Ask any viewer of The Hills to describe Whitney Port, the tallest and prettiest of the show's four female principals, and invariably you will get something like this: "She's the dumb one." Even New York Times took a shot at the doe-eyed blonde, referring to her as "the best approximation of a Shakespearean mute that reality TV has ever produced." According to her boss Kelly Cutrone, however, Whitney is no airhead. She's simply misunderstood!

"The thing with Whitney is she's actually very smart and a really talented worker," Cutrone, who runs high-end fashion PR shop People's Revolution, tells Radar. "She just happens to be a six-foot tall knockout blonde. Obviously, there are a lot of stereotypes that go along with being a six-foot tall knockout blonde, but she definitely doesn't conform to them. I love working with her."

According to Cutrone, Whitney, who graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in gender studies, proved time and time again to be a valuable worker bee. "During a show we did for the Pussycat Dolls, one of the dancers left a piece of lingerie on the catwalk," recalls Cutrone. "One of the models started walking towards it, and I thought for sure she was going to trip. But Whitney, who was sitting in the front row, spotted it and literally dove to make sure that she got it out of the way. We threw her into some pretty intense situations, and she always handled herself well."

As for the other prevailing notion about The Hills—that it's scripted? "Maybe they write other scenes, but we were never once given a script or told to say anything," Cutrone says. "The filming is a very dynamic process, but there's no directing."