Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (33 page)

Normally, I am a relatively laid-back guy, even at work. But when it comes to reunions, I am a man on a mission, to get the story behind the story, to answer the pressing questions that every viewer wants to know, to confront the women and get them to confront each other. I was fully prepped for this role after years of shit-stirring in St. Louis, first with my family and then with my mini–Real Housewives of Clayton High, Jackie and Jeanne. It’s cathartic to get everything out on the table, and if I have to pry and prod a little bit to make it happen, I will. To say I never take any joy or glee in the drama would be as much of a lie as these ladies sometimes try to get away with. So, no matter what, if I see a Housewife getting mad, I’m going to keep poking at her. If I see her get emotional, and I see an in, I’ll keep going down that road. That’s my job. Sometimes I even have to evoke Dan Rather, picking the threads of a story apart until I unravel the shroud and find some truth hidden beneath—okay, maybe I’m taking myself a little too seriously here. But what about the time I tried to get Kim to either say she had lost her hair to cancer or admit she was lying? Let’s revisit, shall we?

AC:
Welcome back to the Atlanta Housewives Reunion Special. Mertise from Oakland e-mailed, “Kim, is that your real hair or is that a wig?”

KZ:
You know, I really want to talk about this. And NeNe, I want to address something to you from an emotional standpoint. I got very sick, I don’t want to cry but (starts tearing), but I got very sick. It’s not something (starts crying) that I would ever choose to do. Almost three years ago, I lost twenty-five pounds, my hair was falling out and nobody knew why and they said, “Kim”—it was a friend of mine, who was a doctor, and he said, “Kim, I got to be honest with you, I mean I’m ninety percent sure you have cancer.”

AC:
So you had cancer.

KZ:
(nods) I wouldn’t choose to walk around with a hairpiece EVER. Nobody would, and for you to say that, NeNe, you knew. I mean I got really skinny, I was sicker than …

NeNe:
That I knew what?

KZ:
That I was …

NeNe:
I didn’t know that you were sick, that you had cancer; that was the first time I ever heard that.

KZ:
I mean I was used to having beautiful hair, that’s what I was known for; that was my signature growing up.

NeNe:
Let me go on the record to say, I never knew that you had cancer. Had I known that, things would have been different. I thought you wore the hairpiece for style. I don’t have a problem with it, you do. I mean if that’s what you want to wear, that’s what you do. I NEVER knew you were sick.

AC:
And are you cancer-free now?

KZ:
You know, they found that I did not have cancer, that I had some other problems.

AC:
So you didn’t have cancer?

KZ:
No, I did not. I lived about three weeks. I remember sitting in a Chili’s waiting for my test results and it was terrible and they were like, “You are healthy this way, but we got some other stuff going on.” Which is not what I want to talk about but there was some other stuff. And it’s been almost three years and my blood work’s great and it changed my life. I’m just happy to be here.

AC:
Okay. So you DIDN’T have cancer.

KZ:
No I did not. Thank God.

Did that make sense? Besides the sitting-in-Chili’s part? You might wonder: How hard is it just to establish whether a person did or didn’t have cancer? But if you’re wondering that, you may not have watched many
Housewives
reunions. Talking in circles was never more predominant than at the DC
Housewives
reunion, where Michaele and Tareq Salahi simply refused, over and over, to respond directly to a question, as if it was everyone else who was nuts for even asking. Forget the hours we spent going around and around like a Ferris wheel dissecting their infamous night at the White House. Listening to Michaele “answer” the question of whether she was or was not ever a Redskins cheerleader would drive a levelheaded person as insane as, well, Tareq and Michaele Salahi appeared to be.

Andy Cohen:
Laura from AZ wants to know, was Michaele ever a Washington Redskins cheerleader for the NFL? There have been a lot of conflicting reports.

Michaele Salahi:
The Redskins in the nineties, uh, well, no, in the eighties, I had worked with, and they came to me at the millennium.

AC:
You had cheered with them in the eighties?

MS:
Not as a full-time cheerleader. I was kinda, I went out in one or two games. I went and fluffed it and did their promotional—they had a show called
Redskins Sideline Report
. Then in the millennium Terri Lamb had come to me and said would you be interested in joining the alumni? And I said, no not really, to be honest—

AC:
Well, why would she—?

MS:
It would hurt me to join it. Because I would have to divulge my age.

AC:
Okay.

MS:
And she said, well if I made you ’91 would you join the alumni? So for the last seven, eight years I’ve been paying dues, and I’ve been a part of it.

AC:
So Terri Lamb, who is in charge of the Redskins—

MS:
Still a good friend—

AC:
 —cheerleaders, she says that you weren’t a cheerleader in the eighties. Or the nineties.

MS:
Right, because well, I’m on the roster. I’m on the roster, so I don’t know. I still have the roster and—

AC:
But, I mean, I read the Diane book [Diane Dimond’s
Cirque Du Salahi: Be Careful Who You Trust
]. She, in all her research, has no record of it.

MS:
She can’t find our answer. She can’t find that I am or that I’m not.

AC:
Your brother—your brother apparently said you were not a cheerleader.

MS:
Right, well, he didn’t know—

AC:
The head of the Redskins cheerleading organization said you were not a cheerleader.

MS:
Yeah, but my—I wasn’t a cheerleader.

Stacie Scott Turner:
And you didn’t have the roster. The roster?

MS:
I do have the roster.

SST:
That—well, no, not in the book.

MS:
Yeah, well, the thing is, Terri and I have the roster, but Diane interviewed Howie—

AC:
Hold on. But you just said to me—hold on.

Mary Schmidt Amons:
They’re saying no!

AC:
You just said to me that you weren’t a cheerleader, that’s what you just said.

MS:
No, I’ve gone out two times. I was never an NFL cheerleader out of our league. I never said that.

AC:
So, what does that—you hopped on the field twice? On the show you said that you were a Redskins cheerleader.

MS:
Right, because that’s what I’ve been told to say by the alumni.

MSA:
(sigh)

MS:
So, when they said—

AC:
It’s a circle. It’s a circle.

(general groaning)

MS:
No, so, no, was I a cheerleader? Yes. Did I go out two times? Yes. Does that constitute as a cheerleader? I don’t know.

So, was she ever a Redskins cheerleader? By the end of it, I neither knew nor cared.

A great Housewives reunion, for me, is when tempers flare and friends, enemies, and—my favorite relationship moniker—frenemies alike lay it on the line. All my voyeuristic thrill buttons are pushed by witnessing such direct, intense encounters from just five feet away, for instance Bethenny telling Alex and Simon to their faces that they’re social climbers, or NeNe lunging at Kim in the first ten minutes of the first Atlanta reunion.

Actually, that first Atlanta reunion was an interesting case: great television and delightful for me as a network executive, but not all that fun for me as a host and a person, now that I think of it. NeNe Leakes was initially the one who made that reunion happen; at the time
Atlanta
premiered, it wasn’t a given that a reunion would follow every season. We didn’t build it into our schedule and didn’t assume there’d be a demand for one with every series. I got a voice mail from NeNe (the first time I’d ever had contact with her directly) saying, “I’m begging you to do a reunion, Andy. I want to confront Kim. I am so mad at the things she’s been saying on the show about me.” NeNe had spent months and months stewing in her anger as she watched the show. She felt she had been slandered. So, who were we to deny her the opportunity to set things right?

The tension, as the women were getting settled into their chairs, was as thick as an expensive weave. I hadn’t experienced anything like this level of hostility before. Normally, my job during these marathon tapings is to keep everybody’s energy up and get them motivated to reveal everything. With the first Atlanta reunion, I quickly realized my job might be to block a punch. Within ten minutes of shooting, while I was probing Kim about her secret-identity sugar daddy, Big Poppa, NeNe went ballistic and looked like she was about to swing at Kim. As NeNe kept yelling at Kim to “close your legs to married men, trashbox,” I wavered between amusement and actual fear.

I think this is honestly the appropriate response to a Housewives reunion. It’s like getting the giggles at a funeral: You know it’s not the time to laugh, but you can’t stop. I get that sensation a lot during reunions—I think viewers do, too—and the editors often have to cut away from my smiling face. How can something so occasionally mortifying also be so hilarious? It’s the women’s personalities, their turns of phrase, the pressure-cooker setting, the sharpness of their accusations versus the tenderness of their feelings, that contribute to making it seem like theater of the sublime, at once dramatic and comedic. Oh, and they’re all in cocktail attire with big hair.

Am I smiling because I’m scared, amused, or both?

When that first Atlanta taping was over, I was honestly worried about the outburst—I didn’t want the show to be too negative. We cut back on much of NeNe’s tirade but left enough in that you got a taste of the moment. The ratings were huge.

First reunions are always intense—there’s all that expectation and anxiety around a major event the women haven’t experienced before. I’ve already mentioned my preview of the New Jersey Housewives reunions when I met the ladies for the first time in the Bravo offices. Dina looked at me that day with terror in her eyes. All she knew about me was that I was an instigator, and she didn’t want to be instigated. I told her not to worry, that we were just having a professional meeting—the reunion was months away. But as the meeting progressed, the tension among the women erupted into screaming matches. I kept telling the women, “This isn’t the reunion—save it for then!” To which Dina replied, “Are you really ready for this, Andy Cohen?” I thought I was.

We usually tape the reunions a few weeks before the finale airs, and we solicit as many questions from viewers as we can leading up to the event. We knew at the time that the
RHNJ
table flip—arguably one of the greatest
Housewives
episodes ever—would be big, but we didn’t know it would be one of the highest-rated episodes still in the history of the franchise and generate countless parodies from every corner of pop culture. We went into the taping with high expectations that the tension among the women would translate into something extraordinary. And here’s a lesson: I’ve found that the reunions I anticipate the most wind up somehow falling flat.