Master Of Ceremonies

Scene City

Memories of a Master of the Lens



Anderson Cooper was the master of ceremonies and talked warmly of his childhood memories of the groundbreaking photographer and filmmaker. His mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, was in a longtime romantic relationship with Mr. Parks. “He was just a cool guy who would be in our house,” Mr. Cooper recalled. “He was cool before I knew what cool meant.”

Credit: Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times
By Stuart Emmrich

Published: June 6, 2012

TWELVE years ago, in an interview with The New York Times for an article that was part of the newspaper’s “How Race Is Lived in America” series, Gloria Vanderbilt described how she first met the photojournalist Gordon Parks, with whom she would have a longtime romantic relationship.

He had come to photograph her in April 1954 for Life magazine for an article on her stage debut, she recalled, and the two formed an immediate bond.

“First of all, he was drop-dead good-looking,” she told the reporter. “We just looked into each other’s eyes, and we were friends.”

Tuesday night, at a gala at the Museum of Modern Art to commemorate the centennial of Mr. Parks’s birth, Anderson Cooper, Ms. Vanderbilt’s son, was the master of ceremonies and talked warmly of his childhood memories of the groundbreaking photographer and filmmaker (“Shaft”) to a crowd that included Sarah Jessica Parker, Karl Lagerfeld, Josh Groban, Clive Davis and Russell Simmons.

At first, Mr. Cooper said, he had no idea that Mr. Parks, who died in 2006, might actually be someone famous.

“He was just a cool guy who would be in our house,” he recalled. “He was cool before I knew what cool meant.”

But later, as Mr. Cooper grew older, he said that Mr. Parks played a crucial role in the choice of his professional path.

“He was the first journalist I knew,” said Mr. Cooper, now an anchor at CNN. “He opened up a world to me: a world I wanted to be a part of. He gave voice to those whose voices had been silenced by poverty and injustice.”

The evening, which benefited the Gordon Parks Foundation (and which raised about $600,000), honored three people whom foundation organizers said embodied Mr. Parks’s “artistic vision and passion.” They were the perma-tanned and ever-youthful HBO executive Richard Plepler (“He’s the only person I know who at 21 looked 53 and at 53 looks 21,” said his onetime boss, the former United States senator Christopher J. Dodd); the musician Alicia Keys (a no-show who accepted her award, presented by John Legend, by video); and the photographer Annie Leibovitz, whose heartfelt acceptance speech was about a third as long as that of the person who introduced her, Paul Roth, the director of photography at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

“There is no young photographer today who doesn’t wish they could be Gordon Parks,” Ms. Leibovitz said.

A version of this article appeared in print on June 7, 2012, on page E7 of the New York edition with the headline: Memories Of a Master Of the Lens.