Make It Nice

by Dorinda Medley

  In order to fully understand where I was emotionally during this time, I need to tell you a little more about what my relationship with Richard was like. We were the type of couple that did everything together. And by “everything,” I really do mean everything. I chose his outfits in the morning; I booked his appointments; I was involved in his business. During every moment of every day, I knew what Richard was doing and he knew what I was doing. Was this healthy? I honestly don’t know, but it’s the way it was. Our lives were completely enmeshed.

  What this meant was that over the course of our relationship I had had less time for friends. It was totally unlike my marriage to Ralph. With Ralph, I’d had tons of time to cultivate and expand my friendships. And at all other points in my life, too, friendship had played a huge role. But while I was with Richard, I kind of just stopped calling my girlfriends as much. I let my supportive circle of women drift to the wayside. This was, in retrospect, a mistake, and there’s a big lesson here: keep your friends close and don’t put all your eggs in one basket, because you don’t know what is going to happen. After Richard’s death, I felt so incredibly lonely. I felt like I was on an island by myself. I still had Hannah, but Hannah was grown now, on the verge of going off to college, and grieving in her own way.

  Slowly, I started to live again. I even started to laugh. I began to forget the images of sick Richard and started to miss who he’d been when he was healthy and happy. I looked through old photo albums with friends and family and reminisced about better times, and that was healing.

  “Remember when Richard almost killed everyone chasing a rainbow?”

  “Remember when he dressed up like a bear?”

  “Remember Kmart?”

  It felt good to be laughing again.

  About four months after he died, a well-known psychic named Anne called me. I’d run into Anne at parties in Washington for years. She was a well-known character in DC and a longtime acquaintance of Richard’s. She’d advised people like Nancy Reagan and Jackie Onassis. I was scared to pick up the phone at first. What if Anne had something negative to tell me? I ignored her calls, but she kept calling. She wouldn’t stop. One night while I was drinking and crying about Richard, feeling incredibly lonely, I finally picked up.

  “I’m so glad I’ve gotten ahold of you!” Anne said. “Richard has been contacting me nonstop because he needs to give you a message.”

  “Is he okay?”

  Let me pause here and tell you that for the first few weeks after Richard died he was around. I know how that sounds, but it’s true. I could feel his presence, and I thought that he was there because he was struggling to move on to the next step. I thought he didn’t want to leave me, but he had to. So, about two months into this, I spoke to him: “You need to move on, Richard. Go!” Soon after that, I didn’t feel his presence anymore. He was gone.

  Now, here’s what Anne said to me on the phone:

  “First of all, Richard wants you to know he loves you. He also wants you to know that he’s sorry for scaring you, but he didn’t want to go. He couldn’t figure out why all those people were at the Brick Church. He wanted to be part of it. He wasn’t happy about leaving. But now he’s transcended. And he’s doing great. He wants me to tell you that you’ll always be his north. Last, if you ever need to talk to Richard, he’ll be listening.”

  I could not believe this conversation! How had she known that Richard was around and then he wasn’t? The due north thing—it was possible she’d heard that from other people or that it had been printed somewhere, but still. I was floored. And it gave me peace to have someone remind me that I could still talk to Richard. I never had to be completely without him.

  When I told this story to my mother, she reminded me of how, when Richard and I used to take two helicopters to Hyannisport—he with his children, me with mine—we’d wave at each other in the sky. “You couldn’t talk to him, but you knew he was there. It’s like that now. Just think of him as being in the other helicopter.”

  So that’s what I do. I talk to him out on the porch in the Berkshires. It gives me hope.

  Besides the condolences and the judgment that I wasn’t a sad enough widow, there was often the empty question, “How are you?” Nobody really wanted to know how I was. Death is heavy. It brings people down. They’re afraid of it. They asked me that question, “How are you?,” to be polite and I understood that, but it was also annoying. How do you think I am? People didn’t want me to be lonely, but they were afraid of my loneliness, too, as if it might be contagious.

  After a while, the unsolicited advice started pouring in. Some people thought I absolutely shouldn’t date for a long time and other people said, “You should start dating soon.” I had no plans to start dating soon. In the months after Richard’s death, I was focused on Hannah, my home, my family, and close friends. I wanted to find some sort of rhythm again in this new life. Being Richard’s wife had been so all-consuming and I had kind of forgotten how to be on my own.

  One day, while an old friend and I were out to lunch at the Core Club, a man named John Mahdessian walked up to the table and said, “How’s my pal Richard doing?”

  Richard and I used to have drinks at the Core Club about once a week, and John was one of the people we often ran into there. He was the owner of Madame Paulette, a well-known high-end dry cleaner in New York, and he managed to save me from a terrible situation involving an expensive borrowed Cavalli dress a few years back. I’d borrowed the intricate $18,000 dress from Roberto Cavalli himself for a dinner at Buckingham Palace, and my girlfriend had spilled red wine on it. (The dinner, by the way, was for Prince Charles and hosted by my friend Fizzy, who invited me.) I was paralyzed. How was I going to fix this dress?

  Madame Paulette, amazingly, restored the Cavalli gown back to its original condition. After that, John would often greet me and Richard at the Core Club and ask how the dress was doing and we’d chat in the courtyard over drinks. Richard liked John, and John liked Richard. It was all very casual and friendly. We didn’t know each other that well, and that’s why, in mid-March, when I ran into John, he didn’t know that Richard had passed away.

  “You didn’t hear?” I said. “About Richard.”

  John was shocked. “Richard died?”

  “He died in November.”

  John told me he was so sorry, and then he offered to take me out sometime. “Let’s go for dinner,” he said.

  I agreed. We went out for one dinner, and then another, and then another, and soon we were dating. At the time, I thought it wouldn’t last long. I had no idea it would turn into a six-year relationship.

  John was the opposite of Richard in every way imaginable. If Richard was vanilla ice cream, then John was peanut butter ice cream. He was fun, free, and unserious, a larger-than-life playboy who reminded me of my Italian grandfather. He’d never been married; he had no kids. He was untethered, super fun, and rough around the edges. He was Mister Feel Good. He used to say to people, “I am the Sultan of Stain, the Maverick of Fabric.” I thought that was so stupid but also somehow endearing. He was just boisterous. He talked fast and liked to dance. He also liked to be surrounded by people, and, until we became exclusive, a lot of those people were women.

  John introduced me to an entirely new world, and he lived in a new world, too: Queens. That little bridge from Manhattan to Queens makes a big difference. The people are different. The sophistication and rigidity are gone. John was friends with a very colorful group. Early in our relationship, he invited me to a wedding at Oheka Castle on Long Island, a place I had not known existed. The bride and groom emerged from neon-colored smoke clouds, and I thought, Boy, these people know how to have fun!

  Quite frankly, I hadn’t had good old-fashioned fun in a long time. John’s type of fun reminded me of the fun of my youth—the weddings at the VFW and the huge holiday dinners with tons of relatives and food. John was familiar to me. He danced in the crazy way my family danced. And he brought levity to my life at a time
when I really needed it.

  The biggest problem with John was that the people around me disapproved of him and constantly compared him to my late husband, Richard. John had never been married, and it seemed to me that he had no idea what it meant to be a parent. He was my age but, it seemed to me, living like he was in his thirties. With John, I either regressed or was having a ball being young again, and I didn’t really care which it was. I wanted to stay up and laugh and dance and drink.

  It was nice, too, spending time with groups of people who had no idea who I was. They didn’t care about who I knew or what my past life was like. I was living in the present and, in a way, it was an escape from the pain and grief I was feeling. The crossover between my world and John’s was fun for so many reasons, but sometimes it was also awkward.

  When I brought him to the Berkshires for the first time, he was dumbfounded. He had no idea that my life was so lavish. I caught him taking pictures of the house and sending them to his friends in Queens, which I thought was weird, and I told him so. “Don’t be weird, John.”

  I never let John sleep at my place when we were in the city. I barely ever slept at his place. The first time I did, I woke up at 4:00 a.m. and thought, I’m in Queens. This doesn’t feel right. I slithered out of the bed and was crawling to the door when John said, “Where are you going?”

  “I need to be home. This is wrong. I have to wake up in my bed, my apartment, on the Upper East Side. This is fine at night, but during the day? No.”

  After dating me for a little while, John stopped seeing other women. We fell in love. Our relationship continued to be defined by fun, laughter, and friendship. I believe my time with John helped to heal me, and it helped John to grow up and know what real love and commitment is.

  Until this point, I’d appeared in the background of various parties and events that had been filmed for The Housewives, because I ran in the same circles as many of the women on the show. We all lived in the small fishbowl of the Upper East Side. We got our hair done at the same place; we went to the same bars; we ran into each other on the street.

  A few years earlier, I’d declined the offer, even though Richard had wanted me to say yes. Now when I was asked, I honestly thought it was a sign from Richard: Take this, Dorinda.

  Even though I’d started to live again and even though I was dating John, I was still grieving and still trying to find out who I was without Richard. I felt like I was floating, like my life had no rails, and then suddenly the opportunity to be a Housewife arrived, and it seemed to make sense. It was something to hold on to.

  As I took stock of the other elements in my life, it seemed to make even more sense. I felt like I had two options. I could either live off what Richard had left me and become one of those Upper East Side women who spend their lives going to Pilates and lunch, or I could take what I had and do something with it. I could make my own income. This was a big draw for me. As you know, I like working and I like making my own money. I had no one to depend on now, and The Housewives was a path toward independence. Plus, Hannah would be in college soon, so that would leave me with an empty nest.

  Really, this was the first time since my early twenties that I could do whatever the hell I wanted, and I was ready to take the leap. Who was I outside the roles of mother and wife? Who was I as just plain Dorinda? I wanted to find out.

  Bravo asked me if I was interested in becoming a castmate, and you know the rest of this story. After a series of interviews and screen tests, they hired me. How could they not? It was an obvious fit. I ticked all the boxes. I was friends with the other Housewives, and I lived the type of New York life that was portrayed on the show. I also fit the bill physically. I dressed in fashionable clothes; I was well-groomed. I told myself I would try it for a year and if I didn’t like it I’d quit.

  The first time I ever filmed was at my friend’s house. I didn’t understand how the mike was supposed to be attached at first. It felt strange to have it pressed against my body, and sort of unnatural, and when the camera started rolling it really hit me: I had decided to be filmed for television. I felt suddenly nervous. What was I supposed to say? What was I supposed to be doing with my hands?

  It’s not easy to show up and be filmed, knowing that the whole world is going to have opinions on what you do and who you are. It takes a certain amount of courage. Also, I was in such a vulnerable position when I started the show. I was still grieving and still unsure about who I was and who I wanted to become.

  The Housewives is not scripted, as I’ve mentioned, and there’s no training that happens beforehand. You just show up and they attach a mike to you and say, “Go.” And then you’re there, in your friend’s kitchen, with a camera moving around you.

  Once we got started, I was very happy to find out that the presence of the camera didn’t bother me one bit. I stopped feeling nervous almost immediately, and at some point I forgot we were even being filmed. I loved the camera and the camera loved me. My very first time filming was with Ramona in the Hamptons. We just started talking, as we had done for years. We talked about the other women on the show; we said some things about upcoming plans. I was authentically myself in that first scene, just as I would always be. I said and did whatever I wanted. I didn’t have to be Dorinda Medley anymore, or Dorinda Lynch, or even Dorinda Cinkala. I wasn’t a good person or a bad person. I was just Dorinda, warts and all, and wow, what a sense of relief I felt.

  Despite my tough shell, I’m very sensitive, and normally I feel guilty and fearful, as we all do sometimes. But weirdly, with The Housewives I felt none of that. It was as if the show existed inside a bubble of freedom for me. I loved it, and I promptly got completely swept up in the process of making it, because it was impossible not to.

  The first year, I didn’t understand that every single choice matters. Your shoes matter; your shirts matter; your earrings matter. I was naïve. I came as I was. I didn’t consider that fans would be clocking every wardrobe choice or that my wardrobe choices would be written about in magazines or by bloggers who would want to know where the clothes came from so they could tell other people to buy them. Some would even add a link on Instagram to make it easier for fans to purchase the clothes I’d worn. This is a common experience for reality stars during their first year. They think they’re playing checkers, but really, it’s a game of chess. They think it’s linear, but in fact, it’s cumulative.

  But I didn’t know that yet. I was just showing up and taking the job as seriously as I’ve taken all my other jobs. I arrived on time and in my regular clothes. I didn’t have hair and makeup people like some of the other women.

  Even though I was exhausted, I enjoyed the hectic schedule. It was new and exciting. I was thrilled to be doing something that was all mine. I was just having fun. Then, in December, filming was over, and that was a new shock—the shock of crickets chirping.

  The whole production team moved to another show. I was no longer seeing all the faces I’d become accustomed to seeing every day for four months. I suddenly had no packed schedule and no car picking me up every day. The first time I got into a cab after that first season of filming, I’d become so used to being chaperoned that I literally forgot I had to tell the driver where I wanted to go. I’d gotten so used to eating out at restaurants, and now it was time to go to D’Agostino to buy my own food. It was a startling change. One day I was being miked and people were bringing me coffee, and the next day I was just some blond lady going to the grocery store for celery like everybody else.

  From January through March, I was walking around the Upper East Side, same as usual. Nobody knew who I was. Nobody knew I’d just filmed the show. Some days, I’d forget the show even happened. It didn’t feel real yet. Other days, I’d remember a moment during filming and think, Oh no, I hope they don’t use that. Or I’d remember a moment but couldn’t remember if I was miked or not. You’d think this wouldn’t happen—forgetting whether or not a microphone is attached to you—but it does, and much more frequentl
y than you might like.

  So, there I was in 2015, out and about in the neighborhood after filming had ended. By April, I wasn’t thinking much about it at all. And then the show premiered.

  Watching that very first episode was nerve-racking! This is when I started to understand how time and story work in reality television. Fifteen hours of filming can be cut to twenty minutes—and intercut with other scenes featuring other characters to give the impression that it might have all happened simultaneously. You might make a sly comment during the filming of the show and think nothing of it. Then later, you might watch the episode and find that the other women on the show are referencing your sly comment continuously. So, a ripple effect can happen, and you can’t predict it. You get to watch the episode only a few days before the audience and all you can do is sit back and watch it unfold.

  I realized some other things, too. Being on television is like therapy, or at least it’s a great way to see yourself clearly. In fact, you don’t know anything about yourself until you’ve seen yourself on-screen. And let me tell you, it is nothing if not incredibly enlightening.

  Before I was on the show, I considered myself to be a stylish woman who was somewhat attractive. Well, I was both shocked and humbled when I saw myself on television for the first time. I didn’t like the way I looked; I didn’t like the way I dressed; I had no idea how crooked my nose was. I was much heavier than I thought. I couldn’t believe the way I walked. I didn’t know I used my hands so much when I talked.

  And this, in a nutshell, is why a first-year Housewife looks nothing like that same Housewife in her second year. After seeing yourself on television, you get it together, which is to say that you go, Oh, this is why everyone else has a stylist and a makeup artist. With greater awareness comes greater curation. I was definitely hiring people to help me look better the next year.

  Other things I didn’t notice about myself: I referenced my mother all the time. So many sentences began, “My mother says…” Also, I talked a lot! But I was funny, even funnier than I’d thought, so at least I had that going for me.