I put together a whole binder of the horrible tabloid articles about me. I had a T-shirt made that said NO, I DON’T LIVE AT THE MANSION. NO, I DON’T HATE SHANNEN DOHERTY. NO, I HAVEN’T HAD RIBS REMOVED. BUT YES, I DO DRESS UP MY PUG. I went to the networks, saying, “Here are the things that have been written about me, and here’s the truth. Please laugh at it. Laugh at my life. I do.”
Even though most of my pitch was about what it was like for me growing up, the executives ate up the bizarre celebrity stories. I told them about how Farrah Fawcett moved into my building, right next door on the fourteenth floor. My friends assumed I knew her because my dad produced Charlie’s Angels, but the truth was that I hadn’t seen her since I was four or five years old.
Soon after Farrah moved in, I had a Halloween party. It was maybe thirty to forty people, with a mix of catered food and stuff my friends and I had made. The music was on, not very loud, and it was still pretty early. Then the phone rang. It was the concierge calling from the lobby. He said, “Hi, we have Miss Fawcett on the line for you.” I panicked. What did she want? Was the music bothering her? It was only nine o’clock. I wasn’t about to take this one on. I said, “Can you take a message?”
When I got off the phone, my friends were very excited to hear that Farrah Fawcett had called. They didn’t seem to care that she was probably furious with me for causing a public nuisance and was calling to chew me out for being such a terrible neighbor. No, my friends were into her, and they wanted me to call her back right away. My friend Amy, tipsy, took it upon herself to call down to the concierge. She came back all proud of herself. She said, “I spoke to the front desk. Farrah explained the situation. She would like to borrow a potato. That’s the message she left. And she left her phone number so we can call her back directly.”
I was confused. I hadn’t had any contact with Farrah Fawcett since I was a kid. Why would she want to borrow a potato? Why would she want to borrow a potato in the middle of a Halloween party? Amy said, “Don’t you get it? ‘Potato’ means ‘pot.’ She didn’t want to tell the front desk that she wants to know if you have any pot. It’s a code.” So Amy, with very enthusiastic support from the other assembled guests, called Farrah back.
A few minutes later a somewhat less enthusiastic Amy came to find me. “Well, it turns out she really does want a potato.” Farrah and her boyfriend were making dinner, and they had steaks but they didn’t have potatoes. She thought maybe we had potatoes. Amy said, “I told her there’s plenty of food here and invited her over.”
Farrah and her boyfriend were coming to my Halloween party! I looked around—luckily, there was nobody in a Farrah Fawcett costume. Everyone was psyched. Then the doorbell rang, and Farrah and her boyfriend came in. Since she didn’t know anyone, I put aside my other hostess duties and focused on Farrah. They got some food and sat down on the couch. I smiled and nodded at her. She smiled and nodded back. Everyone sat there, smiling and nodding at each other. Soon all the friends who’d been so enthusiastic about her attendance slowly moved away, leaving an empty circle around her spot on the couch. Twenty minutes later everyone was gone. What happened? All she’d done was sit pleasantly on the couch and have a few bites to eat. From then on we joked that if we ever wanted to clear out a party, we’d just invite Farrah back over.
My pitch wasn’t just a bunch of novelty celebrity anecdotes. All the characters were based on real people in my life. My roommate on the show was based on Pete. Pete is respectable now, married with a family, and he hates to be reminded of his sordid past, but when he saw that he was being played by a very handsome actor, James Carpinello, all was forgiven. The gay best friend character, Sasan, was based on Mehran and played by Zach Quinto, who became a real friend. His portrayal of Mehran was pretty much dead-on. There were some differences: Sasan lived with his parents and didn’t really have a job. Mehran has a business degree and is a serious professional. The character Janey started off based on Jenny, but Janey’s overtly sexual, and that’s not Jenny at all. In the show Janey was my girlfriend from before I was famous and my fame didn’t mean anything to her. She just called it like it was. Jenny’s very much like that—honest and protective.
So NoTORIous had other familiar characters in it: a nanny, and a controlling mother, and my father appearing only by speaker phone à la Charlie in Charlie’s Angels. There were flashbacks to some of the more unusual moments in my childhood, some real, some fiction, and some in between. In the episode called “Whole,” there’s a scene that takes place in a cult. A bunch of people are sitting around a circle confessing what’s keeping them from being “relevant.” One says, “I’m a crystal meth addict.” The next says, “I’m a sexual compulsive.” When my turn comes around, stymied for any better description of my lifelong struggle, I pause, then, flustered, burst out, “I’m a…Tori Spelling.” That’s what So NoTORIous was meant to mock. Tori Spelling was my personal affliction (custom-made like all my Halloween costumes). It was the punch line to the joke of my life. Tori Spelling wasn’t me so much as it was a name I’d spent most of my life trying to live down. So NoTORIous was exactly what Keenen Ivory Wayans had been getting at—a place where the perception and the reality of who I was would intersect. My life was already being documented by paparazzi. Now I would document it myself and show what it was like from my perspective.
The response to the pitch was better than I could have hoped. There was a bidding war between NBC, The WB, and UPN. Then The WB dropped out, and it was between UPN and NBC. I didn’t know which one to go with. The show could be a small fish in a big pond (NBC) or a big fish in a small pond (UPN). Ultimately, I chose NBC. I figured if I was going to put a version of my life out there, and I was going to play myself, then I wanted to really go for it and play with the big guys. At the time NBC was the place for sitcoms. I didn’t want to have any regrets.
Just because the network hires you to write a pilot doesn’t mean it’s going to be filmed. And just because it’s shot doesn’t mean they’ll put it on the air. I’d been involved with enough failed pilots to know the risks and hurdles.
My writers, cocreators, and I finished the first script, and it was picked up, which meant that we’d get to make our pilot. That’s a huge triumph. As we worked on the pilot, I’d talk to my dad about it as a producer. I was so proud and excited to be in the editing room. My dad would say things like, “Oh, you mentioned NBC. Well, I know everyone there. I can put a good word in for you.” He wanted me to use his writers (“I have the best writers”). He offered me his editors (“I have the best editors”). My dad really wanted to help the only way he knew how, which was by doing it for me. He couldn’t quite grasp that I was accomplishing something all on my own.
My mother knew at least a little about the show. Soon after the script got picked up for a pilot, my mother e-mailed me saying, Congratulations on your script being picked up. We have some concerns about it being about the family. Before you go ahead and film this we request to see a script. Word was that the actress Susan Blakely (who played my TV mother in Co-ed Call Girl ) had run into my mother at a luncheon and said, “I just auditioned for your role yesterday.” I didn’t respond to the e-mail. She had nothing to hold over me at this point (except her apartment where Charlie and I lived). Nothing was going to stop me now.
As the networks figure out what shows they’re picking up for the new season, the agents and managers start to hear rumblings about what’s going to get green-lit. Some shows went away, but word was that ours was still in the running. Then NBC called one of our producers who was on vacation in Hawaii. They asked him to change his ticket and come back from Hawaii right away because they wanted him to start hiring staff for the show. That was a very good sign. It was pretty much unheard of that they’d make a call like that and then kill the show. They screened So NoTORIous for a test audience, and people seemed to love it. I was on a high. A career high point, where everything seemed to be going my way and the future looked too good to be true. Had I learned noth
ing from my past?
I went with Charlie, two of my best girlfriends—Amy and Sara—and their significant others to the Kentucky Derby. I was in a full ball gown at a pre-Derby evening party when I got an urgent text message from my agent: Call ASAP. I knew. I just knew. This call wasn’t going to be Oh my God, we got the pickup! I went into the bathroom to call back in private. My agent confirmed what I already anticipated: NBC hadn’t picked up the pilot to go to series. My heart fell. I was calm on the phone, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay. I’m okay.” Then I got off the phone and cried. Randomly, Tara Reid was in a nearby stall to console me.
We’d come so far, and this time I wasn’t ready to give up. The next day, during the actual Kentucky Derby, I was hunched over my BlackBerry, e-mailing with my producers and agent and manager to figure out our next steps. The show was so much more to me than a job opportunity. It was personal. It let me look at my life in a way I never had before. It seemed like everything, all the rises and falls, silver spoons and custom costumes, had brought me to a place where I was finally able to laugh at myself. I was going to make a success out of it. And then that chance was taken away. I know network TV isn’t all about my personal revelations, but it felt like my whole life led to this. This is why I went through all that craziness. If So NoTORIous happened, my life up till now made sense. So when the show didn’t get picked up, I couldn’t bear to just let it disappear.
NBC agreed to release the pilot, which meant we were free to try to find another place for it. We started sending it out to every network. UPN and The WB said, essentially, “You should’ve gone with us to begin with.” Networks don’t love sloppy seconds. But a week later we got a call from VH1. They’d been tracking this project since the very beginning but didn’t think they could compete for it. Now they were very interested in buying it.
VH1’s pitch to us was that they were a small network. They’d never done a scripted show before—this would be an experiment for them—but they felt it was right for their audience. They said, “We’re not like NBC. We won’t cancel you after three episodes if the ratings aren’t there. We don’t expect huge numbers at first. We stick behind our shows and grow with them.” I thought it was great that they weren’t a prime-time network. We’d tried being a small fish at NBC, and that hadn’t worked out. With VH1, they needed us more than we needed them. It all fell into place. They ordered ten episodes.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Evil Eye
The summer of 2004 was a crazy time. So NoTORIous was picked up by VH1 in June. Charlie and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary in July. And I’d been offered a TV movie called Mind over Murder that started shooting in August. The So NoTORIous producers weren’t wild about this whole TV movie thing just as we were going into preproduction. They wanted to brainstorm more story ideas. But we worked out a schedule where I’d keep working with them throughout the movie shoot.
Just two days after I accepted the part in Mind over Murder, Charlie and I went to New York for two weeks. From there I’d go straight to Ottawa, Canada, to start shooting the TV movie. On this particular trip to New York, I was busier than ever. Not only was I working with the So NoTORIous writers, but Mehran was also in town so we could meet with buyers for a line of jewelry we developed together called Maven. Ever since we were teenagers sketching my future Emmy gowns, Mehran and I have always wanted to go into fashion together. We eventually hope to design clothes, but we decided to start with jewelry. My agent Ruthanne ran an animal rescue organization called Much Love Animal Rescue. I’d been working with them for several years. The first piece I designed was a diamond dog-bone necklace as a gift for Ruthanne’s birthday (eventually raising over twenty-five thousand dollars for Much Love by selling the dog-bone necklaces). Then I had an idea for charm necklaces, and soon thereafter Mehran and I sat on my bed stringing them furiously in order to deliver them to stores on time. After that we sat down to develop a complete line of hip-chic fashion jewelry. We have bold necklaces, bracelet cuffs, and earrings with some semiprecious stones. Aside from the diamond dog bone, which was just for Much Love, there are no diamonds. It’s all stuff I would actually wear myself. When people ask me why I designed the line, I half-jokingly say, “Because my mother said only diamonds mattered, and I want to prove her wrong.”
My New York trip was busy enough, but I had one more task to accomplish: see a voodoo priestess named Mama Lola. Every time something went wrong in my life, I’d joke, “Oh, another pilot didn’t get picked up? I guess it’s because my mother has that evil eye on me.” Once I said it in front of Charlie’s best friend, Kelley, and she looked at me, dead serious, and said, “You have to go see Mama Lola.” Kelley had just returned from New Orleans, where she’d met Mama Lola, and told me next time I was in New York, where Mama Lola lived, I absolutely had to see her. It’s not often in one’s life that one has a chance to meet an honest-to-God voodoo priestess. (Mama Lola doesn’t have a storefront or anything. She’s a devout practitioner of Haitian voodoo. The real thing.) But for a long time it stayed stuck on that list of things I always meant to do when I was in New York: tour Ellis Island, walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, get a colonic, visit that voodoo priestess. I never did any of them.
This time, for some reason, I was determined. If there was an evil eye on me, I wanted it off before I went any further with So NoTORIous. So I called Mama Lola to make an appointment for me and Mehran. (What, you think I wanted to visit a voodoo priestess by myself?) It was set for the next day.
But when I called Mehran the next morning, he was hungover and refused to go. Charlie had gone to Boston to see his family. I couldn’t go alone! Mama Lola lived in Brooklyn. I’d have to cross a bridge! (On the plus side, I could cross another item off my to-do list.) The normal me would have canceled, but this was my only chance, so I decided to go. By myself. To Brooklyn. Radical.
I knocked on the door of a tired-looking house. A young girl in a dress and pigtails (who I later found out was Mama Lola’s granddaughter) took my hand, let me in, and asked me to wait in the living room. I’d never been in a house quite like it. From floor to ceiling the living room was jammed with stuff: dolls, toys, papers, books, knickknacks. There was a dusty TV that must have been my age playing Jerry Springer. I waited primly, my back straight and hands folded in my lap. What had I gotten myself into?
Eventually Mama Lola came in. She was in her seventies, wearing a long caftan and a turban with big gold hoop earrings. Her nails were long and decorated with rhinestones. I know the Hollywood version of voodoo has nothing to do with the real religious practice, but Mama Lola was straight from the movies.
Mama Lola sat down with me. She called me Cory. After a few times I stopped correcting her.
“Why have you come to me, Cory?” she asked. Her voice was deep and serious. She had a thick accent. Um, I thought it would be fun? It might make a good chapter in a memoir someday? I said, “I think maybe someone put an evil eye on me.”
“An evil eye?” That got her attention. “Is it a cleansing you want, Cory?” A cleansing. I didn’t know. That sounded nice and harmless, like a spiritual colonic. “Sure,” I said. “A cleansing.”
We were on the parlor floor of the brownstone. Mama Lola went to what I thought must be a closet door and opened it. Instead, I saw a set of concrete stairs leading into darkness. By candlelight we walked down the stairs. Along the way the walls were decorated with little alcoves hosting shrunken heads, more candles, idols with big phalluses, and crosses. It looked to me like the set decorator had overdone it. Mama Lola kissed all of them as she descended. Then we went down another dark flight of stairs into a subbasement, and she let me into a little room the size of a broom closet. Inside sat three milk crates on the bare floor. Mama Lola gestured for me to sit on one of them. On various surfaces were mason jars full of unidentifiable liquids. A few flies buzzed around. For all Mama Lola’s warmth, this was like the setting of a horror film. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that I was a
bout to be mercilessly slaughtered. Only the certainty that at this point my fate was already sealed and there was no escape kept me from panicking.
Mama Lola sat across from me with a wobbly crate table between us. She told me that the first step of a cleansing was a reading. Okay, that sounded harmless. I waited for tarot cards or for her to look at my palm, but she started laying out a deck of regular cards. She said, “Yes. I see someone. I don’t know who it is, but I see this person and I see jewelry.” I knew it. My mother. (I mean, yes, I had a jewelry line with Mehran. But Mehran wasn’t exactly out to get me. I mean, sure, he still hasn’t gotten over my crimped bangs in the nineties, but I don’t think he’d put a curse on me for that. Nothing identified my mother more than her jewels. It had to be her!) Mama Lola started going on about how I had really bad energy surrounding me. I needed to be cleansed, big-time.
I guess this wasn’t the kind of thing antibiotics could handle. First there would be a “bad” cleansing bath to clear away the evil eye, then a “good” bath to help me go forward. She wouldn’t be ready to do the bad bath until tomorrow. Tomorrow? I was supposed to work all day with my So NoTORIous writers. But this might be my only chance, ever, to free myself from a curse! It could change my whole life. Work would have to wait. As I left, Mama Lola said, “I don’t tell people they need a cleansing if they don’t. I don’t charge for this. If you want to donate to me, give whatever you see fit. But you don’t have to pay me—just tell me if I’m right.” First Terence Trent D’Arby, now Mama Lola. None of my spiritual guides wanted anything but to help me move forward.
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