You don’t censor yourself on The Howard Stern Show, and Anderson Cooper didn’t hold back. He opened up on everything from when he first knew he was gay and the criticism he received for staying in the closet, his career, Botox and his brother’s suicide.
“It’s interesting. The week after he killed himself, I went to his apartment and I was taking a cab back to my apartment,” he says. “Because I hadn’t left, there were reporters outside waiting to get pictures. And someone on the radio said [how could someone rich kill themselves] and it was so odd. I don’t understand how someone could see it that way. It still shapes my life. It’s not the first thing that I think about when I wake up, but there isn’t a day that goes by. That’s the thing about suicide, it suddenly injects this language and vocabulary into your life that’s always there. It’s why if your parent commits suicide, it’s more likely that you will kill yourself. It injects that into your life.”
As Gloria Vanderbilt’s son, Cooper grew up surrounded by her famous friends, including Truman Capote, who he admitted to not liking because his “toenails were disgusting.”
Listen to the full interview:
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