Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture by Andy Cohen Page A

illustration, he got a dreamy look in his eyes and reminisced about some of his own misty, watercolor memories. “Every one of these streets reminds me of a different girl I fucked.”
    I really liked him. I actually liked the Buttafuocos, too. Many times I would find myself back at my desk in New York months after a remote, longingly fingering the cards in my Rolodex, fighting the urge to call these people up to say hello and that I’d been thinking about them. Did they miss me, too? Probably not. Let’s not be naïve. These people were accustomed to having someone drop into town, see them as they wanted to be seen, and then get out of their hair. And while I may have only ever met one Buddy Hackett or one Mary Jo Buttafuoco in my travels, they’d probably met hundreds of me.
    One remote pressed every voyeuristic button I’ve got, and it was so memorable that I kept a souvenir from the encounter for almost a decade. In 1994, I went to Palm Springs to produce the first joint interview Tammy Faye Bakker had agreed to since marrying her new husband, Roe Messner, a business partner of Jim Bakker’s, who’d designed Heritage USA, the 2,300-acre Christian theme park and residential complex, before everything went to hell in a multi-million-dollar handbasket. Roe, as you may or may not remember, had reportedly handled payoffs to Bakker’s mistress, Jessica Hahn. Jim ended up spending some time behind bars, but not before Tammy divorced him and married Roe. It was all very 1980s, back when big shoulder pads and thieving adulterous televangelists were the rage. When the scandal broke, Tammy Faye cried through her unfathomably heavy mascara (think tarantulas mating) and managed to emerge from the whole mess a slightly streaky pop-culture icon. You had to love her for the way she stood her ground even as she was being mocked by every drag queen and comedian (Jan Hooks was my fave) in America. I did, anyway. I tried booking her for a few years. When I got her, I convinced everyone in New York that landing Tammy and her new man was kind of a big deal. Because, by the way, it kind of was.
    I was stoked to spend time with Tammy Faye and see her spidery eye makeup up close and, better yet, see the habitat in which she lived. But there was another kind of insane aspect to my Palm Springs jaunt; I’d done something I bet not too many people would think of if they came to town to interview the former cohost of The PTL Club : I booked myself into an all-male clothing-optional “resort.” The resort was simultaneously kind of disgusting and kind of awesome. Of course, no one on West Fifty-seventh Street knew where I was staying—the place wasn’t exactly on the “Approved Hotels” list provided by the network’s travel department. But then again, it was certainly not my problem that they hadn’t thought to provide a “Disapproved” list as well. Still, I allowed myself to feel a tiny bit righteous because it was cheaper—in every sense of the word—than anywhere CBS would’ve put me. I was a company man; I was being fiscally responsible! Fine, that wasn’t the only reason. There were waterfalls and grottoes and—well, the whole place looked like a low-rent version of the Playboy mansion. For me, it felt like the perfect opportunity to make up for lost time. My friends had all been to strip bars and every trashy place under the sun, and, by comparison, I was a mere babe in the woods—or desert. I had some serious catching up to do. At that time, though, my sense of adventure was still pretty Midwestern, and I could never have imagined checking in to this place under any usual circumstance—as a vacation destination, or with a friend—but as long as I was in the neighborhood on assignment to produce a story on a figure from the religious right, it seemed like a perfectly genius idea.
    My first morning in Palm Springs, I cruised over to Tammy Faye’s house so we could get to know each other and discuss the interview. I