Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (7 page)

So when it came time to apply for summer internships in college, I had my heart set on working for the
CBS Evening News
. Did I want to be an anchor, delivering the news to a trusting, dinner-eating viewership, or did I want to be a producer, hustling behind the scenes to make it all happen? Seriously, I’m asking. Because I didn’t know at the time. I just knew I wanted to Be There.

I wrote another impassioned letter—I was a pro at this point, having nabbed that Susan Lucci interview my sophomore year. As a backup, I’d also applied to the local NBC affiliate in St. Louis. KSDK was actually a powerhouse station with a competitive internship program, a place any college kid would be lucky to work at. But when the internship director there told me, “If you choose CBS over KSDK, you’ll be making the biggest mistake of your career,” I thought, What career? I didn’t have one yet. Who needed that kind of advice? When an acceptance came from CBS, I didn’t hesitate to accept right back.

All the helium instantly whooshed out of my elation balloon when I received a letter telling me I was being assigned not to the
CBS Evening News
, but to
CBS
 …
This Morning
. What?? I had never even heard of or watched that dud-as-a-doornail, dud-on-arrival dud. I was a know-it-all even then, and one of the things I knew was that CBS had never been a contender in the morning. This was like landing a White House internship only to discover I’d be painting the gate. Was that KSDK lady’s taunt coming true so soon? Disgruntled, but having already burned my backup bridge, I packed my attitude and set off for Manhattan.

The sound track of that summer was Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” and I fully intended to. The first time I saw the video, I was at a gay bar called Private Eyes, watching it on a wall of TV screens—at that time, the height of cosmopolitan high tech. But it was the video itself that almost made my eyes fall out of my head. Of course, you recall the intricate plotline: Madonna has a harem of muscly wet men in chains crawling around on the floor. And there’s a cat with the same eyes as Madonna. Madonna is in charge; she is the ruler and she is sexy and she is the boss. It was no wonder I was so transfixed: This was exactly the image I had of myself taking New York by storm. I would not go for second best, Baby. I was about to become a CBS News intern with all of the power and conviction Madonna embodied in that video, minus the lapping up of milk from a bowl (but only because I was lactose intolerant—meaning I don’t really like milk).

This was long before Craigslist existed, and if a serial killer wanted to lure you into a trap, at least he had to put some real effort into it by taking out a classified ad. I prayed that this wouldn’t be my fate as I perused the
Village Voice
and contacted random strangers looking for roommates. Soon enough, subsidized by my parents, I wound up sharing a fourth-floor walkup on East Twenty-first Street with a seemingly non-murderous gay guy who worked for TWA and traveled a lot. My very first day in the apartment, while snooping (duh), I discovered my roommate’s extensive pornography archive thoughtfully displayed in his bedroom. Wow, do gay people keep all their … media … out in the open on shelves like this? I wondered. Life in the St. Louis suburbs provided exactly zero guidance when it came to filling in all those niggling details of gay life such as where to store your spank mags. I figured as long as I was trespassing, I might as well educate myself by taking one of my roomie’s tapes off the shelf and popping it into his VCR. Which promptly broke. Mid-scene. I was mortified. I was going to be evicted my first night. What a tragic waste of youthful promise. This was not what Madonna, or my mother, would have wanted.

When my roommate came home, he shrugged off the broken videotape and laughed at my angst. I loved New York.

*   *   *

From my tiny room on East Twenty-first Street, I had to take two buses to get uptown and west to CBS, which at that time was home not only to the morning show but also to
The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather
,
West 57th
,
48 Hours
,
As the World Turns
,
The Joan Rivers Show
, and WCBS-TV. Walking into the building that first day I felt a glimmer of hope that maybe this morning show gig wouldn’t be so lame.

I joined the other interns waiting in the lobby and sussed each of them out. I didn’t see anything big in the way of competition. I suppose that has to be the day that I met Julie. She and I were in the same internship “class,” but I barely took notice of her, other than when I caught her rolling her eyes at me for trying to be the brown-nosiest teacher’s pet while she couldn’t wait to hit the curb at five o’clock, where her boyfriend would pick her up. If you had asked me that day if this Julie and I would ever become friends, I would have said, “Um, no.” And if you had asked me if I could ever see big things happening for this Julie in the future, I would have said, “Um, no!” Foresight has never been a strength. (BUT FIRST: spoiler alert.) Julie Chen went on not only to anchor the very show on which we were interning, but also to rule the
Big Brother
house and marry the head of CBS. And I’m crazy about her.

While I was busy underestimating my future friend the Chen-bot, we were greeted by an all-business, very New York woman with hair so frizzy, I instantly assumed we’d connect. She had a pencil skirt, skyscraper high heels, and a list of names that she unceremoniously checked, announcing, “Cohen, you’re in consumer. Go find Erin Moriarty.” I was flabbergasted. I’d been assigned to the
consumer
unit? Some of these turnips were going to be working for the entertainment unit and I was in consumer? Who watched consumer news in the morning, on that show? It just seemed dreadful; it was as if I could hear my recently formed tiny bubble of hope bursting.

“I don’t think I want to work in that unit,” I declared. “Where’s Jerrianne?” I was already trying to go over this person’s head, looking for the bosslady in charge of the internship program.

“She’s not in today,” Pencil Skirt said matter-of-factly. “Consumer’s your unit. Give it a shot. If you don’t like it, then we’ll have a discussion.” Even in my agitated, unreasonable state, I recognized the tone of menace in that sentence. Pencil Skirt’s big strong hand hadn’t lifted me to a higher ground; it had smacked me down, hard.

It took all of an hour for me to decide that the other interns at
CBS This Morning
were utter dumbshits, and as time went on they did nothing to disabuse me of this notion. I remember walking into the newsroom on that first day and hearing a girl from Westchester ask our supervisor what three channels the TVs were on. That line killed me, and it also pissed me off. Why hadn’t
that
dummy been assigned to the freaking consumer unit? My superior attitude was a result, no doubt, of the experience I had in my many previous internships. I viewed my CBS internship as something of a graduate course—but I was the only one who saw it that way. To this day, when I look at a crop of interns, I always try to pinpoint which ones are desperate to be there and which ones are just collecting a college credit, and proceed accordingly.

My disgruntlement over not being immediately recognized as the heir apparent to Dan Rather dissipated when I realized that an internship at a network, even in the worst unit on the worst-rated morning show, beat all hell out of a summer internship at KSDK in St. Louis. Turns out we booked names as big as anybody. Henry Kissinger came on to do the weather that year! And even better, Erin Moriarty, the reporter I’d been assigned to work with, was a real journalist, not a Barbie doll with a teleprompter. She researched stories herself, spent hours on the phone chasing down leads, and was a lawyer. Plus, she had this gravelly voice and wore sexy skirts and, I would find out soon enough, did not suffer fools or cocky interns gladly.

My ’fro was gone at this point, and instead I was working my ponytail hard. My internship look also included a shirt and tie with clip-on suspenders. Occasionally, when feeling especially bold, I wore Bermuda shorts with a tie. It was my idea of dressing like a dandy, when what I probably looked like was a Dexy, or one of his Midnight Runners, or a douchebag. Oh, and I was Andrew. That’s what I wrote on my application, even though everyone had always called me Andy. (Be careful what you write on your internship application. My name became Andrew for twelve years and I almost had to go to court to change it back. My name in the credits of our shows still reads Andrew, which I guess still feels grown-up to me.)

Another advantage of working on a national show was the abundance of free food, which to a starving student (and a Jewish person) was an incredibly big deal. I think it was when I was stuffing my face with gratis carbs at the welcome lunch for interns that I began to view the actual staff—not the other interns—as my colleagues. They all seemed to be living the life that I wanted: urban, well traveled, well dressed, and well compensated. I took note of a few gayish guys on staff, only to find out later that they were in the closet. Being freshly out myself, I understood why someone might make that choice, but at the same time, I couldn’t imagine being in the closet in my thirties. I was surprised there even were closeted people in New York in 1989, and deeply relieved I wasn’t going to be one of them. I had no plans to advertise my sexuality in the workplace, but if anyone asked, I’d promised myself I’d simply tell the truth. That decision proved to be one that would guide my entire life: I’ve never hidden who I am, and being gay doesn’t define me. It is one of the things I happen to be. I’m also a Gemini, an asthmatic, and a lover of disco balls. And long walks on the beach. Call me!

Bring your college roommate to your internship day!

*   *   *

Of the two producers I worked for in the consumer unit, I was quickly electrified by, and quite possibly obsessed with, Lynn Redmond, a gorgeous black woman with style and a magnetic personality. I constantly stopped by her cubicle, asking her to tell me about the celebrity profiles she’d produced at Essence TV. Lynn had met everyone from Gladys Knight to Oprah, and I couldn’t get enough of her stories. (Example: Lynn had produced the Janet Jackson interview in which she revealed her secret marriage to El DeBarge, the singer of “Who’s Johnny?” from the movie
Short Circuit
, and a vocal dead ringer for one Michael Joseph Jackson. Which I just put together now, writing this. Ew.) One day, Lynn and I chemically bonded like atoms over a mutual love of Whitney Houston, but, as was typical when she thought she’d given me enough of her time, she said, “Okay, kid, get back to work.” I lingered in the door of her cubicle and waited a few beats.

“Can we be friends?” I asked. Subtlety was not my strong suit, and I was nervous. I wanted to be her friend so badly I could taste it.

“Friends!?!” I can still hear her incredulous, high-pitched response, as though I were asking for her pancreas. She was older and married and living in Connecticut, and here was this gay college kid knocking at her cubicle door with a promise ring in his hand. She didn’t even pretend to let me down gently.

“You’re an intern,” she said point-blank. “I don’t see the common ground. You’re twenty!”

I was twenty-one. And we had Whitney Houston in common! What more did we need? I’d dated a guy in Paris who didn’t even speak my freakin’ language, so how could this woman tell me we didn’t have enough in common? And you know what? Despite how annoying I must have been as I repeated to her all summer long “We ARE going to be friends,” she eventually relented in a major way and remains one of my best friends today.

Imploring Lynn to be my friend

Newsrooms are a crazy mixed cocktail of contradictions—fervor and indifference, devotion and irreverence, curiosity and cockiness—but I knocked it back in a single giddy shot and bellied up for more. I had found somewhere that I belonged. Instantly and irrevocably.