Anderson Cooper: CNN's Hottie Correspondent
By Betsy Rothstein
Anderson Cooper is, refreshingly, not self-obsessed.
He doesn’t brag that Playgirl once asked him to pose nude. Even when asked, he won’t rant about his privileged childhood, being the son of railroad heiress and fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt and the nephew of his great-aunt Gertrude, who founded the Whitney Museum. He won’t bring up the fact that actress Mary Stuart Masterson was in the grade above him at Dalton, the private school in Manhattan where celebrities send their children.
When I tell him my 75-year-old father may know who he is, but I can’t promise, Cooper laughs and says, “I just hope he doesn’t think I’m an a------.”
At 37, Cooper hosts CNN’s “360” — the network’s “unconventional” answer for young people who’d rather do anything but watch a stuffy news program. He says he’s peaking careerwise, but immediately, as though some unforeseen force might swallow him alive if life got too good, he wishes to take back his words. “I’m actually the happiest I’ve been in any job, ever, including waiting tables,” he says, referring to his boyhood summers working at Mortimer’s, a chichi uptown eatery. “I would love to be doing this for a long, long time, which of course is the kiss of death. I’ll be off the air tomorrow.”
But that doesn’t seem likely. Last Thursday, the Chicago Tribune named Cooper one of the best magazine contributors for his work in Details. On Friday, CNN sent him to Baghdad for two weeks to cover the government turnover in Iraq. In the midst of his excitement, he expresses fears about the trip and says, “If I get killed, you can mark this as the last interview.”
The moment of eerie dark humor passes. “I’m excited,” he says. “I’ve been trying to get there for a while. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to go. Course I’m nervous. Anyone who says they’re not is a liar or an idiot. I’m actually more nervous about trying to find stories and get a sense of what’s going on. It’s what I enjoy. I am sort of drawn toward places in the world where there is struggle and conflict.”
This is a theme that emerges several times during our interview. He has confronted loss on a personal level. In 1978, his father, Wyatt Cooper, died. In 1988, his brother committed suicide in their mother’s Manhattan apartment.
Cooper says he’s drawn to places where people suffer unimaginable losses. In the course of his career, Cooper has visited some of the most depressed, war-torn regions worldwide, including Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa and Vietnam.
“Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss,” he says, never specifically dwelling on his own losses. “I found it very moving, and I learn a lot. I learn about other people and the human heart. I guess that helps me learn about myself in my own life. There’s not a lot of bulls---. It’s all there on the surface. It’s all very real.”
Cooper has quirks. But oddly, instead of being weird and off-putting, they have the opposite effect. He doesn’t drink hot beverages and says he has never tried coffee. His beverage of the moment is seltzer water. “Have you tried it?” he asks, semi-seriously. “I’ve rediscovered [it]. Amazing. I like the cold, bubbly thing. I hate drinking regular water.”
He says he doesn’t get nervous anymore before his show, but that doesn’t mean he performs flawlessly. “I maul words all the time,” says Cooper. “I have a problem saying words with two t’s. I say d’s. I talk too fast. I’m not the ideal of what an anchor ought to be. To me, the main thing is to be real.”
In 1989, upon graduating from Yale, he became a fact checker for Channel One, a 12-minute satellite news program that broadcasts directly into high school classrooms. After six months, he grew bored and snuck into Burma where, with a home video camera, he began his self-made career as a foreign correspondent.
Cooper likes to make fun of his own fame. When people greet him on the street, he says, he has such a bad memory that he can’t remember whether the person has watched him on TV or whether he really knows them. “I’m a subcelebrity,” he reasons. “Most people don’t really know me. For me, what’s interesting about reporting is being able to be a blank slate. I like being able to become part of their lives. I find losing anonymity makes that less possible, and that’s frustrating.”
But he isn’t planning on giving up this “subcelebrity” status anytime soon. “People are incredibly friendly to me now,” says Cooper, who joined CNN in 2001, after working as an ABC correspondent and host of the network’s reality show “The Mole.” CNN launched “Anderson Cooper 360” in September 2003. “It’s like living in Mayberry all of a sudden,” he says. “But you know, such is life. There’s plenty of pale, skinny gray-haired guys around.”
Cooper dismisses his good looks, but men and women of all sexual persuasions find him extremely attractive, and he has Internet fan clubs to prove it. Two subjects he won’t discuss publicly are religion and dating. “I don’t really talk about religion,” he says after jokingly mentioning Buddha. When asked if he’s dating, he replies, “You can ask, but I won’t tell you.”
Cooper grew up in Manhattan. Like many celebrity offspring, he has a hard time conveying what it was like being the son of someone famous. “I didn’t have anything to compare it to, so it seemed normal at the time,” he says, mentioning that he was exposed to people such as Charlie Chaplin at a young age.
“We moved every four years and redecorated every two,” he says. “Obviously I was well aware that I had what people consider a privileged upbringing. My mom was never a bake-cookies sort of mom. I really had no reins whatsoever.
During Cooper’s senior year at Dalton, however, he was sick of regimented high school life, and didn’t want to sit around and watch his friends “slowly start to hate each other.” So he drove across South Africa in a truck. To graduate, Cooper persuaded his teachers to let him write about his travels in Africa.
His mother’s reaction to his adventure? “She got pissed off at me because I got malaria in Africa and was hospitalized,” he says. “I knew she would flip out and want me to come home, so I didn’t tell her. So, [I have] a long history of lying to my mom.”
Cooper’s childhood had its flaws. He says the actors, performers and writers he was surrounded by all made him realize that “they’re all just as miserable as everyone else. I think there is much suffering.”
Cooper’s a big TiVo addict. His TV diet is predominately HBO and “Law & Order.” “I’m more ‘SVU’ [‘Special Victims Unit’], less ‘Criminal Intent,’” he says, explaining that he watches nearly everything on HBO. His absolute must sees: “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood” and “Six Feet Under.” At 5:47 a.m. he regularly wakes up to watch Primer Impacto’s astrological forecast on the Spanish channel Univision, even though he can’t understand the language. His explanation: He enjoys the visuals, and recalled a recent video of a horse in Peru dying on the side of the road. “I get ideas of basically what I don’t want to do,” he says.
Of his own show, he says, “It seems to be going well.” But according to ratings, his show stacks up behind MSNBC’s “Hardball” and Fox’s Shepard Smith for April and May.
Cooper once referred to the Manhattan neighborhood where he lives as the “least fashionable place on the planet.” He seems relieved that his West 30s neighborhood is posh-free, dotted with button stores and porn shops.
“The Realtor called it the dirty 30s,” he says. “I thought she meant dirty sexy, but she meant dirty grimy.”
Asked what his mother thinks of his blossoming TV career, Cooper mentions that he just broke the news to her that he was leaving for Baghdad. He says she took it pretty well and remained mostly quiet. “She seems happy. She watches me,” he says. “I think she’s thrilled to death.”
He jokes, “It allows her to feel like she sees me more often, so I don’t have to see her.”
Anderson Cooper is, refreshingly, not self-obsessed.
He doesn’t brag that Playgirl once asked him to pose nude. Even when asked, he won’t rant about his privileged childhood, being the son of railroad heiress and fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt and the nephew of his great-aunt Gertrude, who founded the Whitney Museum. He won’t bring up the fact that actress Mary Stuart Masterson was in the grade above him at Dalton, the private school in Manhattan where celebrities send their children.
When I tell him my 75-year-old father may know who he is, but I can’t promise, Cooper laughs and says, “I just hope he doesn’t think I’m an a------.”
At 37, Cooper hosts CNN’s “360” — the network’s “unconventional” answer for young people who’d rather do anything but watch a stuffy news program. He says he’s peaking careerwise, but immediately, as though some unforeseen force might swallow him alive if life got too good, he wishes to take back his words. “I’m actually the happiest I’ve been in any job, ever, including waiting tables,” he says, referring to his boyhood summers working at Mortimer’s, a chichi uptown eatery. “I would love to be doing this for a long, long time, which of course is the kiss of death. I’ll be off the air tomorrow.”
But that doesn’t seem likely. Last Thursday, the Chicago Tribune named Cooper one of the best magazine contributors for his work in Details. On Friday, CNN sent him to Baghdad for two weeks to cover the government turnover in Iraq. In the midst of his excitement, he expresses fears about the trip and says, “If I get killed, you can mark this as the last interview.”
The moment of eerie dark humor passes. “I’m excited,” he says. “I’ve been trying to get there for a while. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to go. Course I’m nervous. Anyone who says they’re not is a liar or an idiot. I’m actually more nervous about trying to find stories and get a sense of what’s going on. It’s what I enjoy. I am sort of drawn toward places in the world where there is struggle and conflict.”
This is a theme that emerges several times during our interview. He has confronted loss on a personal level. In 1978, his father, Wyatt Cooper, died. In 1988, his brother committed suicide in their mother’s Manhattan apartment.
Cooper says he’s drawn to places where people suffer unimaginable losses. In the course of his career, Cooper has visited some of the most depressed, war-torn regions worldwide, including Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa and Vietnam.
“Anyone who has experienced a certain amount of loss in their life has empathy for those who have experienced loss,” he says, never specifically dwelling on his own losses. “I found it very moving, and I learn a lot. I learn about other people and the human heart. I guess that helps me learn about myself in my own life. There’s not a lot of bulls---. It’s all there on the surface. It’s all very real.”
Cooper has quirks. But oddly, instead of being weird and off-putting, they have the opposite effect. He doesn’t drink hot beverages and says he has never tried coffee. His beverage of the moment is seltzer water. “Have you tried it?” he asks, semi-seriously. “I’ve rediscovered [it]. Amazing. I like the cold, bubbly thing. I hate drinking regular water.”
He says he doesn’t get nervous anymore before his show, but that doesn’t mean he performs flawlessly. “I maul words all the time,” says Cooper. “I have a problem saying words with two t’s. I say d’s. I talk too fast. I’m not the ideal of what an anchor ought to be. To me, the main thing is to be real.”
In 1989, upon graduating from Yale, he became a fact checker for Channel One, a 12-minute satellite news program that broadcasts directly into high school classrooms. After six months, he grew bored and snuck into Burma where, with a home video camera, he began his self-made career as a foreign correspondent.
Cooper likes to make fun of his own fame. When people greet him on the street, he says, he has such a bad memory that he can’t remember whether the person has watched him on TV or whether he really knows them. “I’m a subcelebrity,” he reasons. “Most people don’t really know me. For me, what’s interesting about reporting is being able to be a blank slate. I like being able to become part of their lives. I find losing anonymity makes that less possible, and that’s frustrating.”
But he isn’t planning on giving up this “subcelebrity” status anytime soon. “People are incredibly friendly to me now,” says Cooper, who joined CNN in 2001, after working as an ABC correspondent and host of the network’s reality show “The Mole.” CNN launched “Anderson Cooper 360” in September 2003. “It’s like living in Mayberry all of a sudden,” he says. “But you know, such is life. There’s plenty of pale, skinny gray-haired guys around.”
Cooper dismisses his good looks, but men and women of all sexual persuasions find him extremely attractive, and he has Internet fan clubs to prove it. Two subjects he won’t discuss publicly are religion and dating. “I don’t really talk about religion,” he says after jokingly mentioning Buddha. When asked if he’s dating, he replies, “You can ask, but I won’t tell you.”
Cooper grew up in Manhattan. Like many celebrity offspring, he has a hard time conveying what it was like being the son of someone famous. “I didn’t have anything to compare it to, so it seemed normal at the time,” he says, mentioning that he was exposed to people such as Charlie Chaplin at a young age.
“We moved every four years and redecorated every two,” he says. “Obviously I was well aware that I had what people consider a privileged upbringing. My mom was never a bake-cookies sort of mom. I really had no reins whatsoever.
During Cooper’s senior year at Dalton, however, he was sick of regimented high school life, and didn’t want to sit around and watch his friends “slowly start to hate each other.” So he drove across South Africa in a truck. To graduate, Cooper persuaded his teachers to let him write about his travels in Africa.
His mother’s reaction to his adventure? “She got pissed off at me because I got malaria in Africa and was hospitalized,” he says. “I knew she would flip out and want me to come home, so I didn’t tell her. So, [I have] a long history of lying to my mom.”
Cooper’s childhood had its flaws. He says the actors, performers and writers he was surrounded by all made him realize that “they’re all just as miserable as everyone else. I think there is much suffering.”
Cooper’s a big TiVo addict. His TV diet is predominately HBO and “Law & Order.” “I’m more ‘SVU’ [‘Special Victims Unit’], less ‘Criminal Intent,’” he says, explaining that he watches nearly everything on HBO. His absolute must sees: “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood” and “Six Feet Under.” At 5:47 a.m. he regularly wakes up to watch Primer Impacto’s astrological forecast on the Spanish channel Univision, even though he can’t understand the language. His explanation: He enjoys the visuals, and recalled a recent video of a horse in Peru dying on the side of the road. “I get ideas of basically what I don’t want to do,” he says.
Of his own show, he says, “It seems to be going well.” But according to ratings, his show stacks up behind MSNBC’s “Hardball” and Fox’s Shepard Smith for April and May.
Cooper once referred to the Manhattan neighborhood where he lives as the “least fashionable place on the planet.” He seems relieved that his West 30s neighborhood is posh-free, dotted with button stores and porn shops.
“The Realtor called it the dirty 30s,” he says. “I thought she meant dirty sexy, but she meant dirty grimy.”
Asked what his mother thinks of his blossoming TV career, Cooper mentions that he just broke the news to her that he was leaving for Baghdad. He says she took it pretty well and remained mostly quiet. “She seems happy. She watches me,” he says. “I think she’s thrilled to death.”
He jokes, “It allows her to feel like she sees me more often, so I don’t have to see her.”