FEATURE STORY

he would say, ‘You can’t put that in there.’ There was only one chapter that he told me I could never, ever put into that book, or any book, and I took it out. I respected him, I respected it, and I was like, ‘I hear you, even though it’s the best chapter. I’ll honor your request to take it out.’

Intrigued, I ask her if she can share anything at all about its content, and she does. “It was about a transition period in our marriage. It wasn’t the empty-nest transition, but an earlier one, and that’s all I can really say about it without him breaking down the door and somehow knowing I’m even discussing it.”

I say, “That’s a good man you have, Kelly. He didn’t mind you talking about passing out during sex, at least.”

She answers smartly, “Well, it was hardly his fault. Although, in the retelling, he [boasts that he was] such a cocksman that he made me pass out.”

Ripa says this fondly. She doesn’t mind his bragging because a) it’s true and b) she’s grateful for him — and appreciative that he’s nothing like her. “You have to have a yin and a yang, right? Mark is so quiet in the way he goes through his life, and yet he married a blowhorn, if you will. I am this open book who will even turn the pages for you if you don’t keep up, and yet he allowed me to share these intimate moments because frankly, I think he found them entertaining. At the end of the day, I don’t think he would still be in this marriage if he didn’t find me entertaining. For example, if we go out to dinner with a couple we don’t know very well, and he says, ‘Kelly, tell him the story of how we met,’ then I know he’s invested.” [Incidentally, the start of their romance is adorably and hilariously laid out in chapter “Scenes From a Real Marriage.” A sample: “Mark’s a funny guy … but that is not why I fell for him. Oh no. I knew I was in love with him from the time I saw his headshot.”

Ripa is endlessly complimentary about her husband, and the feeling is clearly mutual: He even made an appearance at The Carlyle Hotel during our photo shoot just to check on his girl. They are couples’ goals.

As such, keeping their relationship fresh is easy, in her opinion. “It’s all very black and white: We fight,” she says. “And I think that’s the key to a good marriage, because you fight when you’re passionate. If we stopped fighting, I’d be concerned. We’re fine here, because we still get into it.

“You know,” she adds, musing, “I was worried when we became empty nesters. It was one of the great turning points of our lives, and I thought to myself, Oh shit, we’re going to be that couple that it ends as soon as the kids are out of the house. I don’t know why one argument led me to believe that, but I do tend to have a flair for the dramatic. Plus, men and women argue differently. For him, a passing argument is no big deal, but for me, it’s like, ‘Well, I guess I have to call the divorce attorney.’ He’s like, ‘Um, what? Are you okay?’”

Momentary lapses in sanity aside, anyone who has ever seen her and Consuelos together get it. Some people just fit, like puzzle pieces, and they are those people. “Mark is the hottest man on earth,” she enthuses (see what I mean?), adding, “But also the most normal. First of all, he’s good at math, so there’s that, and second of all, he has no ego; neither one of us do. We’re literally two people pushing each other up the hill as opposed to one trying to climb up the other one to get up the hill. We’re a team.”

And they always will be — even if he doesn’t always remember to hang up his towel. CHAPTER3

“I’ve never slept with a 50-year-old man. Actually, I suppose I will have by the time this book comes out. Wait, now that I think about it, by the time this book comes out, I’ll probably be sleeping with a man nearly in his mid-50s (52 is close enough). Mark, of course, has slept with a 50-year-old woman plenty of times. I’m assuming I’m the only 50-year-old, but you know what they say about assuming . . .”

This is how the chapter “Scenes From a Real Marriage” starts, and although it is, indeed, about her marriage, it’s also about getting older, and how Ripa learned how to not give a damn (despite her husband, who is only six months younger, referring to her as a cougar, that is).

She turned 50 on Oct. 2, 2020, right in the midst of the pandemic. Not an ideal scenario for a party to be sure, but the actual aging part? That’s a cakewalk, because Ripa believes that with age, comes power — an awakening that the only opinions that matter are your own, or those who love you. Also, she’s had Botox — as she frankly admits in the chapter “Aging Gracefully: The Big Lie” — and is proud of it, so let the haters hate! But really, just don’t. It’s pretty commonplace these days; stigma over, okay?

“I loved my 40s, but in your 50s, you reach a whole new level, where it goes from actively not caring to passively not caring about other people’s opinions. In my 40s, I was all, ‘You’re wrong, and here’s why.’ Now I’m like ‘Oh, that’s interesting that you think that, interesting take.’ That’s as much as I’ll get into it now. Whereas I used to be actively disinterested, now I’m passively disinterested. It is the most liberating feeling on earth — though I do shudder to think what will happen to me at 60. Will I not just even bother to put on undergarments? Is that the age where you’re like, ‘I really don’t care anymore?’ I mean, I still think I’ll go that extra mile to make sure my underpinnings are in place, just in case there’s an accident. And as you now know, I cannot trust my husband in the event of an untimely emergency to dress me properly; I have to have those clothes laid out in advance,” she quips.

All joking aside, Ripa has struggled with social anxiety for most of her life, which she lays out pretty transparently in Live Wire in a chapter called “The White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” about just that. Given how supremely confident she comes across, this is hard to imagine, and I say just that. “First of all, I have a fear of public speaking, which — ha-ha every year I think this is the year it’s gonna get cured, but I really am very terrified in social settings, I’m very awkward in them. For some reason, this always reads as funny. People will say to me, ‘You are so funny, you are the life of the party,’ and I’m like ‘Not really, I’m dying on the inside.’ I don’t know where that stuff stems from, I think it’s just who I’ve always been, part of who I’ve always been. That’s why acting was good for me, because I didn’t really have the burden of ever having to be myself in real life,” she explains.

Ripa has done a deep dive about this with close pal Anderson Cooper, which has helped. “He also has a fear of public speaking, and so he told me that when he started doing speaking engagements for his book, it really helped him — the more he did it, the more comfortable he got. [Yet] I still find when I have to present an award to a friend or give a speech on behalf of a friend, that I suffer such crippling social anxiety. I always say that I have to love them more than I love myself, because it literally takes like years off my life. When I hosted SNL, I felt that years had been drained from my life because that was definitely the most terrified I’ve ever been. Everybody is like, ‘You should be so comfortable — live TV is your bag.’ I’m like, ‘This is a whole different thing.’ I’m comfortable on my show now after almost 23 years of doing it, but it took a really long time to get there, for me to feel comfortable, and it took another 15 years before I settled in.”

Talking to Ripa, hearing her fears, it’s easy to forget just how successful she is, that she’s a six-time Daytime Entertainment Emmy Award winner with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame that has been listed on pretty much every single “power” list you can imagine, who, alongside Consuelos, also runs the successful production company Milojo Productions — she’s just that relatable. She is not an untouchable person; her warmth and candor are part of the reason she’s been so successful. She is human. And like any human, if you cut her, she bleeds.

Which brings me to the toughest chapter for Ripa to write: “Fool Me Twice,” about the challenges she endured when she initially joined the Live team. It was a uniquely challenging chapter because, not only was it painful, but she doesn’t like discussing her late co-host, Regis Philbin, publicly. But if there was one safe space to do so, her own book had to be it. So she wrote her truth.

“I want people to understand that joining Live, from my perspective, was a terrifying venture. It was entering into a work environment that I did not understand. I think had I gone in there now, I would have been fully equipped to handle it, but back then, I was not equipped in any sense of the word. And therefore, I did not protect myself the way I probably should have. It was a different time, back then. It was a tabloid, journalistic, free-for-all, and there were systems in place there for a long time at the talk show that were not necessarily there to protect me.”

Here are some highlights (or lowlights, as it were). Before joining the show, she was warned: “Make sure you know who your boss is;” back then, Philbin allowed to say things that definitely wouldn’t fly today, such as referring to her publicly as “It” — “Uh-oh… it’s got an entourage” (she had two people — hair and makeup); there would be no paid maternity leave (she was pregnant while auditioning for the job); and she was commanded not to look directly at executive producer Michael Gelman. Maybe she’d be turned to stone?

And then there was Regis himself — on the show, off the show, and after the show. She and Philbin weren’t the best of friends, but they were civil, even friendly, and so she was shocked to hear that, during an interview with the late Larry King, Philbin said that Ripa became angry, stopped speaking to him, and hadn’t seen him since the show — none of

The cover of Ripa’s first book, Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories

which was true. Philbin had come back to the show for a special Halloween episode, which was aired. Ripa had invited him over for dinner numerous times. She didn’t point these things out because she didn’t want to add fuel to the fire, but now, with Live Wire, it was finally time to set the record straight.

“A lot of times I didn’t comment on things because I don’t want to extend the news cycle. My silence means more than the chatter. If I’m not saying something, it’s because I’m being graceful and I’m letting my silence do the talking for me,” she says.

In Live Wire, she doesn’t address everything; that would be impossible — but hopefully she’s written enough to share her side of the story and quell the naysayers. “It’s hard to put everything out there, so I didn’t,” she admits. “It’s like a Monet: You really have to stand back and see the big picture. You don’t want to get too involved because if I were to break it down, it would be almost too much, too unpalatable. I still wanted [the book] to be entertaining at the end of the day.”

This chapter, for the record, is not just about Philbin; it was predominantly about the misogynistic work culture of yesteryear that she had to endure. “We talk about all of the awakening that we’ve had in society, but I still find far too often that women are always challenged and asked to take responsibility for the behaviors of men, and it’s really unfair,” she says.

Which leads to what she hopes the takeaway from her tales will be. “I think that in life, as a woman, you have to self-advocate. I’ve been called ambitious, but not in a good way. I’ve been called exacting, also not in a good way. But these are actually really great things, and I think that the fear of not being liked overlies our best intuitions about entering into business arrangements, or contract negotiations, and more often than not, I have come away asking for less than what I know the fair market value of a person like me is. ‘Know your worth,’ as [Morning Joe co-host] Mika Brzezinski always says. Know your value and hold your value. Don’t offer yourself at a discount.”

This sentiment shouldn’t just be applied to work, either. “It works with everything, even dating advice,” she says. “I did not settle, and I got Mark. I was fishing with tackle that should not have landed him, but I got him because I did not settle, and I found my person.”

And where is Ripa today? She’s confident, sassy, and takes full ownership of who she is and where she’s at. She says now: “I had a hard time finding my voice. It took what felt like an eternity, but I finally found it. And it’s mine.”

Loud and clear.