Kyle Richards never heard Sutton Stracke mention her late friend, dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, before the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast headed to Spain for filming on its 13th season.
While reflecting on the ash-throwing ceremony Sutton, 52, hosted for Merce on the latest episode, Kyle, 55, admitted to having no idea who he was before the trip as Sutton addressed the debacle surrounding her selection of white carnations and Crystal Kung-Minkoff, 40, explained why they made her “immediately uncomfortable.”
“Poor Merce. But Merce is looking down and laughing,” Sutton began on the January 31 episode of the RHOBH: After Show.
According to Sutton, she often misplaced Merce’s ashes, just as she did with those of her late father.
“[My father] was like, ‘I’m gonna get the hell out of dodge Sutton. I don’t trust you for nothing. You’re gonna lose me again and again and again, but I’m always in your heart,’” she recalled.
Meanwhile, Sutton added, she kept “misplacing [Merce] in moves,” although she “would always find him.”
“I think he was waiting for the perfect place for me to put him. I really do,” she reasoned. “I was getting those books together for y’all about Merce, and I looked in the index because I wrote a lot of grants for Merce, and I just remember going about Barcelona, Barcelona, and so I looked it up, and there was Sitges. And it was the very first place he went on his very first European tour. It was meant to be.”
While Sutton and Merce had a years-long friendship, Kyle said she didn’t know about it until Spain.
“I never heard Merce’s name before this trip,” Kyle stated. “But hey, if she wants to use this as an excuse to come to Spain, toss his ashes out, and give us some flowers…”
Ahead of her ceremony for Merce, Sutton brought flowers to her RHOBH castmates, one of whom, Crystal, felt uncomfortable about the gesture.
“I thought it was beautiful. And you chose white carnations because that’s the color of Spain flower?” Garcelle Beauvais, 57, asked.
“Well, they’re red carnations, but I could not find those in time,” Sutton replied.
Although Crystal noted that she “really appreciated the sentiment,” the color of the flowers sparked negative feelings.
“I felt immediately uncomfortable because they were white flowers,” she shared.
Because she saw that Crystal “looked very uncomfortable,” Erika Jayne, 52, intervened.
“I took them off or I said, ’Take that off,’ and everybody was kind of looking at me. I said, ‘Well, In Chinese culture, white equals death.’ So you know, who’s uneducated now?” Erika asked, signaling Crystal’s alleged suggestion that the RHOBH cast is “uneducated and shallow.”
“Me, because I didn’t know that,” Kyle admitted.
Despite what she may or may not have told Annemarie Wiley, 40, about her castmates, Crystal applauded Erika for “[knowing] a lot” about the matter at hand.
“I just thought I would go with it and somehow change it out. I actually did ask if there was red, but then Sutton said I wanted it to be white,” she recalled as Sutton insisted she “did not know” what white carnations represented.
“I apologize for that,” Sutton shared.
“[And] you weren’t doing anything malicious,” noted Garcelle.
Also on the RHOBH: After Show, Sutton and Dorit Kemsley, 47, looked back on their tiff over Sutton’s flower arrangements.
“She sort of handed the flower necklace and said, ‘We’re gonna throw it into the ocean.’ I think I made some comments like ‘You’re gonna harm the fish because of the plastic wreath or something,’” Dorit recalled. “I think she was perturbed.”
“I’m like, ‘No, Dorit, this is all biodegradable product. As one of the past council members of Oceana, I’m a freaking socialite man, and so if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it and don’t come,’” Sutton explained. “This is important to me. But first, she has to nitpick it and make fun of me.”
According to Dorit, she was simply teasing Sutton and having fun.
“[But] Sutton can either be in the mood for it or not in the mood it,” she explained. “I think she was like in her room, she was hysterical. You find these things out after. If I knew these things, I wouldn’t have ever tried to play or make a joke or say anything. But that’s the thing with Sutton: She can be in a sensitive space and react differently to something depending on her moods.”
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills season 13 airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on Bravo.
