14 new york | march 16–29, 2020
intelligencerof attendees to the first-ever BravoCon in
Manhattan this past November.
Kingston is a small, low-key city, but that
doesn’t mean there’s not plenty to do.
De Lesseps has already fit in a full morning
of yoga and green juice—“Half the price of
New York, by the way”—then dropped her
visiting daughter, Victoria, off at the nail
salon. De Lesseps purchased a home in the
nearby hamlet of Port Ewen, a scenic hour
and 45 minutes along the New York State
Thruway from her apartment on the Upper
West Side, in late 2018, seeking peace and
quiet in the idyllic environs of the Hudson
Valley. Peace and quiet are not resources she
has always enjoyed in abundance.
Has anyone led a life quite like that of
Countess Luann de Lesseps, née LuAnn
Nadeau of Berlin, Connecticut, also known,
however briefly, as Luann D’Agostino? In
her 54 years, she has been a nurse, a pag-
eant winner, a model, an Italian-TV per-
sonality, French nobility (she retained her
courtesy title from first husband, Count
Alex andre de Lesseps, until she remarried),
an American-TV personality, a recording
artist, and—for a few fateful hours on
Christmas Eve 2017—a Palm Beach County
Jail inmate. De Lesseps was arrested on
charges including battery on an officer and
disorderly intoxication after trespassing,
kicking a cop, and threatening to “kill”
responding law enforcement. It was a nose-
dive for a woman whose 2009 etiquette
guide, Class With the Countess: How to
Live With Elegance and Flair, instructed
readers in how to properly curtsy. She
struck a plea deal and was ordered to a one-
year probation.
Like many New Yorkers, de Lesseps
could not resist the fantasy of the Hudson
Valley as a rural, upstate paradise—even if
it isn’t exactly rural, and even if it isn’t
exactly upstate. Her “hideout,” as she calls it,
a three-bed, four-bath mid-century modern
house perched on the Hudson River, is
entirely round for good feng shui. It’s a great
place to be alone—not counting the com-
pany of her beloved Westie, Aston, as in
Martin—but an equally great place to host
Thanksgiving dinner for 16. “My niece kept
telling me, ‘Upstate New York, upstate New
York,’ and at that point I had paparazzi in
the bushes in the Hamptons. So I was like,
‘You know what? I’m gonna go up there and
check it out.’ ” It was on a hike near New
Paltz that she knew: “Literally, the hair was
raised on my forearms, like, ‘Oh my God,
this is where I belong.’ ”
She may have decamped to the base of the
Catskills in a bid for privacy, but at Rough
Draft, de Lesseps gets recognized by another
patron before she can take a sip of her oat-
milk cappuccino. I didn’t know that youlived up here! She receives the attention
gladly and takes the opportunity to plug her
upcoming tour. She retrieves her phone
from her snakeskin-print tote to read a text
message: It’s from castmate Ramona Singer.
They’re planning a cast party for RHONY’s
April 2 premiere. De Lesseps predicts these
new episodes will be her “redemption.”
To the extent that last season had a unify-
ing theme, it was that her co-stars had come
to consider her—I’m paraphrasing here—a
selfish narcissist with delusions of cabaret
grandeur. That’s because, instead of wither-
ing from public life after her arrest, she
launched a cabaret show called #Countess
AndFriends at Feinstein’s/54 Below, where
she and guests like Rachel Dratch and Laura
Benanti played to sold-out audiences of
drunk women and gay men. Then she took
the act on the road. Onstage, she cracks self-
deprecating jokes about her tabloid misad-
ventures (“No, I won’t be performing ‘Jail-
house Rock’ tonight”) and belts her 2011club single, “Chic, C’est La Vie,” in a voice
that’s appealingly husky, if not always reli-
ably on key (an overrated quality).
De Lesseps, who says the version of her-
self she sees portrayed on television is gen-
erally “75 percent” accurate, maintains her
villainization was unjustified. “When you’re
focused on your sobriety and you’re focused
on taking care of yourself and staying on the
path, it’s hard to give your energy to people,”
she says. Sobriety has become a major chap-
ter of her biography as well as a subject of
the television show she appears on. As con-
ditions of her probation following her Palm
Beach arrest, she was ordered to abstain
from alcohol and regularly attend Alcoholics
Anonymous meetings. But after completing
her probation last summer, de Lesseps
announced in People in January that she has
decided to drink occasionally. Now, I ask her,
does she consider herself an alcoholic or just
someone who’s watching her relationship
with alcohol? “I take it day by day. I drink on
occasion. Right now, I’m not drinking,”
de Lesseps says, a series of sentences she willrepeat more than once during our time
together. “I’m not on probation anymore, so
I can do what I want, you know?”
Coffees finished, we walk outside into the
unseasonably warm February sunlight.
De Lesseps informs me that Kingston was
the first capital of New York, before Albany.
The British burned most of the city during
the Revolutionary War; the intersection
we’re crossing, I later learn, is the only one in
the country where buildings older than
American independence stand on each cor-
ner. Up the street is Crown, a lounge set in a
historic stone house, where de Lesseps took
her co-stars to a cabaret show last season.
De Lesseps and I walk a block north to
Kingston Consignments, where she recently
nabbed a set of mid-century coasters.
“Sometimes you find gems,” she says, deli-
cately raising a cute little fur stole to her
nose. “The only thing I don’t like about vin-
tage is it smells.” This passes the sniff test,
but it’s not a must-buy—unlike the Andy
Warhol print of Marilyn Monroe ($100),
rendered in vivid pink, and a handsome
mirror with a silver braided frame ($59).
“It’s a small toilette,” she says of her guest
bath, but this should be the perfect size. At
the register, de Lesseps flips Marilyn over to
find an “Andy Warhol” signature on the
back. “Why is it signed by Andy Warhol? It
can’t be Andy Warhol,” she muses. The
cashier confers with a colleague and con-
firms that the signature is, indeed, fake.
“Right,” de Lesseps says, laughing. “Of
course it is. It’d be a million dollars.”
She takes the not-Warhol, and I carry the
mirror back to her car, a 17-year-old Range
Rover she shares with her daughter. She’ll
take her Mercedes 550 out of the garage
once she’s confident there won’t be any more
snow this spring. The gas cap is missing—
someone took it—and there’s a scratch here
and there, but this thing is “tried and true.”
Her phone rings. Mani-pedi complete, Vic-
toria is ready to be picked up. But de Lesseps
lingers on the sidewalk to chat just a little
longer. She is enjoying casually dating her
West Coast–based agent, Rich Super,
though she prefers not to use the word boy
friend. As far as the election goes, it was
Bloomberg who got her the most excited.
Have any locals ever given her the sense
they were less than thrilled to have her and
the cameras move here? She offers an
impression of the fellow diner who audibly,
performatively scoffed with displeasure as
the cast filmed over dinner at a hotel in
Rhinebeck, just across the Hudson. “I mean,
I get it. We were kind of disruptive and
loud and doing our Housewives banter,” she
recalls. “That’s exactly why I’m up here. I
don’t want to have to deal with reality shows
or Jersey Shore coming to my town.” ■“ Literally, the hairwas raised onmy forearms, like,‘Oh my God, thisis where I belong.’ ”TRANSMITTED________ COPY ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EIC0620INT_Encounter_lay [Print]_36890289.indd 14 3/13/20 2:36 PM14 newyork| march16–29, 2020
intelligencer
of attendees to the first-ever BravoCon in
Manhattan this past November.
Kingston is a small, low-key city, but that
doesn’t mean there’s not plenty to do.
De Lesseps has already fit in a full morning
of yoga and green juice—“Half the price of
New York, by the way”—then dropped her
visiting daughter, Victoria, off at the nail
salon. De Lesseps purchased a home in the
nearby hamlet of Port Ewen, a scenic hour
and 45 minutes along the New York State
Thruway from her apartment on the Upper
West Side, in late 2018, seeking peace and
quiet in the idyllic environs of the Hudson
Valley. Peace and quiet are not resources she
has always enjoyed in abundance.
Has anyone led a life quite like that of
Countess Luann de Lesseps, née LuAnn
Nadeau of Berlin, Connecticut, also known,
however briefly, as Luann D’Agostino? In
her 54 years, she has been a nurse, a pag-
eant winner, a model, an Italian-TV per-
sonality, French nobility (she retained her
courtesy title from first husband, Count
Alex andre de Lesseps, until she remarried),
an American-TV personality, a recording
artist, and—for a few fateful hours on
Christmas Eve 2017—a Palm Beach County
Jail inmate. De Lesseps was arrested on
charges including battery on an officer and
disorderly intoxication after trespassing,
kicking a cop, and threatening to “kill”
responding law enforcement. It was a nose-
dive for a woman whose 2009 etiquette
guide, Class With the Countess: How to
Live With Elegance and Flair, instructed
readers in how to properly curtsy. She
struck a plea deal and was ordered toa one-
year probation.
Like many New Yorkers, de Lesseps
could not resist the fantasy of the Hudson
Valley as a rural, upstate paradise—even if
it isn’t exactly rural, and even if it isn’t
exactly upstate. Her “hideout,” as she calls it,
a three-bed, four-bath mid-century modern
house perched on the Hudson River, is
entirely round for good feng shui. It’s a great
place to be alone—not counting the com-
pany of her beloved Westie, Aston, as in
Martin—but an equally great place to host
Thanksgiving dinner for 16. “My niece kept
telling me, ‘Upstate New York, upstate New
York,’ and at that point I had paparazzi in
the bushes in the Hamptons. So I was like,
‘You know what? I’m gonna go up there and
check it out.’ ” It was on a hike near New
Paltz that she knew: “Literally, the hair was
raised on my forearms, like, ‘Oh my God,
this is where I belong.’ ”
She may have decamped to the base of the
Catskills in a bid for privacy, but at Rough
Draft, de Lesseps gets recognized by another
patron before she can take a sip of her oat-
milk cappuccino. I didn’t know that you
lived up here! She receives the attention
gladly and takes the opportunity to plug her
upcoming tour. She retrieves her phone
from her snakeskin-print tote to read a text
message: It’s from castmate Ramona Singer.
They’re planning a cast party for RHONY’s
April 2 premiere. De Lesseps predicts these
new episodes will be her “redemption.”
To the extent that last season had a unify-
ing theme, it was that her co-stars had come
to consider her—I’m paraphrasing here—a
selfish narcissist with delusions of cabaret
grandeur. That’s because, instead of wither-
ing from public life after her arrest, she
launched a cabaret show called #Countess
AndFriends at Feinstein’s/54 Below, where
she and guests like Rachel Dratch and Laura
Benanti played to sold-out audiences of
drunk women and gay men. Then she took
the act on the road. Onstage, she cracks self-
deprecating jokes about her tabloid misad-
ventures (“No, I won’t be performing ‘Jail-
house Rock’ tonight”) and belts her 2011club single, “Chic, C’est La Vie,” in a voice
that’s appealingly husky, if not always reli-
ably on key (an overrated quality).
De Lesseps, who says the version of her-
self she sees portrayed on television is gen-
erally “75 percent” accurate, maintains her
villainization was unjustified. “When you’re
focused on your sobriety and you’re focused
on taking care of yourself and staying on the
path, it’s hard to give your energy to people,”
she says. Sobriety has become a major chap-
ter of her biography as well as a subject of
the television show she appears on. As con-
ditions of her probation following her Palm
Beach arrest, she was ordered to abstain
from alcohol and regularly attend Alcoholics
Anonymous meetings. But after completing
her probation last summer, de Lesseps
announced in People in January that she has
decided to drink occasionally. Now, I ask her,
does she consider herself an alcoholic or just
someone who’s watching her relationship
with alcohol? “I take it day by day. I drink on
occasion. Right now, I’m not drinking,”
de Lesseps says, a series of sentences she willrepeat more than once during our time
together. “I’m not on probation anymore, so
I can do what I want, you know?”
Coffees finished, we walk outside into the
unseasonably warm February sunlight.
De Lesseps informs me that Kingston was
the first capital of New York, before Albany.
The British burned most of the city during
the Revolutionary War; the intersection
we’re crossing, I later learn, is the only one in
the country where buildings older than
American independence stand on each cor-
ner. Up the street is Crown, a lounge set in a
historic stone house, where de Lesseps took
her co-stars to a cabaret show last season.
De Lesseps and I walk a block north to
Kingston Consignments, where she recently
nabbed a set of mid-century coasters.
“Sometimes you find gems,” she says, deli-
cately raising a cute little fur stole to her
nose. “The only thing I don’t like about vin-
tage is it smells.” This passes the sniff test,
but it’s not a must-buy—unlike the Andy
Warhol print of Marilyn Monroe ($100),
rendered in vivid pink, and a handsome
mirror with a silver braided frame ($59).
“It’s a small toilette,” she says of her guest
bath, but this should be the perfect size. At
the register, de Lesseps flips Marilyn over to
find an “Andy Warhol” signature on the
back. “Why is it signed by Andy Warhol? It
can’t be Andy Warhol,” she muses. The
cashier confers with a colleague and con-
firms that the signature is, indeed, fake.
“Right,” de Lesseps says, laughing. “Of
course it is. It’d be a million dollars.”
She takes the not-Warhol, and I carry the
mirror back to her car, a 17-year-old Range
Rover she shares with her daughter. She’ll
take her Mercedes 550 out of the garage
once she’s confident there won’t be any more
snow this spring. The gas cap is missing—
someone took it—and there’s a scratch here
and there, but this thing is “tried and true.”
Her phone rings. Mani-pedi complete, Vic-
toria is ready to be picked up. But de Lesseps
lingers on the sidewalk to chat just a little
longer. She is enjoying casually dating her
West Coast–based agent, Rich Super,
though she prefers not to use the word boy
friend. As far as the election goes, it was
Bloomberg who got her the most excited.
Have any locals ever given her the sense
they were less than thrilled to have her and
the cameras move here? She offers an
impression of the fellow diner who audibly,
performatively scoffed with displeasure as
the cast filmed over dinner at a hotel in
Rhinebeck, just across the Hudson. “I mean,
I get it. We were kind of disruptive and
loud and doing our Housewives banter,” she
recalls. “That’s exactly why I’m up here. I
don’t want to have to deal with reality shows
or Jersey Shore coming to my town.” ■“ Literally, the hairwas raised onmy forearms, like,‘Oh my God, thisis where I belong.’ ”