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Biography
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 Anderson
Hays Cooper, anchor and reporter for
CNN, was born June 3, 1967, to Wyatt Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt
Cooper. He was his father's second son and his mother's fourth.
Family
Growing up Vanderbilt
Father's Death
Yale
Brother's Death
Early Career - Channel One
ABC
The Mole
CNN
The Cooper Brand
of Journalism
Notable news coverage
Family
Cooper's father, Wyatt, was a writer and screenwriter who grew up in
Mississippi. A brief stint as an actor led him to screenwriting. In
1975, Wyatt Cooper wrote Families: A
Memoir and a Celebration, a depiction of growing up in
Mississippi and his values as a southern boy, which includes vignettes
of life with his wife and two sons. Cooper tells New York
Magazine's Jonathan Van Meter that he considers his father’s
only book as “sort of a letter from him to me and sort of a guide on
. . . how he would
have wanted me to live my life and the choices he would have wanted me
to make.”
Cooper's mother,
Gloria, was a famous heiress and socialite who
became a successful artist and
designer; she is perhaps more well-known now for her eponymous line of
bluejeans and the books she has written about various stages of her
life. In her childhood, she was famous as the subject of a custody
battle between her frivolous mother and her stern society aunt. The
suit was
more over custody of Gloria's fortune than over herself, and after her
aunt
won the suit, she left Gloria's care to the household help.
Gloria Vanderbilt has had a rather robust and exciting life, not all of
it pleasant. She documented her love life in her book, It Seemed Important at the Time: a Romance
Memoir. Wyatt was Gloria's fourth (and, to date, last) husband.
She had two boys by her second
husband, symphony conductor Leopold Stokowski, Stan and Chris, who were
seventeen and fifteen when Anderson was born. Wyatt and Gloria also had
an older boy, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, born two years before Anderson.
Growing up Vanderbilt
 The Coopers did what they could to
create a normal life for their boys.
But when father collaborates with Truman Capote on screenplays
and mother hosts Andy Warhol and Charlie Chaplin at home,
it can hardly be called an average childhood. Gloria counted among
her circle of friends notables such as Nancy Reagan, Oona Chaplin, and
various luminaries from the film industry. The Coopers entertained
at their home, hosting events that the boys routinely attended.
Both boys attended Dalton, a prestigious private school in New York
City.
 Anderson's
childhood featured events such as appearing on the Tonight Show with
his mother and pretending to be a child bear tamer on What's My Line -
hardly routine occurences in most children's lives. As he later would
tell
CBS's The Early Show, “I met
Charlie Chaplin when I was a little kid
and Truman Capote used
to be at the house a lot. I just thought they were odd characters. I
didn't know exactly who they were.” Richard Grayson recounts a humorous
encounter between eleven-year-old Anderson and Truman Capote here
(scroll to the third story).
The Cooper boys were twelve and fourteen when Gloria became newly
famous as the designer and public face fronting the first line of
designer jeans. Making commercials for her designer line of clothing
and housewares made her recognizable on the streets again, and the boys
made a game out of counting the number of Vanderbilt swan logos they
could see on people's posteriors.
Father's Death
 Wyatt Cooper died of a series of heart attacks
when he was fifty and
Anderson was only ten. Losing his father affected him enormously. “The
day my father died, my life restarted,” he writes in his memoir, Dispatches from the Edge. He would
go on to tell Larry King, “It changes everything. For me, the person I
was disappeared when I was
ten. I mean the person that I was, I feel like, you know, it was like
the new year zero. My life, you know, it seemed like the slate was
wiped clean and I had to figure out how to survive and how to be my own
person.”
Having a source of stability removed
at
such an early
age always alters the path of a child's life. In Anderson's case, it
focused his attention on strength and survivability and created in him
a
need to be
as independent as possible. “Loss,” he tells Jonathan van Meter in New
York Magazine, “is a theme that I think a lot about, and it’s
something in my work that I dwell on. I think when you experience any
kind of loss, especially the kind I did, you have questions about
survival: Why do some people thrive in situations that others can’t
tolerate? Would I be able to survive and get on in the world on my own?”
This even led him to decide - at the age of ten! - that he needed a
job. He writes about his childhood modeling career in a column for Details magazine,
reproduced at the CNN website here.
He modeled for the Ford Agency from the age of eleven to thirteen for
clients such as Macy's and Ralph Lauren, only quitting when a
photographer made an
improper proposition.
 He finished his high school requirements
a
semester early, and his mother allowed him to take a months-long trip
to Africa
when
he was seventeen - alone. This was also inspired by his desire to test
his own independence; while in Africa, he caught malaria and was
briefly hospitalized in Kenya, only informing his mother once he was
safely home. His fascination for the continent, though, remains
unabated to this day, as evidenced by his frequent
trips to report from the Congo or Niger.
Yale
Cooper attended Yale University, graduating in '89. He majored in
political science, and was a member of the secretive Manuscript society, but not, as is
often erroneously
reported, of Skull and Bones.
He was on the rowing crew as coxswain, but took no interest in
journalism during his college years.
Indeed, during the summers following his sophomore and junior years, he
interned, as was revealed in September 2006 by Radar Online, at the CIA, and
considered pursuing
a career in either intelligence or diplomacy. But his second tour at
the CIA was curtailed by his brother's shocking death.
He claims that his senior year passed in a haze and he remembers little
about it to this day.
Brother's Death
 On July 22, 1988, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper
jumped to his death from the
balcony of his mother's fourteenth floor apartment. Cooper writes
movingly of this in an article first published in Details Magazine and reproduced
here at the CNN website.
Whether he was in a semi-sleepwalking state or under the influence of a
bad combination of prescription medication (as his mother has
theorized),
Carter's intentions remain
unclear today. But his death, so random and seemingly pointless,
became a media circus that surrounded the two remaining Coopers.
Paparazzi swarmed the funeral, which
was attended by notables such as Vanderbilt friend Nancy Reagan. Cooper
considered postponing his senior year at Yale to provide emotional
support
for his mother, but she insisted that he return and graduate with his
class.
Carter's death and Anderson's inability to understand it form one of
the
major themes in Cooper's 2006 memoir, Dispatches
from the Edge. He writes, “I thought we had a silent agreement,
that we would both just get through our childhoods and meet up as
adults on the other side. I imagined one day we would be friends,
allies, brothers laughing about our past fights. I'm not sure why he
didn't keep his end of the bargain. Maybe he never knew about our
silent pact. Maybe it was all in my head.”
Early Career - Channel One
After college, Cooper decided to try to break into journalism and
applied at ABC News, but was unable to get even “a job answering
phones”,
which, he is fond of remarking, “shows the value of a Yale education.”
 He was picked up instead by Channel One, a small
organization that
produces news shows for high schools, as a fact-checker. He wanted to
be a
reporter, but thinking they would turn him down if he applied for such
a position, he instead quit and went freelance to various troublespots
hoping to break in to the news business that way. With a fake press
pass made by a friend
with a Macintosh, he managed to make contact with the students
rebelling against the Burmese government and shoot their story, which
he sold to Channel One.
Cooper spent a year in Vietnam, studying Vietnamese, and was then
rehired
by Channel One as a reporter. For Channel One, he covered stories in
Sarajevo, Somalia and Rwanda, traveling alone with his videocamera,
sleeping on rooftops and looking down on the likes of Dan Rather, and
“dreaming of someday having at least a car,” he would later tell David
Letterman.
ABC
 In 1995, Cooper was finally hired by ABC News as their
youngest-ever correspondent (he was twenty-eight at the time),
eventually
becoming one of the many anchors on the overnight news broadcast World
News Now. Broadcast live in the wee hours of the morning, WNN
was
willfully irreverent - a precursor to the comedic news shows now
playing
on Comedy
Central - and featured a staff accordion player and its own
theme song,
the World
News Polka. Billed as News
for Insomniacs, WNN was where Cooper honed
his
now-trademark wit.
The overnight grind was wearing, and Cooper apparently became
disenchanted with the news business, telling Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert
that his
last news story for ABC was “interviewing strippers about a lapdance
ordinance”, so when ABC offered him a job hosting a new reality show,
he took it - a move into entertainment that most critics claimed was
the
death knell to his career in journalism.
The Mole
 The Mole is often called the most
intelligent of the
'Reality Show' genre, and its first two seasons were hosted by Anderson
Cooper as the omniscient, slightly sinister coordinator of events. Ten
players take part in unique challenges that can earn money for the
communal
pot, and like other shows, one is eliminated periodically until only
one remains to claim the prize. The play is a complex iterative form
of the Prisoner's Dilemma in game theory; players have to
cooperate to complete the challenges successfully, yet one player - the
Mole - is
working for the producers to sabotage the rest. The
other players have to attempt to discover which of their “colleagues'
is working against the team.
After the second season, The Mole
reformatted into Celebrity Mole
and the challenges were, purists say,
'dumbed down' considerably. The show lost some of its smarts.
After 9/11, Cooper was eager to get back to the news, and in December
2001, he was hired by CNN, where he remains today.
CNN
 Cooper began as weekend anchor for CNN and was then
moved to early
mornings, co-anchoring with Paula Zahn. The pair was moved to a 7 - 9
PM
slot, and then the two-hour block was broken into two one-hour blocks
in 2003, creating Paula Zahn Now
at 8 PM and Anderson Cooper 360 (or
AC 360, as
it
is often abbreviated) at 7 PM.
From this platform, Cooper has gone to cover
stories as far ranging as the tsunami in Asia and the
Pope's funeral in
Italy. Anchoring from location has become a bit of a specialty, with AC360 setting
up live remotes from a forward artillery battery during the 2006
Israel/Lebanon conflict and more recently transmitting live from the
streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Bangkok, Thailand for the show's Planet in Peril series.
 Hurricane Katrina was something of an epiphany for
Cooper; the
desperation he saw among the hurricane victims was of the type he was
more accustomed to seeing in
third-world nations, and it proved a turning point in his career.
Becoming an on-air advocate for the disadvantaged and dispossessed, he
touched a chord in many viewers, who felt his outrage matched their
own, and they responded appropriately. CNN recognized a moment and
moved AC 360 to a two-hour
slot at 10 PM, where it airs today.
In May 2006, Cooper's memoir, Dispatches
from the Edge, was published. In it, he weaves the threads
of stories he has covered - the famine in Niger, the tsunami in
Asia, Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq - with his own personal
losses and
confronts how they influenced and motivated him. Dispatches quickly climbed to the
top spot on the New York Times best-sellers list and will be released
in paperback in May 2007.
The Cooper brand of journalism
Cooper often remarks that he doesn't feel his personal opinions have
any place in his coverage of news events; in fact, he is quite
opinionated about the place and purpose of opinions. As he tells
colleague Larry King, “I believe very much in being objective. I don't
believe in wearing my
politics on my sleeve. I don't take sides. I know it's a popular thing
in cable news these days to take sides. I just don't do it; nor will I
ever do it. I think it's much more interesting -- viewers are smart
enough to make up their own minds. I don't need -- they don't need, you
know, an overpaid, blow-dried anchor like me to be telling them what to
think or how to think.”
He is not a fan of discussions where the “sides” talk over one another
and try to shout one another down. Guests who bob and weave trying to
avoid a question they don't want to answer, or who spew prepared
talking points in answer to unrelated questions may find the same
question put to them again and again until they are forced to answer or
leave their unwillingness to answer evident to all. One demonstration
of his tenacity for answers came after Hurricane Katrina, when he had
correspondents stake out a New Orleans
restaurant in an attempt to get elusive Mayor Nagin to
appear, after he had cancelled a scheduled appearance only minutes
before airtime once too often.
Cooper continues to champion the dispossessed throughout the world,
calling attention to the otherwise-unnoticed suffering of the powerless
victims of the world's most horrible catastrophes - stories to which
most American viewers are sadly indifferent. He professes not to know
whether or not he can actually make a difference, but finds value in
simply being a witness. That people can simply vanish without leaving a
trace is, he has said, one of the saddest things he can imagine.
Coming soon -
Newsography
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