The man in the photo is Wyatt Cooper, fourth husband of Gloria Vanderbilt and father of the two boys. Wyatt died at 50, during open-heart surgery, when Anderson Cooper was 10. Anderson was the younger brother, the one in red shoes. His older brother committed suicide at 23, when Anderson was 21.
In his thirties, Cooper lived in Los Angeles, attended both UCLA and UC Berkeley, and worked as a screenwriter. While residing in West Hollywood, then an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, Cooper lived near Dorothy Parker and her husband Alan Campbell. A close friendship developed, and a year after Parker's death in 1967, Cooper published an incisive and widely read profile in Esquire magazine, titled, "Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn't". Cooper moved to Manhattan in the early 1960s, and worked there as a magazine editor.
A week ago this would have just passed right by me, but that was before I read Weird Scenes from the Canyon (Laurel Canyon). This book tells about the goings-on in this suburb of Los Angeles north of Hollywood. All kinds of sexual and occult oddities involving the famous actors, musicians, the CIA, etc, stretching back to the early 20th Century. Caves, tunnels, murders, strange deaths of adults and children, drugs, you name it. Lots of weird tidbits, such as the fact that Jimi Hendrix lived for a time in the home of Monkee Peter Tork, and that Jim Morrison's dad was the captain of the ship that was the center of the false flag event used to start the Vietnam War. Very strange linkages.
One of the minor things I took away from the book was that the author and screenwriter Dorothy Parker (mentioned above as a friend of Wyatt Cooper) was born Dorothy Rothschild.
What an interesting web!