Glanville talks about her fights with Adrienne Maloof, her book, her children, Lexapro, and many other things that most people don't discuss.
Brandi Glanville at a recent party in Los Angeles.
Image by Alexandra Wyman / Getty Images
Watching reality television is an education in extremity. Seeing people under pressure, from the cameras and from other cast members, has brought about some of the most fascinating television of the past 20 years. The Real Housewives franchise alone, which has been filmed by Bravo in seven cities (D.C. is the only one to have been canceled), has shown bankruptcy, foreclosure, divorce, bad parenting, death by illness, and death by suicide. To me, it's the show of the American debt economy.
For its plots, Real Housewives, like most reality shows, often relies on the denial and cluelessness of its casts. And that is when a Brandi Glanville type of person — who on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cannot stop herself from speaking her mind, even when it means revealing too much about herself or, conversely, hurting someone else — can really stand out. (Bethenny Frankel of The Real Housewives of New York City also had these skills.) She becomes a stand-in for and voice of the audience as she points out her fellow cast members' hypocrisy or lies or highness or general meanness; it results in a lot of fighting.
Glanville joined Beverly Hills in a recurring role during its second season. She had gained brief tabloid notoriety a few years prior as the jilted wife of TV actor Eddie Cibrian, who was famously busted cheating on Glanville with country singer LeAnn Rimes. The whole mess played out in the weekly magazines for months. Rimes and Cibrian married soon after, and Glanville was left to raise their two sons, Mason and Jake.
Like many Housewives before her, Glanville has parlayed her Bravo success into a book deal, and her account of the divorce, Drinking and Tweeting, was released last month during the show's third season, which airs on Mondays (after this week's episode, the season finale is next week, and then the always fight-y reunion episodes will start). The book has done well, particularly on The New York Times' e-book nonfiction list. In the book, as in life, as on the show, she reveals all — including, as you will see below, her thoughts about vaginal rejuvenation surgery.
I met Glanville (along with a network minder, since she says so many things she's not supposed to) at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills recently to talk about her book and this past season of Beverly Hills, which has featured her insane feud with Adrienne Maloof after Glanville revealed on camera that Maloof and her (now ex-) husband, Paul Nassif, had used a surrogate. Viewers didn't hear what Glanville actually said because of the privacy issues involved — you can watch the clip below — but it's all come out since. Maloof vs. Glanville — and it did end up involving lawyers and threatened lawsuits — provided this season's major story; Glanville's allies were few, with Lisa Vanderpump and Yolanda Foster being the only consistent ones. In the end, Maloof chose not to attend the taping of the reunion earlier this month, and was fired as a result.
It's a lot! Here's the interview.
So this season of Real Housewives has been insane. Mostly —
Brandi Glanville: Adrienne and myself?
Yes. What's it been like reliving it?
BG: Re-watching it is always hard, because it's the kind of emotions you put on a shelf and they're gone, and then you have to drudge them back up. Luckily, heading into the reunion, somebody wasn't there, so — I was anxious the whole night before, just thinking, What's going to happen? What's this going to be? Hoping we could come out on better terms. Then when she wasn't there, I was, like, Whew.
You were nervous only the night before? I would have been nervous for seven months.
BG: No, because I have two little boys, and I have a full life. I can't put that much energy into these women.
So at the reunion, were you all just sitting around waiting?
Show rep: I just don't want her to give too much away about the reunion, because we don't know what it's going to end up looking like.
BG: I'm always in trouble.
Show rep: That's why I'm here, so you don't get in trouble.
OK, so at a certain point at the taping, you were relieved to find out that Adrienne wasn't going to be there.
BG: I do feel like in a battle one-on-one, I can definitely handle myself. But I didn't know what to expect: Was she going to come, was she not going to come? The reunion still managed to get a little nutty. It still got heated.
Glanville, angry at Maloof, sets off the surrogacy explosion here that sets off the whole course of the season. (But you don't hear her say those words, you just see everyone's reaction.)
Let's just talk about what happened with Adrienne. Things were going along perfectly normally with the season, and then you said the surrogacy thing.
BG: Allegedly!
We can talk about that openly, right?
BG: I can't. So, allegedly. Whatever.
So you said the surrogacy thing. Did you realize when you said it what was going to happen?
BG: I didn't realize it was going to be like this. Over our hiatus, she had done some things to me that were not pretty. And I was just kind of trying to get back at her for that. She didn't want me to have a job on the show, she was saying bad things about me in the press, and having her chef do really crappy things —
Her chef! Bernie.
BG: So when the show came back and we started shooting again, you can't really talk about what happened off the show on the show. So I just decided to say, "She's just a big fat liar." Because I was so angry at her. So I was kind of just being a little bit evil.
And you regretted it.
BG: Yeah! You know what? I didn't think about hurting her family; I wasn't trying to do that. But when I saw how it affected them, I felt really bad. At the same time, I felt like, gosh, why am I apologizing? I'm very sorry. But she didn't apologize to me ever. She had Bernie say I was a bad mom, that I drank all day, that I slept all day, and I didn't tend to my children. Lots and lots of different things. This was ever since last year's reunion, after I decided not to be her BFF and go against Lisa — which I just think is so ridiculous anyway. And then she just wanted me off the show. I think she's a really entitled person. So when she wants something, she uses her lawyers to get it. With me, it didn't work out that well. I am sorry for saying what I said. I didn't realize it was going to be this big of an issue. But at the same time, I feel like she should be sorry also. She hasn't said sorry to me. Paul has.
Sympathy should have been with her since you did say something awful, and somehow she managed to blow that. Because of how she handled it, viewers were on your side pretty immediately.
BG: I've had arguments with all of my friends, and a lot of them have a lot of money. But in this town, some of these people, they just can't handle having a conversation: "You know what, I shouldn't have said that, I'm sorry." And then I would say, "You know what, I shouldn't have said that, I'm sorry." And then we'd move on from there and figure out how to make it work. The stuff she said to me — I'm divorced, and I have a very not amazing relationship with my husband. So he was sending me the letters that were in the press from what she had said. "She just wants to get me fired," I'm explaining myself to my ex-husband. Which I shouldn't even have to do. But it caused me problems as well. I was like, "It's all BS. It's all about the show. Don't worry about it. Obviously, I'm great with my kids." It caused some problems. Definitely.
So the sequence of events: I'm asking because I feel like it got so confusing. You say the surrogacy thing. You go to the Mauricio party and have that huge fight with them. You then receive a letter.
BG: Right. There was a letter circulating, and they called my lawyer and said, "If Brandi doesn't come to this meeting, we are going to move forward and sue her." I was, like, why would I go to this meeting? And he basically said, "You have to go and sign a piece of paper and say you won't talk about Adrienne in this way ever again." I don't trust myself at all. At all. I go to my attorney, "How can I do that?!? How can I do that?" I'm not going to sign on the dotted line and say I'm never going to talk about you again. I just don't think you should have to when you're on a reality show. So there was all this back-and-forth with our lawyers. The bills got pretty mounting for me. Then, finally at the White Party, we kind of hashed it out, and they admitted they had a lawyer. I gave them the emails I had of the things Bernie said about me to these press outlets, and Paul's like, "OK, we're going to fire him." They didn't fire him.
Did you feel like they didn't know that?
BG: I think that he seemed surprised. But I feel like we'd gone over it with them a few times — at least with Adrienne. Like, I know that we had at the tea party, that Bernie had said negative things about me and Lisa and some of the ladies. I feel like if he didn't know, I would be surprised. But he acted like he didn't know.
