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

room to ask what they thought. “Sure, let’s do it,” they said. Okay, maybe it was more like, “What kind of fucking idiot are you, Cohen? Where’s your news judgment? Show the X-ray, you moron, and then maybe go get YOUR head X-rayed!” That’s the kind of nurturing, mentoring talk I could always count on from the control room, but of course they were right: Boy, was it ever a memorable moment when Mary Jo whipped out that huge transparent film showing the contents of her skull and then waved it at the camera, yelling about the bullet Amy Fish-ah lodged in there. The segment got picked up all over the place.

Seven a.m. in the Buttafuocos’ living room

At the time, I didn’t totally understand the complexities of TV as theater. I thought the introduction of a prop like Mary Jo’s X-ray would complicate things and screw up the interview. Of course, it only made it more dramatic. Nowadays, I almost never say no to a prop. When Danielle Staub wanted to bring a dummy head to the RHNJ Season 2 reunion so she could demonstrate how hard her hair was pulled by Jacqueline’s nineteen-year-old daughter, I said, “Please do!”

One of my favorite remotes was when I was sent to Las Vegas—my very first time in that city. CBS sent me with the sole purpose of making sure Buddy Hackett showed up for a live early-morning interview.

When I checked in to the Desert Inn, I watched an awesome and informative video on the in-house TV about Suzanne Somers learning to gamble, then I called Mr. Hackett’s room and left him a message telling him I had arrived and would like to buy him a drink before the interview, and that I would be by his room early the next morning, thinking that buying him a drink would be a good way to make sure he actually went to the interview.

When I showed up at his room at 3 a.m., he smelled of lotion. And though his skin was presumably soft, he was not, and he proceeded to tear me a new asshole. “YOU’RE gonna buy ME a drink? A KID is gonna buy me a drink???” he screamed. “I BUILT this town. I OWN this hotel! Who do you think you ARE, kid?”

Unsure of how to respond, I laughed, and thank God, so did he. He drove us to the location in his banana-yellow 1970 Buick convertible, which happened to be exactly the car I drove in high school. I wanted to find out what else Buddy Hackett and I could possibly have in common, but all too soon, it was time for his live spot. When the interview was done, I expected to send Mr. Hackett off and to find my own way back to the hotel, but when he asked, “You gettin’ in or what?” I did not hesitate for a millisecond. Instead of taking me straight back to my hotel, he gave me an unforgettable sunrise tour of Vegas, telling me firsthand stories of Bugsy Siegel and the Rat Pack.

“Hey, kid, ever seen a million dollars in cash?” he asked. Of course I hadn’t. We were in what used to be downtown Las Vegas, off the strip. “Run inside that casino. They have a million bucks under glass in the lobby. Go look!” he commanded, pulling the Buick to a stop right at the casino’s front door. I felt like a boy with his grandpa—or like I might be Buddy’s little buddy! I ran inside and saw the million dollars and got back in the car. “Isn’t that something, kid?” It was.

Next, Buddy started giving me unsolicited life advice. He told me never to accept offers from people I didn’t trust. He urged me to hold on to my memories. And perhaps by way of illustration, he got a dreamy look in his eyes and reminisced about some of his own misty, watercolor memories. “Every one of these streets reminds me of a different girl I fucked.”

I really liked him. I actually liked the Buttafuocos, too. Many times I would find myself back at my desk in New York months after a remote, longingly fingering the cards in my Rolodex, fighting the urge to call these people up to say hello and that I’d been thinking about them. Did they miss me, too? Probably not. Let’s not be naïve. These people were accustomed to having someone drop into town, see them as they wanted to be seen, and then get out of their hair. And while I may have only ever met one Buddy Hackett or one Mary Jo Buttafuoco in my travels, they’d probably met hundreds of me.

One remote pressed every voyeuristic button I’ve got, and it was so memorable that I kept a souvenir from the encounter for almost a decade. In 1994, I went to Palm Springs to produce the first joint interview Tammy Faye Bakker had agreed to since marrying her new husband, Roe Messner, a business partner of Jim Bakker’s, who’d designed Heritage USA, the 2,300-acre Christian theme park and residential complex, before everything went to hell in a multi-million-dollar handbasket. Roe, as you may or may not remember, had reportedly handled payoffs to Bakker’s mistress, Jessica Hahn. Jim ended up spending some time behind bars, but not before Tammy divorced him and married Roe. It was all very 1980s, back when big shoulder pads and thieving adulterous televangelists were the rage. When the scandal broke, Tammy Faye cried through her unfathomably heavy mascara (think tarantulas mating) and managed to emerge from the whole mess a slightly streaky pop-culture icon. You had to love her for the way she stood her ground even as she was being mocked by every drag queen and comedian (Jan Hooks was my fave) in America. I did, anyway. I tried booking her for a few years. When I got her, I convinced everyone in New York that landing Tammy and her new man was kind