how to have fun together. They laugh and cry together. That is life as it should be lived. That is the normal bond between mother and child — friends with profound love between them and preferably no demands.

In this sense my children and I are very American. There are no mutual demands. We see each other when we feel like but every visit is pleasant, full of laughter and jokes. We enjoy each other’s company genuinely. But when once I needed financial help — for the support of my mother in the Alzheimer home — all of us dug into our pockets and helped. It was for my mother, their grandmother. It was for family and when it is for family it is always well worth it.

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