Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture, Andy Cohen [the best books to read txt] 📗

seemingly innocuous beeping was actually Morse code for “GET OFF YOUR ASS RIGHT NOW AND PREPARE FOR YOUR DAY TO BE RUINED.” Without fail, the second I relaxed and forgot it was there, it would come to life, bidding me to call the office right away where someone at the assignment desk was ready to shout me out of my peaceful state, which was often a deep sleep. The orders were always urgent. “Sinatra died, get in here!” or “You’re booked on the last flight out to New Orleans—we need you to be there when Hurricane Andrew hits tonight!”

My response was usually some form of incredulous disbelief. “Wait—you want me to fly INTO the hurricane?” (They did! I did. I got very wet, it sucked, but I got to see Dan Rather hanging on to a pole during gale-force winds.) When that beeper went off, it was never to let me know something fantastic had happened. I started to form a negative mental association between that sound and tragedy—like one of Pavlov’s dogs if it suffered from PTSD. I’d take a breath and wait a couple minutes before calling back, hoping the breaking news would somehow un-break in the interim. I also didn’t want to seem too available. I’M BUSY! I’ve got like eighteen balls in the air!

In Palm Springs, I finally called the CBS newsdesk and was put through to Jim Murphy, senior broadcast producer on the show. “Dude, there’s a massive storm near Petaluma, California,” he informed me. “Millions of dollars in damage and flooding. You gotta go there and get us some guests for the top of the show.”

“I can’t!” I pleaded. “You have to find someone else!” I mean, I was in a paradise of my own making and there was no way I was leaving. They were not taking me away from the weird, naked aerobicizers, whose weird, naked aerobics had taken on a mesmerizing quality, like something out of a David Lynch film. And, more importantly, they certainly weren’t taking me away from my new best friend, Tammy Faye.

Back and forth we went, with me arguing vehemently that this Tammy Faye Messner exclusive was HUGE, and she would go right to Good Morning America if we didn’t proceed with the interview as planned. I guess I was convincing. Jim said he would call me back.

I spent the next half hour sulking in my room. Couldn’t someone from the stupid LA bureau cover the stupid rainstorm in stupid Northern California? (I know I sound hateful and crass, but that is how jaded you become in the news business. It’s not that I didn’t care about a devastating storm; I just wanted to do my story.)

Jim called back. “We’re sending someone from LA, but we pushed Tammy Faye up to tomorrow’s show, and you may have to go up north when the interview’s done.” I was still pissed, but grateful for the twenty-four-hour reprieve. I could go back to having fun, which immediately set my demented mind off on a new (but related) tangent. The voice of my friend Graciela was in my ear, she was my inner prankster, and she was encouraging me to hatch a wicked plot. Maybe I would swipe one of the filthy movies lying around my hotel and hide it under one of Tammy Faye’s settees that might or might not be fugitives of the IRS. How hilarious would that be? Maybe not super-professional. Or adult. Career-wise, this was shaping up to be a really tough decision. This joke might be funny to play on your mom, but as much as you’d love it, Tammy is not your mom, I chided myself; you can’t play such an awful joke on her. So, in the end, Tammy Faye was spared a potentially brilliant prank by a twinge of conscience over the havoc I would no doubt have wreaked. I made a note to stash a porno in my luggage in order to hide it somewhere fun on my next trip to St. Louis.

It was two o’clock in the morning when I drove to Tammy’s house to meet a satellite truck the day of our interview. By then, it had become normal for me to start my workday in pitch darkness while the rest of the world slept. The farther west I went, the more painful the morning would be, because the setup stuff that had to happen before we got on the air took hours. It was all about establishing the shot, lighting it, getting the satellite truck fired up and in a position where it has a clear signal facing the right direction (don’t ask me—I still don’t get it twenty years later). Once you’ve “uplinked to the bird” you begin the pleasurable back-and-forth with the Michelangelos in the control room in New York who would like a plant shifted four inches, the camera turned in another direction, and some snow in the background. “Um, it didn’t snow here,” you tell the disappointed person who thinks since your interview subject is resplendent in winter white, there should be snow.

We were going live at 5:30 a.m. PST. When the door opened, Roe was standing there, and I kid you not that he was smelling intensely of lotion, though it was impossible to say whether it was Buddy’s brand. Was the desert so devastatingly drying to older people that they had to lube up before they could even bend their limbs in the morning?

Tammy appeared in a stonewashed denim jumpsuit. To some, she might’ve looked like a drag Eva Gabor on her way to a Hee Haw audition, but to me she looked perfect. Waiting nervously for her segment, she listened to Harry interview Liam Neeson about Schindler’s List and narrated what she was hearing in a very loud TammyVoice to her half-deaf husband, who was sitting there with the same monitor in his ear. “Oh, how depressing!” she shouted cheerfully. “Auschwitz! The Jews!” She shook her head. I worried that following such