Going Off Script (16 page)

Within six months, the show had gone from being merely mediocre to being the lowest rated on the network, and Mindy, for entirely unrelated reasons and amid widespread staff jubilation, was ousted. Her departure came after an internal investigation into accusations that she had abused her power by throwing two over-the-top baby showers for herself, including one at E! headquarters, at E!’s expense. For weeks beforehand, staff-wide e-mail updates from Mindy’s assistant would land in our in-boxes, reminding employees—who were making zilch—where millionaire Mindy had registered for her luxury baby gifts. Disloyal and embittered underlings warned us that Mindy was privately demanding her own regular updates on who
hadn’t
sent a present.

I was assigned, on Mindy’s orders, of course, to go cover the more exclusive shower she had for a few dozen friends at an oceanfront restaurant in Malibu. Mindy personally directed what the cameras should film. Our first order of business was to report on the gift bags she had waiting for her guests, with me pulling out each item to ooh and ahh over and identify by brand name. (Mindy had a thing for swag bags—the
Los Angeles Times
later reported that she once jacked costly Grammy goodies intended for two entertainment reporters.) I can only presume that my enforced infomercial at her shower had to do with Mindy hitting vendors up for free “gifts” in exchange for product placement and mentions on air. She was also keen for viewers to see E! stars paying homage to her. “Where’s the gift Joan and Melissa sent?” she barked. “Be sure you get that on camera when I open it!”

But where is a rich executive pirate supposed to stash so much
glorious loot? Mindy had just the answer to that…hypothetical…question: in a new nursery decorated for free by one of Style network’s home makeover programs, minus the two-thousand-dollar budget restriction the decorators usually had to work under. Compared to all this, it wasn’t even shocking when the CEO made gossip headlines herself after reportedly getting into a brawl with another woman in the parking lot of a hot Hollywood club where the launch party was held for the network’s new reality show starring Anna Nicole Smith. I was there but missed the fisticuffs. The reason I was there was because I had to be anywhere Anna Nicole was. The voluptuous former Playmate’s show was Mindy’s brainchild, and she envisioned Anna Nicole virtually rebranding E! across the board. To that end, I was temporarily pulled off
E! News
to do nothing but follow Anna Nicole for two weeks to film promotional footage. I was supposed to go to her house in the Valley every morning and just hang out to conduct mini-interviews with her practically every waking hour of her day. The waking hours were tricky to come by.

That first day, we showed up and were let in by Anna Nicole’s purple-haired assistant (who, at Anna Nicole’s urging, got a large tattoo of Anna Nicole’s face on her arm). Anna Nicole was in her bedroom, so I had the crew set up their equipment out on her balcony. It was a clear, sunny Southern California day in the nineties, and the gorgeous view would make the perfect backdrop. An hour later, Anna Nicole came out and greeted me politely.

“Where are we going to do this interview?” she asked.

“Right out here,” I said, leading her to the balcony. She stopped at the door and shuddered.

“Ohhhh, can we not do it outside?” she pleaded in her babyish Texas twang. “It’s so
cold
!”

Wha’? Okay, maybe she hadn’t been out yet and didn’t follow
the weather forecast. Or notice that really large bright ball of fire in the sky.

“I’m sorry—cold?” I tried again.

“Ohhh,” she shivered again. “Soooo cold!”

“No, sweetie, here, why don’t you just check and see? Give me your arm, let’s just put it outside and I’ll show you!” I tugged her arm through the open door and she yanked it back in alarm.

“Ooooh! I have
goose bumps!!
Please, can’t we do it somewhere else?”

We spent twenty minutes resetting the cameras in front of the marble fireplace, and I went to fetch Anna Nicole again.

“Okay, so we’ll just stand here with the mantel behind us, how about that?” I chirped. My smile was starting to hurt.

“Uh, no,” she pouted. “I don’t wanna stand that long.”

Okay, so ninety degrees was cold, and ten minutes was an eternity. We had some perception challenges to overcome here. But E! was banking on this childlike woman with boobs that probably each needed a channel of their own, and I had been handpicked to babysit her. I was stuck, and I had no choice but to humor her. “We can just stand there for a couple of minutes, then walk around and talk,” I offered. With diplomatic skills like these, I really belonged in Geneva, not the San Fernando Valley.

“Ohhh,” she sighed, making what I understood to be another objection. “Do we hafta walk?”

How lazy can someone be? You just slept twenty hours, and you can’t fucking walk across the living room?
I kept the thought to myself and poured extra syrup over my words before asking her, “Where would
you
like to do the interview?”

“Can we do it on the floor of my bedroom with my stuffed animals?” she suggested.

WTF? Acting like her request was a totally normal one, my crew and I followed her upstairs and went into her bedroom, which by the way was very heavy on Hello Kitty. Very heavy.
Hello Kitty clocks, Hello Kitty pillows, Hello Kitty towels. There were also stuffed animals piled everywhere, more than a hundred of them, easily. We sat on the floor while Anna Nicole and her assistant decided which stuffed animals could sit with us. Only fifty made the cut. I clutched a teddy bear and stroked its stuffed head so Anna Nicole would feel reassured. I just wanted to come down to her level of insanity. I started asking questions: Why did she want to do a reality show, what was going to be in it, was there any romance, did she have a boyfriend? All of a sudden, in the middle of answering a question, Anna Nicole started screaming. Really screaming—like, full-throated, horror-movie chainsaw murder screaming. I thought she was having some kind of seizure or maybe an acid flashback.

“THERE’S A SPIDER ON MEEEEE!” she cried. She was flailing around, looking at her chest in sheer terror.

“Anna, no, no, no! Honey, that’s a microphone!” I shouted over her. She stopped screaming.

“Oh. I thought that was a tarantula. That scared the behooties outta me.”

Riding in the back of the van with the cameras on the way home, the crew was still cracking up.

“That woman was high as a kite!” one of them crowed.

“No, she wasn’t,” I insisted. Drugs have never been my scene, and I pretty much need a lab report to tell me whether someone is using any. “Guys, it was an honest mistake. The microphone
does
sort of look like a spider!”

My two weeks with Anna Nicole were like a bizarre mini–reality show within a reality show. The highlights: Anna sitting on the couch in her living room under Hello Kitty blankets, yelling for someone to get her a Yoo-hoo; Anna drinking Yoo-hoos; Anna “remodeling” her bathroom. The latter announcement had me all excited, until we discovered that the renovation involved Anna moving her Hello Kitty clock from
the bedroom to the sink, placing a pink sponge in the tub, and adjusting a Hello Kitty bathmat on the floor. Move over, Nate Berkus. It had more empty calories than my year’s residency at House of Pies, but
The Anna Nicole Show
was E!’s biggest reality hit ever. There are entire episodes where Anna herself appears barely coherent. I ended up on the “Anna Nicole beat” at E! for years, covering the legal battle over the fortune left to her by the eighty-nine-year-old oil tycoon she had married at the age of twenty-six, and later reporting on the disputed paternity of her daughter, Dannielynn.

When I heard in 2007 that Anna Nicole had died of an overdose in a Florida hotel room, I felt sad for her. There are some people who can handle sudden fame and fortune and others, like those lottery winners you hear about, whose unexpected riches destroy them. Anna was a really sweet person, just living a life she was never meant to live, and she couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t.

T
he callousness of Hollywood and its false beauty have always offended Bill’s Midwestern values, and he made me promise at the outset of our relationship that any life we built together would play out on a kinder stage. If we ended up having children together someday, Bill said, I had to agree right then and there to raise them in Chicago. “I don’t want to live in L.A.,” he said. “If we ever get engaged, the deal is one year there, then we’re out.” I happily accepted his terms. I’m not a California person either. Chicago and I clicked just as naturally as Bill and I did. I love that city and feel instantly at home whenever I’m there. I figured I could just commute when the day came, and maybe do more segments out of New York, which would cut my white-knuckle time on a plane in half.

A month after we began dating, Bill invited me to come
visit him in Chicago for the Memorial Day weekend. My work schedule had become a lot more predictable since Mindy blew away in her reported $20 million golden parachute. She had been replaced as CEO of E! by veteran broadcast executive Ted Harbert, whose affable style and amazing track record of bringing hit shows to the air (
The Wonder Years, NYPD Blue, My So-Called Life,
to name a few) promised to boost both morale and ratings at E! My contract was coming up a few months after he arrived, and I still intended to leave. His first day on the job, Ted wanted to meet all the hosts. This was new. I had never set foot in Mindy’s office. As soon as I launched into my background with E!, Ted interrupted.

“Why aren’t you the anchor?” he wanted to know.

“Don’t ask me,” I responded. “Your guess is as good as mine. I used to ask myself the same question, but I don’t anymore. My time here overall has honestly been an amazing experience and I’m fine with it for now.”

“Okay, here’s the deal,” Ted said. “The
E! News
ratings are terrible, and I’m getting rid of the anchors. Effective immediately, you are going to be made anchor. We’ll be announcing it tomorrow.”

I left the room and didn’t breathe a word to anyone, for fear I would jinx it.

At a full staff meeting of the newsroom the next day, our boss relayed the news from Ted: “John and Alisha have left. The second bit of news is that Giuliana will be the new anchor.” Everyone was shocked. Someone raised a hand and asked who the male anchor was going to be.

“Actually, there is no male anchor. Giuliana will be the sole anchor.”

Now I was shocked.

“That, I did not know,” I murmured.

There was something else I didn’t know, and wouldn’t find
out for years to come: They were planning on canceling
E! News
in two weeks, and my promotion was just a magnanimous gesture on Ted’s part to make up for my having been treated like shit. I was going to be the last anchor of
E! News.
There was nothing to lose by giving me my moment in the sun before they pulled the plug.

That night I found Ted in a cluster of executives at a party the network was throwing for a new E! show. I walked up to them. “I just wanted to say thanks for believing in me,” I said. “And, Ted, I just want you to know, I’ve dreamed of anchoring
E! News
since high school, and want to thank you from the bottom of my heart! And mark my word, I’m going to get those numbers up and make this a great show!” I had somehow been teleported back to the Miss Maryland pageant and was finally giving my killer speech. I topped it off with a toothy pageant smile.

“Giuliana, don’t put that pressure on yourself,” Ted said. “Just have fun. Don’t worry about numbers and ratings. Promise?”

“Yeah, but I need one thing. I need to be managing editor. I need to change the content and line of vision. I argue every day with the producers. You’re going to give me the power to change the show.” Pageant girl on a testosterone rush, this was new. Go big or go home.

“Okay,” Ted agreed.

I was elated. Every morning, I would get into screaming matches with the executive producer, Peggy Jo Abraham, and the line producer over what the story lineup should be. It was a battle between Old Hollywood and Young Hollywood.

“No one cares about Harrison Ford!” I would rail. “Lead with Britney Spears!”

Now that the reins were in my hands, I fully intended to make
E! News
the cool, fun broadcast for and about Young Hollywood.

“I think we should lead with Paris Hilton shopping on
Robertson Boulevard,” I declared my first morning as managing editor. Paris was a club-hopping heiress about town who starred with her friend Nicole Richie in
The Simple Life,
a reality show Fox had picked up where the two young socialites tried to do manual labor.

“Are you crazy?” Peggy shouted. “We have Harrison Ford!”

“No one gives a shit about that space odyssey movie, Peggy! I want to lead with Paris Hilton. She’s the new ‘It girl.’ ”

“You should never lead a news program with a photo of nothing happening!” Peggy countered. But I did. Young Hollywood was about fashion, beauty, hot designers, and young socialites who got out of limos drunk with no underwear on. I changed our tagline to “We’re your hookup to young Hollywood,” and let our competitors at
Entertainment Tonight
and
Access Hollywood
have Old Hollywood. (Except for Clooney. I will always give Clooney a pass.)

Our ratings shot up 10 percent in one week.

Two more weeks were tacked onto our cancellation date. The numbers kept climbing. The network brass quietly gave the program a stay of execution, carefully tracking our numbers in case this was a fluke. A year after I took over as anchor and managing editor, Ted Harbert surprised me with a full-page ad in
Variety
with my picture, thanking me for making the show number one. The whole building posted it all over, from elevator banks to reception, to every wall in the newsroom. It was awesome, and I finally felt recognized and appreciated.

Nothing, though, could ever match the thrill I felt when I spent that Memorial Day weekend in Chicago with Bill. Next to the day our son was born, it still ranks as the absolute happiest time of my life, because it was when I knew with soul-deep certainty that I had found the person I was meant to be with forever. Bill and I had known each other for less than two months, but the long-distance relationship limited the time we got to
spend together. Away from L.A. and its demands, Memorial Day belonged entirely to us. Beforehand, I went to visit my nutritionist again. Bill, like me, has a major sweet tooth, and I had told him I was “on a no-dessert kick” for a couple of months, but I hadn’t gone into detail about being a sugar junkie in recovery. One of his favorite things about Chicago, he had told me, was a killer chocolate layer cake from one of his favorite restaurants. There was no way he wouldn’t want to share that with me.