Bachelor Nation

by Amy Kaufman

  If you do, Sean Lowe, for one, thinks you’re cray.

  “My personal opinion is that if you go on that show and you genuinely think you’re going there to fall in love, you’re probably a little off,” said Lowe, who actually did end up finding his wife, Catherine Giudici, as the Bachelor. “I think normal people do it for the experience. There were a couple girls on my show that came on and from day one they were convinced they were in love with me and I’m thinking, ‘No, you’re not. You’re just a little batty. You’re not in love with me. You don’t even know me yet.’”

  About a month after Emily Maynard sent Lowe packing on The Bachelorette in 2012, producers reached out to him to see if he was interested in becoming the next Bachelor. After discussing the idea with his family, Lowe flew from his hometown in Texas to L.A. to meet with executive producer Martin Hilton and top brass from Warner Bros./Horizon and ABC.

  “Martin was really protective of the franchise,” Lowe remembered. “He was, like, drilling it in my head: ‘We want you to stay humble.’ . . . I have no aspirations of moving to Hollywood. I would like to think that I’m a pretty humble guy. That wasn’t a big concern on my end, but that’s what Martin wanted to make sure of. I guess they had painted me as this all-American guy on The Bachelorette, and they wanted to make sure that I stayed that way for The Bachelor.”

  As soon as the higher-ups signed off on Lowe, he understood Hilton’s concerns. Once he was named the Bachelor, he was given a handler who catered to his every need, constantly running to get him food or drink. Producers started asking him where he wanted to travel on the show and what kind of women he was attracted to. (“I don’t discriminate. I said they could be whatever race. I don’t really have a type, as long as they’re nice and sweet.”) Meanwhile, ABC began to market him as America’s heartthrob, building him up as a purehearted, religious guy who just wanted to settle down and raise a family.

  “They really treat you differently, honestly,” he said of the transition from contestant to star. “Like, wait a minute, there’s literally almost a hundred people working on this show, you’re the lead, and so many people are there to serve you. I can see why that would be one of Martin’s concerns, because I think it would be very easy to get a big head.”

  Every potential star, of course, presents different issues. The producers sent Canadian Bachelorette Jillian Harris to speech therapy in a bid to help her shed her accent but canceled the classes after a few sessions revealed how integral her quirky voice was to her personality. Before Desiree Siegfried was named Bachelorette, meanwhile, producers wanted to make sure she’d present as “emotional” enough. She’d barely cried on Lowe’s season and prided herself on her toughness. “They wanted me to be upset when I was talking about how I didn’t grow up with money or cry when I was talking to Sean,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Well, I’m not going to, because I’m not sad about it.’”

  If she wanted the lead gig, producers said, she was going to have to show a “diversity of feeling.” Siegfried said she assured the team she is, in fact, a sensitive person and would do her best not to “smile through everything.”

  There are also financial considerations. The star of the show is the only one who gets paid, and the salary is negotiated based on what he/she might make at work during the production time period.

  “It’s not a lot of money,” said Ben Flajnik, the winemaker who was the Bachelor in 2012. “They don’t want it to be like you’re going on this for the money. It’s enough to cover your expenses while you’re gone. I think it just depends on where you come from and what your burn rate is.”

  Jen Schefft, who in 2005 served as the third Bachelorette, regrets how she handled the money talks. She said she didn’t have any lawyers look at her contract because she felt like she was at the mercy of ABC and “didn’t want to give them any reason to not want to pick me.”

  “I shouldn’t have been such a stupid girl and just wimped out and not stood up for myself,” she said, noting she was paid under $100,000. Meredith Phillips, the second Bachelorette, said she only made $10,000, which she was told was the show’s flat rate. That figure is exceptionally low when compared to what her successors have made; these days, it would be incredibly rare for someone to make less than six figures as the star of the show.

  At least Bachelors and Bachelorettes are given free clothing—something contestants don’t get unless they make it to the final rose ceremony. Instead, participants are sent an extremely vague packing list before the show kicks off. Both genders are told to bring clothes for all climates: swimsuits, winter jackets, sweaters, T-shirts, tank tops, casual day clothes, gloves, and warm hats—plus fourteen formal outfits, in case they make it through all of the rose ceremonies. The clothing needs to look good on-camera, so no stripes, baseball caps or sunglasses, small checkered patterns, visible branding, or solid black or white. Oh, and everything needs to fit in two bags.

  If you’re the Bachelor or Bachelorette, however, ABC hires a personal trainer for you and has you meet with stylist Cary Fetman, who organizes fittings and puts together an entire wardrobe of clothing, gratis. During Emily Maynard’s season of The Bachelorette, Fetman told In Touch magazine that he was given a budget of $350,000 to dress the Southern Belle—and he managed to exceed that figure.

  “You get to keep everything, because it’s all tailored to fit you, which is amazing—but you also get in the best shape of your life to be on national television, so nothing really fit for too much longer after I came home,” admitted Schefft.

  Those without professional help prepare for the show differently. Catherine Giudici only learned how to curl her hair the day before she left for the mansion. But Olivia Caridi, a broadcast journalist who knew how important it was to look good on TV, hired a professional makeup artist prior to meeting Bachelor Ben Higgins so that she could learn how to contour her face.

  The makeup artist had worked with people on reality TV and figured Caridi wouldn’t be getting much sleep. “So she advised on buying a white or a nude eyeliner to put on my eyes to make them look bigger, which I didn’t even know was a thing,” the contestant told Allure.

  Ashley Iaconetti, who competed on Chris Soules’s season, said she shelled out big time before heading to L.A. She visited a boutique near her apartment in New Jersey and bought four gowns with the aid of her parents.

  “I wanted super princessy stuff that I knew I’d never be able to wear again in any other atmosphere,” she said. “I was like, ‘Let’s ham it up right now and play dress-up.’”

  The store was willing to discount each dress by roughly $150, but looking back, Iaconetti wishes she’d gotten more of a bargain.

  “So many of the girls on the show now get all their dresses for free,” said Iaconetti, who had Botox and lash extensions when she was cast. “They’re like, ‘Hey, I’m going to be on The Bachelor. Can I borrow this dress? I’ll tag you in a tweet when I’m wearing it in an episode.’”

  Instagram sponsorships weren’t even possible back when Erica Rose traveled to Italy to meet European prince Lorenzo Borghese in 2006. Instead, the then law student spent most of her time at the gym to prepare for the show. “They did encourage everyone to get into their best shape,” said the contestant famous for constantly donning a princess tiara. “They’d say, ‘Maybe you want to lose some weight, maybe work out,’ whatever. I lost a lot of weight preparing for it—everyone did. They just encourage it. Not to everyone—like if people were already really skinny—but to most of the girls. I was happy I did it because the camera probably does add ten pounds.”

  In addition to dieting, Rose got hair extensions and went tanning. “The normal stuff,” she said with a laugh. She also attempted to learn a few phrases in Italian, though she was disappointed to learn when she arrived on The Bachelor that Borghese didn’t even speak the language fluently.

  Of course, guys stress about getting in shape too. Chris Bukowski—
who went on a record five different Bachelor shows—first turned up on the franchise during Emily Maynard’s season. He was cast only three weeks before production began, so he started going to the gym constantly and eating chicken nonstop, even keeping white meat in his pockets so he could have protein at the ready.

  “It was the worst thing ever. I’m not a meathead, and I was slowly turning into one,” he recalled. “I would work out before work. I would work out when I got home from work. I’d run, like, six miles before I went to bed. It was ridiculous.”

  Even Lowe—who worked as a fitness model at one point—cut out pizza and upped his sit-up routine. Which worked out well for him, since he went on to become the most oft-shirtless Bachelor ever.

  “I was hoping I wouldn’t come across as this really vain, egotistical guy who just has to be seen with his shirt off, because it really wasn’t my call,” Lowe insisted. “It felt silly, but I’m a gamer. It kind of goes back to being friends with the producers. They’re like, ‘Come on. We really would like you to take your shirt off.’ And it’s like, ‘All right. I like you, so I’m going to go along with it,’ even when sometimes you didn’t really want to. ‘Whatever, I guess I’ll just paint myself as the shirtless Bachelor.’”

  Long before the limos roll up to the mansion, producers have already mapped out the roles they’re hoping the cast members will fulfill.

  “We studied them ad nauseam before they arrived,” said former producer Michael Carroll, explaining that a large board with headshots of all the women resided permanently in the office. “You’d pre-categorize everyone and have some shorthand as to who they were. Mom. Southern Belle. The cheerleader. The bitch. We all called them by ridiculous names. The fat one, the hot one, the crier.”

  And sometimes? The black chick.

  Since its inception, the Bachelor franchise has been overwhelmingly white. It took fifteen years for the producers to cast an African American as the lead, with lawyer Rachel Lindsay starring as the Bachelorette in 2017.

  Prior to that, however, the show’s diversity track record was embarrassing. Of the twenty-five individuals cast each season, there were usually only a couple of people of color in the group. But between 2009 and 2012—when Jason Mesnick, Jake Pavelka, Brad Womack, and Ben Flajnik were Bachelors—there were no black women on the show. And no black men appeared on The Bachelorette between 2009 and 2011 when Jillian Harris, Ali Fedotowsky, and Ashley Hebert were its stars.

  “We always had to cast a black girl or two. ABC would say that,” shared Scott Jeffress, who, to be fair, stopped working on The Bachelor in 2005. “It was very obvious to me that it was token. . . . They’re afraid of losing the audience. It’s absurd. It was very upsetting to me. It would make the show more interesting. When some guy from the South is racist as shit and he becomes bros with some black dude and says stupid shit? That’s talking about race, which we need to do today.”

  Though critics had long made note of the show’s diversity problem, it wasn’t until a class-action racial discrimination lawsuit was brought against The Bachelor in 2012 that the issue started to gain any real traction. In the suit, Nathaniel Claybrooks and Christopher Johnson—two football players who had applied to be on the show—noted that over ten years of the franchise, no person of color had ever been the Bachelor or Bachelorette.

  “By only hiring white applicants, Defendants are making the calculation that minorities in lead roles and interracial dating is unappealing to the shows’ audiences,” the lawsuit argued. “The refusal to hire minority applicants is a conscious attempt to minimize the risk of alienating their majority-white viewership and the advertisers targeting that viewership. Nevertheless, such discrimination is impermissible under federal and state law.”

  The lawsuit was eventually dismissed in 2012, with US District Judge Aleta Trauger ruling the show’s producers had a right to control their creative content and were protected by the First Amendment. Though she said Claybrooks and Johnson had a “laudable” goal, she explained that freedom of speech also gave The Cosby Show the right to cast mostly African Americans and Jersey Shore to star Italian Americans.

  Contrary to the plaintiffs’ argument, Mike Fleiss has long said—at least prior to Lindsay’s season—that people of color simply don’t apply to be on The Bachelor or The Bachelorette.

  “We really tried, but sometimes we feel guilty of tokenism,” he told Entertainment Weekly in 2011. “‘Oh, we have to wedge African American chicks in there!’ We always want to cast for ethnic diversity, it’s just that for whatever reason, they don’t come forward. I wish they would.”

  Yet while Bachelor-esque dating shows on cable networks were filled with people of color—think MTV’s A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila or VH1’s Flavor of Love—ABC stuck with its timeworn formula.

  “I think it was like, ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,’” said Duan Perrin, who was one of the first black producers to work on The Bachelor. “Like, ‘VH1 can do that or MTV can do that. They’ve done it, so we don’t need to. We’ll keep with tradition.’”

  The few women of color who did make it on The Bachelor had to fit a certain type. “Pretty, whitewashed, long hair or fake hair,” said Evan Majors, Levenson’s old assistant, who is also black. Even then, the girl’s chances wouldn’t be good.

  “You just knew that girl wasn’t going very far because it never happened, so it became a joke,” said Carroll. “We’d actually root for them. Like, ‘Come on! Oh, episode two? Man!’”

  When Lindsay was named as the Bachelorette in 2017, race was discussed more openly on the show than it ever had been before. Roughly half of the thirty-one contestants who were cast on her season were men of color—far more than had ever appeared on any season of The Bachelorette.

  But it was hardly smooth sailing for ABC. Right off the bat, Lindsay’s season was down roughly a million viewers compared to the previous incarnation of The Bachelorette starring JoJo Fletcher. According to BuzzFeed, Nielsen ratings said Fletcher’s audience was 86 percent white and 7 percent black; Lindsay’s was 80 percent white and 12 percent black.

  And when racial issues arose, the show didn’t do an excellent job of addressing them. Midseason, Twitter users uncovered that one of the white contestants, Lee Garrett, had published a number of racist and misogynistic tweets in 2016 just a few months before he was cast. While ABC publicly denied any knowledge of said tweets, many in Bachelor Nation theorized that production purposely planted a racist in the cast to stir up drama.

  And stir up drama Garrett did. The singer-songwriter, who hails from Nashville, immediately began to clash with a few of the black men on the show. His main nemesis was the wrestler Kenny King, whom he repeatedly called “aggressive,” playing into a triggering African American stereotype. Garrett appeared to bait King into fights—often within earshot of Lindsay—and their contentious relationship ended up playing out as one of the main storylines of the season.

  And even after both men had been sent home, race still featured prominently on the show. Only one of Lindsay’s final four suitors was black, leading some African American viewers to criticize her for not supporting “black love.”

  Eric Bigger, the final black contestant on the season—he was sent home third to last—said he often received words of support from fellow African Americans for making it as far as he did.

  “Even last night, I went out and it was like, ‘Thanks for holding it down for us,’” he said, just a week after the finale aired in July. “I’m not holding it down for you. I’m holding it down for me.”

  Bigger, who works as a personal trainer in L.A.—full disclosure: My friend and I did work out with him one day; I almost died—said he’d never seen the show before he went on. He applied to be a cast member before he knew Lindsay was the star and said, prior to dating her, he’d dated exclusively white women for six years.

  “When it comes to love, the only pressure
you should feel is the pressure you put on yourself,” he said. “I’m not going off of what the culture thinks I should do. If I’m supposed to date Amy, I’m dating Amy. If it’s Amy and Rachel, but I have the biggest connection with Amy, I’m dating Amy. It’s not about the color. It’s not fair. It’s not even right. It’s, like, selfish.”

  “Think about where we live at,” he continued. “There aren’t that many African Americans in Los Angeles—at least not the area I’m in. It’s not like Baltimore, where I’m from, where I see that every day.”

  Bigger said he was more worried about discussing class than race with Lindsay, who was open about the fact that she came from a privileged background, attending private school in Dallas, Texas, where her father is a federal judge. Bigger, meanwhile, grew up in inner-city Maryland and couldn’t recall seeing his parents in the same room before his hometown date with Lindsay. A number of his relatives spent time in jail, he said, and he was constantly surrounded by crime.

  “At one point, I felt like if I really told Rachel where I was from, she wouldn’t like me,” he admitted to me. “I don’t know why, but I was just a little insecure about that. But I said, ‘You know what? I’m just going to own it.’ I told her I’d come from a challenging environment in a tough city. She comes from a wholesome, grounded, structured family, and I don’t come from that. So my thought was that it might make her uncomfortable. But that was a lie that was in my head. It wasn’t true. And after I let it out, I felt better.”

  Ultimately, Lindsay accepted a proposal from chiropractor Bryan Abasolo, leaving runner-up Peter Kraus to become the fan favorite for The Bachelor. Even though Bigger was beloved by fans, a few weeks after the show, he said the producers hadn’t even approached him about being the Bachelor. In September, it was announced that white racecar driver Arie Luyendyk Jr.—who appeared on Maynard’s season of The Bachelorette all the way back in 2012—was ABC’s unlikely pick.