The final weeks between Anderson Cooper and his late mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, were nothing short of “amazing.”
The CNN anchor recalled spending time with his mother weeks before she died while chatting with best friend Andy Cohen at the 92nd Street Y to talk about his new book, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty.
“We had an amazing last couple of, last week or two together…We would just lay on her bed and hold hands,” Cooper shared this week. Vanderbilt died June 17, 2019, at the age of 95 after being diagnosed with cancer.
“When she got told the diagnosis… This wonderful Dr. Tom Nash… She paused for a long time and she’s like, ‘Is it treatable?’ And he said, ‘Look, you can go through treatments, but it’s like a miracle moonshot if it has any impact. And you’re gonna be in a hospital,'” he recalled. “And she was like, ‘No, of course not.’ And then she paused for a long time and she said, ‘Well, it’s like that old song, show me the way to get out of this world, because that’s where everything is,’ which is an old Peggy Lee song.”
Cooper shared that he looked up the singer “and there was this amazing video of Peggy Lee singing ‘Is That All There Is’ on YouTube. It’s a black and white of her in a nightclub.”
“I showed it to my mom and she was like, ‘Oh, that’s marvelous,’ which was a big word my mom liked,” he continued. “And it became this thing that we would look at this Peggy Lee video of her singing ‘Is That All There Is’ like once or twice a day… She started to sing along to it and I would start to sing along.”
“And then we had this great moment where she was holding my hand,” he said, before pausing and getting choked up remembering the fond memory. “While we were listening to the song and it was like, we were dancing and it was, yeah, it was lovely.”
He added, “She also was watching Shark Tank a lot, which was weird,” as the audience laughed.
Cooper, meanwhile, recently revealed that his mom would have done anything to make his dreams come true. During an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the TV journalist said his mom had offered to be a surrogate for him when she was 85 years old.
While he called his mom’s offer “kind of nutty,” he shared that she even went as far as seeing a gynecologist who confirmed that she would be able to carry a child despite her age.
Cooper welcomed his son, Wyatt, in April 2020, just months after Vanderbilt died. Cooper shares the 1-year-old with ex Benjamin Maisani.
