Being Kendra_ Cribs, Cocktails, and Getting My Sexy Back - Kendra Wilkinson [74]
Brian’s first move was to send me on some publicist interviews so I could find someone to protect my image and help me shape it. My first Hollywood publicist was a huge mistake. I don’t think she understood who I was or my fan base. What works for Jennifer Aniston isn’t going to work for me. I was coming off of Playboy but was ready to branch out. I wasn’t expecting the cover of Vanity Fair, but I did expect everyone I worked with to hop on the “let’s do this” bandwagon. I was excited when they set me up for a big interview with Us Weekly magazine. Here I was going into a big magazine to tell my side of the story: “Hef’s girl tells all.” It was supposed to be fun and bubbly, but it turned into a disaster. My publicist didn’t tell me how interviews worked, and I stayed in that interview much too long.
During those couple of hours I said a lot of things I regret, things I shouldn’t have said and wouldn’t have said if I had received better guidance from my publicist. I gave in to passion in the moment and I didn’t know what to reveal and what not to reveal. The interview basically made it seem like I was bashing Hugh Hefner’s way of life. In reality, I was just angry about the way certain things worked out and I probably got too involved in my own fame to know when to keep my mouth shut. Now I know that you don’t give a magazine like that that much time for an interview. I’ve done a million interviews since, and let me tell you how long they are supposed to take: thirty to forty-five minutes. Hang. Up. The. Phone. Or in this case, just walk away. But this was the worst of the worst. They were telling me it was going to be this big question-and-answer session. Next thing I know the article comes out and it’s a big, explosive tell-all. Oops! It looked like I was slamming Hef and Playboy and confessing to doing all of these horrible things when really I was just answering very tough questions they had preplanned. The magazine did its job in getting the ultimate interview it wanted. I felt like my publicist didn’t do her job in protecting me.
It was the most embarrassing article of my life. I was devastated that I let people down, and I felt like my career was more out of control than I realized. I fired my publicist right on the spot. She completely didn’t have my back, and instead of handling my PR, she dismantled it. I almost lost my job, my family, and everything I had because of that article. My family was pissed at me, E! was pissed at me, Playboy was mad at me. Pretty much anyone I could have talked about over the course of that interview (i.e., everyone) hated me. Kevin Burns, the executive producer of my show, called my publicist and bitched her out. He was like, “What the fuck do you do? All she’s got is who she is and you destroyed that and pissed off a lot of people.” That is when I got really fearful.
It was at this low point that I began to really meet the people who would form my team. After a few disastrous experiences with typical Hollywood publicists who almost ruined my chances of creating my brand, I met with Kira Costello, who would become my publicist. She was very sweet and attentive. That is when I learned what this business is all about. When I met with her I said, “Tell me what you do, who you