Okay, take a deep breath. From left, New York cast members Bethenny Frankel, Alex McCord, Ramona Singer, Jill Zarin, and LuAnn de Lesseps, with Orange County cast members Lauri Waring, Jeana Keogh, Tamra Barney, and Vicki Gunvalson. We may have gotten some of the blondes mixed up, but sorry, the tall ones look identical in this picture. Photo: Getty Images
Last night at Bravo’s A-List Awards the Real Housewives of Orange County and the Real Housewives of New York met for the very first time. Now, when we imagined California’s platinum blonde, very bronzed housewives meeting their surgery-deprived, wisecracking NYC counterparts, we expected a dramatic exchange of sorts. But never in all our wildest hair-pulling fantasies could we have conjured up the tedious sniping (and minor bloodletting) that went on backstage.
It all started when we innocently asked Jill Zarin of the New York cast about meeting the Orange County wives for the first time. “There were already some problems going on between Bethenny and Jeana,” she divulged. “Jeana didn’t like the mean-spirited scripting for the presentation of an award. So Jeana was like, ‘Bethenny, do you think maybe we should change it?’ And [Bethenny] goes, ‘No, I think it’s funny.’ And [Jeana] goes, ‘You think it’s funny?’ And [Bethenny] goes, ‘The joke’s on you, so you don’t think it’s funny. I think it’s funny. Don’t change it.’ Jeana didn’t like that.”
Still reeling a bit from that last exchange, we pressed the entire Orange County cast for details the minute we saw them. At first they hesitated: “The most drama we had today is what color we should put on our nails,” Jeana said with a smile. But before we could say “Cleavage Botox” the claws emerged for real. “I always say they’re kind of like a knockoff, you know?” Tamra said. “We’re really the real thing. They’re like a fake Louis.”
“Sometimes they interfere with my Chi,” Lauri added.
“It didn’t take too much makeup to cover the scratch marks on Tamra’s arm,” Jeana said. Wait, hold up. Scratch marks? Sure enough, there was a bit of dried blood on Tamra’s exceptionally tan arm.
“I think it’s exciting to see how people live in other parts of the world,” Tamra told us, “because even when New York came out, we were like, ‘Oh my God, those girls are rude and they’re kind of chubby and they need Botox and they have bad teeth.’”
Man, we cannot wait until the Real Housewives of New Jersey get thrown in there. —Alisa Gould-Simon
See what other Bravo stars sell each other out at our complete coverage of the A-List Awards.
