Going Off Script

by Giuliana Rancic

  “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.

  “I can tell her that you feel it’s bad for the baby and don’t want her to use it,” he offered.

  “No, she can’t know it’s me!” I said. I had fallen into that mommy trap of denial, where the more you despise your nanny, the nicer you are to her. How do they do that? I finally gave up. Cynthia went on to a new job four months later, but the noise machine lasted longer. I still use it. I need to have a life when he’s sleeping, and grab a shower or call my friends, but most important, we travel so much with Duke that the sound machine serves as a constant no matter where we go, which is comforting to the little guy. It doesn’t seem to have affected Duke’s brain. Mine, I’m not so sure about.

  Comfort in numbers is what pulled me up off the floor from my particular strain of baby blues; I started feeling better when it registered that every other mom I spoke to had felt the exact same way, and every article and book I read by or about new mothers confirmed it. The despair lifted after a month or two, but the sheer terror of motherhood held fast. I had more than thirty years’ experience being the world’s biggest scaredy-cat, and now I was responsible for this vulnerable little person whose life was more precious to me than my own. The stress of being on live TV was a walk in the park next to the stress of being home alone all day with a baby.

  Even as Duke grew into a healthy, resilient toddler, I remained on constant alert for all the potential dangers surrounding him. I’m no longer merely paranoid; I’m proactive. What scares me most about motherhood? Everything!!! There isn’t a thing that doesn’t scare the shit out of me or keep me up at night. Every day and every moment, I question if what I’m doing is right as far as raising Duke. Am I an unfit mother if I feed him pretzels instead of kale chips, or find myself cracking up instead of cracking down when he does something naughty? Will I be able to fake appropriate shock if a preschool teacher calls us in to complain that Duke is swearing in two languages? I look not twice or three times before crossing the street with Duke. Oh, no! I look four times, then I keep looking left and right and forward and behind me as I am walking across the street, my head and eyes in constant motion. If I’m not worrying that a car is going to hit his stroller in the street, then I’m imagining a bus jumping the curb and hitting him while we are walking peacefully down the sidewalk. Or a wild animal getting out of its cage the one day we are at the zoo. When we go to a trampoline park, I get nervous that he’s going to snap his neck from an overly aggressive jump and end up paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. Or that he’s going to stick his hands in a fan at the car dealership service center and lose his fingers. I must muster up about twenty crazy and highly unlikely scenarios a day, and even though I know it’s illogical and unhealthy and unproductive to think this way, I can’t help it, and I’m accustomed to negotiating my life around my ever-present worries.

  Now that I was a mother, I became more sensitive to the celebrities I interviewed, and their pain. There was no conscious decision to approach things differently. Being diagnosed with cancer and having the baby, experiencing those extremes of despair and triumph on top of each other, had shifted my priorities and buffed away some of the jagged edges. I found myself wanting to dive deeper in my interviews and connect with my subjects on a level that was raw and real. I was more attuned to people’s vulnerability than I had let myself be before.

  I was even second-guessing my weekly appearance on Fashion Police with Joan. Was the show too mean? “The fashion is secondary,” Joan would argue when doubters posed that question. “This is comedy.” Still, I found randomly criticizing people too difficult—even the celebs I privately regarded with some disdain. Paris Hilton, for example. I considered anything Paris was wearing fair game for a well-deserved zinger or two, but I couldn’t attack her personally, even though she had tried to have me fired once over a question she didn’t comprehend when I interviewed her on the red carpet. (I officially apologize to the world for helping to launch the Paris Hilton celebrity juggernaut when I was made managing editor at E! News. Surely there was another way to boost ratings…) My conflicting feelings about Fashion Police reminded me how fickle perspective can be, and how it ultimately impacts every interview I do. How do you get someone who’s used to performing in movies or onstage for a living to be authentic? I was eager to explore this deeper, and experiment with my platform. Demi Lovato provided the perfect opportunity.

  —

  About five weeks after my mastectomy, I sat down to interview Demi for a half-hour special. Lovato had experienced depression, an eating disorder, and self-harm before going into rehab after withdrawing from the Jonas Brothers tour. Word was, she had decided to enter treatment after punching a female backup dancer, which led to an intervention by her management and her family. She took “100 percent, full responsibility” for the incident. She was owning her mistakes and issues, and was hoping to serve as an inspiration to other young women. So I was surprised and irritated when the publicist who sat in on the session kept interrupting the interview and saying, “too personal.” I had not been told anything was off-limits. I couldn’t figure out why they were being so cagey, even with innocuous questions like how Demi and her old roommates she once lived with when she moved to L.A. divvied up the household bills, like groceries and electricity. “You’re getting too personal!” the publicist snapped again. I asked who paid the cable bill, not her account number, asshole, I silently seethed.

  I later learned that Demi was still struggling with her demons and had, in fact, moved herself into a sober living facility right before the interview. I get it that it’s the publicist’s job to be the bad guy so the star isn’t put in an unflattering light by saying “no comment,” but it was troubling to think that a young celebrity with an important story to share couldn’t because handlers around her considered it too risky. I wasn’t Geraldo Rivera attempting an ambush interview. I know how hard it is to let the world see you at your most desperate, how scary it is to share the i
ntimate details of your life in case it can spare even one stranger out there the same anguish you’ve endured. And I know firsthand that making that connection isn’t just altruistic—it’s therapeutic, and even miraculous. If Bill and I had kept our struggles with infertility private, I never would have had people approach me and urge me to seek out Dr. Schoolcraft because he had helped them have babies.

  As I was pondering all this, the idea for Beyond Candid suddenly popped into my head. I wanted a more intimate platform for in-depth celebrity interviews. I envisioned a setting that was safe and comfortable—their own homes, where we could kick our feet up and chat. There would be no publicists cutting in, and nothing would be off-limits. If someone didn’t want to answer a question, fine, just tell me yourself. The network loved the idea, and I began lining up guests. When former Disney kid Amanda Bynes started to implode in very public fashion, I reached out to her people and began lobbying hard for her to tell her story on Beyond Candid. I promised empathy and a safe place. She was receptive, but before the final details could get worked out, she suffered another episode and ended up involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward. All I could do then was keep praying for her.

  When I went back to Demi Lovato to ask her to do Beyond Candid, she readily agreed, and I interviewed her this time in her own living room, where we sat under comfy throws in front of her fireplace. I told my team I wanted the room clear: only the camera people allowed, no distractions, and no one in our sight line. “If the tape runs out, don’t stop the interview, just put in another tape and if we miss something, we miss something,” I instructed. I turned to Demi. “Demi, if you don’t want to answer something, just tell me. I’m cool with it. I’ll move on.” She shook her head.