TV insiders are tittering over a new novel by former “Entertainment Tonight” producer Heidi Clements, which some say surreptitiously dishes on behind-the-scenes drama with Linda Bell Blue, executive producer of “ET” for 19 years.
Other characters in the humor book may be based on Sharon Osbourne, Lara Spencer and Jane Seymour, sources speculated.
In “Welcome to Heidi,” Clements — who was Blue’s No. 2 at “ET” until 2011 — writes in the voice of a TV producer character who’s “run right out of the Valley” by her boss, “a 50-something plastic-surgery addict who was so overcome with jealousy of me that she went mental.”
In a chapter called “The Devil Wears Lululemon,” our heroine explains, “Every day at work was an adventure in insanity,” working for “a peroxide-blond dictator” who was “about as warm and fuzzy as a porcupine popsicle” and “loved when employees called her ‘Mommy.’
“She actually loved to scream and yell at people, and the bigger the crowd that was watching — the better,” pens Clements. Rewards were “very expensive gifts. I got two Chanel handbags and a Louis Vuitton suitcase. Blood luggage, I call it.”
After the protagonist is promoted to the unnamed show’s “Number Two” job, she’s constantly threatened with demotion, and her boss explains: “I want you to tell me the truth but . . . I want you to talk to me like a wounded baby girl.”
The heroine says, “Getting called into the bathroom [for a meeting] . . . was everyone’s worst nightmare. Faces would turn to stone and you would follow her into that dark abyss.”
When the boss blows up at a Spencer-like anchor for daring to wear beige to the Met Ball, the anchor pleads, “But Gucci made it.” The boss rages from her LA studio, “I don’t care if Jesus made it!” The heroine quits her job during a dramatic blowup behind the scenes of the Prince William-Kate Middleton nuptials — which “ET” hired Seymour and Osbourne to cover.
Clements is now co-executive producer of ABC Family’s “Baby Daddy.” A rep for “ET” declined to comment.
The irreverent book also tackles topics including dating, aging and the main characters’ wild days living in New York.