Details Magazine

One day, when your 5-year-old comes marching into the kitchen, the sleeves of one of your French-cuff shirts dangling past his wrists, and says, "Daddy, when I grow up, I want to be a content provider," you'll have Ryan Seacrest to blame. Or to thank, depending on how much financial support you're hoping to get from your offspring in your dotage.

Since 2002, when Seacrest, then an afternoon-drive DJ at Star 98.7-FM in Los Angeles, began hosting Fox's epically successful American Idol, he has amassed a collection of contracts, hosting engagements, and promotional deals that makes Donald Trump's plate-spinning seem prosaic. Never mind Idol, whose 2008 ratings are the highest on TV-again-or ABC's New Year's Rockin' Eve, an annual cash cow that Seacrest signed a long-term agreement to executive produce and cohost with his 20th-century analogue, Dick Clark. The 33-year-old entertainment mogul's 5-to-10-a.m. weekday radio program at 102.7 KIIS-FM, On Air With Ryan Seacrest-an aural latte that's heavier on celebrity interviews and caller-Ryan repartee than it is on music-is the most listened-to morning radio program in Los Angeles. Every Sunday, more than three million people (tuned to 500 stations worldwide) hear Seacrest's caramel-coated voice count down the American Top 40. He's also halfway into a three-year, $21 million deal with the E! network; and Ryan Seacrest Productions (RSP), is housed at the E! headquarters in Hollywood. Last summer, he signed a deal to be a spokesperson for Crest and Scope. He's a partner in eight restaurants. Sometimes he subs as host of Larry King Live. This all makes the average cultural elitist want to gag on his fair-trade espresso. Many of Seacrest's contemporaries dismiss him as the Malibu-tanned, alabaster-toothed embodiment of everything that is callow and one-dimensional about 21st-century pop culture. At least in public. Odds are, many are secretly watching Seacrest break down reports about the most recent embryo in a Hollywood womb on the eleven o'clock edition of E! News. As the anchor and managing editor, he produces super-quick and -consumable segments with a tone that's insidery and arch—laced with a little Perez Hilton-style mockery but not so much that it alienates the audience, Today's third hour targets. Ratings have more than doubled since he joined the program in 2006.

The valves and pistons of the Seacrest machine, a multimedia behemoth that culls, coats, and dispenses celebrity news, are greased with the extraordinary trust Hollywood's A-list places in Seacrest-even those twitchy from prolonged exposure to paparazzi swarms and tabloid probes. "Ryan Seacrest wasn't the first person to think of doing a reality show with Denise Richards, but he was able to sign her," says Ted Harbert, the president and CEO of Comcast Entertainment, which owns E!. "He wasn't the first person to think of doing a show with the Kardashians, but he was able to sign them. There have been a handful of people in television history who could do that. You put him in a room with somebody, and he can sign them."

Ryan Seacrest was a pudgy preadolescent who dreaded summer because it meant he'd have to take his shirt off at the local pool in the affluent Atlanta suburb where he grew up. He had to wear orthodontic headgear, which he struggled daily to thread into the hardware on his teeth. The kids on the junior-high football team teased him about his weight ("in a 'Hey, you want the last Little Debbie?' kind of way"). But the huskiness didn't become untenable until he developed a crush on a blond girl at his school.
"I had no courage to ask her out," Seacrest says, sitting in his sunny, modest office at E! headquarters-the only notable feature being a framed photograph of Seacrest and Dick Clark looking eerily similar-an up-since-dawn pallor obscured by makeup from the taping of an earlier news segment. "So I started throwing away my lunch-I had been eating two sandwiches. For three months, I would only eat an orange or a grapefruit, depending on the day."

Put aside for a moment that he was a chunky kid trying to get his classmates to like him-what's telling about this vignette is the methodical approach he used to obtain his objective. The blond girl ultimately did surrender, but by then, having harnessed the power of persistence, Seacrest had moved on.

Yet he has been living according to the grapefruit principle ever since. When Seacrest was 16 and working nights as an intern at STAR 94-FM in Atlanta, becoming a successful radio personality-and ultimately the head of a towering multimedia empire-became the new blond classmate.

"I remember thinking, Everything I do from this point on is a step," Seacrest says. "If I'm scrubbing the break room, I'm closer to the studio room. And if I'm in the studio room, I'm closer to the microphone. If I'm closer to the microphone . . . I really got the psychology of it--that everything is connected."

Back in his office he holds up a piece of paper covered with a grid-completely filled--representing tiny increments of his time. "It scares me, too, sometimes," Seacrest says, considering the planned-to-the-second day before him.

But it is in the service of continuing to build Seacrest, Inc., that he keeps this schedule. If he sticks to it, he can work in more meetings in the future. Meetings with blue-chip entertainment-industry advertisers: Proctor & Gamble. Coca-Cola. Wal-Mart.

"As a presenter or a talent, there's a saturation point," Seacrest says. "As a content provider, it's very different. . . . I want the advertisers on Madison Avenue. If they buy into it, then hopefully the mainstream audience buys into it."

"He's not trying to be cool," says his friend Charlie Walk, the president of Epic Records at Sony. "He's just completely focused on continuing to create an entity that covers all areas of pop culture."

Seacrest is in bed, at home in the Hollywood Hills, by eight o'clock almost every night. He sleeps spooning a BlackBerry, his dating life is in suspended animation. "He works too much at the expense of his personal life," says his friend Ellen DeGeneres. "I'd love to see him meet a nice girl and settle down."
But, for the moment, this isn't part of the Seacrest master plan. "I completely fell into [a] relationship, and I didn't want to," he says about a recent girlfriend. "I remember having conversations like 'This is so weird for me, because I'm not supposed to like anyone until I've achieved what I want to achieve.'"

So Seacrest sticks to what works for him: a seven-day schedule that would put most of his peers on Nexium. He maintains that he isn't fazed by the pace. "I'm tired, but I'm used to it," he says. But his subconscious might be. "You know when you watch video screenings and there's a time code in the corner?" he asks, trying to explain a recurring dream. "I have dreams about time codes."