Anderson Cooper Reveals Mom Gloria Vanderbilt Made Him A Crazy Offer

CNN host Anderson Cooper‘s Thursday appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert finds Cooper revealing a crazy but loving offer his late mother Gloria Vanderbilt made him.

Cooper claims his ‘kind of nutty’ late mother Gloria made him a bizarre offer when she was 85 years old. She offered to be his surrogate. Anderson recalls the conversation following his mom’s crazy offer.

“I finally said to her, I was like, ‘Mom, I love you, but even for you, that is just bats–t crazy. That is just nuts,'” Cooper, 54, shares.

“That is so weirdly oedipal on a whole new level.”

Anderson Cooper Calls His Mom ‘Kind Of Nutty’

Anderson goes on to joke with Colbert that had such a thing actually occurred the child would’ve been “on the cover of the New York Post for the rest of its life.” He also claims that Gloria Vanderbilt lovingly continued to offer her services for quite some time despite her advancing age and relationship with him. This offer went on for at least two years, according to Page Six.

“Then one day, I get a thing in the mail that my mom has sent me … and it’s a newspaper clipping and it’s a photograph, the headline is, ‘Grandmother Bears Child for Son,’ and it’s some woman, I think in Italy, who was like 65 or something or 70,” Cooper explained. “And it’s a photo of her in the labor room in the stirrups.

Cooper describes the photo of the older woman in the delivery room, with her son and his husband standing there ‘ready to catch.’ So he states, What does my mom do? She circles it and writes in a note, ‘See!”

It is an amusing story that Anderson Cooper shares about his late mother, Gloria Vanderbilt. However, Anderson welcomed his child via surrogate in April 2020, one year after his mom Gloria’s death. Cooper is co-parenting Wyatt with his former partner of 10 years, Benjamin Maisani.

Sadly Gloria Vanderbilt did not get to meet her grandchild. Despite Cooper’s fond memory of his mother, things were not always good between the TV host and his wealthy mother.

Money Is Not Everything

For several years before her death, Cooper publicly claimed that he would not be inheriting a dime of his mother’s fortune. Not exactly sure what Vanderbilt’s net worth was at the time, it was estimated to be around $200 million.

Anderson Cooper claims that his branch of the Vanderbilt dynasty no longer considers inherited money anything but a “curse” that drags kids down and wastes adult lives.

He reveals he grew up with enough financial cushion to concentrate on the career instead of simply taking whichever job would pay the rent. As a result, he was able to build his own success and wealth.

However, following the death of Gloria Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper must have changed his mind about his mother’s money.

It was big news that Cooper inherited the Vanderbilt estate. However, Cooper was less surprised and told Howard Stern in a previous interview; he’d been helping his mother financially anyway.

“Look, yes, I guess I was left a certain amount of money,” Cooper said. “I put into it a lot more than [I received]. I’ve been helping my mom for a long time.”

When Stern pressed for details on how Cooper helped Vanderbilt, he wouldn’t specify.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cooper said. “It really doesn’t matter. I paid my mom back for everything over the course of my life. I paid her back for my college.”

In the end, the money doesn’t matter; it is the time that Anderson Cooper spent with his mom that means more than anything else to him.