Sometimes Anderson Cooper imagines himself as the Thomas Cromwell to his mother's Henry VIII, the voice of reason — the tether — to her buoyant impulsiveness. And sometimes he pictures Gloria Vanderbilt, who has been in the public eye since her birth 92 years ago, as an emissary from a distant star, marooned on this planet and trying to make sense of it all.
"I always viewed my role as helping her navigate this time and place," Mr. Cooper said recently. But in the documentary of her life, "Nothing Left Unsaid," airing on HBO on April 9, with Mr. Cooper as his mother's interlocutor, and in the epistolary memoir the two have made together, "The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss," out Tuesday from Harper, what instead unfurls is the ways in which this family of two has survived unthinkable losses. There was the death of his father when Mr. Cooper was just 10, and the suicide of his brother, Carter, at 23, a decade later, as Ms. Vanderbilt watched her son's hands slip from the terrace of their apartment on Gracie Square.
In that same decade, Ms. Vanderbilt would make a fortune to rival that of her forebear, Cornelius Vanderbilt, from bluejeans emblazoned with her name, and then lose it all when her psychiatrist and lawyer colluded to defrau d her of her many lucrative licenses. (It was Bill Blass who came to the rescue, writing her a check for a quarter of a million dollars.) And yet, Mr. Cooper said, "She has this enduring optimism and this sense that the next great love or the next great adventure is just around the corner, and she's about to embark on it."
The other day, Ms. Vanderbilt brandished her familiar u-shaped grin and her Old World accent, padding about her jewel-box Beekman Place apartment in bare feet. (Later, she would slip on a pair of gold sneakers to give a tour of her artist's studio one floor below.) "The phone can ring, and your life can change in a blink," she said, emphasizing that last word and concurring with her son's assessment of her nature.
"I also believe you sort of attract what you want, what yo u're looking for, and I think that one must always be in love. To be in love with a person is of course ideal, but you can be in love with a flower, a tree, an idea. Just waking up in the morning, you know. It's an attitude, an attitude of romantic readiness," she concluded firmly, quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald. "We have to have that."
Ms. Vanderbilt, whose father died when she was 15 months old, has been making headlines since her birth. In 1934, the tabloids called her "The Poor Little Rich Girl." That was the year of the bitter custody battle between her aunt, Gertrude Whitney, and her beautiful, too young, hapless mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, who loved parties and the allowance that accrued to her from her daughter's trust fund. She made headlines, too, for her storied romances — to Howard Hughes and Frank Sinatra, among many others — and her four marriages, the first, when she was just 17, to an abusive Hollywood agent rumored to have murdered his first wife.
Ms. Vanderbilt largely raised herself, a kind of emotional orphan careening from marriage to marriage before finding happiness with Wyatt Coop er, Mr. Cooper's father, a screenwriter and actor from Mississippi.
"Wait a minute," Mr. Cooper writes in "The Rainbow Comes and Goes" of his mother's first marriage. "You started dating a guy who was a gambler and rumored to have killed someone? That's not usually the kind of information put in their Tinder bio to attract dates. Didn't you think that was somebody you should probably stay away from?"
Recalling that exchange, Ms. Vanderbilt said: "Of course, you always think you can fix things. You always think you're the one who can."
Ms. Vanderbilt has been hashing out her story in all mediums for most of her life. In her glittering collages, faux naïf paintings and her signature "dream b oxes," there are fatherless figures, distant mothers and recurring images of Ms. Vanderbilt's beloved nanny, Dodo, who gave her the love and constancy she craved. In many of her eight books, a body of work that includes four memoirs, a book of poetry and an erotic novel, published when she was 85 (and which Mr. Cooper, stretching the limits of filial devotion, read in galleys), she continued that interrogation.
Of the erotic novel, "Obsession," she said: "That was so much fun. It was almost as if somebody else wrote it and it just sort of fell on the page. When I recorded the audiobook, though, I thought: 'What have I done? Poor Anderson!'"
Clearly, Mr. Cooper's inheritance from his mother isn't tragedy and it isn� ��t money, as he and his brother were taught at a young age there was no pot of gold for them — though he and she share the same steely work ethic — it's resilience, made springier by a sense of humor.
Both the documentary, directed by Liz Garbus, and the memoir, which is a series of emails between mother and son, have Mr. Cooper investigating the emotional landscape of his mother's life, and in so doing examining his own.
They were a year into the documentary when Ms. Vanderbilt fell ill with a serious respiratory infection. She didn't tell her son just how serious it was, and he left town on an assignment, never learning until his return that she'd been hospitalized. He was deeply rattled, and rued his reflexive impulse to put his work first and view any intrusion as an inconvenience.
On her 91st birthday, they began "a new kind of conversation," as he writes, by email, which Ms. Vanderbilt takes up with characteristic enthusiasm. It is a remarkably frank and tender undertaking. In one exchange, Ms. Vanderbilt recalled her son coming out to her when he was 21, and being stricken with guilt about a derogatory comment she'd once made, that she would feel she had failed as a parent if her child was gay. As it happened, Mr. Cooper had no memory of the incident; instead, he recalled only the positive way she'd described a gay couple when he was growing up. "I rejoice that you're gay," she writes her son.
"She rejoices in everything I do," Mr. Cooper said. "I was talking to Andy Cohen" — the TV and radio host — "and his mother is a tougher critic. She'll say to him, 'Hmm, not your best show.' But my mom is very much a cheering section. I can do no wrong. It's always been that way. If I told her I wanted to dye my hair blue, she'd be happy. You couldn't rebel against her. There is nothing you could do that a) she hadn't already done, and b) she wouldn't be fine with."
Both Mr. Cooper and Ms. Vanderbilt impose order on their lives through their work. Ms. Vanderbilt's environments have long been as much a canvas as her actual paintings. "It was interesting to hear her talk about it," Mr. Cooper said. "To hear her cop to it. If only you can change the color of the walls, everything will be O.K. But once that's done, it feels O.K. for a day or a week, and then she realizes the carpet needs to be redone or she has to move."
Decorating is autobiography, Ms. Vanderbilt likes to say. "Of course, everything is autobiography," she added. Throughout the decades, Ms. Vanderbilt's fantastical interiors — rooms layered from floor to ceiling in gingham or antique quilts — settings as intricate as her artwork, have showed up in Vogue, House & Garden, W, Life and Vanity Fair.
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