by Andy Cohen
Then I stopped back by the opening-night party, where I was talking to the Slatterys, who introduced me to their friend Maura Tierney. I told her how beautiful she smelled and she said she didn’t know if she could believe me, and I said she had no reason not to believe me. I followed up with “I’m not trying to fuck you,” but it came out sounding a little aggressive and she said something like “Wow.” And so I realized I had to make it better and I said, “I mean, I will fuck you if you want me to, but I’m not trying.” And that turned out to be the worst thing I could say. I knew it was all wrong as the words hung in the air. “Oh, you will fuck me if I want to??” She had a smile on her face, but it was incredulous. For ten minutes I stood there unsuccessfully trying to talk myself out of the hole, until these two agents came over to talk to me and I just gave up. I met Eddie Izzard, who was wearing heels and long nails and says he is running for mayor of London. Later the Slatterys came over and asked, “So you’ll fuck Maura if she wants you to, but you’re not trying to?” I think everybody had heard by the end. We all—Slatterys, Brodericks, my new best friend Maura, Scott Wittman, etc.—went to Bar Centrale after, so then it was me showing back up right at the spot where I’d been turned away, which you always think is going to be victorious but it never is.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2014—NYC—SAG HARBOR
I just missed the Cristiano Ronaldo body double at the gym. So upsetting. I need diversions! Had a pitch meeting with Jason Blum and his team about a scripted idea I’d had over a year ago when we were on Barry Diller’s boat with the grandkids called The Sophisti-kids. Initially it was going to be about a group of super-rich, wise-beyond-their-years kids who solve murders. All ideas morph into others, and this one is now about people trying to figure out which rich people have sold their souls to the devil and which haven’t, meaning somehow we’ve lost the kids entirely. So we added some and made the devil a woman—that was my contribution to the creative. The drive to the beach took four hours. I was supposed to have Sam’s with Sandy Gallin tonight but that somehow turned into dinner at Tutto Il Giorno with him, Calvin Klein, and Ross Bleckner. We talked about bad plastic surgery for a long time. I was asleep really early.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2014—SAG HARBOR
It rained all day, which was perfect for me. Spontaneous lunch with Amanda and Jim. Two-hour nap, got Sam’s to go, and stayed home and watched the game (we lost) with a fire and red wine. Mom is terrified I’m gonna be like Joe Giudice and drink three bottles alone, but I didn’t even finish one. Kolten Wong kind of screwed up and of course Mom texted. I told her she had bad juju.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 13, 2014
I’m at war with my eye doctor. The man is so thorough and meticulous, but along with that he’s passive-aggressive, or maybe just mean. No bedside manner. All day I was dreading going but my vision is getting worse. His assistant lady examined me and figured out my new contact prescription and I was hoping I wouldn’t have to see him, but she dilated me and said no such luck. Dr. Personality came in and questioned me. “You say you can’t see distances that well, right?” Yes, I told him, starting to doubt myself. Could I see distances after all? “But there’s only a slight change in your prescription here, so you don’t really need a new one.” He didn’t believe me that I needed a new prescription?! He said my eyelids were kinda dry, and hadn’t he told me a few years ago to moisturize them once every couple of weeks? I said yes and he asked if I do it. I confessed that I haven’t. “Don’t you think it’s about time you listened to me?” he demanded. I felt like he had chopped my dick off. The lady at the desk said they don’t take insurance—none of the fancy doctors in New York City do—and I asked if she would just send in the bill to my insurance company. No, they won’t do that. I said, “You really don’t want to help me, do you?” She kind of chuckled. The whole thing was humiliating. Dinner with Jason at Good. Got a text from someone named Tim who is in my phone as “rower” and looking back at my text history, it looks like we met very late at ASC months ago. He wants to grab a drink later this week. I have a vague memory that he is very tall and rowed in college—or maybe that’s just because I named him “rower” in my contacts. We made a plan for Wednesday after the show. I thought about the dog for most of my massage; I’m pretty sure he’s getting fat. I don’t want a fat dog. He is definitely stout. I keep feeling to see if it’s fat, but there isn’t any, but then he looks it.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2014
When I dressed for the gym I thought of Sean Avery and did all black, then I ran into him on my way to the gym. He approved. They put an insanely aggressive Halloween display up in our lobby. Surfin has been staring at it quizzically.
The Cardinals pulled Seth Maness from the mound in the tenth inning and Randy Choate lost the game for us. I went nuts and for the first time started questioning Mike Matheny’s motives in tweets. The Sicilian guy who is supposed to make me pasta on Friday night texted and said, “Let’s eat out instead, my week is too crazy to make pasta.” I know I’m not a chef, but don’t you just boil the water and …
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2014
I guess if I was ever going to be embroiled in a controversy surrounding the Cardinals it’d actually be about the wives of the Cardinals, and that’s exactly what’s happened! It turns out that some baseball blog noticed that Seth Maness retweeted my tweets questioning why Matheny would take him out. It’s highly unusual for a player to retweet a fan’s comments going against team management, and this morning the New York Post reported that Maness’ girlfriend was actually tweeting on his account. The girlfriend tweeted me confirming that she says “amen” to all I was tweeting. All the retweets were deleted by this morning, as was the girlfriend’s account. I texted Jon Jay, who said it was a real shitshow there, with emergency meetings about the girlfriend’s behavior and a whole scandal going down. I kind of loved it, to be honest.
Wacha almost pissed on the Halloween display. Tamra texted me and is furious about the amount we talked about her last night. I said you can dish it but then you need to either take it or ignore it. Went to the Jeff Koons exhibit and some queen was FREAKING OUT because they wouldn’t let him take his backpack inside but they let women take purses in. He kept screaming, “Think of it as a purse!” I stood and watched for a couple minutes then went through the exhibit, where I wanted to rub my grubby hands on every single shiny surface in there. Stopped by Mark and Kelly’s fancy new town house but they weren’t there. I ate Parmesan Goldfish in the kitchen with Lola for ten minutes then got a cab going down Fifth, where the driver gave me the bad news that his phone informed him it would take thirty-five minutes to get downtown, but the FDR would only be twenty minutes. I said okay but then we were stuck in traffic going to the FDR, which is the totally wrong direction from my house, and I panicked and started heckling him from the back seat—never an effective strategy. Then we finally got on the FDR and flew downtown and I was home in twenty minutes, so I gave him eight bucks on a twenty-eight-dollar fare. Wacha is being extra cuddly and keeps falling asleep on top of me. It is the loveliest thing. Maybe he’s settling in to his life, since it’ll be a year with me this weekend. John Hill is gonna plan something for us to do on Saturday to celebrate.
Kolten Wong keeps hitting home runs. This time last year Mom was heckling him and he was losing games for us; now Kolten Wong is the hero. We completely fell apart midway through the game and I was getting in a violent mood the closer we got to air. Minnie Driver and James Marsden chatted like schoolkids while my attention was diverted by the game. (Deirdre is a great EP but is not gifted at doing play-by-play into my earpiece. She doesn’t understand that I want every play. She’s very incomplete: “Two outs,” she’ll say—but she’ll leave out that they moved to the bottom of the inning.) We lost. The mystery rower who I had a date with texted to cancel, which was fine because I had totally forgotten about the date. I stayed and partied with the kids from the show. Straight Pat made two comments about Wacha being fat.
THURS
DAY, OCTOBER 16, 2014
Turns out everyone at the dog run had been talking about how fat Wacha is too, because I brought it up and Lola, the golden retriever’s owner, said, “We’ve been waiting for you to notice.” Now I feel stigmatized on behalf of the dog. How did I not see this was happening? Maybe I’m too obsessed with my own weight! I don’t want a fat dog! I mean, who does? I want him; I just don’t want him fat. All I do every day is plan this book launch: the tour, the press, and the signings. I had lunch with Gillian so she could bring me my first copy, and there’s nothing quite like the feeling of holding your own book for the very first time. (I guess I think I’m F. Scott!) It looks gorgeous and elegant.
All day long I was regretting saying yes to hosting the charity thing tonight for the Hudson River Park—which was happening at exactly the same time as the do-or-die Cardinals play-off game—and trying to remember why I had, and I was finally reminded: Gladys Knight is performing, and they agreed to throw a plaque on the back of a bench with my name on it. I’m a whore for posterity, I guess. And Gladys. When I arrived at the event, I was seated between Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick (both are very lovely) and two down from Michael Bloomberg. I have a thing where I always want to talk to famous people about their most iconic thing, whether on my show or off, so in no time I was talking Footloose and The River Wild with Bacon. (No, he was not a professional dancer and yes, he loved the river movie and it is his favorite death scene on film.) I think they were regretting saying yes too, but Kyra said she considers it “doing service” and I agreed. Somebody has to do it. And by the way, it felt like I was doing charity work MCing this thing because not one person listened to me while I was onstage. They had me interviewing these Asian violin prodigies and then they performed and no one listened. People are beasts, is the thing. I wonder if they would listen in St. Louis or if it’s really just New Yorkers who are the animals. I, meanwhile, was sitting to the side of the stage following the game on my MLB app for much of the night, and it looked like we were going to win for most of it. Gladys performed and did the classic intro (“Thank you for making this next song our biggest hit—sing along to the record you made number one!”) right into “Midnight Train,” to which I was flailing wildly as Bloomberg sat like a stone next to me. How many of these things has he been to in his life, I wondered. He turned to me and wanted to hear about what’s on Bravo because, as he told me three times, he has never seen Bravo. So I classed it up a little and told him about the cooking and the real estate shows. I asked what he thought of the Comcast/Time Warner deal and he said he saw nothing wrong with it. And I said, “Well it’s a monopoly, right?” but he didn’t really hear that part. I went to the stage hoping to get a chance to talk to Gladys and was chatting with her road manager as a woman came up to take a picture of her, and the manager said, “Get a good look, because we are out after this song. Gladys has to roll.” And just like that she finished singing (“That’s What Friends Are For”) and was on a golf cart and off like Cinderella into the night. The Cardinals game was tied up in the ninth inning and I flew out of there at the speed of Gladys to watch for myself. When I arrived home, I realized it was to be a very bad night for Wachas everywhere. Mine was in his crate with a pile of barf in front of him, poor fella. And on TV his namesake was on the mound, losing the game for us and ending the season. It was awful. I turned it off and went to ASC to meet up with Billy Eichner, which was incredibly fun. Went to bed wondering where the hell Gladys ran off to …
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2014
Worked out on the piers with the Ninja and Wacha sat in the corner watching, next to these people drinking gin out of a bottle and smoking dope. Juxtapositions! Took him to the vet and he turned into a nasty, growling animal. It turned out he was having white-coat syndrome, said the doctor. We were unable to get him to do anything but get on the scale—he’s gained three pounds since his last visit and eight since I got him, and she said I’m overfeeding him. So that’s the end of that. He’s officially on a diet.
Got together with Phaedra at 30 Rock and finally met her son Ayden. I got him an Empire State Building Lego set, so we made that while I tried to convince Phaedra to do a one-on-one special with me for the Real Housewives of Atlanta premiere night. She so doesn’t want to. She’s this weirdly private person who is on a reality show about her life, so that’s a life-sized oxymoron. We were talking in code about Apollo in front of Ayden, saying he is working in a hospital, so I guess that’s what they told him. I got home from the show and drunkenly was looking through my book and noticed we spelled Billy, as in Joel, “Billie.” There’s nothing quite like holding your own book in your hands for the first time and finding a mistake.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2014
It’s Wacha’s Andyversary! As planned, John Hill came over to celebrate. I can’t give him tons of treats as I’d intended to because he is morbidly obese. We saw On the Town with Jason and Lauren and I absolutely loved it. It’s old-school perfection. So romantic and epic—the dancing and sailors and Jackie Hoffman all killed me. So I guess the stink of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark has left the Lyric Theatre. After the show they brought us right back to take pictures with the cast onstage, which was exhilarating. I was a blabbing fool about how much I loved them all. Okay, maybe I was a little high. Or very high. During a long dance break in the show I convinced myself that the Details piece about me is going to come out and be a disaster—I said some dumb stuff—so that’s something to look forward to this week. Went to Orso and got the worst table in the restaurant, right by the kitchen. So I’m a real heavy hitter there.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2014
Watched Notting Hill on TV. The Julia Roberts character is a real bitch and I have no faith that they stayed together. At WWHL, Caissie pointed out that Julia Roberts always plays bitches. The mystery guy wanted to make another date, so we made one for Tuesday. I still have no idea who he is. He rows?
MONDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2014
I told the Ninj that I am done obsessing over the scale. I can’t freak out over a few pounds—I’m just going to go by how I feel, and that’s it. No more weighing. We announced the Bethenny news; it’s great to have that out there. I feel like it’s the calm before the storm of the book-tour madness. People is coming here Wednesday and shooting Wacha and me to promote the book in the magazine, and today they said they want to do a separate shoot of me for their Sexiest Men issue without my shirt on. Maybe I picked the wrong day to stop weighing myself.
Matthew Broderick was on the show with T.I., and T.I. seemed very stoned. We got word before the show that Oscar de la Renta had died and I asked Matthew about it top of show and he said that they swam with him in Greece a summer ago and he was even elegant while swimming. So T.I. thought this was quite funny and was giggling, which of course was highly inappropriate. I hung with Matthew and Wacha in my office having cocktails after the show. Details came out and the piece is great. It might wind up being the best thing that’ll ever be written about me; the writer basically calls me a pop genius. Michael Davies forbade me from going shirtless in People magazine, and thought that if I was straight they wouldn’t be asking. So now I am a victim of homophobia!
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 2014
My PR rep suggested I pose with the sheets up to my pecs for People. I said we will see. My arms and pecs actually look pretty good; it’s the stomach I don’t love. There’s a big Microsoft deal brewing for me that might mean I have to do a live commercial on Thanksgiving and Mom would be in it too. I Skyped her to tell her and she was quite wound up. “I’m doing WHAT in a commercial??? WHAT AM I GONNA WEAR? How will I know what to SAY?” They’ll tell you what to say and we will rehearse, I told her. I told her not to stress, that it’s thirty seconds and no one watches commercials. She said, “You’re right, I haven’t seen one IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!” Which is her refrain, she swears she’s never seen a commercial. Dad wanted to know if there’s a part for him and she kept saying “He’s a MEDIA MONGER.” I told her the term is “m
edia whore.” “Media WHORE! He loves the CAMERA! I’m OVER IT.”
Met Carole and cleared the air. She had stuff to say to me and I to her—so it was very Housewives. I told her I am not inviting her or Bethenny to my Anderson-hosted book party because it’s not fair to the others. She asked about my Christmas party, and I said that too. These are her friends too, she said. Who knew becoming a Housewife would get her uninvited to a party she’s been attending for years? But I feel funny inviting her and not all of them.
Ty Burrell and John Leguizamo were on the show, and Ty and I discovered that we were both working at Faneuil Hall in 1987; he was a bouncer and I was selling Grateful Dead–y Mexican pullovers. I’m hosting these GQ awards tomorrow and haven’t given a moment’s thought to jokes so I asked Caissie to think of some ways to make fun of old GQ pics of myself. She thought of some good stuff, like, “Here’s me on a Tinder date with a blue purse.” Then I went on the date with the mystery rower. Turns out we met a year ago at ASC, not this September as I had thought. So I have no frame of reference for time. He is a nice guy, only twenty-six and a half. He’s six foot six, which is a plus, but maybe not enough of a reason to see him again. I realized when I got home that I have a tentative plan with Grac for Saturday night, which is the same night as Allison Sarofim’s legendary fancy Halloween costume party, and this is a huge opportunity for us so we have to take it! Her themes are always really high concept and everyone takes them really seriously, and this year’s is Italian futurism. So I have to figure out what the hell that means.