The Rainbow Comes and Goes

by Anderson Cooper

  I was in high school when I first heard that your mother was accused of being a lesbian. I wanted to ask you about it, but I sensed it disturbed you, and I didn’t want to upset you by bringing it up.

  The Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

  It was part of what scared me about telling you I was gay when I was twenty-one. I had all the normal feelings of trepidation about coming out to you, but it was largely because of the allegations against her; I wasn’t sure how you would react.

  I remember I once told you that I thought sexual orientation was partly genetic, and you quickly and firmly disagreed. Your reaction surprised me because the idea clearly upset you, yet so many of your closest friends were gay, and were such a big part of our lives growing up.

  Was your mom a lesbian?

  Yes, she was, but she also had affairs with men. I think that for some people sexuality is fluid. Much later she told me her one great love was Prince Friedel Hohenlohe, but she had been unable to wed him because Surrogate Foley, who controlled my trust fund, said that no part of it could be used to finance a second marriage and neither of them had enough money to support themselves in the style to which they were accustomed. By marrying the prince, she would have become a “Serene Highness,” which no doubt would have been important to her, as well as marrying the love of her life.

  After her engagement to the prince ended, her longest and most passionate relationship was with Lady Nada Milford Haven, who was related to the Russian royal family and married to Prince George of Battenberg, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria. Fascinating, glamorous, mesmerizing in her zaftig splendor, Nada had a mop of tousled red and orange hair and lacquered her nails the same shade of mahogany as my mother. She wore dresses of soft, flowing fabrics and carried a cigarette in an ivory holder. Her face was startlingly alive, and she had a great verve for life.

  My passive and shy mother was attracted by the contrast in their personalities. She became another person when she was with Nada: she appeared happy. I didn’t know it then, but I realize now it was because they were madly in love.

  When I was seven, during a stay in London, I once spied on my mother and Nada. Through a half-open door, I saw them sitting together on a sofa, arms around each other, laughing, and whispering in front of a glowing fire.

  My mother, turning suddenly, caught me staring. “Close the door,” she called out, annoyed. “There’s a draft coming in. Run on out and play.”

  Something was going on, but it both confused and frightened me.

  My mother was proud of her relationship with Nada, who was constantly by her side. They even traveled together, guests of William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies at San Simeon, Hearst’s fabled ranch.

  When the story about my mother’s relationship with Nada became public, it was a terrible scandal. In 1934, being gay was considered evil. It was a crime. Gay people could be, and were, arrested, imprisoned, and institutionalized.

  I heard that the doors of the courtroom had been closed and blocked to the public because of a revelation concerning my mother, but I didn’t know what it was, just that it was very terrible—as terrible as murder. Later, I pieced together that it wasn’t murder, but in the minds of many back then, it was considered even more unspeakable.

  The allegation that my beautiful mother was a lesbian, clamped down on my ten-year-old heart, squeezing it hard, as if with a nutcracker. Pain scrambled my brain, sucking me into a whirlpool of vile thoughts. I didn’t understand what it meant, but I knew it wasn’t like the love between Jeanette Macdonald and Nelson Eddy in Maytime or any of the other movies I would come to obsess over. It was something chill and bitter, confirming all the fears I already had about my mother.

  There was no one I could speak to about this. I shut myself in and tried desperately to put the pieces of my heart and mind back into some kind or order. It was a long haul because I obsessively worried that I, too, would grow up to be like my mother: a lesbian.

  When boys came into the picture it was an incredible relief. I was a girl who loved boys, not a “freak” who loved girls.

  I tell you all this so you understand why it took me so long, until my thirties, to understand that there is nothing strange or peculiar about being gay or lesbian. Love between two women, or two men, is precisely the same as love between a woman and a man.

  When I told you I was gay, it must have brought up a lot of your feelings about your own mother. It makes sense to me now. I remember the day I finally decided to speak to you about it. I was really nervous, but felt like I couldn’t wait any longer.

  I had come out to my friends while I was in high school, but had waited to tell you. When I graduated from college, I decided it was silly to avoid it any longer. I assumed you’d figured it out, because you had never asked me about girls, and I’d had a boyfriend all through college whom you knew very well. He slept over at our apartment often, and I thought you must have guessed he wasn’t just a friend. Still, when I went into your room that day, I was very nervous.

  “There is something I need to talk to you about,” I said, sitting down next to you on your bed. “I think I’m gay.”

  I immediately regretted the wording. I didn’t think I was gay. I knew I was. I had known it since I was six or seven years old.

  “You do?” you asked, but it wasn’t really a question. You were biding your time, absorbing what I had just said.

  I explained that I had felt this way all my life, and that I was happy about being gay.

  You said my boyfriend was always welcome, and then, after a slight pause, you said, “Don’t make any definite decisions.”

  It wasn’t really what I expected you to say, and I wondered if perhaps I should have been more direct, but then I decided to just let it sink in for a while with you.

  Did you know I was gay before I told you?

  I may have occasionally suspected you were gay, but it only floated in and out of my mind along with my unresolved feelings about my mother’s sexuality and my remembered terror as a child that I might have inherited the same orientation as well as the alcoholism of my father.

  If you were gay, I thought, it would be my fault and an indication that I had been a bad parent.

  When you said, “I think I’m gay,” you left it open, as if you were not yet certain. We all go through adolescence with conflicting emotions, and I wasn’t sure if you meant you were or might be. Then you left the room soon after without continuing the conversation.

  When you left I was shattered, because I remembered something I had said offhandedly years before when we were talking about one of your friends who might be gay: “I would feel I had failed as a parent if one of my children were gay.” It was an ignorant remark, and I had no idea it would or could have anything to do with you. I wish you had known those words came from feelings I still harbored about the revelation about my mother in the trial.

  It took great courage for you to confide in me, and I wished you had stayed longer so that we could have talked more, but I understood that after telling me something so important you needed time alone to get back to yourself.

  Actually, I thought that after the big reveal you might be the one who needed some time alone. But I knew once you got over the initial surprise you would be supportive. As I said, so many of your friends were gay, and they were always coming over for dinners and parties.

  I didn’t remember your saying that you’d feel like a failure if one of your children were gay, but I do remember something else you once said that made a strong and positive impression on me.

  We were waiting for guests to arrive one night for a dinner at our house when I was around eleven. I asked you about the theater director José Quintero and his partner, Nick, who were coming that evening.

  “They are just like a married couple,” you explained to me. Of course, this was 1979, and in the eyes of the law and most Americans, they certainly were not anything like a married couple, but I never forgot that you believed t
hey were. That is why I knew you would be okay with it when I finally told you I was gay.

  Well, I hope you know that I am more than “okay” with it; I rejoice that you are gay! It is part of what makes you the person you are, and I am so glad that you have found someone who makes you happy. I wouldn’t want you any other way, even if that were possible, which it most certainly is not.

  Today it is still hard to believe how far we have come, with same-sex marriage legal in all of our United States. Of course, it is only the beginning. True equality still has a long way to go both here at home and around the world.

  After the light dawned on me in my thirties, I often secretly wished I, too, had been born gay. My closest friends have always been women, and I certainly understand them more than I do men, but it was not to be. Some people have all the luck!

  In the wake of the headline-making revelations about my grandmother’s relationship with Lady Nada Milford Haven, public opinion began to shift in favor of my mother’s aunt.

  After seven weeks of testimony, the Matter of Vanderbilt, as the case was officially called, came to a close.

  Judge Carew awarded custody of my mother to Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. My grandmother Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt would be allowed to have supervised visits with my mom on weekends and some holidays.

  The judge also made a ruling that my ten-year-old mother could never have predicted, one she thought she might not survive.

  Nothing worked out in the custody trial as I imagined. Though my mother lost, her lawyers said that Dodo had influenced me against her, and Judge Carew decreed that Dodo could no longer have any contact with me. She was fired, and I was not allowed to see her or even speak to her on the phone. I didn’t know where she had gone. I was ten years old, and I thought I would die. It was the worst thing that could ever happen to me—or so I thought until Carter died.

  Up until the judge’s ruling, I had been secure in the knowledge that I was loved, not by my mother, but by Dodo and Naney, who were my real parents. While they were by my side I knew for sure that I was the center of their world. Never had a child been so cherished, loved, and adored.

  When I was separated from Dodo by the judge, part of me did die. Without Dodo at Auntie Ger’s, I felt like a lowly, miserable creature who had committed a crime, only I didn’t know what it was.

  Unexpectedly tiptoeing into this strange new world appeared the changeling, keeping its head up by treading water, wee paws slipping through the marshy meadow, a mouse not shaking the grass, desperately trying and failing to remain unnoticed, all the while dying and straining to please those around me, but most of all the queen herself, Auntie Ger.

  I started stuttering, and dreaded each school day, especially Lit class, when I would inevitably have to stand and stumble through a poem in front of everyone. I recently came across a Greenvale School report card. Below all the C’s and B’s was a handwritten note from my teacher, “She will succeed—eventually.” (See? Everything can turn out all right if you just hang in there!)

  I put on weight and hated myself. I was a hippo on an island, alone, floundering around, clutching at reeds so as not to slip into the hostile sea.

  What mattered beauty? What mattered perfection? They were the attributes gifted only to my mother and Aunt Thelma, which I would never achieve.

  Doubt about who I was spread into my veins. If I didn’t know, then how could Auntie Ger or anyone else? I longed to please and be accepted by her and her grown children, these strange new relatives I had not even known existed, and this desire for acceptance took hold of me with a grip that wouldn’t let go.

  This is a terrible flaw that you, Anderson, thank God, do not have. From birth, you have been cherished and adored. Even as an adult, the need to please others coursed through my veins. Pleasing a person flooded me with warmth, which made me feel successful, and momentarily safe. But it never lasted.

  Trying to please everyone all the time never works. It leads to hating oneself and then hating oneself even more when one later tries to assert one’s authority.

  Today, I am still tempted to be drawn into old patterns. Someone will ask me to do something, work on a painting for them or give an interview, and I have to force myself to pause and question: Do I really want to do this? But whether the answer is yes or no, at least I know the answer will be one that is true to my desires.

  It is stunning to think that the judge would take away the person you cared most about, the woman who’d raised you from the moment you were born. She was your mother certainly more than your biological mother ever was.

  To have gone through all that you did, just to keep Dodo by your side, only to have her removed so suddenly and thoughtlessly—it’s awful.

  I remember when my nanny, May McLinden, who had been with me from the time I was born, left. I was inconsolable and I was fifteen, old enough not to need her as I once had. With Dodo exiled from your life, you must have felt so alone, more than ever before. Was there anyone you could turn to for support?

  Dodo was banished, but I could still see Naney, and every night, promptly at 6:30 p.m., I was allowed to call her room at the Hotel Fourteen in Manhattan. Volunteer 5-6000. I’ll never forget that phone number.

  The judge had the power to send Dodo away, but he couldn’t stop me from talking to my grandmother, even though she had played the key role in the effort to turn me against my mother.

  That call was the lifeline that got me through the day. I knew she would always be there. Her voice leaped through the receiver as I held the phone close to my ear, “Hello, darling mine!” That is how she always greeted me.

  We’d chat about this and that, and I hated having to hang up when it was time to say good night. Occasionally she came out to stay at Old Westbury when Auntie Ger was there. Naney loved to gossip about parties she had attended with my Grandfather Morgan when he was an ambassador in Europe. She’d go on endlessly in Spanish-accented English, a steady stream of banter about royalty, dropping names that meant nothing to me and certainly bored Auntie Ger.

  I adored her and her visits, until one day, when I was fifteen and had met a boy named Geoffrey Jones. In love with him, I wanted to share my happiness with Naney, and told her that we planned to get married someday. But instead of being happy, she trembled with fury.

  “Listen to me, little one: you are a Vanderbilt and can never marry anyone with the name Jones.”

  I became hysterical. The intensity of my reaction startled and frightened her.

  She tried to calm me. “There, there, little one,” she whispered, quickly putting her arms around me. “What’s the matter? What’s upsetting you? There, there, don’t cry.”

  But it was too late. I never stopped loving her, but from that day on, it wasn’t the same between us. When I became an adult, I saw her less and less often, fearful that any disagreement between us would topple me off the tightrope on which I so gingerly kept a grip. To move forward, to not fall off and be destroyed, took all the energy I had.

  When Stan and Chris were born, Naney was ecstatic, and though I didn’t accompany them on their weekly visits to see her at the Hotel Fourteen, I encouraged their affection for her. She died in 1956. Her rambling final words were, “Did you get the ice cream for the babies?”

  It wasn’t until after her death that I learned she had reconciled with my mother at some point after the custody trial. My mother and Thelma were at Naney’s bedside when she died, and she left both of them substantial sums in her will, but she never mentioned my mother to me after the trial, not once.

  Geoff Jones was my first great love, but my first crush was for a boy named Johnny Delehanty. He was several years older than me, outgoing, at ease with himself, and divinely handsome as well. I was very shy then, if you can believe it. I literally would get weak in the knees every time I saw him.

  Once, when my school friends Betty Lewis and Cynthia Ellis stayed overnight at Auntie Ger’s, we sneaked out to meet Johnny and his chums, who picked us up past the
estate’s driveway and took us to Rothmann’s restaurant. Auntie Ger had a watchman named Sharkey who caught us on our way out, but he never said anything to her or anyone else. We never thought about the danger, or the horrendous position my aunt would have been in with my guardian, Surrogate Foley, had this been discovered.

  At Rothmann’s we sat in a banquette drinking ginger ale for half an hour or so—then Johnny drove us back and we sneaked back into the house and into our beds. I had endless fantasies of Johnny and me getting married and living in a cottage like the ones I could see from the car window when I was driven into New York in my aunt’s car. I would write Johnny’s name next to mine over and over again,

  “Delehanty. Gloria Delehanty. Mrs. John Bradley Delehanty. Mrs. John B. Delehanty.”

  His name was inexpressibly magical.

  He was killed in an automobile accident during his freshman year at Cornell. His was the first death of someone I had been close to, and the first funeral I ever attended. It was inconceivable that Johnny could die. Death didn’t exist, except as a word in a dictionary. It’s what happened to old people. It had nothing to do with him.

  I kept Johnny’s letters, which I still have, and a framed photograph of him hangs today in my studio. He looks so young, but at fifteen, he was so much older in my eyes. I grieved, but after a time he faded into the landscape—and with him, the reality of death.

  I’ve never heard you use the tightrope image before, but I understand what you mean. I think we are so alike in our desire to always move forward. It’s something I think about all the time. I don’t know that it’s the healthiest way to live, but it is absolutely at the core of what I believe I need to do. I remember learning years ago that sharks have to keep moving forward to stay alive; it’s the only way they can force water through their gills and breathe. Ever since, that is how I’ve imagined myself: a shark gliding through dark, silent seas.