Candy at Last

by Candy Spelling

  As for Aaron, he was happy to oblige on the condition that when we returned on Sunday afternoon, I would agree to play hostess at the barbecue he had at his house every Sunday evening. When he met us at the airport on Sunday, he presented me with a little gold pin in the shape of a rose with two little leaves made of rubies and emeralds. There was a diamond on the rose. I told him I couldn’t accept it, but he insisted and so I did. I was still a little suspicious of Mr. Spelling and his casting couch. Maybe he was a fast mover and this was part of his repertoire? I couldn’t be sure, so I chose to believe this was something special he had done for me.

  4

  The Writing on the Wall

  My mother was fit to be tied when she returned from her long weekend and heard about how I had spent mine. In fairness, Aaron was twenty-three years older than me, I had met him at a nightclub, and after knowing him for less than two days, I had gone to his house to play hostess for his weekly Sunday night dinner gathering. She was also convinced he had a sock drawer full of those Raymond & Company Jewelers pins. For her, the writing was on the wall.

  “Why are you dating Aaron Spelling when Del Coleman is crazy about you?” Del Coleman was someone I’d had a few dates with. He owned a vending machine company and was quite handsome. We’d been out a few times, but I just wasn’t into him.

  True to her eighteenth-century sensibilities, for my mother it always came down to finances, and she was ever determined to find me a marital situation in which I would be taken care of. When I met Aaron, he was not yet Aaron Spelling as we would come to know him. He had just left an enviable staff writing position to set up his own shingle with Danny Thomas. It was a huge risk and an unprecedented move at the time for a television writer. Aaron was completely without pretension. In fact, he made no bones about scrounging around Desilu Productions for office furniture he could use in his empty office. His vision and drive were intoxicating. He was unlike anyone I had ever met.

  Despite our completely different upbringings, we actually had a lot in common. Aaron understood my confidence issues. He had grown up poor in Dallas, Texas, where his only opportunity to watch television was through the window of a local appliance store. On the way to school, he had to watch out for a group of boys who would beat him up and take his shoes. He had to finish his walk to school without them and arrived to the schoolyard barefoot and humiliated. The saddest story Aaron ever told me was when he won a shiny red bicycle from a store called Sanger Brothers. It was a poetry contest, and he won fair and square, but the store owners refused to give him the bike because he was Jewish.

  Even before Aaron had given me this glimpse into his childhood, I felt I could be vulnerable with him. On our third or fourth date, we spent the whole night practicing my social skills. Aaron was, of course, the master. He could talk to anyone. It didn’t matter whether it was a busboy at a restaurant or a prince, he could have an interesting conversation that made the other person feel good about themselves. So Aaron coached me on making eye contact, shaking hands, and stirring up polite dinner conversation with strangers. It sounds like an odd way to spend an evening, but it helped me and it meant a lot to me that Aaron believed in me.

  Another commonality between us was that we both had first marriages that hadn’t worked out. Aaron was thirty years old when he came to Los Angeles in 1953 on borrowed money. He didn’t have a car or even a typewriter. Just his ideas and his work ethic, which he quickly to put to use working as a roadie of sorts for an all-woman orchestra known as the Ada Leonard Orchestra. Aaron was also working on developing his writing at the Actors Studio in Hollywood. It was there that he met actress Carolyn Jones, who was a fellow Texan.

  For a pair of struggling creative types, one rent payment was better than two, but they both had their sense of Texas propriety. So instead of just “shackin’ up,” Aaron and Carolyn were married. Not unlike my own young marriage, Aaron quickly became disillusioned once he was living with Carolyn. He came home every evening to find his wife intoxicated. The smell of alcohol filled their home and was all over their things. Even though she was earning recognition as an actress, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1957 film The Bachelor Party as well as a Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer, Carolyn remained emotionally unstable. Being the caretaker that Aaron was, he was determined to honor his commitment to the “worse” of “for better or worse” in his marriage vows.

  Aaron and Carolyn were known for entertaining, and the guest list to their parties was like the list of invitees to a Hollywood premiere. It was what went on in the house when nobody was around that was so difficult. The straw that broke the camel’s back came twelve years into their marriage when Carolyn tried to shoot herself in the bathtub at their house on Beverly Drive. Aaron felt awful for calling it quits but followed through with the divorce. His Jewish guilt got the better of him, so he remained friendly with her afterward. We even went to a few cocktail parties at her house when we were dating. It was more than a little bit awkward, but I did it for Aaron.

  I sometimes wondered if his bathtub story was all true. Going to her parties, I had the opportunity to see how sweet she was when she was sober and then how caustic and destructive she became after a couple of drinks. I think Aaron was able to resolve his feelings about their relationship after he helped her land the role of a lifetime playing Morticia Addams in The Addams Family.

  5

  Our Comedy of Manners

  Aaron shot the pilot of The Mod Squad for ABC shortly after we started dating. His inspiration for what became known as the “hippie cop show” was a conversation he had with Bud Ruskin, a retired policeman whom he met at the Daisy. The policeman told Aaron that law enforcement was recruiting young people for undercover police work, and this set Aaron’s mind alight. Aaron pitched his idea for the show to his business partner, Danny Thomas, who promptly told him he was out of his mind. Danny quickly added that Aaron should “go for it.” Unbeknownst to Aaron, he was about to change the landscape of prime-time television with his youth market formulation.

  Aaron and I dated each other exclusively over the next two and a half years. We had very glamorous dates, and other times we were like a pair of teenagers. Before Aaron dropped me off at home for the evening at my parents’, we’d park the car at a little park off Doheny Drive and Carmelita Avenue in Beverly Hills. We, along with Aaron’s 120-pound Belgian shepherd, Adam, would steam up the windows of his black Cadillac Brougham. It was a chic car to have, and it had a special bench row in the front. The funny thing about the car was that it had these two massive car phones in it. One in the front and another in the back. I never understood why Aaron had a phone in the back since he didn’t have a driver.

  Herald-Express gossip columnist Harrison Carroll, who was a fixture of the Hollywood scene, wrote about us several times. First I was the flavor of the week, and then I was the flavor of every week. I used to cut out and save every column that mentioned us. It was fun for me until Carroll wrote, “At the Daisy Club, I asked Producer Aaron Spelling if he and Candy Marer have any wedding plans. ‘Not yet,’ he replied, ‘but I really want to.’ Don’t know if it had anything to do with this admission but Aaron promptly got the hiccups. And tried what was, to me, a novel cure. Drinking water out of a paper cup covered with a tissue.”

  It definitely wasn’t smooth sailing. We had two breakups and a marriage proposal in between. We had actually gone to city hall and gotten a marriage license, but Aaron let it expire. I knew that however unconscious it may have been for him, his hesitation had to do with Carolyn. I think he had anxiety about being trapped in a bad marriage again, and I also believe he was still trying to protect her feelings. It was very hurtful for me.

  Our breakup times were miserable, especially when I ran into Aaron while he was out on a date or vice versa. Right around this time my father told me it was time for me to get my own apartment, because waiting up for me until the wee hours was negatively impacting my m
other’s health. I was very surprised, because in those days nice Jewish girls didn’t live on their own. I decided I would take a big step and move across the country to New York City and try my hand at modeling. My mother did not agree with my proposed move to Manhattan. She felt I was trying to force Aaron to marry me. What my mother clearly did not understand about Aaron was that nobody could force him to do anything he didn’t want to do.

  My mother found a residence hotel for women called the Barbizon Hotel. It was located on the Upper East Side and was known as a safe hotel for women traveling alone to New York City for professional opportunities. The hotel didn’t allow men above the ground floor, and it observed strict dress and conduct codes. The hotel had a library, a lounge where all the residents watched television and played games. There was even an indoor swimming pool. Lauren Bacall, Grace Kelly, Joan Didion, and Candice Bergen were just of few of the hotel’s past famous residents. It sounded perfect. In his 2010 Vanity Fair article “Sorority on E. 63rd St.,” Michael Callahan wrote, “According to a writer for Time magazine, it was ‘one of the few places in Gomorrah-on-the-Hudson where a girl could take her virtue to bed and rest assured it would still be there next morning.’ What’s more, the building possessed ‘the greatest concentration of beauty east of Hollywood.’”

  Even though I was from Los Angeles, I still felt like a girl from a small town going to the big city for her first time. I had never been to New York City before. I immediately loved the energy and the sophistication. I was so excited to get to the hotel and start my new life as a “Barbizon Girl.” After hearing that Grace Kelly had danced in the halls of the Barbizon in her underwear, I guess my expectation was that the hotel would look like a beautiful set from High Society. Well, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The rooms were so small they were claustrophobic. There was a narrow single bed pushed up against a wall and a writing desk an arm’s length away against the other side of the room. The mix of Gothic, Romanesque, and Renaissance-style architecture created hallways that were gloomy and depressing. My room was more convent cell than sorority dormitory, and it goes without saying I didn’t feel like breaking into song in my underwear.

  I left Los Angeles on good terms with Aaron. We were still very close and spoke on the phone almost every day. I was getting work as a model and was determined to stick it out at the Barbizon until I could rent an apartment. One day while we were on the phone, Aaron talked me into spending a romantic weekend with him. Since he didn’t fly, I booked a flight home and he reserved a suite for us at the Bel-Air hotel. The only glitch in our spontaneous plan was that I was supposed to have a blind date with the son of a couple my parents were friendly with. I didn’t know much about him, only that he was a stockbroker. When Aaron invited me out to Los Angeles, I didn’t think twice about canceling the blind date. Without any remorse whatsoever, I left a message with the stockbroker’s secretary.

  Hours later, Aaron met me at the airport in Los Angeles. I was elated to be with him, and we went straight to our suite at the Bel-Air hotel. It was incredibly romantic—at least until the phone started ringing off the hook, that is. Aaron finally answered the phone. It was his assistant, Shelley. She told Aaron that my mother had called the office hysterical because I had gone missing in New York City. Apparently, for whatever reason, the stockbroker in New York had called me back at the Barbizon, and when he couldn’t reach me, he called his parents in Los Angeles. After hanging up with their son, the stockbroker’s parents immediately called my mother, who then called Shelley. She told Shelley that if I had gone missing, she knew for certain that Aaron knew where I was.

  There was no caller ID back then, so I could have easily called my mother back and told her a fib. Instead, I panicked. I threw all of my clothes, which were only sexy nightgowns, by the way, back into the suitcase and had Aaron drive me straight back to the airport. Don’t ask me what my thought process was, but I got on the next flight to New York City and called her as soon as I landed. My mother didn’t even give me chance to start in on the story I had concocted. She immediately hung up on me. I called her back a second time and launched in on my lie, but before I could finish, she hung up on me a second time.

  Shortly after the “incident,” I moved out of the Barbizon and into an L-shaped apartment on 53rd Street between First and Second Avenues. It wasn’t that much better than the Barbizon, but I did have a television set that Aaron had delivered to me.

  One afternoon he called. I could hear in his voice that he had a cold. He told me he didn’t have anyone to take care of him. He also said he wanted us to get married. Aaron was always a big baby when he got sick, so I wasn’t buying what he was selling.

  An hour later Aaron called again. This time he told me he had just spoken with my parents and had gotten their blessing for us to get married. It didn’t matter that I had just signed a lease or that I would somehow have to get the television set back to California. I packed everything up and flew home to California. Six weeks later, Aaron and I were married on November 23, 1968. We had an intimate ceremony in front of immediate family at the apartment home of my parents at Sierra Towers.

  After the ceremony, we all went down to the party room and had a surprise reception with eighty of our close friends and family. Nobody knew we had gotten married until they arrived. Our first dance as husband and wife was to “My Funny Valentine,” which we had danced to the night we met at the Daisy.

  Aaron always liked the way I looked best when I didn’t have any makeup on and my hair was pulled back into a ponytail. It was always so telling to me. Even though he had been such a playboy and had to overcome his fears about giving marriage a second try, once we were married, I knew it would be forever.

  6

  Mrs. Spelling, I Presume

  Aaron had to be on set in Bronson Canyon on Monday morning, so we didn’t take a honeymoon. My husband also happened to be the inventor of the “staycation,” so he arranged for us to spend a luxurious weekend at the Bel-Air hotel. His show The Mod Squad, which had started airing on ABC a couple of months before our wedding, was already getting a lot of attention. The program was more than just “groovy,” it really was socially conscious and reflected what was going on in our country at the time. The antiwar movement, women’s rights, racial issues, and child neglect were just a few of the topics the show explored.

  The Mod Squad was actually the first show ever to depict an African American character as equal to a Caucasian character. ABC was very concerned about one episode where Linc gave Julie a friendly kiss on the cheek. They were up in arms about it at the edit and wanted to cut it out, but Aaron didn’t see anything wrong with it and refused. This new twist on the American crime drama was popular with the youth market as well as adults. It was the first of so many of Aaron’s shows that the whole family could watch together, and it was his breakthrough hit.

  In addition to The Mod Squad, Aaron was very busy shooting what seemed like one television movie of the week after another. If I wanted to see my husband, I had to go out to set to visit him. One time I took my brand-new Corvette out to location in Lancaster. I parked too close to the set, and a big sound boom rigged above the set fell onto the fiberglass hood of the car and left a massive crater-size hole. I tried to be mature about it—after all, nobody was hurt—but I was pretty devastated about the damage to my beautiful car.

  Not long after we were married, Aaron had an important meeting with the president of ABC. They scheduled a drinks meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Aaron was very nervous and asked me to come along for moral support. Naturally I agreed. The only thing was that Aaron didn’t want the president to see that he had brought “the missus” along. So instead of valet parking and letting me go off to entertain myself somewhere on the hotel property while he had his meeting, Aaron left me parked just outside the hotel on a side street. We thought he’d only be an hour, but it turned out to be two hours. Mind you, this was before cell phones and iPads, so it was a long two hours sitting in the car. In
all honesty, I didn’t mind. I was nervous and excited for him. When he finally returned to the car, he was ecstatic because ABC had just offered him the deal that would allow him to create Aaron Spelling Productions.

  It was incredible to see all of this happening for Aaron. He was so brilliant and had worked so hard to get here. Still, I was starting to have identity issues. I loved being Mrs. Spelling, but I wanted to hang on to Candy, too. I think these feelings are common for all young wives, but most of my friends from high school had married and moved away, so I had nobody to share this with. My mother had cagey advice for me about always charging household expenses so they wouldn’t be deducted from my allowance, but what I was experiencing was definitely not something she would have understood.

  Part of my responsibility as Mrs. Spelling was to socialize with the wives of Aaron’s collaborators and the network executives he did business with on a daily basis. They were a nice group of women, but they were twenty years older than I was. We didn’t have anything in common. We couldn’t even talk about our children because I didn’t have any yet. Honestly, I also found them very intimidating.

  Edie Wasserman was the “better half” of Lew Wasserman, the most powerful man in Hollywood. Edie herself was a woman of conviction who was very involved with different causes and a great champion of the Motion Picture and Television Fund. The organization offers social programs and financial assistance to professionals in the motion picture and television industries.

  Doris Stein was the wife of visionary ophthalmologist Jules Stein, who founded the Jules Stein Eye Institute. Doris was a woman of purpose who was the inspiration for the creation of the institute. She devoted herself to initiatives to combat blindness around the globe.