by Amy Kaufman
“Can you blame them when they keep coming back? After all, you are lovable,” Trombetti continued. “You have the strength to say no! They will call and come back as many times as you let them! You don’t need this drama! It doesn’t feel good because it isn’t good!”
I was starting to feel pretty #TeamSusan. We need and deserve to be loved and cherished, she said. We need to make ourselves important so that others follow that direction. And if a man doesn’t treat us well, we need to kick him to the curb. “I am giving you permission to put you first,” she almost shouted.
YES, GIRL!
Now that we felt good about asking for the kind of commitment we needed, Susan began to talk about how to find an eligible man. She said she had a “big background in liquidating frauds” and warned us that you never know just how dangerous someone you’re dating might be. “It takes four seasons for crazy to come out,” she said. “He could be mentally ill. He could be an alcoholic. . . . I’m not concerned over a DUI. I’m concerned over three DUIs.”
Oh, OK. So three DUIs is where you draw the line. Good to know.
“It’s OK if he’s had financial issues,” she went on. “It’s OK if he’s had a DUI. If he was dealing coke out of his dorm, I don’t know if I’d like that, but you’ve gotta set your own boundaries.”
And where does one find this non-coke-dealing potential husband? Online, probably, since it’s 2018. Fortunately, Susan was ready to arm us with plentiful tips about how to create an alluring online dating profile. Our profile photo, she said, was 95 percent of what men paid attention to, so we needed to wear bright colors in it.
“Something like that,” she said, pointing to Molls’s lemonade sweater, a compliment Molls was exceptionally proud of and did not let me forget for the rest of our weekend. Whatever, Susan, get on board with the Southwestern vibes.
Other tips for our online dating profile: No bikinis! If we show too much cleavage, we will be attracting the wrong guy. No negatives or absolutes, like, “Don’t contact me if you have baby-mama drama.” No photos in which you’re wearing sunglasses. No photos with your hot friends. No photos with children. No photos with other people’s children. No photos with animals. No professional work photos.
“You want to invoke romance—not visions of arguments over the boardroom table!” she said. Because a professional headshot totally screams bossy, mean work lady instead of accomplished career woman.
My confidence in Susan was waning. And then this:
In order to expand our dating pool, she said, we had to get up off the couch and start exploring new social circles. And where is the best place to do that? Not in suburban Maryland!
“You need to move where the men are that you want to date,” Susan advised. “I don’t care if it’s a hole-in-the-wall in Beverly Hills.”
As someone who lives just a few miles from 90210, I can tell you that I don’t come across too many holes-in-the-wall on Craigslist. Nonetheless, Susan continued to advise the room to get out of town and join high-end concierge services that would allow for access to exclusive movie premieres and gallery openings.
“I’m telling you, after a few of these things, you’re going to start saying to yourself, ‘How many goddamn pictures can I take with Brad Pitt?’” she said. (Quite a few, according to a “Susan Trombetti Brad Pitt” Google Images search.)
“I was at one premiere and I saw Orlando Bloom. I think he’d just broken up with Katy Perry, because he was looking [to date] when I met him. These guys? They’re just people. They’re these incredible people you never thought you would meet—but you could,” said Trombetti.
Other places to find single, rich dudes? The Four Seasons in Lanai, Hawaii, or any Ritz-Carlton.
“One of the biggest things Chris Soules can teach you about finding love? Put your ass out there in the most unorthodox ways and get out there,” she said.
Oh, right. Chris Soules. Remember him? Nearly four hours into the day, there was still no sign of him. But finally, after a lovely lunch of cold cuts and egg salad—and after some drama involving his car service—he arrived. We quickly learned that Chris would not be delivering any sort of prepared remarks—instead, he was sitting for a question-and-answer session with Susan.
“I’m going to start by asking you something you’ve probably never been asked,” she began. “Who is your favorite Disney character?”
SUSAN IS THE NEXT DIANE SAWYER, Y’ALL.
His answer, by the way, was Ariel. He said he would most like to marry Ariel, the Little Mermaid, who most definitely would be sporting a bikini in her dating profile pic.
Now, mind you, up until Chris’s arrival, I had been typing away on my laptop, jotting down all of Susan’s pearls of wisdom. And no one batted an eye. But when Chris began talking, Susan’s hired security quickly approached me and told me I couldn’t type anything that they were saying during their conversation. Because Chris Soules was relaying state secrets to us, apparently. I slammed my laptop closed in a huff and just began taking notes with good ol’ paper and pen, which Mr. Security Man didn’t seem to mind.
Nonetheless, Molls was rattled. She was worried that Susan’s team would Google us and uncover that I was a journalist and Molls was a comedian who had been trolling the event all day on Twitter. In other words, that we were not there for the right reasons.
Molls kept whispering, “Should we just go? Should we just go?” over and over again under her breath. As she later told me, she was paranoid that we’d be found out, escorted into the women’s locker room, and “given the shaming of a lifetime.” Then we’d have to go outside, hang our heads woefully, and wait eleven minutes for an Uber in the suburbs.
Fortunately, I was able to convince Molls to stay and turned my attention back to Chris and Susan. She had moved on from Disney characters to his dating preferences.
“What do you find most appealing in a woman?” she inquired.
“Looks is important, obviously,” he answered.
“Listen, ladies! LOOKS!” she said, nodding toward the faux-eyelash station that had been set up for later in the day.
“Um, but really it’s about personality and how you hold yourself,” he continued. “If they have an aura of strength about them, I think that’s something that’s important to me. Someone who has been raised well, and you can just tell that they have a background of having a good heart.”
He went on to contradict nearly everything Susan had been talking about all morning, saying how he wanted a woman who had a career and was able to put him in his place. He said he hated text messaging and preferred making telephone calls.
Susan gasped. “Amazing! A guy who actually calls!”
“You don’t fall in love through texts. If a guy’s throwing texts, you need to hold him accountable and move on or don’t respond until you get a phone call,” Chris advised.
“This is a man’s opinion,” Susan said.
After about fifteen minutes, Chris’s time with us had already come to a close, so Susan proposed a toast: “Here’s to all the bastards you’re never gonna miss, and the hot guys you’re gonna kiss!” We toasted with Champagne. I don’t drink, but Molls said it tasted cheap.
At this point, Susan disappeared with Chris, and we were subjected to a series of increasingly dark presentations. With no explanation, representatives from local charities came forward to talk about the work their organizations do. In theory, this was to encourage the seminar participants to embrace charity work, because Susan had said earlier that men are attracted to philanthropic women.
But I felt bad for the charity reps, who could sense that their presence wasn’t entirely welcome by the guests. To make matters worse, those who had paid extra to take photos with Chris kept getting called out of the room in the middle of the presentations.
Then came a young lady from a local beauty salon to tell us about how important proper brow
shape was—that brows frame our face and are the “window to our soul.” We learned all about eyelash extensions, microblading, and permanent makeup.
Oh, and then there was the doctor from the Laser Center of Maryland. He was brought in to tell us all about the services he can provide to women: facial rejuvenation, laser-assisted liposuction, Botox, lip fillers.
By this point, Molls and I were sinking into a deep depression. Susan returned, her cheeks red, as she told us she’d been taking shots upstairs with Chris. We decided to skip the rest of the plastic surgery presentation and duck out early. I requested an Uber. It took eleven minutes to arrive.
Why I’m a Fan
PATTI STANGER
It’s very unusual for a show to last that long on the air at network level in the love space. And we still fall apart when we see the people cry in the car. The producers and I know why they’re doing it: They haven’t eaten. They’ve only drank alcohol. They haven’t talked to their loved ones on the telephone. They haven’t seen TV or read a book. They’re sequestered. And you get ruthless.
Some of them are there for the right reasons. It’s not an absolute. Some of the girls say, “I’ve tried everything—online dating, mixers, traveling, nothing has worked, this is my last resort. Who is better to fix me up than The Bachelor?” But people need to remember that this is a TV show. Part of it’s not real life. They cast for reasons. They’re gonna put [in] four or five people that the main person is attracted to and the rest is gonna be for drama and excitement, like the Corinnes of the world.
People can meet on television, but it’s in the execution. Chemistry rules the street, and that cannot be changed. Can a girl look at a guy who is an 8 and he becomes a 10 in her eyes? Yes, by the personality. He might be shorter, he might be not as rich, but there’s something there. It’s not that way for a guy. When the Bachelor comes along, he sees twenty-five women and he knows right away who he’s interested in. Men are like, “Oh, I could do her,” and that’s it. “The rest I’m not gonna touch.”
In the last generation, there have been more women graduating from college than men. When the market crashed, a lot of men who were super successful over thirty lost their money. If they didn’t invest wisely and didn’t buy real estate, they basically were crying in their soup. So with that being the case, the new generation of millennials are saying to themselves, “I watched my parents suffer to make money to put me through college. They’re miserable, they get divorced at fifty. Quality of life is way more important to me. So maybe I won’t make as much money, but I’ll live a better life.” Your generation is less materialistic. You don’t really need the expensive car. With Elon Musk coming out with a $32,000 Tesla, you’ll be fine. A Prius is an ambiguous car. Is he rich and environmental, or just poor? This generation doesn’t see the fairy tale of the men rescuing them, because they don’t have poster people. In my day, it was still Cinderella. But now, the Prince is dead and Cinderella knows she’s gotta make it on her own.
I think on the show, people want that because it’s a fame game. It’s a competition to win the crown, like Miss America. And you’re drunk. You’re not eating because you’re afraid you’re gonna look fat on-camera. Then there’s Champagne throughout the entire day. Now you’re in a room with twenty-five women and one fucking guy. And everyone’s talking nonstop about who’s gonna get him and how they’re gonna get him.
Because viewers love it when the guy gets on the knee and proposes. That’s the money shot. The ratings prove you love it. We’re talking Nielsen, here. And you’re still watching. Even cord cutters are watching. So they’re doing something right.
—Patti Stanger, matchmaker (The Millionaire Matchmaker, Million Dollar Matchmaker)
CHAPTER 12
Intoxicated by Happily Ever After
The moment I began considering writing a book about The Bachelor, I was hosting one of my weekly viewing parties. Nearly every Monday during Bach season (read: January through September), a bunch of young women congregate in my living room with bottles of rosé and a plethora of Trader Joe’s snacks. Friends have long stopped inviting me to events on Monday nights, and my roommates gird themselves for a couple of hours of raucous discussion.
It’s almost always the highlight of my week. When the gatherings began, I barely knew most of the girls who came—in fact, some I’d communicated with only via Twitter. (I’m sure that sounds sketchy, but you’re talking to someone who thought her best friend in 1998 was a girl she met in an AOL chat room.)
In the years since, we’ve helped one another through breakups, sweat it out at the gym together, and even gone on road trips across California. Sure, my colleagues still love to mock my “Bach niiiiights!”—imagine that shrieked with a Valley Girl inflection—and plenty of people tell me they mute my Twitter feed while the show is on. But this seemingly trivial reality show has actually been responsible for some of the best moments in my young-adult life.
Which brings me back to that fateful Bach Night. It was a special one. We were welcoming our first guest from the show, JJ Lane, a contestant from Kaitlyn Bristowe’s season of The Bachelorette. He’d started following me on Twitter—a lot of Bach folks do this, I think because they want proximity to someone in the media?—and before long, he’d agreed to be our guest of honor at a viewing party. These days, we’re quick to welcome members of Bachelor Nation into the fray, and we’ve also watched alongside notable fans like Allison Williams, Melanie Lynskey, and Lorene Scafaria. (Living in L.A. and interviewing celebrities for a living doesn’t hurt.)
When Lane showed up, he was totally awesome. Even though he’d been painted as the villain of the season, he was gracious and dishy, spilling lots of fun behind-the-scenes info with a group of ladies he’d just met. I remember sitting on my couch, thinking about how judgmental I’d been while watching him on the show. I started to wonder if most of the people on the show were as wildly different in real life—and if they had the kind of war stories Lane did.
This was also, coincidentally, around the time that Lifetime was debuting a new show called UnREAL. Created by Marti Noxon and Sarah Gertrude Shapiro—the latter of whom had worked as an actual producer on The Bachelor for many years—UnREAL was a fictionalized version of The Bachelor. It depicted life behind the scenes on a reality dating show called Everlasting, where producers treated contestants like total shit in order to make juicy television. Because of Shapiro’s background, the show got a lot of attention when it debuted—and strong critical reviews.
“Judging from the first four episodes of UnREAL . . . the job of a reality producer is, however the participants may justify it, a grifter’s game,” read New Yorker critic Emily Nussbaum’s 2015 review of the first season. “It’s a profession for people whose personality disorders make them adept at exploiting the personality disorders of others, who possess the compartmentalization skills of those shrinks who rubber-stamp torture techniques for the CIA (Eating disorders? Daddy’s death? An on-set date rape? It’s all fodder for the story—or something to be covered up.) Like a slaughterhouse exposé, UnREAL is designed as an audience intervention, forcing viewers to taste the cruelty in their reality-TV bacon. The fact that the show itself also tastes like bacon—at once sweet and salty, greasy and irresistible—is no accident.”
In his review in The New York Times, Jon Caramanica echoed a similar sentiment: “The acerbic and unrelentingly sad UnREAL doesn’t exist just to send up reality television, or to pick at its scabs,” he said. “Rather, UnREAL uses that access as a tool to ask questions about these sorts of programs: not just about how they operate—savagely, if its stories are to be believed—but also why participants on both sides of the camera subject themselves to them.”
I reached out to Shapiro numerous times for an interview for this book, but she never responded; I heard through the grapevine that she’s “done talking about The Bachelor.” Alas, when I interviewed her for the LA Times prior to UnREAL’
s debut in 2015, it was clear that her time on the Bach was anything but positive.
A native of Santa Barbara, where her father taught at the nearby UCSB, Shapiro began dreaming of a directing career when she was a teenager. She went to college at Sarah Lawrence, where she hoped to study under the poet Mary Oliver. She was rejected from the poet’s workshop but went on to major in fiction writing and filmmaking. During her senior year, she began interning for indie-film powerhouse Christine Vachon and later got a job managing the studio of fashion photographer David LaChapelle.
At age twenty-two, she migrated from New York to Los Angeles in the hopes of pursuing her directing dream. Instead, she landed on one of Fleiss’s shows: High School Reunion. While there, she said, she signed some sort of contract that committed her to “unlimited renewable options for perpetuity”—meaning she was obligated to work on other Next Entertainment productions too.
When she was asked to start on The Bachelor, though, she was horrified.
“I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m a feminist!’” she recalled, describing her horror at the proposition. “It was like the apocalypse to me. Like, the worst thing that had ever happened. It was like asking a vegan activist to work in a slaughterhouse.”
Still, she went, and under Levenson, she climbed the ranks from associate producer to field producer, where she was responsible for coming up with romantic dates and storylines. She told me that she didn’t remember all the seasons she worked on during her three-year tenure with the show, but she was certain she was around for Andrew Firestone’s and Bob Guiney’s.
After a few years, she was miserable, but she was “such a good Jewish kid that I could not make myself get fired.” Instead, she told her boss she was going to kill herself if she didn’t leave. It was 2005, and she put all her stuff into her car, drove to Portland, Oregon, and considered becoming a kale farmer.
