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

at the top of the hour. Camera crews were in short supply, and to give you an idea of our relative importance, the freelance crew assigned to us was from Topeka, Kansas, and included a sound woman who didn’t know a microphone from a microwave but was a dead ringer for Shelly Duvall as Olive Oyl.

We worked out of an empty space in the back of Oklahoma City’s CBS affiliate, and I was running on adrenaline and deadlines. It’s no accident that in TV news, working this way is called “crashing” your piece. We shot, wrote, and cut three stories a day, which meant going into the field and talking to people on-camera, coming back and screening the tape, writing a script, then working with an editor to put it all together, advising on shots and sound. A good editor, by the way, is the heart and soul of any story, and editors are certainly the unsung heroes of the news business and reality TV as well. He or she can take what you and I would see as ordinary raw footage and hone it into something like a work of art, by lingering on shots of people’s faces, or cutting at just the right moment to an emotional scene, or creating tension by juxtaposing a stark voiceover with jarring images.

Oklahoma City was the closest I’ll ever get to being in a war zone. The people we met were heartbroken and in shock. Someone had come and blown up one of their most visible buildings, killing men, women, and children for a political statement. I knew that somewhere inside, a part of me was wailing and crying for the survivors, but my directive was to chronicle their pain, not to feel it with them. I silenced my own emotions and focused on getting my scripts done and crashing my pieces. And I understood: This was the job. But I also understood: This was not normal. Every time I left a victim at the site of the bombing, it wasn’t two minutes before I was back among my team of coworkers in our little tent city, and that area—with its craft services tables stocked with snacks and hot coffee, and the makeshift makeup stations and the camaraderie—was controlled and predictable. My flirting with a pockmarked intern from the affiliate and partaking in the time-honored journalistic tradition of gallows humor, I now realize, were not so much callous acts as they were a feeble attempt to shield myself from the mess outside.

My last day in Oklahoma City, I finished my final piece at 6 a.m. and headed to my untouched motel room to take a quick shower before catching a plane home to New York. I turned on the TV and watched Harry Smith interview a woman whose baby had died, and the firefighter who’d had to carry that baby out to her. After days of being in the center of a tragedy, the reality of Oklahoma City finally had a chance to sink in. Alone in my motel room, I broke down and wept. I sobbed all the way to the airport, primally and uncontrollably, and while I was at it, I cried for most of the flight home. I didn’t care. I was off the clock.

*   *   *

When September 11 happened six years after Oklahoma City, I was a “civilian,” having left CBS just the year before, after a decade in TV news. I stood on my fire escape first thing in the morning, watching dumbstruck as the Towers fell, and for much of the rest of the day I watched streams of people walk, like a dazed army, up the street from downtown. For days, I walked around the neighborhood, which was acrid with what every New Yorker would come to call simply The Smell—an awful, dread-inducing mix of electricity and jet fuel and ashes. And like nearly every New Yorker I saw during those days, I’d burst out crying in the middle of the street at any given moment, because everywhere you looked, bus stops and fences and streetlights were covered with thousands of hastily copied flyers, each with a picture of another person who had shown up for their job that gorgeous morning and was now missing, and, as we learned before much time had passed, was never going to be found. Here’s why I’m telling you this now: If it was even remotely possible to feel grateful for one thing about 9/11, besides just being alive, it was that I didn’t have to find the people who had hung those flyers and interview them about whether or not they still held out any hope. I didn’t have to sit in an editing bay trying to make a piece work, looking for that certain something that would elevate it over everyone else’s 9/11 pieces. This time, I was just another New Yorker. I was just another person. And while I had never felt worse before, at least I didn’t have to try not to.

I WAS A JEWISH GO-GO DANCER

Can we please move on from me being a drama queen to a story about my fave drama queen? In my personal pantheon of stars, Diana Ross may be even bigger than Susan Lucci. I know what you’re saying: How is this possible? How, Andy? Who could be bigger than Susan Lucci? I think it’s because TV stars seem, in the end, more approachable than pop stars or movie stars. After all, they’re in your home, sometimes every day. Miss Ross is the ultimate diva superhero: big hair, big sequins, big poses, big anthems, bigger than life. And you never have the idea, not for a second, that she’d ever set foot in your home.

Through my work, I began meeting people who’d been idols—and, just as memorably, the people behind those idols. All my co-workers had their own short list of celebrities they were personally obsessed with—usually baseball players or authors or politicians or random heartthrobs like Kevin Costner