Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (25 page)

The show combined two things I adore, a nostalgic (and personal favorite) brand plus reality stars. We hired Bob “The Bachelor” Guiney, notorious
Apprentice
baddie Omarosa, and party girl Trishelle from
The Real World
to be our sideline reporters. Then we cast alumni from reality’s greatest hits, including
Survivor
,
The Amazing Race
,
Project Runway
,
American Idol
, and
Big Brother
to compete. We even threw in someone from
Showdog Moms and Dads
to boost the kitsch factor. I absolutely could not envision a future in which this brilliant show could be anything other than a runaway smash. But my crystal clear vision was actually more like tunnel vision, because Frances didn’t share the passion Lauren and I had for the project. But I persisted. I mean, what’s not to love about Charla, a little person who had kicked ass on
Amazing Race
, going head to head against the surgically reconstructed winner of
The Swan
in a jousting duel? That
happened
, by the way. Charla lost, but not before almost re-rearranging Rachel’s face (again).

We shot the show on the campus of Pepperdine University in Los Angeles, exactly where the original
Battle of the Network Stars
was filmed. We revived its logo and outfits including teeny Speedos and big, fat sweatbands. I was in a sea of modern pop culture meets seventies camp with a strong undercurrent of irony, and I was loving every minute of it.

Watching the reality stars, I observed something that I tell everyone to this day: They are exactly as they appear on-screen. If Omarosa is portrayed as a raving bitch on-screen, it’s most likely because she has moments when she’s a raving bitch. If somebody was a slut in a hot tub on
The Real World
, you might hear a story on-set about them being slutty in, you guessed it, a hot tub. You get the idea. When people ask me what the Housewives are like, I tell them to watch the show. The same can be said for the stars of every other Bravo show as well, whether it’s the fun of Rachel Zoe or the intensity of Patti Stanger. You get what you want from them because they’re just being themselves, as opposed to an actor who might be crazy fun in a bunch of comedies but be a droll bore in person.

Despite her doubts surrounding the show, Frances was good enough to put the full complement of Bravo’s resources behind it, and
Battle of the Network Reality Stars
premiered amid a nationwide marketing blitz in magazines and billboards and on the sides of buses. And it was a complete flop. A total stink bomb. And it was all mine. I learned a great lesson with that one, which was not only to embrace your mistakes, but to analyze the hell out of them to figure out why you made them. What I found out in that case was what Frances had predicted and had been trying to tell me all along: that the show might’ve worked on another network, but that it was the totally wrong fit for Bravo. Today I have the poster for the show (featuring various reality stars in a tug-of-war) up in my office just to remind me: It is better to fail spectacularly and learn from it than it is to never fail and learn nothing.

Q:
How in the hell did
Being Bobby Brown
ever happen, and why have all traces of its existence vanished?

A:
If any show on Bravo embraces the “truth is stranger than fiction” premise, it’s the story of
Being Bobby Brown
. Brown had allowed an Atlanta-based production company to follow him and his family with the intention of creating a docuseries about Bobby’s comeback. The company showed Bravo some footage, which was at once funny and shocking because it featured the former New Edition singer and his megastar wife, Whitney Houston, in some compromising and uncomfortable situations. I had idolized Whitney for years, and even though it could be painful to see her this way, more raw than ever before, as a fan I could still see the incredible light within her shining through. She was a superstar. We licensed the footage and attempted to make nine airable episodes out of it—no small feat, given the complete lack of narrative in what had been shot. There was no sense to be made out of the couple’s life—they seemed to live out of random hotels in Atlanta and may or may not have been completely high for the duration of shooting. Houston’s agent and family were horrified by the entire spectacle, but Whitney agreed to participate for her love of Bobby—or “bah-BAY!” as she called him.

The show was a big, surreal hit, and when the run ended, Dave Serwatka and I flew down to Atlanta the day after Thanksgiving for a lunch with “bah-BAY!” and—small world alert!—his attorney, future Atlanta Housewife Phaedra Parks, to discuss the possibility of a second season of the show. The unspoken issue was that Houston’s people had made it clear that Whitney was saying “
Hell
to the
no
” to a second season, and without her, Bravo didn’t want the show. Although the title suggested that Bobby Brown was the star, Whitney was a huge part of its success. People tuned in to see the “real” Whitney, circa 2005, and visor askew and potty mouthed, she never disappointed. After discussing all the things that Bobby had coming up in his life that he felt would make interesting episodes with or without his wife on-camera, he finally cut to the chase with startling clarity.

“How many episodes would Whitney have to appear in if you picked the show up?” said Bobby.

“Well … um,” I stammered, “let’s say we did ten episodes. If we did ten episodes then I’d say … she’d have to appear in … maybe at least nine of them?” As the lunch wound down, Dave and I realized the series was done. But just before we left the table I had a last-minute Hail Mary brainstorm.

“What about a
Being Bobby Brown
Christmas special?!” I asked. “Can you picture it? You and Whitney picking out a tree and buying presents for Bobbi Kristina! And your Pops carving the ham?” Brown loved the idea and it was shot two weeks later and rushed to air. It turned out to be the most whacked-out TV Christmas event since Chewbacca tried to return to his home planet in time for “Life Day” in the
Star Wars Holiday Special
, with guest stars Harvey Korman and Bea Arthur. Whitney and Bobby had a massive fight the day of shooting and locked the crew out, and when they finally did appear, they seemed influenced by something stronger than just the holiday spirit. The reason you won’t ever see a second of that show again is because Houston’s people made sure that much like the
Star Wars Holiday Special
,
Being Bobby Brown
would only be seen once. When she died tragically just as I was finishing this book, Joe Caramanica wrote about the show in his
New York Times
appreciation of the star: “She looked not just lean but gaunt, and she was both a robust and erratic presence. It was the sort of reality that rarely makes it to reality television.” Happily for Whitney, her legacy is not this show but her great music and golden voice.

Q:
Tell the truth, have you and Jeff Lewis ever dated?

A:
Let me start by saying that stepping into the world of
Flipping Out
to shoot a reunion is a nutso experience. You are actually entering Jeff Lewis’s life, which is to say, the life of a high-profile house flipper/interior designer who happens to suffer from OCD. We usually shoot in whatever home Jeff is living in at the time, where his maid, Zoila Chavez, is puttering around in her uniform and full hair/makeup, bitching at “Yeff” under her breath. It really is what it looks like on TV.

Viewers think Jeff and I have a “Sam and Diane” dynamic, and we do get a huge kick out of each other and love to push each other’s buttons. We fell into that rapport when we met for the first time, for lunch at Arnie Morton’s in LA, just before we were to go into production on the first season of the show. He had two goals at the lunch: First, he wanted Jenni Pulos, his assistant and the reason for the show’s existence in the first place (I told this story in the last chapter, so check it out if you forgot), to have a producing credit—to which I agreed. Second, he wanted to find out how many millions of viewers he needed in order to be the highest-rated show on Bravo. I kept telling him not to worry about the ratings and that I had no expectation of his show being the highest-rated on Bravo, but he would not let it rest. He assured me he would do whatever it took to make a great show and that he’d essentially never turn the camera off during his entire production period. He lived up to that promise, and one of the reasons that show is so great is that the camera doesn’t miss a thing. Meanwhile, I spent much of the lunch staring at his lips and much of that first reunion asking every possible lip-related question I could think of. Have you ever really looked at Jeff Lewis’s lips? They are quite remarkable.

On second thought, we look pretty good together.

Oh, and we haven’t dated.

Q:
Is Bravo gay?

A:
That is a super-deep question. I am attracted to and excited by Bravo. I have been in a long-term relationship with Bravo. But because it is a television network, and not a person, I’m not entirely sure you can call it “gay.” If I had to assign a sexual orientation to it, I would say Bravo is maybe bisexual, because I think at the end of the night, this fun-loving, freewheeling network would be open to going home with whomever it fancied. During my tenure there, we’ve always had an abundant population of gay boys and girls swimming in the Bravo pool, no doubt because we’ve showcased people who are leaders in the fields of food, fashion, beauty, design, and pop culture, where it is safe to say the gay community is well represented. And if you identify Bravo as being “gay” and you assume that was all my doing, I’d like to point out how much gayer Bravo was
before
I even got there.
Boy Meets Boy
?
Gay Weddings
?
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
?
Manhunt
? All green-lit before my time, by my boss, British flower, wife, and mother Frances Berwick. Of course, not every single show on the network had an obviously gay theme before I got here. Bravo was also showing things like Cirque du Soleil and
Inside the Actor’s Studio
. Those are kinda straightish, no?

Maybe the reason some people think of Bravo as gay is because we never shied away from that subject matter the way other networks did, and therefore if you tried to put together a list of some of the all-time gayest moments on Bravo, your head might explode. Because I’m a trained professional, I’ve come up with a few that are top on my mind:

Queer Eye
guy Carson Kressley deciding to surprise the Fab 5 by getting bare-assed naked at a Straight Guy’s house, and the Fab 5 locking him outside

Project Runway
designer Andrae and other homosexual contestants making dresses out of flowers as Tim Gunn critiqued