Vanilla - Ryan Seacrest Distinction

Vanilla
White-Hot
78
new york
august 11–24, 2014
w ho wa nts to
dress lik e RY A N SE ACR E ST?
a lot of
people, presum a bly.
By
B E N JA M I N WA L L AC E
Photograph by
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON
NORMALLY, RYAN SE ACREST AVOIDS THE TIME-SUCK THAT IS THE BUSINESS
lunch, but when the famously hardworking broadcaster, producer,
and businessman does make an exception, it’s inevitably a bravura display of time management, economy of motion, thrift, dietary discipline,
and brand synergy. On a Monday this spring, he was upstairs at
Bouchon in Beverly Hills, one of several restaurants—distributed strategically around the city so he’s always near one—in which Seacrest
owns a small stake. Bouchon is a minute’s walk from the adjacent hotel
where Seacrest was temporarily living and where he’d meet his trainer
after lunch, before returning to his mid-city offices. The natty gray suit
he wore was a prototype from the forthcoming Ryan Seacrest Distinction line of menswear. The iPhone lying on the table had attached to it
a Typo, the Seacrest-developed keyboard extension that BlackBerryizes a smartphone’s touchscreen (so effectively that BlackBerry, days
earlier, had won a preliminary injunction barring its manufacture).
Seacrest wearing
Ryan Seacrest
Distinction.
august 11–24, 2014 | new york
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ANY ARE THE competitors for Seacrest’s time units. Besides
his daily drive-time L.A. radio show (syn-
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dicated by Clear Channel to around 200
stations), weekly “American Top 40” countdown, annual Dick Clark’s New Year’s
Rockin’ Eve, and recurring American Idol
host and E! red-carpet duties, he produces
scripted and unscripted TV shows including the entire Kardashian franchise, is an
enthusiastic tech investor (Pinterest, DigiTour Media, Tastemade) and entrepreneur
(Typo), and such a formidable presence on
social media that he is able, with a single
tweet, to launch subjects to the top of Twitter’s list of trending topics. He is a part
owner of the cable channel AXS, and he
has a $300 million private-equity war chest
for other large acquisitions. And this
month, with the launch of the clothing line
in 150 Macy’s stores across the country, he’ll
directly leverage his brand for the first time.
Seacrest’s show-business sweet spot
may be that, à la A. J. Liebling, he’s savvier
than anyone more famous than he and
more famous than anyone savvier. “I
always kid Ryan that his favorite show
is I Want to Be a Billionaire,” says Rich
Bressler, president and CFO of Clear
Channel. “Most people say his idol is Dick
Clark, but I say it’s Merv Griffin—being at
the intersection of everything. Merv was
worth $2 billion to $3 billion.”
Having worked in radio for more than
20 years, and with a weekday wake-up
time of five o’clock, Seacrest is allergic to
dead air and practiced at removing the
seams from his segues. But not every DJ
transfers that worldview to the rest of his
life. “It’s not a radio thing,” says his radio
co-host, Ellen “Ellen K” Thoe. “It’s a Ryan
thing. He’ll say, ‘I only have so many
units.’ ” Jeffrey Katzenberg, Seacrest’s
regular dinner companion, says, “we frequently find ourselves giving each other
tips about how to be even more anal than
we already are.”
This is manifest in Seacrest’s diet (most
of each day he is fueled by a green juice
blend he brings to work in a cooler pack).
It’s present in the way he maximizes even
the interstitial moments in his schedule.
“You’ll be talking to him on the phone,”
his friend Ben Silverman, the producer,
says, “and he’ll say, ‘Just give me one minute, I have to go back on the air.’ He’s in
the middle of American Idol. Who does
that?” It’s in the discipline he brings to his
sleep habits. When Silverman first met
Seacrest more than a decade ago, “he
requested a 6 p.m. dinner,” Silverman
recalls. “I tried to explain that I was still
at the office rolling conference calls.” They
finally settled on a 6:30 seating, with the
understanding that Silverman would be a
half-hour late. “Which is kind of how our
relationship goes,” Silverman says. “Lots
of mini-­negotiations.”
There’s an elusive, déjà vu–like familiarity about Seacrest: You know his face,
and you may know his facts, but he’s still
something of a cipher. There are none of
the rough patches that give a person
dimension. He has a boy bander’s hair;
a former Crest-Scope spokesman’s teeth;
a politician’s eye contact, handshake, and
social graces. He’s limbically jacked into
the relatable glamour and unintimidating
aspiration of the E! channel. Seacrest
conceives of himself not as the celebrity
that he is but as the person next to the
celebrity, a conduit for the real stars, and
this ability to stand deferentially to one
side while engaging with the super­famous
in a playful, nonthreatening way may be
the key to his popularity: “He’s like O-type
blood,” says a longtime Hollywood
observer. “He could talk to anybody.”
Seacrest’s neuroses are a regular topic
of on-air banter with Thoe. She recently
bought him a T-shirt that reads more
­issues than vogue, which she enumerates: “The overthinking. The way he
sleeps. The three-item rule in the car.
Being afraid of noises on the roof.” The
three-item rule? “If you want your purse,
a bottle of water, and some other item,
everything else has to go in the trunk.”
The overthinking? “Even getting the
dog—that took a long time to get where
we are today. He’s probably been talking
about it for a few years.” The way he
sleeps? “He has to sleep a certain way … I
went online and got him every pillow. A
body pillow. A wedge pillow. He’s tried
every one, it didn’t work, so I have them
all at my house.”
Seacrest’s broad palatability provokes
people to want to disprove it. He has had
no scandals, to the point where the bar for
Seacrest news is incredibly low: A video
clip suggesting he’d been booed at a stadium went viral. His sentimentality pulls
no punches: He recently introduced
“Summer Bucket List,” in which he makes
kids’ wishes come true (“We’re sending
you to karate camp!”), then broadcasts
their tearful reactions. Even the one dissonant note in his uplifting radio show—a
discomfiting feature called “Ryan’s Roses,”
in which adulterers are tricked into confessing and then shamed—offers the
safely populist red meat of tabloid moralizing. He has lapsed into none of the public assholery that afflicts most celebrities
at one point or another. He makes no
demonstrable effort to appear to be something he’s not; if he doesn’t want to
answer something, he’ll politely cite his
privacy. His bachelordom, generally nonpublic dating life, and transparency about
getting manicures have made him the
regular target of late-show gay jokes, but
even these seem driven at least partly by
an ambient hunger for there to be something, anything, please, about Seacrest
that is not as it seems. “How come everybody thinks you’re gay?” a video paparazzo
asked Seacrest as he arrived at LAX last
month with his 23-year-old girlfriend,
Shayna Taylor, before adding, “And you’re
not gay.” “Who thinks that?” Seacrest
responded amiably.
Seacrest disarms critiques of his middle-of-the-roadness by embracing them.
“The first time I met him in L.A.,” says
David Katz, CMO of Randa Accessories,
the company helping to bring Ryan
Seacrest Distinction to market, “an article
had come out that said: Is he too plain
vanilla? Ryan said, ‘That’s interesting,
’cause 20 years ago, the favorite flavor was
vanilla, and it will be 20 years from now.’ ”
P R E V I O U S PAG E , M AG N U M P H OTO S / N E W YO R K M AG A Z I N E . S T Y L I N G B Y M I L E S S I G G I N S F O R B L I T Z ! I N C ;
G R O O M I N G B Y J AY S O N S TAC Y W I T H H AY D E N M G M T. I N C . T H I S PAG E , F OX V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S.
Seacrest ordered a Cobb salad, no bacon,
dressing on the side, then raised his glass
of iced tea and said, “Cheers, bro.”
This tableau notwithstanding, Seacrest,
who will turn 40 in December, is beginning to gesture toward balance in his life.
He said he wanted to get married and have
children, and he has spoken of recognizing
that he must commit “units of your week
and units of your day” to cultivating a relationship. He was about to move into a new
home, then under renovation, that he’d
bought from his friend Ellen DeGeneres
for $37 million. Shortly after he would get
a dog, a black Lab named Georgia, as a
self-conscious step toward domestication.
He had joined something called the Napa
Valley Reserve, which bottles private-label
wine for him, and at Bouchon, Ann Colgin,
a prominent Napa winemaker with whom
Seacrest is friendly, stopped by the table.
Seacrest, who had been vibrant and
focused and impeccably gracious throughout the meal, lamented that he hadn’t been
able to make her birthday party the previous weekend and complimented her on
turning 35. “I just love you,” drawled Colgin, who is in her 50s. She would be a guest
at a dinner for Seacrest’s foundation in
three days, and Seacrest would be her guest
at a lacma fund-raiser over the weekend.
With walls to fill in his new home, Seacrest
has begun dabbling in art (picking up an
Ed Ruscha print, among other things), and
recently joined the museum’s board of
trustees. As we ate, he told me about a
birthday dinner for “a buddy of mine” at
the Sunset Tower Hotel scheduled for that
evening. “Like, I’m not canceling that,” he
said. “I said to them last week we’re all
going, and there’s nothing that’s going to
get in the way of that tonight.”
We continued talking—he told me he
was looking forward to an upcoming vacation to Italy—and at one point I glanced at
my notes. Seacrest saw an opening. “So,” he
said, “can we wrap in ten? Five or ten?
I just like to stay on track.”
I F S E AC R E ST S E E M E D, W I T H American
Idol, to come out of nowhere, and if his
subsequent moguldom appears equally
unlikely, it’s only because no one was
watching. Growing up in Dunwoody,
Georgia, the son of a corporate lawyer and
homemaker, he had a precocious interest
in being on-air: spending his lawn-­
mowing money on a mixer, making lipsynched Bon Jovi videos, DJ-ing countdowns and doing fake TV news broadcasts
in his bedroom, serving as his high
school’s announcer (the Voice of Dunwoody), going to Six Flags to watch DJs
perform, calling a Star 94 DJ for tips and
ultimately scoring an internship and then
the overnight show while still in high
school. “I was just fascinated picturing
what was happening while listening to a
disc jockey,” he told me. “He’d say, ‘I want
to be the next Casey Kasem,’ ” Connie
Seacrest, his mother, says, “and I’d say,
‘Okay, fine.’ ” He’d record her answeringmachine message, and her friends would
call just to listen to the message, she says,
“ ’cause he did such a good job.”
To become the most industrious man in
the entertainment industry, Seacrest
needed a few insecurities to take root.
Home life was stable. His parents have
been married for 44 years, and when he
was growing up, family dinner was
emphasized. “One of the things he’d say,”
Connie says, “was, ‘I’m never going to be
an attorney and work as hard as my dad.’
I say to him now, ‘You’re kind of eating
those words.’ ” But there were a few years
as a chubby kid who wore husky jeans and
Seacrest hosting an episode of ‘American Idol’ in May.
wouldn’t take his T-shirt off at the pool;
he’d trade the healthy lunches his mother
packed for him for “a Hostess Twinkie or
some kind of Swiss chocolate cake that
was not on the program,” he says. “I knew
he’d grow out of it, but he didn’t know
that,” his mother says. Young Ryan also
had a social eagerness that it’s hard
to imagine wasn’t annoying to peers.
“I always wanted to know what everyone
was doing,” he says. “So at the end of
school, Fridays in junior high: ‘Where are
you hanging out? What are you guys
doing?’ ” His teachers, on his report cards,
noted it as an area to improve. “They said,
‘It’s not a bad thing,’ ” his mother recalls,
“ ‘but it’s sometimes disruptive.’ ”
Even as he found himself juggling
school and football and his radio job,
a powerful drive was coming into focus.
He watched Dick Clark ring in the New
Year on TV and projected himself through
the screen. “I wanted to feel that scale of
celebration,” he told me. “I wanted to be
a part of that kind of action.” When Star
94 asked him to run a local road race and
report on it, he flew home early from
a class trip to Europe. When weather
threatened to keep him from meeting
another radio obligation, his family cut
short a vacation to Florida, and back in
Atlanta Ryan spent the night at a hotel
near the station to ensure he’d be able to
make it there in the morning.
Seacrest broke into TV his freshman
year at the University of Georgia, when
a connected roommate helped him land
an audition for a new kids’ game show on
ESPN called Radical Outdoor Challenge.
If you watch a clip preserved on the inter-
net, you see an overcaffeinated teenage
shock jock with a red beanie. You don’t
necessarily think: That kid’s going places.
But CNN profiled the 18-year-old, and he
did a good-enough job on the ESPN show
to be offered a job hosting another kids’
game show, called Gladiators 2000,
which would shoot in California.
In the CNN profile, Seacrest had said,
“I have always put my education as my,
you know, my first main priority, and
I don’t think that any of these jobs or any
of these opportunities should change
that.” When he got the Gladiators 2000
offer, he presented a formal case to his
parents for why they should support a
decision to drop out of college. “Part of his
pitch,” his mother recalls, “was ‘People say
I’m good.’ ” He drove to Hollywood in his
Honda Prelude, with $2,000 in saved
Christmas cash, and spent the next eight
years bouncing around radio stations and
TV shows featuring children and animals.
One was produced by Merv Griffin, who
let Seacrest audit some of his meetings.
Thoe, who knew Seacrest before they
started working together, says that in
those pre-Idol days, he was “a hustler.
Even at the gym, he was taking phone
calls.” Seacrest interviewed on both coasts
for MTV gigs and was passed over both
times. He remembers living in the Valley,
driving to Glendale to shoot five animal
game shows a day, and coming home
exhausted to the Melrose Place–like complex where he lived. When Friends was
on, he’d get together with the other young
residents (actor Mario Lopez and future
Dateline reporter Andrea Canning among
them) to watch on a black leather sofa
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surrounded by black lacquer furniture.
“I really wanted to be successful on TV
and radio,” Seacrest says, “but I remember thinking to myself, I can’t even fathom
what it would be like to be on a show on a
network, in prime time, and it was No. 1.
Fast forward to the machine that was
Idol, and I was living that fantasy.”
Seacrest had already been offered
Family Feud, but he’d turned it down
after being told there was something else
in the works that he’d be right for and
that could be big. American Idol
launched in 2002, when Seacrest was 27,
and within two years was the No. 1 show
on television, a perch it held for the next
six years. Jeff Zucker, now the president
of CNN, has called it “the most impactful
show in the history of television.”
It was a role Seacrest grew into. After
one year, his co-host, a comedian
named Brian Dunkleman, left Idol and
Seacrest removed his earpiece, trading
producers’ instructions for his own
spontaneous reactions. “It really is a
show you have to listen to more than
speak to,” he says. In the wake of the
show’s explosive ratings success, he
didn’t go out and buy a Bentley and
Aston Martin right away (those would
come later). “I thought this could go
away at any time,” he says. “I think midway through season two, the life didn’t
get bigger, but the feeling was different;
we knew we were onto something that
was resonating in popular culture.”
After every show, he’d go home and
review the tape right away. “I couldn’t
even speak to my mom until after I’d
watched the show. And I’d either feel
fine or beat myself up if it didn’t feel
right. I had to learn to manage it.”
The speed of his ascent brought new
opportunities: high-profile commercial
work, other TV gigs (including subbing
for Larry King), and marquee radio jobs,
replacing legendary L.A. drive-time DJ
Rick Dees and Casey Kasem. At times,
his ambition exceeded his reach. A daytime talk show on Fox, On Air With Ryan
Seacrest, was canceled after six months.
A licensing deal to put out a clothing line
called the R Line was short-lived. But
Seacrest was playing a longer game.
Soon after Idol’s start, he had coldcalled Dick Clark and gotten a meeting
with him. “I said, ‘How do you do what
you’ve done in the universe of today?’ ”
Clark had amassed a fortune by owning
large chunks of his TV shows, including
American Bandstand. “He said, ‘You
can’t do it exactly how I did it anymore.’ ”
The world had become more diversified,
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and leverage once possessed by producers and talent had shifted to the networks. Since the pieces of the pie had
shrunk, to be Dick Clark now meant having many more pieces—digital, TV,
cable, technology, clothes. “I walked out
of that meeting,” Seacrest says, “and
I wanted to be in Times Square.”
O ON AF TER Idol
rehearsal ended on a Wednesday afternoon toward the end of this past season,
Seacrest was in his frigidly air-conditioned trailer behind Stage 36 on the
CBS Television City lot. Similar in size to
those of judges Harry Connick Jr. and
Keith Urban but a paltry shack compared to Jennifer Lopez’s double-decker
next door, Seacrest’s trailer was modestly
­appointed—a vase of orange roses and
orchids, a scented candle, a blender (for
green juices on the fly). He joked about
how its décor was appropriate to that
night’s ’80s-themed Idol, when he was
looking forward to using various props
including a Chia Pet, Rubik’s Cube, and
brick phone.
Seacrest’s British stylist Miles arrived
with a few shirts on hangers. Seacrest’s
dressing room, a separate chamber in the
trailer, was full of suits grouped into
ready-to-wear color clusters—black suits
with compatible shirt-and-tie-and-­
pocket-square pairings (and so on for
brown, gray, and blue suits)—that let him
streamline his dressing process. Ryan
Seacrest Distinction will translate this
idea for the masses via a Garanimals-like
system in which each item will have
a color code or two to ease coordination.
Randa first approached Seacrest
a year ago, after observing that there
hadn’t been a successful launch of a new
mainstream menswear brand in 15 years
and concluding that Seacrest would be
an ideal vehicle: He had a high Q score,
a stable and diversified sort of fame, and
an un-fickle, dressed-up sense of style
(he’s been wearing Burberry suits for
years, mixing in everything from Saint
Laurent to J.Crew). “In our industry, we
say traditional black and contemporary
blue,” Katz says. “Ryan’s midnight navy,
right in between. When we started talking to our trend people, they said, ‘Oh,
yeah, we’ve had Ryan on our concept
boards for years.’ When we started talking to stores, they said, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve
had Ryan on our trend boards for years.’ ”
For Seacrest, it was a chance to monetize an extracurricular enthusiasm. One
of the perks of Idol had been wearing
(and keeping) elegant suits, and he had
become friendly with Burberry’s designer
and now CEO Christopher Bailey.
“I really like getting dressed up,” Seacrest
told me. “I like to put on a suit. I like to
go to work in what I call my uniform.
I like to dress nicely for dinner.”
The line, which arrives in stores this
month (exclusively at Macy’s), is priced
to let a million Seacrests bloom ($550
for a suit, $69.50 for a shirt). “Ryan
shared a story with me that when he first
moved to Hollywood from Atlanta and
met with Merv Griffin, he didn’t have a
lot of money but he knew he had to look
good,” Katz says. “It’s important to him
that men who didn’t have a lot of money,
particularly when they’re starting out,
could still look really sharp.” Seacrest, for
his part, sees his customer as “all ends of
the spectrum: a guy interviewing for his
first job, working a full day and stopping
for a bite on the way home … and a guy
my age wearing a suit every day.”
Having whiffed with his earlier stab at
fashion, Seacrest is taking this launch
seriously. He has approved every item,
fabric, and fit, offering extensive notes
for the designers at the various companies making the different parts of the
line, weighing in on everything from
armhole height to lapel width to pocketflap style to inseam cut: “things I’d
learned by wearing suits for a living for a
decade on the air.” The resulting lineup
strikes an urbane, young-man-on-themake, Rat Pack note, with tie bars,
pocket squares, and jackets with highgorge notch lapels. There’s also a lot
more ambition. Where the R line was
what Seacrest calls “a fun T-shirt project,” Ryan Seacrest Distinction will be “a
true lifestyle brand” that, if all goes as
hoped, will eventually grow to include
everything from sweaters to shoes to
watches to bags. As the face of the line,
Seacrest will model the clothes himself
in men’s-magazine ads and a Macy’s TV
commercial, is committed to wearing
them on every American Idol broadcast,
and during Fashion Week next month
will host the resurrected fashion-music
fund-raiser Fashion Rocks on CBS.
AT THE HOTEL BEL-AIR, as swans and
heavy security milled about, 100 guests
arrived for the debut fund-raiser for the
Ryan Seacrest Foundation, which
launched four years ago. Seacrest’s sister,
Meredith, who runs the foundation, and
his parents, who also work for it, mingled with many of his friends and business partners, including Randy Jackson,
Instagram’s Kevin Systrom, three Kardashians, and one Selena Gomez, her
hair tied up to one side. Napa Valley
Reserve wines were poured.
Seacrest arrived straight from Idol, in a
dark suit, no tie, and introduced Harry
Connick Jr., who would sing a few songs.
Connick, sitting at a piano, said that it was
only tonight, after meeting Seacrest’s parents and sister, that he understood who
Seacrest was. “We’re here in the center of
smoke and mirrors,” he said, “and he’s real.”
After everyone had taken seats for dinner, Seacrest thanked the Kardashians
for coming, playing up his red-carpet
persona by asking: “Who are you wearing?” (Kim was wearing Kardashian Kollection.) “I had to ask,” Seacrest said.
Then his sister introduced a video
explaining the foundation’s work, which
consists of building radio and TV broadcast studios in pediatric hospitals, where
sick kids learn the ropes and visiting
stars come and meet them: Seacrest
wants to create what would be the first
major pediatric-hospital entertainment
network. Gomez, the foundation’s
ambassador, stood and said: “The food is
bomb, right?”
After dinner, Seacrest’s mother circulated, schmoozing and deflecting compliments (“There’s no school for parents,
you do the best you can”) and half-joking, “I feel sorry for the dog. He’s never
home.” The foundation and its embrace
of his family are at once another of
Seacrest’s efficiencies and one of the
ways in which he’s trying to slow down,
or at least have a more integrated life.
Seacrest knows that Idol, now taping
season 14, won’t be around forever. The
show has been in a ratings slump the
past few years, which analysts blame on
everything from format fatigue to the
inevitable entropy of a once-hot show
that has already had a pretty long run. “If
Get Dressed Faster!
Ryan Seacrest Distinction organizes its collection like its namesake does his
closet: Everything fits four looks, to streamline decision-making.
STEP 1 Pick a suit.
1
bl ack
2
gr ay
3
blue
4
brow n
STEP 2 Choose a shirt
with the same group
number that’s listed on
the suit label.
STEP 3 Ties are trickier. Choose one with the correct number—
but only if the accent color matches the shirt’s primary hue.
I knew the real answer to that, I’d be able
to keep it from going down,” he says, citing complex factors including contestants’ stories and chemistry among the
judges. “But when I watch these shows
back, even in the decline, they’re very
good television shows, and I hope the
show has a life of a few more seasons.”
Even if Idol were canceled tomorrow,
Seacrest still thinks he’d look for a comparable TV role, and he has no plans to
shrink his radio presence, both because
it feeds everything else and because it
still excites him. That’s been his routine
since he was a teenager: Wake up early,
brush his teeth, go to work. As his life
sprawls in a million directions at the very
moment he’s looking for something
deeper, he’s still figuring out exactly what
deeper looks like.
Earlier, Seacrest had spoken about his
struggle with priorities over the past two
decades. “Amazing things you have
access to, places you get to go, and people
you get to meet that are … so interesting.
But I also had to cancel things a lot. And
I think in the last couple years I realized,
Wait a minute, I could never truly make
solid plans for things that were outside of
work. And I would cancel them to do
work. But I wouldn’t cancel work to
do them. And I think now I feel like
I have a better perspective of balance and
priority. And I want to be able to be there
for things I wasn’t always there for. And
I certainly know that, after seeing my
parents, you have to be available to compromise and deliver on your commitment. I think that I was so committed to
one aspect of my life, and now I want to
even out that commitment more.”
And then, at 10 p.m., Seacrest, with a
5 a.m. wake-up for tomorrow’s radio
show, said, “I’ve gotta go,” and left. ■
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