This year marks twenty years since the tragic death of Carter Cooper, older brother of Anderson Cooper and son of designer Gloria Vanderbilt. My prayers are with them today and always.
On July 22, 1988, twenty three year old Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, who had graduated from Princeton College the year before, went over for a visit with his mother. Earlier that year he had gone through a bout of depression after his long time girlfriend and he broke up. He complained that he hadn’t been sleeping right, but that he was doing better with the break up. He wanted to move home, he’d said, he was lonely in his apartment. Vanderbilt agreed that he should and they spent the day together.
After lunch Carter had fallen asleep, and though he never liked napping because he said they disoriented him, since he’d complained of not sleeping she let him rest. At about seven o’clock that night, Carter, a known sleepwalker, went in to his mother’s room confused and then onto the balcony of his brother Anderson’s, who was away in Washington, room. After a struggle to get her son away from the ledge, Cooper fell to his death from the balcony of his mother’s 14th floor apartment. The family believed the death was caused by a psychotic episode induced by an allergy to the anti-asthma drug Proventil, causing him to sleepwalk. This is backed by a psychologist theory that he was sleepwalking and therefore not in his usual state at the time of death. [1]
Cooper killed himself in her sight by swinging from the terrace wall of her fourteenth-floor New York apartment and then, abruptly, letting go. Those are her words: “he let go.”
Perhaps there are worse things that could happen to a mother, but I cannot imagine what they would be.[2]
In his autobiography, younger brother Anderson Cooper recalls the media circus surrounding Carter’s death. For the four days between his brother’s death and the funeral, Cooper and his mother were prisoners of grief in Vanderbilt’s apartment, having cut themselves off from the outside world. Meanwhile outside the building reporters and photographers waited day and night for the first sight of the grieving family. “When we arrived … for Carter’s wake, about a half dozen photographers snapped pictures as I helped my mom out of the car. I hated them: circling like vultures over our barely breathing bodies.”[3]
The July 26, 1988 funeral was attended by 2000 mourners, including actresses, magazine editors, news anchors, and then First Lady Nancy Reagan and was a top story in newspapers across the country the next day. [4]
Vanderbilt felt like she couldn’t recover. She said if it wasn’t for her son Anderson, she would’ve jumped after Carter. For almost a year, only her dearest friends and her bereavement group that met twice a week, saw her. Newspapers were reporting that she’d locked herself in her apartment but that wasn’t true. She just didn’t want to have to face the world; she didn’t want flashing light and newspaper articles documenting to the public how she was doing because she didn’t know herself. She would sneak out, when she wanted to, and see friends like Carol Matthau, who found her bravery remarkable.
“Gloria is very brave. She is surviving the ultimate tragedy, the death of her son, Carter Cooper” Matthau recalled in her book. “She knows that while she cannot really survive it, she’s healing that part of her that she can save for her other children. For her sense of life. For her belief in believing. It’s possible that she may lead a whole new life, be a whole different person, and start again.”[5]
[1] Vanderbilt, Story102-107.
[2] Martha Weinman Lear, “Letting Go,” New York Times 26 May 1996.
[3] Anderson Cooper, Dispatches From the Edge (New York: HarperCollins, 2006) 44.
[4] James Barron, “Vanderbilt Son recalled as Man with High Ideals,” New York Times 27 July 1988.
[5] Matthau, 294
