Bachelor Nation

by Amy Kaufman

  But there were other on-set mine fields to navigate: namely, the confusing, often volatile dynamic between Fleiss and Levenson. There were whispers throughout the set that the two producers were in a romantic relationship despite the fact that they were both married.

  “You’d catch little things coming around a corner or out of the corner of your eye when they didn’t think anybody was in the room or paying attention,” said Hatta, who often had to interact with Fleiss’s wife as part of his assistant duties. “It was just disheartening. It kind of takes the wind out of you, because I really respected that guy at one point. This just took it down a notch.”

  Rumors about the executives started circulating when staffers began picking up on puzzling behavior between the two. Levenson’s assistant, Evan Majors, frequently fielded calls from her husband in which her spouse had no idea where his wife was. One casting associate noticed Levenson and Fleiss flirting during a rose ceremony, when she sat between his legs, her teeth stained by red wine.

  “We could kind of tell that she was overprotective of him,” said Erica Rose, who interacted with Levenson as a contestant on The Bachelor. “She’d get jealous when people were talking to him. We were like, ‘We’re not here trying to date him.’”

  Meanwhile, Phillips—a onetime Bachelorette—observed how the second Fleiss arrived on-set, he and Levenson exited together.

  “I even went over to Lisa’s house and hung out with her and her husband, and that was awkward,” Phillips recalled. “Looking him straight in the face and talking to him like I don’t know anything.”

  Regardless of what happened between Fleiss and Levenson, I’ve yet to meet one person who worked on The Bachelor who doesn’t credit her as an integral part of the show’s success. She was the one in the trenches, identifying interesting characters, getting juicy morsels, and upping the stakes, employees insist. So when Fleiss was on-set, his interactions with Levenson could become testy—they both had a stubborn streak and bickered openly. But Fleiss actually wasn’t around all that much. He had a company to run and was working on developing a slate of reality programming to fulfill his multiyear production deals with ABC and CBS.

  And after The Bachelor hit, Fleiss was in demand. The show premiered on March 25, 2002, and reviews weren’t kind—not that that made a difference in the ratings. On the day of the show’s debut, Variety published a piece saying the program wouldn’t last long, arguing it felt like “a reality series that comes late to the party and just won’t leave.”

  “Besides being insulting to any woman who may not look like a runway model, The Bachelor, hosted by Chris Harrison, is just plain boring,” the Variety critique read. “It’s as if the network bankrolled a brothel and positioned cameras to catch the action.”

  Many critics took issue with the way The Bachelor depicted women. Even though Chris Harrison started each rose ceremony by telling the ladies that they could reject Michel’s flower if they didn’t think he was someone they “might end up marrying or might want to marry,” many felt the female contestants were disempowered.

  The NOW Foundation, part of the National Organization for Women, gave the show an “F” grade for “sexual exploitation” and “social responsibility.” The New York Times wrote that the show existed “as a hyperbolic reminder of the pernicious view that man-catching at this point in history has odds analogous to hitting the superfecta.” The Los Angeles Times said that “arguably the most distasteful aspect of The Bachelor is the idea that a large group of beautiful, intelligent women—in this case all under thirty-five—would compete to win the approval of one guy.” And The Washington Post argued that The Bachelor had reduced “courtship and matrimony to a Darwinian TV sport,” resembling “nothing so much as a contemporary harem.”

  The show’s creators and stars fired back against the harsh words in the press. “No one is saying ‘this is how dating should be,’” reasoned Michel, who said he didn’t view any of the women as “desperate.” It was just a “weird social experiment,” Fleiss explained—nothing more than “something to watch on television.” Women were the program’s biggest fans, noted Levenson, who suggested ladies responded to the show because “they like seeing that there is a possibility for true love and that they’re not the only ones being dumped by their boyfriends.”

  Not that the audience needed any convincing. Nearly 10 million total viewers tuned in to watch the series premiere of The Bachelor, and by season’s end, that number had jumped to 18.2 million. Michel, as it turned out, didn’t even end up proposing to his final pick, Amanda Marsh, an event planner from Kansas who beat out Trista Rehn.

  “I got this ring for you,” Michel told Marsh, opening a Harry Winston box. “I’m gonna hold on to it.” He went on to tell Marsh that he was falling in love with her and asked if she would move to California, where they could make sure they felt the “same way about each other outside of the fantasy world of mansions and limos.” (They broke up less than a year later, after Marsh learned Michel had slept with Rehn during the show.)

  Nonetheless, the ratings were so strong that the team got to work on a second season almost immediately. In May 2002, casting director Lacey Pemberton—who still finds the program’s eligible suitors today—put out the call in the New York Post, saying the show wanted someone “more approachable” than Michel this time around. “I think graduating from an Ivy League school made Alex seem unapproachable to certain people,” she said. The second Bachelor, she hoped, would be a guy with a “regular job” who “enjoys sports” and “all sorts of regular activities.”

  That guy ended up being Aaron Buerge, a twenty-eight-year-old corn-fed Missouri banker. The blond Midwesterner proved to be even more popular than Michel: His season finale—which did end in a proposal—raked in a colossal 26 million viewers.

  The Bachelor had become a cultural phenomenon—and that baffled the critical cognoscenti. Just as Buerge’s season came to a close, The New York Times published two lengthy pieces attempting to get to the bottom of the show’s success.

  Caryn James, the Gray Lady’s chief television critic, said the program’s popularity spoke to a deep-held nostalgia: “We’re in an age when sexual roles are fluid, and The Bachelor offers an escape from ambiguity, a temporary and knowingly false return to an era in which male and female roles were clear—stereotypical, but clear.”

  Meanwhile, Alessandra Stanley, who became the Times’ chief TV critic in 2003, argued that the show’s appeal was anything but mysterious: “This gauzy ABC dating competition is Jackass for women: a reality show that revels in emotional risk taking and rejection in the same way that Jackass, the MTV series, celebrates men’s foolhardiness and physical pain.”

  It wasn’t long before other networks began attempting to cash in on their own versions of The Bachelor. In December 2002, Fox announced its new show Joe Millionaire, about twenty women competing for a man they believed was worth $50 million. In fact, lead Evan Marriott was just a working-class construction guy. The kicker? Mike Darnell—the executive with whom Fleiss had worked on Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?—was behind it.

  “It’s a pretty inventive swipe at us,” Fleiss admitted to the Chicago Sun-Times. “The Bachelor show isn’t as cynical and I think that’s ultimately why it works, because at its heart is romance. I think viewers like to root for real romance and not something that is [as] disturbed as Joe Millionaire. . . . I mean, [Fox is] desperate for two things—to try to generate some ratings, obviously, because they are in the toilet, but also to try to damage a great franchise like The Bachelor.”

  Joe Millionaire ended up becoming a huge hit, with more than 34 million viewers tuning in for the finale. Fortunately for Fleiss, the concept really only worked as a onetime stunt. A sequel set in Europe, where there weren’t as many people familiar with the original show, tanked.

  Anyway, Fleiss was busy running his own production company, which had grown to 300 emp
loyees just a year after the debut of The Bachelor. Suddenly, he had more shows on prime time than veteran producers like David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal) and Steven Bochco (NYPD Blue). Vanity Fair profiled Fleiss and frenemy Mike Darnell, dubbing them the “Reality Kings.” And network executives gushed about him to the press.

  “Mike has been a gift,” ABC Entertainment president Susan Lyne told the Orlando Sentinel in 2003. “He understands the eighteen-to-thirty-four audience and what they’re looking for in television.”

  But though he would go on to produce more than a dozen other reality shows—High School Reunion, Leave It to Lamas, The Cougar—Fleiss has yet to replicate the ratings success of the Bachelor franchise.

  Which perhaps comes as somewhat of a disappointment to a guy who aspired to have a diverse fifty-year career like Aaron Spelling. (He even named his kid after the Dynasty producer, remember?) But maybe not. It’s not like he’s hurting for cash, anyway. He lives atop the Malibu bluffs in a home worth nearly $14 million with his second wife, former Miss America Laura Kaeppeler, who is twenty-three years his junior, and their two-year-old son. (He filed for divorce from his first wife—his high school sweetheart—in 2012 citing “irreconcilable differences.”) He also has two places in Hawaii: a $2.3 million half-acre property in Hanalei and a two-plus-acre home on the North Shore of Kauai that he purchased from Julia Roberts for $16.2 million.

  Plus, he’s always known his strong suit, and it’s wrapped up in the conceit of The Bachelor: He’s a provocateur.

  “I love the excitement that comes when people say, ‘You can’t do that on TV!’ And then we take the dare and respond, ‘Oh yes, we can!’ I get off on that,” he said in a 2003 interview with the Contra Costa Times. “If I have any skill at all, it’s the ability to come up with ideas that get people talking. With so many choices out there for viewers, you’ve got to get people talking about your show or you have no chance at all.”

  In that same interview, he argued there wasn’t enough sex appeal on television, complaining that he had to wait three episodes to see Tiffani Thiessen in a bathing suit on the short-lived Fox series Fastlane. In that big Vanity Fair piece, writer Mark Seal witnessed Fleiss in the edit bay, asking to see more “sexy images” of the female Bachelor contestants. When the production team pulled up footage of a drunk woman, Fleiss responded: “I thought we had hilarious shit of her fucked up! . . . I would loop a couple of those barf sounds. Loop the wettest one!”

  “Mike would walk by and you would just see the sunglasses over the top of the cubicle, and he’d be like, ‘More T-and-A, Sandi. More T-and-A,’” said Johnson, the former story editor. She remembers being impressed by the way Fleiss could “tap into the populist masses,” delivering suggestions that were deceptively simple but ultimately had a big impact on the viewing experience. He always encouraged the producers to keep the suspense up, and to repeatedly reemphasize what was at stake: Is there a rose up for grabs? Then we better hear the word “rose” every sixty seconds.

  He was also good in a room. When it came time for him to sell a show, he’d trade out his flip-flops and basketball shorts for cowboy boots and black jeans. “He’s a great salesman,” said Jeffress. “He can walk into a room and pitch like crazy. He’s one of the best pitch guys I’ve ever seen.”

  But when it came to The Bachelorette, Fleiss was the one who needed to be sold. After The Bachelor performed so well in the ratings, it wasn’t long before viewers—and network executives—wondered what it would be like if the tables were turned. Yet Fleiss wasn’t sure that audiences would respond as positively to a woman choosing between twenty-five men.

  “Mike was really negative about it. Never did like it,” said Jeffress. “And I agreed with him, in a sense. The house with the girls in it hanging out creates a female-driving audience. They’re talking about the bachelor, talking about jealousy. Guys in a house together? It’s a frat house. It’s a big party. Nobody wants to see it. Mike didn’t think that was what the show needed to be, but ABC wanted it and said, ‘You’re doing it.’”

  “I was sort of dragging my feet on this one,” Fleiss later admited in a 2003 interview with Newsday. “My theory is if it’s working, leave it alone. But the network wanted to silence some of our feminist critics, and rightfully so.”

  Plus, Fleiss and company already had an ideal candidate waiting in the wings: Trista Rehn. After appearing on Alex Michel’s season, viewers had fallen in love with the thirty-year-old former Miami Heat cheerleader who spent her days working in pediatric physical therapy. Though she’d been jilted by Michel, the experience helped Rehn realize “more than ever before what kind of person I was looking for and what kind of person I had become,” she wrote in her 2013 memoir. As the Bachelorette, she felt she’d be more likely to find the One: “After all, people were being paid to scour the country and find guys who fit my ‘type.’ I didn’t have that kind of time and, buried in student loans, I certainly didn’t have that kind of money.”

  The guys who showed up to woo Rehn had all seen her on television prior to The Bachelorette and were eager to date her specifically.

  “It wouldn’t have worked if we had put up any random girl, and told them they’d have to show up and compete for Girl X,” theorized Fleiss in that interview with Newsday before the show’s premiere. “Guys aren’t interested in the notion of getting married, generically speaking. But you dangle some sexy little blonde . . . like Trista . . .”

  And the men will be down to compete, apparently. In true Fleiss fashion, of course, nothing about the gender swap was subtle when The Bachelorette premiered on January 8, 2003. “For the first time in television history, a woman will be calling the shots!” Chris Harrison announced at the top of the show, before introducing the pilots, firefighters, and professional athletes who would be vying for Rehn’s heart.

  “Are you ready to fight the same battles the men fight in having the power and the say in the relationship?” the host asked Rehn, completely earnestly.

  “I think it’s a great thing for a woman to propose,” she responded.

  Yep, that’s right: The Bachelorette was supposed to get down on bended knee and propose to her chosen man at the end of the season. But somewhere along the way—after one guy gifted Rehn with a Tiffany bracelet he’d bought pre-show and another read her a very poorly written love poem—that idea went out the window, sans explanation.

  The show never elaborated upon why Ryan Sutter, Rehn’s ultimate pick, was the one to give the Bachelorette the Harry Winston sparkler viewers had watched her pick out herself. But Bob Guiney, who vied for Rehn’s heart and later went on to become the Bachelor, guessed that being proposed to by a woman would have made Sutter uncomfortable.

  “I think that any one of the bachelors would have wanted to propose instead of being proposed to,” Guiney wrote in his 2003 memoir. “It probably taps into the same feelings that made me want my wife to take my last name. There are some things that you want to keep if you are traditional, and I’m an old-fashioned guy in a lot of ways, and so were a lot of the other guys there.”

  Another break with tradition that the Bachelorette team was worried about? The possibility that Rehn would sleep with multiple men in the Fantasy Suite. “We were very frightened it would look like Trista’s whoring herself up,” said Jeffress. “It’s changed now, but back then, it would have been, ‘Oh my God, she’s horrible.’”

  Rehn’s openness about her sexuality, Jeffress said, helped push viewers past their traditional thinking. “She said, ‘Hey, we’re grown-ups, and I’ve gotta know [if we’re sexually compatible]. We’re feeling it.’ Saying that on TV, I think, helped viewers understand that ‘Hey, it’s OK, these are adults. They’re consenting. They’re just in a relationship and they may be getting married soon.’”

  But critics didn’t think the show was as progressive as Jeffress did. The role-reversal was a “profoundly stupid idea,” wrote The New York Times�
�� Caryn James, back on the Bach beat. “There’s too much sexual stereotyping around, too much of a lingering sense that what makes a man a playboy makes a woman a slut. And The Bachelorette is hardly trying to explode those clichés. With its hokey title (a word no one ever uses) and its smarmy attitude (viewers are going to be looking for signs of sluttiness), this gimmicky series plays right into those stereotypes while pretending not to.

  “The only stereotype shattered,” James concluded, “is that the Bachelorette, who turns thirty during the course of the series, isn’t considered over the hill.”

  A month after that column was published, however, 20.4 million people watched as Rehn and Sutter got engaged. ABC soon green-lit a three-episode wedding special, a lavish affair that the network spent $4 million on; the couple was paid $1 million for their participation. Rehn donned a $70,000 satin Badgley Mischka gown, $50,000 Stuart Weitzman shoes with 282 diamonds on them, and a $1 million Tacori necklace.

  The Sutters are still the franchise’s longest-lasting couple, and they live together in Colorado with their two children, where Ryan continues to work as a firefighter.

  Why I’m a Fan

  ALLISON WILLIAMS

  I watched the first few seasons of The Bachelor, followed by a hiatus until I graduated from college. My first season “back” was Brad Womack’s second season, which I viewed with vigor. I had just moved to L.A., and there was a weekly viewing party at my friend’s house. It just so happened that the man who is now my husband also went to that viewing party, so Monday nights were an excellent opportunity for a group-date scenario when he was in town from New York. Thus, it sort of became a staple in our relationship and, eventually, our marriage. We still watch it every single Monday night.