There was a good stretch of time where my mother would leave me terrifying phone messages. In a very sober voice she would say something along the lines of “Please call me back, I need to talk to you.” You know, the kind of message you leave when there’s been a death in the family. I would call her back and invariably the urgent issue turned out to be “Revlon has a new lipstick called ‘Orchid’…” or “I was reading Vanity Fair and there’s this special conditioner for curly hair…” After some imploring/begging on my part, we had a productive conversation about tone and not scaring the sh*t out of me over cosmetics, and our communication has been better for it ever since. (It even led to what I consider to be the greatest voicemail of all time, in which my mother did away with the ominous tease and any kind of salutation altogether. The entirety of the message was: “Katie Holmes filed for divorce from Tom Cruise.” Click!) Well, turns out Anderson Cooper had a similar issue with his mother, the late Gloria Vanderbilt, making cryptic requests for discussions. Only in one instance she really, REALLY upped the ante, as Anderson described last week on Howard Stern’s Sirius XM show:
“This is like eight years before I decided to have a child,” Anderson said in a Sept. 26 clip from Sirius XM’s The Howard Stern Show. “But my mom really wanted me to have a kid, and she called me up one time and she was like, ‘Honey, there’s something I really need to talk to you about.”
While he noted that their conversations often began as such, with him joking that they normally involved redecorating her apartment or her needing him “to hide a body,” the Anderson Cooper 360 host explained that after he “steeled himself” to go talk to her, he was utterly shocked by what she told him.
“She was like, ‘Well the most amazing thing happened,’” he recalled. “‘I went to the gynecologist the other day,’ — preface to this, is that my mom was 85 at the time— ‘and she said the most amazing thing, she told me ‘I could still bear children.’”
“And with my mom, you couldn’t have a reaction, you had to be supportive,” the 56-year-old explained, joking that it’s how he’s been able to maintain straight faces throughout his many years on-air. “I’ve spent my life not reacting to my mom’s crazy statements, so I said, ‘Yes mom, I think that is amazing. That a gynecologist told you that at age 85 you could still bear a child. I think that’s amazing.’”
At the time, Anderson … was under the impression that Gloria was looking to have another baby.
He then quipped, “And then I’m immediately thinking, ‘How do I stop my mom from bearing a child?’ Which is a thought I’m sure we’ve all had.”
And while Anderson admitted he first tried to talk her out of the idea — explaining that she’d be 105 when her kid was 20 — she clarified that she had other plans. In fact, she told him she could be his surrogate.
“I said, ‘Mom, I love you,” he remembered. “‘But even for you this is bats–t crazy.’”
Ultimately, Anderson and his former partner Benjamin Maisani did welcome two sons via surrogate — son Wyatt, 3, in 2020, and then Sebastian, 19 months, in 2022 — though they did not use his mother Gloria, who passed away in 2019 at 95.
Ah, the age-old question of whether or not to use your mother as a surrogate. But my real question is for Anderson: why are you toiling away with “serious” journalism when you’re sitting on gold like this?! Forget the news, what our society needs to hear are more stories of mothers loving their sons so much they get gynecologists to sign off on pregnancy at 85. I hope Lifetime and Hallmark are already hard at work on Christmas movie versions. And speaking of Hallmark, let’s get some greeting cards that read Mom, I love you. But even for you this is bats–t crazy. It works for any occasion!
The real kicker for me in this story is that Anderson thinks he’s getting ahead of the situation by trying to dissuade his mother from having another kid at 85 — which is plenty insane on its own, to have to utter the words “you’ll be 105 when the kid turns 20…” But Gloria, being the reliably eccentric matriarch that she is, still makes it even crazier! I don’t care if it’s a series, movie, or Broadway show, but this has to be dramatized. And I want Meryl Streep, Sally Field, or Dianne Wiest as Gloria. Thank you, Anderson, for going to whatever therapy you needed in order to share this story with us today.
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Kismet that was indeed comedy gold 😂😂 Thank you!
My kids are gonna be like – texting hasn’t been popular since the 2030’s but she won’t stop! I have to read these long chunks of text and she never uses paragraph breaks.
Great writing Kismet. This story is going to make me laugh all day.
Word. I laughed so hard, I was crying by the end!
Note to self: Don’t call daughters with any crazy ass ideas. Wow at 85 offering to be the surrogate. Well at least she was trying to help you gotta give her that lol.
20 years ago, my Mom offered $20 of her Social Security money to help pay to freeze my eggs. She didn’t think the 6 grandchildren she already had from my older brother and sister were enough. Nor were my cats adequate. Never mind I’d been saying since I was 10 that I didn’t want children. I’m relieved now to know that wasn’t all that nutty.
Omg. Clearly she had no idea what that actually involved. Moms!!!
So creepy. Just in time for spooky season!
The only thing remotely interesting about AC is that his mother is Gloria Vanderbilt. He says he is against name dropping to get ahead, and criticizes others for doing so, yet here he is using his mother again for publicity.
He is quite famous already. Talking about relatives is not going to make him more famous.
Actually, there are quite a few things that I, personally, find interesting about Cooper — and I don’t even watch CNN. His books — at least those that I’ve read — are well-done, and even break new ground. His openness about grief — especially the talks that he filmed with Colbert — are both insightful and relatable. He’s also quite funny, without afaik being crude, and I value people who can model their ability to laugh at themselves. I’m not clear how telling a funny story about his own mother counts as “name dropping to get ahead”, particularly when someone is already quite “ahead” by most standards.
@ Libra: do you think that Cooper — for some idiosyncratic reason — should not be recounting hilarious family stories? Or that he should have described an odd encounter with an anonymous, wonderfully batty octogenarian who loved him very very much — and left it to his listeners to puzzle it out? Perplexing.
Anderson didn’t mention his Vanderbilt heritage until he was well established as a news anchor, this is well known. I’m sure his family connections helped him along the way but I had no idea he was a Vanderbilt until I looked at his Wikipedia bio and I was like what?! Most people were shocked when I would tell them because he did NOT want to be associated as a Vanderbilt. This was YEARS before he openly talked about it and was very low key about it (I was in college when I discovered this and that was over 10 years ago). He never talked about his until maybe in the last 5-7 years?
He is well-established now in his career and known primarily for being a news anchor, not his Vanderbilt heritage. It helps that his last name isn’t Vanderbilt so it’s not the first thing I think of when I think of him.
Same, he’d been around for a long time before the Gloria Vanderbilt link became public knowledge.
He tried to avoid the connection but she wouldn’t let him. Even when he first started out she would just show up unannounced. 😆 So, it wasn’t public knowledge but his colleagues knew.
I actually can relate to this because my mom said this to me as well. What she meant, I think, was that she would be a gestational carrier, at age 75. In reality she would have in no way been strong enough to go through pregnancy, although her general health was pretty good for her age, because obviously it puts a lot of strain on the heart, lungs, bones etc.
What was particularly weird was that I had just had a child a year before, so I don’t know why she thought I wouldn’t just carry it myself again if I wanted a second. Actually it was coming from a place of narcissism and wanting to centre herself in a discussion of whether my husband and I had another child, really.
But from Gloria’s point of view I suppose she thought he might have trouble finding a surrogate. I imagine her doctor was doing an examination and said she had a healthy womb or something and she didn’t really take in that there’s more to carrying a pregnancy than just the health of the womb itself.
This was actually a subplot in the US version of Shameless 💀
Oy. My mom would so try to do this. Having babies is her drug of choice.
Okay, this whole post utterly slayed me. I’m dead now. Your mom, Anderson’s mom. I laughed out loud throughout. Thanks to one and all who contributed to the best laughs I’ve had in a very long time.
Right? This was gold, start to finish!
“I love you, Mom, but even for you this is bat-sh$t crazy” is my new default line for dealing with my mother!
A few years ago when my mom was trying to figure out texting, I’d get texts that said “call me right away.” And I would, OF COURSE, because that sh-t is ALARMING, and it would inevitably be “I saw some throw pillows that would work in your living room.” 💀 💀 💀
It took a while before I could convince her she could tell me why I needed to call her IN THE TEXT MESSAGE.
My Mom is still in the stage where she calls me to tell me she sent me a text. Ummm….
One thing they don’t talk about is that the massive doses of hormones used to support a peri or post menopausal pregnancy are risky, bordering on dangerous. There were some articles about it when Elizabeth Edwards, who had children at 49 and 51 with the help of fertility treatments, was diagnosed with breast cancer 15 years later.
The fertility industry isn’t looking out for women’s health and is seriously under regulated.
Thank you for making my day with this story.
I think it’s kind of sweet. 100% delusional and concerning, but sweet.
Yeah. I’m like: Awwwww! It’s so completely nuts, so loving, and so wildly impractical, but I love the idea that she kind of connected the dots, and offered Anderson the best, most loving gift that she could think of. Lol: I can only imagine the look on his face during that conversation!
My mom would call my cellphone and when I answered, be all “Oh good, I caught you at home.” No mom, you caught me in the produce aisle. I usually answered her call because a) maybe it was an emergency and b) she was deathly afraid to leave a voicemail. Her messages were painful to hear, she was so nervous speaking into the soul-stealing technology called voicemail that she always sounded on the verge of tears and I’d panic because she would be too stricken to leave any actual information in the message and I assumed someone had died.
Lolololololol Kismet!!!!! Thank you for this relatable content!! I don’t know if I’m laughing harder at your mother or Gloria Vanderbilt. This was gold. Bless you!
I adore him, he’s the perfect smart silver fox! I read his book about his family and liked it a lot! And his second book, about the Astors, just arrived today, can’t wait to read it! He strikes me as a kind old soul!
If you enjoyed this story, you should watch his talk show. She was a frequent guest. Always a treat. She had him edit her memoir which included graphic descriptions of her sexual escapades. 😆
Nobody knows how hard, is to live knowing, that you may never experience the motherhood. I admire people who are honest and open about surrogacy. It helps to realise that we still can become a mummy one day with a surrogate help. My child was born through surrogacy in one of the Ukrainian clinics of Professor Feskov in Kharkiv (mother-surrogate.com). I am very proud that I could go through this special journey , with a help of professional team from clinic we have a beautiful, healthy baby born . I don’t understand why should I be ashamed of it. I met and talked a lot with surrogate mothers, there’s no exploitation involved in. They been provided with all that they need ,while carrying baby. The most important what they said, is that they all been covered with legal documents. Why not? Good reward is a good help for the future life! At the end both sides are happy.