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HOLLYWOOD -- This season's ratings resurgence of The Apprentice -- courtesy of its all-celebrity edition -- may have taken some in the industry by surprise, but Marilu Henner could've told 'em so.
Henner, who was one of those celebrities in Donald Trump's employ before getting the sack late last month, had a hunch the seventh season of the oft-imitated reality series would click with viewers long before there was a film and TV writers strike.
"I just had this psychic feeling about it," says Henner, calling from her Los Angeles home. "The only other time in my life that it happened was when I saw the word Taxi in print and I heard that the guys who wrote Mary Tyler Moore were going to do a show about cab drivers and I knew I was going to be on it. As soon as I heard they were doing Celebrity Apprentice, the exact same thing happened."
While Henner's Celebrity Apprentice tenure proved far briefer than her fondly remembered five-year run as Elaine Nardo, the lone female driver for the Sunshine Cab Company, she wouldn't have traded the experience for anything, even if it did mean sleeping an hour-and-a-half on more than one occasion and eating on the run.
"We all lost so much weight over that short period of time," she says of the show's intense three-week shooting schedule. "I wasn't even looking to lose weight, but I see myself now and I go, 'Ooh, you're a little too skinny.' "
Nevertheless, a terrific-looking 55, Henner was no stranger to the entrepreneurial world, having penned seven successful diet and health books (with an eighth, Wear Your Life Well: How to Use What You Have to Get What You Want coming out next month) and teaching on-line classes on her Marilu.com website for the past nine years.
Still, once Trump started dishing out the tasks, was she at all surprised by her own competitive streak?
"Oh, please. My family used to have game night every Friday," she replies. "We once sent someone to the emergency room during charades. Competition never scares me."
Speaking of her family, is it true that her mother used to run a dance studio back in their Chicago home?
"Oh my gosh, we had a dancing school in our backyard with 200 students between the ages of 2 and 80, including the nuns who came over for stretch class," Henner says. "We lived right next door to a Catholic school, so we sort of had backstage passes to Catholicism. My mother also ran a beauty shop out of our kitchen for about 25 women from the neighbourhood, so our house would always smell like perm solution. In fact, where the refrigerator was supposed to be, there existed a blue hair-drying chair."
So with an upbringing like that, it's easy to see why she wasn't easily intimidated by the likes of The Donald.
"Not one time did I regret doing it," she insists. "I'm recommending Tony Danza for the next one. I think he's very competitive and the two of us have a very similar energy."
Now there's some head-butting we'd like to see -- Tony Banta vs. Omarosa.
Louie De Palma could referee.