When art imitates life, it’s not always funny, says CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
“In TV and movies, people are always killing themselves by jumping off buildings. It’s become the punch line to a joke. I don’t watch it. I can’t watch it.”
Cooper’s older brother, Carter, took his own life in 1988, at age 23. He leaped off the balcony of the family apartment in New York as their mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, watched in horror.
“I think about my brother every day,” says Cooper, 36, who discusses the tragedy publicly for the first time in a first-person account in the current Details magazine. (He’s a contributing editor.)
“The violence of his death still stuns me, and it comes to me at odd times throughout the day,” Cooper says of his brother, who had a history of mental problems. “I still have a sense of shock that it transpired at all.”
The anchor – whose 7 p.m. CNN show, “Anderson Cooper 360,” launches Monday – has written about his brother in his journal for years. He would have gone public eventually, he says, but probably not at this point.
A Details staffer who attended Princeton with Carter discussed the elder brother’s death with editor Dan Peres. Peres asked Cooper if he’d be willing to share his emotions.
“It’s something I’ve been writing in my head for the last 15 years or so,” he says. “It seemed like events coalesced into being the right time to write it on paper. It wasn’t an epiphany. I just decided.”
At the moment his brother jumped, Cooper was on the subway in Washington. He was 21 and about to begin his senior year at Yale.
The trauma led Cooper to become a combat reporter. He traveled to ravaged regions such as Rwanda and Sarajevo in search of the meaning of life.
“I wanted to go where the pain outside matched my pain inside,” he says quietly. “I had all these questions about how I was going to live my life. I was trying to figure out why some people survive and others don’t.”
Though he’s glad he did it, writing of his pain hasn’t made it disappear, Cooper says. He’s loath to label it a healing experience.
“I really don’t know what something cathartic feels like. If someone says “closure’ to me, I cringe. It doesn’t have any meaning. Going into this piece, I didn’t have any expectations.”
Cooper has revealed his past in interviews with families of suicide victims. But aside from an appearance on “Good Morning America” on ABC (his alma mater), he has no plans to say anything on the air.
Otherwise, “it ends up being a promotion, like “a very special episode of “Family Ties.””‘
Cooper has never said much publicly about any aspect of his family. He likes it that most people “wouldn’t guess in a million years” that he’s the son of legendary heiress and socialite Gloria Vanderbilt.
“The way I am in real life is very different from whatever image somebody with that sort of background (is expected to) have. That’s a great point of pride for me.
“It could be assumed that I’m a dilettante, just working as a lark, rather than (journalism) being something important I want to do.”
His brother’s death 11 years after his father’s made Cooper “take stock instantly of where I was going in my own life and how seriously I took the thoughts and feelings of others.”
“It made me much more empathic. I understand the pain of loss. I’m very comfortable discussing it with others.”
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