Going Off Script

by Giuliana Rancic

  “No way. Who approved it?”

  “Peggy.”

  “Peggy approved this.”

  “Yes!” Technically, this was true: Peggy read all of our scripts before they went on air and signed off on them. I had submitted this one to her. With ellipses where the words “do moms” would have been. Even as a cub reporter, I knew full well that the sly innuendo was too racy for most networks, E! included.

  That afternoon, I was almost bursting with excitement, waiting for my piece to come on. I was already rehearsing humble thank-yous in my head for all the kudos I was going to get. In the newsroom, everyone was watching the monitors as usual when that afternoon’s show went live. My segment came on, Wilmer and I had our little exchange, and it was over. I glanced around expectantly. No one congratulated me. The newsroom, in fact, was briefly, weirdly silent.

  “Told you,” said Don, before walking away.

  Phones started ringing all over the place, including back in my cubicle. Peggy summoned me to her office. The managing editor, Eddie Delbridge, was waiting there with her.

  “What was that?” Eddie demanded. “What did we just see?”

  “That was the premiere of Summer Catch!” I answered brightly. Sometimes if you pretend nothing is wrong, nothing is. Okay, it almost never really works like that, but it’s worth believing for the one time in 42 million that it does. I needed it to be that time.

  “I did not approve that!” Peggy said.

  “Can I have my script again?” I asked, stalling for time.

  “I have your script,” Peggy said. “It says ‘Do you…in real life.’ ”

  “Mmmm, yes,” I said, trying to sound preoccupied and reporter-like. “In fairness, Peggy, I meant to go write it out. Thank you so much for catching that!”

  Eddie cut in.

  “Thank you so much, but you can get your stuff and go now.”

  “Oh,” I said, still all innocence and bafflement. “I don’t have a few days left? It’s only Tuesday.”

  I didn’t have any days left. My E! audition was officially over. Candidate number thirty-nine was going down in flames. I went outside, got into my most-likely-to-be-repossessed Jeep, and started crying. I called Colet.

  “I screwed up,” I wailed. “It’s over. E! is the only place I can work. It’s exactly what I do.”

  Colet lined up another gig, casting this time for a cheesier, raunchier Bachelor-like show, with a small budget to hire an assistant. We were in business again, and another scouting trip was on the horizon. This time, we knew we had to rethink our strategy. Then it came to us.

  Miami. Why hadn’t we thought of that before? If ever there’s a place outside of L.A. to find attractive, shallow, desperate, vain people, it’s Miami! We booked ourselves a room at one of the cool hotels and announced open calls at Crunch Fitness. If the guys passed our audition there, they could come to our hotel room for an interview. First, everyone had to fill out our questionnaire: Did you ever contract an STD? How do you feel about threesomes? Foursomes?

  Howard Stern had nothing on us. Colet and I tried not to look at each other and fall into giggling fits during the interviews, but we weren’t entirely successful.

  “Okay, Joseph, I see your first sexual encounter was at thirteen. Can you tell us about that?”

  Colet and I were sharing the king-size bed back in our hotel room, and one morning I woke up to the ringing phone. Colet answered. “What? What?” I heard her say. She sounded panicked. “Jules, turn on the TV!”

  I hit the remote, and the screen filled with the terrifying image of the second World Trade tower collapsing in smoke and dust. Colet and I sat in bed that entire day, watching it all unfold. We couldn’t go home; flights were grounded. My parents had told me the day before that they were going up to New York to see Monica and her year-old daughter, Alexa. I tried calling but couldn’t get through. I was freaking out, watching TV, thinking New York was about to be bombed into oblivion at any moment, that my sister, niece, and parents would all perish. After several hours of frantically trying everyone’s cell phone, I finally reached Monica. She was hysterical. She was holding her baby, safe in her apartment uptown, while the sky filled with smoke and the chaos unfolded on the streets below. Mama and Babbo were with her, petrified and in tears, too. Once we were able to get a plane back to California, I spent the entire flight digging my nails into Colet’s arm, convinced that everyone on board was a terrorist.

  I spent the next few months moping around. My sister and her husband had moved to L.A., and my brother-in-law, Bryan, paid me to run errands, wash the car, and babysit. I knew it was pity money, not a paycheck, but I couldn’t afford to not accept their help. The whole country was still mourning the 9/11 attacks and I was as angry as the next person. I came up with what I thought was a good idea. I tapped into the little savings I had and spent $300 creating bumper stickers that read FUCK THE TERRORISTS. Every afternoon I would stand on various corners of Ventura Boulevard in the sweltering hot San Fernando Valley and wave my stickers in the air while yelling “FUCK THE TERRORISTS!” “JUST THREE DOLLARS!” I got hundreds of honking horns in support but very few takers. Careful not to stray from my original plan, I kept sending out my portfolio and answering cattle calls for auditions. I went to one for a crappy TV show and said my one line, “Hey, put your gun down,” so convincingly, I got a callback. Maybe I had acting talent! I hadn’t even been trying all that hard. I was Meryl Streep! On the way to the callback, I wondered how many years the series would run and if I would have to hire a bodyguard to keep the fans and paparazzi at bay. I was called into a room with eight people—all producers and writers—waiting to hear me read again. I choked. I never got another callback for any acting or modeling job. Now I had not only blown my shot at my dream E! job, but I had used up the last of my beginner’s luck, too.

  My parents kept telling me I could always come home.

  “Get a job here,” Mama suggested.

  I was about ready to do that when Gina Merrill called me out of the blue right after the holidays. That moment with Wilmer Valderrama had generated a lot of buzz. Good or bad, people had been talking about it. I thought to myself, Wow, it’s true what they say, any press is good press. This time, she wasn’t offering me an audition. She was offering me a job.

  When I think back to my very first official day at E!, I remember walking into the hair and makeup room and sitting down, when suddenly Joan Rivers walked in with her team. Actually, it’s misleading to say Joan walked into any room; Joan touched down, like a tornado. She crackled with energy and was always mid-monologue. I sat in my makeup chair in awe as she settled in next to me.

  “Are you the new girl on E! News?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’m Giuliana.”

  “How do you say your name?”

  “Ju-lee-AH-na with a G,” I said, starting, idiotically, to spell it for her, like she was going to write me a check or something. “I’m Italian, we don’t have J in our alphabet,” I blathered on.

  “Have you signed a contract yet?” Joan demanded.

  “I think my agent is still working on it,” I said. Great, I had so underwhelmed Joan Rivers that she was trying to find a loophole for the network to dump me before my first show.

  “Have you signed anything?” Joan asked again.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Whatever they’re paying you, get them to agree to more. And then get your agent to get them to ten percent more,” she said. “Get a monthly allowance for hair and makeup, and I don’t mean to pay the hair and makeup people here. They take care of that. I mean an allowance to cover highlights and haircuts, facials, manicures, pedicures, waxing, whatever you need to do to look beautiful. From here on out, you’re not doing it for yourself, you’re doing it for your job, which means it’s all covered. Oh, and health and medical coverage, you need that but that goes without saying. Also, don’t let them walk all over you.”

  I nodded. Everyone in the room had fallen quiet and was li
stening as Joan went on.

  “Don’t be exclusive to just the network, make sure you have an out clause in your contract to be able to do shows on other networks and also a clause that allows you to be a spokesperson for products and big brands,” she said. “While you’re at it, make sure you have photo approval, that’s probably more important than health insurance.” She was only half joking about the last one. The whole room erupted in laughter.

  I had taken out a notebook and was madly scribbling this all down.

  “Okay, you got that?” she said. “Call your agent. Make them put that all in. Tell them Joan Rivers told you. No, I’m not kidding. Drop my name.”

  Joan left in another personal tornado, and I sat there in disbelief. Had that really just happened? Had the queen of comedy just given me invaluable advice, and basically said she had my back? A soft, appreciative whoa from my glam squad brought me back down to earth.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “That was pretty badass.”

  The fairy tale I felt like I was now living in just kept getting more fantastic. The morning of my first Academy Awards as an E! correspondent, I was thrilled to find myself assigned to what the network refers to as the E! Sky Box, perched like a bird over the most famous red carpet in the world. Joan and her daughter, Melissa, hit the airwaves about an hour before going live on the red carpet to do a little pregame commentary. Just before they came on, I was in the Sky Box telling viewers who they could expect to see on the red carpet that day. I then tossed to a commercial break and when we came back, the cameras were live on Joan and Melissa for the first time that day in another area of the red carpet. The mother-daughter team was on fire, cracking jokes with one another and giving viewers the inside scoop on the celebs that would soon be interviewed by the most irreverent woman in Hollywood.

  I was watching the whole exchange on my monitor, giddy with the idea that I was on the same channel and on at the same time as Joan Rivers. It was pretty cool. As I watched, I literally forgot I wasn’t in my living room like the year before and jumped to high alert when a producer yelled in my ear that Joan was about to toss to me live. Joan was finishing her bit, and as I watched the prompter, I saw my name come up. I nervously got ready for Joan to toss the ball up to me. “Okay now, let’s go up to the Sky Box with Guh, um, Gooey…”

  I peeked at my monitor and immediately recognized the perplexed look on her face. It was the exact expression that would cross the brow of every single teacher coming across my weirdly spelled name for the first time on an attendance roll. I learned early on to cut them off with a frantic “just call me Julie!” before the class broke into hysterics over some butchered pronunciation and spent the rest of the year calling me Googly or Gooiana. I hadn’t run into Joan since our makeup chair tutorial in advanced Hollywood economics, but I knew she was famous for botching unusual names—even on Fashion Police years later, she could never say “Rihanna,” it was always “Rowena” or “Rwanda”—and now she was massacring mine live.

  “Mom, it’s Joo-liana, not Goo-liana,” I heard Melissa coach her mother.

  “What’re you doing up there, Hooliana?” Joan sang out.

  “JOO-liana,” Melissa tried again.

  “Wooliana, Wooliana, is that you?” Joan called.

  “Yes, Joan, it’s me, Wooliana,” I answered. “I should be upset that you just mangled my name, but you can call me whatever you want, I’m just honored to be here hosting with you.”

  Joan cracked up. She liked my recovery so much, she began asking me to come on her other Fashion Police specials throughout the year. When the popular show became a weekly series, she gave me a permanent seat as moderator, the “everyday woman” foil to the sharp-tongued repartee of Joan and fellow panelists Kelly Osbourne and stylist George Kotsiopoulos. Joan was a talented writer and had her own killer team of joke writers to help out with the enormous amount of content on each show, and, of course, she could ad-lib zingers like nobody’s business. But the rest of us, I was alarmed to discover, were on our own trying to be funny, a kazoo orchestra under the baton of the great Leonard Bernstein.

  Every week, an intern would deliver fat binders full of photos for the next show, a fashion gallery of hits and misses running the gamut from Miley Cyrus in a raunchy onesie with her tongue hanging out to Sofia Vergara in a designer gown and a million dollars’ worth of Chopard borrowed jewels. At first, I would spend hours and hours doing research before an episode, thinking I needed to sound authoritative when I talked about a bias cut or a dress that had been deconstructed. But that wasn’t what impressed producers and Joan. It was all about the funny.

  I would try to prepare clever remarks or jokes, and it would all go out the window on set, because the vibe would be off. The show was too organic for canned responses, no matter how smart or funny they sounded back in my dressing room when I was saying them to myself. I discovered it was much funnier if I just saw the photos for the first time during the show and said whatever popped into my head. It was fun to voice my opinion and let loose, especially coming from the tightly produced format of E! News at the time. I found the less I prepared jokes and gave my real, authentic reaction to a photo, the more laughs I got. I even pushed a guest into practically sexually molesting Joan in front of our live studio audience (and the cameras).

  “She’s got boobs I’d kill to motorboat!” I exclaimed about Halle Berry during a Rate the Rack segment in season two. I then dared our guest panelist, comedian Adam Pally, to motorboat Joan, and led the studio audience in a chant of “Mo-tor-BOAT! Mo-tor-BOAT!” Joan gestured to her chest. “C’mon,” she invited the cornered Pally, who pressed his face between Joan’s knockers and waggled his head with the appropriate “vvvvvvvrrrrr” sound of a motorboat while everyone, including Joan, fell over laughing. It was the funniest thing ever, and the producers loved it.

  As moderator, it was my job to keep the show moving. Dead air or people talking over each other are the quickest ways to ruin a show like Fashion Police. The second-to-last thing you want to do in this format is step on a comedian’s lines; the last thing you wanted to do was step on one of Joan’s, because the audience would miss out on the kind of world-class humor you can’t really re-create if you try to go back and retape it. One of the greatest compliments I ever got at E! was the time word got back to me that Joan had asked a producer after taping one day, “Is someone writing Giuliana’s jokes?”

  “No,” she was told. “Giuliana does her own writing.”

  “I don’t believe it. Does she really?” Joan pressed.

  “No, really, it’s all her!”

  “God, she’s gotten funny,” Joan said.

  Not everyone was always amused. Most celebrities are secure enough or mature enough to take the occasional slicing-and-dicing by Fashion Police in stride as entertainment. Lord knows Helena Bonham Carter must have the thickest skin and best sense of humor on earth given how often she appears in something that makes no sense. I’ve even speculated on air whether the British actress had discharged herself from a psych ward to go shopping in her hospital jammies. When I trashed Tina Fey’s flouncy Golden Globes dress by Zac Posen and cracked, “Little Bo Peep has lost her chic,” I thought nothing of it. Until the following week, when I was covering the SAG Awards and I spotted Tina coming my way, looking gorgeous in a sleek black gown. She did not look happy to see me standing in first position on the red carpet, impossible to avoid.

  Oh, fuck, I thought, as I announced maybe a little too enthusiastically, “Hi, here’s Tina Fey joining us!”

  “Um, excuse me,” Tina replied icily, “weren’t you one of the people who took a hot, steaming dump on my dress last week?” I looked at her with my smile pasted on and my mind reeling: Just lie! Tell her it was George who said it! Tina waited expectantly for me to respond. She obviously knew I was the guilty party.

  “Ummmm…Yes,” I finally admitted. “Yes, it was me.” She started to storm off. “Tina, hold on!” I implored. “Tonight, you look amazing. Last week, that
dress did not do you any favors.” Tina returned.

  “I know,” she said sweetly. “I was just messing with you.”

  In the poor sport category, the worst I’ve encountered would have to be a certain B list star. I was at an Italian restaurant having a romantic dinner with Jerry O’Connell when the bitch marched right up to the table and interrupted us. At first, I thought it was some stalker fan about to go off the deep end because Jerry was on a date with me, not her, but Jerry vaguely recognized the intruder as someone he’d worked with or met before. “Oh, hey,” he started to say, ignoring her rudeness. But she was staring at me, not him. Her face was twisted with rage.

  “You talked shit about my outfit on Fashion Police,” she said. “What the fuck do you know? That wasn’t cool.”

  “I was just talking about the fashion, it was nothing personal,” I assured her.

  “It is personal,” she said. “Don’t you ever fucking talk about me again.” She walked away and I swore to never say anything about her again (good or bad) on television, because with hideous manners like that, she wasn’t worth a second of my time. I saw her almost an entire decade later when she was a guest on Fashion Police (wait, didn’t she loathe our show?), and I barely looked her way or said two words to her, even though she was sitting five inches to my left. All I could think was what a hypocrite she was.

  I’ve been on Worst Dressed lists myself. I think it’s funny. Who cares? At the Golden Globes a few years ago, I wore a sleeveless black gown with a weird lace garter circling my throat, like I’d just come from a bachelorette party for Goths. When I make a red-carpet mistake, I’m not blessedly there and gone in thirty seconds like the stars sweeping into the awards show: I’m standing out there on display in my bad choice, broadcasting for hours and to over one hundred countries. Sometimes there are heaters blasting away at my feet so viewers won’t see goose bumps on my arms when I’m wearing some skimpy dress in forty-five-degree weather, or a big fan to keep from getting sweat stains on my gown when it’s ninety degrees and I’m standing in the blazing sun for three hours.