Your father once said to me, “As time passes, and we grow older, I’m going to love you even more than I do now.” That was a new and interesting concept to me, that what we had was enough for him, and would get even better as time went on. It’s only a very balanced mind that can think in those terms.
I was thrilled when he said it, but it was alien to me. I’d never thought of the future in that way.
If only I had known then what I now know. I would have sat down and thought about it, seen the rage for what it was. I was born with an appetite for life, a romantic readiness, and I’ve rushed to greet life with an open heart. I still have it. It is the key to everything. Because of this, no matter how difficult some of my experiences have been, they have not hardened me or made me tough.
If you have that rage to live, don’t do something silly and mess up what you already have because you crave more. There is no amount of “more” that will ever satisfy. Once you are aware of this, once you are cognizant of the rage, then perhaps you can see when it leads you astray, taking over your thoughts, propelling you into a course of action you may regret.
When I am unhappy or dissatisfied, I recall what Virgil wrote, “Perhaps some day it will be pleasant to remember even this.”
It gives pause, doesn’t it?
Whenever you’re restless or miserable, if you can imagine that at some point you may look back on that moment fondly, it may make the present more bearable. Even what appears to be a terrible problem may in the future turn out to be a positive change. You just never know.
For all its negative aspects, this restless spirit can, at times, be a blessing. It is the appetite for life that continues to keep one young and alive. It is the key to inspiration that fuels imagination and creativity.
“Never satisfied!” Walter Matthau once described me to his wife, Carol. It was not meant as a compliment. But I take it as one. There is so much to be thankful for, and I am even thankful for my restless spirit.
Four
My father, Wyatt Cooper, was born on a farm in Quitman, Mississippi, in 1927. He attended high school in New Orleans while his mother worked at a factory during World War II, and he eventually enrolled at UCLA, where he majored in theater.
He worked as an actor onstage and on television, and then as a screenwriter. In 1961 he met my mother at a dinner party at the home of a mutual friend. They married in 1963. My brother, Carter, was born two years later, and I arrived two years after that. By then my father was mostly writing magazine articles, one of which led to a book called Families: A Memoir and Celebration, about his childhood in Mississippi and his belief in the importance of family. He died while undergoing heart bypass surgery in 1978.
Sidney and I had been together for seven years the evening we went to the actress Leueen MacGrath’s house on Sixty-Second Street for a small dinner party. We were the first to arrive and were sitting in her living room talking in front of the fireplace when in walked a tall, knockout-handsome man with the bluest, most piercing eyes I had ever seen or could imagine.
We looked at each other, and that was it. Call it the shock of recognition or whatever you will, but the bond was formed in that instant. And that, Anderson, is how I met Wyatt Cooper.
He had recently co-starred with Uta Hagen in Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, and was working in Hollywood with Peter Glenville, on a play Wyatt had written called How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy Now, Mr. Death? Lee Strasberg had directed a production of it at the Actors Studio in New York, and Glenville optioned it for the theater.
After that first meeting, I didn’t know why or how, only that, hand in hand, we had stumbled into a room and locked the door behind us.
You both came from such different worlds and I like that I am a combination of both of them. The first time I went to a Cooper family reunion it was the summer after I graduated college, the summer after Carter died. He and I hadn’t kept in touch with our father’s siblings as much as we should have, and once I finished school, I decided to reconnect with them.
The reunion was held at a state park near Quitman, and three of my dad’s sisters and one of his brothers attended. I met dozens of cousins of all ages, and a great aunt as well. It reminded me of a passage my father wrote in his book about the family reunions he attended as a child:
To see all those colorful people of such variety gathered in holiday mood, with their jokes and their laughter and their familiarity with each other, was as exciting a thing as I knew. It was better than Christmas. They were my kin. We were of the same blood and bone. I felt related. They belonged to me, and we had claims on one another. We watched each other growing up or growing old, and we felt ourselves to be a part of some timeless process, a process the rules of which applied equally to us all.
It was the first time I had been with his family as an adult, and the thing that struck me most was seeing that I shared not just a physical resemblance with some of them, but similar gestures and expressions. To discover that the way I laugh or the way I brush my hand through my hair is something hard-wired in my brain, something that other Coopers had done before me and would do long after I was gone, was powerful, and made me feel connected to both the past and the future. It was a feeling I had never had before, and it has stayed with me to this day.
I wish you had been able to feel that with people in your family: the bonds that exist between generations, links in an invisible chain through space and time.
I, too, wish that I had experienced those kinds of bonds.
Before we married, your father took me to Mississippi to meet his mother and his sisters and brothers. I was overwhelmed. Although he had spoken in detail about his family and what it was like to have parents and siblings, the reality of it came as a shock, and I am not sure I ever got used to it.
Before we married, he said to me, “Lots of happiness ahead for you, little one,” and he was right.
We were married in Washington, DC, by a justice of the peace on December 24, and the following day had a party in New York, at 10 Gracie Square, to celebrate. We didn’t go on a honeymoon, because we were looking at houses, and when we found the one, on Sixty-Seventh Street, we knew that was where we would live.
Your father had a plan for the life that we were going to have together, but as I told you, until I met him, it had never occurred to me that long-term plans were an option. With him, the pieces of the puzzle started coming together. I was afraid, but eager to reach out and make a grab for what I was seeking.
It happened quickly, our new life: meeting his enormous family, moving to the new house, your brother Carter born, then you two years after.
I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, but before I was pregnant with Carter, I’d been pregnant with another child but had a miscarriage in my third month. Everything had been moving along so smoothly—no morning sickness, no signs that anything was amiss. I was the happiest woman in the world as Wyatt and I started making plans for life with our baby-to-be.
Oona Chaplin was so thrilled about our news that she sent us a layette of infant clothes, including a yellow wool sweater she had knitted, to welcome our baby. She selected yellow because, at the time, there was no way to test to see if the child was a boy or a girl.
Soon after her gift arrived, it happened. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, I felt contractions as if I were in labor and I found myself hemorrhaging. I was carried on a stretcher down the long stairs of our house and into an ambulance. Nothing could be done, and we lost our baby.
It seemed to take much longer than it actually did to recover, mainly because I agonized that it might be my last chance to have a child with your father. He was by my side throughout the depression I sank into, and his presence made all the difference. Sooner than we could have hoped, I was pregnant again, this time with Carter.
We took joy in the months of expectant happiness and made no plans for nurseries or layettes until the birth drew near. When Carter was born, we were ecstatic and quickly dec
ided we wanted him to have a sibling.
I was forty-two by then, a difficult age to conceive, so I consulted a doctor, who prescribed a new drug called Pergonal, which was illegal in the United States at the time but available in Italy.
We contacted a friend in Rome, who bought it for me, and I flew to meet him at Charlie and Oona Chaplin’s house in Switzerland. Two days later I was on my way back to New York, wearing a muumuu, with Pergonal taped around my waist. I would have been arrested if it had been discovered by Customs, but wild horses couldn’t have stopped me.
Nine months later, there you were, Anderson Hays Cooper!
I know you always wanted a daughter, and each time you were pregnant you thought it was going to be a girl. It used to bother me to hear you say that, but I understand why you felt that way. If you’d had a daughter you believe you would have understood her more; it’s the same reason that Daddy wanted sons.
One morning several years ago, I woke up and noticed a lump under my eye. When I leaned my head back it disappeared, but whenever I leaned forward, there it was: a small bump under my left eye.
I visited a dermatologist, and he told me it was a fatty deposit and would require a cosmetic procedure to remove. I called you to ask about the surgery, and you couldn’t have been more excited. It wasn’t that you were happy I had this problem, but you were glad that you had the solution.
“I know just whom to call,” you said.
Had I asked for advice on paying my taxes or buying a car, you wouldn’t have had any suggestions, but this was something you could guide me on.
“I’ve made an appointment for you tomorrow. I’ll come along,” you said when you called back minutes later.
Modern and hushed, the doctor’s office felt more like a changing room at a Giorgio Armani boutique.
“Your mother and I have worked together for years,” the surgeon said when we were ushered in to see him.
I told him why I had come.
“Well, yes, there is that,” he said, his tone indicating that there was other work that might be done. He handed me a mirror and asked me, “What do you see?”
Other than the small bump under my eye, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be looking at, so I asked him to tell me what he saw. It turned out there were several things I could have adjusted about my forty-something face, and the odd bump I’d come about would require a far more complex procedure than I was ready to undertake.
“I think I’ll just live with it,” I told you later in the cab as we headed back to your apartment.
“Well, there’s no rush,” you said. “No don’t need to worry about ‘fatal beauty’ just yet.” I sensed a hint of disappointment in your voice. It wasn’t that you wanted me to have plastic surgery—at least I hope you didn’t—but you seemed disappointed that this opportunity for us to bond had ended.
If you’d had a daughter, you believe there would have been more of these moments. You think you would have known just how to talk to her and be a mother to her. I’m not sure that is really true. I suspect you would still have felt many of the same insecurities.
It is true that I’ve always believed if I had a daughter we would have bonded from the moment of her birth. I would have guided her to value and respect herself, confiding in her, sorting out with her the details of our lives.
Is this a fantasy? My friends who have daughters say that girls are much more difficult than boys, especially during their middle teen years. I listen, mesmerized, but this idea is so ingrained within me, I am not sure I believe them.
It was through your father’s example that I learned what it could be like to be the parent I always yearned to be. Because of him, the concept of planning a life, a family, became real to me.
But it all fell apart when he died. Is loss easier to bear when you know it well? Perhaps. No longer an adversary, it becomes a friend.
I’ve often thought of loss as a kind of language. Once learned, it’s never forgotten. I learned the language of loss when I was ten, and still know it to this day. There have been times when I wished I had a scar or a mark, a visible sign of the pain I still feel over Daddy’s death and Carter’s. It would be easier, in a way, if people knew without my having to say anything that I am not whole, that part of me died long ago.
Your father once told me that in the small town of Quitman, where he grew up, there were frequent funerals, which the whole town attended. Finally, his mom told him he would have to stop going for a while because it was getting him too upset. That death was such a part of his early life was a revelation to me.
He once said to me, “I don’t think we will live to be very old.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. When he died at fifty, then I understood. Had I also died then it would have been another person who died, a person your father knew, his wife. Someone very different from the person I am today. If your father and I met now, would he regard me as a stranger? Would he like me, much less love me?
He had his first heart attack in 1976, then the next year he had another, more serious one. He was placed in intensive care.
When a patient was very ill, the hospital relaxed its rules and allowed children in to visit. We made plans to spend Christmas Day with him and bought a tape recorder to create a memory of our conversation. The presents were wrapped and ready to go, but on Christmas Eve he had another heart attack and was moved into a unit with dying patients.
In the days that followed, I was permitted to be by his side only briefly. Much of the time, he was unaware I was there as he gasped for breath.
One day he seemed to suddenly focus on me and said, “This was not part of my plan.”
“But you’re not going to die!” I shouted back.
He looked startled, as if I knew something he didn’t.
“I’m not?” he asked.
“No. You’re not.” And it was true. I believed it.
The next night, January 5, the doctors decided to operate.
I followed as they wheeled him down the hall on a gurney to surgery. He appeared as a man taken from a crucifixion: his body limp, stuck with needles, face unrecognizable, covered with breathing equipment.
I walked by his side, leaning in close, telling him I loved him. He didn’t know me.
During the surgery, I waited in a small private room with several friends and your father’s sister Marie and her daughter, Beth.
Angel, the nurse on the floor, put her head in the doorway as she departed her shift. “Be brave,” she said.
Hours later we heard footsteps coming down the dark, empty, silent hall. It was nearly midnight. “We did the best we could—”
I went home to wake you and Carter. “Daddy’s dead,” I said.
I remember you sitting on the bed saying that while I looked up at you and Carter. I was sleeping on the floor nearby.
That moment, those two words, reset the clock of our lives. I think back to the person I was at eight or nine, the boy who had a mother, a father, a brother, a nanny he loved; the boy who was funny and not afraid to curl up in his father’s lap and show affection and vulnerability.
I think back to that person and know I am a fraction of who I once was, who I was meant to be. As much as I want to break out and laugh the way I once did, feel joy the way I used to, I can’t, not fully, not with the abandon that child with a father once knew.
When he died, the thought of him not being in our lives was something I couldn’t comprehend. It wasn’t just that I was ten years old and didn’t understand the finality of death. He loomed so large in all our lives, he so defined our family, that I couldn’t imagine us without him.
Many years later I was talking to my former nanny, May McLinden, about Daddy’s death. She remembered that the day after the funeral, I said to her, “It will be okay,” and she realized I didn’t comprehend what had happened.
“Nothing was ever okay again,” she said to me softly, all those years later, and I saw that she was crying.
The
re are times even now when dark thoughts take over. Instead of fighting or pushing them away, I pursue each to its final destination. Entering the tunnel, I know I will circle back, as always, to the place I started from; wishing it had been me who died instead of your father. How much better he would have been at guiding you and Carter, far better than I could ever be.
Carter died at twenty-three. He and his girlfriend had recently separated. When I tried to communicate with him about the breakup, he withdrew, cut me out. If your father had been there, it would not have happened as it did. He understood your every mood and would have had the power to get you both through anything that was happening in your young lives.
When your father and I went together to parent-teacher meetings at your school, I would look around at the other mothers and marvel at how much better equipped they were to be mothers than I could ever be, how much more suited to be wives to my beloved husband.
These were thoughts I never voiced, but they were there, hidden, so painful I tried to block them, focus on being a happy wife and mother, believe that everything was going to turn out all right.
But it didn’t.
It was your father who died when it should have been me.
In my deepest heart I know this to be true. I knew this then and I know it now. I have known it since it happened, and I will know it till the day I die: a lifelong sentence with no reprieve.
I hope you know that I do not feel this way.
If things had been different and you died and Daddy lived, there is no telling what would have happened to Carter and me. Who knows the direction our lives would have taken?
What I do know is that I’ve learned things from you that I never could have from anyone else. You opened my mind early on to the idea that I could achieve anything I wanted if I were willing to work relentlessly for it. It was by watching you that I began to imagine what my own life could become, and I love the life I have now. I am this person because of all that happened, the good as well as the bad. I am this person because you are my mother and you lived and Daddy did not.
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