This week, on our favorite television program, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things. They accused their poorly behaved dogs of ruining the miniature version of their house that is in the backyard and decorated with tons of toys even though their daughters are …
We interrupt the regular recap of Rich Women Doing Things to bring you some urgent news. Mauricio Umansky, founder of the Agency and husband to one of the titular rich women, was caught by paparazzi making out with a woman in the Mykonos airport. This comes right on the heels of Kyle’s very personal therapy session that she had in her home. (What is up with the rich women ordering their therapists, fertility specialists, waxers, and other sundry professionals right up to their houses? Did they all get their driver’s licenses suspended?) Kyle tells the therapist that she feels like she can’t live her best life like her husband can. She’s afraid that if she finds someone and moves on, Mo will come back after “sowing his wild oats” and say he wants her back. Oh, dear. That’s not going to happen. That’s not going to happen at all.
When the press publishes the photos, of course, all the women get on their various and sundry FaceTimes to discuss. Erika is the one contractually obligated to call Kyle, who says she doesn’t think the pictures are intentional, especially in Europe. She, once again, thinks Mauricio is blameless. Sutton makes the valid point that the pictures look conspicuously staged, and I agree with her. Her evidence is that she was once in the same airport that Mo is in, and Jennifer Aniston arrived, and there were no paps there. I was convinced already, but when you bring Rachel Green herself into it, then I’m doubly sold.
Sutton has a theory about why they would be staged, and, well, it’s pretty dark. She thinks that Mo did it because there are all these pictures of Kyle and Morgan Wade getting gas, going to concerts, and doing everything but scissoring in Kyle’s backyard. Sutton thinks he staged this for revenge. While I agree that someone called photographers, I have a different theory as to why and who. I think the why is to move along the world’s slowest-moving divorce and force these two to have the difficult conversations that the therapist wants them to have but they’re avoiding. This could be anyone. This could have been Mo, who is such a coward that he doesn’t want to tell Kyle he has a new girlfriend. It could be Kyle who wants him to force a confrontation. It could be their daughters who knew about the girlfriend and were sick of keeping the secret from their mother. It could have been Kathy, but we know it’s not because she wouldn’t call the paparazzi. She would leave a comment on TMZ’s Instagram account from her husband’s iPad.
The most likely scenario, to me, is that the girlfriend is the one who kicked it off. She landed herself a rich man and wants to seal the deal, but he keeps saying, “I have to be careful with my wife and work out my divorce first.” She’s been hearing this for months with no movement on the divorce. How do you force his hand? Let the wife know he’s sleeping around, make it public, blame it on TMZ, get herself a ring, and look entirely blameless.
But this is just distracting us from the main event, which is Jennifer Tilly’s Caviar and Kaftan party and the best dinner-table fight we’ve seen with these women since last year at Kyle’s weed party. First some kudos for our newest wacky rich aunt, Jenny Tilly. How is it that we are 20 years into modern Housewifery and this is the first time someone has thrown a Caviar and Kaftan party? It’s a genius theme with excellent execution from everyone except Dorit, who didn’t read the kaftans part of the invite and shows up wearing a cute Dior dress with a cinched waist and the toile print that my parents had on their bedroom wallpaper in the late ’70s. Jen also tells us that she is Chinese American, and Erika says, “You’re Chinese?” And Kathy Hilton, at the other end of the table, says, “Oh! Oh! Jen! I’m Chinese too! A random woman in Venice told me that I was the mistress of an emperor in the Chu Dynasty in 500 B.C. We’re practically sisters! I should get an Oscar nomination too!”
The real showdown, however, is between Dorit and Sutton. It was almost between everyone and Ann Marie until Jen told them all the place card with her name on it was for her friend, not Anne Marie, the tiny esophagus advocate who soured last season with her presence. Going into the party, Dorit correctly says, “Sutton needs to stop playing the victim in situations she created and then manipulating people to believe she’s the innocent one.” Yes, that is her usual MO, but she tricked Dorit by changing up her tactics this time, and she came roaring out of the gate like a bull that had just had one of its balls cut off.
What Sutton didn’t factor is that she seems to have come down with a serious case of what I like to call Brandi Glanville Disease. That is when a Housewife is mostly correct and has the moral high ground but argues her point in such a base manner that she ruins it and somehow becomes the villain. Take, for instance, Brandi during season two’s classic “Game Night” episode, where the Sisters Richards are terrible to Brandi, but she ruins it all by calling them “fucking cunts” and saying that Kim was probably doing crystal meth in the bathroom. Oh, you were so close to being the hero there, Brandi.
Sutton may have been in the right after Dorit’s house. We all saw Sutton waiting for Dorit for 30 minutes to greet her when she arrived (why she couldn’t go hang with Dorit’s friends, “the Babysitters Club,” as Sutton called them, is beyond me). We saw Dorit spoiling for a fight by taking Sutton’s bag and refusing to give it back. We saw Dorit make a terrible joke about Sutton’s drinking that caused her to call Dorit a bitch and slowly storm out of the party. What is a slow storm? Is that more of a squall? A drizzle? Did Sutton drizzle out of that party?
There was a lot of evidence of what Dorit did wrong for Sutton to latch onto. However, one of them can’t be that Dorit insinuated that Sutton had a drinking problem the year before. The clip we keep seeing is Dorit saying that Sutton is a drinker who probably puts vodka in her coffee. Do I need to remind you of this article, where Sutton says that she starts drinking at 10 a.m.? “At around ten, I think that’s okay for your first cocktail of the day. And then … I try to … it’s just consistency through the day. Then I’m nicer,” she said on a podcast. Okay, so Sutton basically confessed to putting vodka in her coffee and insinuating herself that she is, in fact, a drinker, which is all Dorit says. You can’t be on record saying things like that and then get mad when people remind you.
Anyway, Dorit is again spoiling for a fight with Sutton at the Caviar and Kaftan party. When Sutton orders a glass of water, Dorit asks, “Is that because of our tête-à-tête?” I think she means that Sutton isn’t drinking because of what happened at her house, not knowing that a tête-à-tête literally means “head to head,” which is a two-person conversation. Look at Dorit, being both wrong and pushy all at once.
Once everyone sits down, it’s Sutton who is driving the Confrontation Express, and it crashes right through Caviar Kaspia. Sutton starts by bringing up a comment that Dorit just made about not knowing which Sutton she’s going to get on any given day, and, honestly, Dorit was not wrong. Sutton then gives a pretty evenhanded account of the incident so far and tells Dorit that she needs to stop coming after her. That’s when her BGD really flares up. Sutton says, “You picked on me, and I’m sorry, you need to pick on someone else … whose wallet fits.”
She lost the fight. Right in that moment, she lost. She might have even lost it a little bit earlier when she called her “Poor-it,” something I’m shocked and saddened our snarkier commenters didn’t come up with first. You know she lost when even her girl Garcelle says, “Oh, damn! Okay. Okay. Okay.” She lost even more when Erika asked Sutton if she thought she was bigger than Dorit, and Sutton said, “I think my wallet is.”
In these parts, we’ve been calling Dorit poor and saying that her finances have been like a house of cards for years. I always refer to her house as Surely Rented Manor. These are jokes that we get to make, but they are not for Sutton. Basically, what Sutton is saying is, “I should be beyond reproach because I’m richer than you.” She’s telling Dorit that she is not as good as her, not because of her manners, behavior, or terrible jokes, which are also insults. She’s telling Dorit she’s not good enough because she doesn’t have enough money, which is something no one wants to hear and, honestly, is not an argument that holds water. There are plenty of shitty people with tons of money. Do I need to direct you to what is currently happening in Washington, D.C.?
This also fully opens the door for Dorit to say this in confessional: “Now we are seeing Sutton go where she is most comfortable. As low as you possibly can go. Just because she thinks her ex-husband dropped a big pocketbook in her lap, it gives her license to be such a fucking cunt. The only thing your big wallet has bought you was a horse instead of a date.” The money Sutton got from the husband is hers regardless of how she got it, but when Sutton wants to bring money into the argument, then she’s always going to face that criticism, whether it’s warranted or not.
Dorit plays the entire scene perfectly, whether by strategy or happenstance. She knows Sutton is cooked, that she’s ruined her own argument and reputation with that one (dare I say preplanned) remark. She knows she should say nothing and let Sutton continue to bury herself like a vampire who is ready for bed. Sutton then says, “Let me make this clear to you, missy,” somehow feeling justified in talking to her like a teenager because she’s rich. Sutton then says “her hostess” at the Fourth of July party made it clear she wasn’t welcome, like she’s Miss Manners after just flouting her wealth to make her seem righteous. When Dorit asks if she called Sutton a bitch, Sutton replies, “I should have called you a ‘fucking bitch.’”
Every step Sutton takes after the wallet comment is a misstep. Garcelle tries to diffuse it and asks if Dorit can apologize for her shitty joke and they can move on. She could have, too, if Sutton showed up, calmly explained why she didn’t like the dig, and appealed to Dorit’s sense of decency, but that’s not what she does at all. It’s way too late. But Dorit tries, issues a (really fake) apology, but she still manages to look better than Sutton — Sutton says, “Oh, yeah, real sincere,” giving Dorit the chance to look pleadingly at Garcelle and say, “What do you want me to do?”
It’s at this point we get two great turns by our supporting characters. In confessional, Jennifer Tilly says, “I don’t want these girls to get in a caviar food fight. That would be messy and [voice drops an octave] expensive.” Perfect. I laughed out loud. Give her ten more seasons. But the real surprise comes from the Morally Corrupt Faye Resnick who is sitting in the place she holds down best: at the end of the table. Whether it’s the Dinner Party from Hell, Kyle’s Weed Dinner, or here, MCFR always gets one perfect jab in from the cheap seats. “Dorit doesn’t want to be told she’s late all the time. I drink as much as you. We all have our little buttons,” she says. Perfect. No notes. Except maybe on those tiny little sunglasses she’s wearing.
But the real thrust of the whole argument is one Dorit says to Kyle in the middle of the kerfuffle. “I’m not dealing with somebody who actually wants to have a productive conversation, who wants to have any type of relationship, let alone a civil one,” she says and is absolute right. Sutton chose violence, chaos, snobbery, classism, and the gears of capitalism, which grind us all down, churning our bones to make their bread, including her own. It might have won her the fight, but it sure cost her a whole damn lot, and all of those things it cost her can’t be paid for with a wallet of any size.