Anderson Cooper is the pin-up boy of American news casting. Walking around Manhattan, you'd need to have your head buried in your shoes not to notice the giant billboards of him beaming down with his oh-so-charming smile and silvery blue eyes. There are numerous websites for his fans - Anderfans, as they call themselves - including one called Gunmetal Grey after the startling colour of his hair. He has been on the cover of Vanity Fair, made a cameo appearance on Sesame Street alongside those legends of TV journalism, Dan Rathernot and Walter Cranky, and been profiled by a gay magazine that claimed to out him - a claim he has always sidestepped when it has been raised.At first look, Cooper cuts a rather odd figure as news superstar. He is not one of the exalted group of evening network show hosts, such as CBS's $15m-a-year anchor Katie Couric. Instead, he is tucked away on CNN between 10pm and midnight - a competitive slot, certainly, but not maximum exposure. And then there is the resolutely serious diet he feeds CNN viewers in his show, Anderson Cooper 360°, from famines to hurricanes, domestic poverty to African civil wars.
He insists that he is oblivious to the adulation. "You probably won't believe this," he says when we meet in his CNN office in the glass-and-steel Time Warner building opposite Central Park. "I don't read stuff about myself and if I can help it, I don't look at billboards of myself." When his memoir, Dispatches from the Edge, came out last year, he adds, "I stopped going into bookstores as I thought it would be weird to be seen loitering around my own book."
But beneath the modesty, you might still say Cooper is a man born into greatness. His mother was a Vanderbilt, the family that built the railroads and used its vast wealth to emulate European royalty. He grew up thinking that every small boy's grandparents turned into statues when they died, which explained why his great-great-great grandfather Cornelius was immortalised in Grand Central station. Charlie Chaplin came to tea and Truman Capote was a regular visitor. Andy Warhol's white hair scared the young Anderson - how was he to know he would himself turn Gunmetal Grey?
With so much fame around him, it seemed the natural thing for Anderson to enter that world himself, and he put himself forward as a child model. "I did a lot for Ralph Lauren and Macy's - cheesy newspaper ads, that sort of stuff." But the weird thing is that in the course of our conversation, Cooper seems the antithesis of the man born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He comes across as diffident, almost hesitant, with none of the bombast you'd expect from his Upper East Side roots.
Your amateur psychologist could explain that apparent paradox quite easily. Although his background was one of enormous privilege, it was also one of enormous hurt. His mother, Gloria, was the subject of a highly public custody battle as a child that took her away from her own mother. His father, Wyatt Cooper, a writer from Mississippi, died when Cooper was 10.
Then the brother. In a heartrending passage of his memoir, Cooper relates how his elder brother Carter committed suicide when he was 21. Carter, two years the elder, jumped from the balcony of the family's 14th-storey bedroom in Manhattan, with his mother watching. His final words to her were: "Will I ever feel again?"
Cooper portrays the event in almost unbearably intimate detail. He talks of the guilt he felt then and for years afterwards about not reaching out to his brother when he was clearly depressed. And he describes the experience of seeing Carter's corpse in the casket and noticing a silver screw and bolt sticking out of the head. "I hoped my mom couldn't see it," he writes.
With such tragedy within his family there was only one place to go. The war zone. Aged 24, he just upped and went. In fast succession, he tore around Burma, Bosnia, the famine in Somalia and the Rwandan genocide, filing reports for a news service for schoolkids, Channel One. Wherever there was conflict, he wanted to be there.
Back in the comfort of his office, with stunning views over the park, I suggest that many war reporters appear to display this need to dull their own personal pain by experiencing the pain of others. Cooper disagrees with me. "It's not that you want to witness others' pain, that's the worst part of the job. It's more like speaking a language, and you look for other people who can speak it too. I found it difficult at the time to be in New York, where people don't talk about life and death in casual conversation. I was uneasy at cocktail parties among people making small talk.
"I would much prefer to be in a place where people were dealing with life-and-death issues; cut out all the bullshit, all the rubbish, and reveal things as they really are. Places of extreme conflict felt comforting - no, not comforting, but known to me."
Running around the world for Channel One, he perfected a way of telling affecting human stories, and later brought it to a wider audience through CNN. The technique was put to powerful use in 2005, when Cooper spent weeks in the thick of Katrina, broadcasting searing accounts of the local and federal authorities' failure to help New Orleans. To his bemusement, he became known as the reporter who captured the emotion of the disaster, and he was catapulted into TV superstardom. "The irony is I'm the least emotive person I know. I was raised a Wasp, very tightly wound, and I don't express much emotion at all. I try not to insert myself into the story in a way that many do and always seems to me to be phony."
His latest venture is a four-hour investigation of the global environmental crisis, Planet in Peril. With CNN colleagues Jeff Corwin and Sanjay Gupta, Cooper does his usual act of running around the globe, going undercover in an illegal animal market in Bangkok, hunting poachers in Cambodia, and travelling to Greenland to see Warming Island, a newly created landmass as a result of melting ice caps. After all this globe trotting, of course, he has to return to New York to sit behind his studio desk and broadcast to the nation. He can't keep running forever, I say. "Sadly, that's true," he replies.
I ask him how he copes, after struggling through the Amazonian forest, with re-entry to the domestic American media world of celebrity gossip and political soundbites - the cocktail party small-talk that drove him out of New York in the first place.
"I find I'm spending fewer and fewer of those days of small-talk," he says. "You have to resist the rating system. If you start to do your broadcast based on what you think people want to see, then you end up with nothing but OJ Simpson or Anna Nicole Smith or whatever the tawdry subject is. The easiest thing in the world would be to do Anna Nicole Smith stories, but I don't think CNN viewers want that."
Such resistance to commercial pressures has its costs: his ratings are below his Fox News competitor, Greta Van Susteren, with her preponderance of crime stories, though he has closed the gap among viewers in the 18-34 age group. As his star has risen, there have been other costs on the private side. He has to deal with "four or five" stalkers, he says, as well as persistent gossip about his private life. He was recently profiled in the gay magazine Out as one of the 50 most influential gay and lesbian Americans.Would he like to say anything about that? "I don't think it's my job to talk about my private life," he says.
But hang on. His book is the most intimate portrait of family tragedy that I have read for a long time, I say. I might have added that someone who writes about the screw in his dead brother's head is hardly protecting his private life. "All those things - my brother's suicide, my father's death - were in the public domain. To me, I wasn't writing a tell-all narrative about my life; it was a book about loss, war, disasters and survival."
A more plausible defence, perhaps, would have been that as a journalist who respects the privacy of others, he has the right to retain some of his own. Put that another way: let's give Anderson Cooper the Anderson Cooper treatment. What matters most - the lurid speculation about his private life beloved of his growing army of Anderfans, or that this is one reporter who, against the odds, continues to strive for significance within the arid world of American television news.
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