Jason Merritt/Getty ImagesGiuliana Rancic is a woman of many talents. Unfortunately, teen modeling didn't end up being one of them.
In an exclusive excerpt from her new book Going Off Script: How I Survived a Crazy Childhood, Cancer and Clooney's 32 On-Screen Rejections, Giuliana details her experience with trying to be a model when she was younger, and it's actually pretty hilarious!
Now let's get something straight, the E! News anchor is obviously a beauty and the thought of her doing some high-fashion work doesn't seem far-fetched at all, but it was a completely different story when G first delved into the world of modeling as a teen.
Rancic explains that while she didn't know how to jumpstart her career as a news anchor, she knew there were "plenty of ways to prep for my companion goal of being crowned Miss USA."
So when she saw an ad for the Barbizon School of Modeling in the paper, "I begged my parents to enroll me... One brief interview and twelve hundred dollars of my parents' hard-earned cash later, I was in! The weekly classes were the highlight of my week."
During her classes, G would learn how to exit a car elegantly (which some celebs could learn from today) and the different ways to "sashay down the runway" depending on the style of clothes. After a few months, the girls were ready to have their photo shoot so they could have pictures to send modeling agencies.
"One by one, the stylist and photographer sized each of us up and decided what our 'look' would be—not just for the photos, but for all modeling eternity. Their choice was what we should carry forth into the industry if we wanted to become the superstars Barbizon had prepared us to be."
One of the girls with Giuliana was dubbed "catalog fresh," and apparently, there's nothing fresh about it. "Catalog fresh? I felt bad for her. I had heard that girls in catalogs made decent money, but nothing like the fortune tall girls like me could rake in on the runways of New York, Paris, and Milan."
When it came time to size G up, the stylist and photographer ended up deeming her an athletic wear model for...catalogs.
"It was bad enough I was being told I was a catalog model, but to be told I would basically be modeling for the Sports Authority's newspaper inset was even more of a blow than modeling mediocre fashion pieces in the annual Spiegel catalog."
Then, the photo shoot. Her (unfortunate but kinda funny) experience was as follows:
Before I could start crying, they thrust a sporty outfit into my skinny—lean—arms along with a tennis racquet, a white Izod visor to squash down over my short permed-mushroom bob, and size ten white tennis shoes that looked like a size fifteen with my teeny-tiny bony ankles poking out. Not a cute look. But Barbizon was not done with me yet: They stood me in front of a white screen and started throwing tennis balls at me, urging me to swing energetically. I kept missing and the tennis balls kept hitting me, and I tried to fend off the Barbizon attack by twisting the racquet every which way but up. It was awful.
When she finally got the photos months later, any ounce of hope for a decent picture vanished.
Every single picture in the Barbizon shots showed me with my eyes shut tight or a look of sheer terror on my face. I didn't even look like I was playing tennis. I looked like I was using the racquet as self-defense while being attacked, like Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock's movie The Birds. And I was so shell-shocked over being labeled "athletic," I hadn't even realized how awful the outfit I was modeling actually was. The least they could have done was dress me in a flirty little tennis skirt, but nooooo. I was defending myself from killer birds while wearing what appeared to be prison pajamas—an oversized shirt with broad stripes and matching Bermuda shorts. Both were at least four sizes too big on me. I called Barbizon to ask for a reshoot. They agreed, for an extra five hundred dollars. Pass. I was done.
Giuliana may have been done with modeling, but she continued to search for work, writing, "Every Sunday, I would settle in with a stack of Chips Ahoy to dunk in my latte while I carefully scoured the classifieds section of the Washington Post, looking for audition notices."
But, those weren't much more successful. She highlights one of her biggest audtions was for the lead in Return to the Blue Lagoon.
"No callback on that one. Or the next one or the next. I had a hard shell, though, and just kept going to whatever audition I could."
Clearly, that persistence paid off.
Don't forget to grab your copy of Going Off Script: How I Survived a Crazy Childhood, Cancer and Clooney's 32 On-Screen Rejections when it hits shelves on April 7.