Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (11 page)

I spent the next half hour sulking in my room. Couldn’t someone from the stupid LA bureau cover the stupid rainstorm in stupid Northern California? (I know I sound hateful and crass, but that is how jaded you become in the news business. It’s not that I didn’t care about a devastating storm; I just wanted to do
my
story.)

Jim called back. “We’re sending someone from LA, but we pushed Tammy Faye up to tomorrow’s show, and you may have to go up north when the interview’s done.” I was still pissed, but grateful for the twenty-four-hour reprieve. I could go back to having fun, which immediately set my demented mind off on a new (but related) tangent. The voice of my friend Graciela was in my ear, she was my inner prankster, and she was encouraging me to hatch a wicked plot. Maybe I would swipe one of the filthy movies lying around my hotel and hide it under one of Tammy Faye’s settees that might or might not be fugitives of the IRS. How hilarious would that be? Maybe not super-professional. Or adult. Career-wise, this was shaping up to be a really tough decision. This joke might be funny to play on your mom, but as much as you’d love it, Tammy is
not
your mom, I chided myself; you can’t play such an awful joke on her. So, in the end, Tammy Faye was spared a potentially brilliant prank by a twinge of conscience over the havoc I would no doubt have wreaked. I made a note to stash a porno in my luggage in order to hide it somewhere fun on my next trip to St. Louis.

It was two o’clock in the morning when I drove to Tammy’s house to meet a satellite truck the day of our interview. By then, it had become normal for me to start my workday in pitch darkness while the rest of the world slept. The farther west I went, the more painful the morning would be, because the setup stuff that had to happen before we got on the air took hours. It was all about establishing the shot, lighting it, getting the satellite truck fired up and in a position where it has a clear signal facing the right direction (don’t ask me—I still don’t get it twenty years later). Once you’ve “uplinked to the bird” you begin the pleasurable back-and-forth with the Michelangelos in the control room in New York who would like a plant shifted four inches, the camera turned in another direction, and some snow in the background. “Um, it didn’t snow here,” you tell the disappointed person who thinks since your interview subject is resplendent in winter white, there should be snow.

We were going live at 5:30 a.m. PST. When the door opened, Roe was standing there, and I kid you not that he was smelling intensely of lotion, though it was impossible to say whether it was Buddy’s brand. Was the desert so devastatingly drying to older people that they had to lube up before they could even bend their limbs in the morning?

Tammy appeared in a stonewashed denim jumpsuit. To some, she might’ve looked like a drag Eva Gabor on her way to a
Hee Haw
audition, but to me she looked perfect. Waiting nervously for her segment, she listened to Harry interview Liam Neeson about
Schindler’s List
and narrated what she was hearing in a very loud TammyVoice to her half-deaf husband, who was sitting there with the same monitor in his ear. “Oh, how depressing!” she shouted cheerfully. “Auschwitz! The Jews!” She shook her head. I worried that following such a sad story might affect her energy negatively, but, ever the pro, she snapped out of her Holocaust funk within seconds to open up the half hour singing our theme song, “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” with Tuppins on her lap.

Remember that old showbiz truism, “Never work with kids or animals”? I was so glad Tammy Faye had never heard that. She sat holding Tuppins so tightly that the poor thing started yelping more than usual. On TV, this loving act of strangulation actually read as if Tuppins were howling in misery over Tammy Faye’s singing. It was a crazy, fantastic moment. The interview was a classic.

When we said good-bye, Tammy and I went outside in the rising sun to take a picture by the fake lake—which became my Christmas card that year—before she presented me with a batch of fudge that she’d made me the night before. It was a priceless piece of pop culture memorabilia, and I took it home without sampling a bite so I could preserve it in my freezer for years to come. That fudge went with me through two apartment moves, until I finally summoned the willpower to pitch it, sometime after the turn of the century.

As you know, Tamara Faye LaValley Bakker Messner fought a long battle with cancer that took her from us in 2007. She was a good person who opened her home to me and treated me like a friend. And, because I’m sure you’re wondering, I was indeed sent up to Petaluma. But I still don’t know if a video (adult or otherwise) ever resulted from that naked aerobics session at the resort. If it did, I hope there isn’t a shot of a young guy in the background with unruly hair and an expression of horrified glee. But if there is, and you have it, please send me a copy. I want to hide it under my mother’s couch.

CRY INDIAN

I wasn’t kidding about hiding that porno under my mom’s couch. There was a long period of time where I absolutely loved pranks. Let me be more specific: I loved playing pranks on my parents. So indulge me in kind of a long (but worth it) ramble down Memory Lane for a story that’s become something of an urban legend among my friends, and will either make you think I’m a brilliantly creative fool, or just a fool.

Though I have lived away from them for more time than under the same roof, my family is in constant touch. One of the ways this manifested itself in the early nineties was in the form of a weekly phone call that started the same ridiculous way every Sunday.

When I was “ready” to speak to my parents, I’d call them collect—usually using a pseudonym. (It was always one of the male characters from
All My Children
.) The phone would ring at my parents’ house. The operator would announce, “I have Adam Chandler calling collect,” as we all struggled to keep our composure. The parentals would reject the call, I’d act dejected for the operator, and then my phone would ring a minute later.

“Hello, Adam Chandler,” my mom would say. “It’s Brooke. BROOKE ENGLISH!”

And … scene! The conversation could go down in flames thirty-five seconds later, but the call always started with a big laugh. This system of scheduled family calls was devised by Evelyn Cohen during my freshman year at Boston University. The reasoning behind it was twofold. See if you can follow this line of thinking:

First, my collect call would be a signal that I was available to talk so they wouldn’t have to “disturb” me by calling me first. This, of course, was bullshit, because I got phone calls from them all week long with no regard to my mental state. I guess since Sunday was the “Lord’s day” it was sacred? Even though we weren’t Christian?

Second, Evelyn’s careful consumer research had told her this was somehow cheaper and smarter than actually accepting the collect charge or one of us dialing up an unprompted direct call. Looking back now, I do wonder if this elaborate ruse—two phone calls and a fake name just to have an actual family conversation—didn’t somehow influence a thing I’ll refer to as “the Shawnee Incident.” But first, some background.

The further I was from my parents, the closer I got to Graciela. Our senses of humor fused into one demented organism, and we were constantly laughing about the doings of my parents in St. Louis. She’d fallen in love with them when they visited me in London, but she had a funny way of showing it. Grac, sensing immediately that my mother was gullible and fun to prank, took the possibly imprudent tactic of winning my mother over by torment. Her first misstep was telling my mom I had a crush on a gawky, mannish girl in college. By the time we graduated, the stage was set for a prank, masterminded by Graciela, that was wildly funny at the time but, in hindsight, might’ve gone too far.

The hijinks started small.

It was the dawn of the cordless phone—very early nineties. Graciela and I were each living and working in New York—I in midtown at CBS, and Graciela for future Bravolebrity Kelly Cutrone’s downtown boutique public relations agency repping, among others, an unknown young Tyra Banks. One afternoon, I was lying on my bed chatting like a schoolgirl to my mom while my Agent Zero, Graciela, listened in on the living room extension. I told my mother that I was sorting and folding my laundry—not such a crazy thing, except that I wasn’t doing that at all. My only task at that moment was playing a joke on my mom. So we talked about the latest in St. Louis and who my dad had run into while he was out jogging, and occasionally I’d make reference to a fave T-shirt I was “folding” or throw in a
Metropolitan Diary
esque yarn about my laundry room experience … all made up, of course. Then I slowly grew … “agitated.”

“Gross! What is this?” I cried.

“What? What?” said Evelyn. “What is WHAT?!?!” She was half pleading, half castigating. You should know that my mother has a hair trigger that allows her to go from calm and cheerful to things-falling-from-the-sky shrieking in the space of a breath.

“Oh, nothing, I guess. I thought something was in the laundry.”

And then we got back to the story of what her friend Harriette did. And again I’d interrupt.

“Gross—what is this stuff? It’s everywhere!” I yelled.

“What is it? What STUFF?!”

“It’s like—squishy and mushy a little, and all over my clothes! Gross!” I amped up the drama. “In the pockets of these pants! Damn! All in this shirt!”

“I don’t understand what that could be! Is that from the laundry detergent?!”

“No—I can’t … I have no idea. GROSS! Wait—it’s like, it’s like a banana.”

“A BANANA!?” she screamed. Now I had her. Full bedlam. It was time for the turn.

“OH! I know what this is from … Oh, gross!” My voice loosened as I began laughing. “Oh, I know.”

“What?! What could that possibly be from?” I’d hooked her. She wanted in.

I sighed. “Oh … I was just at a party the other night and Grac convinced me to put a banana in my pants. So of course I did and I guess when I took the pants off, the banana got into the laundry.”

“GOT into the laundry? Andy? Graciela made you do that?”

“She didn’t MAKE me, Mom … She just—it was funny. Don’t worry about it. Wait ‘til I tell her what happened. Oh shit, I’m gonna have to do all this laundry again…”

There was a long pause. And then: “Andy?”

“What?”

“Be your own man,” my mother said.

“What? What are you saying?”

“I’m saying ‘BE YOUR OWN MAN!’ I’m serious!” And she was.

“Okay, but it was funny, Mom! I mean, you should’ve seen it.”

“Yeah. I bet.”

The laughter in my apartment started the second I hung up the phone. “Be your own man, Andy!” Grac squealed. “Be your own man!”

My mom thought Grac was pulling my strings like a marionette and that on my own I would act with some level of common sense, or even (gasp) judgment. But wait: My whole life, when I was being my own man, or my own boy before that, I was one hundred percent clown. I’ve always loved playing meaningless pranks on my parents, specifically my mom. I don’t even know if “prank” is even the right word. Maybe fibbing? Long-drawn-out elaborate lies?

Once, as a kid, I went to the dinner table and told my parents that Richard Nixon was dead. According to my
TV Guide
memory,
Hart to Hart
was on in those days, so Nixon was long out of office, but it still came as a big shock to my parents. “When? How?” they sputtered.

Grac, looking like the cat that ate the canary, with my parents

“This afternoon. I just saw on the news.” I let it go on a few minutes and then told them I was kidding.

“Kidding? I don’t get it,” my mother said. “Is that funny? Do you find that funny?”

“Sort of.” I chuckled.

“How? How is it funny if Richard Nixon died?” She turned to my father. “LOU—do you UNDERSTAND this? Lou?”

I knew it then but I didn’t say. It wasn’t Richard Nixon dying that was funny, it was the notion that I could march in, make up a bold-faced lie, and get a genuine, sometimes horrified, but always true, reaction out of my parents.