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

my story straight. I blamed Paula’s schedule. I blamed breaking news. I blamed Bergdorf’s. I blamed my executive producer. I blamed me. I was a flailing hot mess.

How did this happen? How, in what was meant to be my moment of glory, could I have ended up in the doghouse with my all-time idol? This was like Oprah, but worse. In an attempt to save face, I sent flowers and a very sincere note of apology.

You can breathe a momentary sigh of relief now: This next Susan Lucci story is not humiliating. In fact, she became a guardian angel at a moment when I least expected it. In early 1999, Graciela told me she was getting married. I responded with mixed emotions. I was thrilled for her but also deeply sad that now, officially, she and I could not spend our lives together. I worried I was losing my accomplice. She’d still be around, but it would be different. I knew I couldn’t be selfish, at least not outwardly, and I had to find a way to properly send her off into her new life. So I organized what I think was probably one of the first all-gay wedding showers, a chance for all the boys who worshipped Grac to let her go and to show her how much we loved her. The evening was so important to me that when I realized that the date we’d chosen conflicted with the Daytime Emmy Awards, I shrugged it off. Grac was way more important. I’d just have to set my VCR.

I’d spent months planning the gay shower and making a special video. It was a high-tech love letter to Grac featuring montages of her fabulosity. It included celebrity well-wishers I’d grabbed while doing my day job at CBS—everybody from Johnnie Cochran and Sandra Bullock to several cast members from The Brady Bunch. Graciela arrived at her event in full Britt Ekland hair, a red gingham dress, and white cat-eye sunglasses. She carried shopping bags, a Barbie phone, and a huge lollipop that matched her skirt. How could I give this woman up?

Among her gifts were a Dollywood poncho, Vivienne Westwood’s latest perfume—called Boudoir—fur handcuffs, and red stilettos. The highlight, if I do say so myself, was the video, and as it was playing, I got beeped; it was CBS telling me that Susan Lucci, after nineteen nominations, had finally won the Emmy. It was like a hug from above.

When I announced to the party that Lucci had won her Emmy, the reaction was like Stonewall 2. Graciela and I decided that it was some kind of cosmic sign. Susan Lucci was our fairy godmother, sprinkling magical dust over us, saying that even though everything was changing, we would always be the same. Love would rule.

If Graciela was my Dorothy, Susan Lucci was our Glinda that night. And Judy.

As I’d done for so many years in the past, I had prebooked a morning-after appearance with Lucci’s people on the off-off-off-chance that she would win this time. Monday, I was up at the crack of pitch black, waiting in front of the CBS Broadcast Center for Lucci’s limo, something I hadn’t done since the time Joan Collins visited the studio and scared the shit out of me. When Susan stepped out, wearing a Chanel-ish crème suit, I hugged her with as much happiness as if I’d won myself. I felt like finally there was justice in the world, and I wanted her to know it. She had won!

On the air, we presented her with a dozen long-stemmed roses, which was thoughtful enough. But unbeknownst to us, she’d just come from Good Morning America, where they’d given her nineteen dozen roses, one for each year she’d been nominated and lost. And here we were, handing her a dozen roses that would be dead in hours from the Korean deli on Tenth Avenue. Does that not sum it all up perfectly? Susan, amazing actress that she was, acted as if our roses meant more to her than anything. She even wiped a “tear” from the corner of her eye!

On her way out, we hugged one last time and triumphantly posed for pictures holding up that day’s newspapers. (The Daily News blared AT LONG LAST, LUCCI.) And after so many encounters crammed with so much awkwardness on my end, it felt like the best possible ending to the Lucci-Cohen story arc.

Or so it would have been. But, like characters in our own daytime drama, Susan Lucci and I weren’t done.

It was “winter” in Los Angeles, and Lucci’s daughter, Liza, was Miss Golden Globe. Miss GG is a yearly fixture at the Golden Globes award show where the (pretty) daughter of a (pretty) celebrity (and sometimes even a pretty celebrity couple) puts on a gown and presents the trophies to the winner. This particular year it was Lucci’s daughter, Liza Huber, who would be doing the honors, and the Friday before the Globes, I ran into her, her mother, and their whole family in the lobby of the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where, it turned out, we were all staying. (This was a one hundred percent coincidence, I promise.)

Of course, my heroine was as radiant as ever, but I wasn’t the same Andrew Cohen. By that time, I’d worked with Dan Rather and met more huge stars than I could count. I’d traveled the world, left CBS, and was running programming at TRIO. I was a man, not a kid, and comfortable in my own skin (and with my own eyes). But one slightly cross-eyed look at Erica Kane reduced me right back to a sweaty-palmed nineteen-year-old. No, actually, I was way more nervous than when I’d met her at age nineteen, because over the years I’d lost some innocence and naïveté while gaining plenty of experience in things going terribly.

Of course, no matter how anxious I was, there was no way I wasn’t going to talk to her. I tried to make up for my nerves