Quick Review: The Andy Cohen Diaries

The Andy Cohen Diaries: A Deep Look at a Shallow Year, by Andy Cohen

And argument can be made that some of the greatest diaries are about nothing much.  The Andy Warhol Diaries come first to mind, as that book turns out to be both Andy Cohen's favorite and the inspiration for his latest publication.  Unlike many famous  diarists, from Boswell to contemporary playwright Alan Bennett, Warhol had little or nothing to say about art or politics.  Instead, the artist recorded what Bianca Jagger was wearing at Studio 54 and where he met Halston for drinks. Nothing wrong with that.  Other classic diaries might as easily have inspired Cohen's "Deep Look at a Shallow Year."  Saint-Simon hadn't much to say about philosophy, literature or politics beyond court-gossip and the struggle for precedent when going in to dinner at Versailles. Pepys' Diaries end just as his own political rise began, and while he does include his impressions of events like The Great Fire of London, and his encounters with Majesty, Pepys is still read as much for his picnics and his pursuit of chambermaids as for his opinions on the news of the day.

Andy Cohen's autobiography, Most Talkative: Stories from the Front Lines of Pop Culture, came out just a couple of years ago.  I read that one too, and enjoyed it.  He's a charming fellow, is our Andy; merry as grig, still boyishly handsome at 46, self-deprecating, clever.  The autobiography detailed his somewhat unlikely rise in broadcasting from CBS intern to corporate VP at Bravo and on-air personality.  His career being unlikely only in the sense that very few ambitious little boys from St. Louis, Missouri, with little or no discernible talent, by his own admission, end up hosting an exceptionally popular talk-show, even on basic cable.  After all, he can't sing, can't dance, can't quite tell a joke, and as his latest book shows, despite intense training and a respectable performance in a charity game, he will never be asked to play professional ball for his beloved Cardinals.  What he does do and has always done is talk.  Nowadays, it's mostly what he does for a living.

Watch What Happens Live! is unique half-hour hybrid of post-modern Merv Griffin, drinking-games and hyperactivity.  It's all played out in a rather ramshackle "club house" wherein celebrities of varying degrees of fame and infamy alternately field softballs and answer -- or don't -- the kind of awkwardly personal questions a fan might more usually ask at an airport bar.  It can be hilarious, hair-raisingly unscripted, unaffected and even sweet.  It can also, depending on the sobriety and self-importance of his celebrity-guests, and by Cohen's own admission, be uncomfortably close to a party where only the host is making any effort to have a good time.

Cohen made his fortune producing some of the least edifying, scripted "reality" on television; namely, the Housewives of various locations.  Hugely successful, I confess, I find them uniformly unwatchable hag-fests; reprehensible arriviste goaded into behaving like alley-cats.  While this formula has by now worn so thin that even the participants may occasionally blush under their Kabuki make-up, (how would we know?) there's no question but that Cohen loves this shit.  It hasn't just made him rich, he actually watches it, he cares, he still thinks it's "great television."  Oh, dear.  Among other things and better things, the Diaries show that even rising fifty, Andy Cohen is still that suburban gay kid fascinated by beauty-shop gossip and fan magazines.  He still thinks money makes people interesting and that fame is an accomplishment.  In many ways, he is then a representative voice of the times, no?  No more shallow than the next successful television producer, nor less than the last talk-show host to drink on-air.

As a diarist, he is what my grandmother might have called "a caution" and meant more than she knew.  He is funny, even dear.  He's clearly a loyal friend.  He's good to his parents and he loves his dog.  He's a New Yorker now, down to his designer shoes:

"Coming home from the dog run, I saw two separate girls who were either out for the night or legit prostitutes.  You never see real whores on the street anymore.  I also ran into Joe Montello, then Matt Bomer."

That would be a typical entry: funny, fanboy, and packed with unexamined privilege.  He and his friends like the new Mayor, Bill de Blasio, but hope he won't be "too liberal."  He preserves Patti LaBelle's "half-eaten Life Saver" as a relic, and worries that the high ratings for the "NeNe one on one" will result in her wanting to "raise her fee. Oy."

I enjoyed this book, as I did his last, at least in part because he is so blithely, unselfconsciously uncouth.  For a man who's already published an autobiography and a diary at 46, he leads a remarkably unexamined life.  He'd much rather be on-air than off.  I don't think he's much interested in the interior of anything beyond his soon to be renovated condo. That would seem to be both his charm and his Achilles' heal. He's busy. He goes.  He does.  He talks.  It's interesting, in it's way, even when one hasn't much interest in what he's doing or any idea who half the people in his book are. He's fun.  He's funny. It's all... telling.

That no one's likely to remember most of this in a few years, or care, doesn't make any of it less entertaining.  When future historians of our popular culture need to understand what it meant to be famous, fatuous and rich at the start of the 21st Century, they could do worse than to study this book. 

Andy Cohen is a caution indeed.