by Andy Cohen
Kind of wondered if I’d been a gay pawn on Maher—they kept cutting to me at every gay reference. He did make a big thing on the after show about me being so close to Gavin Newsom.… Maher is so gay positive, but it was weird. And mugging during the jokes is one thing, but why did I send my drink back?
Took three big hits of my vape on the way to the book signing at The Grove. The Barnes and Noble guy told me that Khloé Kardashian had seven hundred people there last week; that’s what the YouTubers get. This is after he told me I had two hundred people, so I felt like a total loser. LA brings out the worst, most insecure version of me. And Cody. So I’m waiting for tea before the signing in the little storage room that I’m sure he didn’t put Khloé Kardashian in and there’s a big basket there with my name on it full of high-end artisanal pantry supplies that normal human beings who use more than the toaster in their kitchens would’ve loved, with a note saying that the lady who plays Mrs. Patmore was going to be in their kitchen store from one o’clock to three o’clock and would I please come over and say hello and that yes, this big basket of crackers and sea salts (that I was planning on giving to the man who’d just made me feel small by telling me about Khloé’s crowd) was indeed a bribe (to which I did not plan to submit). Then he brings me out amongst the little crowd to introduce me (Camille Grammer was there in the front row with her kids, having stumbled across a sign saying I was coming) and I was getting my picture taken when one of the photographers played me a video message on his phone from Mrs. Patmore herself, saying she was next door and to please visit her. The problem was that the message was like forty-five seconds long and I was standing in front of two hundred people who were watching me watch the message from Mrs. Patmore. It was all very awkward, and I made him shut it off halfway through because it was rude to make the crowd wait. The talk and signing were lovely and sweet and, I’m sure, nothing compared to Khloé’s, and it wasn’t until I drove off that I wondered what the fuck Mrs. Patmore needed to tell me that was so urgent that she was moved to send a video message and basket to get me over there.
After the book signing I appeared on this dog-rescue award thing that’s airing on Thanksgiving on Fox. I saw Kathy Griffin backstage, Betty White (of course), Kaley Cuoco, and, on my way out, Paula Abdul, looking very “Straight Up” with a high ponytail. Then went to Bruce’s and we watched the Seth Rogen stoner Christmas movie, which I dozed in and out of but liked.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 2015—NYC
Back in NYC. I stepped on Wacha’s foot no less than five times today, once in front of the bodega on Fifteenth Street, which really hurt him. He kept lifting his little paw up and looking at me with squinty eyes. Picked bathroom light fixtures and fireplace mantels. Worked out at Equinox at rush hour and it was amazing people watching. Got Mexican food with Hickey and came home feeling kind of dizzy and FaceTimed with #BAS, who is going to stay here tomorrow when I go to St. Louis. Emily Lazar called and said Bieber cancelled and could I go on Colbert tomorrow? I said sure, if they find me a later flight. Then I basically made love to the dog. My face was so close to his our eyelashes were touching when we blinked.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2015—NYC—ST. LOUIS
Trump was kind of humorous to me up to now, but he’s saying all this racist shit and lying and people are believing him. I tweeted a Times article and got a raft of hate. Schmoozy lunch with Steve Burke in the executive dining room at 30 Rock. Went home, packed, and went to Colbert, which was really fun. He had me read camp letters and played a clip of Then and Now, and I plugged the radio and the book and it was laughs all around. Like on Bill Maher, I came on at a time in the show when people were ready to laugh—in this case right after Spike Lee, who was not exactly light entertainment. Made my flight, after much anxiety.
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2015–SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2015—ST. LOUIS
It’s a year since the Ferguson meshugas, so Mom and I went there to support local businesses and give back to that community. It wasn’t what we were expecting: The main street is really nice and refurbished and we found two bakeries which were almost sold out of everything and had only white employees.
I got an earful on the drive:
“It’s time for Tony Bennett to STOP SINGING! He’s too OLD!”
“I will NEVER watch DON LEMON. If he’s on, I turn the channel. Who would’ve thought I’d watch MSNBC for breaking news?”
“I don’t care for Matt’s facial hair; why does he DO THAT?!?”
“You need a wine refrigerator for your apartment!!! You NEED IT!!! Don’t buy a new mattress for the guest room, just FLIP YOUR MATTRESS!!!!”
“Who LIES about CANCER?!?”
“If you’re going to POO will you PLEASE do it on MY TOILET so you can see how nice that HOT SEAT is?!?!!”
This was an offer I refused to accept.
Thanksgiving at Em’s really turned into a Balderdash festival. I cleaned everybody’s clocks. Cousin Dave and I took our annual picture for Instagram, which usually elicits many feverish comments about how hot Cousin Dave is, which we read aloud and enjoy. This year we posed with the little candles we’ve had on the table since we were kids, and I posted the pic and quickly realized the candles were little Native Americans—1960s white America’s version of Native Americans—so I immediately deleted the image before the pic became a case of old-school racist imagery that ruined my weekend. (#BAS is getting in my head.) We posed with turkey candles instead.
We watched Steve Jobs—overblown and exhausting—and I read two hundred pages of City on Fire, which gets kind of the same review.… Texted with #BritActor, who met someone he really digs. Even though I was barely seeing him, the news depressed me. I don’t meet people I actually like too often. On the plane home I emailed my entire Christmas party list to let them know I was taking the year off due to renovations at the apartment. Except that I wrote that it was “massive” renovations and then after I sent it I thought that seemed really douchey.
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2015—NYC
Got home to two letters—one from Teresa, wishing me a happy Thanksgiving, and one from my dentist of twenty-five years whom I have been avoiding since switching to Anderson’s without any acknowledgment of the fact. After however many years serving his patients, the letter said, he was retiring and everyone could go see his brother if they wanted to. So I crossed that awkward call off my list.
It was my first show back and I literally couldn’t read and speak. I just had a really hard time putting the words together. Got a lot of tweets asking how stoned I was—more than normal.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2015
It rained all day; it was depressing and blah. I gave a breakfast speech at the Russian Tea Room for a group of ladies and being there reminded me of my fortieth birthday party, which was my own version of Oprah’s Legends Ball. Had a really tough workout with Will. I ran. I hate running. But I kind of love the idea of it. Went home and just blahed around on my bed waiting for my show and texted Anderson saying I am torrentially bored, to which he never responded. I found out an hour later there’s been a horrible shooting in California. Sadly, he wasn’t bored.
All day the kids at WWHL were abuzz about today’s 5:00 p.m. taping with Carrie Fisher and Justin Long—our own special Star Wars episode. We had special graphics (a crawl for the cold open, like the Star Wars opening), we flew in some drag queens to be various Princess Leias, and Mike Robley made a Chew-Wacha costume for the dog. I was all set to give him a mild sedative for his appearance when Carrie Fisher cancelled two hours before the show. Sadness reigned at WWHL. Poor kids. I stayed lying on my bed all afternoon. Meanwhile, I’d had Daryn reserve stationery for everybody on the WWHL team for Christmas—nice note cards with everybody’s name on them—and then realized these kids don’t want stationery. I’m not their grandma! I watched four hours of coverage of the shooting and followed along on Twitter. Social media is proof of how divided this country is, right down the middle.
Gloria Steinem was on live wi
th Mariska Hargitay (I had to spell it phonetically in the teleprompter so I wouldn’t fuck it up). We didn’t know how game Steinem would be, or if she’d be funny or what, and I was especially excited and honored to do a shotski with her; it seemed so cool. It turned out she was game for everything except doing the shotski, so we asked Mariska’s hot, tall husband if he’d do it with us and then Mariska didn’t want to do it because Gloria didn’t want to do it. (I wound up doing it with the feminist bartenders.) Gloria is eighty-one and was wearing red hip huggers. I was extra sensitive on the Plead the Fifth questions because I didn’t want to say anything that could be considered sexist, and it’s amazing either how many things can be considered sexist, or how many sexist things I say. So I settled for “Say one nice thing about the Housewives,” knowing that she considers them the bottom of the barrel and thinking that would be a way of addressing her hatred of them without having to go deep into it. She can’t name one nice thing about the Housewives because they’re so awful, she said. They are the lowest of the low and bad for women. I thanked her and ill-advisedly said I was going to try to change her mind on the After Show. I brought that up three times during the show, thinking it would get people to the web to watch me and the Ms. of all Ms.es go head to head about the Housewives.
I began the After Show with my pro-Housewives arguments (they are entrepreneurs; they speak for themselves and are not dependent on their men; they are mothers; though they may not all get along and are sometimes horrible role models, the show is ultimately about friendship). She replied that it’s actually a minstrel show for women who are overly plastic, mutilating their faces and bodies and performing like idiots in order to brand themselves, as if that’s the only way to do it. I was very sweaty, but I knew it was amazing TV for me to get served by her. Speaking of shade, at the end I asked her about Camille Paglia, who loves the Housewives, but it turns out Camille has said nasty stuff about Gloria. Wacha didn’t care for Mariska’s hot husband.
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2015
I spend so much time looking at my phone that I wonder what Wacha thinks I am staring at all the time. Liza asked me if I talked to Gloria Steinem about driving her in my car on Shelter Island all those summers ago, when Bill told me to pick up Phil and Marlo from a boat at the dock and they were with Gloria Steinem and her husband. All five of us were jammed into my Honda Accord. I’d forgotten all about that!
Wacha ran all over the Ralph Lauren store while I bought duplicates of some suits that were six years old. I walked him around the block afterwards so he could take his first shit on Madison Avenue and he did, and then the twinkly lights in the Christmas greenery on the window short-circuited from his healthy stream of pee. We fled the scene rapidly. Met Grac at the construction site and she flipped for the apartment. She says the guest room is for her and Lynn. She is the only person I’ve told that I’m having a big gold disco ball made for the top of the staircase, and she approved. We did a photo shoot on the temporary staircase. Went to Rossopomodoro, which is always either totally empty with not-great service or packed with awful service. It was the latter, which didn’t matter one bit because I had Grac all to myself and what would have been an hour-long dinner with good service was almost two and I wasn’t complaining. She said if she gets hit by a bus tomorrow she has done everything she wanted in her life. She’s been in a rock band, she said, what more can she do? And she drums in a band now, and so she’s at her peak. I said, “You know what? I agree, which is really a beautiful thing for us both to be able to say.” I mean, I haven’t jumped out of a plane or had a kid, but I waffle on both of these ventures anyway and I’ve done everything else. Wait, I haven’t fucked a girl. But I almost had my chance and I didn’t push it! I started thinking of her funeral, and how we would have to bust it open with a rock band or disco ball or dance party or something crazy, get Ann and Nancy Wilson to come out and sing. I told her where my mind had just gone and she said, “I really hope you and Neal do something like that.” So I was glad I was on the right track. For the record, I hope neither of us gets hit by a bus.
Got home just in time for Mary J. Blige in The Wiz. I texted Mom asking her what she thought and she said it was boring; she’s never seen it before. I said to rewind five minutes and watch Mary J., to which she responded, “You are so gay. Every single one of my gay friends are wild for this show! ”. I said, what do you expect?
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2015
Lots of self-hate on the massage table, thinking about the pic I posted yesterday of me getting fitted at Ralph Lauren … it’s just so douchey. Maybe I’m actually a loser. Saw Ninj and gave him shit about three workout pet peeves: his inability to count, the fact that he hasn’t rebranded/renamed the “burpee” to something more desirable so that people want to do it, and claiming that we’re warming up when we’re going at a hard pace at the beginning of the workout.
I was bringing Wacha in from a walk and was in the elevator with Richie when a gay guy got out and I asked Richie who he was—he said, “Oh, he plays around. He has a boyfriend, but when he’s outta town he grinds like all the rest.” He says he knows everything, which he absolutely does. He said he could write a book but he couldn’t tell all the stories. I told him you don’t have to give it all away, that I know from experience. Later Bill and I integrated that all-black party that Sean and John throw; we were the only white guys in the place. It was a paradise of hot, cool guys; it had a great energy. I left at four when the lights went up and could’ve stayed longer.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2015
Left my coat at the party last night and John Cotton had it at his salon, so Wacha and I walked first to Macy’s—where I bought underwear, which was a total zoo—then to Forty-Fifth between Fifth and Sixth to pick up the coat, and then home, where he had a playdate with Moxie. We were both pooped after!
Dinner with Mark and Kelly at Dirty French—I got them going about All My Children. Amazing stories about Palmer, Natalie, Adam, Erica … on and on. Just when I think we’ve talked about everything, we hit upon some new information. I got in a cab as these two girls were getting out and my cab driver immediately started telling me that white girls have gorgeous big asses these days, and that he doesn’t know exactly why it is but it’s possibly because they’re eating more. He said, “White girls used to have asses like pancakes, but now they’re big.” He was excited about this new development among white women. He’s lived here twenty years and is originally from Ghana. He hates the Kardashians because they have no talent (“besides getting naked on the video”), but if they are in part responsible for the new wave in big asses, then he will accept their positive contribution. He told me he has banged a lot of white girls and gotten laid in his cab “more than four times,” and that he’s done it in the very back seat I was sitting in. He said women are very lonely these days and they just offer it up. White girls say what they like and they need to get fucked, he said. Last week a lady going to Thirty-First and Park invited herself to sit in the front seat, where she was all over him, and then invited him up to her apartment but he declined because it was too unsafe to go into her space; he didn’t know what would be waiting in there! He feels very comfortable doing it in his cab, though. His friend who is a cabbie picked up a lady at JFK two weeks ago and on the way home she stopped and got a room at a motel, where they fucked, and then he dropped her at home. And the tip was good too! He said there are a lot of lonely white ladies that need to get laid. He had a cute smile. He loves being a cabbie, and I can see why.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2015
Wacha is running like a total gimp. I think I gotta get him the second hip replacement; I’ve been putting it off forever. Had a meeting at the apartment, where construction is moving like molasses. I can’t even tell what headway they’re making. Sometimes I suspect they load the place up with people when they know I’m coming and it’s empty the rest of the time. I said, “What’s happened since our last meeting?” and they said, “Don’t you see the wiring in all the
walls?” but I thought they did the wiring weeks ago. I asked Sandy permission to send personalized pads of paper to the Housewives as Christmas gifts (it’s his thing, and I don’t wanna steal someone’s thing) but he said it’s totally fine.
Taped a show with Trisha Yearwood and Babyface that was low energy. Went to the NBC Christmas party at 30 Rock, where Willie and I squeezed each other and I took a pic with the Telemundo people. The guy who busts the sex offenders on Dateline is all white hair. Got a good pic of the tree. Ran over to Bob Saget’s scleroderma benefit, where I’d agreed to run the auction with him. I was seated with Bob, Ashley Olsen, and Candace Cameron. Bob said he’s looking for someone to date and I said, what about a gorgeous Irish girl? He said, she sounds great; tell her I have young semen, so now I don’t think he’s right for the woman I’m thinking of. Joan Collins was AMAZING on WWHL and radio. I have been watching Imitation of Life for the last month, like once a week late at night until I get tired. The movie is endless and so dramatic. I have a crush on the guy that Miss Laura is blowing off and the daughter is so into.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 9, 2015
It smells of pot on every block and every corner you turn and I absolutely love it. Richie worked 8:00 a.m. to midnight in the elevator so I had ninety conversations with him today. He smokes but he only likes joints, has never had a vape, and gets a sore throat on pipes. In other drug news, Richie thinks the lady down the street we see in the morning is on an eight ball but I think it’s pills. He asked what I’m doing on New Year’s Eve and I said, “Going to work,” and he said, “Yeah? I’ll watch you—I been to Vegas, I been to Miami, what do I need to do? Now I can watch you.” I didn’t mind being an option in a catalog with Vegas or Miami.