15
Everything’s Bigger in Texas
My husband was a dreamer and had been since he was a little boy walking around Dallas, making up stories in his head. When he was about eight years old, Aaron lost use of his legs and was bedridden for a year. His doctors believed it was a form of posttraumatic stress disorder from being bullied on his way to school every day. Aaron was in danger of not being passed onto the next grade. He was required to write twenty-five book reports, and I think he wrote something like one hundred and forty. He probably also came up with countless characters and stories in between book reports. (I once read that film director Martin Scorcese had also been bedridden as a child because of his asthma. He also credits this time with fostering the development of his imagination.)
Aaron was a rugged individualist. An intellectual and creative version, but still, a real “pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps kind of guy.” When I think of his vision, his values, his work ethic, and his sense of responsibility, I always think of his roots in the enormous state of Texas. The geography and history of the state were as much a part of my husband’s being as his characters were.
Before I met Aaron, I had this notion of Texas being just like it was in the 1956 movie Giant starring Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Elizabeth Taylor. These rugged men, their cattle ranches and horses that refused to be tamed. Aaron certainly had the southern drawl but didn’t quite fit into the role of Bick or Jett, and he also didn’t learn to ride a horse until he came to Los Angeles and got cast in a western.
What I learned over the years from meeting Aaron’s family and listening to his stories is that Texas really is the land of the entrepreneurial spirit. Unless you’re from Texas, there isn’t anyway you would know that, and I found it absolutely fascinating. I never thought about it, but Texas has only four big cities, and the Dallas–Fort Worth area only became a presence in the last twenty or so years. Until then it was Houston and San Antonio, which is funny to think about now because San Antonio is small by today’s standards. Other than these four cities, Texas is made up of all these tiny little towns connected by rural highways.
Early in the twentieth century, Texas experienced its oil boom known as “The Gusher Age,” when a massive petroleum reserve was discovered near Beaumont. By the 1940s, Texas was the leader of oil production in the United States, and according to some historians, the Texas boom ushered in the global Oil Age. During this rapid forty-year period of development, exploratory wells were drilled all over Texas. Wildcatters were the adventurous entrepreneurs who jumped in their trucks and went from place to place drilling wells in areas not known to be oil fields. The term evolved from the wells that were drilled out in the middle of nowhere, where only wildcats lived. Many of these wildcatters made their fortunes, but they started out with very humble beginnings.
In his own way, Aaron was a wildcatter who struck oil in Hollywood. He had the vision, the imagination, and the drive. Aaron became Aaron Spelling not just because he was such a prolific writer but also because, true to his Texas roots, he wanted to be a stakeholder in his own ideas and play an active role in the creative process. He was already a successful writer at Four Star Entertainment. Many writers would have been satisfied with that alone. Aaron was different. He wanted to find his own well. That Texas spirit of entrepreneurship was hardwired into him. He wanted his own land, and he wanted to be his own oil well.
Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunne, who had known Aaron since the mid-1950s, once touted, “I can honestly say that I’m one of the few people who remember him from when he was poor.” Dunne added, “From the time he started making money, Aaron always lived in big houses.” As a Texan, the ultimate symbol of Aaron’s success would have been a ranch in West Texas. It’s where tycoons (and former presidents) historically go to disconnect from the world, ride their horses, and sit on the porch. I suppose this is what was in the back of Aaron’s mind when we moved from our 2,500-square-foot house off Coldwater Canyon to our 6,500-square-foot house on Palm Drive in Beverly Hills. From here we moved to a 12,000-square-foot house right on the corner on North Mapleton Drive and Sunset Boulevard in Holmby Hills. Aaron’s motivation at the time was a sandbox he had bought for Tori. He didn’t think it fit properly in the backyard of the Beverly Hills House, so we moved to a neighborhood where the homes had more land around them.
At that point, a third of ABC-TV’s primetime lineup was made up of Aaron’s shows. The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, Dynasty, and Hotel, just to name a few. I think in Aaron’s mind it was time to buy his West Texas ranch. The only thing was that he wanted it to be in Los Angeles. I couldn’t believe it, but Aaron was very serious about buying a third home where, in addition to all the pets we already had, we could add farm animals. Aaron did most of his writing in bed surrounded by our dogs, so now I was picturing him like Dr. Dolittle in bed with dogs, goats, chickens, and piglets, polishing a script.
Tori and Aaron really were kindred spirits when it came to animals, so she couldn’t have been any more excited. She wanted the ranch more than anything. I had negotiated a deal with Tori whereby we would rehome her turtle and she would be allowed to add yet another dog to our pack. That was how I kept our numbers down. Aaron obviously didn’t remember our Easter bunny fiasco. The kids couldn’t handle cleaning out two bunny cages. Imagine what would happen with a barn full of farm animals. They would definitely be more difficult to return than a pair of bunnies.
The truth is that with so many of his shows shooting simultaneously, Aaron wasn’t home much, and he also didn’t have much responsibility with the day-to-day management of the house, the kids, or our second home in Malibu. All of that was exclusively my responsibility. I was very involved with my children’s schools—one day I was in class making dioramas, and the next I was leading a troop of Brownies in arts and crafts. All of this, while being Wife-in-Chief running the hospitality and special events division of Aaron Spelling Productions.
I knew that in the late 1930s, Barbara Stanwyck had built an eleven-acre ranch out in Northridge so she could raise horses. The property included an equestrian facility and a beautifully designed twelve-bedroom house that had a stunning stone veneer and charming wooden shingles. Even though she remodeled it and merged it with her friend and neighbor Zeppo Marx’s property, Barbara ended up selling it after marrying actor Robert Taylor. The driving distance to the Hollywood community where they both worked proved to be too far from Northridge. This was back when Van Nuys was considered rural and the post office only had forty residents listed in the area, so imagine the commute in 1980s traffic.
I loved animals then as I do now, and I was the kind of wife and mom who wanted her family to have everything their hearts desired. But honestly, Aaron wasn’t thinking it through. As usual, he was leaving everything practical to me. A working ranch meant ranch hands, ranch hands meant a ranch manager, and a ranch manager meant another house on the property for the ranch manager. The mere thought of it was enough to put me over the edge. I felt like Eva Gabor in Green Acres, only this episode wasn’t a comedy.
I knew Aaron wasn’t going to take no for an answer, just like he didn’t believe me when I said Tori’s sandbox would fit into the yard of our home on Palm Drive. This, by the way, was also an early case of “good cop” (Aaron) and “bad cop” (me), so I needed to find a solution. I gave it some thought, and when I felt like I had the answer, I called a family meeting in my office. The idea that I ultimately proposed was that instead of buying a third house, we put our existing house on the market and find a new house that would combine the city living we were already enjoying with the country life we wanted.
Aaron and the kids were skeptical of my proposal, but I knew my plan was feasible. I elaborated on how I thought it could work and assured the kids that yes, really, they would be able to have all the animals they wanted. I couldn’t help but think of the irony that my mother wouldn’t let me have pets and told me I could have as many as I wanted once I was married. Now here I was wit
h a husband and two children who were animal obsessed. Everyone knew to call us if a family dog wasn’t “working out.”
After I outlined my plan for more space and hence more animals, all the Spellings said “aye.” With my mission accomplished, the meeting was adjourned, and I retired to my bathroom for a relaxing bath. In those days, this was the only place I had any privacy. Even with the scented candles and the aromatherapy bath salts, the release of tension was only temporary. I had my marching orders and without haste would have to find houses for my husband the wildcatter to look at.
16
There Goes the Neighborhood
Like any other family, we hired a Realtor and explained the kind of house we were interested in finding. It actually wasn’t that tall an order. Many people don’t realize that Los Angeles is an expansive city with rustic areas. I think most visitors only think of the historic Santa Monica Pier, Rodeo Drive, Hollywood, and of course Disneyland. There are areas like Mandeville Canyon, which known for its sycamore trees, oak trees, and horse-friendly hiking trails. Robert Mitchum, Esther Williams, Eva Marie Saint, and Aaron’s former boss Dick Powell were just a few of the people who lived out in the canyon. There were also some unique country-style properties up at the top of Coldwater Canyon near Mulholland Drive. These were properties left over from the horse-and-buggy days my mother talked about. The houses were small, but the wilderness around the houses had somehow been left largely unspoiled.
Just across Sunset Boulevard, and only a couple of miles from our home on North Mapleton Drive, was what was known as “Bing Crosby’s old estate.” It was on South Mapleton and Club View Drives, right across the street from Holmby Park, which is known for its 18-hole pitch-and-putt golf course and its lawn bowling court. It was a very charming neighborhood.
Built in the 1930s, the house was perched atop a knoll with a panoramic view of Los Angeles. The vista included an expanse from downtown Los Angeles to Catalina Island. I’m not sure why it was called “Bing Crosby’s old estate.” Bing had lived there from 1943 to 1964, but it had been just over twenty years since he had owned it. Malcolm McNaghten was the original owner of the land and had the house built in 1932.
A Los Angeles businessman, McNaghten was given the land by his father-in-law Arthur Letts, who was the founder of Broadway Department Store and Bullock’s. He was the first Anglo owner of what was known as the Wolfskill Ranch, which was part of one of the early California ranchos. Letts developed his acreage into what would become Westwood and Holmby Hills.
In 1932, McNaghten retained the services of architect Gordon B. Kaufmann, who also designed oil tycoon E. L. Doheny’s landmark Greystone Estate in Beverly Hills, to design his home. At the time, the United States was in the middle of the Great Depression, so McNaghten’s decision to begin construction on his 15,000-square-foot mega mansion was scrutinized, but he forged ahead with his plans. Other members of the community saw the project as a source of employment for skilled laborers and a hopeful symbol that perhaps the economy was turning around.
McNaghten lived in the house until 1943, when he sold it to actor Bing Crosby and his wife, Dixie Lee Crosby. Crosby had just made news for what was called his “White Hot Christmas” in which his Toluca Lake Mansion was ravaged by a fire caused by faulty wiring that ignited the family’s dry, brittle Christmas tree. Bing sold his Toluca Lake colonial and moved into the Holmby Hills house with Dixie Lee and their four sons. Unfortunately, Dixie passed away in 1952 after a bout with cancer, but Bing and the four sons remained there. Bing remarried Kathryn Grant and had three more children with her.
In 1964, Bing sold the house to Patrick J. Frawley for a reported $350,000. Frawley was the president of the Schick Safety Razor Company. He was also the founder of the Schick Treatment Centers. On his website, Paradise Leased, historian Steve Vaught writes, “According to Hedda Hopper, when Crosby departed he left behind a keg of red wine in the home’s basement. A few months later, Frawley checked himself into the Schadel Hospital to cure himself of alcoholism. Coincidence? Hmmm. Frawley’s ultimately successful treatment led him to buy Schadel Hospital and open up a series [of] Schick Alcoholic Treatment centers. So shouldn’t Bing be thanked for that?’”
The fact that Bing Crosby had kept a petting zoo on the property seemed like kismet. There was a little creek and what looked like dens built by otters on the creek. We knew instinctively that this was our new home. In 1986, we paid $10,250,000 for the house and five acres. We later learned that the monkeys Bing kept in cages on the back of the property were rumored to be his primitive home security system. Their screeching was apparently enough to send any intruder—or neighbor, for the matter—running for the hills.
We shot video of the property before breaking ground on our remodel in 1988. Our friend Phyllis George, who was co-anchor of The Early Show on CBS at the time, was the on-scene reporter as Aaron and I ceremoniously tossed the first chunk of dirt with a shovel. It was not in our collective minds that day to break the Greystone Estate’s record as the largest residence in Los Angeles at 46,000 square feet. Our original intention was just to update the kitchen and the bathrooms, take away some of the old nooks and crannies, and add rooms here and there. When both the builder and the architect, James Langenheim, recommended that we simply raze the original 1932 construction and start from scratch, we quickly became familiarized with a stanza from Scottish poet Robert Burns’s poem To a Mouse,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men,
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
The poem may have been written in 1785, but it definitely applied to our remodel two hundred years later. Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones feeling the pain. Some of our new neighbors were not happy and made it very clear. They say truth is stranger than fiction, and it really was.
Our neighbor across the street was outside every morning in her kaftan waiting for the construction company to arrive. She made a big show of counting all the construction trucks, and then she’d run up her driveway and call the city. Meanwhile, our neighbors right next door to us on Club View who never so much as spoke a word to us launched a seven-year offensive against us. It was seven years of measuring our fences with yardsticks and running a ruler against the property line trying to catch us in violation by even centimeters. Strangely enough, the husband was a very successful television director who was about Aaron’s age, so they had probably come up the ranks together. Surely he could have picked up the phone and called Aaron. It would have been easy enough.
Even though our kids went to the same schools, we never crossed paths. Her frustrations with us came via neighbors and of course via our contractor. We wrote one check after another to them in hopes of appeasing them, but it never seemed to be enough. I think we finally gave up worrying about them when we heard through the grapevine that our plan to put up gates around our property was very upsetting to them. Theirs was the only house that didn’t have gates, and we were somehow tarnishing the image of the neighborhood. I had to laugh; these were all multi-, multimillion dollar homes, and she was trying to stand on the principle of false humility.
Neither Aaron nor I ever thought about the consequences that would ensue when we tore down the original house and started construction on the new one. It wasn’t just the neighbors. There was quite a bit of public scrutiny as well, including that of the Los Angeles Times, which chronicled the construction of the house. In April of 1988, Jeannine Stein, a reporter for the LA Times, wrote an article called “The House of Spelling: Massive Construction Project in Holmby Hills Flusters Some Neighbors.” This was the reporter’s lead:
“What’s bigger than a football field, smaller than Hearst Castle, has a bowling alley and an entire floor of closets, and is making some people very annoyed? Aaron and Candy Spelling’s 56,500-square-foot mansion in Holmby Hills. The French chateau, under construction now for two years, has turne
d the corner of Mapleton and Club View drives into a gawker’s paradise. Sprawled across 6 acres on what once was the Bing Crosby estate, the house dwarfs the sizable mansions on the block and looms large over tranquil Holmby Park near Wilshire Boulevard.”
Our neighbor who counted the trucks, whom we’d never met (and never did), went on record in the article:
“Audrey Irmas, who lives across the street, won an injunction against the television producer and the construction company three years ago. She calls the house, which obscures her view of the sunrise, “Look-at-me-I’m-rich architecture.”
‘I hope I never lay eyes on them,’ she adds.”
I understood neighbors wanting to limit construction hours and being concerned about the congestion caused by the heavy construction vehicles. I never understood, however, why they made it so personal. Even after our neighbor had gotten her injunction and we complied with the modified construction hours, she continued waging her war in the press. The Kansas-based Lawrence Journal World ran a feature called “Is Bigger Really Better in the Land of Conspicuous Consumption?” In this piece she referred to our house as a “mental institution.”
The only good news about this article was that the reporter, Jeff Wilson of the Associated Press, also got the other side of the story. The late Elaine Young, who was known as the Realtor to the stars, went on record, “That’s nothing…. The biggest monument is going to be by the Sultan of Brunei behind the Beverly Hills Hotel. He’s torn down five houses for a palace.”
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