Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture

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