Ding dong–it’s official! Omarosa Manigault-Stalworth, the wicked witch/slacker of The Apprentice heard the dreaded words, “You’re fired!” from Manhattan mogul Donald Trump last night. It was about time. For weeks, Omarosa had been bickering with her teammates and using a minor accident as an excuse to ditch work on the NBC reality show in which contestants vie for a $250,000-a-year slot as Trump’s amanuensis. This time, Omarosa insisted that the chronic headache she says she acquired when a small piece of plaster fell on her head during a past “Apprentice” assignment was grounds for taking a sit-down lunch break while her teammates were scrambling to finish on time. Then she boo-hooed outside the boardroom while her team, Protege, was being called on the carpet, even to the point of bursting in upon Trump’s deliberations to weep some more. Omarosa’s downfall was all the more delicious because she and her off-screen supporters had been claiming that the universal loathing she provoked was due to the fact that she was a) an “uppity” woman; b) a “sassy” African-American, or c) both. In short, Omarosa was playing the victimology card, a card that didn’t win points with Trump. “We all have problems,” he told her after she moaned for the umpteenth time about her plaster accident. Said Trump: “I don’t like excuses.”
The only thing to be said for Omarosa was that it wasn’t her fault that Protege performed so poorly (although her behavior did hurt morale). The assignment this week for Protege and its rival, Versacorp, was for each team to pick one of four artists found by the “Apprentice” staff and then sell that artist’s work at a fancy Manhattan gallery opening. While the Protege teammates had the sense not to pick the artist who incorporated his own hair droppings and toenail clippings into his paintings (this is New York), they voted 3-1, over Omarosa’s objections, to back another artist who was almost as bad: “Megan,” whose subjects included dripping blood and a frog smoking opium. Things weren’t helped by the fact that blunt-mouthed Protege-ite Heidi Bressler, whose onscreen f- and other four-letter words are regularly bleeped, announced, “I’d rather sell Tampax than artworks.” Heidi also informed one potential customer at the gallery that a circular work of art by Megan was a toilet seat (it was actually a manhole). The team ended up unloading exactly one of Megan’s pieces: an $868 painting of a possibly dead kitten.
By contrast, Versacorp, which usually suffers from the presence of smarmy, self-important Nick Warnock, this week lucked out because of the presence of smarmy, self-important Nick. As team leader, Nick overruled all his teammates and dictated that they were going with “Andre,” an artist specializing in colorful abstract paintings, the kind of noncontroversial stuff that looks classy in corporate headquarters. On opening night, Versacorp moved $13,000 worth of Andre’s royal blue and avocado-hued blobs. The only downer: The prize was ten minutes of face-time for Nick in Trump’s lushly overdecorated personal offfice–so we had to listen to Nick gas on for ten minutes about his favorite subject, himself: “I bring energy and enthusisam and a sense that everything going well.”
Meanwhile Omarosa whined and whimpered in the taxicab whisking her out of Trump-land forever. “I am a good person who likes to fight for what she wants,” she said. Her last words–wouldn’t you know?–were something about “diversity.”