Bachelor Nation
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Amy Kaufman
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Sections of chapter 6, “Inside the Bubble,” were previously published in the Los Angeles Times as “Alcohol, Sex and Consent: Add TV Cameras and the ‘Bachelor in Paradise’ Party Gets Complicated,” June 30, 2017.
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For whomever gets my final rose
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 A Budding Idea
Why I’m a Fan: Amy Schumer
CHAPTER 2 The Reality of Creating the Fantasy
Why I’m a Fan: Allison Williams
CHAPTER 3 The Roots of Television Romance
Why I’m a Fan: Nikki Glaser
CHAPTER 4 The Road to the Mansion
Why I’m a Fan: Heidi and Spencer Pratt
CHAPTER 5 Drafting a Game Plan
Why I’m a Fan: Melanie Lynskey
CHAPTER 6 Inside the Bubble
Why I’m a Fan: Diablo Cody
CHAPTER 7 Method to the Madness
Why I’m a Fan: Paul Scheer
CHAPTER 8 Under the Covers
Why I’m a Fan: Joshua Malina
CHAPTER 9 Falling for the Fairy Tale
Why I’m a Fan: Donnie Wahlberg
CHAPTER 10 Basking in the Afterglow
Why I’m a Fan: Jason Ritter
CHAPTER 11 Riding the Coattails
Why I’m a Fan: Patti Stanger
CHAPTER 12 Intoxicated by Happily Ever After
Acknowledgments
List of Bachelors and Bachelorettes
A Note on Sources
Interview List
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Introduction
There was no final rose. I didn’t get a chance to say my good-byes. No one even offered to walk me out.
Just like that, I’d been kicked out of Bachelor Nation.
For years, I’d been obsessed with the Bachelor franchise. Even though my beat at the Los Angeles Times is film, I enjoyed watching “The Bach” (like batch of cookies, not Johann Sebastian) so much that I willingly opted to spend my Monday nights writing recaps of each new episode.
Because of my coverage, ABC granted me access to a handful of Bachelor-related activities. I attended tapings of the “Women Tell All” specials, interviewing jilted ladies after they’d been left roseless. One season, the Bachelor himself—along with host Chris Harrison and a slew of cameras—even crashed a viewing party at my house.
And then there were the weekly conference calls—probably the least illuminating of the Bachelor press “opportunities.” The calls worked like this: Dozens of journalists were given an access code, dialed into an ABC line, and then were allowed to publicly ask the contestant o’ the week a question or two. It wasn’t soul-searching stuff—it was Bachelor.net.rose.tv.com asking about onscreen smooching.
But suddenly, the e-mails with bland press releases inviting me to participate in the calls stopped showing up in my inbox. I promptly got in touch with an ABC publicist to see if the move had been accidental. “I’m sorry,” the rep responded, “we’re just so slammed this season that there’s no more room on the call.” Which, what? How do you run out of room on a conference call?
The situation seemed suspect to me, and my editor at the paper agreed. So he decided to call up ABC’s publicity department to get the real story. And what he learned was that, apparently, producers had deemed my coverage “too negative” and no longer wanted me near any show-sponsored events.
I was shocked. Were my recaps snarky? That would be a duh. But who doesn’t hate-watch The Bachelor? No one takes a show about twenty-five women vying for one man seriously. My editor at the LA Times decided we wouldn’t write another word about the show until they reinstated my access. Some members of “Bachelor Nation”—that’s how ABC refers to us rose lovers—were outraged on my behalf. My Twitter followers sent messages to show producers and network executives complaining that the ruling was unfair. The female-centric blog Jezebel even wrote an item about the scuffle:
While her coverage hasn’t exactly been glowing, it hasn’t been wholly horrible either. Perhaps she took one too many stabs at ABC last season . . . So a message to members of the press from The Bachelor “family”: you’re cool, but only when you’re doing it the Bachelor-approved way.
Still, ABC’s so-called ban didn’t stop me from publicly sharing my thoughts about The Bachelor. Even after the paper instituted its “the show is dead to us” policy, I kept watching and tweeting about the show as a fan. And in a way, it was freeing. Without a post-episode recap deadline to meet, I started viewing the series differently—taking in how the Twittersphere reacted to storylines and analyzing how my feelings shifted throughout the course of a season.
I even decided to start an e-mail group, aptly titled “Bach Discush”—I hope you’ve gotten on the abbreviation train by now— and invited about two dozen smart lady fans I knew to share thoughts about episodes and show-related news on the daily. Whenever a new season was airing, we’d gather in my living room with rosé and SkinnyPop to watch together—something that instantly elevated the viewing experience. Because many of us were entertainment journalists, we’d often cross paths with Bach contestants, and sometimes we could even convince them to come watch themselves on TV with us. Eric Bigger, Ashley Iaconetti, and JJ Lane have all been guests on my couch, and once, Robby Hayes ghosted us after promising to come over and requesting we make him Moscow Mules. I have no use for those copper mugs now, you sockless liar!
While it is, admittedly, fun to make jabs about the drunken contestants with their staged limo entrances, I don’t just watch the show because it can be a train wreck. By the finale each season, I find myself rooting for the final two to make it to the altar. I’m weirdly touched by the cheesy proposal—these overwrought declarations of love between two people who’ve known each other for just a few weeks. In those moments, it’s easy to forget that just six couples in the history of the show have wed. (And I think I’m being generous by including the two marriages that came out of Bachelor in Paradise in that figure. I refuse to count Marcus and Lacy. Sorry not sorry.)
A part of me—thirty-two years old, single, and Tindering up a storm—wants to believe in the fantasy.
Sometimes, I even daydream about what it would be like if I were on the show. To be clear: Even if I weren’t banned, t
his would be a total pipe dream. I don’t even have the kind of hands that an engagement ring would look good on. I still, embarrassingly, bite my nails, and I never get manicures. Plus, my friends often joke that if you were to take a photograph of just my hands, you’d think they belonged to a pudgy five-year-old. When I was in second grade, my uncle, who made his living as a commercial photographer, asked if I wanted to earn $100 by working as a hand model for a toy catalog he was shooting, but when he got a look at my hands, my sister, who was a mere six years old at the time, was given the job over me.
Plus, I wouldn’t want one of those gaudy Neil Lane rings, anyway. I want something rare and chic—like a unique crystal with meaning or an antique ring that belonged to someone important. It won’t look expensive, per se, but at least I’ll know the guy had to go farther than the Kay Jewelers at the mall to pick it out.
Besides, I could never pass the show’s stringent yet unspoken body requirements. Even if they generously allowed me to go on as a “plus-size model” or some other bullshit, I’m only five-foot-one, so no one would believe it. I’ve literally never worn a bikini in my entire life. Not once. I never “lay out.” My skin is the color of newly fallen snow. That whole “lounging by the pool” thing? I’ll take a book in a blanket-heavy nook, thank you very much.
And have I mentioned I don’t drink? As if I wasn’t already skeptical enough of the process, the producers would have no chance of loosening me up with alc. Oh, and I’m scared of heights. So helicopters are out. And not in that cute way where it’s like, “Tee-hee, I’m so anxious! Please hold me because I’m nervous and not because I desperately want to be near you!” No. I do not want to get on a small aircraft, and if you even take me within ten feet of something with propellers, I will cause you bodily harm.
But honestly? I’d still apply. I WOULD STILL. FUCKING. APPLY. That’s pretty dark, right? I mean, seriously: What is wrong with me? Why do I want to be that girl? The bronzed one in a two-piece who bungee-jumps and looks like she was born to have a blinding rock on her slim ring finger. A hollow, spray-tanned shell of extensions and sequins whose personality and intelligence always come second to her looks.
What does it mean to be the chosen one?
It’s not a label I’ve ever known, but it’s one I’ve obsessed over since I was a girl. From an early age, I understood that the most meaningful validation a straight woman could get was from a man. Even before I got my period—on the morning of my bat mitzvah, coincidentally—I was boy crazy. I’d spend hours in my room journaling about the smallest interactions with the opposite sex: Pete sent me an instant message after school. Nathaniel glanced at me while reading his poem in creative writing. Tyler said he thought I had a good voice in chorus. If just one of them would choose me—pay me mind for more than a fleeting instant—then I would finally have worth.
“I want a boyfriend. And I’m not just saying that—I feel SO strongly about this,” reads one entry from August 2000, when I was all of fourteen. “I just watched Here on Earth. SO sad. I am so upset right now. I’m just . . . longing. I know this is dumb, but I’m hoping to meet a sweet guy on vacation. I want to kiss someone that passionately. I want to suck on his lips and breathe him in. I know they say movies are fantasy, but if everyone wants that so badly, it’s bound to be somewhere. Maybe I’m wishing for too much too young. I wish I had a mature guy like Chris Klein in that movie . . . wow. I want to find love early on in my life and kindle it always. There are many special people out there—but you have to find them.”
How does one kindle love, exactly? Should I be writing Sixty Shades of Grey instead of a book about The Bachelor? And whatever happened to Chris Klein after those American Pie movies?
I digress. In fact, I actually did have one brief yet emotionally substantive relationship as a teenager with a boy named David. We were both in a singing group together—so hot, amirite?—that had been selected to travel to France to perform as part of an exchange program. At thirteen, I was the youngest one in the group, and David, fifteen, took me under his wing. On the seven-hour plane ride from Boston to Paris, he held my hand as I fell in and out of Dramamine-induced slumber. He sat next to me on all the bus rides and encouraged me to climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower, even though I was trembling with fear.
When we got back to Boston, I rushed to the drugstore to develop my film from the trip, eager to see any pictures of us together. Before I left for summer camp a few days later, he called to say good-bye. My dad answered and handed the phone to me hesitantly, as if he knew how my world was about to change. A boy had never called me before.
At sleepover camp, where I’d stay in Maine for the next two months, David wrote me letters. Every time one arrived, my bunkmates squealed, reading over my shoulder. He sprayed each one with cologne and wrote over and over again how much he loved me. I thumbtacked the notes to the rafter above my cot and spent my rest hours writing back to him in immaculate, bubbly handwriting.
Back at school that fall, though, the budding relationship never came to fruition. I, a lowly eighth grader, was suddenly too uncool for a sophomore. Every time I passed him in the hallway, I ducked into the nearest bathroom to cry in a stall.
It was devastating, but in a way, I reveled in it. I finally had something of my own—real memories, real pain, real letters to tuck away in a secret box under my bed. While my friends were nervously pecking boys on the lips for the first time, I felt like I’d already had my first real heartbreak. And that was romantic.
My dad says that I was always “a dreamy person.” As a girl, he tells me, I was constantly caught up in a fantasy world, dreaming about what it would be like to be famous or date a celebrity. My mom has memories like this too. The first day she came to pick me up from preschool, she says she was shocked to find me in the corner wearing a tutu, pearls, and a tiara, pretending to iron in a tiny plastic kitchen. She never outfitted me in frilly dresses and rarely put bows or barrettes in my hair—overalls were the go-to for Baby Amy. Plus, because she was a working mother, a lot of the cooking and cleaning in my house was often done by my babysitter.
“I remember saying to myself: ‘My goodness,’” my mom recalled. “‘She sees me go to work every day. I certainly don’t wear a tiara. Where did she ever get this image?’”
Likewise, my parents’ marriage was hardly the stuff of fluffy television romance. Which isn’t to say they don’t love each other. In fact, they’ve been married for thirty-three years and often tell me that as they age, they feel their relationship only grows deeper. Still, it was always evident to me that their love was rooted first and foremost in a solid friendship. They met while working together at the same company and only started to fall for each other while teaming up on a project outside of work: They built a replica of a 1938 SS Jaguar 100.
Still, it wasn’t common for my parents to engage in mushy public displays of affection. My dad wasn’t the type to come home with a big bouquet of flowers for my mom, just because. In fact, he didn’t even propose to her—a fact that has always horrified my sister and me. Instead, they jointly decided to wed.
“I don’t really recall all of the details, because it was so uneventful,” my mom told me recently when I asked her to describe how she and my dad got engaged. “It certainly wasn’t the whole romantic, down-on-one-knee proposal, pulling out a big ring. I remember it was around my birthday, and I think he decided to roll the birthday and proposal thing into one and said: ‘Well, we could get married. Let’s go look for rings,’ and that was it.”
Reacting to my shock, she insisted that things were different in the 1980s—no one had a flashy ring, women didn’t “Say Yes to the Dress,” bachelorette parties weren’t weekend-long extravaganzas at remote locations—it didn’t feel like there was a “big machine” around getting married. Still, she said, she would have liked the memory of a proposal: “When people ask, ‘How did you two decide to get married?’ I sometimes wish I had one
of those dramatic stories to tell.”
She does have other stories to share, though, because my dad can be romantic—just in his own unconventional way. Once, he surprised my mom by waking her up at three a.m. and driving to the Berkshires to fly in a hot-air balloon. He loved to spring for sudden weekend getaways to B&Bs on Martha’s Vineyard or in New Hampshire. He even tried to get a helicopter to pick him and my mom up after their wedding ceremony, but the venue wouldn’t allow it. (Instead, he rented a white 1940s Rolls-Royce to drive them away.)
“I’ve always wanted to do things on the fringe,” he explained to me. “Surprises to make her happy. That element of surprise was a fun thing, and it certainly helped with our connection. We had an experience to share.”
OK, so there’s definitely some Bachelor-esque stuff in there. But on the whole, my model of love and marriage growing up was pretty pragmatic. So how did I get caught up with hoping for red roses and helicopter rides that I wouldn’t even go on?
With the promise of free pizza and wine, I lured some of the ladies from my Bach Discush group over to help me get to the bottom of this puzzling question. Surely I couldn’t be the only one who secretly dreamed of having a grandiose love story like the ones depicted on The Bachelor.
Shocker: I wasn’t. But it seemed nearly all of us were embarrassed by this admission. Meredith, a thirty-six-year-old newspaper editor who’s been married for four years, recalled how, early on, she was warned by her dad about the harsh realities of romance.
“I remember my father took me aside and gave me really crappy advice,” she said with a laugh. “He was like, ‘Meredith, if you expect your boyfriend to be showing up at your front door with a rose, you’re just going to be disappointed.’”
Even as adult women, this was the mind-set many of us had adopted: Never expect too much from a man. When asked about her ideal date, Sasha—thirty-eight and a television host—joked she’d just be happy if her husband tidied up around the house without being asked: “I come home. The house is clean. There’s no pee on the toilet. And I get so wet!”