Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - Jersey Shore, Punk Rock, and a Whole Lot of Journalism with Alisyn Camerota

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

This week, Anthony talks with CNN Anchor Alisyn Camerota about her new memoir, Combat Love: A Story of Leaving, Longing, and Searching for Home.  Alisyn shares her journey through love, resilience, risk, and freedom as she navigated the 1980s and her relationship with her mother whilst they both began to forge their own paths to finding happiness. With Alisyn finding her “home” in a local punk rock band, she shares how this newfound courage helped shape herperspective, and prepare her to be a better journalist. They also get into their shared Italian backgrounds, dating, Action Park and more... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open book where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know,

I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. My guest today is CNN anchor Allison Comerata, who I am proud to call a friend. When Allison set out to put her life in writing with her new memoir, Combat Love, there was no question that it would be phenomenal. There's love, there's heartbreak, there's loss, struggle, family, resilience, and so much more. Allison shares it all with us on today's show.

I'd like to take a second to recommend my friend Andy Astroy's great podcast in the back room. Every episode is a fun, incredibly honest take on our society and the political situation, along with some brilliant guests. I've been honored to join Andy on the show, and you know anywhere that accepts me with no filter deserves a shout-out. It's an amazing book. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. The title of the book is Combat Love, which is an awesome title. We're going to get into the title in a second. It's the lovely Allison Camerada. She's a CNN anchor and she's also an author. She's written several books. But this was very personal. This was a very real, you could feel a heartbeat coming out of the book. So it's great to have you. Tell us where it all started. Like,

where did you get this drive and where did you get to become Allison Camerada? What happened? Well, first of all, it's great to see you. It's been too long. And I know everybody calls you, But do people at home call you Antony? Is that people call you? Of course, you call me Antony. You know I've been called a lot worse than Antony and Mooch in my life. You know that, okay? For sure.

But I just didn't know if you're Italian peeps to say Anthony or Antony, like my... I was funny. I was apparently in the transcript at the court and they said, oh, did Anthony Scaramucci come to visit you? I guess they were trying to disperch him by saying I was up there trying to help him get a sentence commuted. So I got asked about that. I said, of course I went there. You think he's the first person I visited in prison? I grew up in an Italian

neighborhood. It's your home home. Right. I mean, what are you kidding me? Right. This book is so real. We're going to get into it. Right. So tell me to start, tell me the ambition arc. And how did you, you know, what did you know you were going to be Allison Cameron? What did you know? Well, okay. I mean, what I tell people is that my ambition grew out of hunger. And so I was always, I had a kind of deprivation model from, you know, childhood on. I wanted more. I wanted more of my mother's attention and love. I wanted more validation. I wanted more recognition. I wanted to be seen and heard. And so mine is completely from hunger. And I think that, I don't know, I mean, I don't know what your impression is, but I think a lot of people who are on television, you know,

crave being seen and heard and are filling some horrible emotional void. It wasn't until very late in life, very recently, after I got married, my husband said, I said, you know, ambition is from hunger. Like, our kids aren't going to have hunger. You know, our kids are privileged kids. So what are they going to do? They're not going to have hunger. And he was like, yeah, also, you're a freak of nature. Not all ambition. He went to Yale. He knew kids who were Silver Spoon kids, who were trust fund kids. He were like, some people have ambition just built in and they just want to do things that are good for the world. It doesn't all have to be out of deprivation. I was like, you're full of shit. Like, I still don't even know if I believe that. But you, I mean, are you, was your, was your ambition driven from hunger or something

else? No, my father was a crane operator. We had tremendous economic anxiety in the house. Yeah. There was domestic violence on my house, which I've written about and talked about, which, you know, I've been open with. And as a result of which it causes trauma. And so you're trying to heal the trauma. Now, you know, television personalities and politicians, they are looking for some sort of attention. I think it's watered down for TV people. The politicians are way worse. They have no self-awareness. Very few politicians can write this book, okay, because maybe they're told by their political

consultant, oh, you know, try to write a book like this and try to be authentic in the book. Very few politicians can write a book, this real and this raw. Well, thanks for saying that. I mean, also their handlers would tell them not to talk about their past if there was drug use or skeletons or, you know. You can't do that. But then again, it's like women in Europe tell me that American women stop at nine. And they said, what do you mean?

Well, they've slept with 30 or 40 people, but they always tell their spouses, nine people, because they can't go into double digits due to the white anglicist action nature of America. So you're laughing. I've never heard that. I always just heard you weren't supposed to sleep with more than your age. Oh, okay. Well, you see that? Okay.

Well, so then you're just fine. But I'm just saying, you know, at nine, obviously, anyway, I've made my point. But this is so real. There are two women in this book. There's a mom and there's a daughter. But she's also like a, it's also you're a mother, actually, weirdly. You're a mother, too, in this book. Even though you're a daughter, you're a mother.

So explain to my viewers and listeners what I mean and how you describe your mom and your relationship. So I was an only child. And I was a product of the 80s. you know, I was a teenager in the 80s, and that was a particularly, if you'll recall, free-range, unparented decade. We were out doing whatever we were doing, and obviously there were no cell phones, and obviously no one kept track of where we were.

You recognize this? Action Bar, thank you. Okay. Action Park. I went there. I have pictures. That was called Class Action Park, okay? How many burns you got on your back from falling off the Alpine slide?

Right. A million. I have, I'm going to pull up pictures of me. In my bikini, if you can handle it, Anthony, at Action Park, because that was a right of passage growing up in New Jersey. And that was just one day. You know what I mean? Like just going to some shoddy amusement park on some rickety ride that was, you know, just waiting for a class action suit. That was what we did every weekend.

Completely unsafe. Yeah. We're probably being sexually harassed by 20 adults there. We're trying to give you free tickets. They were trying to give you a wet t-shirt without the contest. They were spraying cold water on you and your friends. Correct. I lived it with you.

I lived it. This is why the book is so good. You know, this is the thing about you that your kids are going to help your kids. They eventually read, you know, my kids won't read my books for so many different people. Well, I think that they're not old enough yet. You know, they haven't gotten to the point of humbling. You know, I've had my ass kicked by life, society, late night comedians.

And so what ends up happening is you have this humbling that happens than a result of us, you know, like they start out idolizing you to kids, right? And then they demonize you. And then they humanize you, right? So it's idolize, demonize, humanize. You do that with your mom, by the way. I mean, this is what's so beautiful about this book. And I want you to talk not me.

But when you get to the human eyes, then people open up the book. They'll start reading the book because they want to learn about their very human mom. Yeah. It's also about your mom, by the way. You're 84-year-old, beautiful mom. Yes. So my mom's 84 now. And she didn't want me to write this book, and I can tell you all about that in a minute.

But first, she was a very, very elegant, very beautiful, very intellectual, incredibly bright woman. And I was very, very honored to have her as my mother. I loved being her daughter. She was a high school teacher. When I was growing up, she taught English and drama. And I loved holding her hand and going into the high school and all of the high school kids, you know, making a big deal out of Mrs. Camerada, bringing her, her, you know, daughter to class. And it was a real honor.

And so I was quite, because I was an only child, we were very symbiotically connected. And then my parents got divorced when I was eight. So we were really attached. I was very attached to her. You know, she was my only other family member, immediate family member. And then, you know, she was, when my parents got divorced in her late 30s, you know, so, or, I mean, mid 30s. So she went back to school to get her Ph.D.

She began dating. and I felt abandoned by both of these things. She would go to school at night, go to night classes. I was sometimes alone. Sometimes I would stay with friends. She would go out on dates. I was left behind. And I really longed for more attention from her.

And she just couldn't give it to me. And at some point, probably when I was around 11 or 12, I just started substituting friends in for family. And so I had all of these surrogate families. And I would spend, you know, nights. and weekends over at my best friend's houses. And that stayed, that continued basically throughout my teenage years. I just stopped kind of needing my parents or stopped craving attention from my parents

because I didn't think that they were capable of giving it to me. They weren't. And, you know, that's around the time that I started just doing riskier things. I don't want to give up the whole book because the book is so good, but give us a few risky things. So when I was 13, I fell in love with this local punk rock band named Shrapnel. And Shrapnel was the older brothers of some of my friends. from Shrewsbury, New Jersey. Shrewsbury is a very tiny little one square mile town in

Monmouth County, New Jersey. So Shrapnel were like our hometown heroes because they were about to put out an album. They opened for the Ramones. They were going into CBGB all the time and playing a CBGB. They were like on the cusp of this really exciting musical career. And we were all so excited. And I just really fell in love with them. I saw them live for the first time at my future high school when I was in eighth grade. I was 13. And from that point on, I just, Thus, I had it. Like, I had shrapnel fever. And I just started trying to figure out how I could ever see them and where I could see them live.

And so the only way to do that was eventually to end up starting to go to CBGB and some of these, you know, punk rock clubs in, as you well know, Anthony, like the most burned out part of New York, the Bowery in New York in 1981 and 82. I lived there with you. If you were from Long Island, you would have been listening to like Mazarin, which is the same sort of band. Yes, yes, except Shrapnel is so much more talented. But anyway, so I was just going, like, I was doing it, I wasn't doing it for the sake of just risk taking, and I wasn't doing it for the sake of danger. I was a scared cat. I didn't like being in all these dangerous situations. There was one night where I was tired.

I was still, you know, going to high school the next day, and I would have like a history test. So I would be tired at midnight after Shrapnel set. And I, the general practice among my friends is if you, You were tired. You had to go out to the car and sleep by yourself. Like nobody was going to leave the show, you know, just because you were tired. So I went out to my friend's car in the Bowery at midnight and got in the car and I fell fast to sleep. And I awoke to punk rock skinheads with baseball bats breaking open, shattering the passenger side window of the car right in front of us and all of this like horrible sound and glass shattering. They were stealing stuff, as you remember from 1981, out of the car in front of us. And I pout my head up and I saw what was happening and I ducked down into the stairwell and just covered my ears and sat there and prayed that I would make it home that night and that I wouldn't be, you know, killed by skinheads. And that was just one night. I mean, you know, there was danger lurking around those times. And so I was pretty, I was unsupervised and I got myself into various pickles like that.

And then the upshot is that at 16, I finally, I left home because, you know, I didn't feel like my mother's, I felt like my mother's path and my path were diverging. And I left home at 16. And things, spoiler alert, did not get easier from there. And it took a long time for my mother and me to work our way back around to each other. It's an amazing real story. And, you know, one of the problems is like, you know, Taylor Swift has a new song out called Cassandra. And I was trying to explain to my kids who Cassandra actually was the great literary figure from Homer, who's blessed with Claire Royance, but she's cursed with nobody believing her.

And what Homer's trying to say with Cassandra is, that is, all of us with the truth, Allison. We can't handle the truth. Cassandra was the first Jack Nicholson and a few good men. And so when we shed our denialism and we can look at the truth in our own lives or we can look in the truth in our society, we get happier. We make things better. This book had to be therapeutic for you, I believe. Am I right at that? Oh, gosh, yes. Oh, my gosh, yes. Very therapeutic. Tell us why. Tell us why. Because these were, I had a lot of unfinished business. And so, for me, it gave me a lot of closure. These things were rattling around in my head. You know when you get an earworm of a song and it just plays over, it's like stuck in a needle and it plays over and over and over in your

head until you either hear the song again or you can somehow banish it. I had an earworm of my past. These stories played on this loop in my head all the time. And the only way that I was able to exercise them ultimately was to write them down like this. I always wanted a chronology. They were bouncing around in my head and I couldn't remember exactly what happened first and what happened, you know, last. And so finally, I just treated this book like a reporter. You know, I wrote down everything I remembered. And then I went back to my journals that I kept as a teenager and 20-something year old young woman and cross-referenced it. And then I went back to all the people in the episodes that I write about and asked them what they remembered of these nights. There's a night that

I sneak backstage at a Ramon's concert. And I was with a friend of mine who, I called in the book, Tom. And I hadn't talked to him for, you know, 35 years. And I found him on Facebook and said, hey, can I call you for a minute? He was like, sure. And I said, can you tell me what you remember about the night that I dragged you backstage at the Ramon's show? And we snuck backstage. And he told me everything.

And, like, it jelled with mine and it supplemented some of my memory. And then I was able to add some of that into the scene. So I did a lot of research for the book. And that helped me so much tie up loose ends from the past. And they don't haunt me anymore. I mean, it really gave me more bandwidth, more mental damage. When I read the book, I was like, good for you, Allison Camerata, because when I finished the book, I was like, well, I thought I knew you. And, you know, I consider you a friend. You've always been great to me. And I hope you feel likewise. But I feel like I was more connected to you. I feel like I got you more. And I got the tenderness of you through the life experience that you've run the gamut of. Let's talk about something fun for a second. I want to talk a little bit of America's Most Wanted. But before I get there, I want to talk about your love life for a second. Okay. Because this book, okay, combat love, I mean, you're doing fabulously with this love life of yours.

You're dating. You're going to all the best restaurants. You were, you know, you're sitting next to like all-star people. And then all of a sudden this curveball comes into your life at age 26. You run into what happened? Something happened to you. What happened? You ran into somebody and everything changed. That's so funny. Well, I mean, look, I, well, a couple things. I am glad. that you are heralding my love life because I... I didn't... You were heralding the love life. I didn't know. You were heralding. I'm with you. All I'm doing is reading and reflecting. Part of why I was willing to share very personal, intimate things in the book was because I feel like I wanted to let teenage girls know that it doesn't have to be all about

sexual harassment, sexual assault, campus sexual assault, binge drinking. You know, there was around the Me Too movement, there was rightfully, I think, a correction where people finally, women, young women started talking about some of the experiences that they'd had that they had kept secret about sexual assault or whatever. And that was long overdue for sure. But that also has a way of like then becoming the narrative where sex seems scary and having a love life and a boyfriend and everything can seem scary. And I just wanted to remind people, everyone, that like teenage girls can have a lot of agency. Teenage girls, you can have a lot of. You can have a, a very positive love life. I did for a long, I mean, I feel like I have in my life and I feel like my boyfriends were a big part of my life and I'm so glad that I had them. They were kind of protective of me. So it was a different narrative and I felt like I should share that for my own teenage daughters that it can be super positive too. But all that said, you know, I basically combat love has a double meaning and one is that it was a shrapnel song, Combat Love. Another was combating, you know, when you combat something that you're afraid of,

and I was keeping a lot of things at an arm's length because I had been so, I guess, trained from childhood not to trust anybody and that I would be abandoned and I had so many abandonment issues that I was kind of keeping everybody. I wasn't being vulnerable. I didn't allow myself to be vulnerable in my 20s. And so I just, you know, got myself into some trouble with mental health and with relationships because I thought I wanted love. But I just, I was doing everything possible to combat it. And in the story, you hear about how I wasn't able to have a real committed relationship and what I ended up having to learn in order to do that.

Right. So, I mean, the book is fabulous. Okay, so let's go to America's Most Wanted. You were nervous. I don't see you as nervous. Well, I was only nervous because I didn't know what I was doing. I was hired as an off-air reporter. So that basically meant like a field producer.

So I was hired to go out and find these unsolved murders and mysteries and go and figure out how we would tell them on America's Most Wanted in these little recreations, these little mini movies. And I had never done that before. And I just took to it right away. So the first day, I was nervous. I went in, you know, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and couldn't wait to start my new job. And the producers pulled me aside and they were like, oh, just wait until the nightmares start. And I was like, nightmares. What do you mean?

They were like, oh, yeah, all the blood and guts and gore, it's going to really seep into your psyche and haunt your sleep. I was like, uh-oh, like I hadn't occurred to me. And then what ended up happening was I loved that job. I bonded with it. I love the criminal mind, you know, finding out about the criminal mind. I loved getting justice for the victims. Like it ended up being extremely empowering for me that job, even though people had predicted that it could haunt you. It had the opposite effect on me. It actually made me feel safer that I was going to be able to, to go out and get the bad guys. All right. So your mom's doing good. I mean, everybody that reads this book wants to know about your mom.

I know. It's true. Is your mom doing good? What's going on with her? She's doing really well. She really didn't want me to write the book, as I alluded to. Is she dating? No, she has her, so her husband, my stepfather died 10 years ago and she has, I think, retired her dating life. And she's just, you know, 20 minutes ago, she was out in the kitchen with my kids helping my son with a book report for school. So she's just a grandmother who's hanging out with us. She's still executing on that English teaching. Absolutely. Having a grandmother who's an English scholar is very helpful. Yes. And she's doing great, Anthony. Like she really,

as I said, she said many times, can't you wait until I'm dead? Or I told her I wanted to write the book. And I'm so glad that I didn't because it ended up working out. Like she. I think if she reads this book, I think she's very happy about it now because she's happy with how it ended up for us after, you know, a lot of turbulence. She knows there are seven real plots as an English major. And she knows that there's a hero's journey. Yes, there is. And she knows there's a rite of passage.

And what is our life? It's a collection of memories, but it's also these experiences shape us, you know, and also this is a book that your children will read and you have created space in their lives for their own failure. which is very, very important. You're a super, you don't mind me saying so. You're a super successful person, and you don't want that to eclipse any of the ambition of your children. And this book is so real that you've created now open territory for your children to live

and explore their own lives safely. And this is a reason why I gave the book to my daughter. I wanted her to read it so that she could get a sense for trials and tribulations of what happens. And the good news for my daughter and our children, they missed action part. because we almost died at Action Park, right? You know that you and I almost died. We're probably there at the same time.

I don't know if I almost died, but I almost got maimed. Like something had to have been amputated. Exactly. Nobody can understand. I had this. The Mulva Hill sent this to me because I commented about it on CNBC one night. It was called Class Action Park. Okay, so we're down to the five words.

I have what I call my five famous words. We read your book. I come on five words. I want you to react to those words. you give me a sentence, a word, whatever it comes to your head, okay? I want to say the word shrapnel. I say fabulous. I mean, I write Anthony in the book about how it doesn't have a negative connotation for me.

And I want to be sensitive because I know for most human beings, it does have a negative connotation. This is the rock band. This is the rock band that you were hanging with. Yeah. So for me, Shrapnel is just the most nostalgic, warmest excitement. That's my world association with it. All right. And I love that.

Okay. So I say the word home. what do you say um i would say you know warmth i would say warmth and um safety safety safety see both said it at the same time because when i hear you in the book home is safety home is a safe zone yes okay want to say the word family hmm um gratitude yeah yeah i'm so grateful i'm so incredibly grateful eternally grateful that i've been able to have this family that i have and create this family. I desperately wanted to have a happy marriage. I achieved that. I wanted to have children. I achieved that. I'm very, very grateful for that. How blessed. You know, when I,

when I hear the word family, I see that there's perfection in the imperfection. I think it's very important for people to know that, you know, that every family has its own facets and it's like a jewel. There's always a little bit of a dent in the jewel, but it's beautiful. And it's, there's good and bad. Okay. I say the word loss. I would just say universal, you know, I I think that that's something that we, it all of us have. And I think that another part of the reason I wrote the book is because I think it's a bond that we can talk about. I mean, you're just hearing about your story and the moments of trauma in your life

and my, the loss that I experienced in my life, it's something that can bond us all. And that is, it's universal to me. And so I can relate to that with other people. It's part of the human condition. We are, you know, the great general, Marcus Aurelia, has said that the unfortunate outcome of life is the continuation of loss. So the five-year-old version of Allison Camerata and Anthony Scaramucci is long gone. We remember it, but there's a new version.

It's the version that lives in 2024. So there's a permanent evolution that we have to embrace and accept. Well, and I would argue the better. You know, sometimes it's new and improved. Yeah, I mean, no, 100%. Listen, I'm grateful for some of the things that I think went wrong in my life that actually turned out very right. That's the weird thing about life. You just never know, right? I see the word love. I just say the answer. I would say that that's the answer.

I just really, I mean, I know that sounds corny, but I just believe that if you lead with love, if you look for love, if you give love, all that stuff, I think that we, I think that's the answer because we're in really troubled times, as we know, and you just have to get back to that feeling of basically love. I don't know. To me, that's the body one. When I read combat love and I hear the word love, I think of the word unconditional. Yes, that's right. And it took me a long time to be able to give unconditional love and to find unconditional love. And so that wasn't a given for me. Right. That's hard. It's hard. It's hard. Particularly the way you grew up, it's hard. But you acknowledge that and you write about it very beautifully and very honestly. So the title of this book is combat love. And there is combat in

this book and there is lots of love. It is from the very entertaining, very charismatic, very successful, Alison Comerata. Thank you so much for joining us on Open Book today. Natny, you're the best. I really, I appreciate our friendship and I appreciate you, and I look forward to seeing you very soon, I hope. Do I make you laugh when you see me on TV? I do, right? Because, you know, I'm thinking, I'm thinking the shit that you're thinking. Yeah. And I have the balls to say it against these monkeys, right? You're saying the shit that I'm thinking. I laugh when I see you on TV.

I also laugh when I see you in person. All right. Well, I'm sending you lots of love and you're the best. And the fuckbook is great. Thank you. Well, it's hard not to love Allison Comerata. She's a very special person. It has a heart of gold and writes so tenderly and write so honestly about her life.

I would recommend this book to anybody, anybody that's going through a difficult time or anybody that's raising children or creating a family, the cycles of ups and downs and Allison's family are frankly very consistent with most American families. And what I love about Allison is her honesty, she's not coding over any of the bad parts. It makes me think about human frailty when I read Allison's book and one of the greatest quotes of all time, the best among us choose not to judge human frailty so harshly. It's a very tender book. I recommend it to you. You should go out there and buy it and I think you'll enjoy it a great deal. No, but you're my podcast, Ma. You're listening? You ready to be on the show?

Allison Comerata is a C&N anchor. I've been on her show many times. I don't know if you'd recognize her, but she's a petite Italian woman. And she's from New Jersey. She wrote a book about a mother-daughter relationship. But mother-daughter relationships are complicated, aren't they, ma? But I'm not asking about me, ma. What's your relations like with my sister, Susan. We have a good reliance in a while. I don't think it's good. Okay, but don't mothers typically

fight with their daughters a little bit. They have to, right? It's like a little bit of a fight over control, right? That's what Allison says in her book. Well, I'm very Italian race, even though I'm American. And when she wanted to move to Huntington, I feel like I would do anything for them,

even though I'll maybe say, I owe you because I go out of the house. Yes, ma. Okay. I live two miles from your house, but you think, like you need a passport to come to my house. I mean, you think that's too far. I mean, you're out of your mind with this stuff. All right, so let me, let me ask you a different question. Do you remember

Action Park and when I got my, the skin scraped off my back when I went there with my cousin Bobby, or you don't remember? Yeah, yes. Why would you let us go to a place like that? What the hell's wrong with you? Well, I have a little bit of an edge to anything like that. Right. So you let me, so you let me go to Action Park, and I fell off the Action Park sliding, took half of my back off. All right. All right. What out you want to talk about, Ma? It's your show. Okay. You're the star of the show. So what else you want to talk about? Anything else? I love you very much. That's for sure. All right. I love you too, Ma. All right. I'll call you later. All right. Okay, honey. Bye. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions,

it's at Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.