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

factories and skiing in Gstaad? Certainly not this pitch: A producer had the whole Bravo office in a lather about the HUGE TOP SECRET star he was bringing into the office. I was convinced it could only be J Lo. But the producer arrived for the meeting with only a briefcase, which he opened theatrically to reveal “Madame,” the puppet who in the ’70s had replaced Paul Lynde as the center square on Hollywood Squares. One memorable pitch took me out of my office and inside the mind-boggling 123-room Los Angeles mansion of Aaron Spelling, where I sat in the “library” listening to his widow, Candy, tell me what she would and would not do on TV. As I munched from a platter of crudités the size of a manhole cover, I realized I was surrounded by leatherbound copies of every script her late husband had ever written. Breathing in the rich smells of leather commingled with aging pages of Dynasty and TJ Hooker dialogue made me feel appropriately faux-literary as I bided my time until I was allowed into the dowager Spelling’s storied wrapping-paper room. It did not disappoint.

But Candy would have had to try really hard to beat my all-time kookiest celebrity pitch meeting. Back when the TRIO network was still afloat, I was in LA when I got a message that Cybill Shepherd wanted to pitch a reality show that she was billing as a real-life Absolutely Fabulous starring Cybill and her best friend. We met in her manager’s office in Beverly Hills on a hot Los Angeles summer day. I wore flip-flops, khakis, and a T-shirt, which is not unusual office attire for Los Angeles.

It’s been my experience that when you take any kind of pitch from a celebrity, they are usually “on.” Because in that moment they are their own product, so they are presenting a version of themselves that either they want you to think they are or that they think you want them to be. Sometimes that person can wind up being completely overbearing; other times, they can be charming. With Shepherd, it was somewhere in between.

Cybill was dressed to the nines, made up, hair done, and with her best friend, who was similarly upbeat and well packaged. In a nondescript, steaming office, they were cheerful, engaging, and flirty. Very flirty.

“How old are you, Andrew?” they cooed. “Are you Jewish?”

“Um, yes?” I stammered. I felt like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. But Dustin only had one Mrs. Robinson, and he wasn’t gay.

“We LOVE Semitic men!” Cybill exclaimed.

Her friend agreed. “We love them!” she nodded.

I was uncomfortable, and it was so boiling in that office that the internal gaydars of two sophisticated, well-traveled LA ladies had apparently completely short-circuited. I wondered if I should just come out to them right then before they tried to titillate me into picking up their show. Cybill said she was baking. She kept fanning herself and lifting her hair off the nape of her neck into a loose pile on top of her head.

“Do you mind if I slip off my shoes?” she asked, not waiting for a response before letting her dogs out. She certainly didn’t need to explain needing to let her feet breathe—I was the one in flip-flops. I was starting to groove on her casual style as she told me about the real-life madcap situations that she and her pal got into in real life, and how that would translate to a hit show. Blind dates! Motherhood! Menopause! It was pretty much a pitch for a reality version of her successful CBS sitcom Cybill. Not a horrible idea.

Suddenly, though, Ms. Shepherd did have a horrible idea. A very, very horrible idea. “It is so fucking hot in here,” she announced, “that I think I have to take my shirt off.”

I’ve been told that I cock my head a lot on Watch What Happens Live, particularly when someone says something weird or outrageous (which is a lot). Well, I’m pretty sure I sprained my neck with the extreme cocking I did at her suggestion. Cybill was squealing with laughter as she asked her broiling friend if she was up for joining in this game of pitch-tease. Big shock: Her friend was into it. I thought maybe a better idea was to turn up the air-conditioning, but for perhaps the first time in my life, and for reasons I still can’t comprehend, I kept my mouth shut. Maybe I had heatstroke.

They proposed a deal: They would take their shirts off, and then I would follow suit and take off mine. I should remind the reader here that there were other people in the room. Other people who were certainly as hot and sweaty as me, but nobody was making them take their shirts off. Not that I wanted to see any of them without their shirts. Not that I didn’t want to, either. You can see how this was becoming weirder by the second, and although I was already pretty sure at that point that we weren’t going to buy this demented version of Beverly Hills AbFab Theater, I had to admit I was curious to see how this would all play out. And I was hot. And by “hot” I mean that I was sweating-like-I-was-going-through-menopause hot, not hot like ready to bang the Moonlighting lady.

“Okay,” I said, and off came my shirt.

There I was, sitting across from Cybill Shepherd, famed star of The Last Picture Show and The Heartbreak Kid, who was now wearing slacks and no shoes and a black bra. The curiosity that had been percolating moments before abruptly evaporated. Now I just wanted my mommy. Or Dan Rather. Cybill’s friend was also wearing a black bra. And these ladies were lovely, but I really, really did not want to see them in their dainties. They continued to pitch me the show, the two bra-clad Mrs. Robinsons and me, naked to the waist.

“If this is the first meeting,” I wondered to myself, “what