Candy at Last

by Candy Spelling

  The trouble with the plan as outlined was that we were going to have three hundred pairs of shoes walking over my light-colored silk carpets. Prince or no Prince, this didn’t work for me. I knew my gorgeous silk carpets would never survive. The solution we came up with was that the room would be carpeted with an area carpet, at the expense of the Prince. So days before the dinner, a carpet company came and installed a light-colored carpet in what I came to call the “Prince Charles Suite” of The Manor.

  The night of the fund-raiser arrived and so did Prince Charles along with his entourage that included more than one valet. He was a nice man, very soft-spoken. I hadn’t smoked in years, but that night I went off and had a cigarette by myself to calm my nerves.

  We took the Prince into Aaron’s office, where his valets straightened everything from his tie to his shoelaces. When one of the valets accidentally dropped a cuff link, everyone on the Prince’s team fell to their hands and knees to look for it. It was clear that Aaron and I were expected to do the same. So we did. I still have this image of Aaron rolling his eyes at me as we combed through the carpet fibers looking for the Prince’s cuff link.

  The dinner went off without a hitch. I was seated next to the Prince, and I think because I was the hostess (though my girlfriends say it’s because I was his type), he was very focused on having a conversation with me. We talked about his sons, William and Harry. He was also interested in architecture, so we chatted about the L'oiseau-style architecture of The Manor and also some restoration projects he supported through his charity fund. By the time we moved on to the dessert course, I could tell Aaron was desperate to sneak off and go to bed.

  Finally, dinner was over and the Prince stood up. He was very polite and offered us thanks as we escorted him to his waiting car. As the motorcade pulled past our gates, Aaron sighed with relief.

  “I thought he’d never leave.”

  18

  Upstairs Downstairs

  The Prince of Wales wasn’t our only houseguest from the House of Windsor. We actually had a couple others. My friend Edie Goetz was the daughter of Louis B. Mayer. She had an exquisite art collection that included Picasso’s Motherhood painting from his Blue Period. Edie also had a butler named Lodge. Having been footman to the Queen Mother before coming to Los Angeles, he was a treasure in his own right. Lodge worked for Edie until she passed away in 1988, at which point he returned to London.

  While we were building The Manor, I had become somewhat friendly with David Geffen, known to all as the wealthiest man in entertainment. In 1990, David made headlines when he purchased the 9.4-acre Jack Warner Estate on Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills for $47.5 million. At the time this was the highest price paid in the United States for a private home. David started his remodel on the Warner estate about a year before we moved into The Manor.

  When The Manor was complete and became the center of so much media attention, I received an inquiry from Lodge the butler. He was seeking employment. Butlers with credentials were not easy to come by in Hollywood, so I immediately offered him a job.

  Lodge flew out and became part of our staff. He was absolutely wonderful. He really had this regal air about him. We loved hearing all the stories about the royal family, and we also learned the differences between butlers and housemen—butlers don’t clean. One day David called to tell me he was putting French limestone on the terraces of the estate. Lodge was in the background as I gave David my honest opinion.

  “No, don’t do that! The limestone is going to crack. I’ve already had to replace some stones.” David told me that his interior designer Rose Tarlow had already ordered the limestone. He didn’t think he could change course at this stage of the game.

  About a year later, David had finally finished his remodel. The house was done and he was moving in. Just days later, my security personnel informed me that Lodge was gone.

  “What do you mean he’s gone?” I asked. Apparently Lodge had literally packed his suitcase at two or three in the morning and fled. I couldn’t imagine where he had gone.

  “He went to work for David Geffen.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My security team explained that Lodge had been offered a job by David Geffen but didn’t have the courage to face me, so he had run off in the middle of the night.

  A few months later, Lodge’s best friend, James, came to work for us. He had also worked at Kensington Palace. I guess we didn’t interview him thoroughly enough because one evening when Tori had some friends over for a Murder Mystery party, James told me with disdain that he didn’t serve children. Needless to say, James didn’t last long as a member of our staff. A few years later when Tori was on Beverly Hills 90210, Aaron was also promoting his book A Prime-Time Life. Aaron had a book signing at Book Soup on the Sunset Strip so we went as family. I couldn’t believe it, but there was none other than James waiting in line. When he got up to the table, he asked if he could take a picture with Tori. I found it very curious that James wouldn’t wait on her at the house but had no problem waiting in a long line to get her autograph now that she was on a hit television show.

  We went through another couple of English butlers before I finally figured out that they all left as soon as they got their Green Card. We also received applications from several other butlers with resumés that included experience at Kensington Palace. It turned out to be easy enough to check references at the palace, and let’s just say a number of those applicants didn’t check out.

  Sometimes our personnel issue at The Manor involved staff members who wouldn’t leave. For eighteen years we employed a housekeeper named Mrs. Hing. We called her Hing for short. She started working for us when she was close to the age when most people are thinking about retirement. Hing became one of our live-in housekeepers who stayed overnight five days a week. She had a bedroom in The Manor with a nice bed, a dresser, a club chair, and other accessories. Her work ethic was unbelievable especially considering her age.

  When she wasn’t sleeping at The Manor, Hing stayed with her daughter, Suzi. Well, one day I happened to be in the motor court when Hing’s daughter came to pick her up. She was driving a massive Cadillac Escalade with those fancy rims and what appeared to be a custom mesh grill. It looked like something you’d see on one of those MTV reality shows. Hing looked over at me with such an expression of scorn her face.

  “I paid for that car.”

  Years later when I was thinking about selling The Manor, I thought it would be the perfect time to retire Hing. She was 84 years old and quite honestly, I was very worried about her health. So we offered her a nice severance package that she accepted, and then she retired.

  Not a week later Hing called. She needed a job. This time she was more clear. She needed a job to support her daughter. I didn’t know what to say to her, but I knew offering her a job was not the answer. I thought it would be a nice gesture to let Hing have some of the furnishings from her room. I thought perhaps the club chair, the dresser, or her nightstand might be comforting for her to have in her room at her daughter’s house. She was very appreciative of the offer and said she would make arrangements to come by.

  Well, it was Hing’s daughter who came by in her Escalade. She also brought a second car driven by a friend. They took every piece of furniture and bedding from Hing’s old room. The literally stripped the room bare and loaded up the cars with everything except for the headboard that was mounted on the wall.

  Sometimes I find myself thinking about Hing. I hope retirement is treating her well. I also still think about Lodge. I wonder, was The Manor just too much work, or were we not high enough on the Social Register for him?

  19

  The Story of the Storyteller

  Aaron always used to tease me and tell me I was the worst storyteller. I always knew that if I forgot an important detail and then went back to it, or waited too long to deliver the punch line, my husband the raconteur was bound to give me a bad review. “Candy, you are the worst storyteller.” Throughout our m
arriage when we went to formal dinner parties or big Hollywood events, it was always my job to make sure Aaron and I looked good. It was his job to do the talking.

  This arrangement worked for me then because I was still a little shy, and those evenings could be overwhelming. With my loquacious husband at my side, I always had the comfort of knowing that he would get other people talking. I know my storytelling ability is not as bad as he made it out to be; it’s just that I don’t tell stories the way Aaron did, but then again, who could?

  Aaron’s repeated bouts with cancer and his subsequent struggle with Alzheimer’s is not a story he would be able to tell. This would be the one story in which Aaron would gloss over important facts, skip ahead, and diminish the impact of the central theme. It is a difficult tale to tell, but I am the only one who can tell it because I was there at his side throughout it all.

  In the early 1990s, Aaron was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He had a successful surgery and was given a clean bill of health. A few years later, it must have been around 2000, he developed a cough that just wouldn’t go away. We went to see our family ENT doctor, who made the initial diagnosis.

  Aaron was a tobacco pipe smoker and had a collection of about six hundred Dunhill and Sasieni 4 Dot pipes. He amassed this collection because he would smoke each one only between twenty and thirty times and then was done with it. When he posed for portraits for the television network, he insisted on being photographed with his trusty pipe. I came to know more about pipes than I ever thought I would because of Aaron. I learned how much tobacco to put in them to break them in and the different kinds of mouthpieces available. Aaron preferred the fishtail because he liked to hold the pipe in his mouth when he was working.

  It used to really worry me to see the pipe just hanging on his lips. I couldn’t help but say something to him. We must have had the same conversation a million times. He would tell me he wasn’t inhaling and then I would point out that it didn’t matter, his mouth was still full of hot tobacco smoke.

  Our ENT accompanied us to see the oncologist at UCLA. The strange thing about this particular appointment was that when the oncologist was verbally going through Aaron’s medical history with him, he asked him whether he had any history of cancer.

  “No.”

  I jumped in to correct my husband, “That’s not true. You had prostate cancer.” I was never quite sure if Aaron was intentionally revising his medical history or whether he edited that time from his memory the same way he edited out scenes from his scripts. In either case I knew I could never let him go to the doctor alone again.

  Based on Aaron’s symptoms and an examination, the oncologist at UCLA was 99 percent certain Aaron had throat cancer. It was grim but not surprising. It was everything I feared all those years that Aaron’s Dunhill pipe sat in his mouth. The only thing more frightening than the diagnosis was the recommended treatment. The doctor believed that the only way to treat the throat cancer was to remove three quarters of Aaron’s tongue. Aaron said he would rather die than let them cut out his tongue.

  Somehow I managed to stay out of the emotion of the situation. There was no biopsy yet, so really we didn’t know exactly what we were dealing with. I believed there would be a better answer if we took the next step of having the biopsy performed. It would be at least a week before it could be done because even for this they needed to make sure Aaron was in good health. When the day arrived, we had the biopsy done and then headed out to Malibu. I’ll never forget our housekeeper erupting into hysteria when Aaron lit up his pipe at the beach house.

  “Mrs. Spelling! Mrs. Spelling! He’s smoking again!” Our staff was crazy about Aaron and they didn’t want to see anything happen to him. None of us did.

  Somewhere I had heard the expression, “Man can live forty days without food, three days without water, and about eight minutes without air … but not one minute without hope.” When the biopsy came back positive for cancer, I knew I had to keep hope alive. This was definitely our darkest hour. I had never dealt with oncologists before but somehow I figured out how to tackle it. I ordered slides of the biopsy and then called every leading cancer center in the country to let them know I was sending them. I had phone consultations and prayed that Aaron wouldn’t need to travel somewhere far away for treatment because I knew we’d have to take a train. The cancer was aggressive and we didn’t have the luxury of time.

  Coincidentally, we ended up less than ten miles away at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. The doctor there was confident Aaron’s cancer could be successfully treated with treatment and technology that UCLA did not offer because it was a teaching school. This particular external radiation machine was called an IMRT machine. It allowed the doctor to pinpoint the dose of radiation delivered in the body with greater precision than ever before. This reduced side effects and protected the healthy tissue in the body. The treatment required that Aaron be fitted for a face mask and a mouth brace so his teeth wouldn’t fall out. It was a lot of information to process. Ultimately, we decided this was the path we would take.

  The next six weeks were quite an ordeal for both of us. I could see that just preparing mentally for the treatment really took it out of Aaron. We were at the hospital almost every day, and when we weren’t there, we were at home bracing ourselves for the next round of radiation. Oftentimes, Aaron’s platelet count would drop, so he needed blood transfusions. It was grueling.

  One afternoon at the hospital, we ran into the famous hot dog man from Holmby Park. He was at Holmby Park every day with his car, and attached was a little trailer that held his grill. He sold hot dogs, french fries, and popsicles and had a very distinct rainbow-colored umbrella open above his car. When he didn’t have any customers, he sat there under the umbrella watching the cars go by on Beverly Glen Boulevard.

  Sometimes he kicked off his shoes and you could see his bright white socks from the other end of the block. Every day for years while we were building the house, I got my lunch from him at two-thirty or three in the afternoon. Now here he was in the same radiation treatment center as Aaron. It was very sad when he died.

  It’s hard to believe that through all of this, we never discussed anything that was happening. Aaron was from the same generation as my parents, and they didn’t talk about these things. They just pushed up their shirtsleeves and got through it. This was a big difference between the two of us. I needed to talk about my feelings.

  I had started seeing a therapist before Aaron was diagnosed. It was long overdue. I had a lot of feelings that had built up over the years, and I wanted to talk about them. There was no quiet desperation or anguish and there also wasn’t a last straw. I was just finally ready to start talking. At the time, I didn’t know that therapists had areas of specialization just like physicians.

  The first therapist I saw was in Century City. She has since become the authority on getting men to “put a ring on it,” as they say. I went two or three times but wasn’t entirely comfortable. Turns out neither was she. At our last appointment she told me she couldn’t help me. She said I had a lot of anger issues and referred me to a colleague who specialized in women and anger issues.

  The second therapist was the right key. She worked out of home. Her office was in a space over her garage. It felt very private and personal. I did find, however, that I didn’t care for the traditional fifty-minute hour. I was so introverted that by the time I finally got going, the fifty-minute hour was up. I adjusted my hour to ninety minutes. Initially I went once a week. Then it was twice a week and before I knew it I was going three times a week. I like to joke that the therapist couldn’t shut me up.

  I was so grateful to have the therapist as my support system during Aaron’s treatment. It was a challenging time. I found I was reliving what I had gone through with my mother and I was confused by this, but the truth was, I was resentful of Aaron’s illness.

  It was such a relief when Aaron completed his radiation treatment and his scans came back clear. He had beaten the odds and tr
iumphed over cancer a second time. I was happy to see my husband in good spirits as he recuperated from the torture he had endured.

  Couples who are married as long as Aaron and I had been have a tendency to finish each other’s sentences and intuitively read each other’s minds. We were no exception to this. Shortly after his radiation treatment concluded, I noticed something was off but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. One day I happened to overhear him in conversation with one of his assistants and it finally hit me.

  “Stop answering for him. Let him answer for himself.”

  Aaron’s assistant looked at me as if I had lost my mind. He was a clever man and a brilliant writer who knew how to cut in and out of dialogue. He had used the tricks of his trade to hide Aaron’s memory loss. I asked Aaron to spell a word and he couldn’t. Aaron Spelling, true to his name, was the world’s best speller. When he couldn’t spell a relatively simple word, the truth was undeniable. This also explained his resistance to seeing people and socializing.

  By the time I caught on, it was late in the game. I needed to talk to someone who would know about Aaron’s condition. Aaron and I had been close with former president Reagan and Nancy Reagan. Aaron and Ronnie had known each other since Aaron moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1950s. We had had them over quite a bit, so I felt comfortable sharing what was going on with Nancy. She of course had been through it herself with her husband while he was still in the White House, so I felt she was the right person to confide in.