Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (28 page)

Scott Dunlap, an advertising exec from a gated community called Coto de Casa in Orange County, had picked up a camera and shot some footage of a few of his neighbors, who all happened to have big boobs and big blond hair. I know that sounds blunt, but WOW did it ever describe these women. Amy and Frances Berwick were intrigued and commissioned a development reel, which means Bravo pays a production company to do some more shooting in order for us to get a better idea of what the show might look like.

The development reel featured the women of Coto de Casa talking about their personal lives and ritzy lifestyles. They showed off their homes, which were like fiberglass castles looming behind big gates that miraculously kept people out but let cameras in.

I didn’t discern much self-awareness among these women as they proclaimed how much they detested anything “fake” in people. They all had what looked to me to be a decent amount of silicone up front and very expensive dye jobs that were all the same color. One woman, whose house had a backyard pool with a grotto and waterslide that reminded me of that all-men’s Palm Springs resort, talked a mile a minute about her insurance business, which she said was extremely important to her. It felt kind of unreal to hear a woman who looked like she did talking about … insurance? Her neighbor and good friend was a former Playboy Bunny whose husband was a pro baseball player and whose son freely admitted that his friends’ mothers were MILFs. Another (blonde) told us that every single person in her neighborhood had had breast enhancements. Duh.

The true lives of these women seemed more titillating (sorry, couldn’t resist) than anything I’d seen on daytime TV in
years
. These ladies were completely transparent about their vanity and their love of money, and about wanting to have it all while being the hottest and most well-rounded women in the County of Orange. Unabashed and unfiltered, they meant what they said even though they occasionally contradicted themselves (which were, of course, the best moments). If we got this right, I thought it could be a
Knots Landing
for the millennium: hot women in an aspirational town living the high life, marked by drama both extraordinary and ordinary. ABC’s
Desperate Housewives
was the biggest show on television at the time. Clearly, people loved watching a show about fictional fabulous friends and frenemies living in the same neighborhood. Wouldn’t they love the real thing, too? We changed the name from
Behind the Gates
to
The Real Housewives
, and we were off.

Except that the rough cuts sucked. The confessional interviews where the ladies spoke straight to camera weren’t stylized—they weren’t well lit, and the women didn’t look their best. Something else was missing, too. The women weren’t going deeply into their emotions or being honest about what was happening with their friends. And the stories didn’t always make sense—what they were saying didn’t match the way we saw them acting. Why was Jo bored while Slade was at work? Did Vicki have a love/hate relationship with Jeana, or did she really just hate her? And where was Jeana’s husband all the time?

The more we at Bravo asked the producers out in California for answers to fill in the blanks, the less anyone knew. We discussed killing the
Housewives
before they ever hit the air. In fact, we went so far as to put together a budget to how much of a bath Bravo would take if we just cut our losses and walked away. But—thank the lord—we decided to stay with it and start over again. We parted ways with the original producers and sank even more resources into the
Housewives
by shooting additional interviews with the women and even more footage of their daily lives. Then we headed back to the editing room.

Even with this richer material, we had other problems. For instance, the cast looked like a California Implant Pageant where you couldn’t tell the contestants apart. I wasn’t the only one at Bravo with this issue, and if
we
couldn’t keep them straight after watching hours of footage of them, we certainly couldn’t expect viewers to be able to. That’s when we devised the animated banners and little chapter headings that appear before each person’s scene.

Lauren Zalaznick and Bravo marketing head Jason Klarman came up with the idea of playing off the opening of
Desperate Housewives
, where Teri Hatcher and the gang held apples, by having our ladies hold oranges. Just before the premiere, Lauren tacked “of Orange County” onto the title, in case we ever decided to do another version of the show somewhere else. Bravo exec Shari Levine and I initially objected, worried that the “of Orange County” was so CLUNKY. Plus, given the troubles we’d had in the edit of this show, we just knew the chances that we’d ever replicate it anywhere else were zero. (Yes, I am occasionally a massively misguided idiot.)

I held my breath the first time I saw the show intro for the OC
Housewives.
Each of the women appeared in various pieces of “fashion”—that season it was bust-enhancing satiny tops with a big, bejeweled centerpiece (called “skytops”!)—while saying something that was supposed to define who they were. The statements were along the lines of “I love Botox!” and “Everybody has enormous boobs!” and “Here’s to not being fake!” (If you’re keeping a running tab of how many times I’m mentioning the word “boob,” welcome to my world with the
Housewives.
I’ve talked more about boobs in the last few years than most editors at
Playboy
and way more than any gay man ever should.) Watching that first episode as it aired, I worried that the women were going to think we’d painted them in the most shallow light possible. I was sure they were going to hate it, freak out, and quit. I asked Shari to find out how the women had reacted. She left to make some calls, and after just a few minutes, she returned to my office.

“They absolutely love it.” She smiled. And just like that, I knew that the most important element of the show, the only element, was stable. These women were going to go along for the ride. And the ride? It was going to be wild …

The reviews were mixed. Tom Shales of the
Washington Post
called the women “fascinating bores,” but predicted “sociologists and anthropologists of the future are going to have tons and tons of material to sift through as they try to understand what life was like in the first decade of the 21st century.” David Bianculli of the
New York Daily News
hated it: “Not only did I not care about this quintet of California preeners, but I was rooting against them.” Charles McGrath in the
New York Times
opined, “Like so much reality TV, it’s both educational and grimly fascinating, and leaves you feeling much better about your own life—if for no other reason than that you would never be so stupid as to appear on a show like this.” I did say they were mixed, right? I mean, if you stare at that Shales quote long enough, it is practically a rave of the magnitude normally reserved for British mysteries on PBS!

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting this type of show to win acclaim from the pros; I was much more worried about the critics closer to home. When Graciela called after the first episode, I had been silently questioning whether I was on to something or crazy. Then she gushed: “Vicki Gunvalson? Are you kidding me? Did you make her up? Obsessed. Lauri? She might be my favorite. She’s the Farrah. Is Jeana’s son hot? Doesn’t she look like Wynonna Judd?”

Back in St. Louis,
The Real Housewives of Orange County
wasn’t playing to any standing ovations in the Cohen household. My mom was having none of their self-absorbed nonsense.

“I can’t watch those women,” Evelyn declared. She refused to budge no matter how many times I implored her to give it another try. She only tuned back in the following year for the reunion show and that was because I hosted it. And her comments still weren’t exactly positive.

“Well,
you
looked okay,” she allowed. But “THOSE WOMEN!??” Evelyn would never be swayed by OC.

The first season—only seven episodes—did okay in the ratings for most of the run. Then suddenly, just before the finale, it started popping. Viewers who’d begun watching only to confirm that they found the women repellent somehow became invested in their stories—which proved to be more universal than anybody initially thought.

That first season we established guidelines and rules of thumb for making the show that we still follow today. Though we shoot a lot of footage for each season, we don’t shoot the show like
The Real World
, where cameras follow the stars around 24/7. For Season 2 of
Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
, we shot 1,270 hours of footage to make twenty 44-minute episodes—or a ratio of approximately 85 hours of footage for every 1 hour used. Why do we shoot that much? Because we’re looking for those elements that make the perfect storm of a
Real Housewives
episode, namely, real humor, conflict, emotion, heart, and something totally unexpected—let’s say, a wig pull. Our producers find out what the women have coming up in a given week, and they pick and choose which situations to document. They keep tabs on how the ladies are feeling about each other and what happened the last time they were all together, so that no jarring or confusing gaps are left unexplained. When the ladies meet a friend or another housewife for lunch, the restaurant is called in advance and cleared for shooting. The housewives are not told what to say or how to think—all the footage is unscripted. The drama comes from the casting. We do not cast wallflowers—we want women with a point of view, plenty to say, and the confidence to say it in the presence of equally outspoken women. What started as a possible one-off experiment became an ensemble drama with story lines as complex as anything anyone could ever write.

At this point, we knew we were on to something. Plus, we had at trick up our sleeves that we didn’t even realize was there at first. Amy’s team had another show in development called
Manhattan Moms
, which featured two women that we absolutely loved, Jill Zarin and Alex McCord. They didn’t know each other, but they would soon enough. Jill was a fast-talking Upper East Side yenta type. (Her mother, Gloria, would castigate me years later for using the term “yenta,” but I always meant it with love.) Alex and her Australian husband, Simon (proud owner of the glossiest red leather pants mankind has ever seen), were from a completely different mold: outsiders striving to be insiders who were breeding their kids for overachievement. We thought we had the seed of a decent show on our hands, but with the success of
The Real Housewives of Orange County
, it occurred to us that it might be smart to turn
Manhattan Moms
into
The Real Housewives of New York City
. (If I didn’t thank her at the time, I would like to now publicly thank Lauren Zalaznik for her stroke of brilliance in adding a location to the original franchise title. It wasn’t clunky; it was genius.) The mere thought of a
Real Housewives of New York City
series gave me goose bumps, because I knew firsthand that women in New York were nothing like our Orange County ladies. Only the packaging and themes of the shows would be similar. And once we realized that our format could work somewhere else, producing a wildly different show depending on where it was set, we could not stop thinking of the possibilities. And indeed, every series has its own flavor: OC is cul-de-sac normality. Atlanta is campy and over the top. Jersey is hot-tempered and clannish. DC was thoughtful and provocative. Beverly Hills is image-conscious and
this
close to Hollywood. Miami is spicy and tele-novelic. New York is aggressive and controlling.

We set out to cast more women in New York and fell into the method we still use today—ask the women themselves to be our talent scouts. In this case, Jill Zarin became a great resource for us. In addition to Ramona, she brought us several other women in her circle, all of whom would have been perfect. But for one reason or another, women kept falling out—one cosmetics company executive couldn’t get her boss to agree to her appearing on the show, while another couldn’t convince her husband to go for it (both common obstacles that wind up quashing would-be wives). We passed our start date with two roles still to fill, so we started shooting with just Jill, Ramona, and Alex, knowing that footage would be unusable if we could not nail down the final cast. Finally, we told the producers and the women that we were canceling the show before it ever began if we didn’t get two more cast members. And then the reality TV gods smiled upon us, orchestrating a fantastical event that changed the face of the franchise.

It was a summer Saturday in the Hamptons—
Super
Saturday, to be exact, when a major shopping fund-raiser to fight breast cancer coincides with a big polo event. All you need to know about Super Saturday is that it’s a madhouse. On this particular Super Saturday afternoon, two desperate people—both desperate for something
more
—met at a place that is a magnet for desperate people … the polo tent in Bridgehampton.

Bethenny Frankel was in a fight with her boyfriend, and despite a splitting headache, she’d forced herself to go to that tent to network. She wanted to brand herself as a celebrity chef and she was searching for a photographer to take her picture, hoping that that picture might land somewhere and lead to something. She was looking for anything that might get her noticed and get her face out there. She was in a vile mood and, like I said, desperate.

“You skinny bitch! Look at you! Where’d you get the VIP bracelet?” There was no mistaking the nasal honk of Jill Zarin across the noisy tent.

Bethenny had met Jill several times out and about on the New York social circuit. They were just casual acquaintances, but that was all about to change forever. Jill had brought one of our casting producers with her to the polo tent. With the fate of her show on the line, Jill wanted to help. Jill, as we now know, is big on helping.