Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (34 page)

The whole setup for the New Jersey Season 1 reunion felt like a comedy waiting to happen. We had two very pregnant participants—Jacqueline and Teresa. Because Jacqueline’s due date was a few days away, we had to shoot close to her hospital and wound up in a small commercial studio somewhere in the middle of Jersey; to be more precise, amid abandoned railroad tracks and empty warehouses. If anybody had wanted to get rid of
my
body, there would have been no lack of places to stash it, as long as someone else wasn’t already buried there. When I walked in that morning, I took one look at the set and turned to Bravo exec Christian Barcellos, my on-site producer and partner-in-crime at almost every reunion, and declared it the ugliest we’d ever used.

How to describe this set … a chessboard-style black-and-white-tiled floor; the tackiest white sofa and loveseat flanking what was to be my chair, a wide white baroque throne with wings; a big white filigreed coffee table topped with a massive, funereal flower arrangement in the shape of New Jersey; and a background resembling an endless Teletubbiesesque blue sky with several large chandeliers hanging from nowhere. Christian, usually a pro at making last-minute lighting tweaks that magically transform the feel of a set, said, “Well, it does feel like a cross between
The Avengers
and
Heaven Can Wait
, but we’re working on making the blue darker.” When we sent a preview picture to Shari Levine at Bravo HQ, she e-mailed back: “I can’t stop laughing. That is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.” The New Jersey Housewives always ride that line between over-the-top and leopard chic—it’s part of the fun of the show—but this set was like New Jersey on a bad acid trip.

Despite the god-awful set, we thought it would be a great show: Tension had been high among the ladies
for over a year
and the confrontations were bound to be epic. When I walk into a reunion taping, the first person I look for is Christian, who’s always ready to brief me on the moods of the various ladies. And on that day it went something like this:

I especially enjoy the flowers in the shape of New Jersey.

“Danielle is sequestered on the other side of the building, far from the others. They won’t run into each other. She’s ready to go and in a great mood. You need to go talk Caroline off the ledge—there’s something that’s been going on between Dina’s family and Danielle since we wrapped and Caroline is furious and freaked out.

“She wants to speak with you. Neither she nor Jacqueline nor Dina will mention what’s going on, and Dina is threatening to walk off the set if anything gets ugly and if this
thing
gets brought up. We don’t know what
it
is. Jacqueline looks ready to give birth—we have a nurse on the set—but she, Caroline, and Teresa say there’s more about the book surrounding Danielle’s past they want to expose. They’re nervous but fired up. Teresa’s in there, making jokes and in a great mood. Go say hi to Danielle first.”

Good morning to you, too, Christian.

I sat down in my heavenly throne knowing that we had all the ingredients, or “ingredientses” as Teresa might say, for a bang-up show. I do remember it well, but mainly for the long, painful silences. Nothing happened. Dina and Jacqueline froze and totally clammed up. I pushed and prodded, but the more I tried to get them to reveal their feelings, to admit how they really felt about each other, the further in the other direction they went. As their castmates looked on in shock, they essentially said they were willing to give Danielle another chance. If you’d seen the season that preceded this discussion, the sentiment seemed completely unreal, unbelievable, and of suspicious motivation. Then, Teresa and Caroline, obviously frustrated with their costars but not willing to climb out onto any limbs themselves, basically let Danielle off the hook. It was only in the last five minutes that Caroline confronted Danielle with a cryptic, “You are garbage. What you did to my family was so terrible…” For years people have asked me what the hell Danielle had done to that family. Well, finally, here is what I know: The allegation was that Danielle had somehow gotten involved in a matter involving Dina’s custody of her daughter, Lexi. Danielle, of course, denied it, and, to my knowledge, the matter went no further.

The next day, Sirens Media, our producers of
RHNJ
, called to say Jacqueline and Caroline felt like they had more to say and were even suggesting that they do a “do-over” to get out their feelings for Danielle. The truth was, they didn’t want us to use the footage of Caroline crying about Danielle and the secret issue.

Another shot? A do-over? There are no do-over reunion shows! In happier news, Jacqueline’s baby, Christopher, was indeed born two days later. And as far as I know, nobody welcomed him to this world with a New Jersey–shaped flower arrangement.

Another highly anticipated reunion turned into a snore with Season 2 of
RHA
, which had been a fever-pitch rage-fest all season long, full of wig-pulls, controversy over Kim’s debut single “Tardy for the Party,” even warring fashion lines (there isn’t enough tape stock in Japan to satisfy my love for discussing She by Sheree). But when I got to the set that morning, I encountered five very shut-down Atlanta Housewives who had taken some sort of vow of silence. Two days before, I’d had my one and only cross conversation with NeNe Leakes. I actually don’t know that I’d call it a “conversation,” and “cross” may be too polite a word; she actually called, screamed at me for five minutes, and hung up. She was torrentially unhappy with the finale, which she’d just finished watching in preparation for the reunion show. It was the big She by Sheree fashion show and she didn’t like how she was portrayed, nor did she care for the epilogue cards about each of the women at the end.

The lack of agita during that reunion was causing
me
agita, with the women not playing along with the questions, not backing up things they’d said during the season, and refusing to call each other out regarding obvious issues. The only one on-set getting any shade from the women was me. At one point I turned to NeNe and asked, “What’d you do with NeNe?” During the break, I chastised them: “You know what, this is so BORING. I don’t want you to fight. I could give a shit whether you fight or not, just be
yourselves
. Don’t clam up.” But, with the exception of Kandi, the women never opened up, and the viewers were pissed. (“Why were the women so SHUT DOWN?! They decided to stop talking at the REUNION? What is with them?!!”) Again, those expectations that a huge, drama-filled season equals a huge, drama-filled reunion show will get you every time.

Of course, as you know, it’s not always stony silence—far from it. The New York reunions are unique for their frenetic, unwieldy energy. The
RHNYC
women have this uncanny ability to talk over each other at peak decibel level; it’s like being trapped in an Evelyn Cohen echo chamber. When they go at it, there’s no interrupting them. And yet, as loud and nasty as they got, there was something that always amused me about watching Jill and Ramona fight over almost anything, be it a tennis match, RSVPing to a party, or what happened in front of a step and repeat. Watching any Jill vs. Ramona kerfuffle is like indulging in a slushie—it’ll give you a headache, but that won’t stop you from enjoying it. There is something so primal about the atmosphere the New York women create that I remember breaking for lunch at Season 2’s reunion at Cipriani and feeling that it might be perfectly acceptable for me to strip off my clothes and eat raw meat with my bare hands. (Note: I quickly decided against this.)

One of the most common questions people ask me is, “How do you
deal
with those
women
?” The main answer is that I am crazy about them and the show. These women are funny, they are earnest about what’s important to them, they dress to the nines for every occasion, they often only take themselves seriously, and most of them recognize the simultaneous gravity and sheer absurdity of the end-of-season forum. It is like a courtroom of manners and etiquette and they’re the overdressed star witnesses. And me? Even as I’m caught in the cross fire during an intense exchange, my producer-brain is parsing what they’ve said and determining if we’re getting what we need to make an exciting TV show, whether it’ll be enough content for two parts, and if the fans will feel like they got enough drama, excitement, news, and fun. I’ll admit that I’ve had my moments when I was too exhausted to listen to one more word, or if I did, I would simply lose it, but I never crossed that boundary. Not until minute 45 of the
Real Housewives of New York
Season 4 reunion taping. Allow me to relive my shame.

The morning had started out intensely, with Jill asking anyone who would listen whether she was in the “A Position”—not a term anyone on any reunion set had ever actually used, but which in her mind meant seated beside me. I knew from
Watch What Happens Live
that she was big on seating placement: “I would like to request to sit next to Andy,” she’d tell our booker, as though there were tons of other options on our tiny set. Needless to say, she wasn’t pleased to discover that LuAnn and Ramona had already been assigned seats on either side of me.

In the final moments before we started rolling tape, Alex arrived on-set and was also annoyed about the seating arrangement. She was supposed to sit on the far end of the couch, the same position she’d had for every other reunion show. “I don’t want to sit here. Can I sit further in? I’m always on the end. I’m tired of being on the end!” I told her to think of herself as the voice of reason on the end, which she very often was, but she still wasn’t happy.

With all the talk about “Where am I sitting?”—as if these grown women were little kids at a birthday party table before cake—by the time we got rolling I was already a little spent, and you can see it on my face at the top of the show when Alex and I curtly greet each other. That was as quiet as things got, though, because once we were off to the races, I was in the middle of a pack of wild beasts roaring and screeching simultaneously over each other. I tried to get them to quiet down, or at least speak one at a time, to no avail. It was as if they couldn’t hear each other. Or me. Unfortunately, it was the only reunion show taping my parents had ever attended. They stopped by on their way to a matinee of
Book of Mormon
.

“Please let each other speak! One at a time!” I begged.

I had the Countess to my right, and I tried to appeal to her respect for etiquette and called for decorum. No one listened. I moved on to sporadically telling them all to “
Shut
UP!” Nothing. To give you an idea of the scene, read this mini-transcript really fast and imagine everyone speaking at once:

Jill:
You can give it but you can’t take it.

Ramona:
I can take anything, whatever you want to give to me. You just said …

Kelly:
You don’t want to encourage that kind of behavior.

Ramona:
… my husband, inferring whatever.

Jill:
No, go ahead … what about your husband?

Ramona:
Nothing. He’s a great man, I’m very lucky. I wish you had a great husband like mine because I know you don’t.

Countess:
You know what … I love Bobby.

Kelly:
I love Bobby!

Jill:
Were you there? WERE YOU THERE? Because I got …

Ramona:
Get a life! Get a life, loser!

Jill:
Lowlife!

Andy:
Shut up!

Alex:
Shhhhhh!

Andy:
Shut up and let me ask about it, okay? You guys are acting like beasts today!

A half hour into shooting and I was yelling at grown women, telling them to shut up, something I could not have pictured myself saying to anyone just an hour before. Oh, and it wasn’t working. Finally, I screamed at the top of my lungs, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!”

And they did. We all apologized to each other and moved on. Hours later, as we dissected the situation that led to me yelling at them—almost like an instant reunion for the reunion—they agreed that me yelling “STFU” was the only thing that could have actually gotten them to do it. When we took our next break, I remembered that my poor parents, who’d come to New York hoping to see their son in action, making them proud, had instead witnessed me dropping an F-bomb to a bunch of ladies in cocktail dresses. Luckily, they were on my side.