Anderson Cooper shocked to find out mom Gloria Vanderbilt had brief lesbian relationship
After working with his mother on a book and documentary about her life, Anderson Cooper thought he knew everything there was to know about Gloria Vanderbilt.
It turns out the famous heiress and fashion icon had still more to tell.
Cooper was visibly shocked when mother and son sat down for a recent interview and Vanderbilt, 92, revealed that she once had a brief lesbian relationship as a teenager and a student at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut.
‘What? Hello. This is news to me. You didn’t mention this in the book, Mom,’ the CNN anchor said during the pair’s interview with People Magazine.
‘I went through a brief so-called lesbian relationship with a girl in school,’ Vanderbilt said.
‘Cynthia, her name was, and she came once to visit my aunt in New York on holiday. We had this sort of lesbian relationship and it felt so great. It felt so good and yet I thought, “There’s something about this.”‘
Vanderbilt’s mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, had lost custody of her during a famous custody trial in 1932 and during the trial was ‘accused’ of being a lesbian.
‘This is before the thing I knew about my mother,’ Vanderbilt said. ‘I thought, “No, this is something that’s not really what I want.” It was very brief.’
She adds: ‘I think almost everybody goes through at one point … of course, the thing is, now we realize there’s no difference. Love is love.’
The book Vanderbilt and Cooper wrote together is The Rainbow Comes and Goes and the new documentary he did on his mother is called Nothing Left Unsaid.
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Charlie says:
That would be a surprising thing to find out about a parent, especially when they are in their nineties!