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

me is, “How do you deal with those women?” The main answer is that I am crazy about them and the show. These women are funny, they are earnest about what’s important to them, they dress to the nines for every occasion, they often only take themselves seriously, and most of them recognize the simultaneous gravity and sheer absurdity of the end-of-season forum. It is like a courtroom of manners and etiquette and they’re the overdressed star witnesses. And me? Even as I’m caught in the cross fire during an intense exchange, my producer-brain is parsing what they’ve said and determining if we’re getting what we need to make an exciting TV show, whether it’ll be enough content for two parts, and if the fans will feel like they got enough drama, excitement, news, and fun. I’ll admit that I’ve had my moments when I was too exhausted to listen to one more word, or if I did, I would simply lose it, but I never crossed that boundary. Not until minute 45 of the Real Housewives of New York Season 4 reunion taping. Allow me to relive my shame.

The morning had started out intensely, with Jill asking anyone who would listen whether she was in the “A Position”—not a term anyone on any reunion set had ever actually used, but which in her mind meant seated beside me. I knew from Watch What Happens Live that she was big on seating placement: “I would like to request to sit next to Andy,” she’d tell our booker, as though there were tons of other options on our tiny set. Needless to say, she wasn’t pleased to discover that LuAnn and Ramona had already been assigned seats on either side of me.

In the final moments before we started rolling tape, Alex arrived on-set and was also annoyed about the seating arrangement. She was supposed to sit on the far end of the couch, the same position she’d had for every other reunion show. “I don’t want to sit here. Can I sit further in? I’m always on the end. I’m tired of being on the end!” I told her to think of herself as the voice of reason on the end, which she very often was, but she still wasn’t happy.

With all the talk about “Where am I sitting?”—as if these grown women were little kids at a birthday party table before cake—by the time we got rolling I was already a little spent, and you can see it on my face at the top of the show when Alex and I curtly greet each other. That was as quiet as things got, though, because once we were off to the races, I was in the middle of a pack of wild beasts roaring and screeching simultaneously over each other. I tried to get them to quiet down, or at least speak one at a time, to no avail. It was as if they couldn’t hear each other. Or me. Unfortunately, it was the only reunion show taping my parents had ever attended. They stopped by on their way to a matinee of Book of Mormon.

“Please let each other speak! One at a time!” I begged.

I had the Countess to my right, and I tried to appeal to her respect for etiquette and called for decorum. No one listened. I moved on to sporadically telling them all to “Shut UP!” Nothing. To give you an idea of the scene, read this mini-transcript really fast and imagine everyone speaking at once:

Jill: You can give it but you can’t take it.

Ramona: I can take anything, whatever you want to give to me. You just said …

Kelly: You don’t want to encourage that kind of behavior.

Ramona: … my husband, inferring whatever.

Jill: No, go ahead … what about your husband?

Ramona: Nothing. He’s a great man, I’m very lucky. I wish you had a great husband like mine because I know you don’t.

Countess: You know what … I love Bobby.

Kelly: I love Bobby!

Jill: Were you there? WERE YOU THERE? Because I got …

Ramona: Get a life! Get a life, loser!

Jill: Lowlife!

Andy: Shut up!

Alex: Shhhhhh!

Andy: Shut up and let me ask about it, okay? You guys are acting like beasts today!

A half hour into shooting and I was yelling at grown women, telling them to shut up, something I could not have pictured myself saying to anyone just an hour before. Oh, and it wasn’t working. Finally, I screamed at the top of my lungs, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!”

And they did. We all apologized to each other and moved on. Hours later, as we dissected the situation that led to me yelling at them—almost like an instant reunion for the reunion—they agreed that me yelling “STFU” was the only thing that could have actually gotten them to do it. When we took our next break, I remembered that my poor parents, who’d come to New York hoping to see their son in action, making them proud, had instead witnessed me dropping an F-bomb to a bunch of ladies in cocktail dresses. Luckily, they were on my side.

“It was all you could do to SHUT THEM UP!” Evelyn said, herself screaming.

“I think it was the right—and only—thing to do, Andy,” my dad quietly agreed. They skedaddled out of there in a hurry, and at the time I wished I could have scurried right along with them.

Still, probably the most heated and most talked-about reunion of all was at the end of New Jersey’s second season, which was the first time all the women had been in a room at the same time with Danielle since the first reunion. The second season of that show was essentially fourteen episodes of Danielle vs. the other women. The uneasy feeling as we were getting settled at the Atlantic City Borgata was even worse than it had been for the Jill vs. Bethenny reunion of RHNYC. I knew going in that Teresa’s temper was intense, but I wasn’t expecting much more than raised voices. I was