It’s no secret that Lisa Vanderpump loves her dogs. She especially loves referencing them in her Real Housewives taglines, which, it becomes clear over our conversation, kind of double as life philosophies.
“What was it? Throw me to the wolves and I shall return leading the pack?” she says, using a favorite tagline to explain why she ultimately returned to Real Housewives of Beverly Hills for its upcoming seventh season after last year’s... let’s say rough time, in which the cast ganged up on her and accused her of being a master manipulator. “Or how about this one: I’m passionate about dogs and I’m crazy about bitches.”
Vanderpump, recently named the Best Real Housewife Star in Bravo History, knows better than anyone that life can’t be guided by the wisdom of Real Housewife taglines alone.
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Indeed, part of her success in the franchise is owed to the fact that she arrived to reality TV with a fair share of preternatural wisdom, honed through decades as a restauranteur first in London with her husband, Ken, and now in Los Angeles, where hotspots SUR and Pump provide the setting for her voraciously consumed Bravo spinoff, Vanderpump Rules, which begins its fifth season on Monday.
The London native’s luxurious purr is interrupted by a sigh of relief when comparing the launch of a new season of Housewives to Vanderpump Rules, which she executive produces. On that show, she happily cedes over the dramatic narrative to the bevy of spray tanned twentysomethings who have spent years both working together at her restaurants and blacking out, sleeping, and fighting together at the area’s trendiest clubs.
“With Housewives, I kind of dive into an unknown abyss, basically, wondering what transpired and who said what about me,” Vanderpump says.
That anxiety-inducing experience, which she will go through again when RHOBH returns in December, gives her a certain sense of empathy for her employees-turned-cast. They include the engaged Tom Schwartz and Katie Maloney, walking “that haircut” Jax Taylor, incessant emotional breakdown James Kennedy, and Beverly Hills Bond villain you not-so-secretly want to spend every waking moment with, Stassi Schroeder.
But that empathy has also turned out to be a liability as an executive producer.
“I have, in moments, seen cuts of Vanderpump Rules and thought, ‘No, we can’t say that!’ ‘We can’t show that there!’ ‘We can’t keep that in!’” Vanderpump says. “But I suddenly thought, hold on a second. Are we making a show about what I want them to say or what they’re actually saying? So you’re between a rock and a hard place sometimes.”
Of course, that awkward space seems generally to be where Vanderpump is residing these days.
The matriarchal role she’s taken on with her staff only intensified when they became reality stars. She feels a responsibility for guiding them through the hazards of the medium, having weathered it longer. But that’s at odds with the responsibilities she holds as a business owner who might have fired most, if not all, of these kids had she not become their mentor and had they not become great TV on the show she produces.
She frequently interchanges the words “cast” and “employees” when we speak, which is fair: they are all, genuinely, both. She swears casting directors played no part in assembling them, either. Vanderpump has long had a practice of hiring employees’ friends and relatives as opposed to putting out a hiring notice, thus explaining the intertwined lives of the Vanderpump Rules cast.
“If a lot of bosses saw what their twentysomething employees did in Vegas over the weekend, a lot of them wouldn’t have a job come Monday morning,” Vanderpump says. “I do have to say, ‘Well hold on a second. I wouldn’t know this.’”
She admits the filmed personal lives of her employees sometimes do pollute her opinion of them. “But if Jax is getting arrested for stealing sunglasses like he was last season, maybe I wouldn’t know that if it wasn’t for the fact that we’re on a reality show.”
“It does get a little messy sometimes,” she says. On Monday’s season premiere, for example, notorious drunkard James once again goes off on a booze-fueled tirade, insulting his co-workers’ weight and miming masturbation while tossing a cranberry vodka at them. He then cries and says he’s acting out because his parents are divorcing.
Vanderpump gives him a stern talking to, yet another in a long series of warnings that his seemingly unlimited chances might soon dry up and her sympathy for his personal issues can only go so far. But with ratings on the line, “far” can be a pretty a long distance.
“I also have to be sensitive to the fact that, breaking the fourth wall, they are on a reality show,” she says. “I have to be sensitive to that and that they are exposing their lives and have some understanding of what they’re going through to a certain extent.”
And all of this drama, too, is at odds with Lisa Vanderpump herself, a workhorse who helped build a business empire and spends just as much time balancing a dizzying array of philanthropic endeavors as she does coddling her beloved dogs.
Plus, there’s the aura of class she carries: the regal way she seems to glide across her own Beverly Hills Versailles, Villa Rosa, meandering with a glass of rosé through the swans and miniature horses and genuinely enjoying the company of her husband of 35 years, a rarity for the table-flipping, back-stabbing moral pit of reality TV.
For all that class, though, the season five premiere of Vanderpump Rules largely revolves around cunnilingus.
We learn in the premiere that Jax walked in on his girlfriend, Brittany, apparently having girl-on-girl oral sex with another cast member. We learn this because Jax, ignorant that he is embarrassing his girlfriend, goes person to person telling them about the tryst, including Vanderpump.
“Look, I’m probably not having those conversations in my life, having been married 35 years,” she says, about the show bearing her name spending an hour on cunnilingus. “But I do think if you put a group of 20-year-olds together, things happen.”
She starts re-weaving the show’s tangled web of hookups and relationships as an example, including ones that occurred off camera in the show’s downtime. “‘Down time takes on a whole new meaning in this episode,” she cackles.
While not exactly condoning Jax’s behavior—spreading rumors of his girlfriend’s cunninlingus is unusual, to say the least—she does acknowledge his transparency as the instigator driving certain stories, even if he’s not the perpetrator of a drama. It’s a unique quality, and “I’m not sure if it’s a good one or not,” says Vanderpump. But “as a producer, that’s a gift,” she says. “You can’t orchestrate that.”
After more than 250 episodes in the medium, she knows the kind of vulnerability and also fearlessness required to be a reality TV star—even if she cringes while using the phrase.
“I was successful before this,” she says. “My hope is that my life isn’t defined by being a Housewife.”
“I’m not the Housewife who’s going to be sitting there having my nails done every week,” she continues. “I am the Housewife who runs a business and has recently been to Congress to speak and am very involved in philanthropic things that are important to me.”
She recalls a speaking engagement she had a few days prior and making a point to request that she not be introduced as a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills star.
“That’s been great,” she says. “I’m not putting it down for one second because I’ve embraced it and enjoyed it and taken advantage of it to draw attention to things that are important to me.”
She also was more than ready to walk away from it.
Vanderpump has made no secret of the fact that, after what she calls last year’s overly “mean-spirited” season,” she had no desire to return to the franchise that made her a TV star. In fact, she started filming two weeks after the rest of the cast—that’s how long she held out.
There were endless talks with producers, house calls, tears. “I was vociferous,” she says. “It was absolutely my stance that it didn’t work for me anymore.”
But things began to change. Her close friendship with Kyle Richards continued. A friend whom she had introduced to Bravo joined the cast (the name is still under wraps, and Vanderpump wouldn’t spill). The same production company that films the show is used for Vanderpump Rules, and her strong relationship with them began to warm her up to a RHBOH return. And there was the feedback from fans she received on social media.
“But I always wasn’t going to go back with a smile on my face for the cameras,” she says. “I was going to go back saying, ‘You were a lot of fucking bitches to me.’”She made up her mind. Why should she let them push her out? Cue the taglines/mantras: the wolves, leading the pack, the bitches. And, as always, it was her matriarchal instinct that ultimately convinced her to return—albeit this time it had nothing to do with mothering possibly deranged reality stars on Bravo, but her own children instead.
“I say to my kids sometimes that you’ll regret things you don’t do more than things you do,” she says. “You learn from them.” You learn. And you make fantastic TV.
