Going Off Script

by Giuliana Rancic

  The second weekend in December, I was supposed to come visit him in Chicago. Bill said he would be getting in later from a business trip, and would send a limo to pick me up. When I landed, the limo was waiting, but it wasn’t our usual driver, and he wasn’t taking the usual route. On top of that, he weighed about three hundred pounds and looked like a guy straight out of The Sopranos. When he suddenly pulled into a deserted field, I convinced myself I was being whacked and started freaking out. What if he’s kidnapping me? Will Bill just pay the outrageous ransom or refuse to negotiate with thugs? Who’s going to do Fashion Police for me? The limo stopped and the back door opened. Expecting to see a gun aimed at my head, I was beyond relieved to see Bill on the other side with a huge grin on his face and his hand extended to help me out of the death car. He led me to a waiting helicopter. We climbed inside and put on the giant headphones as the chopper lifted off the ground. I am absolutely terrified of helicopters, but as we swooped over Lake Michigan, the spectacular view of Chicago and all its Christmas lights glittering beneath us made me forget that I was going to die any second. Bill had deep-dish pizza and champagne for us, and he set his glass by his feet and unstrapped his seat belt. He got down on one knee, accidentally smashing the champagne flute in the process. Unhurt, he went on.

  “Will you marry me?” he asked.

  I pretended I couldn’t hear him over the whir of the helicopter’s propeller, but really I just wanted to hear him say it again. And again.

  “Yes!” I finally answered. He slipped a ring onto my finger.

  When the chopper landed, Bill led me back to his place, where a path of rose petals led to a whole chocolate cake from Bill’s favorite spot. We were in heaven.

  Later, when I went to the bathroom, Bill heard a sudden yelp. “Holy crap!”

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” he called.

  “This ring is innnnsannnnnne!” I shouted back. I hadn’t looked at it in the light yet. The five-carat cushion-cut diamond was clear as ice, throwing off sparkles in every direction.

  We planned a September wedding and decided to have it in Capri, where I had spent my childhood summers. It would be a small, elegant ceremony with a full, traditional Mass in both Italian and English. Like any woman, I had been working on the details since I was a little girl. We were surprised when the Style network asked to film our wedding, but thought why not? Great way to save the cost of a videographer.

  I had been in awe of Monique Lhuillier dresses ever since I had first seen her exquisite creations. She had jumped into the international spotlight when she designed Britney Spears’s wedding gown, and her evening wear frequently appeared on A-listers walking the red carpet. When I reached out to the boutique for an appointment to look at wedding gowns, I was shocked when I got a call back the next day telling me that Monique happened to be a big fan of mine and would like to meet with me herself. She wanted to personally design the perfect dress for me. I freaked! It was a dream come true! Just like marrying Clooney. I mean Bill. I went in to meet Monique and she was the kindest, sweetest woman. She showed me around the showroom, and we picked apart the different silhouettes to get a feel for what I gravitated to and what felt right for me. Was it a strapless princess gown with a big, full tulle skirt? Or a long-sleeved, lace-embroidered sleek and super-elegant gown with a straight skirt? I had always admired Grace Kelly’s iconic wedding gown of silk tulle and taffeta, with a bodice of antique Valenciennes rose point lace with seed pearl buttons. Created by MGM costume designer Helen Rose, it was a masterpiece that managed to be regal yet understated. I pictured mine to be very similar. Long lace sleeves, cinched waist, full skirt, dramatic and long veil. Monique gently brought me back down to earth when she reminded me that my wedding was in the hottest month in southern Italy. Was the church air-conditioned, she wondered.

  “Great question,” I said. I called the Santa Sofia Church in Ana Capri and shouldn’t have been shocked to learn that a church built in the late 1400s did not have AC. Crap, there goes Grace Kelly part deux! I said to myself, not to the nun who presumably answered the phone. Instead, I settled on a gorgeous satin strapless ivory gown with ruching on the skirt and a pretty bow wrapped around the waist. I still got the dramatic veil, à la Grace, since one of the most moving parts of the ceremony I always envisioned is when the bride reaches the altar and her father tenderly lifts the veil to reveal her face. I didn’t give a shit how hot it was, AC or not, I was not willing to give up that moment!

  I got to know the creator of BCBG, Max Azria, and his stunning and fabulous wife, Lubov, when I first started at E! and often wore their pieces on air. When these longtime friends heard I was getting married, Lubov, the designer of the line, offered to design my bridesmaids’ gowns. This whole wedding planning thing was turning out to be a lot more fab than I expected. I should get married every year, I thought. Errr…maybe not.

  Anyway, I went to her showroom on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, and the choices seemed endless. Together, we then came up with a flowy chiffon floor-length dress that was lightweight but still elegant. “I can do this dress in any color,” Lubov told me. I considered all the possibilities. Black? Too harsh for summer. Blue? Never been a fan of blue. Then I literally closed my eyes for a few seconds and thought of Capri. The tastes, the smells, the yellow lemon trees. Yellow!!! That was it! I decided on canary yellow for the four bridesmaids—Bill’s sister Karen, Pam, Colet, and my friend Bobbi Thomas. Monica was maid of honor, of course, but I wanted her to stand out. Her dress needed to be different, not matchy matchy with the other girls in the wedding party.

  “I know the perfect dress,” Monica announced. She would precede me down the aisle in a stunning yellow Oscar de la Renta with black embroidery throughout. The dress was one of the most coveted pieces from Oscar’s most recent runway show. I recall a friend of mine asking if I was cool with my sister wearing such a statement dress at my wedding, not to mention it having close to the same price tag as the bridal gown.

  “Heck no, I think it’s fabulous,” I quickly responded. My sister is a baller. Always has been, always will be. She added so much glamour and high fashion to my wedding day. I will never forget that dress. I may have to relive our teen years and sneak into her closet someday to steal it. I burglarized her closet so often when we were younger that she’s probably upgraded her security system and has guard dogs living in there now.

  The bridesmaid dresses came with a sash, and Lubov once again offered limitless color options. I decided on black. Yellow and black looked cool together, and it was really the only color that would work with the embroidery in Monica’s dress. When I called my mom on the way home to tell her, she freaked.

  “A black sash? On your wedding day? You-a crazy or what? Is this your wedding or a funeral? No black sash, Giuliana! No black sash!!!”

  Here’s the thing: I could either argue with a superstitious Italian woman that a black sash at an Italian wedding does not signify death, or I could just let it be. A matching yellow sash it was.

  Bill and I made a reconnaissance trip to Italy a month before the wedding. For a control freak like me, having to do it long-distance had been unnerving. And not without disaster. For the reception, we booked the historic five-star Grand Hotel Quisisana, nestled on one of Capri’s sunniest bluffs. Conversations with the catering and special events staff about my very specific requests tended to end in typical Italian fashion, with a noncommittal “Don’t worry, we take-a care of it!”

  “Yes, but will you be able to get enough red roses for each centerpiece?”

  “Ah, roses!”

  “How many can you get?”

  “Enough.”

  “Let’s do two dozen.”

  “Okay, no problem, you going to like it.”

  “No, can you do the centerpiece like the picture we sent you?”

  “Don’t-a worry!”

  When they faxed a photo of the centerpiece they had put together, it bore no resemblance to what I had ordered. The menu was having
similar ad-lib issues. Everything fell into place once we were in Italy and I could be hands on, with backup from Mama DePandi and my personal assistant turned wedding planner, who kept banging his forehead against the wall and whimpering, “I don’t speak Italian!”

  Then Mama threw a curveball.

  Only native Italians were allowed to actually get married in the Catholic Church on Capri, she informed us. Ummmm, had she thought to break this little bit of news to us before we had put down a $25,000 deposit on the hotel and sent out two hundred invitations to people, of whom 190 had RSVP’d “yes” and booked their nonrefundable travel to Europe? Presumably this “natives only” rule was set in place to prevent foreign tourists from booking up the church and forcing the locals to live indefinitely in sin, but I wasn’t foreign, strictly speaking, and as practicing Catholics, Bill and I didn’t want just a pretty destination ceremony. We wanted the church wedding. Mama consulted with her old parish priest in Naples and assured us she had a solution. We just had to do what she said. That alone should have made us nervous, but we were stressed enough already, so we just felt relieved and grateful. She told us we’d have to go to the government office in Naples and take some test.

  Once we were there, a sour little bureaucrat handed us some forms in Italian.

  “Si, si, brava!” Bill said, pretty much using up his entire Italian vocabulary. The bureaucrat eyed us suspiciously and turned his back to run off some copies at the Xerox machine. Mama had told him we were all Italian. Scanning the documents, I assumed this was the Italian equivalent of filing for a marriage license, but judging from Mama’s cues, you had to be an Italian citizen to get one.

  We’re screwed, I thought. There was no way Mr. Si Si Brava could pass as a native son now that he had opened his big Croatian American mouth. Mama sidled up next to Bill to help with his forms while the official’s back was still turned. The bureaucrat watched us leave with his arms folded and a scowl on his face. We made it out of the government office without getting arrested for wedding fraud and assumed the coast was clear.

  Mama pulled me aside. “Giuliana, I know you’re leaving, but you have to fill out some important paperwork tomorrow in Naples. They said you have to do this before you can have the ceremony in Capri.” It was just a few forms, she said, and it didn’t mean anything. We hadn’t come to Italy planning to have the equivalent of a civil ceremony, and a legal wedding date a month before the one we had chosen, without our friends there to bear witness and help celebrate.

  The next morning, there was a knock on our door. Bill opened it, and all my local relatives were standing there, holding plates of cookies and bouquets of flowers dyed green, for some superstitious Italian reason. They had been tipped off by Mama that we were getting legally married that morning, even though the supposed bride and groom had no idea at this point. I told Bill that the family just wanted us all to go to church together and that we needed to fill out some paperwork before our wedding in Capri. We set off, with Bill wearing shorts and me in jeans. A dozen Italian relatives surrounded us, and the uncles and male cousins tugged at Bill’s arm, trying to peel him away. I attempted to get between them, like one of those wildebeests on a National Geographic special who try to protect the most vulnerable ones when lions move in to separate them from the herd. It didn’t work, and Bill was carried away. Pretty soon, he called out.

  “Jule, c’mere!” He understands Italian way better than he can speak it, and what he’d been able to put together from the uncles’ chattering alarmed him.

  “Why do people keep saying ‘You’re getting married!’ and congratulating me?” he asked.

  “Don’t listen to them! We’re just going to church!” I insisted.

  Once inside the church, though, they suddenly split us up, and Bill had to go in the back. The priest was there with all these forms in Italian, and Mama was yelling at him to go. He returned with someone from the Italian consulate. Bill had to prove he could read and speak Italian. The guy spoke to me first, and Bill heard him say, “and William Rancica” so he said, “Mmm hmmm, si signor.”

  We left the church, with the relatives congratulating Bill again and saying, “Let’s go celebrate and eat!”

  Bill turned to me with a confused look.

  “Did I just get married? I’m not understanding what happened.”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I’ll ask my mom later.”

  Her explanation never did make sense to me, in Italian or English, but technically, we may have gotten legally married in shorts and jeans with a ragtag bridal party holding green flowers more than a month before our planned wedding date of September 1, 2007.

  Bill bitterly refers to the incident as his “ambush wedding.”

  When the real wedding weekend arrived, I was at the hair salon in Capri the afternoon before the rehearsal dinner when I overheard one of the customers say, “Finally, it’s raining!” I almost snapped my neck looking out the window and couldn’t believe my eyes. It was drizzling. “Four months without a drop of rain, and tonight we finally get rain. Amen!” the receptionist chimed in. Everyone was happy and smiling, but my eyes welled with tears and I raced back to the hotel to grab Bill.

  I was still panting from the run when I grabbed him.

  “It’s raining, Bill! It’s raining on our wedding weekend, and tonight the entire dinner is outdoors and it’s going to be ruined!”

  Bill ran to the window, surveyed the sky, and put his hands on my shoulders.

  “I promise you, the sky will part and the sun will come out. There will be no rain at the rehearsal dinner.” Lo and behold, he was right! At dinner, we watched great swaths of blazing violet and orange paint the sky as the sun slipped into the Mediterranean Sea. It was the most spectacular sunset I’d ever seen. A sneak preview, it turned out, of the gorgeous wedding day I woke up to.

  There are moments every bride cherishes on the day she becomes a wife. For me, it was my first glimpse of Bill, waiting for me at the altar, so tall and handsome in a tuxedo my father the master tailor had made for him, his eyes filled with a love that I knew God had meant only for me.

  Looking into those eyes, I began reciting my vows. It’s a bit eerie now when I watch our wedding tape and see the exact moment when it hit me how real this commitment was, how eternal this bond. Tears I couldn’t stop began streaming down my face as I spoke aloud those five simple words:

  In sickness, and in health…

  chapter nine

  Barely a month after our wedding, Ted Harbert, the E! Networks president who had made me anchor, approached Bill and me with the proposition that sparked our first philosophical disagreement as husband and wife. Our wedding special had drawn over three million viewers, a one-episode blockbuster that was Style’s highest-rated special ever. And that was before it re-aired domestically and aired internationally for five years following our wedding. Now my bosses wanted us to do a reality show. Bill, the practical one, was mortified. I was intrigued.

  “Why would we even consider it?” Bill wanted to know. “What’s the upside?”

  “Bill, why does there always have to be an upside?” I teased. “Do something just because it’s fun and an adventure!” I honestly thought it would be a lighthearted romp through the park. It appealed to my impulsive nature and tendency to live life out loud, anyway.

  Looking at it, as was his nature, from a business perspective, I had to admit it didn’t make sense, though. Or dollars. The only reality stars who get rich exposing their lives for the world to dissect are the ones ambitious enough to use the show and their newfound celebrity as a branding opportunity for an already viable business venture. Bethenny Frankel had managed to parlay her three-season Real Housewives of New York platform into a multimillion-dollar Skinnygirl Cocktail empire, but any number of Bravolebrities who’d stuck around for much longer runs on air worked their asses off to hawk makeup, jewelry, or accessory lines with very modest, if any, success. Far more have ended up in financial straits, not to mention div
orce court, jail, or all of the above. The desire to be on TV can quickly turn aspirational people into desperate attention whores who will stoop to just about anything to stay on TV. I’ve seen them try to fake fights, affairs, and scandals to get on the cover of the weekly magazines in the hopes of keeping their ratings up and their shows renewed. It’s so pathetic.

  Even celebrities who were accustomed to being in front of the camera have ended up feeling the pressure of public scrutiny and private manipulation and watched their marriages fall victim to the “reality show curse”—Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott, Bruce and Kris Jenner. In my years at E!, I had probably interviewed every big reality star at some point or another, though, and I felt like I had a unique perspective on this weird corner of pop culture. My belief is that reality shows accelerate your marriage forward in whatever lane it happens to be in. If you’re headed for divorce, you’ll get there faster. But part of me wondered whether the opposite could be equally true: If you’re solid and happy to begin with, would putting yourselves in a glass bowl make that bond even stronger?

  “Let’s make marriage look cool,” I urged Bill. “What harm can come from that?”

  Besides, I pointed out, he had already been on a reality show when he competed in and won the first season of The Apprentice.

  “That was all about business,” Bill objected. “They didn’t follow me into my bathroom and bedroom!”

  I had no such qualms. Culturally, I was predisposed not to have any expectation of privacy whatsoever, thanks to my crazy Italian family. Case in point: my first period. I was thirteen, and it came in the middle of a big Fourth of July barbecue we were having, with all the Italian aunts, uncles, and cousins over. I was all freaked out, but Mama was busy with all the guests, so I went outside to sit on the brick wall lining our driveway and wait for Monica to come home. She was in the eleventh grade and would know what to do. My sister pulled up in her white Rabbit convertible with her cool friends.