Participants within the one-season “Girls of Hedsor Hall,” which aimed to reform “dangerous ladies” into correct women, reveal claims of sexual harassment, being disadvantaged of meals, and the lack to give up the present after producers took their passports.
In the summer time of 2008, Donald Trump — using excessive on the renewed success of his Emmy-nominated NBC actuality present The Apprentice, due to the addition of the phrase Celebrity to the entrance of its title — hosted an audition at The Beverly Hills Hotel. Two dozen enticing ladies, most of their early 20s, filed into Bungalow 22 — Trump’s home-away-from-home when visiting L.A., although he owns a mansion proper throughout the road — and stood in entrance of a video digicam whereas a casting agent grilled them about their ingesting habits and intercourse lives. Trump sat glumly on a settee and watched, then, towards the tip, huddled with the manufacturing heads to provide his notes. “Not scorching sufficient,” he stated, in accordance with a number of individuals who had been current. “We want hotter ladies.”
The world little famous nor lengthy remembered it, however the actuality sequence being forged that day was The Girls of Hedsor Hall, the primary of many failed Trump makes an attempt to construct a actuality model not tied to The Apprentice or the Miss Universe pageant and — for a lot of concerned in making it — a lingering supply of embarrassment and even trauma (“The worst expertise of my life,” says one former contestant). It aired for just one eight-episode season on MTV in 2009, and as we speak clips are tough to seek out on-line, as is proof of Trump’s involvement (it’s important to go deep into the IMDb credit to seek out his identify). But the idea has Trump’s fingerprints throughout it: a dozen “bad girls” from throughout America — one a self-described nymphomaniac, one other a black-out drunk, one other a gutter mouth — had been shipped to a ending faculty exterior London, outfitted in skimpy schoolgirl uniforms and lectured by a stern headmistress on behave like correct English women.
“We are all sick and uninterested in the glamorization of those out-of-control younger ladies,” is how Trump defined the present to reporters in 2007. “So I’ve taken it upon myself to do one thing about it. I’m making a real-life model of My Fair Lady with my firm Trump Productions. The thought is genius and the present can be big.”
The genesis of the present traces again, as so many issues in Trump world do, to a press convention at Trump Tower. This one was in December 2006, shortly after the reigning Miss Universe, Tara Conner, examined optimistic for cocaine and obtained caught kissing Miss Teen USA at a Manhattan nightclub. Making headlines throughout the nation, Trump publicly forgave Conner for her transgressions and introduced that, opposite to the rumors within the tabloids, she wouldn’t be dethroned. “I’ve at all times been a believer in second probabilities,” Trump introduced.
That generosity of spirit obtained seen by Chris Coelen, then a prime government at a British actuality TV manufacturing home referred to as RDF (he’s now CEO of L.A. manufacturing firm Kinetic Content). “We had executed a present in England, Ladette to Lady, about wayward younger ladies getting despatched to ending faculty, and we wished to bundle a model for America,” Coelen says. “And when Trump forgave Tara Conner, that story arc of forgiveness appeared very a lot according to the concept for the present.” Coelen pitched the concept to Andy Dean Litinsky, the previous Apprentice contestant Trump had employed in 2006 to go his TV manufacturing firm, and Litinsky took the pitch to the highest. “Looking again, it was not a really well-constructed actuality present,” admits Coelen of the Brit unique. “Over the course of the episodes, the women grew to become higher behaved, and extra boring. But Trump should have preferred it, as a result of we made a deal.”
For some time, it regarded like Fox may choose up Lady or a Tramp, because the present was titled then, however it in the end landed at MTV, which was in the course of a actuality growth of its personal, with packages like The Hills and the about-to-be-launched Jersey Shore. Trump, then 62, wasn’t a pure match for the youth-oriented community, however he threw himself into selling the present, holding one other press convention with Conner, whom he employed as a bunch on the sequence (he reportedly additionally wished to rent Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the lady on the middle of the Gov. Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal, however she was by no means forged). Beyond branding, although, Trump’s involvement in The Girls of Hedsor Hall appears to have been restricted. In reality, his greatest notice seems to have been the one he gave at that casting on the Beverly Hills Hotel. “We stored telling him the women wanted to look actual and have persona, that you simply couldn’t have a bunch of fashions staring into the digicam like in a Robert Palmer music video,” says a TV government who was on the casting. “But I don’t assume he obtained it.”
Starting in October 2008, the 12 contestants who finally had been forged — most from auditions Trump didn’t attend — spent as much as eight weeks at Hedsor House, the ancestral house of the mom of King George III (and as of late a location for motion pictures like Johnny Depp’s Mortdecai), the place they had been taught to stroll with books on their heads and launched to English delicacies like noticed dick. “It was a horrible, horrible expertise,” remembers contestant Jen Marden, then a New York City membership hopper who was described within the present’s press supplies as a “snobby bitch,” now a 35-year-old occasions planner in Florida.
Of course, it’s not unusual for actuality present contestants — notably those that do not win — to have dangerous reminiscences of their time on TV. But the The Girls of Hedsor Hall appears like an particularly sad set. “They barely fed us — I suppose they thought it made higher TV if we had been hungry and cranky,” says Marden. “They washed our uniforms possibly as soon as the entire time I used to be there. And one evening, they’d a cocktail celebration and I obtained into an altercation with one of many friends — he was claiming to be English royalty however I’m fairly positive he was an actor — and he grabbed my chest and would not let go. I informed the producers that evening that I wished to go house and so they stated, ‘Well, that’s going to be arduous. We have your passport.’ I lastly obtained out after we went on a pheasant hunt and I handed out from dehydration and malnutrition. That’s after they realized I is perhaps a legal responsibility to them, as a result of I used to be not properly, so I obtained despatched house.”
Other contestants inform related harrowing tales (“They stored our passports, our baggage, our cellphones,” says one). None of them ended up utilizing their publicity on the present as a springboard to any type of notoriety, with the semi-exception of Briana Frost, now 31, the self-described nymphomaniac who went on to turn into an grownup movie actress (she didn’t reply to THR’s request for an interview). Only one contestant reached by THR says she left Hedsor Hall a greater girl, definitely a richer one. “I used the cash to place myself by faculty,” says Kimberly Ferrari, 32, who gained the $100,000 jackpot on the present’s finale. The onetime celebration lady is now a center faculty math instructor in Long Island. For probably the most half, although, the women of Hedsor Hall want they’d by no means auditioned within the first place. “I simply wish to neglect about the entire thing,” says Marden. “But now this fool is our president and it brings again actually, actually dangerous reminiscences.”
This article initially appeared on The Hollywood Reporter.
