Going Off Script (13 page)

My all-time worst might have been the day I strutted on set looking like Snooki’s cheesy cousin. Actually, Snooki doesn’t have a cousin as tacky as I was this day so let’s say I looked like Snooki’s cheesy cousin’s ex-boyfriend’s new video ho. I came out in a tight leopard dress with a fresh orange spray tan and thick clip-on bangs—yes,
clip-on bangs
—to match my long, straight blonde extensions. Somewhere back in time, a caveman was looking for his missing escort. Meanwhile, I thought I was hot shit. I walked onto the set the way Nicki Minaj must crawl into bed with a new man: feeling sexy, sultry, and seductive. About ten minutes into the show, I caught a glimpse of myself in the monitor and thought,
Who’s that scary-looking girl on set with the nasty bangs? Is she from a Lil Jon video?
I realized it was me. What’s amazing is that I had the nerve to play my favorite segment, Starlet or Streetwalker, on that episode and actually laugh and call other people streetwalkers. When I got home that night, Bill said I should fire my stylist and my hair and makeup team.

“While you’re at it, fire yourself from
Fashion Police
for allowing that,” he added.

(I did tell them I was pissed, and, for the record, I happen to have a whole new team now.)

Withering as she was on air—she once lamented Billy Joel’s weight gain by saying he’d eaten the Dixie Chicks—Joan was the ultimate diplomat in real life. She always waited until I was leaving before casually asking me about what I had worn that day.

“Bye, Joan!” I’d say, giving her a hug and kiss and wishing her a safe trip back to New York.

“By the way, Giuliana,” she would begin, “is this outfit yours or Wardrobe’s?”

If I said it was mine, she would go, “Oh. It’s nice!” If I said it came from Wardrobe, she offered one of two comments:

“Give it back,” if she hated it.

And if she loved it?

“Steal it.”

Joan herself could be wearing a pink feather boa with a black beaded top and a statement necklace, along with several chunky bracelets and a couple of golf ball rings, but none of us ever would have criticized her fashion choices. She could carry off over-the-top beautifully because she
was
over-the-top.

The designers whose creations sometimes get shredded by
Fashion Police
have never complained that I know of. In fact, they see me on the red carpet each year at the Met Gala, which is the fashion industry’s version of the Super Bowl, and they run to me to say how much they love watching
Fashion Police
. And not just little-known designers: I’ve had Tom Ford and Valentino make a beeline to me to tell me they watch, as well as newer designers like Prabal Gurung.

It still sometimes amazes me what we can get away with on air. Sometimes I wish the producers had stopped us. Kelly and I once went off on the longest gross-out tangent describing just how disgusting we found the shade of yellow reality star La La Anthony was wearing one week. On and on we went, from bad to worse, until it got to some revolting STD reference. As a general rule, Kelly, George, and I were limited in the number of swear words we could use, because Joan would rack up so many bleeps. As moderator, I had to maintain some semblance of control.

The dirty jokes, the freewheeling guests, the risqué games we play, and the side-splitting laughter are all reminders to me of how lucky I am to call this work. My favorite part of the show, though, was always Joan’s greeting. She made up a new silly term of endearment for me every episode. I was her chickie-poo, her captivatingly cool cucumber, her gentle giantess of journalism, her beautiful baller of broadcasting, her tall tamale of truth. One time, I was her bug-eyed beaver. “Do I have bug eyes?” I asked the camera, while flipping Joan my middle finger. She coined
the word
slassy
for Rihanna, explaining that the singer always managed to look slutty but in a classy way, “like you, Giuliana.”

I looked at the camera and mouthed the word
bitch,
but admitted out loud, “Only Joan can say that and warm my heart.” And that’s the truth. Only Joan. Which makes it all that much harder to imagine the show going on without our beloved Joan. When Joan passed away, my first inclination regarding the future of the show was that there was no future. That the show would go away. When producers first reached out to tell me that Melissa had given her blessing for the show to continue with a new host, I was shocked. Melissa and I went to dinner, and she explained that her mom, the consummate professional and hardest-working woman in show business, would have wanted the show to go on. She told me that Joan wouldn’t want any of us to miss a beat, and I believed her. After having known Joan so many years, I knew what Melissa was telling me was the truth. The question was, what would
Fashion Police
look like and who could ever replace Joan Rivers?

There were months of conversations among the executive producers of the show, Melissa, Lisa Bacon, and Gary Snegaroff, and the network head honchos. All sorts of names were making headlines as possible replacements, but the one that was mentioned in every article was Kathy Griffin. From the minute her name came up, I was not-so-secretly rooting for her. I have been a fan of her stand-up for years and loved that she would always credit Joan for paving the way for female comedians like herself, something she made sure to mention in interviews long before Joan passed away. To me, it came down to respect, and I liked that Kathy respected Joan in life and in death.

When the official announcement came out that Kathy was joining the panel, I was ecstatic and shot her an e-mail that said “Amen! Welcome to the family.” She responded by inviting me to her house for dinner and late-night karaoke. My kind of girl.

M
y love life and my professional life never seemed to fall into sync, and I started my dream job without any dream lover at my side. I wasn’t exactly burning up the gossip columns as the new “It Girl” in town. By the time I got to E!, I’d been in L.A. for nearly five years, and all of my close encounters with any bona fide stars fell into one of two categories: disastrous or ludicrous.

My losing streak had begun, of course, at the Sky Bar. Even before I met the 90210 actor who took me on a date to a skeezy drug house, I had landed an invitation one night to the home of someone I’ll call Mr. Prime Time. It was only a few weeks post-Depp, and I had wriggled into a tight black tube dress with sky-high hooker heels in hopes of finding him again back at the Mondrian. I had come with Justine, but she was off somewhere with her music executive when a good-looking guy with chiseled cheekbones and great dimples struck up a conversation with
me. He wasn’t anybody I recognized, but he was nice to talk to and look at, so I decided to give him a chance and finesse my woman-of-mystery skills until Johnny Depp reclaimed me.

“So, what do you do?” I asked.

“I’m an actor,” he said. Standard answer at the Sky Bar. I may have raised an eyebrow or smirked ever so slightly.

“Yeah, cool. Are you on a show?” I asked. I didn’t get an advanced journalism degree for nothing.

“Yup,” he said. He named a show, and I told him I’d never heard of it, in an airy tone that suggested I had better things to do with my fabulous, mysterious life than watch no-name cable channels at three a.m. My dismissal of his acting claims hit a nerve.

“Do you want me to prove it?” he challenged me.

Now I was curious. What was he going to do, recite the soliloquy from
Hamlet
? Big deal, so could I, and that didn’t make me Judi Dench.

“Turn around,” he instructed. I did, and there he was, smoldering from a giant billboard above Sunset Boulevard. He was the sexy new face of a major retailer. Not only was his TV show a hit drama that everyone in America except me apparently watched, but Mr. Prime Time was the show’s resident hunk. Oh, and it was on a major network, not cable. I still didn’t know the show, but I loved the brand he was modeling for on the billboard, and I liked that he could handle some attitude.

We had a few more drinks and he invited me back to his place, which turned out to be a dreamy apartment in West Hollywood. The living room had tall windows dressed in gorgeous white drapes, and the whole apartment had this beautiful, chic European feel to it—an aesthetic weirdly disrupted by a bowl full of Blow Pops on the coffee table. I promptly unwrapped one and popped it in my mouth. Subtle. Mr. Prime Time and I settled on the couch, and as we sat there talking, he fell into this dark funk
over his ex and his kid, and started confiding how conflicted he was. We were both pretty buzzed by then. I listened with an intense concentration that had more to do with getting to the bubble-gum center of my Blow Pop than to the bottom of his psyche. Here I was, a tipsy twenty-three-year-old, offering relationship advice to a man more than ten years my senior, when all I really wanted was to have my first actor make-out session. Finally, we started fooling around, and, moving to the bedroom, I asked if he had anything more comfortable I could slip into. He pulled out a gently worn T-shirt and boxers from the same retailer that he was the face for on the billboard. Smooth.

Long before Patti Stanger made the line the catchphrase for her
Millionaire Matchmaker
reality show, I had a strict no-sex-without-monogamy rule. I planned on being famous someday, and I didn’t want some parade of past conquests coming out of the woodwork.

“Okay,” Mr. Prime Time said, “I like you. You’re smart. So, in the morning, I’m going to have cereal. Do you like cereal?”

“I do,” I said.

“I have Cap’n Crunch,” he said in a somber way that made me think it was code for something kinky that I didn’t understand and quite possibly did not want to. Pirate games? Wrong girl, matey. Get a parrot.

Six in the morning came with sun pouring through the tall windows, and I felt a dead weight pinning down my arm. He was asleep on it. I opened one eye and immediately thought,
Omigod, I hafta get outta here, even if it means pulling a coyote and chewing my arm off.
I needed to be gone before he woke up, to leave him wondering where I went and who I really was and when he might see me again. Women of mystery did not stay for breakfast. I carefully extricated my arm and crept out of bed.

There were two cereal bowls neatly laid out and a box of Cap’n Crunch on the table. I scribbled a note to leave on his
pillow: “Had to run, busy day. Raincheck on cereal? My #…Giuliana.” Breezy with a hint of interest, damn, I was good. I was totally channeling La Femme Nikita.

Dressing for my great escape posed something of a dilemma: my choices were a black hooker dress and heels or a pair of boxers and wrinkled T-shirt. I put on the dress but stole his clothes anyway. I wanted a souvenir, and I needed proof to show my girlfriends. (How a plain tee and boxers would prove I spent the night with OMG DON’T YOU KNOW WHO THAT IS?! I wasn’t sure, short of DNA testing, but they seemed like important evidence at the time.) I tiptoed out his front door, into the gated pool area. I went to let myself out, only to discover that I needed a key. I was trapped. Again. I considered my options: Throw rocks at his window and yell up, “Maybe I will have that cereal?” Too embarrassing. Or throw my bag and heels over the fence, put the boxers and T-shirt in my mouth, scale the fence in a tube dress, and then drop eight feet to the ground on the other side, twisting my ankle in the process? Yes, that’s the ticket, Giuliana, because it’s so much
less
embarrassing to hobble barefoot down Sunset Boulevard at the start of rush hour in smeared makeup, tangled long blond hair, and a hooker dress, carrying a man’s boxer shorts and T-shirt along with the stilettos my rapidly swelling ankle could not fit into.

I eventually made it home without attracting the attention of vice cops, and promptly rented every movie I could find featuring Mr. Prime Time while waiting for him to call, which didn’t happen. After a week had passed, my friend Justine insisted I call him and stop playing so hard to get.

“Hey, it’s me, Giuliana!” I said.

“Who?”

I reminded him.

“Oh yeah, the girl who stood me up for our cereal date. What’s up?”

We ended up going for dinner in West Hollywood, and there was no connection whatsoever. Zero, zip, not even a flicker. He went on to become an award-winning director. Eight or nine years after our hook-up, I walked into my sister’s kitchen, and there he sat. It turned out that he had recently met my brother-in-law, Bryan, a film producer, while discussing a project.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey, are you Monica’s sister?” he asked.

“I’m
Giuliana
,” I said a bit testily.

“Nice to meet you!” he said. He clearly did not recognize me.

After I left, he turned to Bryan, who later relayed his request to me: “Your sister-in-law is hot. Think she’d go out with me?” I told my brother-in-law I wasn’t interested. Every time I went over to my sister’s house, though, it seemed like I was seeing Mr. Prime Time, who would then proceed to hit on me. It was the bad-date version of
Groundhog Day.
Was I that unmemorable? One day, after he had said, “We should go out sometime” for about the tenth time, I finally told him we already had.

“You offered me Cap’n Crunch!” I reminded him. He looked sheepish.

“So we hooked up?” he asked. “I don’t remember that at all. How could I not remember you? I was drinking back then, maybe that explains it.”

Which means we never would’ve gone anywhere, anyway: guys who drink too much are high on my list of turnoffs. At the top are guys with no real ambition: I don’t count being in a band and having no long-term goal as ambition. Next would have to be mama’s boys, especially the ones who ask their mothers for advice about you, and then actually take it, even when they know it’s wrong. I also rule out guys who dance too well, ones who know nothing about handling finances, men who are disloyal and think cheating is okay in the “right” situation, guys who watch porn and go to strip clubs, guys who have mandatory
guy nights and guy weekends, serial confessors who reveal their deepest, darkest secrets by the end of the first date, and cheesy men who drive flashy cars. (Thank you for curing me of that forever, Richard D.) Oh, and beefy guys with too much muscle, like Joe Manganiello and Chris Hemsworth. Some women think of them as beef cakes; I think of them as Lumbersexuals.

My list of turn-ons is short but nonnegotiable: men who are elusive, smart with their money, family oriented (must be good to their mothers), loyal, and morally sound. Puppy dog eyes don’t hurt, either.

I had matured enough since Lance and Richard to add the most important quality of all: kindness. I wasn’t in the market for any more dysfunctional relationships with men who belittled me in any way.

Since the whole dating thing wasn’t working out so well in L.A., I shifted gears when I got my job at Artist Management Group and became a stalker, instead. Not a professional, pop-out-of-your-closet-with-a-butcher-knife kind. I was purely a recreational stalker, and I had just one lone quarry. He was the first person I met at AMG, a tall, gorgeous man who stepped into the elevator with me. Aquiline nose, green eyes, dressed to the nines.

“What floor?” he asked.

“Six,” I said.

“Me too. AMG?”

I nodded. “I start today. I’m in the mailroom.”

“Oh, that’s on four,” he said. The elevator stopped and I had no choice but to get out. I waved like a dork as the door closed on my very own Mr. Big.

Pushing my little mail cart around the offices, I spotted him again soon enough. His name was Jordan, and he was a talent manager. Matthew McConaughey was among the stars he represented, and they were tight enough that McConaughey
dropped by on practically a daily basis. Most women at AMG silently willed McConaughey to linger in the agency’s offices, but I silently heckled him to go home already so I could go in and schmooze with Jordan on a real or fake mail errand. Whenever he spotted me, Jordan would wave me into his office or stop in the hallway to chat awhile. He was slightly flirtatious but never inappropriate, a sexy mentor who treated me like an amusing and promising protégé. He called me “Talent,” and I was a lovesick schoolgirl who spent hours deconstructing and analyzing every tiny gesture or casual greeting, hoping to ferret out the hidden valentine. After work, I would tail Jordan and park outside his house, waiting to see if a woman’s silhouette appeared in his window. If he went back out again, I followed to see if he was meeting a date at a restaurant. I didn’t have any specific plan; I just wanted to know about his life because I could never actually be
in
his life. He was way out of my mailroom girl league.

My sister, Colet, Colet’s sister, and all my other friends got wrapped up into my love fest with Jordan. I was their one-person telenovela. When I got promoted to assistant and my boss, Pam, became a friend, I sucked her into my infatuation, and she would join me on my nighttime Jordan vigils. Pam and I usually finished work at eight, then we’d get dinner and drinks somewhere, then we’d go stalk Jordan till eleven. We’d hide in my car and wait for him to pull up to his house, then watch his living room light come on, then the bedroom. Then he’d pull the shades, and we’d debate whether there might be some slut who didn’t deserve Jordan waiting in bed for him. We were just bored, when it came right down to it. It was entertaining at the time.

Pam did her best to find me a better date than Jordan, who had no idea we were, in my mind at least, meant for each other. When the 2001 Academy Awards rolled around, Pam happened to be dating Benicio Del Toro’s manager, and she invited me
along for a dazzling night of Oscar parties. When we came out of the Awards ceremony, the streets were backed up like crazy, of course, so she told me to wait at a gas station on Sunset Boulevard, and she would pick me up. I was standing there in a gown and fur vest with high, high heels when a limo pulled up and I got in and sat next to Benicio Del Toro holding an Oscar. He had just won Supporting Actor for his role in
Traffic.
“Hi,” he said. We all went to the
Vanity Fair
party, and I tried to stay as close to Benicio as I could, shadowing him and pretending to rub his arm so the paparazzi on the way in would think I was his girlfriend. “Hey, everyone!” I sang on my way in, doing my pageant wave. Inside, every star on the A-list was coming up to congratulate Benicio—Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie—and I just latched on and rode Benicio’s coattails the whole night. They were the best coattails ever. Benicio was having the time of his life and didn’t seem to mind. We even danced together in a group.

On my last day at AMG, Pam was watching me pack up my stuff and being all supportive, telling me how much she hoped my dreams would come true, and so on. Then Jordan walked by, and Pam called after him.

“Hey, Jordan!”

“Pam, no, don’t you fucking dare, please, oh God, no no no, dammit!” I warned her under my breath. I sensed epic humiliation about to unfold. Jordan had stopped and turned around.

“Yeah?”

“Come back here! Giuliana wants to tell you something!”

Epic. Humiliation.

Jordan came up and flashed his Mr. Big smile at me expectantly. I smiled back, and Pam jumped right in.

“She wanted to tell you that she thinks you’re God’s gift to women,” she explained oh-so-helpfully. When it came to reckless disregard for my well-being, nonexistent Australian bungee
jumpers had nothing on Pam. I tried to laugh it off so Jordan would see that this was all just some dumb joke. Pam’s dumb joke. We could laugh together at Pam and her lame-ass joke. The three of us stood there smiling sort of maniacally.

“You’re very sweet, but Pam said it,” I pointed out.

Jordan looked straight at, and through, me. He cocked his head and walked away.