Bethenny Frankel Has Raised over a Million Dollars for Puerto Rico. She's Not Done Yet.
People reported in October 2017 that Frankel was on track to raise over $1 million in funds and supplies just for Puerto Rico. Her contribution, she tells me, “is said to be the largest private relief effort in the United States in that period of time.”
She basks in that, but just for a second. “I did think it was interesting that Trump never said anything,” she adds. No note of thanks or phone call from him or his team. Nada. She wonders whether she hasn’t heard from him because he feels it would make him look bad. But Frankel assures me she doesn’t see it like that. Some gratitude would have been a simple acknowledgment. She dictates: “There may have been some balls dropped because there’s so much going on in the world, so thanks for doing your part as a citizen.”
She’s miffed. Not furious, but just conscious of it. She floats the notion that Trump doesn’t know. He hasn’t seen what she’s done and accomplished. He hasn’t spied the jets! Given his obsession with how the press responded to his inaction in Puerto Rico and the praise that was lavished on Frankel in return, this strikes me as implausible, I tell her. She laughs, shooting down her own speculation. “I can’t imagine he doesn’t know because he knows me. So he knows. Got it. I will not wait near the mailbox.”
When we meet, Frankel tells me she’s scheduled to return to Puerto Rico, where the official death toll has risen to 2,975, an estimate 50 times the initial number, in September. She plans to take her daughter, Bryn. But Dennis Shields, with whom Frankel was in an on-off relationship, is found dead of an apparent overdose later in the summer, and the trip is postponed. A week after our interview, Frankel puts on a gown and a fresh pair of false lashes to shoot this season’s The Real Housewives of New York City reunion show. (Most of which can best be described as: Everybody Hates Bethenny.)
I start to question what it must be like to deal with the raw horror in Puerto Rico and then return to this—
“And deal with bullshit?” she breaks in, cutting me off. “There’s different categories. I’m going to go out for a nice dinner when I’m here, and I’m going to be filthy and dirty and clean myself with wipes when I’m there. It’s different.” When she travels on vacation or a business trip, she flies first class. She wants a seat that turns into a bed. This baffles her assistants: Frankel in 32E to deliver aid to Mexico. But the dissonance—that’s just how it is. “It would feel very strange to be like, I’m not going to go on that Guatemala flight because it’s coach.”
“There are leaders and there are followers. There are doers and there are talkers. I’m a doer, and I’m a leader."
At the start of her career, Frankel worked for a publicist whose name she can’t even remember. At the office, she would talk on the phone while she completed whatever menial tasks she’d been given. But the publicist hated it. “She said, ‘There’s no talking on the phone.’ And I was like, ‘Why? I’m fucking licking envelopes. Why can’t I talk on the phone? Why can’t I wax my legs, if I’m licking the envelopes? What’s the difference? Who cares?’” Those edicts—what good do they do?
Now, if Frankel has a rule, trust it serves a purpose. It’s not just for some fake sense of decorum. It accomplishes a discrete aim. Like, it ensures that her floors are the most radiant and unblemished in all of Manhattan.
“There are leaders and there are followers. There are doers and there are talkers. I’m a doer, and I’m a leader,” Frankel tells me. Or at least, I think she does. I’ve been perched on a stool for 45 minutes, but I haven’t met her gaze once. This whole time, she’s stared ahead at the mirrors in front of her. Even once her makeup is done and her hair has been tousled just so, she doesn’t waver. I look at her there too, not facing the cheek that’s turned toward me, but watching her watch herself.
Frankel claims she doesn’t like niceties. (Unless they’re thank you notes from the Oval Office.) She likes action. “Go fix the problem.” Then she pauses, brows filled in and narrowed. “I don’t talk about what women don’t get and men get,” she says. “I just get.”
Mattie Kahn is a senior editor at Glamour.
