Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture Andy Cohen (nice books to read .TXT) 📖

collated packets for the anchors, and did irritating grunt work for producers, some of whom seemed to me like Michelangelos of the mediocre. I was a ball-and-chain to the ringing phones and absolutely stank at ripping scripts, but my respite was how I began each morning, running the Green Room, which was always a parade of insanity—a coffee-based cocktail party featuring an always unusual guest list. One morning, Tip O’Neill asked Sammy Davis’s widow, Altovise, if she was “here to sing.” She said, “No, but my late husband was the greatest singer of all time.” Why do white people always assume black people are going to sing?!? Every morning saw some type of weird interaction, and I lived for those moments.

Me as a newsclerk at CBS. This is what we used to call a computer.

Even though it sometimes took years to get promoted, and the show always seemed to be a hair away from cancellation, after about six months I was convinced I’d outgrown my role as a newsclerk. They’d been letting me produce live segments, and when Connie Chung filled in for Paula Zahn, I produced a whole series for her about soap stars (I’m pretty sure it was award-worthy). I was also sent to West Palm Beach to help book a juror in the William Kennedy Smith trial. We got juror Lea Haller, and everyone said it was a coup. Years later, she would marry the prosecuting attorney, Roy Black, and years after that, she became a Real Housewife of Miami. (Small, freaky world.)

My new best friend Lynn let me conduct my first interview ever (I was off camera). It was with Robin Williams, renowned for his manic energy during interviews. I stuck to my questions, didn’t listen to his answers, and essentially killed all of his shtick. Later, we watched the tape together and she critiqued my performance. Lynn gave me a C- (equivalent to credit for getting through it).

Maybe because I was openly gay, or maybe because my boss was giving me a shot, I was sent to LA—for my first time—to try to book somebody associated with Magic Johnson, who’d just revealed he was HIV-positive. Even though by that point I’d tested negative a couple times, I was still racked with fear, and the news of Magic’s diagnosis was huge, symbolic of this being more than a gay disease. I booked a Laker, and it felt important, being part of a story that was to be a watershed moment in the history of AIDS.

On the plane ride home from LA, flying MGM Air (where every seat was first class!), I was sitting behind these two guys who seemed to be talking about CBS. Since I never met a discussion I didn’t like to bust in on, I leaned right over their seats, poked my head in between them, and said, “Hey! Do you guys work for CBS?” I was humiliated when one turned to me and I immediately recognized Jeff Sagansky, then president of the network. I quickly told him I worked for CBS This Morning and to please not cancel it, then made my head pop away to a place where he couldn’t see it again.

When I got back to New York I was promoted to assistant producer. Free from the ringing phones and Xerox machine, I was exactly where I wanted to be. At that broadcast, I went on to become associate producer, producer, and senior producer and always made it a point not to give the newsclerks my grunt work. I knew one day I’d be working alongside—and for—them.

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After I’d been working at CBS for a few years it dawned on me that as I traveled the country, I wasn’t merely parachuting into stories: I was parachuting into lives. I would land smack-dab in the middle of someone else’s drama, before disappearing forever. I became a highly trained professional voyeur. I had a walk-on role in everyone else’s soap opera.

I had produced a slew of feature-y live shots, and they all amounted to pretty fun little vacationettes, but not always scintillating television. It sounded great in New York when I pitched going to Boulder, Colorado, and having the cute editors of a rollerblading magazine demonstrate the latest craze to Harry and Connie Chung in New York. If you’re lucky, you missed that actual segment, though, because it boiled down to Harry and Connie wondering on live TV what they were doing watching two people doing lame rollerblading tricks in a half-dark parking lot at dawn. As bad as that one sucked, it was miles ahead of the “National Family Learn to Bowl Week,” remote from a bowling alley in San Francisco. The piece I produced featured the darling bowling Higa twins, who could neither bowl nor were very darling. And have you ever seen a bowling alley at 5:15 a.m. PST? You’re not supposed to, is the thing. I called my mom after the segment. “That was so BORING!” she said, supportively. “Is that NEWS?!?! It’s no wonder your show is in the PITS.” When I got back to New York, I kept saying, “It wasn’t my idea!” to anyone who would listen. That’s the thing about morning shows: You have to fill a lot of time.

I wasn’t always assigned to the nobodies. For instance, I spent the morning with Mary Jo and Joey Buttafuoco at exactly the time all three networks aired movies based on the insane story of Joey’s teenaged lover walking up to their front door and shooting Mary Jo in the face. The saga of the Buttafuocos and Amy Fisher, the “Long Island Lolita,” was the biggest story going that year, and I was in their living room after courting Mary Jo on the phone for a week.

It was a satellite remote, and that morning, Mary Jo told me that she wanted to show Paula Zahn the X-ray of her head live on the air. I thought this was a bad idea and called the control