Introducing Tough Cookie: The Wally “Famous” Amos Story

DYNASTY: The Royal Family’s Most Challenging Year

Vanity Fair

Society & Culture

3.6 • 860 Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Meet Wally Amos. He founded the ubiquitous Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookies in 1975, turning the brand into an overnight sensation and himself into a pop-culture fixture in the 1970s and 1980s.

But there’s a darker side to Wally’s seemingly sweet story. One filled with five marriages to six women and a string of bad business decisions that led him to lose the empire he had created.

When he passed away in 2024, host Sarah Amos set out to untangle her father’s complicated past and finally face the life and legacy she had been avoiding.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's a sunny day at Fort Green Park.
0:05.0	The dogs are out, the children are out, the people are chilling.
0:10.0	So we're gonna find a cross-section of people.
0:15.0	We're gonna find some old people, some young people.
0:19.0	A little bit of everything. These guys look friendly. This is really easy. I'm Sarah. Hi. We're with Vanity Fair. Can I ask you guys a question?
0:29.6	Yeah.
0:31.6	What do you guys know about the brand Famous Amos?
0:35.6	Really good cookies.
0:39.2	I feel like we would have them for like elementary school snack in Texas.
0:43.5	Little tiny bags of tiny chocolate chip cookies.
0:46.1	To me it's giving like large Costco multi-snack packs.
0:50.3	My fiance loves them.
0:53.7	Have you ever had a famous famous cookie?
0:57.0	Bite-sized crunchy chocolate chip,
0:59.5	a staple in vending machines,
1:01.2	or the after-school snack rotation?
1:04.2	The tan bags, the blue logo,
1:06.9	a part of American culture
1:08.4	that feels like it's just always been there.
1:12.1	Black owned, or black created, I guess. I don't know if it's still owned by black folks.
1:17.5	But if you're a little bit older, you may also remember a man.
1:21.4	African American male with a embroidered shirt, with a straw hat, happy face, looking and pointing at a large cookie.
	...

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