Andy Cohen has always been a talker. In high school, he was voted “biggest gossip” and “most talkative”—hence the title of his new memoir, Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture.
Cohen, who grew up in Clayton, is Bravo’s executive vice president of development and talent; he’s parlayed his love of talking into one of the most popular late-night chat shows on TV, Watch What Happens: Live, where Cohen, his celebrity guests, and the live audience are all drinking cocktails, and viewers (who, sadly, have to mix their own drinks) can call in, Facebook, or tweet questions directly to Cohen. As the title points out, anything might happen, and often does. But it’s Cohen’s ability to channel that staticky energy in a more controlled way—producing edited reality shows like The Real Housewives series, Top Chef, and The Millionaire Matchmaker—that’s made him famous.
“I think truth is stranger than fiction,” Cohen says, and the memoir bears that out, with never-before-heard stories about Grandma Wrinkles, Dina Manzo’s hairless cat (as seen on The Real Housewives of New Jersey), and Bethenny Frankel’s near-sabotage of her reality-TV career. The Housewives chapters were the hardest thing to write, Cohen says, “because I wanted to make sure I was giving them good behind-the-scenes stuff, and filling in a lot of blanks, and I wanted to make sure it was new. I think I had a hard time telling what was new and what wasn’t, just because I was so deeply in it for the last few years.”
But the book is a lot more than just a pop-culture tell-all; it’s a coming-of-age (and coming-out) story about a St. Louis kid who conquers the world—or a network, anyway. Cohen traces his obsession with TV to childhood, when he clocked many hours on the couch, eating Entenmann’s donut holes and watching soaps and network TV blowouts like Battle of the Network Stars.
“The stories were all there in my head,” Cohen says, “but I had to get them down right.” He says a very rigorous deadline (August 8 to January 1!) helped him focus. And in the midst of all that, Watch What Happens: Live went from two to five nights a week.
“I would just hunker down and write,” Cohen says. “I was sending stuff to my editor as I was writing, and she was sending it back with her comments and notes… It was just a constant back-and-forth for four months. And we did it!”
Though his prose crackles with sarcasm and humor, Cohen approached the process like a journalist, pulling out six or seven journals from the late 1980s and early ’90s, journals he’d kept at CBS during his early career, and a recorded interview he’d done in 1987 with soap star Susan Lucci as a very ambitious Boston University sophomore. “I wrote that story first,” Cohen says, “and then from there, I really jumped around.”
Lucci, however, is a constant throughout the book—at one crucial point, Cohen agonizes over whether shows like Housewives helped kill off soap operas—including his beloved All My Children, which broadcast its final episode on TV last fall. Though some might argue that killing soap operas was the best thing that reality TV ever did for culture.
“Look, at worst, it’s a show you can watch without guilt, and something you can gossip about with your friends,” Cohen says, when asked how he counters the “reality TV is rotting our brains” argument. “At best, I think it’s like cultural anthropology. It’s like the sociology of the rich. I think you could put one of these shows in a time capsule and in 30, 40, 50 years, you could look at it and say, ‘Oh my God, this is how these people lived then.’”
Listen to Andy Cohen read an excerpt from his memoir:
Also, a scroll through the network’s website reveals—in contrast to a lot of mainstream media—a network that revels in diversity, with cast lists filled with people of all ages and colors and sexual orientations. In the book, Cohen recalls his crush on Erik Estrada of CHiPs, though he wryly observes that as a kid growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, there were virtually no gay characters on TV to identify with, except for “Paul Lynde being a mean queen in the center square, and Charles Nelson Reilly kibitzing with Brett Somers on Match Game.”
“In 1992, The Real World started, and that was just kind of a watershed, because there was a gay person who was my age who was on TV,” Cohen remembers. “And that was just huge. And now, it is what it is. I’m a late-night host who happens to be gay. So it’s a wild evolution.”
And it’s one that might’ve played out a little differently had he changed just one teeny-tiny detail: his choice to intern with the consumer-news unit of CBS This Morning, rather than at KSDK-TV in St. Louis. At the time, though he did go with the CBS internship, he considered it to be sort of an insult, “like landing a White House internship, only to learn I’d be painting the gate.”
“Maybe I would have wound up working at KSDK and staying in St. Louis,” Cohen muses. He finishes the thought with a very St. Louis comment: “I don’t know! But that would’ve been a nice thing, too.”
The book is out May 8; Cohen speaks at the St. Louis County Library’s Headquarters Branch (1640 S. Lindbergh, 314-994-3300, slcl.org) May 11 at 7 p.m.
