Can the Octomom Go Hollywood and Get Rich?

Nadya Suleman may have a hard time making it simply as a celebrity, and here's why

Do you think the Octomom will really stay famous and get a book deal and a TV show?
—Octofever, Kansas

A TV show? Less likely every minute. Sure, one Emmy-winning reality-TV producer tells me he would love to give a series to Nadya Suleman, the jobless woman who used fertility treatments to birth eight children, after she already had six.

"She's a trainwreck," says Terence Noonan, who spent two years producing Elimidate. "You can't stop watching."

But Suleman keeps missing opportunities. Earlier today someone who works with the TLC network (home of 17 Kids and Counting and Jon & Kate Plus 8) told me they were open to working with her. Hours later, network prez Eileen O'Neill issued this statement: "TLC is not pursuing any program at this time with Nadya Suleman. We wish the family well."

Oh well. And that's not even the first of Suleman's Hollywood fumbles...

She's still lacking a key celeb necessity, that of representation. You know, an agent, a publicist—something. It's hard to land the kinds of deals that'll feed 14 mouths without the kinds of Hollywood pros who keep running away from her.

As it turns out, people are falling all over themselves to tell me how they don't rep her. In the past week or so, Suleman has gone through two publicity firms, neither of which rep her anymore. (Maybe it has something to do with the death threats?)

A firm called the Killeen-Furtney Group took on Suleman on Jan. 30 and stopped working with her around Valentine's Day. An automated telephone message originating from the Killeen-Furtney offices indicates that Suleman is now represented by the Ambassador Agency, but they're just as quick to deny any involvement with her.

In a statement issued Monday, Ambassador president Wes Yoder said, "Ambassador has not executed a representation agreement, nor do we intend to do so.

As of this second, no one officially flacks for her, and I could find very few publicists who said they would. Ditto with book publishers. (Off the record, one told me that free rubbernecking is one thing, but paying for it in hardback form is different altogether.)

"I think the only way I would rep her would be if she agreed to come out and tell the whole true story," says Sara Lien, a PR director for a publishing company called BRIO. "I'm not sure she is doing this, and it is making her image take a nose-dive."

"As long as she is seen as unstable or unlikable or selfish, she might help bring eyeballs to television or to a magazine that has a photo essay," Bill Wolfsthal, associate publisher of Skyhorse (my publisher, by the way) tells me. "But I think it's unlikely that people will want to read her book."

All this may have you wondering: Some publicist is willing to represent Chris Brown, but not Suleman? Why?

One word, publicist Ann Marie van den Hurk tells me: "Money."

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