Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (17 page)

I was far too hardened to mass tragedy for a twenty-seven-year-old, but like a lot of journalists, I needed that emotional armor just to do my job. By that point in my life I’d gotten pretty good at showing up on the scene—plane crash, wildfire, flood, hurricane—quickly establishing relationships with people in the midst of devastating trauma, and getting them to talk about it on-camera. It was like some sick kind of speed dating where my job was connecting to people in their most vulnerable moments, getting what I needed, and going. It’s not that I didn’t have empathy; there was just always another plane to catch. These were years where my life was divided into two-week increments that totally revolved around what stories I was covering or who I was producing live in the studio. The only variation that ever occurred was when news broke and I was pulled into the fray.

There’s incredible adrenaline involved when you become a competitor in what amounts to the broadcast news edition of
The Amazing Race
. Teams are dispatched, planes are chartered, and the pressure is on to get to the story first, plant a stake, and own it before your rivals. The way you win is by getting the people with the most compelling stories to stand in front of your cameras and spill their guts.

Because I flew there from Chicago—on a flight packed with journalists and so turbulent that the reporter next to me crossed himself several times—I thought I’d gotten to OKC quicker than any of my New York counterparts, but I soon discovered that any self-congratulations were premature.

While there were plenty of people still en route from New York, the private charter flights had already landed, and a familiar but yet still surreal scene was taking shape on the perimeter of the disaster zone: Every major and minor media organization was camped out with tents, trucks, and lights, forming some kind of gruesome circus that, if not for its proximity to catastrophe, might otherwise seem kind of glamorous. I could tell just by the intensity of the frenzy that this was the biggest story I’d ever seen. While searching for my camera crew I saw every broadcast journalism star you could name, and I finally walked right into Connie Chung smoking a cigarette. I greeted her probably too enthusiastically, given the morose scene around me, but I was caught up in the camaraderie and drama of the race.

I stayed awake for two days shooting with correspondent Jane Robelot, writing and producing stories about rescue efforts and volunteers to air during the morning newsblocks, those news segments on morning shows at the top of the hour. Camera crews were in short supply, and to give you an idea of our relative importance, the freelance crew assigned to us was from Topeka, Kansas, and included a sound woman who didn’t know a microphone from a microwave but was a dead ringer for Shelly Duvall as Olive Oyl.

We worked out of an empty space in the back of Oklahoma City’s CBS affiliate, and I was running on adrenaline and deadlines. It’s no accident that in TV news, working this way is called “crashing” your piece. We shot, wrote, and cut three stories a day, which meant going into the field and talking to people on-camera, coming back and screening the tape, writing a script, then working with an editor to put it all together, advising on shots and sound. A good editor, by the way, is the heart and soul of any story, and editors are certainly the unsung heroes of the news business and reality TV as well. He or she can take what you and I would see as ordinary raw footage and hone it into something like a work of art, by lingering on shots of people’s faces, or cutting at just the right moment to an emotional scene, or creating tension by juxtaposing a stark voiceover with jarring images.

Oklahoma City was the closest I’ll ever get to being in a war zone. The people we met were heartbroken and in shock. Someone had come and blown up one of their most visible buildings, killing men, women, and children for a political statement. I knew that somewhere inside, a part of me was wailing and crying for the survivors, but my directive was to chronicle their pain, not to feel it with them. I silenced my own emotions and focused on getting my scripts done and crashing my pieces. And I understood: This was the job. But I also understood: This was not normal. Every time I left a victim at the site of the bombing, it wasn’t two minutes before I was back among my team of coworkers in our little tent city, and that area—with its craft services tables stocked with snacks and hot coffee, and the makeshift makeup stations and the camaraderie—was controlled and predictable. My flirting with a pockmarked intern from the affiliate and partaking in the time-honored journalistic tradition of gallows humor, I now realize, were not so much callous acts as they were a feeble attempt to shield myself from the mess outside.

My last day in Oklahoma City, I finished my final piece at 6 a.m. and headed to my untouched motel room to take a quick shower before catching a plane home to New York. I turned on the TV and watched Harry Smith interview a woman whose baby had died, and the firefighter who’d had to carry that baby out to her. After days of being in the center of a tragedy, the reality of Oklahoma City finally had a chance to sink in. Alone in my motel room, I broke down and wept. I sobbed all the way to the airport, primally and uncontrollably, and while I was at it, I cried for most of the flight home. I didn’t care. I was off the clock.

*   *   *

When September 11 happened six years after Oklahoma City, I was a “civilian,” having left CBS just the year before, after a decade in TV news. I stood on my fire escape first thing in the morning, watching dumbstruck as the Towers fell, and for much of the rest of the day I watched streams of people walk, like a dazed army, up the street from downtown. For days, I walked around the neighborhood, which was acrid with what every New Yorker would come to call simply The Smell—an awful, dread-inducing mix of electricity and jet fuel and ashes. And like nearly every New Yorker I saw during those days, I’d burst out crying in the middle of the street at any given moment, because everywhere you looked, bus stops and fences and streetlights were covered with thousands of hastily copied flyers, each with a picture of another person who had shown up for their job that gorgeous morning and was now missing, and, as we learned before much time had passed, was never going to be found. Here’s why I’m telling you this now: If it was even remotely possible to feel grateful for one thing about 9/11, besides just being alive, it was that I didn’t have to find the people who had hung those flyers and interview them about whether or not they still held out any hope. I didn’t have to sit in an editing bay trying to make a piece
work
, looking for that certain something that would elevate it over everyone else’s 9/11 pieces. This time, I was just another New Yorker. I was just another person. And while I had never felt worse before, at least I didn’t have to try not to.

I WAS A JEWISH GO-GO DANCER

Can we please move on from
me
being a drama queen to a story about my fave drama queen? In my personal pantheon of stars, Diana Ross may be even bigger than Susan Lucci. I know what you’re saying: How is this possible? How, Andy? Who could be bigger than Susan Lucci? I think it’s because TV stars seem, in the end, more approachable than pop stars or movie stars. After all, they’re in your home, sometimes every day. Miss Ross is the ultimate diva superhero: big hair, big sequins, big poses, big anthems, bigger than life. And you never have the idea, not for a second, that she’d ever set foot in
your
home.

Through my work, I began meeting people who’d been idols—and, just as memorably, the people behind those idols. All my co-workers had their own short list of celebrities they were personally obsessed with—usually baseball players or authors or politicians or random heartthrobs like Kevin Costner (boring!)—and they let their lists be known around the office; if someone on your list got booked on the show, it was expected that you’d wind up producing their segment.

Everyone at the morning show knew that I was first on the list to produce a Diana Ross interview, and I only had to wait three years to do it. In 1993, Miss Ross was holding a press conference at Planet Hollywood in New York to announce a new boxed set and other events surrounding her fortieth year in show business. My boss, Chris Fahey, assigned me the piece. Not that she really had any choice: Had she given it to someone else, I’d have quit. Or at least cried.

I was too overwhelmed to even try to get anything meaningful out of the experience. When we met in a small room upstairs at Planet Hollywood, I murmured to her that downstairs they were displaying one of her outfits from when she was in the Supremes. I knew this probably wasn’t news to her; I just wanted to say the word “Supremes” to Diana Ross. Also, I hoped she would catch the undertones hidden in my seemingly innocuous statement: “I read Mary Wilson’s book and she said you weren’t nice to her—what’s the real deal?” Diana Ross didn’t address my telepathic question, but she did assure me that the dress downstairs, which she hadn’t seen, was a fake.

“Those dresses are in storage and at Motown. They’re not here,” she declared. Let’s pause a moment and gather ourselves together in the wake of this news that Planet Hollywood may not always be one hundred percent genuine in its star-studdedness.

I was quiet from that point on, just shrank into the background. Still smarting from my Oprah experience, I didn’t even try to get a picture with her. I was too scared. But later that photo—or lack thereof—would haunt me. It would have been proof of our meeting, as much to myself as to anyone else. Without it, I’d be stuck just claiming I’d met her, then struggling to describe how she smelled as proof of our encounter (a bit cocoa-buttery with a top note of exotic flowers?).

The experience was terrifying, thrilling, and also a letdown. You meet someone you’ve spent an eternity thinking about and you expect it to be the culmination of something very significant, the celebration at the top of a mountain. Instead it is two people meeting in some relatively normal moment and situation. And it always happens that one of the people cares a lot more about what’s going on than the other one does.

Next came Joan Collins. Which, let’s be honest, may be the only way to follow Diana Ross. By this point I had already learned that, for the most part, people don’t resemble the characters they play on TV. But I very badly wanted Joan Collins to
be
Alexis Morrell Carrington Colby Dexter Rowan. I wanted to be
abused
by her. Not in a creepy way. I just mean that I wanted to be emasculated and snapped at by one specific character/woman.

At 7:30 on the morning of the interview, I dutifully waited in front of the CBS Broadcast Center for Miss Collins’s limo to arrive. I never, ever waited downstairs or in front of the building for my guests to arrive. That was work for a CBS page or intern, the latter of which I’d already been; producers waited in the Green Room. But I wanted to experience Alexis fully. I got what I wanted.

“Please don’t come anywhere
near
me with that coffee,” she snapped at me the moment she stepped out of the car. “Someone spilled red wine on me last night and you’re making me very
nervous
.” She wore a pinstripe suit, her face was fully made up with bright red lips, and she wore a wig that was Curly Alexis Perfection. What was not to love?

“The limo was
late
. And
hot
as a
sauna
! And the driver did
not
know where he was going! He thought we had some sort of
radio
interview. Do I
look
like I’m on my way to a
radio
interview?” She looked around, though I was right in front of her. “Who do I
follow
? Where are we
going
?”

Thank you, Ma’am, may I have some more! I was ecstatic. This was exactly what I’d wanted. For just a moment that morning, I was one of Alexis’s slacks-wearing male assistants at ColbyCo.

“Follow me, please, Miss Collins,” I happily whimpered. “We’re going to the second floor.”

“We are very
prompt
people,” she lectured. “We are not
late
. Who is interviewing me? We’re not showing the exercise video. I only want to discuss my
book
. Now, is there a wardrobe mistress? Where is she?”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I might’ve had a boner by the time she said
wardrobe mistress
.

“I need a
safety pin
!” she barked. I found her one in the makeup room, thank the lord. Momentarily.

“
No!
That one is
far
too large. I need a small one for this blouse. If you’ll find a
wardrobe mistress
I am
quite
sure she’ll have the right one!” She turned to her publicist. “I thought
Live at Five
was
horrible
yesterday. This ‘
Matt
’ was supposedly interviewing me, but the woman kept chiming in and interrupting and I was saying, ‘Exactly
who
is doing this interview?’”