A documentary entitled “Nothing Left Unsaid” of course begs the question: What, indeed, is left unsaid? Even Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, CNN host Anderson Cooper, who’ve led public lives from the very beginning, must surely have secrets that they’re not about to tell in front of the cameras. Suffice to say that what is said in the new HBO film by Liz Garbus is a mother-and-son story unlike any other. How could it be otherwise?In 1934, at age of 10, Gloria Vanderbilt was thrust into a tabloid scandal made for a 24/7 news cycle when her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney bitterly battled her mother, Gloria Morgan, for custody of the child heiress. From then on the cameras were never far away, chronicling Vanderbilt’s fabulous social life, acting career, eponymous designer jean business, and her four marriages. Her husbands included Pat DiCicco, a Hollywood agent suspected of killing his first wife; the legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski, more than four decades her senior; the filmmaker Sidney Lumet; and Wyatt Cooper, the Southern-born writer with whom she had two children, Carter and Anderson.Cooper was ten when his father died of heart failure at age 50, the first tragedy he’d share with his mother. The second was even more devastating: the suicide of son and brother Carter, falling to his death at age 23 in front of his mother from the terrace of her Manhattan apartment. One way Cooper has processed the untimely deaths of his father and brother was to throw himself as a news correspondent into war zones and calamitous global events that would make them pale in comparison. A clue to Vanderbilt’s survival through her 91 years is a bit chilling. “I have inside me the image of a rock-hard diamond that nothing can get at,” she observes in the film, “and nothing can crack and I’ve always known that about myself.”Few personal scars are left untouched in the documentary and Garbus frames them with admirable insight and forbearance. At one point, a former girlfriend of Carter’s recalls that he’d phoned her the night before his suicide, asking her for company. Though she sensed he was somewhat distraught, she declined because she had a pimple on her face and didn’t want him to see her that way. It’s a heartbreaking and all-too-human detail of which there are many in the film. Garbus recently spoke with ARTINFO about putting together this fascinating documentary, which begins airing on April 9 and which will be supplemented with a book, “The Rainbow Comes and Goes,” to be published concurrently.There really can’t be “nothing left unsaid” between Anderson and his mother as long as the cameras are rolling, can there?I think that there are parts of themselves that they hold very close and, um, there’s a part of their life that they have shielded from the public. But they were so open and trusting and warm in making this film. They didn’t set any parameters.When Anderson asks his mother in the film why she consented to this documentary, she said, “I guess I am a ham.” You’d think that given her early childhood, she’d be allergic to cameras.I think she enjoys … She had a public life and a private life in other ways. She always enjoyed being photographed, she was a very successful businesswoman, and who she was, the image, was a part of that brand. She always enjoyed being an actress and that part of her interaction with the public.Anderson says that he always thought that he was like his father but that he’s come to realize that he’s more like his mother. In what way?Well, I think … I would say … you know, let me come back to that one.Anderson says that there’s no equivalency but how have his family’s tragedies prepared him to bear witness to the suffering he’s covered as a reporter? Death and loss was not something that was kept under the rug in his family. It’s been very present and in that way he felt comfortable being a witness to very different situations and experiences that his life as a reporter gave him. It wasn’t something that he had instinct to run away from.The documentary makes a case for role reversal in that Anderson seems like a parent to the child that is Gloria Vanderbilt. Gloria is not a person who had a mother … she didn’t have the constancy of parenthood. As he said, and I think she said, it’s not necessarily something that came naturally or easy to her because she didn’t have [role] models. So sometimes in those family relationships, children fill in where they feel the need to fill in and I think Anderson certainly did that.Did he do that from an early age or after Carter’s death?From a very young age. He was ten, I think, when his father died, and he felt the need to get a job and work, to explore modeling at that time. He had that sense of responsibility, and maybe his father’s death was a pivotal transition because his father was such a nurturer. He felt the need to fill the role of the organized, future-thinking person of the family.Do you think it’s ironic that Gloria, as the subject herself of a custody battle, chose to go through one with Leopold Stokowski over their two sons?I don’t think she chose to do it. In her view, he thought she wouldn’t have the stamina to fight because of all the skeletons that it would bring up for her. She did indeed have the stamina and she won.Do you think that the estrangement from one of the sons might have been the price she paid?I think that since [the completion of the film], they are back in touch in some way. So perhaps there will be healing. But I don’t know where it stands.Why do you suppose she agreed to the soul-baring moment of re-living Carter’s suicide?I think his death is very present for her every day. She doesn’t push it down or push it away. Talking about it is her way of making sense of it so it’s not something that’s very distant from her mind and her heart. For people who’ve lost children, or have suffered the loss of something so tragically, it’s inspiring how life can go on even when it goes on with such pain. And I think to see that resilience and recovery, how she has kept living, kept working, kept loving, is inspiring. So I think it was a generous re-telling in that way.What do you suppose was going through her mind during the shoot when she says that she’s failed so many times? She was going through a whole range of emotions. I think she was thinking of her mother and the lost connection there, her regret at not being with her nanny at the end of her life. And Carter. She’s replayed in her mind what more she might have done. But I think she’s very brave and should be commended for facing those issues. We all go through life with regrets but so many of us never face them.Can we come back to the question of how Anderson is more like his mother than his father?Well, I think I’ll leave that up to the viewer to decide. I don’t really have an outside answer for that one.Do you think it has something to do with survival and resilience?Sure. Perhaps that’s what he meant. They’re the last two of the immediate family. How is he like his father, Wyatt?His father was always planning, always organizing. Leaving nothing to chance. There’s a worriedness that Anderson probably inherited from his father of trying to take care of everything and everybody.At 91 in the film, Gloria Vanderbilt is still hoping to find a great love. Is she one of the last of the great romantics?Who’s had as storied a love life as she has? She loves “love.” Sinatra. Brando. The four husbands and the twelve years with [photographer and filmmaker] Gordon Parks as an interracial couple at a time when many people were not doing that. To go through all of Gloria’s lovers we would have had to make it a six-part series.
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