During Aviva Drescher’s two seasons on “Real Housewives of New York City,” she was manipulated by producers, vilified by castmates, publicly shamed by her octogenarian father and berated as an “idiot” and “witch” by the Twittersphere.
And she’d do it all again.
“It helped me raise awareness for amputees, and opened up a lot of business opportunities for me that continue to come,” says Drescher, 45, who lost one leg as a child in a farm accident. Though dismissed from the franchise back in October 2014, she is vying to get back on the show.
“I have four children,” she says. “There’s never enough money in New York City.”
Since Bravo launched the “Real Housewives” franchise in 2006 with the Orange County, Calif., edition, it has produced eight spinoffs — including the NYC version, which has cycled through 14 stars since 2008. Over the past decade, the collective brand has tallied nearly 20 post-filming divorces, four arrests, one suicide and enough chatter about rehab stints, cheating and bankruptcy to occupy a year’s worth of Lifetime movies. The eighth season of “RHONY” premieres April 6 with a new sacrificial lamb: pin-thin Flatiron mom Julianne Wainstein.
As fans brace themselves for three more months of women acting like entitled teenagers and airing their peccadilloes —plus a whole lot worse — on television, many are left wondering: Who in her right mind would sign up for this?
Former cast members reveal to The Post just why they’re willing to expose themselves and their families to public shame. Credit the allure of celebrity, the paychecks (which can reach the high six figures) and the megasuccess attained by one and desired by all — “RHONY” star Bethenny Frankel’s 2011 sale of her Skinnygirl cocktail brand for a rumored $120 million.
“It’s way more intense to become a ‘Housewife’ than it used to be,” says Melissa Stanforth, a casting director at Jupiter Entertainment who has worked on the New Jersey, Orange County and Beverly Hills, Calif., shows, and explains that production companies have seen “every socialite out there.”
Once you make the cut, you better deliver.
“It’s not a show that celebrates women,” says Kelly Bensimon (“RHONY” seasons 2-4). “But that’s just the nature of the beast: He who barks the loudest gets the bone.”
Drescher tells The Post that the Bravo producers reprimanded her after a relatively tame appearance during the Season 5 reunion, where she apologized for calling Sonja Morgan and Ramona Singer “white trash.”
“The producers said, ‘We don’t want our characters to be self-censoring. We want them to be themselves’ — i.e., wild and dramatic,” says Drescher.
According to the former “Housewife,” she was given an eight-week contract for the second season and told that, if she “delivered drama” during that period, she would get a full five-month contract.
“So what did I do in those eight weeks? I produced drama.”
Drescher ran with what she calls her “storyline” — exposing a rumor that castmate Carole Radziwill had employed a ghostwriter for her best-selling 2005 memoir, “What Remains.”
“I don’t care who wrote her book. I don’t care if [it was her] or Santa Claus,” says Drescher. “I was definitely cast as the villain. And I was going to be the best villain that there was! I played to win.”
Her contract was extended for the full five months.
But it wasn’t enough. Despite producers later warning Drescher that skipping a filmed group trip to Montana would result in her ousting, she decided to stay home because of an asthma condition.
Drescher realized she needed to do something drastic to stay in the producers’ good graces. So during the Season 6 finale dinner, when the women began picking a fight with Drescher, she used it as her opportunity to take the stage.
“The only thing that is artificial or fake about me is this,” she screamed — though no one called her fake — and ripped off her prosthetic leg, throwing it down on the table. Seconds later she hurled it across the room like a javelin.
“I’ll crawl home,” she said, as the women looked on in shock.
“[I did it] so I could make a big splash and come on next year,” says Drescher.
In the end, she was still cut, something Drescher blames on on-air nemesis Radziwill’s friendship with Bravo honcho Andy Cohen.
Alex McCord, a star of the first four seasons of “RHONY,” says the show quickly turns “ ‘Hunger Games’-ish,” with women going more and more overboard to increase their airtime and secure spots for the following season.
“It’s about who can throw the biggest, best party,” she says.
During the debut season, her husband, Simon van Kempen, shelled out $5,000 to charter a yacht for her birthday.
“I’m sure he thought, . . . ‘Wouldn’t it look great on camera?’ ” admits McCord, who says that, during “RHONY’s” early years, Bravo didn’t put “a dime” toward events the “Housewives” threw.
Now, the production companies front the costs for everything from limos that take cast members to filming locations to an engagement party Drescher hosted for her father at the Museum of Sex.
While most “Housewives” say their friends stood by them after they joined the show, not everyone is keen to be associated with reality TV, especially among the snootier enclaves of New York City.
One former “Housewife,” who asked to remain anonymous, claims that wine-chugging “RHONY” star Ramona Singer’s then-teenage daughter was asked to leave the tony Upper East Side school Convent of the Sacred Heart because “Ramona embarrassed herself on the show and they thought it was a negative reflection on the school.” Singer refutes this, saying her daughter “loved Sacred Heart but decided she wanted a co-ed [school].”
“I think being on the show definitely became frowned upon,” says McCord, who now lives in Australia and is back in college studying psychology.
“Season 1, we had a huge editorial spread in Harper’s Bazaar. That would not happen today,” she says of the series, which is now associated less with glitz and glamour and more with cattiness and drunken faux pas.
But, McCord acknowledges “Real Housewives” has proven its staying power.
Casting director Stanforth says that she is inundated with Facebook messages from wannabes begging to get on the show. Typically, though, she finds her Next Big Thing via recommendations from her network of high-end real estate brokers and athletes’ wives, wining and dining reality TV virgins to gauge their star potential.
“I always ask people what’s off the table. [If they] say, ‘This, this, this and that,’ I say, ‘You shouldn’t be on reality TV,’ ” says Stanforth.
Bensimon was originally slated to be on a fashion reality show when producers switched gears and asked her to come on for a few episodes of “Real Housewives,” which she had never heard of.
“They said, ‘They’re famous socialites,’ ” says Bensimon. “[Producers] kind of bait you a little bit.”
“We always look for those organic, real, natural connections,” says Ryan Flynn, vice president of current production at Bravo, of casting choices.
For Bensimon, there weren’t any “real connections,” but that didn’t stop producers from making it seem as though she was brought on as a close friend of cast member LuAnn de Lesseps.
“I had met LuAnn once at a cocktail party a couple years beforehand,” says Bensimon.
Meanwhile, Cindy Barshop (“RHONY” Season 4) directly reached out to producers about joining the show to get some press for her laser hair-removal business (she now owns VSpot, a vaginal rejuvenation spa on the Upper East Side).
After an interview at her West Village apartment, Barshop was sent to hobnob with series Queen Bee Ramona Singer.
“They wanted to see how we interacted. I could talk to a wall, but there just wasn’t chemistry,” says Barshop, who adds that Singer “had her own agenda” for acting mute.
On her way out, Barshop and a producer got stuck in the elevator, and the beauty maven turned on the charm.
“They taped me in the elevator and sent the reel to Los Angeles, and a week later they called and said, ‘You got it.’ ”
According to Drescher, back when “Real Housewives of New York” started, women got around $7,000 for a season; McCord says she and her hubby netted $15,000. Now, typical first-season pay for the series is $40,000 to $60,000. By their second year, cast members are raking in closer to $200,000.
The anonymous former “Housewife” estimates that show staples like Ramona Singer are making $500,000 to $1 million a year. Bethenny Frankel is famously said to have secured $1 million for her return to the series last year.
A Bravo spokesperson had no comment on any of the allegations in this story.
Cast members do not receive residual payments for reruns, says Drescher, and the women pay for their own hair and makeup, except when they tape their confessionals — typically about eight times a season. In New York, the confessionals are filmed at a studio decorated to mimic each woman’s home.
Bensimon, whose novel, “A Dangerous Age,” comes out in June, says that when she was picked for the show, producers said, “We just want you as you.”
So, during a horseback-riding scene, Bensimon skipped heavy makeup and went with a natural look, as she typically would.
“They were like, ‘The next time you film, you need to have your hair blown out and be wearing makeup. You’re supposed to be a supermodel, not a drowned rat!’ ” Bensimon recalls.
Despite the producers’ meddling and the fact that she was portrayed as a psychotic beauty — who, in one episode, was flown off an island early because of a breakdown — Bensimon, a single mother of two, said she’d do it all again to support her family.
“Call me crazy,” she says. “Just spell my name right.”