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The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Season-Finale Recap: The Ghost of Kathy’s Future

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

Not My Sister’s Keeper
Season 12 Episode 21
Editor’s Rating 5 stars

The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills

Not My Sister’s Keeper
Season 12 Episode 21
Editor’s Rating 5 stars
Photo: Casey Durkin/Bravo

This week on our favorite program Everything Falling Apart With Kyle Richards, everything fell apart and Kyle Richards was there. Was Diana Jenkins? Unclear. I think I saw the blur of her in a red dress that could have used a necklace even though she says she’s too rich to borrow jewelry, but I’m not sure it was, in fact, the princess of Liplikia. Know who else was missing? Glen, Kyle’s party planner. She’s having a huge soirée in her backyard (remember COVID?) and it is being planned by some lady named Nicole who is on crutches. How did she injure herself? Probably when she killed off Glen so that she could be the one to plan all future white parties.

Speaking of the help, the best part of Garcelle’s Birkin party at her house was Patrick, Kathy Hilton’s butler, flirting with Joshua, Sutton’s assistant. It would be a match made in supporting character heaven. Faye Resnick could officiate the wedding. Crystal’s brother Jeff could plan the (separate) bachelor parties. Mikey could select the outfits for the wedding. The ghost of Kevin Lee could flit across the background going “Shi shi shi shi shi.” Teddi Mellencamp could arrive completely uninvited and talk about her latest neck surgery. It would be amazing.

Anyway, Garcelle hosted a party for all of the girls to put on little white gloves and fight over Birkins. Kathy couldn’t make it, so she sent Patrick in a feat of servant diplomacy so that she would look good at a party she didn’t even attend. Now that I think about it, this entire episode was about Kathy Hilton but we didn’t see her, we didn’t get a confessional, nothing. She never showed, like Godot or Niles’s wife Maris on Frasier.

But as everyone sits on Garcelle’s couches, Kyle tells Lisa Rinna that she needs to let this Kathy stuff go so that she can maintain a relationship with her sister and so that everyone will attend her daughter’s wedding. “My sister apologized, I have to move on,” Kyle tells Rinna. That’s what is crazy about this whole thing. According to everyone involved, including Rinna, Kathy was mostly lashing out at Kyle. If Kyle has accepted her apology then why do any of these other women even care?

Lisa, however, takes this opportunity once again to talk about how “shooketh” she was, like she’s a Shake Weight in a wobbly gym on top of the San Andreas Fault. She doubles down on making Kathy look bad even when Kyle is asking her to drop it. Even when Kyle gets teary and walks into the kitchen for a break, Lisa follows her into the kitchen to talk about it some more. Lady, can you not take a hint? Listen to Snoop Dogg and drop it like it’s hot. (I’m sure when he wrote that song he had RHOBH in mind.)

In her confessional, Kyle says that it is not helping that Rinna keeps taunting her sister. That is exactly what she is doing. She started with drinking the 818 tequila in Aspen and it has continued since; she keeps bringing up Kathy’s fit and talking about how “I’ve never seen anyone behave like that in my life.” Really? Did you see Erika in Aspen? Did you see Brandi Glanville slap Lisa Vanderpump in Amsterdam? Did you see yourself threaten Kim Richards in Amsterdam? I’m not saying what Kathy did was nice (though we still don’t entirely know what she did), but Lisa can only be so shocked. I mean, she had a dressing room next to Heather Locklear’s for years. Lisa Rinna has seen some shit in her day.

As Sutton walks away with another Kelly bag and Garcelle gets a $15,000 Birkin (her first), I thought maybe it was done. Maybe as we head into the finale party we would have something else to talk about. There’s already enough happening here. It is a backyard benefit that is also a product launch that is also a charity that is also Princess Grace of Monaco’s legacy that is also some sort of promotional event for a diamond company called Biscotti or something that is also another opportunity to see how poorly behaved Kyle Richards’s dogs are as they are locked in her bedroom just chewing up thousands of dollars in designer pumps. Who even has time for drama when they have all of that to get through?

We need to keep talking about Kathy, though, because this is when it leaked to the press. Before Erika and Rinna conveniently arrive last (as if the producers aren’t tracking every one of their town cars), Kyle is telling everyone about how she’s upset that this is in the press and someone can’t seem to let the story go. Garcelle is right, if Kyle’s friends won’t drop this, both in person and the press, then they don’t care about Kyle or her family. Kyle says that she feels this is a situation that is being taken advantage of, to which Garcelle answers that she feels like Erika and Rinna are using this to take the heat off of Erika.

After eating a hunk of steak that looks like a medium-rare troll turd, the women all convene on the couches so that Garcelle can posit these theories to the group. Garcelle asks Rinna point blank what she was so offended by that she needs an apology from Kathy. This may or may not have been an allusion to the racist and homophobic nature of some of Kathy’s comments that were coming up in the press at the time. But Lisa says that Kathy doesn’t owe her anything, so Garcelle implores her, for Kyle’s sake, to let it drop.

This is when Lisa puts her Daytime Emmy to work. First, she tells us that if she sweeps Kathy’s behavior under the rug, like Kyle wants, she is going to get cancer. Really? What did Kathy do? Just scream, “Asbestos, cigarette smoke, tanning beds, the dye in red M&M’s”? It’s so bad Garcelle visibly rolls her eyes. Then she says that by not telling anyone what Kathy said back at Kyle’s house — and she goes around the horn asking everyone individually if they know what was said at the house — that she is protecting Kyle and her sister. Okay, that is a fair point. But since we haven’t seen what Kathy said and Lisa won’t say what she said, we have to assume the worst. It’s the same as what Kim Richards did to Lisa back in Amsterdam that made her snap, saying, “Let’s talk about the husband.” Vague allegations, I say, are even worse than concrete allegations because it allows us all to assume the worst. In this instance, thanks to some press leaks, we all think that Kathy is a racist.

It’s at this moment that Erika admits that she does want Kathy to be pummeled. She thinks that if she has taken all of this heat for two years for something she didn’t even do, then Kathy should take some heat for something she actually did. I would counter Erika that the first year she was pummeled for something she didn’t do, the second year she was pummeled for the way that she treated her castmates in the aftermath of that. Kyle doesn’t want to talk about it anymore and goes into her house, with Dorit chasing after her yelling, “Kai, Kai, Kai,” like she’s a first-grade teacher in the Valley reading off attendance. (All three Kais were in attendance that day.)

It seems like the conversation is over, but it isn’t because Kyle is holding onto her ace. Kyle says she knows that the leaks in the press were coming from someone in the group. Sutton earns her diamond once again and asks Erika and Rinna to their faces if they’re the ones that leaked. They both say no, and Erika says she wouldn’t know how to do that. I mean, it’s not that hard. “Page Six” literally has a “tips” button on their homepage.

Kyle says she has it from a “very good source” that it was Erika’s publicist who leaked the information about Kathy to the press. She says the press got a play-by-play text message of what was happening at Erika’s hair party and how the women were talking about Kathy. The editors do their best to indict Jack the Publicist by showing him walking around the party and hanging behind Lisa and Dorit as they talked about Kathy’s meltdown. They also give us audio of Mikey, Erika’s assistant Laia, and Jack talking about how it is “going down over there.”

Yeah, that looks pretty bad. However, we don’t know Kyle’s source so we have to take her word for it that it’s trustworthy. There are two bits of information that we get from Erika, though, that discredit it. She says that Jack is also Nicky Hilton’s publicist and it doesn’t make sense to leak information about Kathy and thereby damage his relationship with Nicky. (We all know that Erika is broke these days, he’s making way more off of a Rothschild than he is off of Erika.) Also, to counter the theory posited by Garcelle and Kyle, there is nothing that is going to take the heat off of Erika. Sure, the press and the women might be talking about Kathy for a little bit, but every step of every lawsuit, every auction of Tom’s possessions, and every time she leaves the house in a crappy outfit is going to be covered by the press. Them going after Kathy is not going to stop that, and Erika (and her publicist) both know this.

I’m not saying this didn’t happen. In fact, I think it is a very likely scenario. But I would like to posit another likely scenario. We all know that the world is full of people who watch these women’s every single move. We see some of the media outlets and podcasters on the show itself. We also know that Kathy posted publicly on Instagram for her husband Rick to come save her from Aspen. Let’s say a reporter from RadarOnline sees that. They say, “Shit, what is going down in Aspen?” I know from the research into my book that outlets like RadarOnline have producers from the shows on retainer. That person calls a producer and finds out there was a fight at the Caribou club. That reporter then calls the Caribou Club and offers the bouncer $500 to tell them what happened with Kathy that night. That gets picked up by some outlets that do their own digging. Then people start sending tips to Deuxmoi and Bravo and Cocktails. Other outlets pick up those anonymous accusations. The story rolls on and on and on like some kind of snowball before it all lands in Kyle Richards’s front yard to make a fake winter wonderland the likes of which we saw the day Jamie Lee Curtis came over to mesmerize Dorit with her wind chimes.

I’m not saying this is what happened, either. I’m just saying that there are a lot of explanations. Sutton could have told Joshua everything that is going on and he met a guy at Hi Tops who was cute and a fan of the show and he dished to him and then that guy told his friend who works at Reality Blurb. Like they said, they all have a lot of people around them, it wasn’t necessarily Erika and Rinna, even though it also very well could have been.

What we really need, at this point, is a reunion. It’s so hard to leave a season like this — in the middle of everything. We need everyone to sit down, have Andy grill them, and find out what really happened, and I can’t wait. (We’ll be discussing it in the next edition of the Housewives Institute newsletter, so make sure to sign up if you haven’t already.) Meanwhile, Kathy was off somewhere, out of town without an excuse, trying to figure out how to get out of all of this. She’s going to get Sutton’s assistant to say that she didn’t call him an F-word. She’s going to plant mean stories about Erika and Rinna. She is going to go on a charm offensive with all of the press. She’s even going to keep Bravo from playing the trailer for the reunion at the end of the episode by kidnapping one or both of Andy Cohen’s young children. There is a ton going on here, and I can’t wait to see more, especially the implosion of the Get Along Gang.

RHOBH Season-Finale Recap: The Ghost of Kathy’s Future