Marc Malkin

Bravo/Denis Poroy

Let the catfights begin!

Gretchen Rossi, the newest member of the Real Housewives of Orange County, has no problem saying how she really feels about veteran Housewife Vicki Gunvalson.

"I think sometimes Vicki is in her own little world and doesn't pay attention to anyone around her," Gretchen told me this morning. "It comes off very rude and very insensitive."

Case in point: tomorrow's episode, in which the five Housewives are driving in a limo to a spa day at Sonya Dakar in Beverly Hills. While Gretchen is telling them how her fiancé, Jeff Beitzel, is suffering from acute leukemia, Vicki is preoccupied with work on her laptop. (Jeff passed away in September, shortly after the season had wrapped filming.)

"Vicki is just typing and couldn’t care less about what I'm saying. And then afterward, she's like, 'I don't want be chitchatting about death,' " Gretchen said. "I was like, What?"

And then there are the comments behind her back...

The other housewives have a field day calling Gretchen a "gold digger" because Jeff was 23 years older than her.

But Gretchen insists her and Jeff's love was real. So real that she refused to marry him while he was dying. "I think people would have made assumptions if I had married him during that time, and that's not the reason I was ever with Jeff," Gretchen says, now 31. "It just wasn't…I really wanted to marry him when he was healthy enough to walk down an aisle. Jeff asked me many times to marry him while he was in the hospital and I said, 'I'm not doing that.' "

And it's one of those comments about Jeff that caused a rift between her and Tamra Barney, who up until Gretchen arrived was the youngest and so-called hottest Housewife of the bunch.

"You know, she was just really offensive to me in a statement that she made about Jeff," Gretchen remembered. "She just hit the wrong chord with me. The day before, we talked and she was my best friend it seemed like, but then the next night she was making comments about him. It was really hurtful."