The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (16 page)

Even now, I can’t stop changing things around me. I just hung mirrors on one entire wall of my bedroom. I loved the look at first. It had a magical
Alice Through the Looking-Glass
ambience.

“Perfect,” I thought.

Now it just seems like a wall of mirrors.

The truth is, and I haven’t told you this yet, but I’m considering moving from my apartment. I just heard that the house on Washington Mews in Greenwich Village where Auntie Ger lived is available. Or perhaps I might move into the penthouse apartment at the top of the building I live in now. It has a terrace, and you can see the river. What do you think?

M
om, you are going to be ninety-two soon, and I really don’t think moving apartments is a wise idea. You know as well as I do what’s going to happen: You’ll move into a new apartment and it will satisfy you for a few months, but then the restlessness will return.

Don’t worry
, I just sneaked that in to shake you up a bit. I know now that moving won’t solve the problem, but the impulse is still there.

It’s true that I constantly need new stimulation, and I know it is exhausting for everyone around me. Impatience is my biggest weakness. My biggest strength: the ability to harness this weakness.

Well, that last sentence isn’t really true. It just sounded good on the page.

I’m still very impatient. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. I become enthusiastic, and if something sounds like a great idea, I move on it without considering the long-term ramifications. I plunge forward, without giving it another thought.

I’m working on trying not to do that, but it’s hard. I’ve always relied on instinct, on my impulses. I’ve been told psychologists consider that a great sign of immaturity, but to me it’s a kind of leap of faith.

I
t’s interesting that you recognize your impulsiveness. I don’t think you used to. I have always been aware of it, and as you said, it is exhausting for those around you. You get an idea in your head, and then you’re suddenly sending out e-mails about it. You don’t really think it through. You decide to have a dinner for a few friends at your apartment, and it quickly grows into a party for thirty people whom you then need to entertain at my house because the layout is more convenient. Or you visit a friend in Santa Fe and fall in love
with the place and decide you are going to move there, but you haven’t really thought through the reality of living in a new city where you know only one other person.

More often than not, I have to be the voice of reason, advising you to slow down or rethink something. It is not very enjoyable being Thomas Cromwell to your Henry VIII. Henry had all the fun, and Cromwell ended up declared a heretic and beheaded, though I do hope to avoid that fate.

Despite our differences, I am just now realizing how much like you I am. It has never really occurred to me before. Though I plan a lot, I do think I am naturally impulsive. It is only by watching you over the years that I have learned to suppress that impulsiveness. I force myself to wait and plan. I run through a range of scenarios and options in my head before I act, and I rarely discuss my ideas with others. I don’t want the intrusion of their advice interrupting my thoughts. When I bought the house I live in now, I agonized about it for weeks, silently making financial projections and trying to imagine where I would be in my life and career many years from now.

When Carter was little and couldn’t sleep because he was worried about something, Daddy used to say, “Carter, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.”

I don’t think that is something you or I do very well. Even
now you’re constantly rearranging, redecorating: painting floors, laying down new carpets, moving artwork. It never stops.

Your restlessness was always frustrating to me, but I now see just how impatient I am as well. To others, a room looks fine, but I notice a cable slightly visible behind a speaker, and it becomes all I see. Or I paint a room and it seems all right at first, but after a few weeks want to repaint it. I’m always looking to move on to something new.

I used to have cleaning frenzies as a child. When I felt things were out of control, I would seek to create order over what I could, vacuuming and dusting, rearranging and throwing things away.

Shortly after I told you that your impulsiveness is exhausting, a friend of mine said to me, “It’s exhausting being around you.” I have to admit that he is right. Even I get tired of the constant churning and planning, the inability to allow myself to simply enjoy, enjoy, enjoy.

With aging
you gain perspective, as if looking through a telescope. Your eye focuses and sees things you never noticed before, or never wanted to. I now see so many flaws in myself, things I wish I had done differently.

Looking back on it now, I see how much Sidney loved me, big time. No one in the world did more for me than he did, showering me with love and supporting my career, and yet I was never satisfied.

Toward the end of the relationship, he would say to me, “You’re not giving me all of yourself.”

Sadly, it was true. After discovering that Leopold was not the person I thought he was, I edited myself in future relationships, always holding something back.

Shortly before he died in 2014, I met with Sidney briefly and was able to tell him how much he meant to me, how much I loved him. It freed me from the tormenting guilt over our split that I’d been agonizing over for years.

When Sidney and I separated, Richard Avedon said to me, “I don’t know if the kind of happiness you’re looking for exists anywhere.”

It startled me then, reminding me of the pain I had caused, the trail of broken hearts that stretched behind me as I’d heedlessly wandered in the forest. It doesn’t startle me now. It contains a truth I have only come to understand with time.

Avedon was right: the kind of happiness I was looking for didn’t exist. It was what Sontag wrote of, “The inescapable longing for something you never had.”

W
ould it have made a difference if you had understood that at the time? So often, I can comprehend something rationally and intellectually, but it doesn’t change the way I feel emotionally, no matter how much I wish it did. Would it have lessened your restlessness, your inability to be satisfied, if you had recognized it for what it was?

I like to think so
, but I’m not sure. If you can see your patterns of behavior, and you can understand the motivations behind your actions or emotions, it can help tremendously. It doesn’t mean I would not have been restless or dissatisfied, of course, but I might not have acted on those impulses in the way I did.

I’ve always had passion, what John O’Hara called a “rage to live.” Yet part of me craved stability, which is incompatible with that rage.

At the start of my acting career, I read for the part of Carol Cutrere in Tennessee Williams’s
Orpheus Descending.
At one point she says, “I want to be seen, heard, felt!”

That’s what I wanted, too.

When you feel you have so much to give and so much passion inside you, there is only one thing to do, and that’s go out and find it, fulfill it. If you have that rage to live, nothing is
going to stop you from trying to satisfy it, and each time you fall in love anew or achieve a creative goal, you tell yourself, “This is it! This is what I’ve been looking for!” But then you soon start to think, “It’s not enough, I want more. I want perfection!”

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.

Y
ou 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:

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 decided 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?