Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (2 page)

“Is Erica modeled after Kate in
Taming of the Shrew
?”

“How will the pregnancy story line affect her?”

“Who is the love of Erica’s life?”

(These are all perfectly fine questions. What I won’t know until years later when I re-listen to the interview—yes, I recorded every word—is that I interrupt her every answer to tell her what my mother and I think will happen. In fact, I talk about my mother constantly. Thank God, I got over THAT! My mother would hate it.)

The waiter comes. Lucci orders a cheese enchilada and a chicken enchilada. Her publicist orders the same. I order a beef taco, and, feeling very capable and adult, I firmly tell the waiter that I do not want any beans on the plate whatsoever, and the waiter does not question my decision.

Emboldened, I turn to Susan and ask her the worst thing Erica ever did. She says, “Kill Kent.”

“BUT THAT WAS A MISTAKE!” I scream.

She giggles. “This is a man I can talk to!”

Susan Lucci called me a man.

We get into a great conversational rhythm. It’s a real interview. I ask about the red knit dress she’s wearing. It is her own, not Erica’s, she says. I lament the injustice of her eight Emmy losses and question the legitimacy of the Daytime Emmy judges. She is humble and grateful, as though it is her first time discussing this travesty. Near the end of the interview, I ask her what her salary is. And quickly apologize, telling her my professor made me ask. (Asking a difficult question while simultaneously apologizing is a skill I will implement twenty years later with the Housewives.) I feel so triumphant about asking the question that it doesn’t register that she never answered.

When all the enchiladas have been consumed and all of the questions have been asked, I give her a BU sweatshirt and she carries on like I’ve presented her with a diamond ring. “Oh, Andrew, you couldn’t have brought me anything better. It is so soft! I can’t get over how soft it is. I love sweatshirts!”

In my letter, I may have promised the publicist that this would be a cover story in the BU
Free Press
, not what it really is: an assignment for a class that I’ll pitch to the paper. But post-lunch, feeling chummy and in the club, I am comfortable clarifying that the feature is not exactly locked. That comfort curdles, however, when the reaction on the publicist’s face indicates this is the number one most wrong thing to say. Yet I can’t stop myself, next telling them, “I’m such a huge fan that I probably would have lied about the story altogether just to get a seat at a table with Susan Lucci!” I’m a runaway train of misdirected enthusiasm and late-blooming honesty.

The publicist’s face only grows more contorted.

I quickly change my story. “This is a guaranteed cover!” I assure them. Amazingly enough, this seems to get things back on track. They in turn assure me that they can provide “color art,” which is a magical-sounding phrase that I later learn means “We’ll send some slides to the paper.” (The piece will eventually run in the
Daily Free Press
, saving me from my white lie.)

The check arrives. Susan and her publicist compliment me for being well prepared, and I realize our time together is coming to an end. I begin angling to go back to the set with them. Susan tells me—sweetly, pityingly, of course—that visits like these are set up months in advance, and it’s not going to be possible today.

I’m devastated. I actually might cry. I’ve waited six years to get on the inside, and just as the door has opened, it’s slamming shut again. I keep it together and refocus on Susan’s radiance.

She asks where I’m from.

I tell her I grew up outside St. Louis.

“Oh, St. Louis! There are very bright people outside the coasts,” she proclaims. Her publicist agrees! At any other time, at any other table, I would have been highly offended and preached from my soapbox about the spirit and intelligence of the Midwestern people, but because Susan Lucci said it, I feel … weirdly vindicated. Perhaps the St. Louis tourism bureau could use her words as a tagline—“There are very bright people outside the coasts!”

In front of the restaurant, we take photos and say good-bye. As I watch Susan Lucci disappear down Sixty-ninth Street, I wonder if I’ll ever see her again. I wonder how my life will ever take me back to this place, where I can sit with an idol and talk about something I love. I feel the tears I pushed down moments before welling back up. I don’t let them. Instead, I run to a pay phone on Central Park West so I can report the day’s news to a string of people. Starting with my mother.

I didn’t know it then, but I’d end up working at CBS News and having a front row seat for every pop culture and news-making event of the 1990s, meeting nearly every idol I’d had as a kid. I didn’t know I’d go on to be ringleader to a fabulous galaxy of women starring in a real-life soap opera. And I definitely didn’t know that this would not be my last encounter with Ms. Lucci. But sadly for me, none of our other meetings would go as well as our first. In the TV business, that’s what we call a tease. So, stay tuned.

The bar mitzvah photo. Oy.

ICED TEA

I hate hearing about other people’s childhoods. Unless you Mackenzie Phillipsed your way through high school, chances are I won’t care about your first kiss. I promise this part won’t be long and I will try to make it relatively painless, like my childhood itself. And I’m not writing about my first kiss; it was uneventful and with a girl and that’s about all you need to know.

I was a good kid, but I’ve had one Achilles’ heel that’s stayed with me through the years: talking. I simply could not shut the fuck up—I still can’t—and that small issue has gotten me in all sorts of trouble. For instance, my third grade teacher, a rigid old redheaded German battle-ax, was so appalled by the volume (and relentlessness) of my voice that she made my entire class write “Screaming Causes Cancer” fifty times on a piece of paper that we then had to tape to our desks. Now, my mother is a take-no-prisoners kind of woman, a pint-sized fight-for-what’s-righter who is often inclined to march somewhere and give somebody the what-for, and when I let that story spill at the dinner table, Evelyn Cohen demanded a next-day sit-down with the Fräulein and the principal. At the meeting, that sour Kraut informed my mother that beyond becalming my loud voice, she should have me reading
The Runaway Train
instead of
The Secret Garden
, a book I loved and read over and over. Then in the next breath she told my mother that my father should be spending more time with me. Mistake.

My mother went into action like this more than a few times. For instance, in high school, I was kicked off the water polo team during our final practice of the season for (guess what?) talking while the coach was giving us a pep talk at the very end of the practice. He dinked my teammate Jeff Goldstein, too, and our parents were furious—at the coach, not us. At dinner that night my mother shrieked at my poor dad: “What are you going to DO about what’s happened to YOUR SON?” She wasn’t going to be happy until my dad kicked the coach’s ass with such conviction that he let me back on the team in his last gasp of breath. But my father failed in his effort to get me reinstated on the team, thus enduring years of ribbing from my mother. “I’m glad you weren’t sent to negotiate during the Iranian hostage crisis, Lou. You’d have GIVEN THEM MORE AMERICANS! Are you listening to me???” By the way, it probably bears pointing out that for my part in getting kicked off the team, I suffered no punishment. I was particularly skilled at getting out of punishment, and usually did so by slowly winking at my mom while she was in mid-yell. It stopped working postpuberty, and now pretty much the only winking in my life is from Vicki Gunvalson during
RHOC
reunion shows.

My talking was legendary among my extended family as well. Once I talked for two days straight in the backseat of my uncle Stanley’s station wagon as it careened toward the west coast of Florida. I was probably fourteen, on a road trip with my sister Em and our cousins, and in my boredom, I came up with the brilliant idea of using Em’s hairbrush, with its clear plastic handle and black bristles, as a microphone into which I did a constant play-by-play of the trip, with no commercial breaks. I sang pretty much every mile marker—“mile marker
two-hun-dred and sev-en
”—from Missouri to Georgia. I did the weather, monitored goings-on in other cars (“Hairy man in pickup truck to our left is picking a winner! Does he have a problem?”), and interviewed the other passengers. I “reported” on various tidbits of information I’d picked up at Camp Nebagamon that summer, like the rumor that Diana Ross was actually a bitch to the other Supremes.

There were plenty of other things I could have done in that car besides broadcast the station wagon news. I had the new Go-Gos cassette and against my mom’s orders had brought my favorite book, a history of
I Love Lucy
, which I’d checked out of the public library (again) at the beginning of the summer, each renewal more and more upsetting to my mom. I thought it was great that I was showing an interest in something—even if that something was Lucy’s offscreen relationship with Vivian Vance. (According to this book, Lucy demanded that Vivian be twenty pounds heavier than she during the run of the show. That didn’t seem like a friendship to me!) My mother had told me she never wanted to see that pink book in my bedroom again. It wasn’t pink, it was salmon, but I instinctively resisted the temptation to correct her. After all, I was the boy who, just a few years earlier, used to go door to door in my neighborhood with a broom and ask if I could sweep people’s kitchens.

Back to the car trip. I kept on talking. And talking. I honestly thought everyone was enjoying my commentary, until the truth came out at a Ruby Tuesday’s off the highway in Georgia. My aunt Judy expressed her displeasure not by saying, “Shut up, stop talking into the hairbrush!”—which I totally would’ve understood. No. My aunt—my own flesh and blood by marriage—dumped an entire pitcher of iced tea over my head! Okay, maybe she had asked me to shut up for the love of God once or twice before that. But maybe she should’ve said it more like she meant it. Anyway, I was shocked.

I sat and sulked in the backseat for the rest of the trip to Sarasota. My bitterness was accompanied by a growing panic about the TV situation that awaited us at the condo. Every year before one of these trips I’d make my parents triple-check that there’d be two TVs in our condo, but sometimes the condo owners lied. Here was the awful problem: Not only was my aunt Judy the type of person to douse me with beverages, she was also the type of person to watch
Days of Our Lives
, and my cousin Jodi had inherited that defective gene.
Days
came on at exactly the same time as
All My Children
. How could we watch both our shows when they were on simultaneously? I knew I would be outnumbered, forced to watch a daytime drama of inferior quality, at peak tanning hour, no less. For the life of me, I didn’t understand the appeal of
Days.
It was all fantasy and improbable plotlines. I hated NBC soaps. And
Days
looked especially weird to me, like the tape was old or gauzy or something. (You do NOT want to get me started on CBS soaps—so dark!) ABC soaps, in case you care, were bright and urban and smart—at least that’s what I preached.

I don’t even remember what happened that year when we arrived at the condo. Maybe there were two TVs and everything was fine. Maybe I missed an entire week of
AMC
because I was moping in my room, or because my aunt drugged me with Dramamine even though we were no longer driving. I’m not saying she definitely did, I’m just saying everything is a blank and I wouldn’t put it past her.

I do know that I probably spent some time enjoying the company of my cousins, because we were close and we shared a certain passion. Jodi and I wasted a solid year and a half portraying Donny and Marie in her parents’ bedroom. We danced in unison routines, performed witty banter, pretended to skate around the room like the Ice Angels, and sang “I’m a Little Bit Country” and “May Tomorrow Be a Perfect Day.” Her brother Josh was a drummer and Em played a supporting Osmond. I loved doing impersonations. My specialty was the Reverend Ernest Angley, who wore a white suit and a big toupee and healed people. I often took my Reverend Angley act out onto the street and “preached” around the neighborhood. From my perspective it was a big hit, though now I wonder what people thought of the screamy little Jewish boy pretending to be a Bible Belt preacher.