Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (27 page)

Being manhandled before the launch of Season 2 of
The Real Housewives of Orange County

THE HOUSEWIVES

This is the point in the book when housewives take over my life. Sure, I’d always worshipped divas. But housewife divas? I only knew them from the soaps … which I guess means I actually knew them pretty well. The
Housewives
franchise was going strong before I realized that my youthful days of watching
All My Children
had not been misspent, but incredibly
well
spent. I had unknowingly groomed myself for career success!

Before I go in deep about the ladies, I’m going to tell you a story about their dogs. Why? Because the biggest divas of all do not have two beautifully waxed legs, but four furry ones, and their antics encapsulate one quality I find so endearing about the Housewives—the absurdity. And I love being in the middle of it all.

Before Bravo, I’d never paid any attention to pets—my sister and I had a puppy for exactly twenty-four hours, returning home from school to find it gone, sent to “a farm” by my clever mother, who’d looked into her future and seen fifteen years of taking care of it with no help from us. We were devastated, but not scarred enough for me to remember the banished creature’s name. My life proceeded happily from that point on in an almost completely petless fashion, with the exception of my brief crush on Tammy Faye Bakker’s outrageous dog, Tuppins. Then came Dina Manzo of the New Jersey cast and her hairless cat, Grandma Wrinkles, and I was shocked awake from my pet-related apathy. Grandma Wrinkles was impossible to ignore, and that is because she was one of the ugliest animals I’d ever seen. When Caroline Manzo reported that old GW stank like bacon, I became mildly obsessed—from afar. A bacon-scented hairless cat named Grandma Wrinkles? As they say, you cannot make this shit up. When Dina eventually brought the animal to the Clubhouse, I fell in love. More accurately, I fell in love with hating her. Because while she didn’t leave fur everywhere—how could she?—I swear she left a faint oily spot where she rested her scaly body on the lap of one of my favorite suits. Kind of like bacon does to a paper towel. While remaining disgusted with the cat, I have grown to admire her mistress’s eternal devotion to her, despite how positively unappealing she is on every level. Even after Dina left the show, Grandma Wrinkles and I stayed in touch. (Thank God for e-mail, because I plan never to literally touch her again.)

Of course, I am not averse to all follicularly challenged animals. You know who I am talking about: Sir Giggy Vanderpump, Lisa Vanderpump’s alopecia-stricken Pomeranian, the ultimate Beverly Hills pampered pet, with his own canopied lounge by the pool and a wardrobe fit for a miniature drag queen with expensive taste and a love of pills. Giggy became an instant sensation, and even I couldn’t help but go nuts over that dog on
Watch What Happens: Live
, featuring him on the show more than many human Bravolebrities. Even when Giggy’s not with me, he’s there—his framed picture sits over my shoulder on the show.

On New Year’s Eve 2011, a new kind of TV history was made when I officiated—live—the first televised wedding between a dog and a cat. Lisa and Dina stood by as Grandma Wrinkles and Giggy committed themselves to holy matrimony. I’m sure the American Family Association let out a big “I told you so” in seeing that gay marriage led to exactly what they’d feared, unions of hairless animals of different species. And to tell the truth, at the last minute, I’d had doubts about going through with the whole thing. During the wedding rehearsal, I asked the obvious question we’d all overlooked due to our hysterical obsession with the housepets:

“Is this going to be stupid?”

“Well, it’s not going to be
smart
,” producer Caissie St. Onge replied.

Our ratings for the show peaked at 12:15 a.m., at the exact moment of the wedding. And while the Wrinkles-Vanderpump “marriage” was over faster than Kim Kardashian’s, it taught me something important: Don’t question the stupidity of a stunt you’re going to do on your show fifteen minutes after you’ve dropped a big ball of wigs from the ceiling to ring in the New Year. Stupidity is sometimes what it’s all about.

Giggy became so popular that he started a Twitter feed, @Giggythepom, and I’d find myself in a meeting, or on a date, as my BlackBerry buzzed with a fresh tweet. From a hairless Pomeranian.

From @Giggythepom to @BravoAndy “Oh woofee! Mistress and I saw next week’s episode but I’m not in it enough! I look cute though!”

From @Giggythepom to @BravoAndy “Rum Tee Tum, you moved my picture in the Clubhouse. Mistress and I aren’t happy!”

Giggy’s complaints about the placement of his photograph became a constant every week when I went off the air. If it was moved in the slightest, that “dog” would “notice” and I would hear about it. And the “dog” would rile up his followers to flood my Twitter with comments. Around the time Giggymania reached its fever pitch, the New York Housewives were returning for their fourth season. My BlackBerry buzzed.

From @realgingerzarin to @BravoAndy “Annndy! It’s me, Ginger! Follow me!”

It was Jill Zarin’s dog, Ginger. Ginger had always been a mainstay of the New York Housewives and what I’d call a yippety dog. And while I’ve been known to profess my love of ginger people, Ginger Zarin was just not my cup of tea. I used to rib Jill about how much I didn’t care for her Chihuahua and she’d jab back that I was going to one day fall in love with Ginger and beg to adopt her. I had my doubts.

From @realgingerzarin to @BravoAndy “OBSESSED yet uncle @bravoandy?”

From @realgingerzarin to @BravoAndy “Good morning Uncle Andy! Have a nice weekend! I know you will obsess over me someday!”

Now I don’t know if Ginger was tweeting for herself or if she was having someone else do it, but whoever it was seemed to have a poor grasp of how obsession works. Because it is rare that a person knows someone, or some dog, for four years and THEN becomes obsessed. It’s usually the opposite.

From @realgingerzarin to “Ask @BravoAndy where my picture is in the Clubhouse? Sad?”

From @realgingerzarin to @BravoAndy “Follow mommy @JillZarin and follow ME @realgingerzarin.”

Um, who was supposed to be obsessed with whom again? I wondered if I would seem crazy if I contacted my attorney about taking a restraining order out on a canine because I was being stalked by a dog on Twitter.

I didn’t have the heart to block @realgingerzarin, but I ignored the tweets and I never followed her. I had to draw the line somewhere. When Jill was booked on
Watch What Happens Live
’s one hundredth episode, the night of
RHNYC
’s fourth season premiere, she insisted on bringing Ginger even though I told her I was concerned that the dog would yip and yap through the show (unlike darling Giggy, who always seems … sedate … and was possibly born without a voice box). So, Ginger arrived dressed in what looked like a miniature Madame Butterfly outfit—a doggy kimono!—which Jill announced was “in honor” of the recent (devastating) earthquake in Japan … I did not even know how to respond to that one. I still don’t. During that show, Jill presented me with a framed picture of Ginger for the Clubhouse, further exacerbating my dilemma. What exactly were my obligations regarding this portrait? Did I dare risk the wrath of @Giggythepom by replacing his photo with Ginger’s? I try never to play favorites with Housewives, but wasn’t I allowed to prefer one Housedog over another? Was it really that big of a deal? Days later, in a long e-mail from Jill about some issues she was having with Bravo, she dropped this:

“Even Ginger asked me, ‘Mommy, why is Giggy (whose show is not in cycle) on WWHL and mine isn’t? Why doesn’t Andy like me too?’”

At first I thought that Jill (or Ginger) was joking, but the rest of the e-mail conveyed a pretty sincere tone. In my reply, I noted, “I am at a serious loss for words about your dog being jealous about my affection for Giggy. There are 30 dogs on Bravo.”

After that exchange, I did not put the photo of Ginger on my set. I just couldn’t.

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.