Aristocracy, Lost and Found

When HBO approached documentarian Liz Garbus about a feature on Gloria Vanderbilt, she was a tad skeptical.

Was there anything to say about the storied heiress that hadn't already been said?

Married four times and romantically linked with luminaries like Frank Sinatra and Howard Hughes, Vanderbilt has been a boldface name in gossip columns forever. With her high cheekbones and prominent name, she was a regal fixture in the world's fashion magazines. Her form-fitting designer jeans have sold in the millions since 1978, each still displaying her glittering signature on a back pocket.

But the Brooklyn-based Garbus, whose documentary on jazz singer Nina Simone (What Happened, Miss Simone?) was nominated for a 2016 Oscar, wanted something more than faded celebrity. In Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt & Anderson Cooper, she found it.

Delving into stacks of news clippings, vintage photos, family scrapbooks and yellowing love letters, Garbus weaves threads of love and loss into an epic story of a bygone American aristocracy. The film, which debuted in April on HBO, is available on demand and HBO Go.

It was Cooper, who is Vanderbilt's son, who suggested the project to Sheila Nevins, president of HBO Documentary Films and a longtime friend of Garbus's.

Initially wary, the filmmaker came away impressed after meeting with Vanderbilt. "She was incredibly thoughtful, extraordinarily resilient, vulnerable and thoroughly relatable," says Garbus, who won a 2007 Emmy as a producer of Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (with Rory Kennedy, Jack Youngelson, Diana Barrett, Nancy Abraham and Nevins).

Cooper, a CNN host and anchor (who is an executive producer on the documentary, along with Abraham and Nevins), conducted the film's centerpiece interviews with his mother.

The arrangement was unorthodox, but "the obvious dynamic between them was very, very rich," Garbus says. "I knew that there would be this narrative of him learning stuff for the first time."

In the film, Cooper learns plenty.

When his mother casually mentions that her first husband, Hollywood agent Pat DiCicco, was said to have been involved in the death of his ex-wife, Cooper is dumbfounded: "You married a guy when there were rumors that he'd killed his former wife?"

"Sweetheart," Vanderbilt tries to explain, "I was only seventeen!"

Even as a tot, Vanderbilt had achieved a kind of fame. She was the archetypal "poor little rich girl" — a child with many mansions but no real home.

Shortly after her birth in 1924, her parents left her with a nurse and went off on a six-month international romp. While she was still a toddler, her railroad-heir father Reginald Vanderbilt died.

At 10, she was the focus of a sensational custody dispute that pitted her mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, against her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

Among her husbands were director Sidney Lumet, and, finally, Wyatt Cooper, a Mississippi-born screenwriter. With him she had two sons, Carter, born in 1965, and, two years later, Anderson.

When Carter was 23, he woke from a nap, ran to the terrace of Vanderbilt's Manhattan apartment and dangled one leg over the edge. She begged him not to jump. "He looked up at a plane, and it was kind of a signal," Vanderbilt recounts in the film. He hoisted himself over the edge, clung for a second and dropped 14 stories to his death.

"I went to bed for three weeks and I haven't cried since," she says. "There are no tears left."

One of the last scenes shows Cooper at his brother's grave with his mother, "Those moments are important and brave," Garbus says. "Seeing people work through painful moments might inspire others to look their own regrets in the face."