Then, later in the season, the undeterrable Jill gave me an incredible oil painting of Ginger dressed as Queen Elizabeth. This could have been considered passive-aggressive, given that Giggy is a Brit and Ginger seemed to be mocking his monarch, but the portrait was actually too hilarious to not feature on the show. It was amazing! Maybe Ginger wasn’t so bad! Jill was thrilled and said we could keep it for as long as we wanted, and I probably would have left it on the set forever, because I really did admire it. But after Jill’s contract was not renewed for a fifth season of The Real Housewives of New York, we got a call asking that we please send the portrait back. And who could blame her for wanting to repossess it? Ginger never looked better or seemed more interesting than she did in that painting.
Even though I may not love every Real Housepet of every Real Housewife, I do love that all of their mommies anthropomorphize them by dressing them to the nines and setting up Twitter accounts for them and taking them to nicer restaurants than I can get into. The absurd doggy drama juxtaposed against the absurd but real human drama—now that’s television.
Back in Beverly Hills, Adrienne Maloof got a German shepherd from her husband, Paul, as a surprise birthday present at the end of Season 1. But Adrienne quite possibly realized that there are no designer totes or cute outfits for German shepherds, meaning that they are not good accessory dogs. So for the opening of Season 2, she brought in a ringer—a mini-schnauzer named Jackpot. This made Giggy very insecure, and I made matters worse—with my wicked old button-pushing tendency again—by running a pup popularity contest on WWHL asking viewers whether they preferred Giggy or Jackpot. Jackpot won.
From @Giggythepom to “OK @BravoAndy I am not coming out, ever.”
For male dogs, these two were really acting like a couple of bitches! I got the silent treatment from Giggy for weeks after that poll. It was kind of nice to have more time to interact with actual people. But I couldn’t let the bad blood go on between us, so I had the brilliant idea of commissioning Mad Fashion designer Chris March to make me a Giggy costume for my Halloween party on the show. Chris is a genius, so I trusted him implicitly and never even looked at the costume until I was getting dressed and made up for the live show. I looked like I was in blackface with a decapitated grizzly bear on my head, and my hands were swaddled in huge furry paws that made it very difficult to sip my cocktail, which I desperately needed for hydration because the costume was a sauna, and I was shvitzing like crazy. Worst of all, the costume, the heat, and maybe the cocktails made me kind of delirious/crazy/woozy, and I felt the inexplicable need to punctuate my comments with weird little barks, which didn’t sound at all like Giggy. I sounded like GINGER!
Succumbing to heatstroke in a dog costume on national TV, I had to wonder: How the hell did I get here?
Let’s start from the start, shall we?
* * *
One afternoon in early 2005, Amy Introcaso-Davis, then head of development at Bravo, hovered in my office doorway with a VHS tape in her hand and a glint in her eye.
“Watch this,” she said, handing me the tape, “because it’s coming your way.” Amy’s team frequently passed ideas in various stages of development to the production department, which I headed.
“It’s called Behind the Gates,” Amy explained.
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
