Whether you know Lisa Rinna as a divisive Real Housewife of Beverly Hills, a glamorous and full-lipped contestant on “The Traitors,” or even as a disinhibited Instagram vixen dancing to Bad Bunny and Madonna, you’d never get the sense that any emotion was off-limits to her.
She is, after all, the woman behind a thousand cultural moments: Shattering a wine glass and reaching for a fellow Housewife’s neck across a table in Amsterdam. Casually asking another if people were using cocaine during a dinner party, as a co-star’s jaw dropped. Sitting cross-legged in a cage, her famous mouth pursed in resignation, wearing a puffer jacket and angular wraparound sunglasses on “The Traitors.”
But as Rinna has cultivated her nearly four-decade career, including stints as a soap opera actress, red carpet interviewer, talk show host, QVC spokeswoman, boutique owner and pregnant Playboy cover girl, she’s grappled with some of life’s darkest experiences in front of rolling cameras.
Her mother’s death in 2021 and her subsequent, explosive exit from “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” were possibly the only events that could force her to slow down, examine long-buried feelings and evolve into the Lisa Rinna she is today.
In a new memoir, “You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It,” out on Tuesday from Dey Street, Rinna is frank about the highest, lowest and hammiest points of her life. It reads like an exorcism of her negative memories from “Housewives”; an ode to her family and long marriage to the actor Harry Hamlin; and an embrace of getting older and wiser — and of hormone replacement therapy. (“I will kill you if you take my hormones away!”)
Rinna, 62, riffed on those topics over lunch this month at the Polo Lounge in Los Angeles. She was preparing to film a reunion with the “Traitors” cast the next day — “the first time I’ve been excited about a reunion,” she said, stabbing chunks of a well-done, bunless burger into Thousand Island dressing.
The fourth season of “The Traitors,” the devious, murder-mystery-inspired competition on Peacock that pits celebrities and reality stars against each other for a cash prize, concludes this week. “I feel like the mother of the group,” she said of her castmates, even those with whom she had clashed. “I’m a mama bear. I’ll go to bat for you.
“‘Traitors’ has helped people see that side of me — that I’m not this scary villain, devil-child,” she continued. “That means more to me than anything in this whole experience.”
The masochism of reality TV
It’s rare for Rinna to say no to any professional opportunity.
“I am a worker-bee actor,” she writes, “and we respond to a paycheck and a steady gig.”
After breakout roles on soaps like “Days of Our Lives” and “Melrose Place” in the 1990s, that drive took her to some outré places. In her book she describes filming 13 Taco Bell commercials in the desert, and reveals behind-the-scenes tricks like moistening burritos with baby wipes to keep them glistening. She can laugh about her commercial for the adult-diaper brand Depend while acknowledging the financial relief it afforded her family. As she herself put it on “Housewives”: “I’ll do anything to make a buck.”
But committing to “The Traitors,” which relies on purposeful deception and secret alliances, took six months. She was still fragile after her 2022 departure from “Housewives,” which had coincided with the loss of her mother, Lois. A neighbor’s adult daughter, who was a fan of the show, ultimately persuaded her.
The experience was “a fever dream,” Rinna said. Before arriving in Scotland to film, she had to complete a 537-question psychological evaluation, then sit for a two-hour therapy session on Zoom. “They know everything there is to know about me,” Rinna said.
Her “Traitors” persona was noticeably different from “Housewives” — goofier, lower-key — often to the chagrin of her castmates. In one exchange, her competitor Colton Underwood taunted her by saying he had expected to see her act more like “a Housewife.”
“He wanted to see me being aggressive, angry, yelling, and sassy,” she said. “I was quiet. I was measured.”
Tiffany Mitchell, another contestant on “The Traitors,” said Rinna had surprised her more than anyone on the show.
“I looked at her as this larger than life person,” Mitchell said, but Rinna immediately put her at ease. “I send her my most insecure thoughts — I don’t know what I wouldn’t bring to her for advice.” She has added Rinna to her personal Mount Rushmore of idols, along with Janet Jackson, Tina Turner and Angela Bassett.
Rinna was eliminated after a majority of the cast began to doubt her loyalties and voted her out. By the time she departed, the show’s demands had exhausted her to the point of catharsis. Years of pent-up grief and emotions poured out when she left. “‘Traitors’ ripped me wide open,” she said, “and it was such a blessing.”
Still, she regularly warns people about the perils of reality TV — not that anyone listens. “There’s a masochistic element to every reality show,” she said, but “everybody wants to be famous. It’s as simple as that.”
Playing the villain
There’s famous, and there’s reality TV famous.
But “Real Housewives” famous pushed Rinna toward behavior and decisions she never would have made otherwise. “You don’t ever think that you would do some of the things that you end up doing out of survival,” she said about the show.
In her eight seasons — “the longest job I have held in my 35-year career,” she noted at the time of her departure — she changed the paradigm of what it meant to be a reality star on Bravo, the network that airs the “Real Housewives” franchises. She was open about treating it like any other role, instead of pretending it was real life, and was willing to do what was needed to keep the drama moving.
Growing up in southern Oregon, Rinna recognized from a young age the emotional appeal of the antihero. “In Medford as a kid, I used to go watch live W.W.E. matches at the armory, and the fans always loved the villains the most,” she writes in the memoir.
Harry Hamlin, Rinna’s husband of almost 30 years, hardly recognized her reality TV persona. “The person she was on ‘Housewives’ isn’t anyone I know,” he said, and believes she was mirroring the personality disorders around her. (The copy of the D.S.M. he keeps on his desk is useful when trying to assign armchair diagnoses to her co-stars.)
In the book, Rinna writes that she resumed work on the last season of “Housewives” three days after her mother’s death. Her behavior was often hard to watch, especially when she tore into her co-stars.
“Everyone that came in contact with me was basically like, I don’t want to look at you because all I see is grief,” she said. “No one knew what to do with me.”
In her memoir, though, Rinna puts to rest many of her notorious conflicts with former colleagues, while offering tantalizing details about the inner workings of the series.
For starters: Designers are loath to loan clothes to Housewife stars. It is a liability for their clothes to be associated with what could be a “toxic mess,” she writes, and she spent a large portion of her “Housewives” salary on her wardrobe and styling in order to keep up with her co-stars.
Bravo comes under fire, too. “We work for gangsters,” Rinna once told her co-star Erika Jayne, according to the book. “Don’t ever forget that. It’s like Vegas. Bravo is the casino, we’re the players and the house always wins.”
In conversation, she was just as forthcoming. Talking about Kyle Richards, who has starred on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” since its first season, and her sisters Kim Richards and Kathy Hilton, who also appeared on the show, Rinna was open about the family dysfunction she witnessed. The sisters’ dynamic has a level of “psychosis that you don’t even know how to begin to deal with,” Rinna said, which she believes came in large part from their mother.
From the time she joined “Housewives,” Rinna said she knew that “I do not want to be doing this when I turn 60.” She thinks at least one of her former co-stars feels trapped on the show by feelings of loyalty or obligation. “I don’t want to speak for her, but …. ”
With that dangling, Rinna knocked a full drink into her lap.
She laughed at her klutziness, fishing out ice cubes and a straw from her pants as I worried about her enormous, white faux leopard coat. Her concerns were more prosaic. (It was from Ann Taylor.)
“I hope she’ll bring me another iced tea.”
‘When people ask my sign? I say dollar.’
Rinna has written books before, including a self-help guide, an eyebrow-raising sex manual and a novel about a Hollywood starlet. But she was initially resistant to write a memoir.
“I saw the fear and I saw things that I needed to deal with but didn’t want to,” she said. “I then came to the decision that I probably should write the book because of what I needed to face: grief, pain, the toxicity of ‘Housewives.’”
Despite those underlying themes, “You Better Believe I’m Gonna Talk About It” is breezy and self-aware. Rinna is open about her cosmetic procedures, fashion tastes and trademark frugality. (One proposed tagline during the “Housewives” credits sequence: “When people ask my sign? I say dollar.”)
“She knew what she was promising just with that title,” said her ghostwriter, Dibs Baer, but Rinna never wanted to punch down. The more they worked on the book, the more it became about Rinna redefining herself yet again, Baer said.
Rinna and Hamlin are considering their next chapters. Acting jobs are drying up in Los Angeles, Hamlin said, and they’re thinking about moving abroad or to upstate New York.
Their daughters, Delilah and Amelia, are settled and thriving in their mid-20s. Rinna, who’s always loved fashion, is finding new clout as a style influencer just as Amelia’s modeling career has taken off, and walked in a couture show at Paris Fashion Week this year.
Rinna feels she has at least one more great role in her — on a prestige show like “The White Lotus,” or something else directed by Ryan Murphy. After her stint as a Traitor, “murdering” castmates each episode, she’d like to try playing a fictional killer.
But no matter how famous she becomes, some things about Lisa Rinna will never change. Even now when she dines at the Polo Lounge she parks on the street. It’s cheaper than the valet.
Joumana Khatib is an editor at The Times Book Review.
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