I knew from the start that I wanted an antique ring. My first ring, which I gave back to Charlie, was platinum with a solitary diamond. I imagined something two-toned, with yellow gold and platinum, and another stone besides a diamond. Back in L.A. we’d gone to look at engagement rings at a place in Beverly Hills called Antiquarius. It’s a big building where lots of different antique dealers have booths. Dean kept pointing to diamond rings, but none of them exactly fit my vision. Then we got to the ring. I said, “There it is. That’s the ring I envisioned.” It had a gold band with platinum around it. There was a diamond and a sapphire. Dean played it down. He said, “It’s good that I know kind of what you want, but it’s only our first day of looking….”
Of course he’d given me the ring I’d picked. It was a beautiful, glorious, freezing, romantic moment. At some point Dean shouted, “She said yes!” It echoed and echoed through the trees. Then, completely unexpectedly, there were fireworks. Neither Dean nor his amazing sisters could take credit for those—they were Christmas Eve fireworks from a nearby town—but we decided to take them personally.
Eventually our carriage came back to get us. We rode back through the parallel rows of hurricane candles (which I later found out Dean’s nieces had lit themselves, staying out of sight just ahead of the carriage, running for a mile to light every single candle all the way to the table in the woods). Mrs. Claus twisted around in her seat and said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. We’ve been married for forty-six years, not forty-four.” I nudged Dean. We had a new goal. Then she said, “Oh, what a blessing that it’s raining. It’s like a baptism. The rain is a symbol of cleansing, and the future is yours to create. Everything that starts from now on is about the two of you.” I like to believe she had no idea who I was and that the subtext of her message wasn’t Congratulations, you’re no longer a homewrecker.
Dean and I were having such a great time in Collingwood that I didn’t sit down and call my friends one by one with our news. The only notification I gave my beloved friends who were always there for me was a group e-mail telling them what had happened. (By the time I got home two weeks later—years in the tabloid world—they’d all read the details in Us Weekly anyway.)
I was on top of the world and nothing could interfere with that, but, as always, all my silver moments have cloudy linings. My relationship with my mother had been cool since my wedding to Charlie. We never got in touch about the divorce. I missed her sixtieth birthday party. We weren’t officially in a fight or not speaking, but we weren’t exactly bosom buddies. And yet she was the only person I reached out to when Dean and I got engaged. With friends, if you keep making an effort to reach out and you keep getting hurt, you eventually stop trying. But it’s much harder to give up on family. Somewhere deep down you want it to work so badly that you keep making the same mistake over and over again.
I sat down and wrote my mother a long e-mail. Dean was asleep. I’d taken an Ambien, so maybe my judgment wasn’t perfect, but I poured out my heart in that e-mail. I told her that I was so happy, so in love. I’d finally found real love, and I wanted to share it with her, to share it with my family. I wrote, I want you to know and love Dean. I want us all to get together when we get home. In the back of my head somewhere I suspected that she wouldn’t want to hear that I was really happy and in love. Because she wasn’t happy. She didn’t have that kind of love in her life. But I thought, I’m being truthful. She’s my mother. She should want me to be happy. I want her to be part of it.
I had a slew of e-mails with Congratulations! in the subject line sitting in my inbox on AOL. But my mother’s response didn’t come for four days. We were both on AOL, so I knew she’d opened and read the e-mail. Silence.
Finally a reply appeared. It was a brief e-mail. It said, Congratulations on your engagement. Daddy and I are very happy for you. Love, Mom. It went on to say, P.S. We’ve decided to sell the condo sooner than anticipated, and we need you out of it by January 30th. That gives you one month.
I laughed. Then I cried. Then I laughed again. Here it was. Documented for history. This was our relationship. Even though I hadn’t called—I’d sent an e-mail—it was the best I could do with her. I’d poured out my heart.
I had lived in that condo for ten years. Charlie was still in the apartment—he’d be there until the beginning of January, and let’s just say Charlie was not in an accommodating mood. We were due home from Canada on January 4. I started back up on So NoTORIous three days later, and we were in the heart of production. I had work every single day, and they were bound to be fifteen-hour days. I had been planning to move in March when So NoTORIous went on break. Now everything was going to have to go to storage. My mother was evicting me.
That night over dinner with Dean’s sisters and our new friends, someone suggested that I e-mail my mother and ask for an extension. But I refused. I thought she wanted a reaction, and I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. I didn’t want to ask for anything from her again. I’d rather go way into debt. In fact, with the divorce and the hotels and the wild shopping compulsion I’d indulged before I met Dean, I already was in debt. Hiring movers to pack and store ten years of my life in record time cost me ten thousand dollars. I think of that as my mother’s engagement present to us.
Not long after we came home from Canada, Dean and his soon-to-be-ex-wife started having custody issues. The details, again, aren’t my story to tell. But one subject that emerged in their conversations was Dean’s dream that, for the sake of the children, we’d all get along eventually. He pictured us all having dinner together not long down the line. Probably in hope of moving the custody dispute along, his wife, Mary Jo, said she wanted to meet me. Dean called me at my office at So NoTORIous to tell me that she wanted to meet with me over the upcoming weekend. The way it was presented was that she wanted to talk to me about being a stepmom. He said she wanted to make sure we were on the same page, that we agreed about behavior, bedtime, and eating—normal day-to-day stuff.
This was a hundred times worse than facing Charlie. I mean, put all my nonconfrontational past aside and you’ve still got me sitting face-to-face with a woman whose husband of twelve years and father of her children left her for me four months ago. And I’m supposed to have a civil conversation about whether I should feed her son peas or carrots for dinner? Oh. My. God.
I know I said that Dean quelled all my irrational fears. But I had to wonder: Was it irrational to be terrified of her? She had every right to be angry at me. And for her wouldn’t it be a simple, logical jump from This woman destroyed my marriage to And so I must destroy her? These things happen. Especially in TV movies. In fact, I’d probably starred in this one. His ex-wife would murder me, and all the papers would say was TV MOVIE QUEEN TORI SPELLING MURDERED AGAIN—THIS TIME FOR REAL!
I told Dean I didn’t want to do it. He was upset. He was trying so hard to make everything okay. We went back and forth on it all day long. In between phone calls I told my producers what was going on. They said, “What? No, he’s not seeing straight. You can’t go see this woman. Nothing good can come out of it.” But if you do go, they said, Dean should go with you. I suggested this to Dean, but he said, “No. She wants to meet with you alone.” Of course she wanted me to come alone! She wanted to kill me!
Finally he told me it had nothing to do with him or me. It was something I should do for his son. So I agreed. I figured worst-case scenario: I die. And then Dean would feel bad. But I was going to be brave. If I survived, it would be the bravest thing I’d ever done.
I was the Other Woman. I didn’t want to be threatening, so I dressed in jeans, a baggy sweater, and tennis shoes. I didn’t wear makeup. I put my hair in pigtails (possibly a mistake since she’s twelve years older than I am). Oh, and one more thing. At the last minute before I walked out the door, I turned around and grabbed the biggest kitchen knife out of the knife block. I stuffed it into my purse. I wasn’t going down without a fight.
Mary Jo welcomed me into her hou
se with a gracious smile. She was pretty and pleasant. As soon as I came in, she said that she’d just put water on for tea, and would I like some? I was so taken aback at her warmth that I rolled over like a puppy dog. “Great, great. That’s perfect.”
As we sat down to talk, I made two potentially fatal mistakes right off the bat: One, out of habit I’d deposited my purse on the dining room table. Now we were in the living room. I was completely defenseless. And two, she brought me tea I hadn’t seen her make. And I drank it. Had I learned nothing from my TV movies? But as the minutes passed and my vision didn’t go all blurry, I finally relaxed a little.
We sat there for three hours. Conversation didn’t exactly flow. She made limited eye contact. Even so, she set a sort of old-girlfriend chitchat vibe, as if we’d gone to school together and hadn’t seen each other for five or six years. She led the conversation, filling me in on her life and kind of giving me “tips” on Dean in a confiding but somewhat ominous way, saying things like, “Oh, he has the worst temper…but you’ll see that eventually.” I kept trying to steer the conversation toward my responsibilities as a stepmom, but she had other things on her mind.
We left on a nice note. She thanked me. We even hugged. I grabbed my hidden Cutco weapon off the table and said good-bye. When I got in my car, there were two main feelings swirling in my head. The first was pride. For once in my life I had tackled my fear head-on. (Sure, I had to come armed, but let’s not kid ourselves. Even if I’d pulled out that knife in self-defense, I wouldn’t have had the first clue what to do with it.) It haunted me that I’d never had that final meeting with Charlie. It still keeps me up at night. But this time I’d actually done it.
The second feeling I had was doubt. I was going home to Dean, and somehow she’d put questions in my head. I loved him. I knew that. But how well did I know him? She seemed so warm and sincere, and yet in talking about Dean, she had described a man I didn’t know. Things were going too well—someone had to rain on my parade.
I have a pretty detailed short-term memory. I can read a script through once and remember all my lines—for the next day at least. That night I walked Dean through every detail, every line of dialogue from my afternoon with Mary Jo. He was floored. He said, “I can’t believe I sent you into a meeting where you’d come back doubting our relationship.” But the doubts were short-lived. And no matter how stupid Dean felt, I didn’t regret that meeting one bit. It was the bravest thing I’d ever done, even if I had to do it with a Balenciaga-sheathed knife in hand.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
What? It Doesn’t Grow on Trees?
Blood, sweat, tears, and hair-extension maintenance. I worked around the clock on So NoTORIous. Sometimes I’d come to the set to start filming at five or six in the morning. I’d wrap at eight at night and head to the writers’ trailer to brainstorm new episodes until midnight. Then the next morning I’d be back on set. It was my total career fantasy finally come true.
Being in the writers’ room felt like therapy. I’d sit there recounting stories, and the other writers would chime in with their own stories or ideas about how to make mine funnier. It felt good to get all that stuff out and to laugh about it. Playing myself on the show was scary at first. Usually, I have a character to build around, but when that character was me, was I just supposed to say everything the way I’d say it, or was I supposed to act like…me? Of course, just because it was loosely based on my life didn’t mean that the character was exactly me. I’m a little more grounded. It was more like me in my younger, 90210 days, even though the show was supposed to be taking place post-90210.
Then there was the executive producer side of the job. I was in charge on set. That had never happened before. Acting was great but familiar. What was new to me was sitting with each script, seeing jokes that I wrote, and planning shots. I had a say in wardrobe; I approved locations and sets; I did casting sessions for the costars and guest stars; I went to budget meetings. When we worked on the pilot, sometimes we’d be in the editing bay until three a.m. There were moments when I stepped back and realized that we were working on a set that was supposed to be my apartment. The characters were supposed to be my friends. The story was supposed to be my life. I was literally reliving some of the most memorable moments from my past, but this time I was miked and there was better lighting. And it was all because of an idea I had. I made this happen, and I loved every second of it.
Loni Anderson played my mother, and she eventually became like a cool mother figure to me—so much so that at some point she said, “I’m sad for your mother. She has no idea what an amazing daughter she has. She doesn’t even know you. It’s her loss.”
Originally, when I pitched the show, the network loved the story about Farrah Fawcett wanting to borrow a potato, and it fell on me to ask her if she’d do a cameo on the show. I still lived next door to her at the time, so I went across the elevator bank and slipped a script under her door. A few days later she called. Apparently, her mother had just passed away—I had no idea. She said she’d been going through some hard times but that she read the script on the plane coming home from the funeral and laughed through the whole thing. She was still chuckling as she said, “I remember that. It must have seemed so bizarre. I really just wanted a potato.” She did the part.
Before the show even aired, we started getting reviews. I’ve (noTORIously) never gotten good reviews—some backhanded compliments for Maybe Baby, It’s You and Trick, but with TV? Never. I had no idea what critics would make of the show. But as the reviews came in, they were the best I’d ever gotten. The LA Times ran a feature saying, “Beverly Hills, 90210 alumna, tabloid regular, gay icon and plucky Hollywood heiress, [Tori Spelling] has her fans, but in the 16 years she’s been working as an actress, the 32-year-old has been subjected to what even the most poisonous observer of pop culture would have to admit is more than her fair share of vitriol and ridicule.” They went on to say, “While this sort of thing has been done before…it has been done here exceedingly well…. She is a comedian, not a starlet, and if she is made for no other comedies than this one, she has landed for now in the exact right place. Little Tori, happy at last.” The New York Post described the show as “very witty, sometimes brilliant, insightful hybrid sitcom So NoTORIous—a Curb Your Enthusiasm for the under-40 set,” and the writer went on to say, “What I didn’t know about Tori Spelling is that she’s also smart. And funny. Very.” Even the Hollywood Reporter had to admit, “She creates an appealing character despite all the preconceptions, many of which are acknowledged and dispensed with in the first few scenes.”
The show hadn’t aired, and the producers were already taking the reviews to the frame shop. I should have known it was the kiss of death. It’s the “build me up to break me down” curse. Whenever there’s a sign of hope, I know the crash is coming soon. It’s the “Horseface” comment. It’s the lead role in Scary Movie 2. It’s being the “indie queen” and starring in Maybe Baby and all the pilots I did after 90210. The night So NoTORIous premiered, Dean and I had a little party at our house for the cast, producers, and our agents. The ratings were at best mediocre.
Our premiere fell on the evening that daylight saving time kicked in, so there was hope that the time change had caused a mix-up, but the next week it was the same thing. Blah ratings. At first VH1 said not to worry, so we all hoped the ratings would pick up in the second season. Some shows are like that. The show was a critical success. It was a good, smart show. We felt blindsided when VH1 changed their tune and didn’t give us a second season. The reason they gave for canceling the show was that it was too expensive. It cost a million dollars to make a single episode, and they could spend two hundred thousand dollars per episode on a reality show and get better ratings. They said, “Maybe we’re just not ready for scripted TV.” We met with the head of VH1 and offered to cut the budget in half. I said I’d take half of my salary. He said, “I guess I’m going to lose my standing in the gay community if I cancel”—the show had a cultish
following, particularly among gay men—but then he canceled it anyway.
VH1 went silent. All the people we’d been friends with there disappeared. It was like a breakup—we never heard from them again.
I was thirty-three years old at the time; I’d been working almost consistently since high school; and I had nothing to show for it. When all my friends were kicking back in college, being supported by their parents while they partied every night and squeezed in a little schoolwork on the side, I was working seventeen hours a day, five days a week. When the cast of 90210 took off on summer and Christmas breaks, I filmed as many TV movies as I could.
All actors know that you need to strike when the iron’s hot. You never turn down work. So I worked all through my twenties and sacrificed love, friends, relaxation, a college education. Now after all that I was two hundred thousand dollars in debt, almost bankrupt. And every time I tried out for a part or pitched a new show, it was like I was back at square one. It never got easier. Don’t most careers get somewhat easier as you have more experience under your belt? All I wanted was to stop constantly making calls and taking meetings and strategizing relationships. It would be so nice to be able to relax and coast, with some idea where my next job was coming from.
Yeah, about that whole debt thing. How did a girl like me end up in debt? Well, I guess it starts with how I grew up. You remember the birthday parties. My godfather, Dean Martin, would give me a money tree blossoming with twenty-dollar bills, and where would that money go after everyone oohed and aahed? I have no idea. I didn’t have a bank account. Not then and not later, when I scooped poo with my father to earn an allowance. I had a piggy bank, but to my memory all the piggy had in its belly was a few breakfasts’ worth of coins. I didn’t ask my parents for money because I never had to. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere alone—I was always with Nanny or our driver. In high school other kids would get dropped off in Westwood—the neighborhood of shops and restaurants surrounding UCLA—to walk around, but I always had a chaperone. The one time I went to a mall with a friend after school, I got in big trouble.
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