I wrote another impassioned letter—I was a pro at this point, having nabbed that Susan Lucci interview my sophomore year. As a backup, I’d also applied to the local NBC affiliate in St. Louis. KSDK was actually a powerhouse station with a competitive internship program, a place any college kid would be lucky to work at. But when the internship director there told me, “If you choose CBS over KSDK, you’ll be making the biggest mistake of your career,” I thought, What career? I didn’t have one yet. Who needed that kind of advice? When an acceptance came from CBS, I didn’t hesitate to accept right back.
All the helium instantly whooshed out of my elation balloon when I received a letter telling me I was being assigned not to the CBS Evening News, but to CBS … This Morning. What?? I had never even heard of or watched that dud-as-a-doornail, dud-on-arrival dud. I was a know-it-all even then, and one of the things I knew was that CBS had never been a contender in the morning. This was like landing a White House internship only to discover I’d be painting the gate. Was that KSDK lady’s taunt coming true so soon? Disgruntled, but having already burned my backup bridge, I packed my attitude and set off for Manhattan.
The sound track of that summer was Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” and I fully intended to. The first time I saw the video, I was at a gay bar called Private Eyes, watching it on a wall of TV screens—at that time, the height of cosmopolitan high tech. But it was the video itself that almost made my eyes fall out of my head. Of course, you recall the intricate plotline: Madonna has a harem of muscly wet men in chains crawling around on the floor. And there’s a cat with the same eyes as Madonna. Madonna is in charge; she is the ruler and she is sexy and she is the boss. It was no wonder I was so transfixed: This was exactly the image I had of myself taking New York by storm. I would not go for second best, Baby. I was about to become a CBS News intern with all of the power and conviction Madonna embodied in that video, minus the lapping up of milk from a bowl (but only because I was lactose intolerant—meaning I don’t really like milk).
This was long before Craigslist existed, and if a serial killer wanted to lure you into a trap, at least he had to put some real effort into it by taking out a classified ad. I prayed that this wouldn’t be my fate as I perused the Village Voice and contacted random strangers looking for roommates. Soon enough, subsidized by my parents, I wound up sharing a fourth-floor walkup on East Twenty-first Street with a seemingly non-murderous gay guy who worked for TWA and traveled a lot. My very first day in the apartment, while snooping (duh), I discovered my roommate’s extensive pornography archive thoughtfully displayed in his bedroom. Wow, do gay people keep all their … media … out in the open on shelves like this? I wondered. Life in the St. Louis suburbs provided exactly zero guidance when it came to filling in all those niggling details of gay life such as where to store your spank mags. I figured as long as I was trespassing, I might as well educate myself by taking one of my roomie’s tapes off the shelf and popping it into his VCR. Which promptly broke. Mid-scene. I was mortified. I was going to be evicted my first night. What a tragic waste of youthful promise. This was not what Madonna, or my mother, would have wanted.
When my roommate came home, he shrugged off the broken videotape and laughed at my angst. I loved New York.
* * *
From my tiny room on East Twenty-first Street, I had to take two buses to get uptown and west to CBS, which at that time was home not only to the morning show but also to The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, West 57th, 48 Hours, As the World Turns, The Joan Rivers Show, and WCBS-TV. Walking into the building that first day I felt a glimmer of hope that maybe this morning show gig wouldn’t be so lame.
I joined the other interns waiting in the lobby and sussed each of them out. I didn’t see anything big in the way of competition. I suppose that has to be the day that I met Julie. She and I were in the same internship “class,” but I barely took notice of her, other than when I caught her rolling her eyes at me for trying to be the brown-nosiest teacher’s pet while she couldn’t wait to hit the curb at five o’clock, where her boyfriend would pick her up. If you had asked me that day if this Julie and I would ever become friends, I would have said, “Um, no.” And if you had asked me if I could ever see big things happening for this Julie in the future, I would have said, “Um, no!” Foresight has never been a strength. (BUT FIRST: spoiler alert.) Julie Chen went on not only to anchor the very show on which we were interning, but also to rule the Big Brother house and marry the head of CBS. And I’m crazy about her.
While I was busy underestimating my future friend the Chen-bot, we were greeted by an all-business, very New York woman with hair so frizzy, I instantly assumed we’d connect. She had a pencil skirt, skyscraper high heels, and a list of names that she unceremoniously checked, announcing, “Cohen, you’re in consumer. Go find Erin Moriarty.” I was flabbergasted.
