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

air, surrounded by endless blue sky and natural mountainous sculpture. And we were all wearing the uniform of virility, two-piece denim suits. Dan and I were in a car following Imus, and when he stopped to snap a picture, we jumped out of the car and watched. But back in the car, it became a Dan Rather open mic, a super-personal one-on-one celebrity interview.

“Does Richard Nixon hate you? Do you ever see him?” I asked. He said they didn’t see each other for twenty years and then ran into each other crossing a random street in New York City but didn’t speak.

“What’s the deal with Barbara Walters?” He said she was the most competitive person he’d known and had once high-heeled him in the foot running to interview someone.

“What’s the most dangerous situation you’ve been in? Most embarrassing live TV moment? Why haven’t you ever been on Oprah? What do you really think of Connie Chung? Tell me about the guy who mugged you.” I was like a ravenous dog, and he answered every single query. “Oh, wait—Have you met Princess Di?” Yes, I was exactly this annoying. But this was a legend, and we were out in God’s country, alone together, and I had to ask every damn thing I could think of while I had the chance. (Unfortunately, today I can’t remember many of his answers. And that kills me, because I do remember an entire catalog of Captain and Tennille lyrics.)

With every passing moment, I became even more of a Dan Fan. He seemed like he was in the zone with me, too. “This is so beautiful. Why don’t we stop the car and I’ll take a picture of you, Andrew, that you can send to your mom to show her where you were?”

“Dan, will you be my daddy?” I asked. In my head, of course. We stopped the car and Dan carefully knelt on the dusty ground to get the best possible picture. Our cameraman took a picture of Dan taking a picture of me—a moment so meta and surreal you might not believe it if I didn’t have the evidence.

At the end of the shoot, as we drove to our departure spot at a landing strip in the middle of nowhere, I felt like I’d climbed to the top of some sort of Broadcast Journalism Peak. I’d worked with Dan Rather in the field. As we’d been previously instructed to do, we parked our rental car on the edge of the landing strip, locked our keys inside, and boarded the private flight for home.

The plane turned to taxi, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Not only had I had the time of my life as a one-man captive audience to a TV news legend, we had also survived the shoot without incident. No one had mugged Dan, I hadn’t screwed up, Dan seemed relaxed and pleased, and I had the footage I needed for a great piece on Don Imus. I reclined my luxurious leather seat and had just popped the top on my first can of free limitless Diet Coke when suddenly the plane lurched under me and I noticed that we were tilting—sinking, actually—into the tarmac. The huge plane had hit a sinkhole in the asphalt of a runway ill equipped for aircraft this size.

I had rejoiced too soon, and now the earth was eating Dan Rather! It was sucking The Anchorman—and me—into the ground!

“Is the National Desk aware of what’s happening?” Dan breathlessly inquired of me seconds later. “What’s the plan from New York?”

“Um…” I stammered, when what I wanted to say was, “I am sitting here right next to you and haven’t had time to alert the media that we have a sunken anchorman.” I felt that I should have had a better answer, that I should have had a plan in place for dealing with a situation like this. But how can you plan ahead for the ground opening up underneath you?

I called my executive producer in New York and explained what had happened. The EP spoke with Dan, then wished me luck as the pilots scrambled to find another jet to take us back to New York. They found one a short drive away in Billings, Montana. Exiting the plane, I now saw that the earth hadn’t exactly tried to swallow us but, more accurately, had taken a nice bite out of the plane. Dan and I grabbed the flight attendant, who grabbed her tray of veggies and dip, and we all headed back to the car we’d left on the edge of the runway.

The car! We’d dutifully locked our keys in the car an hour before, and now we had to break into it. Luckily, a newsman on the road always has a recently dry-cleaned garment on a crappy wire hanger, so a few intense rental-car-damaging moments of jamming and probing later, we got inside and raced out of there hoping to get to Billings on time. My fears that our not-so-near-death experience had ruined what was otherwise a grand weekend flew out the window as Dan, clearly in high spirits, sang in the car—songs like you’d hear at camp around the fire—and let it be known to all of us that he had Knicks tickets for that night and was confident that if we hustled, he’d still make the game. We were served nibbly bits by the flight attendant, and then the three of us kicked out a sing-along jam that lasted the whole way home from Billings. Best. Trip. Ever.

By the way, The Anchorman made it to Madison Square Garden in time for tip-off. But it was all downhill for me at CBS from there.

They say you can never go home again, but I sure as hell tried. I returned to the morning show in 1999 as a senior producer running their entertainment unit. My life became a resounding chorus of “NO” coming from every publicist in America. “No, Julia Roberts can’t come to the