By anyone's standards, Anderson Cooper is a handsome devil: those brilliant blue eyes, the prematurely grey hair, that fine aristocratic nose. He's as far removed from the creaky, craggy stereotype of a network anchor as might be imagined. Anderson Cooper is America's sexy TV news beast.
And if that's what points viewers to his nightly newsmagazine Anderson Cooper 360° (CNN, weeknights at 7 p.m.), fine and dandy.
Otherwise, Cooper doesn't care to hear about his rakish good looks. The sex-symbol tag has dogged him for years. It doesn't help one's credibility factor as a newsman when you end up on People magazine's Sexiest People Alive list, which is precisely what happened two years ago.
"It held very little reality for me at the time," says Cooper, speaking long-distance over the din of CNN's New York newsroom. "There was a lot of the same thing when 360° started a year ago, but you have to ignore it. I tend not to read stuff about myself; I prefer to be oblivious. But it's very flattering that someone thinks that I'm . . . whatever."
Cooper was bound to stand out in the TV news spectrum, if only for his bloodline: He's the son of New York socialite and fashion doyenne Gloria Vanderbilt. At 37, Cooper is the youngest of all U.S. network anchors - by three decades in two instances. His nightly newsmagazine is the antithesis to the evening news as ploddingly espoused by Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, but there again, Cooper brushes off any suggestion he's the hip alternative.
"If I'm hip, we've got a problem in this country," he says. "I really shouldn't be held up as any model of hipness. If anything I think I'm sort of old school in my approach to objective reporting and not wearing my opinion on my sleeve. There's a lot of that in American TV news these days. Too much, in fact."
Anderson Cooper 360° is part of CNN's ongoing plan to draw younger viewers (Cooper's CNN predecessor in the same timeslot: Connie Chung). And the show has performed steadily for CNN since launching this time last year. It's a brisk nightly mix of the day's top stories blended with edgy regular features, such as Campaign Unplugged, Overkill, Raw Politics and Cooper's personal editorials titled The Nth Degree. The approach is more Jon Stewart than Walter Cronkite.
"We're trying to develop as many branded segments as possible, and to go behind the scenes," says Cooper. "It's intended as a fresh take on the news; viewers have moved beyond the concept of the traditional newscast and the all-knowing news anchor. They want news with more information, more energy."
Cooper was also a recent willing participant in the Canadian-made series Back in . . . (MuchMoreMusic, Fridays at 9 p.m.). The series provides a look back at the 1980s, with Cooper lending his presence as a wry pop-culture commentator. "That was a pretty cool experience," he says. "I talk about the cultural importance of Flock of Seagulls and other major events.
"I was in high school and college back then, my formative years. I had big hair, but fortunately I kept tight control of those photos."
Cooper's early years were also spent basking in the glow of his mother's rarefied high-society circle (his father, writer Wyatt Cooper, died when Anderson was very young). His mother was an iconic public figure, the original "poor little rich girl" and millionaire heiress who just recently, at 80, penned a racy memoir, It Seemed Important at the Time, detailing affairs with everyone from Howard Hughes to Frank Sinatra. It's safe to say young Anderson enjoyed a unique upbringing, and was in near-constant proximity to the very creative and very rich.
"When I was younger," he says, "I talked to the adults around me that I respected most about how they got where they were, and none of them plotted a course they could have predicted, so it seemed a waste of time to plan too long-term. Since then I've always gone on my instincts."
Cooper's privileged existence never affected his work ethic. He went straight from graduation at Yale, class of 1989, into a fact-checker job at the Channel One Network, a cable channel beaming daily newscasts into U.S. schools.
Cooper merged his post-Yale wanderlust with sensible career planning: He moved to Vietnam, enrolled at the University of Hanoi and began filing video reports for Channel One. He worked as a freelancer from various hot spots - Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia - through the early 1990s before being scouted and signed by ABC News as their top field correspondent, which meant more road trips back to the same danger zones.
"I've always loved reporting from the field most of all," says Cooper. "There's something about doing live TV and being there as it happens that's always appealed to me. I think there's great value to bearing witness to these events as they're actually happening."
His seven-year stint at ABC also found Cooper subbing on the desk for news reports, filing stories for 20/20 and hosting the all-night broadcast World News Now, where he first began delivering his trademark offbeat editorial commentaries. He even tested his hand at reality-TV as the originating host of The Mole, about which he now offers a polite and brief, "I have no regrets."
Cooper's career focus shifted again when he signed with CNN a few months after Sept. 11, 2001. "I wanted to be reporting again," he says.
The difference between ABC's news operation and the sprawling CNN news machine was immediate. "Their missions are entirely different," says Cooper. "At CNN, there's a sort of purity to the mission, which is nice. We're all about the news, wherever it happens in the world. And the global resources we have to draw from are astounding."
Cooper's first few years at the all-news network were spent field reporting and being tested on the weekend anchor desk. He was also brought in for special occasions. "When the war in Iraq began I was anchoring the overnight coverage for CNN," he says. "Your teleprompter is blank and you have four hours to fill, and it can be a very long night if you don't know your stuff. I like that challenge."
After working out of CNN's Atlanta headquarters for a few years, Cooper moved back to his native New York, where 360° is taped each evening. It's good to be home, though he's still getting used to New Yorkers bellowing his name.
"Being in New York is like being in Mayberry on the old Andy Griffith Show," says Cooper. "People on the street say hello to me constantly. It's very nice, but a bit odd at first. I have a really bad memory, so I couldn't tell if I knew the person, or if they knew me from TV. Now I just say hi to everyone who looks at me. It's easier."
He's also settled into his role as a dependable CNN fixture. Cooper isn't booking any holiday time in the months ahead as the U.S. presidential election looms. He's one of the mainstays on CNN's coverage of this week's Republican National Convention in New York, and he already knows he'll be pressed into further service as the election draws closer. Bring it on, he says.
"I'm certainly more comfortable in this job now than when I started," says Cooper. "I never even intended to be a news anchor, so there's been a definite growth period for me. Learning the right way to ask questions and how to properly interrupt people, learning how to do it all in my own voice. I think I still have a long way to go, but I'm getting better at it."