The Rainbow Comes and Goes Read online

  Photo by George Hoyningen-Huene, courtesy of R. J. Horst/Staley Wise Gallery.

  Contents

  Introduction

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Epilogue

  About the Authors

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  My mother comes from a vanished world, a place and a time that no longer exist. I have always thought of her as a visitor stranded here; an emissary from a distant star that burned out long ago.

  Her name is Gloria Vanderbilt. When I was younger I used to try to hide that fact, not because I was ashamed of her—far from it—but because I wanted people to get to know me before they learned that I was her son.

  Vanderbilt is a big name to carry, and I’ve always been glad I didn’t have to. I like being a Cooper. It’s less cumbersome, less likely to produce an awkward pause in the conversation when I’m introduced. Let’s face it, the name Vanderbilt has history, baggage. Even if you don’t know the details of my mom’s extraordinary story, her name comes with a whole set of expectations and assumptions about what she must be like. The reality of her life, however, is not what you’d imagine.

  My mom has been famous for longer than just about anyone else alive today. Her birth made headlines, and for better or worse, she’s been in the public eye ever since. Her successes and failures have played out on a very brightly lit stage, and she has lived many different lives; she has been an actress, an artist, a designer, and a writer; she’s made fortunes, lost them, and made them back again. She has survived abuse, the loss of her parents, the death of a spouse, the suicide of a son, and countless other traumas and betrayals that might have defeated someone without her relentless determination.

  Though she is a survivor, she has none of the toughness that word usually carries with it. She is the strongest person I know, but tough, she is not. She has never allowed herself to develop a protective layer of thick skin. She’s chosen to remain vulnerable, open to new experiences and possibilities, and because of that, she is the most youthful person I know.

  My mom is now ninety-two, but she has never looked her age and she has rarely felt it, either. People often say about someone that age, “She’s as sharp as ever,” but my mom is actually sharper than ever. She sees her past in perspective. The little things that once seemed important to her no longer are. She has clarity about her life that I am only beginning to have about mine.

  At the beginning of 2015, several weeks before her ninety-first birthday, my mother developed a respiratory infection she couldn’t get rid of, and she became seriously ill for the first time in her life. She didn’t tell me how bad she felt, but as I was boarding a plane to cover a story overseas, I called her to let her know I was leaving, waiting until the last minute as usual because I never want her to worry. When she picked up the phone, immediately I knew something was wrong. Her breath was short, and she could barely speak.

  I wish I could tell you I canceled my trip and rushed to her side, but I didn’t. I’m not sure if the idea she could be very ill even occurred to me; or perhaps it did, acting on it would have been just too inconvenient and I didn’t want to think about it. I was heading off on an assignment, and my team was already in the air. It was too late to back out.

  Shortly after I left, she was rushed to the hospital, though I didn’t find this out until I had returned, and by then she was already back home.

  For months afterward she was plagued with asthma and a continued respiratory infection. At times she was unsteady on her feet. The loss of agility was difficult for her, and there were many days when she didn’t get out of bed. Several of her close friends had recently died, and she was feeling her age for the first time.

  “I’d like to have several more years left,” she told me. “There are still things I’d like to create, and I’m very curious to see how it all turns out. What’s going to happen next?”

  As her ninety-first birthday neared, I began to think about our relationship: the way it was when I was a child and how it was now. I started to wonder if we were as close as we could be.

  The deaths of my father and brother had left us alone with each other, and we navigated the losses as best we could, each in our own way. My father died in 1978, when I was ten; and my brother, Carter, killed himself in 1988, when I was twenty-one, so my mom is the last person left from my immediate family, the last person alive who was close to me when I was a child.

  We have never had what would be described as a conventional relationship. My mom wasn’t the kind of parent you would go to for practical advice about school or work. What she does know about are hard-earned truths, the kind of things you discover only by living an epic life filled with love and loss, tragedies and triumphs, big dreams and deep heartaches.

  When I was growing up, though, my mom rarely talked about her life. Her past was always something of a mystery. Her parents and grandparents died before I was born, and I knew little about the tumultuous events of her childhood, or of the years before she met my father, the events that shaped the person she had become. Even as an adult, I found there was still much I didn’t know about her—experiences she’d had, lessons she’d learned that she hadn’t passed on. In many cases, it was because I hadn’t asked. There was also much she didn’t know about me. When we’re young we all waste so much time being reserved or embarrassed with our parents, resenting them or wishing they and we were entirely different people.

  This changes when we become adults, but we don’t often explore new ways of talking and conversing, and we put off discussing complex issues or raising difficult questions. We think we’ll do it one day, in the future, but life gets in the way, and then it’s too late.

  I didn’t want there to be anything left unsaid between my mother and me, so on her ninety-first birthday I decided to start a new kind of conversation with her, a conversation about her life. Not the mundane details, but the things that really matter, her experiences that I didn’t know about or fully understand.

  We started the conversation through e-mail and continued it for most of the following year. My mom had only started to use e-mail recently. At first her notes were one or two lines long, but as she became more comfortable typing, she began sending me very detailed ones. As you will see in the pages ahead, her memories are remarkably intimate and deeply personal, revealing things to me she never said face-to-face.

  The first e-mail she sent me was on the morning of her birthday.

  91 years ago on this day, I was born.

  I recall a note from my Aunt Gertrude, received on a birthday long ago.

  “Just think, today you are 17 whole years old!” she wrote.

  Well, today—I am 91 whole years old—a hell of a lot wiser, but somewhere still 17.

  What is the answer?

  What is the secret?

  Is there one?

  That e-mail and its three questions started the conversation that ended up changing our relationship, bringing us closer than either of us had ever thought possible.

  It’s the kind of conversation I think many parents and their grown children would like to have, and it has made this past year the most valuable of my life. By breaking down the walls of silence that existed between us, I have come to understand my mom and myself in ways I never imagined.

  I know now that it’s never too late to change the relationship you have with someone important in your life: a parent, a child, a lover, a friend. All it takes is a willingness to be honest and to shed your old skin, to let go of the long-standing assumptions and slights you still cling to.


  I hope what follows will encourage you to think about your own relationships and perhaps help you start a new kind of conversation with someone you love.

  After all, if not now, when?

  One

  A flashback this morning when I woke up: it’s my seventeenth birthday and I’m striding along Madison Avenue, hastening to meet my boyfriend.

  I knew the excitement, the anticipation that girl felt, and in knowing, I became, for an instant, seventeen once again.

  But I am not seventeen. I am ninety-one.

  No longer can I stride or hasten. I was unaware that if I lived long enough, there would come a time when this would be impossible. When I was seventeen this never crossed my mind; nor did it as the years passed and I got older. I was aware that “old age” happened, but to other people, not to me. Perhaps it’s because, as a child, I did not have parents and siblings as most people do, and I didn’t experience the circling spans of life and death.

  My first reaction upon reaching ninety-one is surprise. How did it happen so quickly? Am I ready for it?

  If I am ninety-one, it means my time on this earth is racing to the finish line. Will I have the power to complete the race with a badge of courage, leaving those I love with a memory of me that will sustain them and give them strength when I am gone?

  Until I fell ill with influenza and asthma this year, I believed my best years were ahead. I’d been blessed with superb health all my life, so it was a shock to find myself suddenly on a stretcher in an ambulance, the sirens leading me to New York Hospital, where your father, Wyatt Cooper, was taken by ambulance thirty-seven years ago, the hospital where he died.

  Asthma is a terrifying experience, like having a tourniquet strangling your throat. You choke, gasp for air, wonder, “Is this it? Is this how I will die? Please, God, or whoever you are—not yet.” It is a cliché, but a true one, and I understand it only now: Health is your most treasured gift. As long as you have it, you are independent, master of yourself. Illness grabs the soul. You plunge in and out of hope, fearing you will never recover. All that I have been, all that I am, all that I might become no longer exist. I am alone. Nothing can distract from the truth of this finality.

  How can my body betray me when there is so much still to be done? You see, it isn’t age itself that betrays you; it is your body, and with its deterioration goes your power. You end up obsessed, entirely focused on your health, paying attention to every nuance, every ache and pain. Instead of working or living your life, you waste your time on appointments with doctors.

  Do you know the poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne?

  From too much love of living,

  From hope and fear set free,

  We thank with brief thanksgiving

  Whatever Gods may be

  That no life lives for ever;

  That dead men rise up never;

  That even the weariest river

  Winds somewhere safe to sea.

  It is no mystery where time is leading us. No secret the road we are on. Hand in hand, or fist to fist, we move forward at a snail’s pace, relentlessly bent in one direction, toward the same end.

  Death.

  The word leaves a smear across the page as I write it in my journal. There is no denial, no wriggling out of it. The more I try to erase it, the deeper it grinds into a smudge of black blood. There is no other truth to depend on, no other certainty. It is as inevitable as birth. Death is the price we pay for being born.

  How we die is another matter. If terminally ill, we have the choice to take our own life. Secretly somewhere inside me lies the notion that I will slip away quietly in my sleep.

  There is also the vague, crazy fantasy or hope that it simply is not going to happen to me. Perhaps I inherited this indomitable optimism from my mother’s mother, Laura Delphine Kilpatrick Morgan, whom I called Naney. She stipulated in her will that two nuns sit by her open coffin in rotating shifts for the four days leading up to her burial, to ensure that her eyes did not suddenly open and that she was actually dead.

  Ready or not, I know that someday there really will be no more “you,” no more “me.” And when it happens, we will be hurled into infinity with no chance of return.

  But don’t worry. I am on the mend. Last night I dreamt I jumped over that dwarf planet Pluto, trillions of miles away, the one they have sent a spacecraft to get pictures of for the first time. It was a cinch.

  Your Naney Morgan had nuns sit by her coffin for four days to make sure she really was dead? I didn’t realize you could get nuns to do that.

  I can’t imagine what it’s like to be ninety-one. I’m still adjusting to the idea of turning forty-eight, which I will in a few months. I haven’t told you this before, but I’ve always assumed I would die at fifty because that is how old Daddy was when he died.

  My doctor has assured me repeatedly I will live well past that, but I don’t entirely believe him. The benefit of thinking you will die at fifty is that it can spur you to accomplish a lot of things at a young age, which is what I have attempted to do, but now the prospect of living longer makes me uncertain about the plans I’ve made.

  Clearly, I have not inherited your Naney Morgan’s spirit of optimism. I know that, as a child, you were very close to her, but other than that I don’t really know anything about her.

  I’ve always wondered why, when we were growing up, you didn’t talk about your past. By the time I was six or seven, Carter and I knew all about Daddy’s childhood on a farm in Quitman, Mississippi. He frequently recounted stories about his brothers and sisters and their large extended family. He told us about his troubled relationship with his father and his deep connection to the place where he was born, but you never mentioned your family. Did you just find it too difficult to bring up?

  It never ever occurred to me to talk to you or Carter about my childhood. My life had been scrambled, so filled with strange events and surreal subplots, that to try to lay them out would have been like combining Franz Kafka’s The Trial with Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

  Also, your father didn’t have just anecdotes to tell you about his childhood—he was a great photographer and had hundreds of pictures to illustrate whom and what he was talking about. The people in these photographs gazed into the camera, free of makeup and artifice. I couldn’t help but wonder what they would think of me if they had any idea of the chaos I had come from.

  Of course, I spoke to your father about what happened to me, but trying to explain my feelings exhausted me, and all that emerged was a brief encapsulation, nothing that got to the heart of the matter.

  If it was too complicated to lay it out for the man I loved, how could I even begin to translate it for my children?

  I had never had the experience of talking about my thoughts and feelings. When I was a child, adults really didn’t communicate very much with children. I needed time to sort out what had happened, to understand the motivations of others that I had not been aware of as a child.

  The first time I went to a psychiatrist, I was about twenty-seven. I sat down in his office, and said, “I’m here, but there’s one thing I don’t want to talk about: my mother.”

  Well, that was ridiculous of course; it was exactly what I did want to talk about, as I was still fearful of my mother in many ways. It is one of the blessings of age that the fear is now gone.

  I later had an extraordinary experience with a different therapist. In 1960, LSD was being heralded as a possibly miraculous new way for some patients to delve into unexplored areas of the subconscious. My therapist asked if I wanted to try it under his supervision, and I eagerly said yes.

  Even today, I can recall everything that happened in that one session as if it were a few hours ago.

  I saw myself as an infant in 1925, in my crib at my father’s house in Newport, while he lay in the next room dying. I heard footsteps running through the hallways, doors opening and closing, voices signaling to each other. It was night, and I knew something terrible was happening.
I could stop it, I believed, if only I could get out of my crib and go to my father, but I lay on my back in the darkness, fists clenched, unable to do anything.

  Suddenly the noises stopped. The door to my room opened. Sharp against the light from the hall was the shadow of my beloved governess, Dodo, and my father’s mother, my Grandmother Vanderbilt. They drew close together as they stood whispering to each other in the silence. Screaming, I pulled myself up against the bars of the crib, still believing that if I could get to my father I could save him. Dodo picked me up and rocked me in her arms, while Grandma patted me, but I kept screaming. Yet they didn’t take me to him. I choked on my tears, unable to tell them anything at all.

  What I experienced while using LSD changed my life. It enabled me to reconcile with my mother after fifteen years of estrangement and begin to put together the pieces of the puzzle of my past.

  Before you read any further, I should probably fill you in a little on my mother’s background, so you can better understand some of the events she is referring to. Much of it is new to me as well, and I had to look it up in history books, since she had never mentioned it.

  My mother was born Gloria Laura Vanderbilt in 1924, into a family of tremendous wealth. The first Vanderbilt to arrive in America was named Jan Aertson. He came to the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in 1650 as an indentured servant hoping to escape a life of poverty in Europe. He settled on Staten Island, and that is where his descendants remained for nearly a century, until Jan Aertson’s great-great-great-grandson Cornelius Vanderbilt changed the family’s fortunes forever.

  Cornelius dropped out of school when he was eleven and began working on his father’s boat ferrying passengers and cargo between Staten Island and Manhattan. By sixteen, he was in business for himself, using a small two-masted schooner in the waters around Manhattan. Cornelius was a cunning businessman and eventually moved into the steamship business.