Going Off Script (24 page)

I went on to recount the feeling that the world had instantly crashed down around me when those four words
—you have breast cancer
—forced me to face my own mortality at thirty-six years young.

“I instantaneously began sobbing and couldn’t stop sobbing while the doctor said words like mastectomy, radiation and chemotherapy,” I wrote. “I could only think about dying. I was truly distraught. Once I picked myself up, what did I do? I got in my car and I drove to work…I went to the place I had gone every morning for the past 10 years. My home…E! I wiped my tears and walked through the newsroom at
E! News
like I did every day. I went to my office and instead of closing the door, I left it open and put a big smile on my face as if it was just another Tuesday. I walked onto the set of
E! News
with Ryan that day and made a promise to myself beforehand that I would be overly
enthusiastic and peppy to overcompensate for the incomprehensible pain I was feeling inside. Not a single soul on that set or watching the monitors in the building had any hunch at all that I had just received the worst news of my life.”

But I had gone back months later to watch the tape of that episode, and what I saw broke my heart.

“I had expected to see some sign of duress, a sign of a woman trying to hide a painful secret,” I wrote my bosses. “Instead, I witnessed the complete opposite. And it made me realize I have always put my job first. Even in the most strained moment of my life.

“After 11 years at
E! News,
I have decided to resign as lead anchor. This has been a difficult decision for me to make but one that will allow me to spend more time with my growing family and to devote more time to my charitable efforts, particularly those that focus on women battling breast cancer.”

I slipped it into my handbag to drop on the desk of the E! president the next morning.

It was time to leave on top and find my purpose in life.

I
couldn’t believe I was quitting my job. My dream job, no less. It felt strange to think of myself not being at E!, no longer part of the daily adrenaline rush of a newsroom covering the ever-shifting landscape of pop culture. What would my life feel like without all these amazing people who filled my working hours? Was I really cut out to be the suburban stay-at-home wife and mother I liked to imagine myself becoming, or would that fantasy get snuffed out with my first snowbound week of a Midwestern winter? Who was going to gossip with me in the real world about Kim Kardashian’s latest selfie with the kind of insider knowledge Ryan Seacrest provided? Or offer up the kind of hilarious wisdom that only Joan Rivers could? If I retreated from the public eye, would I lose that treasured connection with fans whose prayers had carried me through more dark tunnels than they could possibly know?
On the other hand, I felt excited and relieved that I was taking this drastic step.

My crazy career simply never allowed me to pour 100 percent of myself into taking care of my family or myself. Whatever I’m doing, I want to be all in, fully present. The last few years had been so busy, juggling four shows as well as my endorsements and business ventures. Whenever I left the office and walked through my front door at home, my heart would be singing, “I’m all yours now!” to my family, but in truth, there wasn’t nearly as much of me left to give my son and my husband as I wanted, or as they needed. And I needed more of them, too, to nurture myself. Walking away from Hollywood was a choice I was ready to make. Pam read the draft of my resignation later and urged me not to deliver it. “Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked, as both my manager and friend of nearly twenty years. “Sleep on it.” I did, then went back and told her my decision was still the same. “Okay,” Pam said. “I’ll set up a meeting.” Pam, my agent, Nancy, and my lawyer would go with me to tell my bosses I would not be staying when my contract was up in a year and a half. I owed it to them to deliver the news in person. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to hold it together. The little girl who had rehearsed every moment of her dream career back in her pink Laura Ashley bedroom had never thought to practice saying good-bye.

Ted Harbert had been promoted by our parent company to chairman of NBC, and Suzanne Kolb was E!’s president at the time. “What brings you all here?” she asked as our respective teams settled in. Tears were already stinging my eyes, and I momentarily regretted not just taking the chicken’s way out and sending the resignation letter via e-mail. My agent took the lead, conveying my gratitude for the wonderful years I had spent at E! before telling Suzanne that I had decided it was time to leave. The new baby, my recovery from the mastectomy, and a commuter
marriage were too much to juggle. I braced myself for the next part, where the E! brass would thank me, wish me luck, and tell me they’d make arrangements for me to clear out my dressing room and turn in my parking pass. Their response caught me by surprise.

Hold on, hold on, hold on! What can we do to make your life better? What would make it easier for you?

“Ummm, well…I haven’t thought about that,” I admitted. I had seen this as an all-or-nothing situation.

Suzanne and the other executives urged me to go figure out if there was a scenario that might entice me to stay. I left the office and called Bill.

“So that didn’t go quite like I thought it was going to go,” I said, filling him in on what had just happened. He was looking forward to both of us living full time in Chicago even more than I was, and had been waiting several years for me to deliver on my pre-engagement promise that we would spend no more than one year in L.A.

“Okay, that’s interesting,” he said neutrally. Hating L.A. was the third character on our reality show, and every time my contract had come up, we would discuss whether I should renew it. Our conclusion had always been “not yet.” It is the kind of job people kill for in Hollywood. Besides, Bill had TV gigs in L.A., too, hosting the newsmagazine
America Now
opposite Leeza Gibbons, and going on to do a Food Network show. But with the baby and my health to consider, the decision to fold our tent and leave had seemed crystal clear this time.

Bill and I met with my managers the next day in our backyard to analyze this latest twist. I knew his philosophy as a businessman was that “everything has its price,” but what was ours? I couldn’t pay to get a clone of myself, so living in both L.A. and Chicago full time was an impossibility. What if I could spend more time in Chicago, though, short of moving there
altogether? We sketched out a proposal that would allow me to occasionally shoot
E! News
from a studio in the Windy City. I would also be taking vacation and personal days—no more going for eight or ten years without asking for time off! There’s a difference between dedication and blind devotion. Like most career women, I had fallen into the habit of overcompensating. We’re always considered less reliable than men, because our lives seem so much messier—we’re the ones who miss an important business meeting when the school nurse tells us to come pick up a feverish child, we’re the ones who get pregnant and go on maternity leave, or take personal time when someone in our family needs us. We’re insecure about our jobs because anyone could swoop in and snatch them away from our uncertain grasp.

Even as I was recovering from my double mastectomy, my responsibility to
E! News
had overshadowed my sense of responsibility to myself, and I went back on air just two weeks after surgery. It was a mistake. My body had suffered major trauma, and I did not really have the physical or emotional reserves to jump right back onto the treadmill, full speed ahead. I cried out in pain my first day back at work when my stylist lifted my arms over my head so I could slip into a dress. On day two I was relieved when she wheeled in a rack of new clothes—nothing but button-up shirts I could wear with pants or skirts. I worried whether I looked different. I needed more time than I allowed myself to heal. But so many fans had reached out, always telling me I was so brave. I couldn’t let them down. I felt like I needed to show myself as soon as possible.
See? I’m fine, I’m okay, nothing to worry about!
It was what Brave Giuliana would do, and as much as I longed to, I couldn’t banish her yet. Maybe I needed the illusion as much as my audience did.

E! generously agreed to let me spend ten weeks a year away from set, either on vacation or shooting from Chicago—enough to make Bill and me feel we could manage the back-and-forth
a while longer. But it wasn’t just how much time I would spend working that needed some adjustment.

Battling cancer and becoming a mother at the same time changed not only how I looked at the world, but how I moved through it. There wasn’t room in my life anymore for cynicism or selfishness. Having purpose moved into the space that ambition had long inhabited, and now I consulted God more often than agents.

The time had also come to face the fact that anxiety had gained the upper hand in my lifelong battle against unseen disaster. Specifically, my phobia about flying. My life was revolving around it, and if anything, it was getting worse, not better.

Even my joy over Duke’s birth had been overshadowed by my certainty that we would all die in the private plane Bill had chartered from a friend to take the three of us from Denver to Chicago, where we planned to introduce the baby to family and spend a few weeks relaxing and enjoying the beautiful summer on the shores of Lake Michigan.

We had reserved two private suites at the medical center where Duke was born—one on the maternity wing for Delphine, and another two rooms down the hall for us. We were able to bring Duke back with us to our suite right after he was cleaned up and pronounced healthy by the medical team. Bill and I gave him his first bath and celebrated parenthood over a steak and lobster dinner. We would spend one more day in Denver, then board the small plane for the two-hour flight to Illinois. The thought of taking my newborn on a plane increased my fear of flying a thousand fold. I frantically began researching how much it would cost to charter a tour bus, instead. One that no rock bands, sports teams, or bachelor parties had ever been inside. I would consider Michael Bublé’s bus, if he had one. He seemed clean and trustworthy. Or Gwen Stefani. Yes! Gwen Stefani would be perfect: I had interviewed her before,
and she was lovely. Plus she was a mom, too! She would understand. If she had a bus, it probably already had a changing table, bottle sterilizer, air purifiers, and blackout shades on the windows, right? I scrolled through the contacts on my phone, only to find that I had three different numbers for Paris Hilton (definitely not her bus) but none for Gwen. Okay, so scrap that. I would just have to be very specific with the charter company about what kind of bus I wanted to rent: a virgin bus. One that no one had ever smoked in. Or sneezed in. And what about the drivers? Were they polygraphed and run through Interpol’s global databank of criminals, or at least Googled to make sure they hadn’t been the subject of a
48 Hours
mystery? Barring that, did we still have that list of questions we’d asked Delphine before choosing her? Maybe I could just use those to weed out sketchy bus drivers, if I took out any uterus references. Bill thought the whole bus idea was completely nutso, and we argued about it nonstop. Finally, we agreed to let the baby’s doctor settle the transportation debate. “Sixteen hours on a bus versus two hours on a plane?” he said. “Hands down, the plane. You want to get there the quickest and safest way possible.” I was so anxious the day of our flight that I insisted we stop for a quick drink first, even though it was only eleven a.m.

“That’s nice, Mommy’s already a drinker,” Bill remarked sarcastically to Duke.

“Bill, I am a bigger problem to you sober than drunk once we get on that plane,” I reminded him.

The flight was fine, and we were given a hero’s welcome in Chicago, where our friends and family had decorated the hangar with balloons and signs welcoming Duke home. Having long since sold the cavernous, painfully empty house in Hinsdale, we had settled into a two-bedroom suite at a nice hotel for the next few weeks, and they had set up a little nursery for us.

Overjoyed as I was to finally have the baby I had wanted for
so long, I was confused when a dark cloud settled over me. It came as a shock when I found myself struggling with many of the classic symptoms of postpartum depression, even though I hadn’t physically given birth. I spent my first week of motherhood in a weird funk, not bothering to shower or change out of my white robe, and tugged down into a suffocating quicksand of sad emotions—regret, guilt, dread. Why did I bring someone into this crazy world? What was I thinking? How selfish I had been! I kept looking at my tiny son and weeping over how helpless he was, how pure and innocent. There was so much he would have to learn, and so much evil out there he would have to avoid or outrun!

“Honey, it’s okay, you’re going to be stressed out. It’s perfectly natural,” Bill comforted me. He had seen his sisters go through this. “You’re doing a great job.”

The fear consuming me was very much like the paranoia I used to feel as a latchkey kid watching the evening news night after night back in Bethesda, except now I felt the panic not for myself, but for my child. I kept mentally hitting the fast-forward button, weeping over the everyday hurdles of an ordinary life: What if Duke got sick? What if bullies picked on him at the playground? What if he got drunk with his high school buddies and got behind the wheel of a car? What if his wife left him for his best friend? What if he got laid off and started drinking too much? What if he grew old and broke his hip? How could I ever protect him from a life’s worth of pain? One day, the fear just overtook me, smashing me like blown glass into a million shards. I lay on the floor in my robe, sobbing my eyes out, feeling totally unworthy of this amazing gift God had entrusted me with.
I can’t be a mom!

My feelings of inadequacy weren’t helped by the night nanny we had lined up to help take care of Duke. Cynthia was a Jamaican nurse who had worked for my sister occasionally and came
highly recommended. We flew her to Chicago, and the two of us immediately became locked in passive-aggressive warfare. I wasn’t a natural at the mechanics of caring for a baby—I was the youngest in my family and had zero experience with infants—and Cynthia picked up on my uncertainty and started tsk-tsking and correcting everything I did. I appreciated the necessary tutorials, like how to properly swaddle the baby, but I felt my hackles rise over the constant minor adjustments. Really? Was every single bottle a little too warm or a little too cold, every single diaper I changed a little too snug or a little too loose?

The first night, as I put Duke to bed, Cynthia made the first of her many pronouncements: “Miss G, we are going to need to get a white noise machine, trust me.”

“What is that?” I asked.

“Oh, it will make him sleep better,” she promised. Insomnia didn’t seem to be a problem for Duke, but I went along with the nanny’s white noise plan.

It turned out to be a stupid machine going SSSSHHHSHSHSHHSHSHSHSHS all night long. How are you supposed to have sweet little baby dreams with this annoying soundtrack playing all night? I would sneak in and turn it off. Cynthia would turn it back on. I decided it was going to cause brain damage, or make him grow up thinking extraterrestrials were trying to contact him. He would be the kid wearing a homemade foil receiver on his head to third grade. I went Googling in search of scientific proof of the white-noise menace to wave in Cynthia’s face. There wasn’t any. I knew why she wanted it—it was so she could make phone calls, take showers, and move around the room while on night duty without waking Duke up. But Duke himself didn’t need it, and I resented her insisting he did. I thought about flinging the thing out the window and pretending it had fallen, but I was a little afraid of Cynthia
and sure she would find out. I couldn’t just throw it away because she probably had Dumpster informants. I asked our doctor if he would tell her it was bad for the baby.