The Real House-Husbands Strike Back

TheDailyBeast.com:

It's not easy to be married to Real Housewives—you can be publicly humiliated, insulted, or dumped. Nicole LaPorte talks to Beverly Hills spouses Mauricio Umansky and Russell Armstrong about the perils of public marriages; to New York's Bobby Zarin about being an "Ambassador of Good Will;" and to Bravo executive Shari Levine about the show's divorce rate.


"I'm going to be more engaging next season," Russell Armstrong said, when cornered at a party recently and asked about his stint on Bravo's The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Over the course of the recently-ended reality show (Part 1 of the reunion episode is Thursday), Armstrong—a straitlaced venture capitalist married to Housewife Taylor Armstrong—emerged as an unrivaled schmuck.


Robotic and awkward, Russell appeared always to be dragging a pouting Taylor away from parties just as they were getting started; he bought their allergic daughter a puppy and then seemed to want them to keep it. Even just sitting at the breakfast table, he looked like he'd prefer to be having a colonoscopy. Taylor, meanwhile, spoke openly to her fellow Housewives about her marital problems.


"I didn't really understand what we were getting into," Russell told The Daily Beast defensively, but with more charm than was ever displayed on TV (not that that's saying much). "I don't really watch reality television. And so we decided early on that this was Taylor's project; that I was going to be supportive, but just stay in the background. And that backfired."


It's not easy being a Real Househusband. Although the show—which has also explored the McMansions of Orange County, New Jersey, New York, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.—ostensibly revolves around the demi-fabulous femmes of its title, spouses inevitably get dragged into the drama. Very often, there is a price, and coming across as a schmuck is the least of it. These people were all cast, at least in part, for their potential volatility; being prodded by producers and fellow castmembers, and seeing their relationships through the public's eyes, can be a combustible combination.


On The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Mauricio Umansky, husband of Kyle Richards, came close to losing one of his biggest real-estate clients (Frasier star Kelsey Grammer) after his wife had a spat with Grammer's soon-to-be-ex-wife Camille. More seriously, the series has attracted attention for the number of couples who have divorced after, or while, being on the show—most recently, we've seen the Grammer union dramatically implode, and on last year's The Real Housewives of D.C., British expat Cat Ommanney's husband, Charles, a White House photographer who appeared visibly irritated while cameras were rolling, filed for divorce not long after the show wrapped. In its six different editions, there have been seven Housewives divorces and one broken engagement.