The Andy Cohen Diaries (33 page)

We taped a show with Jon Hamm this morning. Sedaris was on with him and had assumed we were doing the show at 11 p.m., not a.m.—which makes sense—and completely overslept. I called her at ten-fifteen and she begged me to find someone else to fill in. I told her there was no one and that I would see her in twenty minutes. I don't know how she did it but she showered and was in the chair made up by eleven-ten. Lots of St. Louis talk with Jon Hamm, who was incredibly handsome and very nice. I asked him about the MLB event I was invited to in July (he's done it several times) and he said it's really fun and easy, that he would be there, and that I should
absolutely
do it. He talked me into it! I'm still scared, but doing it.

So now I'm in a conversation with that Italian on Tinder who I swiped just as an example on the Larry King web show, and Larry King keeps tweeting asking what's going on with the guy. It's like he thinks he is officiating my wedding to this guy.

Had dinner with Jason and Lauren and gossiped about everything, then did a great show with Ricki Lake and Jason Priestley. Ended the night with what I am pretty sure was a two-and-a-half-hour massage. I don't know what time I went to bed.

FRIDAY, MAY 9, 2014

Worked out but was really sore from the massage, which seems sort of counterproductive.

Today was the day of Abby's first ever visit to New York City, and I met her and Em at their hotel as they arrived from the airport. We did what I guess you do with seven-year-old nieces, went directly to the American Girl Store, which is a tremendous racket. You just look around and picture everything floating in a garbage barge in twenty years. But she loves it, so I don't need to be living in Haterville. From there to a diner and then I dropped them at Serendipity 3 to run down to my place, where I was meeting Grac, Bruce, and Amanda to pre-game before the Cher concert. It took a whole hour (and some pot lollipops) for our collective attention spans to settle down and for us to get off our phones and out of our heads, and when we did, it was a magical night. Ray drove us and took us in that backstage car entrance at Barclays Center with the elevator that's like the
Star Wars
compactor room. Bill, who is also P!nk's tour manager, met us backstage and brought us into a big, mostly empty hospitality room, in the middle of which were gathered: Sandy, Brian Fox, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Brian Williams and his great wife, Jane, and Ron Meyer. There was a woman with CZJ who was asking me all sorts of questions about
WWHL
in front of Miss CZJ, who I am pretty sure was looking at us like we were speaking Mandarin. She ultimately asked what I did in the hours before the show to kill time and I jokingly said “masturbate,” but maybe that wasn't appropriate because did Michael Douglas have a masturbation issue? A sex thing? Brian Williams was nice and we joked about how obvious it was that I would be seeing
him
at a Cher concert. But I did wonder why I licked a pot lollipop before having to make small talk with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Brian Williams. At this moment of my life is this the reality of what it's like to go to a concert? Will I ever learn?

The show was so fun and amazing—another killer farewell tour, better than the last one, I think. There were a few long breaks for costume changes (the costumes are the only weak part; Bob Mackie didn't do them for I think the first time in Cher's existence and you could tell—we saw some bunched-up tights!) but who cares. She's sixty-eight, as she told us (“What's
your
nana doing tonight?”), and can do whatever the hell she wants. We took a lot of bad videos of the concert that we won't ever do anything with and then when all our phones go dead for good because of the impending takeover of the world, we will forget they ever existed.

We waited backstage for Cher and I ran into her best friend Paulette, who is a big reason why Cher did
WWHL
in the first place. Paulette is allegedly my biggest fan and forced Cher to do the show, so I will forever be grateful. We had hugs and photos and I met her husband and son and we talked a little baseball. When Cher came out she didn't know who I was at first, then it clicked in and she was great. We took a selfie and I just fawned all over her. On the way out her manager told me she was announcing additional dates at the Garden, the Izod Center, and somewhere else in the area next week. Awesome that she can sell out four arenas in the metro area still—at sixty-eight.

On the Manhattan Bridge heading back into the city, Grac read us some of the items on her “ideas list” she's been keeping for a few years and they were brilliant. One was pot suppositories and another was a Grateful Dead Nursing Home. I would invest in both. Ray was in hysterics and he hadn't even had a lollipop!

SATURDAY, MAY 10, 2014

I woke up with a hazy memory of Liza Minnelli at the Cher after party, and then spoke to Sandy, who said indeed Liza was there. How did I not pay more attention to
that
!?

Em, Bruce, and I had been plotting for weeks to put Ava and Abby together and today was the day. They are a year apart and even though it can be tricky forcing two little girls to bond, it worked from the word go. Pre-
Wicked
matinee, we all had lunch at the Palm. Coincidentally, Dave's family was there too and were all heading to the show, which I hadn't seen since opening night ten years ago. The witches still got it! The end of Act 1 will go down as one of the great act endings on Broadway, right? It has to. We took the girls backstage to meet the witches afterwards. I want to do an all-black version of
Wicked
called
Blicked
.

It was a monsoon outside and we got soaked leaving the theater, which Abby declared to be the best part of her visit to NYC. We ducked into Trattoria Dell'Arte and rosé'd it up in a corner booth.

This friend of Padma's has a beagle thing—hers passed away while she was on her honeymoon—and she asked if she could ever come hang out with Wacha. So she was at my apartment today for hours while I was at the show. He didn't have any burn marks on him or anything when I got home, so I am fairly certain there was no abuse. I didn't really think that, my mind just wandered to poor Penny on
Good Times
. (These are the things that fill my brain.)

SUNDAY, MAY 11, 2014

Perfect NYC day. It was like the day the Hobbits were freed, or whatever the hell happened at the end of
Lord of the Rings
. It felt like a party in the shire, 72 degrees and sunny. Wacha started the day in front of the mirror, barking at himself for twenty minutes. It was the first time he had noticed the mirror. He is a lil dumb, as discussed. Took him to the dog run and met Em and Abby at the Standard for brunch, where I completely stuffed myself: nova platter, scrambled eggs, turkey sausage, and then obviously I picked at Abby's fries. Teaching Abby to walk Wacha was priceless. I put Em and Abby in a cab for LaGuardia and ran into Seth Meyers and his wife, Alexi; she and I engaged in a weird handshake/aborted kiss greeting, to which I demanded a do-over. I hate a weird greeting.

I met Joe on the Piers and we encountered an amazing forest ranger lady with a badonk of a booty who almost gave me a fifty-dollar citation for having Wacha on the lawn, but I made a plea that we weren't under Taliban rule and she let me off just this once. She was in a scooter with a sliding window that she used with great effect. It was like her own little portable DMV station.

It was one of those days when you just didn't want to go inside, ever. A sweet twink informed us we were listening to the strains of the great Ariana Grande coming from the next pier and we walked over, crashing some sort of fancy event that looked like a set for a White People Benefit for Africa on
Sex and the City
, with Samantha doing the PR. It was sparsely attended, as if with just enough background players to shoot a scene. We saw Donna Karan and some models and ate pizza, ice-cream sandwiches, and cookies, and I got a bag of candy to go. Wacha got recognized twice. We sat on a bench for an hour after the party and watched people. People don't cruise anymore. That's just over. The amount of cruising and pickups that happened on those piers for years and years and now no one even
looks
at each other that much anymore. I am from the generation of meeting on the street and connecting—there was nowhere else to do it, but Grindr and Tinder killed that. I still look at everybody. I dig eye contact!

We ran into more people, then I left Joe and sat on a bench in Abingdon Square and obsessed over Wacha's Instagram and showed this old lady next to me how to use her phone in what seemed like the unlikely event that she would choose to call her sister. She made it very clear with me that she did not actually care to call the sister—who does not own a cell phone—and had no future plans to do so either. She is scared of her iPhone and it's turning into a problem, she said. I did some good troubleshooting with her but I couldn't tell what was sticking. What did stick is that this old lady doesn't like her sister
one bit
. Every time I was talking about the phone she brought it back to the sister.

I take way too many pictures of Wacha. I think it is a potentially disturbing addiction, although certainly better than crack or even excessive masturbation, despite what I implied to Catherine Zeta-Jones the other night.

Tonight Simon Halls hosted dinner for Ryan Murphy and
The Normal Heart
at the Palm and I ate like a pig: steak, chicken parm, creamed spinach, repeat. Mark Ruffalo and I took a selfie and he is absolutely my doppelgänger. I have no problem with that, and he seems fine with it too. His wife, Sunny, says he will play me in a movie, which is unlikely but I'm glad there's an actor of his caliber ready to step in. While dinner was wrapping up I got a text from a random number that said, “Uncle Boons—a few weeks ago. Outside under the awning.” It was the guy in the yellow raincoat that I'd cruised after dinner with Bill Persky. I knew he would find me! I replied: “What took you so long to find me?” (I thought that was a clever response.) We went back and forth and decided that fate had brought us together at the end of a perfect day and we simply must meet each other immediately for a drink so that we could plan the rest of our lives together. We didn't actually talk about fate or marriage but that was the ongoing subtext in my mind. I told Bruce what was up and he said,
“Go now!”
I went to Anfora and he was waiting, not exactly as I remembered him—Did he have a beard? Was he really that young? He wouldn't tell me his age, or how he'd gotten my number. After a few minutes, his suspected age was dropping precipitously because he had no frame of reference for any iteration of Cher (not even “Believe”). I don't know what age you have to be to have not been touched by Cher. I guess under twenty-five. Anyway, the longer we talked, the more I realized this was not going to be the person I spend the rest of my life with. He was coming from a Sunday of day-drinking, so he kinda needed a shower and maybe a nap, but he made it clear that he was up for a roll in the hay. I don't know if it was my deflated expectations, my full stomach, or what, but I settled for a peck in front of my apartment and sent him off, which I think surprised him. I don't think we'll see each other again.

MONDAY, MAY 12, 2014

This morning Wacha was taking a massive dump and who appears from thin air? Brooke Shields! Is she the prophet of Wacha's poop? I went to the gym knowing I'd gained weight, not planning to weigh myself. But Mark was there and egged me on to get on the scale. I
gained five fucking pounds.
I weigh 170. Of course I do after what I ate this weekend. Pigging off Abby's leftovers, gorging at the Standard, grazing at that White People Benefit for Africa, eating everything at the Palm—all while bragging to my sister what a health kick I'm on. I am a dejected pig.

Tonight was the premiere of
The Normal Heart
. It gutted me completely. I was sitting there sobbing between Kelly and Allison Levy, who were also sobbing. Everyone was. It is a story that needs telling. I can't stop thinking about these thousands of people who just disappeared in the most inhumane way possible, with all of society turning their backs on them. That this happened in my lifetime is a travesty. We are supposed to be a civilized society. This should go on Reagan's record in a more significant way. He let it happen.

TUESDAY, MAY 13, 2014

Martha Stewart sent me an incredible basket of dog products. Totally unrelated, I was in a horrible mood all day. My allergies were horrible, Ricky Martin's people were micromanaging our interview with him, there was irritating stuff I had to deal with at work, and I felt fat. I had an impossible workout boxing and kicking and still didn't get my aggression out of my system. I got out of my funk in time for the Ricky Martin taping. I honestly think they were worried I was going to gay him up—that was the undertone I was getting—and after seeing
Normal Heart
last night, it felt contrary to the whole point of being out of the closet and where we are in 2014. I'm the only gay host in late night—if you can't gay it up with me, where can you? But he was lovely, very warm and sweet and adorable. And because he was so disarming (did I misread the situation?) my upper lip was sweating and I was way, way too flirty with him on camera. I should've toned it down but he was so cute and I couldn't stop. I felt a little gross but he seemed fine. After the show I met with Bethenny and pitched her the Martha idea. She loved it. I think the next step is getting P. Diddy to do it.

Tonight Daniel Craig was being honored at the Spring Benefit at MoMA and I was happy to be there with Bruce, Bryan, and Barkin. Somehow I wound up seated at Madonna's table, which was a great surprise and subsequently a total buzzkill since I had to leave for my show midway through dinner. She was chatty and funny. She hated the wine and texted her driver to go grab a bottle from her house and bring it back to her. I never found out what kind she was getting—she told me to wait and see. I couldn't. Motherfucker. What
kind
did Madonna get??? I was still in
Normal Heart
mode, thinking about an entire lost generation of gay men, so I quizzed her about Herb Ritts, Keith Haring, and Basquiat. She said she feels like all her contemporaries are dead, including Michael Jackson, who she said she wasn't great friends with but considered a contemporary. I asked if Whitney fell into that group and she said probably not because she didn't ever get to know her well.