Kathy Griffin posted an emotional tribute to her late friend Gloria Vanderbilt, despite her public falling-out with Vanderbilt’s famous son, Anderson Cooper.
“I lost a friend today,” Griffin wrote on Instagram on Monday following Vanderbilt’s death. “The one and only Gloria Vanderbilt. I loved her so much. She let me call her ‘Glo Vandi’ and I would be so flattered when she would refer to me as her daughter.”
Though Griffin, 58, says she remained close to the New York society and fashion icon until her death at the age of 95, the comedian and CNN journalist Cooper fell out in 2017 over her controversial Donald Trump severed-head photoshoot.
Following the release of the photo, Cooper tweeted, “For the record, I am appalled by the photo shoot Kathy Griffin took part in. It is clearly disgusting and completely inappropriate,” though he later said he wants “nothing but good things for her.” And, because of the photo uproar, she was canned from CNN’s annual New Year’s Eve broadcast, which she and Cooper had co-hosted since 2007.
Just this March, Griffin told Variety it still hurts that Cooper publicly distanced himself from her at the time: “I was devastated. It still hurts. I mean, I really loved him. I don’t have a punchline for that one.”
Elsewhere in her tribute to Vanderbilt, Griffin fondly remembered glamorous dinner parties and time spent on Vanderbilt’s sofa, where they’d “talk for hours.” Griffin said when she and Vanderbilt would get together, she loved “wearing something ridiculous to get her to laugh from the moment she opened the door.”
Vanderbilt died after a battle with stomach cancer.