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

Years later, I had long forgotten this incident and was surprised to learn that Sparks had written of me in a nonfiction book about his life. In it, he thanked me for my compassion in not airing that footage. I was honored, but mortified. Looking back on it now, I wondered if I should’ve included it in the story. This may sound unfeeling or opportunistic, but we were a legitimate documentary show, and we were there to tell the truth about what was happening to this man in the days leading up to the biggest event in his life. One of the reasons that I think the Housewives resonates with viewers is that we show everything that happens during our production period—good, bad, or ugly, it’s real.

Some might actually say I flouted the laws of journalism by cutting the phone call. At the time, obscuring a detail about a fiction author’s life did not seem the same as withholding information about a world leader. Last year, Erin took me as her date to a party celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of The Notebook. In the car on the way over, I finally confessed that I’d withheld the footage of Sparks receiving that phone call. Her reaction surprised me and instantly eased any lingering doubts I had. She said that had it been a hard news story, it would’ve been our obligation to show that footage, but since it was a feature, she was okay with my judgment call. I walked into that celebration with a light heart and loved reuniting with Nick, who still credits that 48 Hours piece with much of his first novel’s initial success.

*   *   *

One of my favorite stories as a 48 Hours producer was a profile of Don Imus that I produced with Dan Rather. The plan was for Dan and me to join Imus for (a little under) forty-eight hours in Monument Valley, Utah, as the famously abrasive radio personality took pictures for a new coffee table book celebrating one of his passions, photographing gorgeous Western scenery. (Who knew?)

48 Hours. “Shirtless Tuesdays” with colleagues Mary Noonan and Diane Ronnau—I was the only one who complied.

I spent sleepless weeks before the shoot fretting about being entrusted with taking Dan Rather on location with no “adult” supervision. This was a very big deal, and, if I may say, a mark of my reputation at the time that I was even being allowed outside the building with Dan, whom I barely knew. Dan’s legend preceded him: He had a heart of gold but could be tough and exacting and maybe a little on the edge of losing it sometimes. Oh, and he seemed to be a magnet for crazy.

Things happened to Dan Rather. This was the man who’d been punched at the ’68 Democratic National Convention. This was the man who’d been taken for an endless taxi ride in Chicago by a possibly unstable cabbie trying to jack up the fare, resulting in Dan hanging out the window and shouting to people that he was being kidnapped. This was the man who’d been mugged on the street by a disturbed stranger who kept demanding, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?!” (which in turn inspired a hit song by R.E.M.). Even though Dan had gone some years without a bizarre incident, I didn’t want any of that going down on my watch.

I was summoned to Mr. Rather’s office overlooking the set of The CBS Evening News, the very setting of my humiliating ejection as an intern years earlier. I came prepared to brief him, in detail, on our plan. Dan’s a tall guy, a massive anchorman with a very large head (all anchormen have exceptionally large skulls, by the way, with the exception of Matt Lauer). He smelled, of course, of lotion. Fully lubed for his broadcast and half-listening to me while knotting his tie, Dan was encouraging and kind, yet authoritative. He said he’d known Imus for years and this would be a breeze. “Sounds simple enough, Andrew,” he said with a wink. He liked to wink and I like to be winked at, which I thought should work well. After that meeting, I couldn’t reconcile the stories of Dan’s nutbaggery with the steady, trustworthy anchorman who’d just put me at ease.

A few days later, I boarded Mr. Imus’s Gulfstream jet, which was to carry us out west for our photography adventure. Dan hadn’t shown up yet, but Imus had, and he seemed as geared up for Mr. Rather’s arrival as I was. Imus and I had spoken already on the phone for a preinterview, and in the course of our conversation the shock jock had revealed himself to be nothing but a pussycat, tickled that Dan was coming on this journey. In person, he was a gracious host to me. “What kind of mood is Dan going to be in this weekend?” he joked. I told him Dan couldn’t wait for the trip, which Dan hadn’t actually said but seemed okay to convey in the interest of keeping our subject pumped up. Moments later, The Anchorman arrived, enthusiastically bounding up the stairway to the small plane and totally supporting my claim that he was stoked. I sat in awe, listening to the two broadcasting legends as they discussed the news that was dominating the morning’s headlines: Frank Gifford getting busted with a woman in a hotel. Gossip! Of a celebrity nature—I was glad it wasn’t politics they were discussing, and their tone was one of gentlemen who are quite pleased it was someone else getting busted in a situation like this. I didn’t hear a ton of sympathy for Kathie Lee, either.

The whole weekend was basically a rugged denim fantasy. I was with a manly broadcasting legend and we were driving around a rocky American landscape shooting a grizzled radio legend while he took pictures. We are were in the middle of nowhere, under an orange ball of blazing autumn sun with just a nip in the