Heather Dubrow Has a Full-Time Driver and No Fixed Address, and She's Fine With Both

Heather Dubrow sold her Orange County house for $55 million, bought a two-bedroom apartment in Beverly Hills before the house was even listed, and will tell you with a straight face that she is ‘weirdly low maintenance.’ She does her own makeup. She skips facials. She hates sitting in a chair for a manicure. She also has a full-time personal driver named Pete and, at the moment, no primary residence. These things coexist inside Heather Dubrow without apparent tension, and honestly that might be the most Housewives thing imaginable.

She walked into the Out & About studio in a Louis Vuitton dress from the oversized-zipper collection, her husband Terry, a plastic surgeon, in tow, and within roughly ten seconds of arrival Terry had his shirt off showing his own work to the hosts. Heather’s read on this was immediate and accurate.

We’ve been together almost 30 years, people take their tit out all the time at him, all the time, that’s just a thing.

Three Out of Four Kids, and Counting

The part of this conversation that actually lands is the stuff about her children. Three of her four kids are queer. Her daughter Max wrote a book called I’ll Give It to You Straightish and hosts a podcast by the same name. Her youngest, Ace, is twelve. Dubrow is careful and genuine here in a way that reality TV doesn’t usually reward. She’s not performing acceptance. She’s just… fine. More than fine.

Your eyes are blue, your hair is brown, you’re six feet tall, you’re gay, like whatever man, it’s just biology.

What she’s less fine with is the way other people treat it as tragedy. She’s clearly exhausted by the condolence-card energy that follows any public acknowledgment of a queer kid, the ‘how are you handling it’ crowd who frame a child’s identity as something a parent has to survive. She mentions GLAAD, the Trevor Project, and Family Equality as parts of her support network, but the clearest answer she gives is that her husband is her actual anchor. Nearly thirty years in, she talks about Terry the way people talk about a really good business partner who also happens to be their best friend. It’s a little boring in the best way.

The Ace situation she handles with more care. He’s twelve, he was on camera from nine months old, and the ‘announcement,’ as she frames it, wasn’t an announcement at all.

I didn’t make an announcement, I acknowledged my child because other people wanted to talk about him.

The Real Housewives Part Is Still a Mess

Season 17 of The Real Housewives of Orange County is airing now, was filmed about ten months ago, and Dubrow’s relationship with the cast is, in her words, ‘not fantastic.’ She keeps it vague enough to stay out of trouble while being specific enough to confirm that yes, Tamra said something, and yes, Heather is the one who actually has the receipts. The logic is circular in the way Housewives drama always is: someone did something shady, someone exposed the shady thing, now the person who did the shady thing is calling the exposer shady. Dubrow raises an eyebrow at her own genre. She knows the party she went to and the party she watched back are never quite the same party. That self-awareness is what makes her good television, even when she’d probably rather be in Anguilla with Terry.

She’s not going on a Housewives all-franchise girls trip. She said so clearly, then softened it to say she actually likes the trips when things are good, that Shannon Beador is unhinged-drunk-fun, and that she and Tamra are historically good travel companions. Kyle Richards and Lisa Rinna, who she’s known since they took acting classes together decades ago, would make the short list for a non-televised version. She did not extend the same courtesy to Ramona Singer, who she imagined fighting over a room. ‘I can buy the resort, sweetie,’ she said, and that is the sentence that should be on her Wikipedia page.