By SUSANNAH CAHALAN
June 8, 2008
When Whitney Tower Jr. - heir to the Vanderbilt and Whitney fortunes - attended his beloved cousin's funeral two decades ago at St. Jams Episcopal Church on the Upper East Side, he wasn't only pining for his late friend . He was yearning for a needle full of smack.
His 24-year-old cousin, Carter Coo per - brother of CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper - had leaped to his death from the rooftop of their mother's Gracie Square mansion. But Tower couldn't think about the tragic suicide - nor did he care that he was sitting next to then-First Lady Nancy Reagan. Instead, Tower scur ried up to Harlem to score heroin.
After the July 26, 1988, funeral, friends and relatives gathered at the home of Carter and Anderson's mother, fashion maven Gloria Van derbilt.
Tower locked himself in a bath room and shot up. He recalled bra zenly chatting up the first lady, who was clueless as to how stoned he was, quipping, "Tell me all about how you thought of 'Just say no.' "
It's amazing he's still alive to tell the tale.
Last week at an Upper East Side club, Tower toasted - with a glass of water - two things with his literary agent, Marianne Strong: his eighth year of sobriety and the upcoming auction of his painful tell-all memoir, "The Gilded Needle."
The affable Tower, 57, recalled 21 strung-out years, when he squandered his multimillion dollar trust fund, sold priceless family heirlooms, and even traded his portrait by Andy Warhol to quench his $1,000-a-day heroin habit.
Tower claims that he shot heroin every 15 minutes, did heroin-cocaine "speedballs" with John Belushi only days before the comedian's fatal overdose, and was counseled into rehab by Mick Jagger. But it took 10 stints in rehab and four halfway houses before he finally cleaned up.
"I've been hijacked, carjacked, pistol-whipped, shot at, everything, just to get drugs," he told The Post. "There were so many moments in my life when I got on my knees and prayed to God to save me. I truly believed that I was going to die so many times."
Tower is the great-grandson of Whitney Museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and a direct descendant of railroad robber baron "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt.
