Giuliana Rancic: No shame, no gain

There is one very important thing to know about Giuliana Rancic. The woman cannot be humiliated.

Consider the moment from E!'s Golden Globes pre-show when cameras captured Rancic on the red carpet screaming like an unhinged, microphone-wielding stalker after an on-the-move George Clooney and his Italian girlfriend, Elisabetta Canalis. ("Elisabetta! Soy Italiana! George, come on!")

Surely the former Bethesda, Maryland, resident and holder of journalism degrees from the University of Maryland and American University didn't realise cameras were rolling as she flailed her Hollywood-skinny arms and yelled at one of the most admired movie stars on the planet... right?

Wrong. "I'm, like, screaming for George Clooney, knowing that people at home are either going to love the moment or hate the moment," Rancic says from her office at E! headquarters in Los Angeles, where she's become a fixture during the network's exhaustive coverage of industry fetes such as the Globes and the Academy Awards.

"And it was totally a polarised moment. You either loved it and thought it was the most insane, funny thing you've ever seen. Or you absolutely hated it and thought, ‘Oh my God, how embarrassing for her.' But if you know me, you know that nothing embarrasses me.

"Anything could happen to me on live television," she says, "and I sincerely don't care."

Perhaps it's that lack of shame that has turned Rancic, 35, into a ubiquitous TV personality. She has two shows of her own — E! News Live, which she co-hosts with Ryan Seacrest, and the Style Network reality series Giuliana and Bill, which peers into the life Rancic shares with her former Apprentice-star husband — and an unabashed eagerness to ask revered actors and filmmakers about diets, designers and dating situations.

To use that word again, she can be polarising; some of the less complimentary comments about her on blogs and message boards run the gamut from mean to plain befuddled.

Language barrier

Those critics might be surprised to learn that once upon a time, Rancic had no interest in tracking the trysts of Taylor Lautner. What she really wanted to do was cover hard news.

Rancic says she the sort of kid who often sat in the back of the classroom to doze or doodle in peace. Part of her early disinterest in education, she says, was due to a language barrier.

When she first moved with her family from Naples, Italy, to the Washington area when she was in elementary school, Rancic spoke only Italian and a little Spanish, but no English. She started to find herself by obsessively tuning in to the local news.

"Other children watched the cartoons or whatever," remembers Rancic's father, Eduardo DePandi, owner of the Bruno Cipriani clothing store in North Bethesda.

"She watched the news."

After their daughter earned her undergraduate journalism degree at the University of Maryland, Rancic's parents expected her to marry her then-boyfriend and work at his family's business. But she wanted to get a master's.

After secretly applying to the graduate-level broadcast journalism programme at American University, Rancic began attending classes — without telling her parents. She maintained the lie for a month, then finally confessed.

"We are an Italian family," says DePandi, 72, who has decorated the walls near his front register with his daughter's pictures.

"We are very close, always. Me and my wife, we didn't know what to do. But we said, OK, we've got to let her try."

Eventually, it became clear that Rancic's journalism career might not take her into the realm of the hard-hitting and investigative. She remembers covering a hearing at the Pentagon for an AU assignment. Her peers came back with serious reports on what had occurred during the proceedings.

Rancic, on the other hand, focused her segment on how hard it was to find the hearing room in such a massive building. Soon after, she says, the dean of students for the journalism school pulled her aside.

"‘What you should do is let everyone else deal with Capitol Hill and the White House and the Supreme Court,'" she recalls being told.

"‘Let these other students cover that stuff. Why don't you move out to Hollywood?' That's exactly what he said to me.

"I had a whole plan," she says. "And when he told me you should probably be intro-ing music videos or, you know, trying to get an interview with a celebrity like John Stamos, I'm thinking, what!? Are you kidding me right now? I was a bit insulted."

She wasn't insulted for long. She graduated from American on a Sunday. The following Friday, Rancic was on a plane to Los Angeles.

For the first two or three years, Rancic says, she worked "random jobs" until she finally landed at E! While being tested for a permanent reporting position, she interviewed That '70s Show star Wilmer Valderrama at the red-carpet premiere of his movie Summer Catch, a comedy in which his character has an affair with a friend's mother.

Rancic asked him if he'd ever had a similar experience, which sparked what she characterises as a playful conversation about dating older women. But when she got back to E! and tried to include that portion of the interview in her piece, an editor warned that she'd get in trouble.

"I thought, why wouldn't I ask that question?" she says. "My brain works in weird ways on the red carpet."

Soon after the piece aired live, Rancic says, she was fired. But two months later, E! rehired her and made her a correspondent after management noticed how much feedback, positive and negative, came from that Valderrama interview. "It was my worst gig for E! and my best gig for E!, you know what I mean?" she says.

The veteran red-carpet hostess — she's been doing this interviewing-the-Hollywood-elite thing for eight years — says she knows what E! viewers, a group mostly made up of women ages 18 to 49, want to know on Oscar night. And contrary to the grumblers and grousers, she says, it's got nothing to do with the nominated films and everything to do with fashion, beauty tips and who's going to which after-party.

Says Rancic: "If they wanted serious conversation, they'd go to CNN."

Shallow appeal

Kevin McLellan, president of Comcast Entertainment Productions, which owns E!, says the network's research backs up that assertion.

"We know the diet questions and how-you-did-your-hair questions, to some extent, people may find shallow," he says. "But to another extent, they are really important to our audience." (That audience has swelled recently. Last year's Oscar red-carpet coverage attracted 3.2 million viewers, up 14 per cent over 2008.)

Most of the stars — not to mention the designers, jewellers and handbag crafters who shower them with product — are happy to oblige Rancic & Co by answering red-carpet questions, shallow or not. Rancic cites Julia Roberts, recent Oscar winner Sandra Bullock and George Clooney (whose praises she frequently sings on-air) as some of the more indulgent, down-to-earth stars who play along with the "Who are you wearing?" game.

Interviewed ahead of last Sunday's Oscars, she said she's hoping for more occasional awkwardness, mishaps and maybe even some Clooney-baiting screams.

The woman who says "no shame is my middle name" can't help herself: "I love train wrecks on live TV."

Don't miss it

Giuliana and Bill is screened on the Style Network on Sundays at 1pm and Mondays at 11pm.