On “The Real Housewives,” Frankel promotes her Skinnygirl brand with zeal. Illustration by Olivier Goka

The reality-television star Bethenny Frankel climbed into a black S.U.V. and addressed the driver. “Hi,” she said. “How are you? Can I have one of those candies?”

It was a Friday afternoon in SoHo, and Frankel and her director of business operations were on their way to a party. She unwrapped a hard candy and sucked on it thoughtfully. Though Frankel is forty-four, with a five-year-old daughter, she has the skinny-but-busty figure more commonly associated with lingerie models and comic-book vamps than with middle-aged parents. As is often the case with Frankel, the party was not strictly for recreational purposes. She was promoting a line of premixed, low-calorie alcoholic drinks called Skinnygirl Cocktails.

Frankel, who was wearing an embroidered green cocktail dress, stars on the Bravo reality show “The Real Housewives of New York City,” part of a franchise that includes iterations based in Orange County (the original), Atlanta, New Jersey, and Beverly Hills—each one delivering a regional variation on the themes of friendship, intrigue, and occasional hair-pulling among a group of sometimes tipsy ladies of leisure. Frankel is something like the show’s screwball heroine. She is a fast talker, and she has a bit of Borscht Belt comedian in her. Fans quote her “Bethenny-isms,” brassy sayings such as “Get off my jock!” Her take on another Housewife’s home décor: “Jill’s apartment is Liberace, Versace, like, la cucarachi. It’s like Ivana Trump. It’s got dangling things everywhere. . . . If I were in Jill’s apartment for a weekend, by myself, I would feel like I’d taken a hit of acid.”

According to Frankel, although her television career is her most visible pursuit, it’s not her most important one. “I went on the show single-handedly and exclusively for business,” she has said. During the first season of “The Real Housewives,” as the cameras rolled, she ordered a cocktail she’d come up with, which she called “the skinny girl’s margarita.” In 2011, she sold the Skinnygirl Margarita brand to the liquor conglomerate Beam Suntory, the maker of Jim Beam, for a reported hundred and twenty million dollars. The sale made Frankel rich. It also ushered in an era in food marketing, inspiring female-focussed innovations like Skinny Pop, Skinny Pizza, and the Skinny Flavored Latte. Frankel told me, “I turned a brand around in, like, a year on television and nobody even knew that I was doing it.”

Since then, her life has had a bumpier trajectory. She left “The Real Housewives” after three seasons to star in her own spinoff show, “Bethenny Ever After,” which chronicled her marriage to a pharmaceutical salesman and the birth of their child. She also hosted a daytime talk show, called “Bethenny.” The talk show failed. So did the marriage. This year, Frankel returned to “The Real Housewives of New York City,” which just ended its seventh season. “It was like the Hell Freezes Over tour,” she told me.

As part of Frankel’s deal with Beam, she retains the rights to use the Skinnygirl name for products other than booze. (“I own Skinnygirl, but Beam paid me all this money to use her,” she told me. “I win.”) In the past five years, she has rolled out more than a hundred new products, or SKUs (pronounced “skews”)—mostly low-calorie foods, such as popcorn, chips, and salad dressing—in partnership with national food conglomerates. Her goals are imperial. “When Grey Goose sold, they sold for two billion dollars, but that’s it,” she said in the car. “You could never make a Grey Goose lip gloss or a hummus.” She went on, “I just got an e-mail today about the low-carb bread. ConAgra wants to do baked goods.”

Frankel’s deal with Beam requires her to make promotional appearances for her liquor brand. In the car, she asked her employee, a polished blond twenty-six-year-old named Alexandra Cohen, “Is this for Spicy Lime or Pinot?” Cohen explained that it was for neither. Frankel would be meeting a group of life-style bloggers who had been hired by Beam to act as “influencers” for Skinnygirl Cocktails. “These are ten bloggers who are going to share with every single follower that they met you, and that you’re inspirational,” Cohen said. She added, firmly, “It’s important that you message the right things to these people. Because these people have a ton of followers.”

“O.K.,” Frankel said. “Why did they only pick ten, though?” She’s active on Twitter, but the nuances of social media sometimes escape her. (An agency called DM2 manages most of her social-media accounts.)

“Because they’re the most influential.”

“Influential of what?”

“Messaging of cocktails,” Cohen said. “Like, if you tweet something about a cocktail, it goes to 1.4 million people. One of these girls tonight—Lauryn Evarts, of the Skinny Confidential—she has half a million followers. It’s a blog. And she worships you. She’s, like, ‘I want to be the next Bethenny Frankel.’ ”

The car pulled up outside the James Hotel, where the women were greeted by a Beam marketing executive and the bloggers, who looked like younger versions of Frankel. They wore brightly colored cocktail dresses and had well-honed personal brands. Evarts said, “I’m all about having kale in one hand and champagne in the other. Balance, balance, balance!”

Looking around the party room in the hotel’s basement, Frankel delivered critiques in the form of a comic riff: “The lighting in here! I feel like we should seal the windows and turn on the gas. It’s depressing! Jesus Christ. If we sell a couple more bottles, maybe we could get better lighting.” A Beam employee rushed to adjust the dimmer.

Frankel can be difficult on “The Real Housewives”—in one episode this past season, she refused to eat sushi at a fellow-Housewife’s dinner party, saying, “I only eat shellfish”—but, when it comes to promotional gigs, she has a rough-and-ready attitude. She got behind the bar and began making drinks. “We’re starting off with an old Hollywood cocktail,” she said, mixing Martinis using Skinnygirl’s Bare Naked Vodka. “You girls have to decide if you want it dirty or clean. What do you drink to go out?”

The bloggers were prepared for this question. One answered, “I’m a red-wine girl, but when I go out I get white wine, St. Germain, soda, and lemon juice.”

“I love that,” Frankel said. “You should name it. It should be your signature drink.” She lifted her glass. “We’re, like, at an A.A. meeting, but drinking,” she mused. “Cheers, everyone!”

Frankel’s twin vocations are, in some sense, the same. “I’m a marketer,” she told me, explaining her role in business and in television. “I know how to communicate to people, and I think that’s what marketing really is.” It’s also an apt definition of celebrity. In 1944, the German sociologist Leo Löwenthal coined the phrase “idols of consumption” to describe the burgeoning celebrity culture. With their clear skin and fabulous wardrobes, stars give us something to aspire to—and an excuse to buy stuff we don’t really need.

Famous people of various stripes have moved product: Mark Twain sold flour; Babe Ruth sold Pinch Hit tobacco; Bette Davis sold shampoo. But, for the most part, these stars were shilling for other people. Frankel’s career is an example of an increasingly common phenomenon, in which the pitchmen are starting their own businesses. Gossip blogs have a word for these celebrity-C.E.O. types: “celebpreneurs.” Gwyneth Paltrow, who has refashioned herself as a life-style guru, started Goop, which sends out an e-mail newsletter that combines shopping guides with health advice like “a combination of infrared and mugwort steam cleanses your uterus.” The company recently opened its first pop-up stores. Kate Hudson co-founded a line of workout clothing called Fabletics, whose parent company, JustFab, aims to take on the yoga-wear behemoth Lululemon. “This is my life—wearing leggings,” Hudson told People. And, this spring, Reese Witherspoon launched Draper James, a Southern-inspired Web site, whose motto is “You only get one life, so let’s make it pretty.” (It sells things like sixty-five-dollar cocktail-napkin sets.) The most successful celebpreneur to date is probably Jessica Alba, who co-founded the Honest Company, an online vender of toxin-free home products, which was recently valued at a billion dollars.