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I'm Jane Pauley, and this is Sunday Morning. We think of it as a time not so very long ago when America was a kinder, gentler place, where neighbor looked out for neighbor, and we lived together in prosperity and peace, or so we remember it. And one town seemed to sum things up pretty neatly, even if only on television. So whatever happened to Mayberry? Ted Koppel this morning takes us to the place where that spirit, real or imagined, lives on.

Those guns aren't real, of course, and this is just a replica of a Hollywood set for a television series that went off the air more than 50 years ago. So what is it that keeps tourists flocking to Mount Airy, North Carolina by the hundreds of thousands every year? I'll give you a hint.

Ahead on Sunday Morning. As an award-winning reporter, Anderson Cooper has spent much of his life digging for the facts, searching for the truth. But as Mo Rocca will tell us, it's only recently that Anderson Cooper turned the spotlight on himself and his illustrious family. Anderson Cooper's mother was Gloria Vanderbilt, scion of America's once wealthiest family. But growing up, Cooper knew little about his mother's forebears. When you were a kid, your father showed you the statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

I was, you know, six or seven years old. The only thing I remember coming away from it was believing that all grandparents turned into statues when they died. Anderson Cooper's family history later on Sunday Morning. And then on to Hollywood. James Brolin has been a serious actor for more than half a century. But as our Tracy Smith discovers, the one thing he doesn't take too seriously is himself. He's had a life many would envy. Thank you all for coming to my funeral.

But James Brolin says there's always room for improvement. I'm shot. I'm trying to just lose this little role I got right there. You see that one? No.

You look great. So what do you think you're best known for? Gosh, sleeping in. The Brolin family patriarch on life, love, and longevity coming up this Sunday morning.

You just bought a skateboard? Yeah. God bless you. The Emmys are tonight here on CBS. Proof positive the new season is in full swing. Perfect timing for Martha Teichner's report on dialect coaches.

The people who make certain actors know whereof they speak. And more. It's Sunday morning for the 19th of September 2021. We'll be back right after this. Who hasn't waxed nostalgic about the good old days when life was simpler, more neighborly, civilized? Ted Koppel starts us off this morning with a visit to the real life counterpart of the town most of us knew only on television. That tall amiable sheriff and his little boy Opie heading to a fishing hole on the outskirts of Mayberry, North Carolina, were actually strolling along a back lot in Culver City, California. Ron Howard, he's the actor who played Opie, is now one of Hollywood's top directors. Most of the other stars, Andy Griffith, Don Knotts, who played his deputy Barney Fife, and the actors who played Aunt Bee and Floyd the Barber, they've all passed on. After all, it's been 53 years since the show was canceled.

So it may come as something of a surprise to learn that Mayberry is doing just fine. Even though its actual name is Mount Airy. And it's only genuine link to the Andy Griffith show is that Andy was born and grew up here. Andy Griffith, God bless him. If he had not been born in this particular town, we wouldn't be standing here having that conversation.

Enjoy your tour today. Randy Collins is president and CEO of the Mount Airy Chamber of Commerce. And he's recalling when North Carolina's tobacco and textile industries had the stuffing knocked out of them. After the mills closed, I think a lot of the town fathers and the business owners got together and said, hey, you know, what about this Mayberry thing? Maybe we can do something with it.

And businesses were born or reinvented. It's a little bizarre, isn't it? It went off the air right more than 50 years ago.

Yes, sir. It captured a reality that never was true. Mayberry is fictitious. Most everyone knows that, except maybe some of the rabid fans of the show. They believe it's real.

And let it be said, the town isn't doing a whole lot to undermine the illusion. Stop by at Wally's filling station and you can get a ride around town and a vintage Ford Galaxy squad car. These days, there's a whole fleet of them carting tourists around town.

Once a month or so, Betty Lynn, who played Barney Fife's girlfriend Thelma Lou, is brought from a nearby retirement home to the Andy Griffith Museum. I went from Arkansas, so I've been waiting to see you for 30 years. Crowds of appreciative fans line up for autographs.

I can die now. We are constantly looking at other ways that we can promote the community because we know the Mayberry generation won't be here forever. But now with streaming television, Andy will be will be forever with us and we hope a younger generation will pick it up. As if on cue, the Foster family from Pomeroy, Ohio, showed up. Watch it four hours Monday through Friday.

It's no exaggeration to say that this recreation verges for the Fosters on being a national monument. You watch the Andy Griffith Show four hours a day? More than that.

What do you mean more than that? It's on sometimes early in the morning. Aren't you afraid that after a month or two of watching four hours or more a day that you're going to turn his little brain to mush? Oh no.

No. No one comes to good wholesome shows. Tell me why you like it so much. Good clean comedy. Yeah, good clean comedy.

Has morals, values. You don't see that a lot today in TV. Down on Main Street where tourists peek into Floyd's Barbershop or grab a bite at the snappy lunch. We drove from Louisiana for the famous pork chop sandwich. That is so good. You hear the same theme. Yeah, I'm missing out on this.

Kind of messy, but it's delicious. I think the generations now long for that simplicity of the episodes of Andy being real with his son about stealing or doing the right thing. And as a godless society that we see today is longing for simple life.

Back when neighbors were neighbors and they provided for everybody else. What do you see, Mr. Koppel? Let me flip it back on you. I know you're doing this.

Sure. But what do you see? What you're saying is true of certain people. If you were black in the 60s, things were not all that good for you. If you were a Vietnam vet coming back, things were not all that good for you. Down in the valley, valley so low. What actually happened during the years the program first played? The world seems to have veered off, at least for the moment.

The collision course toward global annihilation. From Dallas, Texas, the flash President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Allied casualties are high. 232 Americans killed. We the Negro citizen of Dallas County are marching today from Selma to Montgomery.

Those events never intruded inside Maybury's imaginary town limits. Can you give me a ride home, Paul? Oh, I can't, son. Barney's got the squad car and he's off on a very important mission. Maybury is where more than 30 million Americans a week went to escape reality. Which is why it's strange to find so many people half a century later searching for what made America great in a copy of a town that never was. You folks gonna have to stand up off the curb so you gonna get your toes run over. And as Randy Collins of the Chamber of Commerce acknowledges, African Americans were all but invisible on the Andy Griffith Show.

There were very few speaking parts. One. Okay, Opie, take over quarterback position.

Okay, let's go. If you watch closely in the crowd scenes, I think Andy and others on the show pushed to make sure that there were people of color in the crowds, but you have to look closely. Maggie Rosser is in her 90s now. She and her younger brother and sister were all born here, left, and returned. I moved back here, 19 and 73. So we wanted a sandwich and we went in. Here, in Mount Airy. In our main street and they served us, but we had to go out and eat.

They wouldn't let you sit. Right. So even in 1973. Yes. Or a little bit after. A little bit after. Yes.

Yes. Bobby Scales, also born and raised in Mount Airy, has a clear memory of race relations in the 60s. Blacks knew where they belong and whites knew where you belong too. And everything was segregated. Black people didn't exist.

Evelyn Scales Thompson is Bobby Scales' twin. In making those programs, it was for basically the white population. She believes she understands the ongoing popularity of the program. It's appealing to people who are not familiar with small towns and what Andy has projected is a quiet, peaceful town with everybody happy and everybody's looking for peace. So Mayberry, Mount Airy, good place to live? It's a good place. If it were not home, I would not be here.

Unwrap that for me. I mean, you know, your home is where you make it. Yes, but not where you were born and your memories and family. But if your memories are mostly memories of being treated as the lesser, why would you want to stay?

Well, I wasn't treated as a lesson in my family. I have family history. Our property is there and memories of childhood is still very strong.

I'm very satisfied at being retired in the place where I grew up. Somehow Mount Airy becomes more complex with each conversation. I bet, I bet.

Yes, indeed. Mount Airy is a place where fantasy and reality intersect. If I wave the political thermometer across the forehead of Mount Airy, the people here believe that Joe Biden is the legitimate president?

That's a good question. Our former president had a lot of support here. If you took a poll that would probably not lean in our current president's favor, As for the visitors, for 20 bucks a pop, they get to ride on a trolley car tour of Mount Airy. Sometimes, a fellow in a deputy's uniform, and he does look a little like Barney Fife, rides along. The Elvis impersonator was an unexplained bonus.

Thank you, thank you very much. As was the entire crew from CBS Sunday Morning. Now, I know you came here to have a good time and not to talk politics, but let me just ask you, as a matter of curiosity, how many of you think we had a fair election? I saw two hands go up, so is it fair to say the rest of you think that it was not a fair election? No, it wasn't. I don't think it was at all. Was it a fair election? By no means.

Because? I think there was a lot of butter for us. It's been proven, there's been proven. It's now been proven, there's been people that's voted that's been dead 50 years. I think it's more of the mail-in ballots. You don't know how much of those that were duplicated, triplicated, the whole bit. Look how many dead people voted for Biden. One question.

It's a serious question, and I know you all will take it seriously. Tell me what you think happened on January 6th at Congress. They showed truckloads of people that they were bringing in for this.

It was all staged. And that's how that started. They even showed pictures of us on the news about these vehicles coming in with all these BLM people.

Yes sir, he was starting to say. It's just great to see our country. Whose fault was it? One writer did blame Donald Trump, but he was in a distinct moment. I think it was staged.

We visited a lot of the Trump rallies. I don't understand why they're focusing so much on that one issue when there's so many cities that are being burned down every day by protesters. That's supposed to be peaceful.

But it's all focused on holding these two people. We're gonna kill everybody that was there. Yeah. We don't even watch news on TV. We don't know. We don't feel like that we are being told the truth.

No. And we find our truth in other ways, and I won't say what those other ways are. But I feel like we're not being told the truth because we're trying to be swayed in a direction that we know is not the right direction. I won't be offended. I've been a journalist all my life. When President Trump talked about the press being the enemy of the people. They are.

They are. And I love President Trump. I love that man.

I do. I just hope when this airs it won't show southerners as a bunch of dumb idiots like so many parts of the country do. We have a lot of love in our hearts. We love our country.

We love our fellow man. And if the rest of the country felt like that, it would be a better place. This conversation about politics and division is what people come here to get away from. We don't care what color you are.

We don't even care what your politics are. We just want to be good neighbors and treat everybody alike. And that's why they're coming here. That's what America should be.

That's what America should be. And when the script was written in Hollywood, that's the way it was. Wherever you come from, your accent often gives you away and can be really tough to lose. But if you're an actor, Martha Teichner tells us, learning an accent can be even harder. All right, everybody, put your gloves on, do a grid search.

Kate Winslet's Emmy-nominated performance in HBO's Mayor of Easttown is so good, you could be fooled into thinking she really has a Delaware County, Pennsylvania accent. So if you've got something you want to tell me, you better do it now. Because as soon as you leave the station, I'm going to start digging through your life.

But you would be wrong. I don't know if it's necessarily a feeling of wanting to prove something, but I just always want to be doing this job. I need everybody to be there for me. I am a revolutionary.

I am a revolutionary. And if you thought 2021 Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya actually sounds like Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah. Thank you, God. I can't be here without your guidance and your protection. Wrong again.

In this day and age, could stars even be considered convincing if they failed to nail their character's accents? Please come forward. So how do they pull it off? Say my mama. My mama. My mama.

My mama. Normal. Normal. Yeah, your ass normal. Your ass normal. Okay, girl.

Chances are they work with someone like Denise Woods, one of Hollywood's small inner circle of 20 or so A-list dialect coaches. Take the L's off of kill. Kill. Kill me. Kill me.

Kill me. Here, Woods is preparing Solea Pfeiffer for her starring role in an upcoming Tyler Perry film for Netflix called A Jazz Man's Blues. For every sound in language, there is a phonetic symbol, like there's a note to music. And so if you know how to notate what people are saying, if you learn the system, the methodology, then you can notate what people are saying. She's talking about this, the international phonetic alphabet.

It's symbols incomprehensible to most people, but a key to the DNA of any dialect or accent a voice coach has to reproduce. Nen, nen. And I want nen, nen, nen.

Why'd you come nen? Yes. We have so many, you know, boxes that we check when we hear someone speak for the first time. And so I want to honor it.

What I do when I work with the actors is I learn the dialect with them. Sad and happy, sad and happy, sad and happy. Nice. As opposed to sad and happy, sad and happy, sad and happy. Where does she find examples? My first resource is YouTube. And it's, it's my dream source.

Yes. You know, it's not as closed as me. Here are a couple of the voices Denise Woods used to coach Solea. I'm Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and I farmed on the Marlowe plantation for 18 years.

I bowled a hole down in there, I hooked a vacuum, cleaned the holes. Locating accurate samples of period dialects can be tricky. We need to get back to work bringing slaves to freedom. I was the dialect coach on Harriet, the film Harriet starring Cynthia Erivo. We have samples in the Library of Congress of slave narratives. They are really authentic to the period.

Authentic. That is not a word anyone would use to describe actor speak in the early decades of talkies. Singing in the rain isn't just about Gene Kelly dancing. It's about silent stars speaking. And I can't stand him.

And I can't stand him. So Hollywood Studios made up a dialect that came to be called Mid-Atlantic. How's it coming? Oh, beautifully Dexter. We're so indebted to you for these lovely people. Mid-Atlantic, no one lives in the middle of the Atlantic.

You know, halfway between the US and the UK. Samara Bay is another top tier dialect coach to the stars. Was it supposed to be aspirational? I think it was totally aspirational. Absolutely. The idea of Hollywood as this sort of untouchable, glamorous place, that accent was helping sustain that.

What happened? So what language I am butchering now? English. For one thing, Sophie's choice. Meryl Streep's correct Polish layered with German accent in the 1982 film.

Yeah, that sound of typing will make me think of my father. Epitomized a changing Hollywood universe, increasingly inhabited by dialect coaches. I like to think of dialect coaching as a design element. So the same way that we think about costume design or, you know, the set that we're in or the soundscape, the question is, what is the accent and how is it helping tell the story? I found Icelandic pretty easy, but maybe that was, maybe Samara just made it seem easy.

Because you are a dreamer. Samara Bey taught Canadian actor Rachel McAdams her Icelandic accent for the 2020 film Eurovision Song Contest. And Iceland is amazing for specialness. Her homework included dissecting the speech of Icelandic singer Björk. There's a lot more scrutiny and audiences can't be fooled. And also, I just think as a performer, you have a responsibility to do right by your characters. This is what I actually used with Rachel. Oh, my. Yes. But can she make me sound Icelandic? I always prefer to call pop music like folk music because it's the music of the people. So pop is that short O sound.

She doesn't have that. Pop music like folk music. Get that L in folk. Folk.

Beautiful. I always prefer to call pop music like folk music because it's the music of the people. No acting award in my future, I suspect.

But if costume designers and makeup artists win Emmys. The sounds are there. Isn't it time dialect coaches get some recognition? Wow, that's fun. That was really well done and very brave.

It was fun. Hi, podcast peeps. It's me, Drew Barrymore.

Oh, my goodness. I want to tell you about our new show. It's the Drew's News Podcast. And in each episode, me and a weekly guest are going to cover all the quirky, fun, inspiring, and informative stories that exist out in the world because, well, I need it.

And maybe you do too. From the newest interior design trend, Barbie Corps, to the right and wrong way to wash your armpits. Also, we're going to get into things that you just kind of won't believe and were not able to do in daytime television.

So watch out. Listen to Drew's News wherever you get your podcasts. It's your good news on the go. A sure sign of improving times, museums are reopening across the country. We asked Serena Altschul to preview a few of the best new shows of the new season, and she begins at a new museum guaranteed to be a box office smash.

In Hollywood, there's always a new It Girl. And this fall, it may just be the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. The museum, designed by architect Renzo Piano, cost $482 million and is already turning heads even before the doors open on September 30th. And are you ready to open?

Oh, man, I'm so ready. I am so ready to open this museum. Bill Kramer is the museum's president and director. The Academy has 13 million artists. In our collection, scripts, photographs, costumes, props, storyboards, personal collections. We are drawing from that collection, but we're also securing loans from collectors. Steven Spielberg loaning us Rosebud. It doesn't get better than that. The museum is filled with artifacts from the familiar, like Dorothy's Ruby Slippers and E.T., to less recognizable pieces like this typewriter used to write Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

Mother of God, Mother! Fittingly, the building also has two theaters, which will show movies daily. It's a museum that seems like a perfect fit for the theater. It's a museum that seems like a perfect fit for Los Angeles, but it's one that waited nearly a century for its close up. The Academy was founded in 1927, and in 1929, at a board meeting, the founders of the Academy stated that they needed to build a film museum. And yet it almost took a century.

It almost took a century. And this iteration launched in 2011. It's diverse. It's inclusive.

It's equitable. But it represents film history, I think, in a truer, more accurate way. This museum isn't the only coming attraction this fall. There's plenty of art to see all around the country. Jasper Johns, for example, will be the subject of an unprecedented show taking place simultaneously at both the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Other noteworthy retrospectives include a Judy Chicago exhibit at the de Young Museum in San Francisco and Barbara Krueger at the Art Institute of Chicago. Back on the East Coast, the Brooklyn Museum is dressed to the nines with a Christian de York exhibit, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston stays cozy with some unique American quilts.

We would also like to wish a happy 10th birthday to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, an anniversary giving us all yet another reason to celebrate a return to museums this fall. And you know what every woman's hope for fulfillment and happiness is? A marriage. A satisfying, a beautiful marriage. You want 66, Mom?

Yeah, I'll see you. Fantabulous. Scooby. Scooby-Doo.

I'm sorry, Daddy. Nearly 60 years after his big screen debut in the Sandra Dee comedy, Take Her, She's Mine, actor James Brolin is still going strong. He's in conversation with our Tracy Smith. How much time do you spend out here, you guys? Um, we visit a lot. Okay, you really have to see this place to believe it. With the custom-made millhouse and the oh-so-perfect pond, it looks like some kind of movie set, but it's really James Brolin's Malibu backyard. Oh, this is heaven. He says most of the credit goes to his wife of 23 years, Barbara Streisand.

All of the flowers around are in that exact spot because they have to be. She designed pretty much everything. Me, I just work here.

Excuse me, are you a doctor? And you might say this is his other job. Something extraordinary. Sweet Tooth is the Netflix series about a post-apocalyptic world of hybrid animal people and a terrifying pandemic.

By his tenth winter, the boy was now the man of the house. Brolin is the show's narrator, a calmly reassuring voice when everything seems to be going to hell, but it took him a while to get it right. The first day of any job, I've got what they call the collywobbles.

The collywobbles? Yeah, yeah, just not sure I like these people. I'm not sure if I should have taken this job. Where are we? You know, I got a plane ticket somewhere.

Second day, piece of cake. Then you're in. Yeah. Seems he's been in for most of his life. You might recall that James Brolin came to fame as the dashing Dr. Stephen Kiley, opposite Robert Young in TV's Marcus Welby, MD.

Well, if she's old enough to die, then I'm old enough to tell her so. Brolin did well on Welby, so well, in fact, that he earned an Emmy, and that was just for the pilot. So how did life change? By the sixth show, we were number one, and we stayed there all year. Life changed. I got a better dressing room.

And there'd be better dressing rooms to come. You belong here at the St. Gregory. In series like Hotel, where he starred and directed, and in movies like 1979's The Amityville Horror. I'm coming apart. Oh, mother of God, I'm coming apart. But then there's the one that got away. A lot of people may not know that James Brolin was almost James Bond.

How close did you get? I had the job. I literally, Roger Moore said he wasn't going to do any more. So he did some screen tests. Hello. Even learned a James Bond move or two. But after that, nothing.

Hello, you're still there? Well, I had a little trouble with the line. We heard through someone else that Roger had to go to the hospital.

Roger had decided to do one more. That was octopussy, by the way. And yeah, it could have been fun, you know. What do you tell yourself when things like that happen? Stuff happens.

And life happens too. Brolin has three children. His eldest son, Josh, was born in 1968. This is my war, not his. And in his case, the apple didn't fall too far from the tree. Has your father ever personally offered you advice on Iraq? No, I haven't asked.

I don't need to. Wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. You know, there's a higher father I appeal to. What is it like for you as a dad to see the success that he's had? Well, it's great.

But if he didn't have any success, it would be the same to me, you know? So do you get out in the water? I do, but not with a board anymore. The elder Brolin is 81 now. No, really. He's also a highly qualified pilot and a former pro race car driver. He doesn't get out on the racetrack much anymore, but he's still more active than some people half his age. You just bought a skateboard? Yeah.

God bless you. And my daughter's a big skateboard. And he's the first to admit that meeting his wife was the best thing that ever happened to him. You've been married 23 years. What's the key to a long marriage? Mm, negotiation, I think, kindness. Usually a referee is good, which means a marriage counselor or somebody that you know that comes over and talks and has you talk and has you talk. And we've done well at that.

In public, the two sometimes look like love-struck teenagers, but he says it's been that way since they were first dating. I went off to a location in the Philippines. And I would call her, and this was before cell phones. I think I spent every nickel I made on this movie because we would be on from three to five hours on the phone. Three to five hours. Three to five hour phone calls.

Yeah, $5 a minute from the Philippines. Oh my goodness, what were you talking about? Just teenage crap. Is that how you felt? It was like a teenage thing? Yeah, it was. I could almost feel her lying on her bed on her stomach with her feet up.

You know how teenage girls do? Anyway, so when I got home, we felt quite close by then, you know? I do kind of feel like I'm in the movies sitting here. Yeah, well, you're not. It's all too real. And talk about real.

Along with Sweet Tooth, Brolin has three new projects on the way and a sense that maybe his best work is still ahead. Do you think about legacy? No, I don't actually, no. What I got to do is still going to happen, if it does. In other words, I haven't done the thing that makes legacies yet. And I may never.

But you just may. I'm open and optimistic about everything always. And but I feel like there's part of me that's been also ran.

You know, all these horses are running and there's the winner and then there's the also ran or the almost made it, you know? There's a part of you that feels that way? There's a part of me that, yeah, still feels that. That I've got something to do or I didn't do something or even maybe the Bond thing, if that had happened.

Something might have changes from that one film, you know? But don't mistake his wistfulness for regret. James Brolin loves what he does and just wants to do more. I never felt like I'm ready to move on to the next best thing. My favorite days have been at work other than the days my kids were born or the days I was married. Every day at work has been just gold to me. What does that do for your soul? What is it?

It makes me miss it right now. Here we are talking, wasting time. You know him from television, but Anderson Cooper is also an author. And his latest book is about his family. A family with a name once synonymous with the word wealth.

He talks with our Mo Rocca about the rise and fall of the Vanderbilts. So all this is just a small amount of stuff from my mom's storage units. For the past 15 years, CNN anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper has been sorting through his mother's treasures. She was a completely different person then. Cooper's mother was Gloria Vanderbilt.

My new scratch denim jeans. Known for her designer jeans and as the so-called poor little rich girl at the center of an infamous depression era custody battle between her own mother, also named Gloria, and aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Yeah, this I just found recently. This was the headline of the Daily News. July 4th, 1935, Gloria loses child after the trial. This is her. She's the age that my son is right now. This is the day her father died. There she is with her father. Gosh, do you look at that guy and go, wait, hold on a second.

He's my grandfather. I know it's like it's crazy. Completely different. It's another.

Yeah, it's another world. Another world where the Vanderbilt name was synonymous with enormous wealth and privilege. A name that Cooper says he didn't want to be associated with.

I felt like no good could come of me paying attention to them. The Vanderbilts, when I was a kid, seemed kind of like layabouts. I knew they had all these houses and they were museums now, but it had no reality in my life.

But after his mother's death in 2019 and then the birth of his son, Wyatt, in 2020, Cooper decided to delve into that side of his family history, documenting it in a new book. The Vanderbilts came to the new world from Holland in the 17th century. The first generations here were farmers. Is it kind of funny to you that you've ended up living not so far?

It's weird. I will say, when I started doing research on the book, I had no idea that the Commodore had lived right here. Then came Cornelius, aka the Commodore. So Commodore Vanderbilt was a really extraordinary person.

I mean, he grew up on a farm in Staten Island. Cornelius left school at age 11 and made his first fortune in shipping. He built from one small little boat of moving supplies. He built an empire of steam ships. And steam ships are basically just the first chapter of his career.

Right. Well, that's what's so crazy is he built two massive empires. It was late in life when he decided steam ships were the past and railroads were the future. And he started buying up small railroads around the Northeast.

And eventually he formed a railroad company that basically was the all rail service on the eastern seaboard to Chicago. Yet Cooper also discovered some unflattering aspects of his great-great-great-grandfather's character. When I read that you described him as avaricious and pitiless, I thought that's, um, that's blunt. Well, yeah, I mean, he was. I actually started out thinking maybe he was a psychopath, which then I came away after doing a lot of research on, I was like, you know what, that's a little harsh.

Like who can say really, I mean, who knows what's in someone's mind. There's no MRI that we have of him. But he himself said he did have a mania for money and other people have described it as a pathology. And I do think it was, it was his sole reason for being. When the Commodore died in 1877, he'd amassed $100 million. He had more money than the U.S. Treasury. One out of every $20 in circulation belonged to the Vanderbilts. By 1885, the Commodore's son William Henry managed to more than double the family coffers to about $230 million, close to $6.5 billion in today's dollars.

But it was the next generation of Vanderbilts whose ambitions had nothing to do with making money. Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his brother William K. Vanderbilt, their wives decide they're going to get the Vanderbilts to take over New York society. And then the spending begins.

Yes, the spigots are turned on and the, yeah, the spending begins. Craving respectability, this generation of wealthy Vanderbilts spent lavishly on mansions that dotted Manhattan's Fifth Avenue and palatial summer cottages in Newport, Rhode Island. Pop quiz, what was the Vanderbilt family's least favorite constitutional amendment? Yes, anything to do with taxes, yes. The 16th Amendment to the Constitution ushered in the federal income tax in 1913. Estate and inheritance taxes soon followed.

But the Vanderbilt spending habits continued unabated. I view the money as a kind of a pathology that infected subsequent generations, because I think they all grew up with this idea that there would always be money there and there was no need for them to actually work. When Cooper's mother Gloria was born in 1924, her inheritance was much diminished and she was given little guidance on how to maintain it. This book helped me understand my mom in ways I never really even imagined, because once you see the world she was born into and the life her father led and the life her mother dreamed of leading and the life that her grandfather led, you see why it was that she, you know, grew up just spending money and thinking nothing of it.

In 1978, Cooper's father Wyatt died. From the time I was a kid, I viewed myself as my mom's protector after my dad died when I was 10. My mom was a remarkable lady, but I knew she did not have a plan and she had never had a plan.

When it came to money matters, Anderson assumed an almost parental role with his own mother. And I would talk to her at, you know, 13 about, you know, you can get a bank account and you should put money in savings and saving money is making money and just stupid things I had read about. You would say that at 13 years old to her. She just never had a plan. She just felt like, I once heard, I think I was like 14 or 15, I remember I was going up the stairs in the house and I heard her on the phone saying to a friend of hers, well, I'll always be able to make money.

And I remember stopping and freezing when I heard that and thinking we are doomed. And that for me was a huge factor in, I just, I started working as much as I could. I got a job as a child model because when you're 13, 14, there's not a lot you can actually do.

They're the upper strata. Gloria Vanderbilt did make her own fortune with those genes, but Anderson Cooper never stopped working. I'm Anderson Cooper. Work for me has been the thing which has gotten me through everything. Work has always been the one constant in my life. From the time I was working as a child model as a kid, it was something that was reliable that helped me calm myself and know that I was building a foundation for a life. A life that now includes his son, 16-month-old Wyatt, to whom the book is dedicated.

I thought, I want to write a book for my son that kind of explains part of his past or his family's past. And it's an honest view, I think, at this remarkable family, which remarkable in good ways and also bad. Thank you for listening.

Please join us when our Trump interview sounds again next Sunday morning. There are bad people in the world. The best way to protect the good people is to convict the bad. So here's to us. The Good Fight, the final season, now streaming exclusively on Paramount+.