Going Off Script (25 page)

“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.

A
bout 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 intimate 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.

“You know what? Ask me whatever you want. I think this is a really good platform to get an important message out to a lot of young women.” The difference was like night and day. She opened up and talked all about cutting herself, bulimia, depression. The interview was amazing and got picked up all over the world.

Motherhood didn’t just make me mush, though: it made me fiercer than I’ve ever been, too. When I got caught in the social media war between LeAnn Rimes and her new husband’s ex, Brandi Glanville, shit got real.

It started back in the summer of 2011, when Bill and I were opening our first restaurant, RPM Italian, in Chicago. A reporter asked me which celebrity I would most love to feed at RPM, and I said LeAnn, because she looked a little thin, what with all the stress in her life. She and Eddie Cibrian had carried on a very public adulterous affair before divorcing their respective spouses and getting married a couple of months earlier. LeAnn fired back at me on Twitter, and Brandi chalked me up as being on Team Brandi. LeAnn’s representative left a message
one day with the singer’s number, saying she’d like me to text or call her. I ended up texting her. “We should get together,” she answered back. “This is so crazy!” We met for drinks and ended up talking about how people love to tear others apart over their weight. Too skinny or too fat—it doesn’t matter which. Body size is a hot-button topic in our society, and people in the public eye, especially, are considered fair game to attack.

I ended up interviewing LeAnn for
Beyond Candid.
She broke down in tears when talking about her affair with Eddie and the firestorm of public criticism that followed, saying she had never known such pain, nor had she meant to cause any. I found myself not as quick to disapprove of her behavior as I had been. I mentioned this on an episode of
Fashion Police
when we were discussing LeAnn frolicking in a bikini on a beach with Eddie, and her home-wrecker reputation came up again.

“I used to totally poo-poo this relationship, then I watched his ex-wife on
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
She is batshit
crazy
!”

Next thing I heard, Brandi was tweeting away about me. “Hopefully her man doesn’t leave her and give her surrogate baby to a bonus wife,” she wrote.

Surrogate baby? Not only was I personally offended, but I was offended on behalf of all the other women who had to rely on surrogacy to have a child and saw it as a gift, not something to be ashamed of or held up for public ridicule. I did exactly what I knew full well would make crazy Brandi even crazier: I didn’t respond, even though she was trying and trying to get me to react. Respond to a D-lister, and you become a D-lister. Brandi’s celebrity exists largely within her own twittersphere, and is based almost entirely on her feuds with LeAnn or fellow Housewives. I had no intention of entering her unhappy little world, but months later, I was on
Watch What Happens Live
with Andy
Cohen, and he read this tweet out of nowhere from a viewer wondering if I had cleared things up with Brandi.

“If she ever mentions my baby again, I’ll cut her,” I said without hesitation.

H
aving a child puts the future of our own reality show into question. Neither Bill nor I want to raise an attention-seeking brat, and Duke deserves his own life without the public scrutiny that Mommy and Daddy signed up for. Besides, we ask ourselves all the time, what more do we have that anyone would want to watch? We’ve already shared so much. And the one hard-and-fast rule we have about our reality show is that it remain real.

Authentic
is one of those words people like to throw around a lot, but after you’ve spent a decade or two in Hollywood, you genuinely appreciate it on the rare occasion that you see it. After thousands of celebrity interviews, party chats, and red carpet drive-bys over the years, my admiration for the stars who are genuine grows deeper by the day, especially when I’ve had the opportunity to watch them evolve over the years. Some, like Dakota and Elle Fanning, I first met as child stars, and now they’re beautiful young women every bit as sweet and unspoiled as they were back when a seven-year-old Dakota invited me to color with her. I wish I could bottle what they have and spritz it on some emerging young celebrities. Ariana Grande has made several headlines for her reported junior diva moves. I got my own dose of the twenty-one-year-old newcomer when I was on the red carpet for the Grammy Awards and was told by producers that Ariana was on her way to my position for an interview. I always stand on the same side at every red carpet event, and a big red X is placed on the spot
next to me so the celebrity knows exactly where to stand. Suddenly, Ariana and her team came flying over to me, and the next thing I knew, she had jumped into my spot. When my floor director told the publicist to please have Ariana move over and stand on the X, the publicist angrily issued an ultimatum: Either she stands where she is, or she doesn’t do the interview.

I was flabbergasted by the exchange, and shot Ariana a conspiratorial look as if to say “How crazy is this?” She feigned ignorance, looked at me with those Bambi eyes, smiled, and didn’t budge. I was about to say, “Fine. Then we are pulling the interview, screw you!” but everything was happening so quickly, and the next thing I knew, the red light was on, we were live in more than one hundred countries, and Ariana had successfully planted herself with her preferred left side facing the camera. (Which, BTW, would be the side I fought for thirteen years to get. Earn your stripes, girl.) If Mariah Carey wants to shove me off the platform, I’ll take the face-plant and gladly interview her from the floor.

Authentic doesn’t mean perfect: Probably my worst interview ever was with the late Gary Coleman, the four-foot-eight actor best known for his childhood role as Arnold on the hit sitcom
Diff’rent Strokes,
which I had loved as a kid. In 2003, Coleman, then thirty-five, tossed his hat in the ring to run for governor of California in a recall election that Arnold Schwarzenegger ended up winning. But Gary, may he rest in peace, was kinda out of his fucking mind. He was seriously committed to winning, even though his candidacy had been sponsored as a satirical gesture by an alternative weekly newspaper in Oakland and his platform pretty much amounted to “why not me?” When we sat down for our one-on-one, I immediately asked if he really thought he could win: