Beverly Hills
Lampshade hat aficionado Kathy Hilton is rich. How rich? So rich she keeps her nudes in a bank vault, so rich she hires the chef de cuisine away from the hotel for an afternoon and then tells him how to grill lobster, so rich she gets her kicks by watching Kyle and Dorit dissolve their friendship over a seaside dinner.
Housewives are notoriously afraid of two things: overhead lighting and ghosts. Either one will send them running and screaming. So when the Villa Catalina caretaker mentioned right away that “little people” haunt the place, any hope for a peaceful time was extinguished.
You have to wear pants to the Magic Mike show if you want to get pulled on stage. Everyone is clear on this, including Sutton, who mentions several times that she has brought pants and panties. She’s ready, even if she had to call her assistant to come over and find her pants because she can’t remember where she hung them when she unpacked.
Kathy! Oh no. Oh, Kathy. What have you done? We never get the answer to the question “What did Kathy say in Aspen?”, not even an HR investigation can get the women to un-circle the wagons, but it sure sounds like it was…bad? Even before that now infamous wrap party, Aspen was full of tension.
The Tom Girardi scandal is in full swing and Erika will employ any sort of magic to get the audience to look away. For her first trick, she saddles up to Crystal on the beach and tells her to stand up to Sutton. Then, at dinner, she announces she comforted a crying Crystal on the beach.
The Tom Girardi case is about to hit the press in a big way. Just as this sojourn to the desert wraps up, THAT LA Times piece, the one that is so long only Sutton could bear to read it to the end, is about to hit inboxes and mailboxes all over SoCal. But for these few days, only Erika knows that, and she is clearly on edge.
San Diego is driving distance from Beverly Hills, but there is no Sprinter van for these wives - they each travel in their own Range Rover. Kathy kicks her own trip off with an iconic moment, asking Kyle to call her house and speak to “the lady” who works there, a turn of phrase so out of touch and clueless that even Kyle has to laugh at it.
Bravo casting, in their infinite wisdom, knew that what Beverly Hills needed was a couple of cooky aunts, in the form of Sutton Stracke and Kathy Hilton. Kathy arrives with her own fan, for white noise, and an inability to plug it into a wall. She roasts Kyle’s salmon recipe so savagely that Kyle gets nervous and burns dinner.
Denise Richards is an icon, born with an innate knack for capturing the cultural imagination. Her small handful of theatrical movie roles, made when she was young and impossibly gorgeous? Cult classics we still talk about decades later. Her marriage to Charlie Sheen? Dominated the tabloids for years. And as a Housewife, her one scandal was so juicy that it rocketed her to a vaulted position as one of the greats.
Having banded together to chase off Lisa Vanderpump, fissures are starting to show in the core group, the Fox Force Five. Kyle and Teddi are sure that Erika should be bothered by an impression Lisa Rinna did of her. Erika assures them she isn’t, but they would rather die before letting it go.
