Dorit Kemsley was speeding along the streets of Beverly Hills in her G-Wagon on the way to Kathy Hilton’s mansion when she noticed the familiar creep of paparazzi in her rear-view mirror. The 48-year-old reality star and fashion designer – best known for her role on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills – had just publicly announced her separation from husband, Paul “PK” Kemsley, after nine years of marriage. She was tightly wound and emotionally spent. She lit a Marlboro with one manicured hand and used the other to steer, giant shades covering her eyes. It was a candid, irreverent moment captured by one of the mostly forgotten and largely ignored cameras installed by the television network in her vehicle.
What she didn’t expect was for Bravo to actually use the footage, and for it to then go viral (you very rarely catch people smoking these days on reality TV). Within hours of season 14 airing, fans were uploading the clip to TikTok, soundtracked by Charli XCX and Lana Del Rey. “The way Dorit Kemsley just made me want to divorce my husband, tell everyone he’s an alcoholic, drive around Beverly Hills in my Range Rover and smoke a cigarette out of the window,” posted one user to the tune of Del Rey’s “Ride” – a song universally used online to express a sort of theatrical unravelling. “I always knew Dorit had a fire in her,” said another fan. “Reminds me of the end of Cruel Intentions,” a third chimed in. The message was clear: Dorit had unintentionally revealed herself to be just like us – over it, not immune to a stress cig – but still undeniably fabulous.
“I remember the headspace I was in,” she says now, speaking over Zoom from her home office in Los Angeles. She’s in a chocolate-coloured roll-neck, warm and easy to talk to. Behind her is a painting of her own side profile, edged in gold. Occasionally, she’ll stop to sip from a wine glass full of water using a straw, which gives me flashbacks to the show’s infamous talk-to-camera “confessionals”. “I was coming out of such a dark time. It felt like I’d been holding it together. And then I was just like… fuck it. So that was what you saw.” Once the episode aired, people in droves started sending her the clip. She was surprised, but she embraced it. “It’s fascinating, because you realise how something can resonate with so many people, and I would have never expected a moment like that would have,” she says. “Seeing the I don’t give a fuck. I really learnt to appreciate the humour and also the power.”
It’s been 18 years since the first ever episode of Housewives (first came Orange County, then New York, and then in 2010 Bravo launched Beverly Hills). In the years since, it’s become a reality TV behemoth, with RHOBH its crowning jewel (last season’s debut drew in 2.5 million viewers). But to anyone unfamiliar with the franchise – which follows the lives of wealthy socialite women – it can be hard to explain its longstanding allure. I often think of Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 text Notes On Camp, in which she describes “pure camp” as follows: “The essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.” To enjoy Housewives, then, is to enjoy camp in its purest form. A screaming match in the back of a Sprinter. A car-window cigarette in Beverly Hills. Immortal lines like: “At least I wasn’t doing crystal meth all night long in the bathroom, bitch.”
