Even when I was sixteen years old and working full-time on 90210, my financial independence took the form of a credit card. The bill went straight to my business manager. I didn’t give a second thought to how much something cost and had absolutely no idea what my bill was every month.
I came from money. But I didn’t exactly expect to be supported, now or in the future. I’d been living independently since I moved out of the Manor, except that I paid rent to my mother for the ten years before she evicted me. I hadn’t even gotten a money tree from Dean Martin since the mid-eighties. Before my father got sick, before I sold So NoTORIous, I had lunch with my dad at his office once a week or every couple weeks. Eventually people who were pretty high up at his office started telling me that he was starting to fade. He was a little out of it, and they said in no uncertain terms that they thought I should talk to him about the contents of his will before he was any further gone.
It felt gross and wrong, but my father’s colleagues were emphatic enough that I eventually summoned the nerve to broach the subject with my father.
At one of our lunches I said, “I hate to bring this up, Dad, but I know you love me and Randy, and I know you’d want to protect us and your future grandchildren. I’m not asking for anything, but I just want to make sure you know what your will says about me and Randy.” I said, “I don’t want to get into details, but I want you to make sure that everything’s set up the way you want it to be.” He said, “Let me find out. I’ll talk to my business manager.”
I didn’t have to ask again. The next time we had lunch, he said, “Babe, I talked to the business manager about the will. You and Randy are going to be fine. You guys are totally set up. Don’t worry. You’re getting just under a million. You’ll be fine.” And he believed it.
I have no idea what the actual number is, but reports had it that my father was worth $500 million. I realized in that moment that my father knew nothing about money. Of course I know a million dollars is a lot of money. But was it in my family? My father would buy my mother a million-dollar necklace for Mother’s Day without blinking. At the same time I believe he was totally sincere when he thought I was beyond set for life. I thought, God, okay. It is what it is. In that same conversation my father said, “I know you need money right now, and I want to help you out. If I give you something today, will you promise me to just accept it?” I thought he was going to write me a check. He didn’t know the extent of my debt, but anything would help. Instead, he went with Aunt Renate, his assistant of forty years, to his safe. When he came back, he handed me five one-hundred-dollar bills, saying ceremoniously, “This should help you out for a while.” I shouldn’t have been surprised. Often when I saw him, he’d slip me a twenty-dollar bill and say, “Don’t tell your mother.”
This was my dad at a restaurant: Eat the meal. Add the tip to the check. Hand the struggling actor/waiter a hundred dollars. And then there was me. He never said a single word about wanting us to make it on our own. He never did anything to teach us about the value of money. He never talked about wanting us to be independent. But there you have it. Just because someone has a lot of money doesn’t mean they spend much time thinking about it.
So, getting back to the question at hand, how did I find myself in debt? What about all those years on 90210, all those TV movies? Where was my nest egg? I guess the best answer is that I didn’t think about it. I wasn’t raised to think about money. I had no idea how to manage it or how to put myself on a budget. I was born into a millionaire lifestyle, and I had no idea how to live any other way. If my mother liked a shirt in a catalog, she’d order it in six colors. I went from that way of living with my parents to working on 90210, where for a while I was able to maintain it without their help. I didn’t live in a mansion, but if I walked into Barneys and saw a cashmere sweater I liked, I’d take it in multiple colors, just like I’d learned from my mom. I never looked at the price tag. Mehran always calls those the “glory days.” He says, “We’d walk into Dolce and Gabbana; they’d see you, close down the store, and bring out the champagne. You’d drop fifty thousand dollars. We were on top of the world.” As recently as right before I met Dean, my shopping was at an all-time high. I was obsessed with Internet shopping. I didn’t want to be in the living room with Charlie, and I didn’t have work, so I’d disappear into my office and shop online for hours. I was on eBay constantly. Not a day went by when boxes didn’t arrive at the door. I wouldn’t even open them. The boxes would just pile up in the dining room.
Now things were different. Years had gone by where I still bought whatever I wanted to buy. I lived the high life, but my income was unstable and fluctuating. I wasn’t making millions. Dean and I hit reality. We had to start thinking about our budget.
I’m a fashion whore and I love clothing, but I had to change where I shopped. I became the girl who looks for the bargain. My friend Jenny buys a lot of her clothes at a fancy boutique called Calypso. She’ll spend four hundred dollars on a sundress. I used to spend that without blinking. Now I’ll spend twenty-five dollars at Forever 21 and be just as satisfied. Once you change, I think you change forever. I don’t think I could ever go back to spending money so easily. That’s not to say that I don’t still indulge, but I’ll buy a good piece that I know will last me for years to come. And I still have a serious weakness for Christian Louboutin shoes. But you can wear shoes over and over again!
Right—that’s another thing. I get photographed a lot. Last year I was on the cover of Us Weekly four times. Even if the reasons why are different, sometimes it seems I’m photographed by the media as often as big stars like Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie. But stars like that don’t have to pay for most of their clothes, especially red-carpet dresses. I go out, I’m photographed in a dress, and (unless I want to be mocked by the press—which maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to invite upon myself, but don’t I get mocked enough already?) I can’t wear it again.
The other thing about all that publicity is privacy. Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie can afford ten-million-dollar homes with driveways, gates, and security guards. I grew up with that, and it sure would be nice to feel safe and have a refuge from the paparazzi, but I can’t afford to buy such a house. In a weird way much of my life seems to be dealing with megastar issues on a microstar’s budget.
Look, I’m not complaining; I’m just trying to explain what it feels like to think about money for the first time in your thirties. Adjusting my lifestyle has been, for the most part, a good learning experience. Dean made a lot of what had seemed important to me stop mattering. Having nothing felt amazing. Everything was so simple. All the weight was gone. I loved it. We lived in six places in two years. If we didn’t have furniture, we could sleep on a mattress. The day I met Dean, my whole world changed for the better. I could go with the flow. Love made all the other stuff unimportant.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A New Family
When it came time to plan my wedding to Dean, I contacted the only travel agent I knew: the one who arranged my honeymoon with Charlie. It was kind of an awkward e-mail to send: Hi, um, a year ago I asked you to plan my honeymoon, and now I’m asking you to find a place for my next wedding. But business is business—she didn’t complain.
Dean and I fell in love alone. We’d both had big weddings the first time around. Now we wanted to get married alone. We told the travel agent that we wanted to be married on a tropical beach. We wanted privacy. It should be secluded and spiritual. Other than that we were open to anything. A couple days went by, and then a packet from the travel agent arrived in the mail. I opened it with excitement, ready to explore our options, but there was only one slim brochure inside. It was for a place called the Wakaya Club in Fiji.
Planning my first wedding was all about decisions. I had to look at one hundred flowers to select the right three. The food at the first tasting was delicious, but I had to do four more. I was focused on getting the wedding perfect, but what about the marriage? Now I looked do
wn at the Wakaya Club brochure. Shouldn’t there be options? What about Tahiti? Everyone was always talking about Tahitian huts with glass floors over the ocean. And here our travel agent was telling us, “I can send you other brochures, but this is the place.” She was so firm. And how could it be the wrong place when I was with the right man? We decided to take a leap of faith. We booked it.
Two weddings in two years, and the only thing they had in common was me. For the second wedding I didn’t want a classic wedding dress. We were getting married on the beach. In Dolce & Gabbana, I found a fitted white eyelet summer dress. It wasn’t a wedding dress, but it had a short train. It was perfect.
It was a ten-hour flight to Fiji. As I’ve mentioned, I inherited my fear of flying from my father, who came by it honestly. He served in the U.S. Air Force and was on his way from Fort Worth, Texas, to an air base in Ohio when he came down with the flu. The flight surgeon pulled him off the plane—he was too sick to fly. That plane to Ohio crashed, and everyone on it was killed. My father rented a car and drove straight from Fort Worth to Dallas to see his parents. But when he entered his childhood home, his mother opened the door and immediately fainted. The authorities had telephoned to tell the family that my father was dead. When she came to, she made him swear he’d never fly again. He promised. He was eighteen, and he never got on an airplane again. Growing up, every time I traveled by plane, he’d cry and I’d cry. You wonder why planes give me migraines?
Someone from the Wakaya Club met the plane in Fiji. Then we had to go get a marriage license. At the airport a sweet couple recognized us and said, “We’re getting married—what are you guys doing here?” The paparazzi had been on a “Tori and Dean Wedding Watch” for weeks, and we didn’t want to be busted. We were so paranoid that we just said, “Oh, vacationing.” Then we went to the Fijian equivalent of city hall to get our wedding license and ran into the same couple getting theirs. They were definitely onto us. But of all the couples marrying in Fiji, what were the chances that the one couple we encountered would be the kind of people who would spend part of their wedding trip calling the Enquirer to sell information about another marrying couple? (Answer: 100 percent. We later found out they called the tabloid immediately. I guess they figured it would pay for their honeymoon.)
Now was the hard part. Wakaya Club is on its very own island in Fiji. To get there, we had to take a four-person puddle jumper from Fiji to Wakaya Island. It was my worst fear, but I was done letting fear stand in my way. I guess they’d heard about my fear of flying because our escorts offered us warm wine. I downed a glass. The flight was terrifying. The pilot, who was two feet in front of us, kept turning around to give me a thumbs-up. Eyes on the road, buddy, eyes on the road!
After what seemed like a lifetime but I’m told was less than an hour, we landed on a unpaved clearing the size of a postage stamp. Overshoot and you’d go off a cliff. Enough with the drama, people. I got it. We were secluded. Would an actual runway have killed anyone? At the time I wasn’t negotiating for a runway. I was too busy kissing the unpaved ground and cheering, “I made it, I made it!”
There were ten little cottage suites, called bures, lining the beach. Basically little huts, but five-star huts. And that was it. No shopping. No restaurants. No village. Just the visitors, and a community of Fijians who live and work at the resort. We stayed in the “Governor’s Bure,” which was the fanciest of their suites. It was very Tommy Bahama, with woven bamboo walls and timber floors. There were two rooms, a master bedroom, and a living room. It was the ideal blend of primitive luxury: an open-air lava rock shower and a flat-screen TV. A waterfall in the private garden and a four-poster bed with fine sheets.
We spent our first couple days at Wakaya just hanging out. I love seashells—I have ever since I found the beautiful ones my mother hid for me in Malibu. But now that the jig was up, I couldn’t fathom finding real ones just sitting there in the sand. But the beaches were absolutely covered with all sorts of shells. I was so excited. I became obsessed. I even put on snorkel gear to crouch in two inches of water looking for sea treasures. No shell was too small or broken for me. All of Dean’s photos are of me, in a bikini and sunglasses, stooped over peering intently at the sand. Dean just lay on the beach staring at me with a content smile on his face. He said, “You’re like a little girl, full of sheer joy.” I was. I felt totally free.
True to our two-person wedding plan, the traditional rehearsal dinner held for out-of-town guests had two attendees: me and Dean. The table was strewn with Fijian flowers, and a Fijian band played drums for us. We ate authentic food. But there were some other guests whose presence wasn’t physical.
I know I’ve said it before, but Nanny was a mother to me. She died three months before I married Charlie. I have regrets that I didn’t spend enough time with her in her last few years. I’m just not good at phoning. She’d leave me messages saying, “It’s Nanny. Call me back! I’ve called twice now!” I’d call to apologize and she’d say, “I don’t care, but call your dad. He gets sad when you don’t call him.” Toward the end she was diabetic, on dialysis, and in and out of the hospital. When she was in the hospital for the last time with an infection they couldn’t locate, I was there every day. The doctor said, “Margaret’s a miracle.” He couldn’t believe how strong she was—up until the end she was talking about how she planned to wear lavender to my wedding but didn’t trust a friend to pick out a dress for her. When the time came at my first wedding, I placed a lavender rose on a front-row chair to save a seat for Nanny.
When I arrived at her bedside on the day she died, the nurse said, “Wake up, your baby’s here. Tori’s here.” Nanny said “Baby” to me—that’s what she called me—so I guess she knew I was there. But while I was there, she took a turn for the worse. When I called my mother to update her, I was in hysterics. She told me to go home. She said, “I made my peace yesterday. I said my good-bye. You’ve made your peace. You should go home now.” But I wanted to stay with Nanny through the end. My biggest fan, Nanny watched every single TV show I ever was on. I had taped The Ellen Degeneres Show the day before, and it was on that day. We told her I was going to be on and turned up the volume on the TV. She literally hung on until the show was over, and then she passed. When she died, I was holding one of her hands, my brother was holding the other.
My brother and I helped organize her funeral, and I wrote a eulogy for her. In the days after her death we spent a couple days going through her apartment—she’d left instructions that she wanted me and Randy to take anything we wanted to remember her. The whole apartment was full of photos of us growing up. On the bookshelves were album after album. Tori: first grade; Tori: second grade; Tori: graduation. She had saved every picture I ever drew. When the woman next door saw me, she said, “Are you Tori? Margaret’s daughter? I’ve heard so much about you. She was so proud of you.” It dawned on me that I’d only really known Nanny in the context of our lives. I’d spent time with her in Crenshaw, but I didn’t know her personal life when we weren’t around. In her apartment I felt like I saw more clearly what our relationship had been. She wasn’t just a mother to me. I was a daughter to her.
May 7, the date of the wedding, was the day Dean’s father had died the year before. His mother died when Dean was fifteen. We liked to say that his parents and Nanny teamed up in the afterlife to make sure our paths collided. They were and are our angels. At our “rehearsal” dinner Dean and I wanted to celebrate them. After a private dinner in our hut we went out to the beach where there was a little bonfire waiting for us. We wrote letters to his parents and Nanny expressing love and thanking them—our closest family—for bringing us together and looking out for us. We invited them to be a part of our wedding. Then we put the letters in the fire and watched the smoke rise up into the night.
People magazine had an exclusive on our wedding photos and sent a high-end fashion photographer. He brought his girlfriend and a two-person crew. Not a bad gig, flying to a deluxe resort in remote Fiji to pho
tograph the world’s smallest wedding. Soon after we arrived, we got a fax warning us that the wedding had been leaked to the Enquirer (thanks to that couple at the airport). The letter told us that everyone knew we were getting married in Fiji. They’d dispatched teams of paparazzi and were flying them to Fiji to come find us. This was not good news. We just wanted to be alone. I knew what it was like to have helicopters drowning out the ceremony, and it was exactly what I wanted to avoid.
Freaking out, we told the resort manager what was going on. He smiled, perfectly calm, and said, “No worries. Nothing will happen.” I thought it was sweet, how he thought his island was so isolated, but I said, “You don’t understand. These people always find a way to get their money shots.” But the manager told us that in his twenty years there not one picture had ever gotten out. He said he’d spoken to his friends who ran the various tourist businesses on Fiji. No boats would come near the island. No planes would fly over the island. No helicopters would venture near the airspace. No one would get a picture of us. It sounded crazy and impossible. But we never heard a single helicopter. I had to hand it to the travel agent. She was beyond right about the privacy.
The next morning was our wedding day. We woke up to pouring rain. Rain! In Fiji! We had no backup plan, so we just moved ahead. They told us they’d decorate the spa bure for us. I was disappointed, but oh well. What could we do? Besides, as Dean reminded me, it rained when we got engaged and Mrs. Claus told us it was a baptism. After a decadent breakfast, we got a couples’ massage. Then, two hours before the wedding, the sun burst through the clouds. It was a gorgeous day.
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