Cirque Du Salahi: Be Careful Who You Trust (24 page)

Multiple Sclerosis—The Elephant in the Room

Even in this enlightened day and age, many people who learn they are suffering from disease don’t want anyone else to know. They’re either embarrassed by their body’s weakness in fending off attack or, like Michaele, they just don’t want to have to deal with the pity-party that comes after people learn about it. Many don’t want their medical condition known for fear it could affect their employment status.

It’s probably the main reason Michaele is always smiling. Even after scathing personal attacks or arguments with her husband, she keeps a queenly countenance about herself. “On his deathbed my father said to me, ‘Keep smiling, Michaele. Always keep smiling.’ And so I have.” In the face of her illness, the humiliating financial trouble she and her husband faced and after the torrent of negative news about the couple, Michaele struggles daily to project an image that nothing could possibly be wrong.

Back in the mid-1980s, when I was a rookie television reporter working for WCBS-TV in New York, I was assigned to cover the so-called “Baby M” surrogate mother trial. In brief, a woman named Mary Beth Whitehead had signed a contract and agreed to donate an egg, be inseminated and give birth to a child for Dr. Elizabeth Stern and her biochemist husband, William. Whitehead’s egg was fertilized by Stern’s sperm. After giving birth, Whitehead changed her mind and wanted to keep the baby. After many legal proceedings a New Jersey court ordered a shared custody agreement between Whitehead and the Sterns.

It was during testimony at this trial that I first heard about multiple sclerosis and pregnancy. The Sterns had gone looking for a surrogate because Elizabeth, a professor of pediatrics, diagnosed herself as suffering from MS and she felt carrying a baby to term would be too dangerous to her health. A medical colleague of Dr. Stern’s had said that his wife, who also had multiple sclerosis, had suffered temporary paralysis during her pregnancy and that fact scared Dr. Stern. All these years later I wondered if this could be the reason why the Salahis had no children. Were they too afraid what a pregnancy might do to her health?

The question was posed in an e-mail to Michaele: “May I ask? Did you and Tareq make a conscious decision not to have children? Was it because it just wasn’t something you wanted or was it tied to the MS?” The nearly 45 year old Michaele wrote back a surprising response, “We love children! Who says it is out?! Anything can happen!”

Michaele’s long time physician who spoke to me with her written permission, and on the condition that I not reveal his name for fear media attention would disrupt his medical practice, waved off the notion of childbirth at this stage in her life. “I think that’s Michaele being Michaele. That happy, everything is fine—everything is do-able personality. That’s her being Michaele and not stopping to think, ‘Hmm. Okay how is
that
going to work? If you sat her down and spoke to her about it she would likely have doubts about having a child at 45, like any woman would.”

Speaking from his medical office in Fairfax, Virginia, our conversation turned to Michaele’s overall struggle with multiple sclerosis and how it has progressed over the last decade and a half. The doctor prefaced his answer with a brief description of how the stress in an MS patient’s life can tremendously affect their symptoms.

“Michaele is a fragile and breakable person who always puts on a mask of a bubbly, happy person and that’s very hard to maintain. That’s very stressful to maintain. She has been constantly stressed,” he said, beginning with the early pre-Tareq days when she worked in the department store and through the worst of the Salahi family feud at the winery. “It’s not good for anybody to be under this much stress, but when you put MS on top of it—it really isn’t good.”

Since this caring physician has known and treated Michaele for so long, the question of her weight was raised. Could she be anorexic? “Ever since I met her she hasn’t changed. Her weight has stayed at about 127 pounds,” he said as he leafed through her chart. “I have no reason to believe she is anorexic. Now, there have been times when she came to the office and she’d lost weight….but I think it’s due to the MS and not to the lack of food.”

Multiple sclerosis does a lot of things to the human body, but its unpredictable in its course and the effects vary greatly from person to person. It happens after the protective sheath around the brain and spinal cords deteriorate. That process, demyelination, interrupts the messages being sent to the rest of the body. That can cause a world of symptoms from the sensation in the extremities of feeling “pins and needles,” numbness, itching, burning, stabbing, or tearing pains to fatigue, dizziness, muscle spasms and impaired thinking. In fact, according to
WebMD.com
, “Problems with thinking occur in about half of people with MS. For most, this means slowed thinking, decreased concentration, or decreased memory. Approximately 10 percent of people with the disease have severe impairment that significantly impairs their ability to carry out tasks of daily living.” Impairment in vision often occurs as does sudden onset of paralysis. In short, MS is an autoimmune disease—one in which the body literally attacks itself leaving areas intensely inflamed with sores. The damaged tissues heal but leave behind thickened, fibrous scars (scleroses), which doctors commonly call “plaques.”

The worst part, according to Michaele, is that you never know when the symptoms will invade and interrupt your life. They could occur while sitting at the breakfast table, driving a car or while attending a fancy party.

There is much discussion among scientific types who study multiple sclerosis about how the diets of MS patients can affect their symptoms. Dr. John McDougall and his mentor, the late Dr. Roy Swank, have devoted decades to studying and charting how a diet that is very low in fat can make a major difference in the number of relapses an MS patient experiences. The so-called McDougall Diet emphatically suggests that those with MS try to maintain a very low body weight as a means to help arrest the progression of their disease. By this measure, Michaele is doing everything right to try to counter this daily attack on her body.

Premiere Day and Night Tightrope

It finally arrived. August 5
^th
, 2010 was the date Bravo chose to premiere its long anticipated series,
The Real Housewives of D.C.
You might think there would be grand plans at the network for one big blowout screening and cast party—but you would be wrong.

It was an early morning call for all the cast members, still in New York finishing up final PR obligations in advance of the program’s premiere that night. They awoke in separate hotels, the four (relatively) friendly
Housewives
in one midtown Manhattan hotel, the Salahis sequestered at the W Hotel, by themselves. Once again they were all to meet at 30 Rockefeller Center to appear on the final hour of NBC’s
Today Show
, the “girlfriend hour” as it’s called in the television industry, hosted by Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb.

The program began in an odd way that morning. The usually chipper hostesses shifted in their seats, looked off camera and seemed distracted. Kathie Lee opened the show. “We
were
going to have the
Real Housewives of D.C.
with us today …” she gave a nervous laugh, “but they’re getting along so well today, we only have ONE!”

With that the camera shot switched over to reveal Michaele, dressed in a bright red dress with a camel colored blazer, as the only occupant on the set’s large white couch. She played along, smiling and sheepishly waving to the camera. She shrugged her slim shoulders as if to say, “I don’t know where everybody else is!”

“Widen out so we can see where the rest of the people are,” Hoda said. Then, in a clipped voice she added, “Not yet arrived. Coming soon, hopefully.” The camera slowly panned the width of the curved couch showing only one photogenic blonde sitting smack in the middle. “They’ve not yet arrived or (they’re) not talking to each other…We will wait and see.” Kathie Lee added. “I met some of the ladies downstairs and there is palpable tension. Let’s just put it that way.”

As Hoda and Kathie Lee took time to recap for their viewers the Whoopi controversy from the day before—they even ran a video snippet from
The View
—there was a mad dash behind stage to corral the other four housewives and get them on the couch. Michaele believed they were simply dillydallying in the makeup room. She said she had heard some of the producers offstage saying, “Get them out of hair and makeup!” The real story may involve a back stage protest of some sort—but no one at NBC would confirm that.

Finally, more than three minutes into the show, the other cast members entered the studio and sat down on the couch. Almost immediately, and led by
Housewife
Mary Amons, they made it clear they were
so over
the whole White House “Party Crasher” thing. They made it clear they were
so over
Michaele and her husband too. It was uncomfortable television as
Housewife
after
Housewife
unloaded on their cast mate.

Cat Ommanney announced in her husky British accent that she and Michaele weren’t friends and would never be because they didn’t have anything in common. Lynda Erkiletian said the Salahis lived a fake “Bonnie and Clyde” type life and had left a trail of lawsuits and had stolen money from charities. Viewers may have been taken aback at the unbridled attack and no doubt wondered why someone would sit there and take all that verbal abuse. The scene was duplicated on every program the cast appeared on during this last minute publicity binge. Somehow this final appearance with Hoda and Kathie Lee seemed more hate-filled than all the others. The entire time, the smile never left Michaele’s face. She dismissed Lynda’s objections by simply saying, “You are angry and jealous.”

If Bravo TV had booked this final pre-premiere appearance thinking it would be the positive capper to a week of publicity, they may have gotten more than they bargained for. Sure, the mostly female audience that watches Hoda and Kathie Lee is the same audience they wanted to attract to the
Housewives
franchise. But Bravo executives risked overexposing their most visible asset, Michaele Salahi, and the discourse between the
Housewives
turned so ugly as to be off-putting.

If the other women of that bickering cast only knew the medical background of the woman they so brutally and repeatedly attacked, things might have played out differently.

After the live program the cast members scattered, all making their own way back to the capital. The Salahis were on their own again, scheduled to take the 3 p.m. U.S. Airways Shuttle back to home base for the evening’s festivities. Michaele was exhausted and emotionally upset by the events of the week, from the fallout after Tareq doused Lynda with red wine, to the fiasco at
The View,
and then that morning’s
Today Show
bitch-fest on the highly rated
The Today Show with Hosts Hoda and Kathie Lee
. Whether Michaele chose to acknowledge it or not, the Salahis entered the limousine for the drive to La Guardia Airport with the blunt truth following them; Tareq’s emotional episodes were driving most of the anger being leveled at the couple. Except for the cracks about Michaele’s weight and the mistaken speculation that she was anorexic, the cast members weren’t really attacking
her
so much as they were going after the ubiquitous Tareq. The sniping at producers, the wine throwing, and his tape recording of Whoopi Goldberg while he demanded an apology for his wife, combined with his general conduct in business matters—all combined to give his detractors barrels of ammunition with which to attack. These attacks spilled over onto Michaele, of course, whether she had anything to do with the cause or not.