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

studio, she’s on Regis that day. Tom Cruise? Yes, that would be NO!” The last time I’d been at CBS This Morning, we’d consistently been number three. By this point, we were probably number nine: Competing with Today and GMA had been hard enough, but in the couple of years I’d been away, the competition for bookings had also started to include Entertainment Tonight, Access, Regis, Rosie, and a host of others. It was brutal.

I logged countless hours backstage at awards shows, which sounds fun but wasn’t. I’ve spent a noticeable percentage of my life at the Oscars, the Grammys, and even the friggin’ Country Music Awards, and it was tuxedo warfare. To make these evenings as punishing as possible, the awards producers made everyone backstage—including our poor camera operators and sound guys—wear black tie to impart an air of glamour to every hideous occasion. The morning after every sleepless award-show night, my bosses in New York expected an upbeat, flashy piece that featured Mark McEwen, yukking it up with all the big winners. Nobody knew the hell associated with delivering on that promise.

Backstage at the awards, each show has a little makeshift room constructed of what’s called pipe-and-drape—which is exactly what it sounds like, curtains hanging from pipes, all lined up in this little velveteen shantytown. Every show creates a staging area commensurate with the show’s status. Entertainment Tonight and Access always did it up big. They’d haul in huge lighting rigs with portable spaceship set pieces, photo booths, comfy couches, and In-N-Out Burgers. Naturally, that’s where every big star stopped first. Mary Hart and her tribe of blond producers always looked like they were having so much FUN, laughing and schmoozing with the stars. At that time in my life I probably hated Mary Hart more than that woman who suffered seizures triggered by hearing Mary Hart’s voice. Today, of course, I look back on my hostility as wasted energy, but at the time, ET was everything we were not, with their big budget, and ratings, and power. And free-flowing burgers.

Backstage at an awards show with Mark McEwen

Over in Morning Show Alley, we’d be in the corner behind Today and GMA— shows that needed no other set dressing than their superstar anchors. Katie Couric adorably perched in a director’s chair was like catnip that lured in frisky members of the glitterati. By contrast, our CBS area usually consisted of a blue curtain, a plant of the fern variety, a couple lights, and—in later years—a bowl of loose LifeSavers. We were very proud of the candy jar because occasionally the stars would take a piece! That meant they liked us! “Candice Bergen ate a LifeSaver!” we would marvel. At the time, we never saw any irony in choosing that particular candy. And even though the stars straggling by our tent genuinely liked Mark McEwen, we were always last in the rotation, and that meant people were usually sick of giving interviews by the time they got to us. You know what makes for lousy television? One-word answers.

I would try to prebook celebs before award shows, calling publicists and saying that I knew their client was going to win and please don’t forget to stop by backstage to show off the new hardware. We also started pursuing up-and-coming talents who had no real name recognition yet but had gotten some critical acclaim. The hope was that they’d do our show in New York when nobody else knew who they were, and later they’d feel some loyalty to us as they started becoming famous and winning awards. It seemed like a good idea, but it didn’t really work. I remember one particular screaming match with Hilary Swank’s publicist, who’d screwed us in some painful way after we’d gotten behind Hilary when no one else (the Today show) cared.

While everyone who was anyone in Hollywood was out celebrating their wins and trying to work through their losses with the help of recreational consumables, I’d be at CBS Television City writing and editing the piece. We’d always finish and walk out as the sun was rising and I’d complain to Mark that we looked too good to waste ourselves on the war we’d just fought.

To say that morale on that show was at an all-time low is really saying something, but it was true. One day I came in to work and the poster on my office door—for the film Life Is Beautiful—had been ripped down the middle. “Who the fuck ripped my uplifting Holocaust poster?” I yelled. “FYI everybody: I called security and they’re pulling the camera footage from the hallway!” I had every intention of finding the culprit, and a day later one of the anchors came into my office and closed the door.

“I have a confession. I ripped your poster. It was five in the morning, no one was here, I was pissed about something stupid, and it was the first thing I saw. I’m so sorry.”

Life was not beautiful at the bottom of the ratings, and nearing the end of 1999, the anchor was put out of misery with another relaunch of the show. This time CBS had lured Bryant Gumbel, an Emmy-winning former star of the Today show, back to morning television. In a series of decisions meant to reflect the hugeness of this development, execs changed the name of CBS This Morning to The Early Show, built an expensive, state-of-the-art studio adjacent to Central Park, and then, for some reason, fumbled the coanchor hire. She was quite lovely and cute and nice and I have nothing against her, but she had a mild personality and was no match for Bryant Gumbel, who could turn sitting presidents into penitent schoolboys. We all crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.

It was imperative that I bring out the big guns to salute Gumbel’s return to morning television. I booked Mariah Carey to perform outside on our plaza, for her first-ever morning show concert. Mariah wanted it to