Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (29 page)

“I’m doing this show—we already started filming a little bit but we need someone else. It’s about housewives and moms. We need another housewife,” she told Bethenny.

Bethenny didn’t think she fit the bill. She wasn’t a housewife or a mom. She was a celebrity chef, or at least she wanted to be one. Jill’s husband, Bobby, brought over the producer. Bethenny shut down. She had nothing to say. But then her boyfriend, Jason, went into action. He opened up to the producer about his kids and his life with Bethenny. He was selling it; he was selling her.

In the car ride home, Jason encouraged Bethenny to do the show, but he also made it clear to her that he would have no part of it. Bethenny thought she had everything to lose—she had an endorsement deal with Pepperidge Farm and a diet/cookbook coming out. She’d already been a finalist (and lost) on
Martha Stewart’s Apprentice.

“If I do this show, and it does badly, I am officially the biggest loser ever. I will have been on
two
reality shows,” she would later remember telling Jason. But perhaps against her better judgment, she agreed to let the producers put her on tape.

Back at Bravo, when I watched a tape of Bethenny, I was against casting her, even though I thought she was really funny. Simply put, it seemed lame to me to have someone who’d already been on one reality show turn up on another. Also thanks to Jill, we had another woman on tape, LuAnn de Lesseps, who seemed a bit dry, but I couldn’t resist the fact that she was a countess, and spoke about her title without a hint of irony. Her husband’s family had given America the Statue of Liberty! I lobbied for the Countess, and she was in. We continued to debate about Bethenny, and although I still had reservations, her acerbic wit and willingness to risk it all convinced us to offer her a contract.

My guess is that if you’re reading this book, you’re the kind of person who knows that the rest is Housewives history. Jill and Bethenny established themselves as a well-heeled Laverne and Shirley and
RHNYC
was a big hit, in part because the viewers loved their friendship.

Of course, it wasn’t all one big happy sorority party. I placed an important call to my parents in St. Louis. “You have to watch this!” I urged them, certain that
New York
would engage them in ways
Orange County
never could. Evelyn was duly amused and an instant habituée. Can a Jew say “Hallelujah”? My mother became wholly invested in the women, their clothes, where they ate, and how they spoke to each other. We began comparing notes like we’d always done with
All My Children.

“I do NOT have a good feeling about THAT COUNTESS,” she’d say. “Your father just can’t STAND the sight of Simon. He has to LEAVE THE ROOM when he comes on! Actually all of them make him very nervous. He gets upset—you can’t believe it!”

“I just can’t get over that people speak to each other this way, in public places,” Dad said. “They make me very nervous, Andy.” Mission mostly accomplished!

A few years later, weeks before we began shooting Season 3 of
RHNYC
, I went with a friend to finally check out Bridgehampton Polo for myself and stepped right into a steaming pile with Jill Zarin!

“I am so fucking mad at Bethenny. You have no idea how horrible she’s been to me. I am letting it all hang out this season. It’s not gonna be pretty, Andy.”

You know I’d be lying if I said I didn’t love a good brouhaha, but I also knew that viewers liked seeing these two
together.
How would a ruptured relationship play on the show? Without trying to control the situation, I gently suggested to Jill that maybe they could work it out before the season started. To my utter chagrin, that failed to happen. All during filming I heard reports from the field: an awkward encounter at a fashion show, Jill playing LuAnn an old nasty voice mail from Bethenny, phones being slammed down—everything but a reconciliation. “No!” I thought. “These women are ruining everything. For us and for themselves!” I had a terrible feeling that the crack in this beloved friendship wouldn’t resonate with our audience and that it would spell the end of the show and doom the spin-off we were planning with Bethenny.

It turned out viewers were enthralled, and that fractious third season did better than the previous two. There was something weirdly relatable—or maybe cautionary—about two good friends calling it quits, possibly forever. And watching the other women play two ends against the middle and scurry back and forth across enemy lines was simultaneously painful and entertaining. (It was enter
pain
ing!)

The next
Housewives
edition to premiere was Atlanta, which would go on to become our highest-rated of all the cities in the franchise. We’d been sitting on a casting tape for a show called
Hotlanta
for a while, featuring a group of affluent black women with energy and attitude. I was excited about the idea of doing a show featuring rich African Americans, a concept I hadn’t seen on TV since
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
The
Hotlanta
women became
The Real Housewives of Atlanta
and all I could say was, “BAM!”

Linnethia “NeNe” Leakes was an instant standout, telling the camera even then, “I walk into a room and my eyes are popping and my lips are busting and BAM!” But every time I watched the tape I became more confused by Kim Zolciak. I didn’t understand her role within the group—first of all, and most obviously, she was white. Just as obvious, her blond mane was a full-on wig. She looked like a country singer to me and seemed more Nashville than Atlanta. She just didn’t feel Bravo, which lots of analysts crunching numbers tell us is watched by the most upscale and educated audience on cable—lots of urban women and their gay best friends, along with hip suburban moms. A fair number of straight men get hooked on the Housewives, too, after their wives cajole them into watching. (My theory: They love having the green light to gawk at hot women with big knockers getting into catfights.) Boy, was I wrong about Kim!

New Jersey
was next. We threw out a casting net in three locations but were immediately drawn to the women from Franklin Lakes—featuring the original five Wives, all of them as Jersey at it gets. It was the first time we considered using women who were related to each other, and the intense family bonds added a whole new dynamic. Amy Introcaso-Davis, a Jersey girl herself, made several trips to the Garden State to rendezvous with the women. These ladies weren’t about to enter into this show lightly or quickly and had many questions about the process and ramifications, questions unlike any we’d heard in the past. For instance: “Has anyone been audited as a result of this show? Or wiretapped?” From the beginning, Caroline Manzo was their leader; everyone in the room seemed to defer to her. Teresa Giudice, an old friend of the Manzos whom we were eager to cast, dropped out of and then back into the show multiple times before we even started shooting. We never got a straight answer about why she kept changing her mind, and at some point I just stopped asking.

We shot the season and it was on the shelf for at least a year before it actually aired, which sometimes happens. We’re kind of like air traffic controllers, making certain all the different programs are lined up for prime landing and takeoff spots. I first met the Jersey ladies in person a few months before they were about to finally debut, when they came to the Bravo offices to meet our PR team. I rarely meet Housewives before their seasons are wrapped and in the can. I get to know them on tape, just like everybody else. (After all, it’s not a real “set” of a show I’d be visiting, like stopping by the
Top Chef
kitchen; If I went on-“set,” I would be busting in on what is essentially someone’s real life. So, I wait.) At that first meeting, the tension in the room was palpable. Remember, for them, all the drama you see in a season has already happened months before in real time, so when the show finally airs, it is like a post-traumatic flashback for them. The Jersey women hadn’t all been together since the infamous Teresa table flip, which had happened over a year earlier, even though viewers wouldn’t see it until the season finale. Grudges, hurt feelings, and resentments had been marinating for months by the time our PR team started discussing the launch plan for the show.

“You see what you’re in for, Andy Cohen?” Dina Manzo taunted me. “Are you ready for this?” Dina and her sister Caroline call me “Andy Cohen”—always both names. By this point, I considered myself an old hand at Housewife-wrangling, and I thought I did, indeed, know what I was in for. I thought wrong, of course. There was so much venom in that room that day, we could’ve shot the reunion right then and there. The only thing missing would have been the hideous Teletubbiesesque set. If you haven’t figured it out yet, there’s nothing I like better than sitting atop a powder keg in a roomful of loose cannons. That’s why I love my job. But making stars—Bravolebrities, if you will—out of everyday alpha women (and men) means that my role as producer can be particularly intense and unpredictable. In fact, I don’t feel like just a producer. I’m often a shrink, or a cheerleader, protector, peacemaker, and referee. I work with a team of really sharp people, including Shari Levine and Christian Barcellos, who are basically making an entire documentary every week, and my day-to-day contribution to the series includes screening multiple cuts of every episode and giving editorial notes on the show (change the music, hold on a shot of someone’s reaction to something, explain in an interview what was happening in a scene, etc.). When I’m not concerning myself with those fine details, I’m involved in casting, tracking stories with the production companies, and mapping out how they’ll play over the season, and the offscreen drama of picking up and negotiating the Housewives’ contracts between every season.

Yes, negotiating with a Real Housewife is a story unto itself, and one whose nitty-gritty details must remain confidential. Suffice it to say, the process can be tense and fraught with emotion. In the early, uncharted territory days, the New York women used Bethenny to do their collective bidding—they fancied themselves akin to the cast of
Friends
. She once called me from Jill Zarin’s closet to demand more money on behalf of the group in exchange for … something I can’t even remember now (more episodes? a reunion?). On
Watch What Happens Live
, Ramona’s tendency toward outbursts inspired the term “Ramotional,” and she’s always been that way. Before Season 3 of
RHNYC
could start, in a highly unusual move, Ramona insisted on accompanying her lawyer to the Bravo offices to negotiate in person. She arrived dressed to the nines, sporting sunglasses indoors. It wasn’t long before she decided that she didn’t care for the direction in which things were heading and Ramotionally stormed out of the room. That was the end of Ramonagotiating in person. Luckily, we were eventually able to hammer out a deal that looked okay to Ramona, with or without her Pinot Grigio.

While I don’t usually interact with the women while they’re in production, on rare occasions I am asked to step in. For instance, a couple of years ago, NeNe tried to get out of joining Kim and Kandi on the last leg of their (classic!) Tardy for the Party Tour. She’d committed to riding on the tour bus, and the other ladies were going to meet up with them in Miami afterward. It was a potentially great way for all the women to come together at the end of the season. We really wanted NeNe on the bus.

“I don’t want to fight with Kim,” NeNe confessed.

I asked her to go on the bus and told her to do what she wanted once there. “Just go have fun,” I said. “Don’t fight. People love seeing you and Kim having fun together—you’re a great team.”

Ultimately, NeNe decided to take the bus with Kandi and Kim, and, of course, just as they were pulling out of Orlando, she got in a massive fight with Kim that lasted the entire four-hour drive to Miami. Now, I’m sure you think I was happy about that, but I was really sorry that Kim and NeNe ended up fighting, because I knew that it wasn’t what NeNe wanted. I can’t imagine that’s what Kim wanted. And that was the fight that caused the final rift in Kim and NeNe’s on-again off-again friendship. The two have barely spoken since, and I really miss seeing them together.

One of my hopes for the women is for them to come across as fun and interesting, to be happy, and to do well as a result of the show. The Housewives can also make serious money, especially when they use the show—with Bravo’s blessing—to brand themselves, the way Bethenny did with her Skinnygirl margarita empire, or Teresa with her Italian cookbooks. But, as it does for anyone, fame can have its own price, even though the prospect of fame is what draws most of the women to participate. In my not always successful role as counselor and guardian, I tell the women never to read what people are saying about them online. Not one of them has listened to me. I can’t say I can blame them—imagine becoming suddenly famous and knowing that complete strangers are writing and commenting about what you said or did months ago. And once they’ve looked, it’s hard not to look again, as fans’ opinions can change on a dime: One minute they hate you for calling someone a “Chinky Chinky Chinaman” (Ugh. See: Vicki,
RHOC
Season 2), and the next they’re crying with you as you send your daughter off to college.

On the night of the
RHBH
series premiere, I begged Camille Grammer to ignore what people were saying about her; having already seen the shows, I knew she was in for a rough season and told her as much, but I promised that the viewers would get behind her toward the end. I checked in with Camille a few times during that season and she was miserable. Her voice was heavy and she sounded despondent. At a time when she was going through such a low point in her life, the fans’ comments hurt her even more. I tried to convince her to poke fun at herself as a defensive strategy, but that’s hard to do when you just don’t feel like laughing at anything. In the meantime, she was labeled “the most hated Housewife in history.” But by season’s end, when Camille showed her true, vulnerable self after learning that her husband, Kelsey Grammer, had been cheating with a twenty-nine-year-old flight attendant, the fans could finally empathize. Camille was vindicated, and relieved.