You know Andy Cohen from your television. Not his face, necessarily, but his body of work: the runny-mascara reality empire to which the women in your life have become passionately addicted. The man is responsible for a lot of television. Some critically adorned (Top Chef), some culturally malignant (the delirious, multi-city Real Housewives hen party), and then some plenty popular but unremarkable beyond the circus tent of Andy's home network, Bravo. As the head of programming—Andy has puppeteered each of the many dozen reality shows Bravo has put out in the past seven or eight years—he's gotten his prints on huge chunks of pop culture. And along the way, the face of Andy Cohen has become increasingly inseparable from the kind of television he makes.
A few years ago, having recognized this—Andy's presence in those series, that they all seemed to breathe the same air—Bravo asked Andy to produce a new kind of television: his own show. Where he would step in front of the camera to confront, and more generally vibe with, the creatures of his own creation: Housewives, Hollywood stylists, designers of anything you can get paid millions to design. (All while Andy, his guests, and the zealous studio audience drain cocktails.) The result, Watch What Happens Live, has transmuted into a celeb-studded, five-nights-a-week 11-p.m. mainstay of volatile looseness—the only live talk show in late night and, I'd suggest, the most primitively authentic thing on television. As people in TV will tell you, there's stuff that can happen on a live show with booze and famous people that doesn't happen anywhere else.
See, Andy adores famous people, probably more than anything. It's tough to find a famous person he doesn't have history with—either a unidirectional infatuation or a forged friendship from his twenty years on the scene. But he's also eager to ask the kinds of brazen questions fans of celebrities most shamelessly want to ask. Secrets, gossip, regrets. It's prying but innocent and ingenuous, and guests seem to appreciate the candor. It helps, too, that they know the score, and are perfectly willing to give up the goods.
In the beginning, WWHL guests were famous friends of Andy's—prized pals he'd accumulated, in real life, over the years. They hung out in an audience-less studio and indulged his silly questions, played his made-up games. But as Bravo grew to become synonymous with Andy's specific brand of ubiquitous, deliberately gaudy reality TV (The Millionaire Matchmaker, The Rachel Zoe Project, Fashion Hunters), the famous people who loved Bravo shows (and, in particular, loved WWHL's self-aware chatter about those shows) were suddenly approaching Andy straight-out. And so after the move to five nights a week last January, instead of just filling the slate with Andy-friends and other popular "Bravolebrities," the roster of guests grew to include Jerry Seinfeld, Pharrell, Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Maddow, Mark Ruffalo, Larry King, Meryl Streep, John Mayer, Dan Rather, and a long list of others. (Rather took his first-ever on-air shot of whiskey at Andy's prodding.)
Here's something else that started happening around the time the show moved to five nights a week: Men were tuning in to WWHL in big numbers. Men who were maybe paying half-attention while their wives and girlfriends cackled at Flipping Out or a Real Housewives of New Jerseyreunion but who closed the laptop and locked in for WWHL.
"It happens all the time now," Andy told me in September. "Yesterday, for example, I volunteered at Cantor Fitzgerald, did this 9/11 charity day. And I walked onto the trading floor, which is like being in the locker room of a football team or something—there's a lot of testosterone. And every one of those guys knew who I was and had watched my show."
"I said this the other night on the show; I basically spoke directly to the straight men," he said. " ‘I know you're watching. I met you on my book tour. You come up to me everywhere I go. And I've figured out why you like me: I show a bunch of boobs and asses and good-looking women. I get your wives and girlfriends playing drinking games. I get 'em wound up, I get 'em drunk, and just when they're at the point where' "—he snaps—" ‘I'm off the air.' "
"You're their fluffer," I said.
"I'm their fluffer!"
***
A bunch of times this fall, I sat with the audience of eighteen in the "clubhouse" of WWHL. The set is a replica of the den in Andy's apartment. It's like that scene in Wayne's World when Wayne and Garth see Wayne's basement on the soundstage for the first time. It's gotta be a little heady. You can read a history of the show in the tchotchkes he's got on his shelves. Gifts from guests (a Justin Bieber doll, a Housewife's former breast implant), photos of Andy with '70s songstresses, a framed Lite-Brite of the St. Louis arch. "I feel like I'm in my home, like we're doing the show for party guests at my apartment," Andy says. "I still don't feel like I'm on TV."
It had been a not-so-secret dream of Andy's since he was a kid to be not just in television but on television. As a closeted teen in St. Louis, Andy watched a lot of TV: sitcoms and sportscasts and news hourlies and soap operas. He internalized the whole of it. Inside the box existed glamour, mass presence, fame, and influence; life was good inside the box.
Andy made a play to get on TV after a college internship at CBS News. A producer told him he had a good face, a good voice, abundant energy—but that his wandering eye might be a problem. What fucking wandering eye? Nobody'd ever mentioned anything about a wandering eye. His mom insisted the producer was nuts, and Andy believed her. But he doubled down on producing, and made morning-show segments for over a decade at CBS before eventually moving to Bravo. Takeaway: There was unsatisfied ambition. But after four years, the network recognized that Andy, having gotten pretty great at making stars, was becoming one, too.
"I'd worked with Andy on the little aftershows and Housewives reunions, and he was a stone-cold television talent," recalls executive producer Michael Davies. "He was the kind of person you spend your career looking for."
Each of the WWHL shows I attended was different, but the pre-game was pretty much the same—the audience members huddled up drinking in the lobby, swapping stories of how they scored invitations (it's a tougher ticket than you'd ever imagine; a pair of seats recently went for eighteen grand at auction, "something that's happening quite a lot these days," Andy says), and then squeezing in on sawed-off benches behind the cameras. In that little space, on those little-kid benches in the studio, mouthing the words to One Direction singles, female audience members (and just as many men) have trouble controlling themselves as they wait for Andy to arrive. I saw a representative sample of guests—Bravolebrities, actors, musicians—but no one generated the same kind of physical anticipation as the host.
One show I attended that was pretty great: Liam Neeson and Ethan Hawke. Liam's a friend of Andy's. In fact, Andy gets serious during one of our conversations, discussing the moment when the network first approached him about the show, which happened to coincide with the death of Liam's wife, Natasha Richardson: "A friend of mine had just passed away, and I was in this state of shock. Here I was getting the biggest opportunity of my life, right at this moment when everything had been recalibrated in terms of what was important to me." So there's real history between Andy and Liam; it's nice to watch them together.
Ethan, on the other hand, is new to WWHL, but there's easy chemistry. Soon it's time for a game called Plead the Fifth. Andy asks you three tough questions; you can plead the Fifth on one. This is the part of the show that generates news. No pre-interview, no editing—gotta answer it live or suffer the antagonism of host and audience.
First question: "A Reality Bites edition of the little gamelet ‘Marry, Shag, Kill.' " Janeane Garofalo. Winona Ryder. Renée Zellweger.
Um, pass.
Second question, Andy asks Ethan who the most difficult star he's ever worked with is, and Ethan, after some knuckle-chewing, says: "Okay, you wanna know? I mean, this is the truth, hand on the Bible: William Hurt is a son of a bitch. I mean, holy shit." The third answer's pretty good, too. If he had to eat any co-star (à la Alive, that plane-crash movie Hawke did in the early '90s), who would it be? He has a seventh-grader's grin: "Angelina Jolie. That's pretty easy." (Later, while filming the web-only aftershow—where Andy asks more textured questions that would feel out of place in the snap-snap of the live show—Ethan calls Jolie "the kind of woman people write novels about...a major-league woman.")
At the commercial break, though, Ethan's all regrets. "Dammit, I should've said I'd eat the dog from White Fang." He's especially banged up about Hurt: "Man, I shouldn't have said that."
"He won't see it," Andy says.
"He's gonna be in the back of a cab on the way to the airport and he's gonna get a little snippet of it."
Andy makes a face like it'll never happen, and then they're back.
Andy asks Liam some questions, too. "Rumor has it that you are unequivocally the most well-endowed person in Hollywood. True or false?"
Liam: "Well, I'm told that Willem Dafoe and myself are kinda..." He does his hands like a tight horse race.
Andy: "Neck and neck?"
Liam: "Yeah."
Ethan: "The appropriate term is head to head.
***
I get a handful of pre-show exchanges with Andy, and in each instance, while juggling his makeup lady's preening and my questions, he's checking two things on his phone: popular questions for guests submitted via Twitter and Facebook—"People watching the show dictate what we're talking about"—and St. Louis Cardinals scores.
Andy has invariably said that his Cardinals fandom was the only thing growing up that "didn't scream G-A-Y." And this isn't, like, an actress's convenient glomming onto the Lakers. Andy fixates on Cardinals gamecasts like Philip Roth characters lean into the radio in the '40s and '50s parts of his novels. His dream guest? Cardinals third baseman David Freese. Before Andy threw out a first pitch at Busch, three separate guests—Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Costas, and Matthew Broderick—offered the same advice: Whatever you do, don't stand on the mound, and don't bounce it. Andy ended up way high and way outside, he says: "the gayest pitch in the history of baseball."
One night, Andy's running through the show's lineup, deep in prep for guests Donnie Wahlberg and Jenny McCarthy. He's all lit up—a harkening to adolescent Andy.
"Jenny McCarthy was the one I thought could turn me straight," he tells me. "I thought that if I could just get my shot with her, it could happen."
Andy and some of his producers talk through a game he's gonna play that night, Dare or Dare. Donnie just has to guess whether Jenny'll do the first thing or do the second instead.
"Do you think she'll show me her tits?" Andy asks a young producer.
She shrugs, and then shakes her head.
"Can I say, ‘Can I feel your boobs?' "
She scrunches her face. "Maybe you can say touch..."
"But I'm gay."
"Yeah, but I don't want you to ‘feel' my boobs," she says.
"But it's Jenny McCarthy!"
In the end, Andy just has Jenny lick his face. Also, after confessing the whole turn-me-straight fantasy on-air, she's totally inspired: "You have no idea how good I'd go down on you," she says. "I have a masculine energy," she adds during a break. "But! Then I have fun bags, too."
Before they go out there together, before his 2-D teen dream presents in the body of a pretty bangin' 40-year-old, he knots his tie around his neck in his dressing room, yawns ("I usually don't catch a second wind until 10:56"), and conjures what I imagine to be a freeze-frame image on his big-backed Sony Trinitron of Singled Out-era Jenny.
"Man, I wanted to fuck her."
***
The line for Andy's West Village book signing spills out of the store and onto the sidewalk. For such a dependably present and responsive force on social media and live television, he doesn't do meet-and-greets all that often. This is the rare opportunity to see Andy in person, a chance to face-to-face with "the neighborhood celebrity," as one woman describes him. (And this in a downtown neighborhood with plenty of more famous residents.) It happens not just in New York or L.A., but when I went up to Boston with him, too—that recognizability, and, like, waaay-down-the-sidewalk recognizability. He belongs to a lot of people, it's proprietary—that's how they feel.
The reason WWHL is important above all else, I'd argue, is that same super-real quality that generates the enthusiasm for Andy. The newness. The way the things that feel fully recognizable and ubiquitous—that is, reality television and late-night talk show—are, in Andy's hands, combined and made not just fresh, but completely new. How we feel like we're seeing some of these people as we can't see them anywhere else.
Quick: Name the current Real World cycle; how many seasons of Idol are we now—six, nine? Is Survivor still on? Those shows, and all of the reality-TV photocopies they spawned, have become untethered to their beginnings. And so, cut like a bundle of balloons, they all sort of just float around, indistinguishable from one another. You watch any reality show, you're watching the same show. ("I'd like to think," Andy has said, "that were he alive today, Warhol would be painting the Housewives.")
***
But WWHL positions itself differently, sorta next-generation. After all, live is different. Live, late night, booze: even differenter. Live, late night, with reality stars and non-reality-TV stars (who are, though, living in a reality-TV-seeming reality we pay a whole lot of attention to) who come on and act super-real. Just big-time makeup, some lady wraps, bottomless cocktails, and Andy. It's the new thing in real.
When the line hooks through the front door at the signing, a pair of assistants hand out plastic cups of something called a Corpse Reviver No. 2 and Andy's favorite, "Fresquila." "Like a Prayer" plays dutifully; Andy ended his book's dedication, "And of course to Madonna. Just because." A Miami Housewife, camera-ready, cuts the line and surprises Andy. He does seem surprised. And not as happy to see her as she is to see him. (This seems to be a common dynamic between Andy and many of the Bravolebrities: The adoration is mutual, but unbalanced. In many cases it seems Andy loves them like people love their pets, whereas the stars seem to love him like pets love the human who's rescued them from the pound.)
"I feel a weird kinship with them, 'cause I actually feel responsible," he says. On-air, Andy is skilled at maintaining a legit allegiance to his Housewives—and all guests, more generally—while simultaneously winking at the audience. "I think on my show or at the reunions, I can sense if the camera's on me, and if they're getting my response. And I feel like through my expressions, it's fairly clear what I'm thinking. But at the end of the day, first and foremost, I'm always an enthusiast."
The conservatively suited man in front of me in line looks like Guy Pearce. He bounces on his toes and preps with his partner. "We've been together thirteen years, married for three, and three kids," the guy, Mike, tells me. "But thirty minutes a night, Andy is my fantasy husband."
Mike is an assistant principal at a high school. He pulls mints from his bag, pops a couple, and confesses, "I don't act this way with anyone else, about anything else."
When it's his turn, Andy stands—he's wearing flip-flops, for some reason—and Mike explains to Andy that he is his fantasy boyfriend.
Andy: "I'm your boyfriend?"
Mike: "No, this is my boyfriend. Husband. You're my fantasy boyfriend."
Andy: "So I'm your free pass?"
Mike: "Oh, 100 percent. I just brought Steve along to keep me in line. My best friend said she was less nervous about me meeting Obama, 'cause at least I'd be able to act appropriately with him."
Andy starts inscribing the title page, while Mike straightens his face and thanks Andy for what he's done for the LGBT community, especially for young people. Andy lifts his pen and thanks Mike in the eyes. Then Mike pulls out some things that had been squirrelled away in his assistant-principal brief—a mazel sweatshirt, mainstay WWHL paraphernalia—and Andy poses for a series of photos. In one, Andy rests his head, doe-eyed, on Mike's shoulder. "You know, I worked out an extra half hour this morning," Mike says. "Had to."
When it's my turn, I hand Andy my copy of the memoir, Most Talkative. It's a totally entertaining book. Energetic anecdotes from his wide-eyed proximity to the making of pop. He clacked out a manuscript, without assistance from a ghostwriter, in four months last fall. And yet the book feels written by two people—one whose seriousness about news and the business of TV is unmistakably that of an executive and one who's pure junkie, pure fan. The slivered contact ridge between those two halves is where WWHL exists, how it comes off.
Andy's excited to see me. Not for any particular reason except that he knows what to expect—I'm not gonna catch him off guard with a strange request. He shows me some of the gifts he's been given tonight. Jack Spade cuff links. A hat rainbowed in sequins like Funfetti cake. A letter, enumerated as a series of fifteen thank-yous. Thank you for keeping your hair salt-and-peppered. Thank you for helping me come out. Near the bottom, the guy mentions that he worked out twice that morning in anticipation of their meeting.
"These workouts are a thing," I say.
"I guess it's a thing!"
Andy fills the title page with thick, runaway lines, like a Keith Haring sketch. Thought bubbles, motion lines, a signature, and finally: Don't make me look like a douchebag!
