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‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ recap: Terrifying journey into the mind of Camille Grammer

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I thought she was self-aggrandizing. I thought she was a bit of a snob. I thought she wore the baggage of being married to Kelsey Grammer on her sleeve.

Before the show last night, though, I had an inkling that maybe I was being too rough on poor Camille Grammer. Her marriage was imploding, after all.

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I was wrong. My mouth hung open like a trout’s as the credits rolled, jarred by how dreadful of a woman she seemed to be last night.

Other things happened on the ‘Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’ this week. The ladies shopped. Adrienne Maloof’s uncle died. Lisa Vanderpump and permanent houseguest Cedric made floral arrangements for one of her restaurants. Yet the whole thing was a blur — all that I can remember is Camille. Narcissistic, manipulative, wealth-flashing Camille.


Let’s recount:

— Adrienne calls to say she can’t come because of her uncle’s passing. The first thing Camille does once she’s off the phone — after, of course, beckoning for Nicole, the house manager, to come take the phone so she doesn’t have to hold it — is express astrological concerns that this could mean something bad for her.

—She goes to see soon-to-be ex-husband Kelsey Grammer — my, Frasier sure is looking old! — and has invited all the wives out there with her. She visits the apartment that she ‘designed’ in an earlier episode. But she laments how small it is. It’s ‘confining,’ she says, and she’s used to more ‘substantial’ estates. She doesn’t know if she can manage to live in a home that’s a mere 3,000 square feet — which, according to what little knowledge I have of New York City real estate, is a Taj Mahal of an estate in the Big Apple.

—Her mother — who has cancer — lives in New Jersey, but Camille’s so busy that she arranges to visit her mother while she gets her nails done. Camille complains to her cancer-stricken mother going through chemotherapy about the exhausting ‘battery of tests’ she had to go through to see if she might have the same disease. She whines of how tired she is, and how difficult her life is — again, to a cancer patient, as she gets her nails done. (Her mother, it appears, didn’t get her nails done.)

—Now, the even juicier stuff: We’ve talked in past weeks about Camille claiming that Kyle told her that no one would be interested in her without Kelsey there. Snippy thing to say, and I stick to what I said before: I don’t think Kyle actually said it, but I believe Camille truly believes she did. Even if she did, I don’t think it would be without merit. To paraphrase a line Joe Biden once used, a sentence for Camille is a noun, a verb and Kelsey Grammer.

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The whole scuffle hung over the New York trip like the ghost of Jill Zarin. (‘Get a hobby,’ anyone?) Kyle preemptively took Camille aside and apologized, calling it a miscommunication. She claimed she would never say something like that. Camille insisted she would, and did, with her eyes strangely bulging from their (cough, cough, surgically tightened) sockets.

But the two ended making up, and hugged. It’s all good now, right?

No, no.

At dinner 20 minutes later, according to Lisa Vanderpump’s count, suddenly the wounds weren’t healed for wounded Camille. It erupted between the two of them in an awkward and totally not-classy dispute that can basically be boiled down to this:

CAMILLE: How dare you call me insecure.

KYLE: You are, you’re crazy!

CAMILLE: Why must you keep throwing all these jabs at me?

KYLE: That’s B.S., Camille.

And it seems they basically recycled some variant of those lines over and over again. It concluded with Camille saying she hadn’t made it up. ‘I swear on my mother,’ she said, ‘who has cancer.’ (Classy.)

Kyle retorted that she needs psychological help. Immediately.

The screen cut away to an interview with Camille, talking about how she had the upperhand by keeping her cool. ‘Sorry, Kyle, you lose,’ she said, with a nefarious cackle.

I was dumbfounded by the spectacle. The show was coming to a close, and I just stared at the screen with the discombobulated gaze of Kim Richards.

***

O.K., fellow Show Trackers: I need to hear from you on this. Where do you stand on this? We don’t have the good fortune of actually seeing the conversation at the center of this squabble. Do you agree with me, and think that Camille manufactured this? Or is Kyle really the one at fault?

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-- Rick Rojas

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