Divas from Jersey stir up debate

By VIRGINIA ROHAN

The Record (Hackensack, N.J.)

HACKENSACK, N.J. — They live in North Jersey McMansions, shop for expensive jewelry, clothes and furniture, drive luxury cars, religiously work on their hair, nails and tan, play tennis at the club and seriously indulge their kids — all while television cameras record their over-the-top lives.

One chats with her teenage son about opening a “high-end” strip club. Another pays cash for big-ticket items. Yet another describes her clan as a “good, old-fashioned Italian family.”

No, they’re not the fictional Carmela Soprano, Rosalie Aprile, Gabriella Dante et al, but “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” — five women, three of them from Franklin Lakes, who star in the popular Bravo docu-soap series’ fourth and latest installment, which debuts at 11 p.m. Tuesday.

These divas are Jacqueline Laurita and her sisters-in-law Dina Manzo and Caroline Manzo, along with pals Danielle Staub and Teresa Giudice. As many who saw the sneak preview have pointed out in online chat rooms and e-mails, they are reminiscent of the wives from that HBO drama.

While there’s no mob component in the reality series, there is a certain mystique surrounding it. The Manzo sisters are married to brothers Albert and Tommy Manzo, who run the Brownstone in Paterson, N.J., where “The Sopranos” filmed some scenes. And as the New York Post and others have duly noted, in 1983, the brothers’ 350-pound dad, Albert “Tiny” Manzo, was found dead in the trunk of his car, having been shot four times. His unsolved murder was presumed by authorities to be a hit.

So, here we go again, some locals gripe. Just when America has started to forget “The Sopranos,” along comes another TV show that casts Garden Staters in a less than flattering light.

The “housewives” themselves say that although they’re not surprised by the “Sopranos” comparison, it is off-base. “If we were the same exact people living in Oklahoma, I don’t think we would have that stigma attached to us. I just think New Jersey has a bad rap for that, and if your name ends with a vowel, all of a sudden they gotta go right back to that,” Dina Manzo said on the phone this week.

She and the other “housewives” say they heard about the show through their hair salon/spa, Chateau the Art of Beauty. Owner Victor Castro had learned through a client that the production company Sirens Media was scouting for locations for a reality show that turned out to be “The Real Housewives of New Jersey.” Castro agreed to have the producers photograph his salon, and while they were there, he learned that they were still interviewing people for the cast.

“I thought of this group of fabulous ladies,” says Castro.

To be fair, the three other “Real Housewives” series — set in Orange County, Calif.; Manhattan and Atlanta — also were essentially “Lifestyles of the Rich and Self-Indulgent.” But Dina Manzo said that her motivation for doing the show was to bring attention to Project Ladybug, a nonprofit organization she founded to help local children with life-threatening medical conditions.

Still, what Bravo seems to be playing up in promos is the sex, the decadent spending and the catfights. (Giudice is seen angrily upending a dining table in coming attractions.) And press materials contain such lines as “The hair is big, but the drama is bigger.”

Vincent Curatola, who played Johnny Sack on “The Sopranos,” thinks that if Bravo is trying to imitate “The Sopranos,” they missed the point of that dramatic series. “It was Shakespearean. It was about the human condition. Period,” says the actor.

What’s more, Curatola says, when he was growing up in Englewood, N.J., in the 1960s, on the same street as the Johnsons (of Johnson & Johnson) and the Eastmans (Eastman Kodak), old-moneyed families didn’t behave like these “housewives.”

“Whenever we bumped into these people in downtown Englewood, I just said, ‘Hi, Mr. Eastman,’ ‘Hi, Mrs. Johnson.’ I found out later who they were. You’d never guess by the way they treated each other and the people behind the counters,” Curatola says, contrasting that with these “housewives”’ ostentatious style. “It’s way out there. You talk about new rich? This is yesterday rich.”