“I'll give you lack of discretion,” huffs Mary Jo Eustace, leaning over the edge of a table as she pushes her long hair over her shoulder and sharpens the gaze of her blue eyes.
A host of the popular W Network cooking show He Said, She Said, alongside Ken Kostick, she had minimal Canadian-style celebrity until her husband, Dean McDermott, dumped her to marry Tori Spelling in 2006 after meeting the Hollywood heiress and actor on the Montreal set of a Lifetime movie.
For both Ms. Eustace and her ex, divorce made their names. And I have asked– nicely – about her motives for writing her new book, Divorce Sucks: W hat to Do When Irreconcilable Differences, Lawyer Fees and Your Ex's Hollywood Wife Make you Miserable , when it feeds that tabloid culture she says she abhors.
The attention her divorce got in the gossip pages was a complete surprise, she explained earlier.
“It wasn't like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt or anything of that level, but there seems to be a fascination and it continues to be … I never thought it would be such a big deal,” she says.
To prove her take-the-high-road discretion, she launches into a story about a “major producer” in Los Angeles who called her in the summer to pitch an idea for a show in which she would star. The scene was quintessential La-La land, she reports.
The producer strutted in to “take” the meeting. “You're older, you're dating and you're probably looking for love,” he said soothingly as he began his pitch, she recalls. He was proposing a reality show about her dating life. He lobbed an earnest look in her direction. “We want you to be happy. That's the end goal,” he explained.
“Who's we?” she asked.
“Well, Tori and Dean and I, we just want you to be happy. We're really concerned about it, and it would make for great postmodern-docudrama-family-divorced viewing.”
Her ex and his new wife, who star in their own reality show, Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood , would be the producers.
“There is not enough money in the universe to make me do this trash,” she replied hotly. “How would this empower me? This would victimize me.”
Then she pitched her own idea – a show called Second Act about helping midlife women reinvent themselves. He wasn't interested.
A pilot for the concept, with Ms. Eustace as host, has just been announced with the W Network in Canada.
She acknowledges that the divorce has made her more visible, but she rejects the idea that she was (or is) interested in fame. “I would say this,” she says. “No. 1, I'm not an actress. I don't pretend to be. I do my hosting and my cooking.”
But she and Mr. McDermott had moved to Los Angeles to further their careers just before the split. She still lives there.
“Mine was never an on-camera career,” she explains. “If that worked, great. We moved to support his career. Yeah, definitely this experience has made me more visible and more famous, but at what cost? It was a horrible divorce, horribly public and humiliating.”
Then why do the book and make it more public?
“Because it was all so surreal. We had just moved to L.A. We had adopted a baby. [They also have a 10-year-old son.] … Then there was an article and a picture of Tori and Dean in a passionate embrace with all sorts of unnamed sources saying our marriage was troubled, that he wasn't leaving his kids but he was leaving me, that I was 62 years old, embittered and crazy … my whole life was being rewritten … and then, because of all the publicity surrounding this, my daughter's adoption was jeopardized. … I was thinking about how am I going to survive this.”
