The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills reunion recap: 'Two half-truths and a lie'
They know this show is…filmed, right? If I were a Housewife and lived half of my life inside a tornado of passive-aggressive co-workers, knowing I’d have to field hostile questions from Monty in Nevada who’s been reading The Blogs at the reunion of said co-workers, I would be studying tape of the preceding Housewives season like a Friday Night Lights quarterback about to go to State with a college scholarship on the line.
Now, where it gets tricky is when the editors can prove you to be a liar with unseen footage. In my hypothetical Housewife-world where I don sequin highlighter dresses and pin the entire Claire’s inventory to my scalp, I would proceed with extra caution in regard to things I know could have been filmed, but didn’t necessarily air. Because it’s always possible for your memory to betray you.
Camille is…the opposite of cautious at this particular Reunion taping. She is, as the kids say, wildin’. She’s not lying, per se; I mean, she is saying a lot of untrue things, but I think she genuinely believes those things. So, this woman thinks she’s telling the truth, she genuinely can’t understand what the other women are upset with her for, and she’s most definitely been going through a difficult time emotionally at the time of taping — it’s a perfect storm for her to blow up, say something completely nonsensical to just about the only innocent on those couches, Denise, and nearly remove her entire dress as she storms off the stage in an effort to remove her mic pack.
If someone hasn’t made a gif of “It was a joke and you aaaaall laughed” for me to deploy every time I shoot a brick in the group text, like, yesterday…then the internet is canceled.
TEDDI, ON THE OTHER HAND…
Oooooh, that lady is telling some half-truths, and she is doing it with intention. That’s not better or worse than what Camille is doing, it’s just different.
Teddi knows it as much as we do: this Puppygate story doesn’t entirely add up, especially the part about her never speaking directly to Lisa Vanderpump regarding the plan that she’s 100 percent sure Lisa Vanderpump masterminded. But we simply don’t have the clips to prove Teddi is lying about something; we just have the clips to make Teddi look kind of dumb. Truly, I could watch the flashback of her declaring, “Never have I told a lie, and never will you hear me tell one” forever. And so, it seems, can Andy. He points out that when Teddi was so dramatically calling out Lisa Vanderpump in the Bahamas, she was still lying to Dorit about her involvement in the setup, and when Teddi tries to say that she actually had told Dorit she was involved already at that point, then some unseen footage contradicts that. Andy informs her that she’s now lying about lying.
I think anyone who is so sure they’re that honest of a person’s main problem might be that they’re lying to themselves.
GO AWF, VIEWER, GO AWF
But that’s enough about Puppygate, about which we’ll never know the full truth. So how about a trip to lawsuit land instead, which the Housewives think we can’t know the full truth about, but we definitely can and will sooner or later. Andy informs the women that some viewers think they spent so much time talking about Lisa Vanderpump and Lucy Lucy Apple Juice this season in order to bury negative stories about themselves. Let’s take it to the viewer cards, shall we?
Monty from Nevada wants to know why Erika is happy to talk about LVP all day but stay silent on her husband defaulting on a $15 million loan. Amy from Texas wants to know why Kyle hasn’t mentioned Mauricio “scamming someone out of $37 million,” instead of talking about Dorit’s dog. And Andy himself just looks over at Dorit and adds, “It’s interesting because you’re also involved in an ongoing lawsuit with your former business partner for Beverly Beach.”
So they each talk about how difficult the legal proceedings have been and how they regret the mistakes that got them to this point….
Just kidding, Erika says that Tom’s thing is “resolved,” Kyle defensively tells Amy from Texas to get her facts straight and then never tells us what the facts are, and Dorit once again says that she can’t talk about the details of her lawsuit because it’s ongoing. It’s still a pretty solid segment though, for so shadily pointing out that half of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills are embroiled in lawsuits.
Riiiight up until they roll that infamous clip that came out on Twitter of Dorit being chased around a pool in the Bahamas by someone demanding to know where the money she owes her former business partner is. And Andy tries to act like it’s the women’s fault for not mentioning it, when it’s the show’s fault for not airing it. We will take handheld camera footage if it means watching Dorit be comically chased around a large water slide, Andy!
COME AGAIN, CAMILLE?
In fact, there’s quite a bit of question over Bravo’s culpability in the goings-on of this season of RHOBH, mostly from Camille, who seems to have *had it*. But let me be clear, my feelings on complaints about editing or production are always this: if you’re gonna get paid for the time, you gotta get down with the crime. These women know what they’re getting into when they sign on for these shows, especially the ones who have been around since, ahem, season 1.
And yet, Camille truly seems not to understand how being filmed works. After Andy rolls the montage of her being two-faced over and over throughout the season, Camille says she understands how people could think she talks out of both sides of her mouth when the clips are “put together like that.” She’s referring, of course, to the clips that explicitly show her talking out of both sides of her mouth, probably the most incriminating of which are the ones where she’s talking s–t behind Dorit’s back, and then cooing to Dorit’s face about how much she’s enjoyed getting to know her better.
Because Camille’s whole argument about not liking Dorit, which she explains in great detail, repeating over and over how much she does not like Dorit, is that Dorit is phony and a fake. But is it not phony and fake to pretend you like someone that you actually despise?
Dorit — who I simply cannot believe, nor stand, how much I’m agreeing with this Reunion — tells Camille that she’s entitled to her opinion, but don’t invite her to these momentous occasions in her life like her birthday and wedding if she doesn’t like her. “Well, that’s production,” Camille says back matter-of-factly and the whole room full of velvet couches and weird stone busts erupts into flame. Andy tells her that she has power over what she does and Camille digs in deeper saying, “No, that is the truth, I didn’t want to invite any of you ladies to my wedding.”
The whole flaming room then bursts into an atomic mushroom cloud.
Then the conversation shifts to the dinner in the finale where Camille brought up all of Dorit an PK’s financial issues, and Camille tries to defend herself saying that she didn’t know she was going to be ambushed at that dinner. They roll the clip of Camille insisting that the other women tell her what’s on their mind regarding her behavior, even as they insist that they shouldn’t because she’s been through a lot.
The other women onstage tell Camille that she’s confusing, and boy does she commit herself to that reputation, screaming, “AFTER MY ASSISTANT PASSED AWAY AND AFTER YOU LADIES TRASHED ME IN A VAN. THAT’S NASTY! YOU DON’T COME TO MY WEDDING AND THEN TREAT ME SO DISRESPECTFUL AFTER IT. THAT WAS NAAAASTY. WHY CAN’T I SAY A NICE THING ABOUT LISA VANDERPUMP WITHOUT YOU — THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK — COMING AFTER ME.”
It’s an iconic performance, truly one of the record books. It also does not make a lick of sense.
Some of these things happened, but not in that order, and can Camille really pull blows about them coming to her wedding and disrespecting her when she just said she didn’t even want them there? Kyle makes an interesting point that Camille is scared of the legions of LVP fans on Twitter which is why she both says that LVP manipulates stories, but also says that the other women are mean for saying that LVP manipulates stories. Then Camille makes a reasonable point in saying that she can both think LVP makes some shady moves while also not wanting to come down hard on her about those shady moves when she was in the midst of grieving her brother…
Those are the very last reasonable things that happen. When Camille won’t stop yelling all of her responses, Denise says quietly, “Camille, why are you so angry?” And wow…things just goes off the rails after that. If Camille doesn’t like Teddi and Dorit, she despises Denise. And it’s unclear why! Except it becomes a little clearer as it comes to light that when Denise speaks words to Camille, Camille just kind of…hears whatever she wants to hear.
After Denise asks why she’s so angry, Camille throws her hands up and yells, “DENISE! DENISE! Shut up, I mean, I can’t.” Rinna tells Camille not to tell Denise to shut up and Camille responds: “But I don’t like her. I don’t like her! SHE TOLD ME to tell my daughter she was a f—ing liar.” Record screech — no she absolutely did not. They roll the scene from the finale that Camille is referring to where Denise was, to be fair, aggressively inserting herself into a conversation about Teddi allegedly snubbing Madison that she didn’t really belong in. But she’s just trying to tell Camille that if her daughters told her Teddi had snubbed her, she would simply reassure them by telling her that Teddi surely didn’t mean to snub her.
What she says verbatim is: “You know what I would say to my daughter? I would defend them and make my daughters feel like they were—” which is when Camille cuts in and says, “Well then maybe you make your daughter feel like s–t, but I—” which is when Denise cuts back in and continues, “No, I don’t make them feel like s–t, I make them feel okay, like, ‘Don’t worry, honey, they didn’t snub you.‘”
And Camille just…decided to hear Denise say that she should tell her daughter she was “a f—ing liar.”
It is wild to watch the clip and then hear what Camille thinks happened, which not only includes being wrong about what Denise said but also being wrong about what she said. Teddi points out that when Camille called Denise a bad parent during that conversation (“well maybe you make your daughters feel like s–t,” as you’ll recall), and Camille screams back, “I DIDN’T SAY THAT! I SAID, ‘I do not curse at my kids.'”
What?! Maybe even Camille realizes at that point that she’s conflating facts because then she starts explaining that when Denise was drunk in the Bahamas, she said she cursed at her kids. But that’s also incorrect! They roll the unseen clip, and Denise is telling the other women about how she sometimes yells at her kids. But she makes no mention of cursing, and for the record, in the other clip, Camille is the one who started cursing!
Denise tells Camille she needs to take a moment, and Andy changes the subject to the lunch Denise and Camille had where Camille was gossiping the whole time. Camille looks offstage and says, “So this is truly a setup?” She gets up and rushes off the stage, entirely unzipping her dress to get her mic pack off along the way. But it’s not quick enough because we can still hear her mumbling, “Bulls–t, they did say those things, she did say she cursed at her kids, she did say that, f— them, take this off, I’M LEAVING, bulls–t, nasty bitches,” which, funnily enough, is the working title of my book about the Real Housewives franchise.
See you back here next week to get to the bottom of…whatever the hell just happened!
Related content:
Comments