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The pre-fall edit and trunk triumphs from Louis Vuitton, and a summertime sneak peek at Fendi’s new collection in marvelous Mykonos
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Why you might want to reconsider transforming yourself into a celebrity doppelgänger; plus why you might want to make liquid
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The hottest Haute Living events of the season
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OPEN AN Book
KELLY RIPA IS AIRING ALL OF HER LAUNDRY — THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE DINGY — IN HER FIRST BOOK, LIVE WIRE.
BY LAURA SCHREFFLER PHOTOGRAPHY MILLER MOBLEY STYLING AUDREY SLATER HAIR RYAN TRYGSTAD MAKEUP KRISTOFER BUCKLE SHOT ON LOCATION AT THE CARLYLE HOTEL, NYC
here aren’t many people who would a) admit to passing T out during sex; b) to waking up in the emergency room inexplicably wearing a 1980s-style French-cut leotard and red “fuck me” Manolo Blahniks, as dressed by their husband; c) publicly airing said encounter in a collection of true short stories (aka a memoir); and d) making the moment not only funny, but relatable, but then, no one else on earth is Kelly Ripa, a badass B who, at 51 years old, has finally learned and inured to the rigors of not giving a shit. This potentially traumatic yet hilariously written tale is just one of the vignettes in the Live with Kelly and Ryan host’s upcoming first release, Live
Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories, available on September 27 from Dey Street
Books. And now, because I know you need to hear the rest (I sure did), here it is, the crux of a chapter entitled “Don’t Let Your Husband Pick Your Death
Clothes.” The year was 1997, pre-morning show, and Ripa was recently married to her then All My Children co-star Mark Consuelos and a new mom to six-month old Michael when she passed out while doing it. But not, like, because it was so good or anything (although duh, of course it was — and she says as much). When she came to, appalled to find herself wearing aforementioned articles of clothing plus a pair of husband Mark Consuelos’ oversized Juventus warm-up pants with side snaps (why Mark, why?), there was more to come: The reason for said swoon was a twin pair of ovarian cysts, which were apparently more alarming to Mark, because he, too, almost had a case of the vapors and nearly fainted on the hospital room floor. She writes: “My eyes shift between the fuzzy images on the screen, the remnants of my ovarian tormentor, and Mark happily snacking away. Sex can be so traumatic I think, and yet one of us is completely undaunted. There he is, happily munching on the saltines now and ordering a second apple juice.
Mark could be at a movie, or a spa. Instead, I’m flat on my back wondering when the other two cysts will burst.” She adds, “Also, here is my husband, who is, dare I say, stylish, well-dressed at all times, and yet he dressed me like a dime store prostitute in my time of need. It’s still baffling to me to this day that this is the best costume for the day that he could find for me, to the point where, when I was on the stretcher, I thought I was dreaming; I was having a nightmare. I didn’t realize I had come to.” See what I mean? She’s hilarious. It’s the Kelly Ripa we know and have loved since she first appeared as Regis Philbin’s co-host in 2001, the one who has won over America with her smile, sprightliness, and relatability. What’s more, with Ripa, what you see is what you get. She’s never had much of a filter, to be honest, but now she’s finally comfortable sharing some of her most private good, bad, and ugly behind-the-scenes moments with the masses instead of the tiniest of glimpses into her everyday life. Well, okay, not her everyday life, per se. Her favorite chapter — “The Good
News: You Can’t Die From Embarrassment” — was a one-off situation that is most definitely not the norm for anyone, including herself. Ripa immediately calls herself out in an entirely self-deprecating way, referring to this chapter
hauteresidence.com “I HAD A HARD TIME FINDING MY VOICE. IT TOOK WHAT FELT LIKE AN ETERNITY, BUT I FINALLY FOUND IT. AND IT’S MINE.”
as one where she gets “even close to a glamorous and fancy schmancy name-droppy life.” And it involves her close encounter with celebrity crush Richard Gere, which is probably why it’s her favorite chapter. Because while the retelling isn’t the story she would have hoped for (she couldn’t help murmuring the words to “Up Where We Belong” from his film An Officer and a Gentleman in his face) the point is that it’s still a story, and it’s all hers.
The setting: Jimmy and Jane Buffet’s waterfront home to celebrate actress Anjelica Huston’s birthday when she found herself taking the last empty seat in the room — right next to Gere. So after some charmingly dorky attempts to ingratiate herself to the Pretty Woman actor, they both found themselves coming to the rescue of a fallen party guest — who swore up and down she hadn’t drunk anything or eaten anything bad (and whom they later learned had eaten an extremely potent pot brownie). She spent the next two months telling everyone and anyone on Long Island about how she and Richard Gere saved a woman’s life, embellishing and adding to the story every time. The kicker: Months later, they ran into each other at a different mutual friend’s party, when Ripa approached Gere saying, “Do you remember when we saved that woman’s life at Jane Buffet’s house during Anjelica’s birthday party?” There was a long pause, and Gere responded: “You were there?”
Now, Kelly tells me, “I was clearly the person that didn’t belong in that room, because you know that Mark was like, ‘You’re not bringing an autograph book to a party’ and I was like, ‘What if someone amazing is there?’ I’m not used to being around celebrities in the wild. In fact, I’m so unused to it that in my mind, I cast myself as Richard Gere’s co-star. To this day, I still revere Richard Gere. I don’t know that I would ever have the comfort level to approach him again; it was such a big moment in my mind. And that he couldn’t recall that I was even there tells you everything you need to know about my life. I’m always more impressed than everybody else.”
Ripa is more everything than everyone else. She’s a ball of energy from the second we start speaking, and as such, our conversation runs the gamut of topics from bad vacation hair to her poor use of the semicolon (her words, not mine) to, of course, her book itself — and why she decided to tell her stories now. If you guessed the pandemic was the impetus, you’d be right — but only in a very nonlinear way. During the lockdown days of Covid-19, she started posting bits of what she refers to as “crazy essays” to social media and simultaneously, sending “absolutely ridiculous” emails signed “Love, Ryan and his mom, Kelly’ where she took on the role of co-host Ryan Seacrest’s mother. But she had already been writing these tales down, putting pen to paper in a journal at the behest of pal Andy Cohen for the better part of two decades. And between a push from her publisher and her colleagues, Live Wire was born. So, dear readers, prepare yourself to get to know the real Kelly Ripa — wife, daughter, mother, talk show host to the stars, Jersey Girl, firecracker, and so many more epithets that they’d fill up a page. But no matter what hat she’s wearing, she’s funny as hell.
CHAPTER 2
When Kelly and I chat on July 5, she and Mark have just returned from a monumental trip out west — momentous in that it was the first trip the couple has taken in 25 years without their kids. “At first we were, ‘Wait, what will we possibly do?’ and then I realized we could do whatever we wanted! It was a revolutionary vacation,” she enthuses. That being said, there was one downside, in her opinion (though obviously not in my eyes). “Who knows what will come out of my mouth after a two-week vacation?”
Indeed. For starters, she tells me she’s already hard at work on book No. 2, which will kick off with how she tried to get out of her Live Wire book tour by pretending to have Covid-19. But then she actually caught it, which means wham, bam, thank you ma’am — she’s fresh out of promotion excuses. “I blew my Covid wad too soon, if you will,” she laments ruefully.
There’s another section she’ll definitely include, one where she’ll issue a warning to her family and friends in advance — especially her kids — as she did in Live Wire where she discussed doing it with their dad and then being wheeled through triage in head-to-toe Lycra.
“I will definitely include that time during the pandemic that I thought my husband got me pregnant,” she shares. [Which, as a sidebar, would mean a 19-year age gap between her youngest child and a newborn.] “I started taking pregnancy tests daily, but then Mark sort of gingerly said, ‘Could there be another reason why you’re not getting your period?’ and me saying, ‘What other reason could there possibly be?’ He really had to walk on eggshells here [by explaining to me that I was probably going through menopause].”
And he did a damn good job, because Kelly didn’t want to cut her husband for being the bearer of bad news. Instead, she was relieved. “I was really grateful that I was not going to have to explain to my kids [Michael, 25; Lola, 21; and Joaquin, 19] that they were about to meet their new sibling.”
The Consuelos clan is as tight as can be (what Ripa refers to as her “little tribe”) but, like most kids, the thought of their parents knocking boots could potentially make their brains implode. “My kids never want to think of us in any sort of intimate way whatsoever. That’s why in that one chapter, I was like, ‘If you are related to us in any way, I urge you to skip over this.’ If for some reason my kids feel the need to read the entire book — which, don’t get me wrong, I don’t suspect that they will — but if they did, I don’t want them to read that chapter because it would sicken them. No one wants to think of their parents being intimate.”
Though that chapter comes with a warning, her kids haven’t read the book yet. She did send them the chapter, “The Nest Is Clean,” about being an empty nester. “My daughter was like, ‘You can’t write any of that.’ I said, ‘Too late, it’s in the book.’ Conversely, my oldest son was very moved by it, and because he’s older, I think he really got it. My youngest son I don’t believe read it, but he told me he did. He’s dyslexic and I know he’s thinking, ‘Do you really want to give me more to read?’ I get it; I know reading takes a toll.”
While her kids may not have internalized her tales of life, love, and the whole damn thing, the one person who made sure to read absolutely every word was none other than her respective other. “It’s funny: Mark was my biggest champion in the whole process. He read it with the eye of not just a person reading it because they had to save their own marriage, but with the eye of a reader. He would recall things that he found pertinent, or relevant, or language that he didn’t understand.
“I wasn’t sure if I could even write — and I’m still extremely unconvinced — because I found the entire process to be overwhelming and exhausting, especially with the editing,” she admits. “Sitting with [my publisher], going through things she thought should come out, while I was like, ‘No, that needs to stay in.’ Just knowing that Mark was there through all of it, and very, very tolerant of me discussing our lives in the way that I did, thinking for sure that
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