Anderson Cooper Told Howard Stern No Money From Mom Gloria Vanderbilt

Anderson Cooper (photo by dbking via Wikimedia Commons)

CNN newsman and Kathy Griffin New Year’s foil Anderson Cooper is making a movie about his mother, fashion legend and Vanderbilt heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. Through her own entrepreneurial accomplishments and a very good start life, Gloria Vanderbilt amassed a fortune somewhere near a quarter billion dollars. But Cooper told King of All Media Howard Stern in 2014 that he won’t get any of it. His mother told him there would be no inheritance, perhaps as a motivational tool. “There’s no trust fund,” Anderson told the inquisitive Stern, saying that the uncertainty this created was a driver of his ambition.

The glamorous Gloria’s story — Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt & Anderson Cooper — will be shown on HBO in April. It’s a heck of a story — a sort of combination of Citizen Kane and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. In other words a reality show that scans like fantasy — and sometimes like nightmare. Vanderbilt, 91, was married four times, not always to nice men, and saw her son Carter kill himself at age 23. But then on the flip side Frank Sinatra, Errol Flynn, Roald Dahl and Sidney Lumet (her third husband) were among Vanderbilt’s romantic partners. And she managed to lucratively place her name on the behinds of millions of women. None of that loot has fallen into Cooper’s lap, but he’s doing just fine. He inherited much of the Vanderbilt style — and made his own way.