Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (39 page)

Keep your sense of wonder, always remember where you’re from, and appreciate moments as they happen. I can’t tell you how many benefits I’ve attended featuring amazing performers singing their heart out while the audience is engrossed in their phones.

This is the most urgently important piece of wisdom I can give you: Be aware of your breath at all times! Bad breath strikes us all, no matter how rich or famous you are—it can and will happen to anyone! There’s nothing worse than getting a big whiff of someone’s rotten sulfurmouth at a party. You will never forget that person, for all the wrong reasons!

ALL MY LUCCIS

Here’s what: I’m ending this book right where I began, with Susan Lucci.

Over the course of the early nineties, a pop culture seismic shift occurred in my life as I slowly weaned myself off my ten-year addiction to
All My Children.
I know what you’re asking right now: “WHY!? HOW DID THIS HAPPEN, ANDY?” Well, let’s get you a nice cup of herbal tea to sip while I explain it to you.

It was a combination of things. First,
AMC
started to get boring. I can only imagine how hard it must be to write incredible amounts of dialogue and drama every day, but nonetheless, the plot kinda ran out of gas. At the same time, I was producing stories at
CBS This Morning
about a topic that had once been odious to me: CBS soaps. Specifically,
The Young and the Restless
, which had always seemed repellent to me because of its glacial pace and dark atmosphere. But apparently, I was alone in my assessment, because
Y&R
had been the number one soap for eternity.

And that’s when the unthinkable happened: I got hooked on
The Young and the Restless.
(Are you FREAKING OUT from that news?) Maybe it was network loyalty, maybe I’d matured, but somehow this show that I’d always considered languid and boring now felt moody, enigmatic, and fascinating. The stories had a slow build that made their climaxes all the more powerful. It was a new way to look at soaps, and after having criticized the show for years, I embraced it. This kind of thing happens to me constantly. Call it self-contradiction, call it flip-flopping, call it bloviating opinionated gasbaggery without foundation that will soon crumble. I prefer to call it growth.

I didn’t advertise my switch to CBS daytime, I just quietly started taping
The Young and the Restless
. Which was all well and good, except
Y&R
shared a time slot with …
All My Children.
If DVRs had existed back then, I probably could have gone on leading this double life for years, but as it was, I had a choice to make. And though it saddened me, I quietly entered into a trial separation with
AMC
.

Regardless of that breakup, I was still dying to have Susan Lucci on CBS. My love for her transcended my allegiance to any soap. But while my heart ached to produce her in a morning show segment like she’d never been produced before, my mind knew it would be unlikely to have such a big ABC star appear on a competitor’s morning show.

It had been five years since I ran into her again, in June 1992, Daytime Emmy night. She’d just lost for the twelfth time but received a one-minute-thirty-second emotional standing ovation later in the show as she took the stage to present an award. At the end of the broadcast, she was surrounded by press and fans as she made her way out of the Marriott Marquis ballroom in New York City. I was now an assistant producer at CBS News covering the show. I fought my way through the crowd until we were face-to-face in the frenzy. Grabbing her hand, I said, “You wouldn’t remember me, but I’m…”

“You’re Andrew!” she said. “What are you
doing
with yourself?” she asked. When I told her I worked at CBS News, she turned to her husband and Dick Clark. “This is the boy who took me to lunch when he was a sophomore in college,” she told them. “And I said, ‘Oh, I’ll be hearing from Andrew Cohen again.’ And here you are! You brought me that sweatshirt,” she added, as though that day were as indelibly imprinted in her memory as it was in mine. I floated on air all night.

A few years later I was at the premiere of a James Bond movie at the Museum of Modern Art. In honor of the film, MoMA had been transformed into a casino, albeit the less fun legal kind. I saw her across the room—tiny and glamorous and glowing. Before I realized what I was doing, I walked halfway over to her. I broke out in flop-sweat. What was I supposed to say? Would she remember me? Would she NOT remember me? The fifty free hors d’oeuvres I’d eaten earlier combined with just the thought of approaching her had me right on the cusp of throwing up, but I knew I’d hate myself if I didn’t try to talk to her. I continued right up to her, praying my stomach contents would stay in.

“Susan!” I said. “It’s Andy Cohen. I interviewed you for the BU newspaper?”

I was relieved when Susan said, “Of
course
I remember you! Hello!” Then I said, “Hello!” She nodded and smiled. I had nothing to say beyond that, the exact thing I’d said to her the last time I’d seen her. I did an incredibly awkward nod/shrug/bow combo and backed away. I fake-cashed-in my fake-chips and left, convinced that she actually had no clue who I was.

But like any stalker worth his salt, I never gave up on her, and I did finally concoct a reason to get her on
CBS This Morning
. We were doing what might rank as our lamest series ever—which is saying something. This venture was called “Celebrity Secrets.” The people involved were neither big celebrities nor were they revealing anything that came close to being a secret. In fact, the only secret revealed by this segment was that morning shows have a
lot
of time to fill. No matter. I used it as an opportunity for another Close Encounter of the Lucci Kind.

I called Lucci’s publicist—a new one, I have no clue what happened to the woman who’d made my college dreams come true—and pitched this “Celebrity Secrets” idea. Surely there must be a “secret” that Susan would share with Paula Zahn on our morning show? To my unmitigated joy, they agreed that Susan would do the segment, and after some back-and-forth, we agreed on what unbelievable secret Susan would reveal to the world, for the first time ever, on our show: Susan Lucci Loves to Shop on the Top Floor of Bergdorf Goodman! In my mind, the image of Paula and Susan and Susan’s personal shopper strolling through Bergdorf’s seemed like Morning Show Gold. In retrospect, I realize a TV star shopping at Bergdorf’s was not really much of a secret. Where did people think she shopped?

Many preparations, walkthroughs, and schedule adjustments followed in the ramp-up to the Lucci shoot.
All My Children
helpfully rescheduled Lucci’s on-set day to accommodate Paula’s interview. Bergdorf’s agreed to close their top floor for several hours. I locked in our two best crews and lighting guys to ensure the women would look flawless. I was proud to be meeting Lucci this time as an established TV professional and not an awkward fan. It felt like another one of those out-of-body moments when you can see your dreams and reality meeting.

Then everything went to shit. The morning of the shoot, I got a call from my boss telling me to cancel the crew. “Why?!!” I practically screamed. “Why?!!!” I was given several explanations as to why the whole thing was off. One version was that Paula thought the segment was beneath a newswoman of her stature. Another version was that the executive producer
hated
the series and that this particular non-secret, at Bergdorf’s, was beyond his comfort level. I’ve come to believe the former.

Whatever the real reason, it was then up to me to break the last-minute news to Susan Lucci’s camp. And of course, I had to think of a fake excuse to offer them, because of the two excuses
I’d
been given, one version made our anchor look bad and the other made me look like an idiot for coming up with the idea in the first place.

Bumbling my way through an uncomfortable series of phone calls with the publicist, I’m sure I came across as a total nutjob because I hadn’t gotten 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
!