There are a lot of hostesses out there. Some of them turn letters; others have been involved in the sort of activities with Bob Barker that the AARP would never sanction unless a defibrillator was handy. Many of them are just vapid eye candy that appeals to a male demographic; Leeann Tweeden doesn’t fall into any of these categories. First of all, any man who isn’t aware of Ms. Tweeden should have his Y chromosome confiscated and be forced to wear pink taffeta until he gets head on right again, and his priorities straight. Leeann has graced the covers of FHM, Maxim, and Playboy. She spent seven years on The Best Damn Sports Show Period, has served as the MC for the National Heads-Up Poker Championship, and currently you are the hostess of Poker After Dark.
Besides possessing the sort of beauty that can cause any male to suddenly relive puberty, or quite possibly spontaneously combust, Leeann is extremely bright and has an odd habit of vacationing in places where people lob RPGs in her direction. She is also very interesting to talk to, and doesn’t hold her opinions back. We are pleased to present our interview with Leeann Tweeden.
LP:
Is it true that in the days before you were a model, you were accepted to Harvard?
LT:
That’s so funny that you asked me that. Everyone seems to want to know that. That actually was not a completely correct statement. I graduated high school when I was sixteen, so yes, I graduated in three years, so obviously I wasn’t stupid, but I wanted to go to LA instead of college. I grew up in Northern Virginia, and my mom was really good friends with a guy who helps place people in schools. He helped a lot of politicians kids get into the schools that they wanted, and celebrity children, etc. We had talked about where I would want to go, and I said “well if I’m going to go to college…”, (which I kinda knew I wasn’t going to go to college anyway, because my mind was already set that I wanted to move to Hollywood and become a model), I said that I wanted to go to Harvard. So suddenly, after talking about going to Harvard when I was a kid, I never took an entrance exam, I never even wrote to the school, all of a sudden that became “oh she was accepted to Harvard.” You know how the internet can be. I never said I was accepted to Harvard.
I’m going to school now, for the first time, at thirty-five. So seventeen years later I figured that I wanted to.
LP:
So what are you going to school for?
LT:
Poly Sci. I’m going just to do it, but I love it. I’m a straight 4.0 student. All my professors keep sending me stuff about interning and doing things. They are like, “If you ever want to get out of the entertainment business you can probably do foreign policy for the government.” It’s pretty funny, but I love it. I love the challenge. But like I said, I’m not really doing it for anything specific other than to continue my education and challenge myself.
LP:
Speaking of foreign policy, you do a lot of USO tours. How does it feel going into a war zone?
LT:
It never gets old. I’ll tell you a just little background on that; my dad served in the air force in Vietnam. He was deployed and that’s how he met my mom. They were stationed back and forth between the Philippines and Vietnam; where their bases were. I always grew up in a really patriotic household, if you will. You know what I mean, love of country. At a young age it was instilled in me that I was very fortunate to be born in America versus a lot of the places in the world. So I was very aware of that. As I got older, we, and you lived through this too, we had a relatively quiet thirty years with no real military action and no real wars or anything happening on this level. So when Afghanistan happened, one day I got a phone call from one of my agents, he said “Hey would you like to go do a USO tour?” Obviously there had to be a reason why they thought I would want to go. I don’t know how they came up with that idea but I was so excited to do it. Of course I said yes, I mean I left, like the next day. We went to Bosnia, and Macedonia, and the Balkans and all those areas where we had troops left over from Kosovo and Bosnia. So that was the first trip I did. The very second trip I did was serving Thanksgiving dinner to troops in Afghanistan. It’s an amazing experience.
I’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan now ten times and it never gets old, it’s always a little scary. Sometimes we go on trips, stay there for two weeks, and nothing happens and, the last two times I went in December; I just got back a week ago from Iraq, but in December I went on a holiday tour and our helicopters were shot at with rockets twice. They landed within a football field from our helicopters. We were in the middle of Afghanistan, out in the middle of nowhere, and the Taliban was shooting at our Blackhawks; that kind of sucked. Other times we can go, and nothing really happens. You can hear gunfire and things like that happening wherever we are though.
I’ve been with Robin Williams a few times, and I think he said it best, that there is no better audience that you can go and meet and perform for.
LP:
So you give up holidays and get shot at in order to make soldiers smile; these are not exactly values that define the modern Hollywood mainstream. How do you fit in among the current California “progressive” culture?
LT:
I guess you could say that I don’t really fit in! A lot of people in Hollywood are very far left in their views of the world. I’m not saying I’m all the way to the right, but I have some of the old school values that my grandparents and parents raised me with. I have found a pretty large group of friends here in LA that isn’t your typical Hollywood crowd. We talk about how the media was so important back in the day, when we were unapologetic; men were men, you know, not only the Charlton Hestons, who we love, but like John Wayne, and all the people when the good guy was the good guy. We weren’t embarrassed to be the good guy and to do what’s right. And now it’s like every movie is about apologizing for being American, apologizing for being strong, apologizing for being the first to help everybody, and I’m like “Wait a minute. What happened in this country that suddenly we have to apologize for being Americans?” Everybody wants to rag on us around the world, yet when something happens we’re the first people they call. Every single time. And were the first people to respond, every single time. It’s like you hate the cops, but the minute somebody’s breaking into your house, who do you call? 911. I’m kind of sick and tired of the whole thing too.
LP:
So, a little bit of your personal history; you won the Venus International Model search. Did they ask you any of those annoying pageant questions about how you would change the world or that sort of thing?
LT:
Like if I believe in Gay marriage?
LP:
So you see where I’m going with this.
LT:
Yeah, of course, and no. Let’s face it, and I know plenty of the girls who competed in the Venus Model search competition for swimsuits, hello, were not trying to solve world peace, although some of us probably could help. I know Ms. Americas, and I know Ms. USAs; Ms. USA was always known for whoever’s the hottest chick that looks great in a bikini is going to win. That’s just always the way it was. You didn’t hear the girl playing the harp or singing opera during her talent competition, because her talent was how well she walked in a bikini. So then you have Ms. America, where it is a scholarship based program, where these girls are getting scholarships to college or their graduate programs, and they actually have talent. So that [the Ms. California incident] pissed me off because again, and you can see where I’m going with this, that the last time I looked, it was still the United States of America and someone can have a different opinion then you. And when someone like Perez Hilton comes out and says that was the wrong answer, I’m sorry, it’s like political science, there is no right or wrong; it’s your opinion or mine. For them to vilify this poor girl who wanted to compete in a beauty pageant, asking her political questions, although Donald Trump is loving it, is absolutely ridiculous. I don’t know who died and made him [Perez Hilton] the speaker of all gays, and lesbians, and transsexuals, or whatever, but I talk to some of the gay people that I know here in LA, like my one friend, I go to PF Changs all the time at the Beverly Center and eat lunch, and I sit at the bar, and he was rolling his eyes, saying “you know what? He’s making us all look bad.” He says “cause, you know what? I think the girl should have her own opinion.” He said “What? He doesn’t like her just cause he didn’t like what she said?” And I said “Well, there you go.” So hearing it from people like him, they’re even mad that Perez has kind of become the official spokesperson, because he’s so obnoxious.
And to me, in the end, I’ve been on a couple interview shows on radio and stuff where I have talked about it, but the one thing I never really hear, and thank God that its kind of gone out of the news now, but that first week all I thought to myself was that I live in California; I actually voted no on prop eight; you know what, if they want to get married, let them get married, I don’t care about that. I’m not that conservative. If two people love each other, who am I to say that they can’t get married, but she also represented California, who the majority of the people voted yes on prop eight, just like she thought. So how can he be so mad because he thinks San Francisco and LA are huge, which they are, but he forgot that the middle of the state, like her, thought that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Also, their President said marriage should be between a man and a woman. I don’t see them vilifying him. He’s like the savior; they drank the Kool-aid, and they can’t say anything bad about him, so they go after a beauty pageant girl? Why don’t you actually go against the guy who can actually change policy and help you in your cause, then picking on a poor blonde girl, just because you wanted to be in the pageant instead of her?
LP:
After you won the Venus International Model Search, you worked with fitness guru and infomercial legend, Tony Little. Is he any calmer in person?
LT:
It’s funny, because he was one of the judges, and so I ended up getting one of his deals. I did the cover of his first fitness book, and then I did that first infomercial that he did that was the biggest selling infomercial of its time. The whole “Tony Little, oh my God he’s the guy with the long ponytail, and he screams all the time”, but in person he’s kind of like Robin Williams. You think, oh my God, you’re going to have these boisterous personalities, and then you meet him, and he’s almost shy, introverted, quiet; it takes a minute for him to sort of warm up and kinda get comfortable to talk to you. So I was looking around, saying, is this really the guy that I’ve seen before, and that’s the crazy “I’m going to get you in shape, and were going to burn fat” guy. He’s a really, really nice guy. He’s a great salesman, I mean obviously; he’s still selling the gazelle and all those other things. So he’s still doing his thing, and is very successful. He’s a really great guy, and I’m really grateful; being the young, eighteen/nineteen year old girl, I got to be on the cover of a book that was sold in every bookstore in the country and on an infomercial that was seen by millions of people, ten times a day, and on every channel. Yeah, it was actually a really fun experience for me.
LP:
After that you moved on to seven seasons with Best Damn Sports Show Period, the National Heads-Up Poker Championship, and currently you are the hostess of Poker After Dark. So you have credibility in both the sports and poker genre. Because of your time with the Best Damn Sports Show Period, and the relationship with Fox Sports, were you ever approached about being the WPT hostess when they moved over to Fox?
LT:
Never! Isn’t that funny? Well you can put my name in the hat if you like.
LP:
What is one of the rumors floating around in cyberspace about you that isn’t true?
LT:
Besides that I was accepted at Harvard?
LP:
Exactly!
LT:
Let’s see, people think that I was a Playboy Playmate, which is not true. I was on the cover of Playboy when I was hosting the show, Fitness Beach, or one of the girls on Fitness Beach; on ESPN, you know, one of the workout shows. It was 96, oh my God, I’m really dating myself, but people say “oh, you were a playmate!” I respond, “no, I think I was the only celebrity girl that was on the cover of Playboy that wasn’t naked on the inside.” I was topless, but my hair was covering me, and there was no nudity.
Actually Hugh Hefner had to sign off on that. Because when they asked me, they were like “we would like to know if you’d like to be on the cover of Playboy. We’re doing our Olympic, Summer Olympic/ we wanted a fitness girl celebrity or an athlete on the cover, and they asked me, and I said, well I’d do it, but I don’t want to be nude. So they called me back, and they said okay. Which I thought at that point it was going to be like “I don’t believe in Gay marriage”, I thought I wasn’t going to win the title, you know what I mean. But it worked out, so I don’t know, I may be one of the only people out there whose ever appeared on the cover of Playboy that wasn’t naked in the centerfold or a playmate, or whatever.
LP:
Okay, last question; it is a rather silly one. If you were writing your own eHarmony ad, what would it say?
LT:
I’m thinking of all the clichés in my head, and its making me laugh. Okay, let’s see…Patriotic girl who loves the outdoors, not big into partying, that likes to race cars and jump out of planes, likes intelligent conversation, loves animals…and who loves to travel.
We would like to thank Ms. Tweeden for her time, and look forward to seeing her on Poker After Dark for years to come.
