Short skirts, big hair and plenty of backstabbing: how did a reality show about LA estate agents become a pop culture sensation? It's all thanks to one woman — TV's greatest villain, Christine Quinn. Camilla Long meets her.
Finally, finally, it arrived at the end of November — the fourth series of Selling Sunset. For more than a year we had been starved of the life-giving sight of extremely tall, rake-thin women strutting into extremely large, luscious houses in Los Angeles in shreds of Balenciaga, asking each other: "What do you call the kitchen off the main kitchen?"
Fans will know the answer: it is, of course, "chef's kitchen". After hoovering up three whole series of the reality show, mostly back to back, over the long, horrible summer of lockdown — it went to the top of the charts on Netflix, where it became the wildfire hit of Covid — there aren't many of us who aren't experts in selling "praper-dee" (property) in Hollywood now.
Each episode of the show, which features estate agents who work on Sunset Strip, is a volley of high heels, short skirts, ridiculous hair and fake everything — from tits to fireplaces. Most of the best parts are brought to us by its extraordinary villain, Christine Quinn. She is outrageously watchable — a kind of sexy, thin, diamond-encrusted emu Marilyn Manson: nearly 6ft of Texan boss bitch, complete with signature rope of long, dead-white ponytail. Usually she's wearing some acidic outfit — a fluorescent tracksuit or boots that have "Rich AF" down the side or a tiny chair as a handbag. She will happily pick her way through the desks at the Oppenheim Group, the estate agency where the women work, looking, as one co-star put it, like "the Joker".
And then there's the bitching. Hardly a scene goes by without the hilarious Quinn, 33, telling us how much she loathes her colleagues — particularly Chrishell, a honey-locked, button-nosed, terminally conniving former soap actress who is a "kiss-ass". Quinn prickles with savage one-liners — "You look like a slutty Big Bird." About Chrishell, then a new agent: "She can sit on the floor until she's proved herself." At the end of the new series the fight gets so nasty that Quinn spends the best part of 20 minutes of the finale in tears at a party, screaming "You guys are horrible" and "You guys are monsters." It is like nothing I have ever seen on a reality TV show.
So I'm kind of apprehensive about meeting her — will she be a total wreck? We meet in a sexy hotel in Soho, where she is staying with her husband, Christian, a tech entrepreneur — "He invented the food-delivery industry" — and her baby, also called Christian, whom she had in May. In person she looks amazing: head to toe in ice-cream lavender bouclé and dripping with diamonds, including a rope of diamonds given to her by her husband — when we are horsing around at the shoot later she insists I wear it. She doesn't work out and eats anything she wants. "She's like my straight male clients," her press officer says with a sigh. She is incredibly funny, relaxed, smart — but it is no secret that I love her.
How is she doing? Well, she still has "trauma" from the birth, she says. She had to film all through her pregnancy, 12 hours a day, going back home between scenes and getting new clothes and glam for each. At 35 weeks she had been "cramping so bad for two days … and I called my doctor and told her, this is really strange. And she said, 'No, you're fine.' " The next day, "Jason and I were filming" — in the show she looks as if she can barely stand up — "and I don't feel good at all." So they wrapped and she went home for a nap.
Just as she was turning over, she says, "my water immediately broke. It was just like in the movies — it was gushing. I couldn't even put pants on." So she wrapped a towel around her middle and raced to the hospital, where they discovered that she was already "10cm dilated", so there was no time for pain relief. They tried to vacuum the baby out — "imagine that with no pain medicine" — whereupon the baby's heart rate started dropping and "I was flatlining, the baby was flatlining", so she had to have an emergency C-section. She was in so much "excruciating pain" that she "blacked out".
At this point "they took my husband out of the room and they said, 'You need to choose one right now — baby or Christine?' And he was, like, 'You need to do both.' " It was "absolute insanity". "The time I walked into the hospital to the time the baby was born," she says, "was 22 minutes." If there had been traffic, "I would have probably died myself, along with the baby."
She had a few days off and then she went back to work, a little more than a week later.
What, I shriek. A week later? Didn't she feel awful? She felt "swollen", she says, "and it was hard to be on my feet and walk". But she is so "go-go-go" she gets bored if she sits around the house — a US$5 million shag pad in the hills, with infinity pool, floating staircase and an "environmentally friendly fireplace" — so she found the strenuous days being physical "in a weird way helped heal me". Hmmm, OK. She shrugs. "We're women, you know. We have no choice and we are f***ing strong."
One of the great features of Selling Sunset is how shamelessly competitive everyone is — Quinn may look kind of pastel but that doesn't mean she won't crawl over broken glass to sell a house for US$10 million. Baby C's baby shower included an "extreme high-fashion jungle" and a live sloth — "My favourite animal in the whole world." Her wedding, which featured in one episode of the show, cost US$1 million, with snow, swans, a black wedding dress and a gothic wedding cake that "bled" — it was the highlight of series three.
But she cried when she saw that they had chosen to focus on the pathetic Chrishell, who flounced out of the party after a fight with another estate agent, rather than broadcast her "vows". If you want people to "see your side", she tells me, you have to get up and get back on the show, even if you're splitting at the seams. Did the producers of the show apply pressure to come back as soon as she had given birth? "No, not really," she says. "I think it was a decision that I made to go back, because if I don't tell my story, someone else is going to tell it for me."
Even so, her husband can't watch the show because it is "edited and manipulated and spun and turned around".
Having said that, I'm astonished at what they put her through. The new series shows her nearly giving birth on set, nearly dying when she has the baby, then coming straight back to work, only to be dragged to pieces by her co-stars. "Jealousy is such an ugly thing," she says now with a sigh. Was it really necessary for her to be repeatedly attacked and accused of "lying" on camera when she is, as she says, "crazy hormonal"? At one point, for example, she is more or less forced to go to a "mindset coach" ("I help people manifest") to stop her slagging people off, but instead of "closing the door to drama, for once and for all", we only discover more.
"I don't want to live in that place I used to live in when I was a child," she whispers at the end of one scene, about growing up in Dallas. As a child she spent years in fear of her mother dying: she had "lupus, Raynaud's, arthritis so bad, this is the only movement in her hands. [She holds up hers and kind of quacks them.] Her hands are totally fused together. She had breast cancer twice … a double mastectomy. She had an aneurysm, open heart surgery." During the surgery "we were saying goodbye to her because the doctors were telling us that she wasn't going to make it. But she made it through."
When Quinn was 16 her mother decided to home school her so they could spend more time together in case she died. But her mum couldn't teach, "so she sent me to an alternative school", which is a kind of school for children in special circumstances. "And that was, you know, an eye-opener. I went to school with people that were members of gangs, with girls that were being trafficked. With girls that were prostitutes, and I would see their pimps pick them up after school. Girls that were pregnant", kids who were "in and out of jail, problems with drugs. And I learnt to grow up really quick," she says.
She got arrested herself on her 17th birthday. "At my birthday someone gave me a little marijuana. My parents taught me a lesson. They left me in jail for four days." What was jail like? "The food was horrible," she says, "and everyone was in there for things like prostitution, and I was just, like, I'm here for friggin' weed."
After she got home she moved out, enrolled in acting classes, got her Texan accent "beaten" out of her. "Sometimes when I drink it can come out." She moved to LA to try her hand as an actress, "usually the dumb blonde girl", but quickly discovered that the only person she really liked playing was herself. She also met Jason, one of the small men twins who own the brokerage, and was earning cash on the side.
When Selling Sunset came along it seemed like a match made in heaven — she is now the standout star of the show, one of the funniest women on television. She is mega-rich, married to a man who loves her, about to launch a self-help book cum memoir called How to Be a Boss Bitch. Well, how do you be a boss bitch, I ask. "Just really not giving a f*** what other people think of you," she says with a giggle.
Selling Sunset series four is on Netflix now.
Written by: Camilla Long
© The Times of London