Anderson Coopers mom Gloria Vanderbilt wanted to be his surrogate at 85
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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