Gloria Vanderbilt was willing to do whatever it took to have grandbabies — including carrying them herself.
During an appearance on “The Howard Stern Show” Tuesday, Anderson Cooper detailed his late mother’s “bats—t crazy” idea to be his surrogate at age 85.
“This is like eight years before I decided to have a child,” Cooper, 56, told Stern. “But my mom really wanted me to have a kid, and she called me up one time and she was like, ‘Honey, there’s something I really need to talk to you about.'”
Without having any idea about what was to come, the “Anderson Cooper 360” host went over to Vanderbilt’s house to see what was wrong.
“She was like, ‘Well, the most amazing thing happened,'” he recalled. “‘I went to the gynecologist the other day,’ — preface this, is that my mom was 85 at the time — ‘and she said the most amazing thing, she told me ‘I could still bear a child.'”
“And with my mom, you couldn’t have a reaction, you had to be supportive,” he explained, noting that he had perfected his poker face over the years as a reporter.
Instead of revealing his true inner feelings, Cooper simply told his mother that the discovery was “amazing.”
“And then I’m immediately thinking, ‘How do I stop my mom from bearing a child?’ Which is a thought I’m sure we’ve all had,” he joked.
Cooper, who thought his mother was talking about having her own child, then tried to calmly explain to her that welcoming a child well into your 80s might not be the best decision. However, his mom immediately cut him off to share her actual idea.
“And finally she said, ‘I’m not thinking of baring a child myself,'” Cooper recalled. “She said, ‘You know you can get an egg anywhere nowadays?'”
“She said, ‘What I was thinking is you get an egg and fertilize it with your sperm and I will carry your child.'”
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Cooper, who was understandably caught off guard, told his mom that he loved her but was quick to point out that it was a “bats—t crazy” idea.
This isn’t the first time that the longtime journalist has spoken about his “nutty” mother’s strange idea.
During an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in September 2021, Cooper revealed that his mom kept offering her services years after he first turned her down.
“Then, fast-forward two years later, 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.
“She’s in the delivery room with her legs in the thing, and her son and his husband are right there, ready to catch,” Cooper continued, recreating the photograph. “And my mom has circled it and written in a note, ‘See!’”
Despite Vanderbilt’s determination to bear her son’s children, Cooper and his former partner Benjamin Maisani welcomed two sons via surrogate — Wyatt, 3, in 2020, and Sebastian, 1, in 2022.
While his mother unfortunately died in 2019 and did not get to meet either of her grandsons, Cooper “was able to tell her shortly before she died that [he] was going to have a baby.”
