First of all, thanks for being here.
Hey, my pleasure.
Congratulations are in order.
Playgirl magazine named you the second hottest anchor.
A, how do you know that?
Big fan of the magazine.
I've been in it so many times I thought I'd check it out.
Yeah, the competition is I beat Larry King, woo.
Yeah, and narrowly edged out Sam Donaldson.
I think we have his, there he is.
(audience laughing)
He was the centerfold in that issue.
It's nice to know there's a fetish group for everyone.
So I give hope to like, pale, skinny,
gray haired ameba-like people.
Right.
No, no, no, you're a fine looking fellow.
Well thanks, Conan.
Shows going.
Well, we'll talk later about that.
We'll go to dinner, discuss it more thoroughly,
but you must tell us what's going on
because I actually never leave the studio.
You travel and cover news.
You just covered the wedding of Charles and Camilla.
Is that correct?
I did, yeah.
I was just in England on Saturday covering the wedding,
which I don't know if you saw it, it was bizarre.
It was sort of, I mean, clearly
there's a lot of intermarriage has been going on
over the years and they're all, I don't know if you saw.
They're all wearing these hats.
It's a whole country we're talking about.
No, no, no, we're talking about the royal family.
It does look like a Star Wars bar.
(audience laughing)
We're here for the wedding.
(Conan making alien sounds)
Well, they're are also all wearing these hats.
I don't know if you saw this,
that looked like they'd been running through the forest
and like got trees and branches and twigs got on there.
Can I ask what is it about,
and no one admires Britain more than I do, love you guys,
but what is it with their obsession with giant ugly hats?
It's bizarre.
And they weren't even hats.
They were literally twigs and branches,
like there were birds nesting
in Camilla Parker Bowles' hair.
[Conan] Right, right, right.
It's very strange.
Did you have a good time at the wedding?
It was fun. I mean you know,
I wasn't actually invited to the wedding,
so I was kind of standing outside,
but you know, there was a streaker, which is always fun.
You know what, that country, the streakers.
Love the streakers, yeah.
The streaker was here in this country and a big thing
in like 1974 and it lasted like six months.
In England it's still the rage.
People are always running by at royal funerals
and going like, oh it's a streaker.
I didn't get to see his bits and pieces
because they covered them up very quickly,
but what's weird is as soon as they grabbed him,
the police put a pair of pants on him.
I don't know where they got the pants.
The streaker is so common in Britain
that bobbies carry a nightstick and a pair of pants.
I happen to know that for a fact.
Then all the bobbies polarized with the streaker.
They were standing around like, yeah, they posed with them.
And then they brought him back.
They took them in the direction of Windsor Castle.
So I was convinced, and I kept saying on air,
that he was a wedding guest
and that he'd just gone like crazy
and decided to like take off the pants and leave the party,
and then they brought him back into the party.
Like anyone's relative at a wedding just running around.
Now I do want to ask you a little bit.
Your mom, famous fashion icon, Gloria Vanderbilt.
That's right.
Something I didn't know about you
when you first went on the air
and she wrote a book about her life.
Yeah, just recently.
And I'm curious, I don't know how comfortable I would be
if my mom wrote a book about her life.
Well, it wasn't just her life.
She just came out with this book about her sex life,
basically, and it was about all the guys
she's like hooked up with over the years.
That's gotta be very strange for you.
Well, it's a little bizarre, yeah,
'cause I used to think the worst thing in the world
was like, hearing your parents talk about sex.
It's not.
The worst thing in the world is learning
that your parents' sex life is actually more interesting
than your own.
And my mom has hooked up with like Marlon Brando
and like Howard Hughes flew her around, so to speak.
(audience laughing)
So to speak.
How do you compete with that?
It's like, well, I don't know, you know, I kissed somebody.
It can feel kind of lame and also then
reading these chapters, 'cause she would send me
these chapters as she's writing it,
and you know, I was fine with most about it.
You know, I sort of intellectually understood.
I should embrace her sexuality or whatever it is.
But my mom's 81 and there's some things
I just didn't want to know about.
She's writing about things that are happening today.
She talked about this guy she's dating
and she describes him as the Nijinsky of conalingus.
Now, I don't know much about dance, but-
Can we go to commercial now?
Yeah, I know.
I don't know much about dance,
but I'm guessing the Nijinsky is very limber.
Yes.
Why explore that area at all?
Well, anyway, don't you have to go to therapy
after reading something like that?
I know, I begged her to take out the whole Nijinsky thing,
but she didn't, she just laughed about it.
Right, right.
And there's photos in the book, I understand.
Not thankfully of that, but yeah, there are some photos.
People are filing out right now.
Well, let's change topics shall we?
That's what any good host would do now.
You were on TV constantly.
You're Anderson Cooper, 360, you're on TV all the time,
but what do you like to watch in your spare time?
When you go home and watch television, what do you watch?
Well, there's two shows I'm obsessed with.
One is this show Premier Impacto.
Do you guys watch this on Univision?
Yeah.
All right.
It's on Spanish television.
It's on five o'clock every afternoon
and it's the most tabloid news program on the planet.
Basically it's all in Spanish, which I don't speak,
but you don't really need to speak Spanish
because first of all,
the anchors are totally like busty women in low cut gowns
and it's all about their legs.
And then the, whatever the lead story is,
is whatever the most dramatic video of the day.
And it can be like a horse that got hit
on the side of the road in Ecuador.
But if it's like bleeding.
They'll just show that footage?
They'll show the video, yeah.
It's amazing, and that'll be the lead story of the day.
But my favorite part is that 5:47 every day,
or thereabouts is this guy, Walter Mercado,
who is a huge astrologer in the world.
He's hugely popular.
And he gives the daily astrological forecast, which yeah.
And he looks like he's completely Botoxed.
And you think when his mouth opens,
Botox will pour out of the mouth.
But he looks like Liberace and he's very dramatic.
He has two cameras and often he's like in the lobby
of Caesar's palace and he'll look at one camera
and he'll be like Hemmeney, and then he'll turn
very dramatic and go Taurus and he'll give the forecast.
He'll give the forecast, which you don't even understand
because they're in Spanish.
But you don't need to.
Yeah.
Someone told me You brought a clip of this guy.
Yeah, I wanted you to see him.
Let's show this clip from Premier Impacto.
Why not?
Let's take a look.
(Walter speaking foreign language)
Okay, that's the best thing I've seen on television
in a long time.
It's gold.
What is that called?
It's Premier Impacto.
It's five o'clock on Univision every afternoon.
He's at 5:46, 5:47.
I just want to see that.
I'm setting on the TiVo.
Oh no, it's fantastic.