Gretchen Rossi & the Pussycat Dolls—the arrogance of beauty

By George Milton, Hipographia
Crack-TV Chronicles
The housewife that couldn't

Gretchen Rossi—one of the stars of Bravo's seminal franchise, Real Housewives of Orange County, is a lucky genetic accident. By that I mean she's outside the norm. In the bell-shaped distribution she's one of those creatures sitting pretty on one of the extremes—the extremely fortunate one—the coordinates inhabited by people blessed with perfect body, features and voice, the kind that answers a teenager's wet prayers. Rossi's looks are the prime if not sole reason why Bravo picked her to impersonate a "real housewife"—a suitably Orwellian term for a woman who's neither a housewife nor very real.

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Prancing around, Gretchen evokes an awful lot a real-life "pleasure model" in the spirit of Pris, the tragic replicant (played by Daryl Hanna) in the classic sci-fi Blade Runner. Pris was an advanced "biological robot"— a "skin job"—as "replicants" were contemptuously called by special cops assigned to track them and "retire" them when they violated the rules and landed on Earth. Pleasure models were expressly designed to serve as sex objects for colonies of "off-world" soldiers. (Yes, it wasn't much of a PC world.) Such bionic creatures had little raison d'etre beyond that task, understood in its most unadorned sense.

I suppose Rossi is not particularly concerned about such things, and I doubt very much she saw Blade Runner. I equally doubt she could ever make a connection with the Pris character, obvious as it is. That kind of thinking is foreign to Gretchen and her hedonistic tribe, always on the go and with little time for culture of any kind. Well, come to think of it, brain and culture (as long as the looks last) may be quite unnecessary.  That's where the arrogance of beauty comes in.

The pedestal shakes

In any case, the Barbie Doll aura hovering over Gretchen Rossi suddenly went ultra dark when her abysmal performing talents—at least when it comes to singing—were revealed recently in Las Vegas. You see, the lady wanted to sing—not just romp— on a Vegas stage and she eventually got her wish—but with disastrous results. (To be fair, it seems the whole cockamammie idea originated with her limp Svengali boyfriend, the cunning but ultimately equally clueless Slade).

The Housewives regurgitate capitalism's values through every pore.  Despite all the primping it's not a pretty sight.

The venue chosen for Gretchen's Vegas debut was a burlesque act, the aptly named Pussycat Dolls, which is chiefly conceived as a pretext to serve titillating soft-porn to well-heeled gawkers. For safety's sake, the picked musical number was Fever, an old standard practically owned by Peggy Lee. It's not a terribly complicated song; it doesn't require great vocal gymnastics. A minimum of competency is all it demands to make anyone shine.

That was not to be, however. Armed with only some desultory vocal training (or maybe because of it) in Gretchen's hands, from the first riff, Fever became an unrecognizable, nailscratching-on-glass, traumatizing mess.  To say that it was jaw-dropping bad is not to write figuratively but literally: several of the "wives" and not a small number in the audience simply looked at the undulating blond figure in utter disbelief.  As such, Gretchen did set something of a record: a record for what now must stand as the worst ever rendition of Fever on a professional setting. Now, many will say, the lady can't hit a note, is tone-deaf, etc., etc., but what about her acting chops? Am afraid that not much can be expected in that department, either. Like many esthetic accidents, she's managed to secure a television spot, so, technically, she's on TV already, but she's playing herself, not exactly a demanding part. Beyond that a huge interrogation mark beckons.

Gretchen Rossi and her ilk, products of a plastic, less introspective generation than even the relative youngsters strutting now around in their mid and late 40s, are faithful products of a culture shaped and punctuated by marketing values. In this crowd, the glitter is what counts, but the glitter can stretch only so far. As such, they seem to lack a capacity for pathos. Marilyn M, beautiful though she was, and not precisely endowed with great culture at the start, had it. Far from the dumb blonde so many saw in her (thanks mostly to the publicity boys) she was also possessed of a curious mind; she could be equally fascinated by a Di Maggio and an Arthur Miller. And superficial as many of her roles were, the person behind the flickering mask was clearly there: her biography is nothing if not poignant. Such chiaroscuro is almost entirely absent in these women, who mindlessly swim and wallow in the most appalling materialistic banality, boasting a set of mediocre, ignorant, self-absorbed personalities that elevates shallowness and pettiness to new highs. Uber consumerists, though, that they all surely are.

The cautionary note about the Gretchens of the world is that the power of looks is usually a whimsical one. The beauty window is fleeting. And while many beauties may escape a downward spiral, a significant number will not. For them, the phone will simply stop ringing, the golden touch will be gone. The bubble of lust that put some wind under their wings, to use the cliche, securing them fame and money, will become but a weakened breath incapable of sustaining flight. Then what? If they haven't hooked the right daddy to keep them in style by then, they will face a bitter, steep decline and ever tougher choices as time continues to take its inexorable toll.

Incidentally, such is the cookie cutter template of mediocrity defining this lot that I could have written this piece on just about any of them. Slade (Smiley) bombs as a comedy act and Gretchen can't sing, but neither can LuAnne Nadeau (aka LuAnn de Lesseps, or as Countess LuAnn) of the NY franchise; and both Melissa Gorga (RHONJ) and Kim Solziak (RHOA) are not exactly brimming with talent, albeit gall, nourished by a chorus of sycophants, is in ample supply. Meanwhile it's Bravo that gets to have the last laugh. Shamelessly catering to the most rancid forms of hoi polloi voyeurism the channel specializes in nouveau riche decadence reality tv (not that imaginative, by old riche standards) but equally contemptible. Contemptible, by the way, is not the same as lacking in audience appeal. Like a twisted car wreck, a multitude seems to be willing to watch such programs at any cost, a suitable commentary on the times we live.