Cooper interviews mom on brother's suicide

Socialite Gloria Vanderbilt gave a rare interview Monday about her tumultuous life on her son Anderson Cooper's syndicated talk show.

Among the subjects she discussed was the suicide of her other son, Carter.

"All the time," Vanderbilt, 87, answered when Cooper asked if she still thought about that day in 1988 when Carter, 23, went over the balcony of his family's Manhattan penthouse. "I still run through it," she said. "And he did not jump," she described.

"He was sitting on the wall with one foot on there and one foot hanging over and he kept looking down. And I kept begging him to, to . . . " she trailed off.

"And then when he went, he went like an athlete, and hung over the wall like this," she demonstrated, holding the arm of her club chair tightly. "And I said, 'Carter, come back,' and for a minute I thought that he was going to come back, but he didn't. He let go."

It was the thought of Anderson, then 21, that kept her from going over herself, she said. "There was a moment I thought I was going to jump over after him. But then I thought of you and it stopped me from doing that.

"There is never closure on something that happens like that," she added. "You never, ever get over it. But you learn to live with it."

"Anderson," which airs locally at 4 p.m. on WPIX/11, has gotten off to a slow start since its Sept. 12 debut. The show's first two editions garnered an anemic 1.1 rating, according to Nielsen. (One ratings point represents 1 percent of the total TV audience.)