When we told Lisa Vanderpump she was in the running, she gave us a taste of her shtick: “Hold on a minute. I’m having sex with my husband but I’m going to push him off so I can talk to you.” I saw in her the potential for a narrator, someone Joan Collinsesque to lay down the rules of Beverly Hills. (Indeed, her intro would later declare that she “made the rules in Beverly Hills.”) Lisa’s neighbor, Adrienne Maloof, couldn’t decide whether to do the show and asked executive producer Alex Baskin, “If you were me, would you do the show?” He replied, “No, and I’d be making a huge mistake.” Adrienne was in. Through Adrienne, we found Taylor Armstrong, whose daughter went to Adrienne’s kids’ school. The two used to meet for coffee after dropping off the kids. We put an offer out to the Richards sisters, Kim and Kyle, who had a competing offer from another channel to star in a docuseries with their sister Kathy Hilton. Over Thanksgiving break 2009, while we were dealing with the Salahi mess, Kim and Kyle were wrestling over whether to be Beverly Hills Housewives or 3 Sisters.
Just before production began, Kyle was looking through her address book to see if there was anyone else she knew who’d be perfect for the cast. She came across Camille Grammer’s name, not realizing she was helping to cast her eventual arch nemesis. Grammer seemed indifferent and nervous about the prospect, but she came in the next day and shot an interview with Evolution. The production company thought her husband would never let her do the show in a million years. Imagine their shock when Kelsey Grammer himself called the casting director, expressing his full support of his wife’s participation and saying that he would do whatever he could to make it happen. His wife was still on the fence when producers Douglas Ross and Baskin visited their Malibu compound.
“These guys seem like nice guys—they seem like we can trust them,” said Kelsey, briskly dismissing her concerns. In the meantime, Kelsey had enlisted Adrienne and Paul to get Camille to do the show. (In hindsight, it appears that Grammer may have been trying to keep his wife busy with the show while he moved to New York to have an affair.) His campaign worked, and we had six Housewives.
During that first season, the Armstrongs’ marriage seemed tense and very business-oriented. Taylor bragged about her husband’s wealth, saying, “He’s richer than Texas,” and threw a $60,000 birthday party for their five-year-old daughter. I should mention that if someone says they’re going to throw a $60,000 birthday party for their five-year-old, as Taylor did, we’re going to be there, for sure. But we never suggest that people go on shopping sprees, or spend money they may or may not have, or pretend to own a mansion that’s not theirs.
On the show, Russell appeared cold and distant to his wife, and he told producers that though he didn’t love how it was edited, he loved the show. His biggest complaint that season concerned a dinner that had been shot in Lisa’s wine cellar in which her friend Mohamed accused Russell of stealing $15 million from him. He was upset about this potentially airing, and to his delight the scene never made it into the show (not because of his complaints, mind you.) He boasted at the end of the season that his business was up “900 percent” since the show started airing, and he told producers at Evolution that he was interested in buying their company.
What I didn’t know was that by the end of Season 1, Taylor had already confided in her castmates about alleged physical abuse by Russell. It became kind of an open secret, and though I only found out after we’d wrapped, I can’t say that I was surprised. The whispers in the cast were that Taylor was on her way out of the marriage and would be before we shot more. By the time we rolled on Season 2, the women were having frank and difficult conversations with Taylor about her life with Russell, but they were mainly happening off-camera. Meanwhile, Russell sent Camille and the producers a letter threatening to sue anyone who said anything defamatory about him on the show. But at no time during production of that season did Russell ask to be taken off the show.
We’d planned to wrap that season with a party we’d shot at Lisa’s restaurant, Sur, where all of the friends were seeing Taylor for the first time since she’d left her husband. Days after that party, Lisa and Kyle were awakened at 6 a.m. by a phone call from TMZ chief Harvey Levin with the news that Russell Armstrong had been found dead, an apparent suicide. At that moment, I was on vacation (I always seem to be on vacation when bad things happen), but nonetheless on the phone with Bravo exec Christian Barcellos discussing a crisis with the Jersey Housewives when an e-mail popped up on my BlackBerry with the TMZ.com report that Russell Armstrong had hanged himself. I was stunned. Speechless. I could barely say the words to Christian, and immediately thought of Taylor, and especially of their daughter Kennedy. Next came thoughts about the position we were in. What should Bravo do? The suicide raised many questions that nobody ever even dreamed would come up. We had to figure out what we should do with a show in which Taylor and Russell’s story played a big, dark, and real part.
I spent the next several weeks pacing around with a phone to my ear, rewatching the first eleven episodes of the series, which was due to premiere in a month. The conversations—with Evolution, the women, our lawyers, our PR people—were exhaustive and deliberate. We had serious decisions to make that would affect a family already going through
