Sunday Lunch with Leeza Gibbons
Leeza Gibbons, as you have probably long suspected, is very, very nice.
At 48, she is unchanged from her days as the anchor of "Entertainment Tonight" and the host of the daytime talk show "Leeza," her slim figure cloaked in a blue wrap dress and her unlined face framed by flawlessly straightened hair. She is also, from the moment I walk into 437 Rush to meet her, absolutely "on."
"You have a great life," she gushes as I sit down, raving about how much fun it must be to eat lunch and read chick lit for a living.
She has done her homework, reading up on past columns, and is in full-on charm mode. She even smells sweetly fabulous, like a combination of baby skin and fresh flowers.
And if all her niceness is meant to result in a ridiculously friendly interview, it's totally working.
Gibbons mentions that she is about to head to Tampa for a big Home Shopping Network sale of her cosmetics line, and while this is precisely the sort of hyper-consumerism I'd generally be inclined to mock, Gibbons beats me to the punch, picking up her salad fork and offering a fast-talking, super-enthusiastic pitch for calling in right now and making several installment payments for it.
"Look at the shape of this fork," she jokes, cradling it. "Look at its perfect curve, the way it just sits so perfectly in your hand. This fork could go straight from appetizer to dessert, from breakfast to dinner. And the weight of it . . . not too heavy, not too light."
She flashes a million-dollar smile and laughs a big, Southern beauty queen laugh.
Gibbons' line of cosmetics is part of a bundle of lifestyle products, including "sheer inspiration" life coaching, which is something she seems to take just slightly too seriously, but this, I can only assume, is a result of having lived in Southern California for 20 years.
"Hollywood is my hometown now," says Gibbons, a South Carolina native. "All three of my kids were born there. . . . They grew up thinking that everybody's mommy is on TV, and that is a little weird."
Support to caregivers
Gibbons, of course, was an early practitioner of the kind of entertainment journalism that brings celebrities into people's homes every night, but she's somewhat less than enthusiastic about what "Entertainment Tonight" has wrought.
"I think a lot of it, honestly, has become shameful," she says. "At times, for me, even just as a consumer of information, it's a little uncomfortable. I think there is a line. I've made my living off the backs of celebrities, but I've tried to keep that line in my mind. I couldn't do it today."
Gibbons is in town to promote the work of the Leeza Gibbons Memory Foundation, the charity she founded when she left broadcasting in 2003 after her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. The organization offers support to caregivers of Alzheimer's sufferers, and expanding its reach, Gibbons says, "is my purpose now."
"The need is tremendous," she says, "and I think we're doing a lot of important work in terms of de-stigmatizing memory disorders."
The foundation sponsors support centers, like the one at Provena St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, called Leeza's Place, where caregivers can take their loved ones for a range of supportive services.
"Rather than saying, 'I think there's something wrong, let's go get you tested for Alzheimer's,' you can go to Leeza's Place and make a scrapbook page together and talk about memory that way," she explains, adding that her own mother is now in the disease's devastating final stages.
Eventually, Gibbons says, she is likely to go back to the lucrative television career that made her entrepreneurial and charitable ventures possible. But she is not sure where she might fit in the brave new world of Internet-driven gossip and scandal-mongering. Her impulse is to somehow try to be . . . nice.
"After I did eight years of [a daytime] talk [show], people would say, 'How do you get people to come on and say that stuff?' And I'd always have to answer, 'How do you get them not to?'" she recalls now, with just the slightest hint of a cringe.
Separated, but loving
Gibbons herself is trying to walk a certain, dignified line between openness and respectable privacy. She earnestly discusses the impact of Alzheimer's on her own family (Gibbons' mother saw her own mother die of the disease, as well) but tries to keep some details away from public view.
And separated from husband Stephen Meadows for almost two years, she maintains a curt dignity when the topic of family arises.
"We are better examples of loving partners now that we are separated," she says, sounding a bit like she might have rehearsed the line.
A good gossip columnist might have pursued the subject, but as Gibbons enjoys a sparkling water and a tomato and mozzarella salad, her cheerful but resolute silence seems to ward off such unpleasantness.
This, I imagine, is what all celebrity interviews were like when the journalists were all as nice as Gibbons.
