There wasn’t much for me to do to get ready. I put my hair in braids and let it dry naturally. When I took the braids out, I had wavy, beachy hair. I did my makeup and slipped on my dress, and I was done, dressed, and ready to wed before my husband-to-be. It took twenty minutes from start to finish. Somebody notify the Guinness Book of World Records.
When I walked out of our bure, I felt content, beautiful, and so at peace. I was completely, 100 percent happy. It was effortless. For my first wedding everything was perfectly staged. I was so carefully made up and coiffed. I moved like I was back in that heavy Marie Antoinette costume. Now all I wanted was to look pretty for Dean. My hair was flowing in the wind. I barely had any makeup on. I felt the sand moving between my bare toes as I walked outside. Amazing!
Before Dean saw me, we got in separate Jeeps to head to a beach we’d chosen for the wedding ceremony the day before. We drove through the wilderness of the tiny island on winding dirt trails, passing deer and wild boar. As I stepped out of the Jeep, I was greeted by a guy in warrior regalia. He blew into a conch shell to announce my arrival, and I followed a path of white frangipani petals around the trees to where Dean was standing near the water’s edge.
I was carrying a bouquet of white orchids. The stems were wrapped in ribbon, and dangling from that were narrow ribbons with little sepia photos of Dean’s mom and dad and Nanny. Our guests. Dean was in place next to the officiant, who held our two rings in a shell full of sand and seawater. The People photographer was there with his crew, and we’d also brought along a kit to make our own non-traditional wedding video. We used eight-millimeter film, so our wedding video would be silent, grainy, and rough-cut, like a home movie from the seventies. For the wedding itself, we hired a local videographer to do the filming.
It was my second time walking down the aisle, but it was a completely new experience. The first time my nose was running, my dad was standing on my train, and I had my best bride face on. This time I was looking straight ahead, thinking, I love this man so much.
The People photographer was getting his shots. The videographer was backing down the aisle as I walked toward Dean. And the officiant was standing in place with the seashell holding our rings. Dean and I took each other’s hands and stood there beaming at each other. I just wanted to stay in that moment forever, and I did my best to memorize it. I can still remember the exact look in Dean’s eyes as he looked at me. We took a few moments. Then we were pretty much done taking it in, and it seemed like the ceremony should be starting, but nothing was happening. We looked over at the officiant and saw that everyone was on their hands and knees: the officiant, the various cameramen, the warrior with the horn. The videographer had bumped into the officiant, spilling the rings out of their little baptismal shell. The rings were gone. Dean stalked off, upset. I followed him, and he said, “We’ve been through so much. We planned this out. You look so beautiful. And now the rings are lost!” I was totally calm. I’d lost one of Dean’s rings before, on the roof of our hotel in Ottawa. I knew we’d still be in love and, eventually, married, with or without those rings.
If finding my string ring on that gravel roof in Ottawa was looking for a needle in a haystack, then this was looking for…rings on the beach. Then they found Dean’s ring. That was half the battle. Almost. I wear a size 3½ ring. It was so small, I knew there was no hope of finding it. But the ever-calm, “don’t worry, it’s all taken care of” hotel manager sent a couple of his guys away, and moments later they came back with sand sifters. Sand sifters! They weren’t metal detectors, but I was still impressed. I made a mental note to borrow them for shelling. Fifteen, twenty minutes went by, then someone shouted, “I got it!” Phew. We were meant to be after all.
Dean wanted to start over from the beginning, so I went back to the Jeep and waited until the warrior guy blew his conch shell. I walked down the beach to Dean. We read the vows that we’d written ourselves. I said, “I promise to live with you and laugh with you; to stand by your side, and to sleep in your arms; to be joy to your heart, and food for your soul; to always make you, you.” Dean said, “I promise to worship and adore you each and every minute of every day. I promise to protect you with my life and promise to give of myself till time’s end.” The vows were a little longer than that, but they were still short but sweet. And that was it. The photographer was Dean’s witness, and his girlfriend was my witness. We were man and wife. We kissed, and all five of the other people there clapped. Then Dean said, “I’m going to take my wife for a walk down the beach.”
This was our most private moment in a very private ceremony. Later I’d compare it to the “intimate” moment Charlie and I were supposed to have after our ceremony, when various attendants milled around as I had my hair and makeup touched up and had my portrait done. But there, on the beach, I wasn’t making comparisons. Dean was my family now. We walked and talked about how magical it was. Everything we said was just love, love, love.
We drove back to the “cocktail hour” in a Fijian Jeep that said Just Married in Fijian and was decorated with palm fronds and coconut shells instead of aluminum cans. At my first wedding I missed both the cocktail hours. This time I was 50 percent of the guest list. Out on the beach in front of our bure, they’d set up a lounge area for us: a couch with ottomans and pillows. There were tiki torches and flowers everywhere. They played a special CD we had brought with us, and we ate shrimp skewers served on leaves, sushi, dumplings, rose champagne—all our favorite things.
Before dinner we had our first dance. Dean led me into the shallow water, where the eyelet train of my dress spread out behind me, wet and sandy. Dean rolled his pants up, and we danced in water up to our shins. The song we danced to was Lonestar’s “Amazed.” It had come on the radio once when I was pulling out of a parking lot. I stopped my car. It reminded me of Dean. My whole life I’d known fairy tales, seen romance movies, and heard love songs, wanting them to resonate, wanting them to feel real. I’d always wanted a fairy-tale wedding. This time around, all my attention was on the real prince who stood before me. This was the fairy tale.
After we danced, the photographers and staff went off to have their dinner and left us alone for ours. They served us a five-course meal in a four-poster bed set up on the beach. By the time our third course came, we were getting drowsy. The photographer had to wake us up when they brought out the cake. It was a beautiful cake decorated with fresh orchids. He took his shot of us cutting the cake and left. It’s a good thing, because the photos of us tasting the cake might not have come out so picture-perfect. Apparently, they’d used salted butter to make the cake. Then added more salt. It was like a salt lick. It was terrible. We were too blissed out to care.
I took my bouquet to the water’s edge. The little photos of Nanny and Dean’s parents dangled against my wrist. I stood with my back to the ocean and said a silent prayer to them. Then I tossed the bouquet into the ocean, and we watched it float away.
As for our wedding night, well, after a long day together I couldn’t wait to have sex with my new husband.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
You Can Never Go Home Again
Six weeks after our wedding Dean and I were in a Toronto burger joint with another couple when I glanced down at my BlackBerry and saw an e-mail from a friend saying, I just heard about your dad. I’m so sorry. I was perplexed. My friend worked at ABC News. Did she know something I didn’t know? I checked my next e-mail. It was from Chris, a creator of So NoTORIous. It read, I’m sorry. I know you were trying to get home in time to see him. I looked up at Dean and said, “I think my dad just died.”
As we left the restaurant, my phone started to ring. My publicist, my manager, one friend after the next. Everyone in my life was calling to express their sympathy. My father had passed. But it was four hours before I heard from anyone in my family. My brother finally called.
A couple weeks earlier I’d gone to see my father for the first time in nine months. I can’t say exactly why it had been so long. Th
ere was no fight, just an increasing list of alienating moments: My mother didn’t call back when I told her I was getting divorced; she told me I had to move out of her apartment when I told her I was engaged. Then So NoTORIous started airing a couple months before Dean and I got married, and I was pretty sure that hadn’t helped matters. The character of my mother in that show was, well, somewhat in the Mommie Dearest vein. We showed her selling my possessions on eBay, leaving my brother on a cruise ship, and putting an evil eye on me. Even though it was fictionalized, a lot of what happened in the show was loosely based on stories and behaviors that I described to the writers and that my mother surely recognized in some form, regardless of how warped she thought the retelling to be. Although I saw my mother interviewed at a red-carpet event saying, “It doesn’t bother me. It’s a comedy,” it’s not like she called to congratulate me.
But as far as I’m concerned, the biggest reason for my alienation from my parents was Mark. My mom spent all her time with him. They went out every night. Dad said he didn’t want to go to functions and was happy for Mark to go. I didn’t buy it. Then I started hearing stories—I’d been told she went to Paris on a private jet with her girlfriends, but someone I knew saw Mark flying to Paris on a commercial plane the same day. Mom would have movie night and would tell my father everyone who was there except Mark. I’d say, “You know Mark is down there too,” and he’d say, “Oh, maybe she told me but I forgot.”
I don’t think my father had to die so soon. Yes, he had a stroke, but for two years before that—years when he could have recovered from throat cancer—he gave up on life. He never saw daylight. He rarely got out of bed. Or walked around his property. Or ate. He’d drink Ensure out of a can. He felt useless at work. His shows were running themselves and nobody needed him there. And his wife went out every night without him.
When we were in Fiji, one of the writers from So NoTORIous e-mailed and said that my mother had closed my father’s office and sold its contents. He told me to look at Perez Hilton’s website. I saw that it said a high-profile Hollywood producer had sold his office furniture at an online auction site. Then I saw the photos. It was his stuff, still in the office I recognized as his. There was a lamp for sixty dollars. A coffee table for two hundred dollars. Even the hideous fish windmill that Ed McMahon had given him, which he proudly displayed on his office patio for years. That undeservedly beloved fish windmill was listed for twenty dollars (far more, I’m sure, than its actual value). But that summed it up for me. I felt that selling my father’s office was essentially stripping his life of meaning. I couldn’t bear to watch it happen, to watch him cared for by nurses while my mother and Mark controlled the house. His fire was gone. But I’ll always regret that I missed nine months with my dad that I can never retrieve.
Before my dad died, my brother told me he wasn’t doing well, but I didn’t believe it. Maybe I didn’t want to deal with it. But mostly, I thought that my mother and Mark wanted him to seem like an old, feeble man so they had an excuse for their behavior.
Finally my brother called in tears. He wanted me to come see Dad, to introduce him to Dean. Mom and Mark were in Vegas, and my father was at home with a nurse. It had been so long. We’d had maybe two strained conversations on the phone in those nine months. I didn’t know how he’d react to seeing me. But Randy told me that Dad wouldn’t remember how long it had been. And Randy said he’d come with me. I’ll always be grateful to him for that. It would be the last time I saw my father alive.
My father was in bed, looking frail but not terrible. When he saw me, he lit up, and just like that, it was as if no time had passed: I was Daddy’s little girl again. He was with it but not sharp, happy to just watch sports. I sat at the foot of the bed pretending to care about football, and at some point he said, “So what’s our next project? What are we gonna produce together?” He was meeting my new husband for the first time, but this was how he best related to me—what could he do for me, what could he give me, what show could he put me in? He might have asked about my dogs, but never about my life.
After a couple hours Randy, Dean, and I left. On the way out I went into my mother’s upstairs den, where she keeps photo books. I said to Dean, “This is the last time I’ll ever be in this house.” I opened up my travel Balenciaga. It was a huge bag, but thankfully, Nicole Richie and Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen made it fashionable to carry weekend bags everywhere; otherwise, the guards might have busted me. I took the photo books from when I was a baby, including one with my birth certificate. Then we went downstairs, and I took some cookbooks that had Nanny’s recipes in her handwriting. That’s all I wanted. Somewhere deep down I had to be aware that I was saying good-bye to my dad. And I knew when my mother came back, I wouldn’t be welcome.
What happened next was my fault.
At a social event I talked to someone who worked for a weekly magazine. We were among friends, and I didn’t think of the conversation as a press interview. But of course you can’t blame the media for doing their jobs. So I was catching my friends up, and I mentioned that my father and I had reconciled but that I wasn’t seeing my mother because she was having a relationship that I didn’t approve of. Surprise, surprise, two weeks later it appeared in the magazine. I didn’t know it then, but that would be the beginning of the press war between me and my mom.
Right after I saw my father for the last time, Dean and I went to Toronto. I called my father twice, the first time was on Father’s Day. He was hard to understand, and I told Dean that it sounded like he’d had a stroke, but nobody told me anything. The next time I called turned out to be three days before he died. I was in the middle of doing press for So NoTORIous, but I’d also just found out that the show had been canceled. When I asked for my father, my mother got on the phone. She said, “Hi, Tori. It’s Mom. Your father has had a stroke, so he can’t really talk. This is a private matter. We’d appreciate it if you didn’t go to the press with this information.” I insisted on talking to my father, and when he got on the phone, I heard him say, “Hey, babe, I love you.” He was pretty out of it and hard to understand, but I was happy that he knew I’d called.
When I got off the phone, I was furious at my mother. I know she was responding to my indiscretion in the press, and I can’t say I blame her, but at the time all I could think about was that what I’d said was true—her relationship with Mark was disturbing, and I thought it had taken a toll on my father when his health was in jeopardy. My whole life, through all my conflict with my mother, I’d never really had it out with her. I never spoke back to her. Usually, I’d do something passive-aggressive like bringing the birthday cake for Nanny even though I knew she was against it. What she said wasn’t totally unfair, I get it, but for some reason that phone call was the final straw. I wrote an e-mail saying something like, Keep what out of publication, Mother? The truth about you and Mark? You disappoint me to no end. You should never have been wife to a man so generous and loving. You never deserved him. You never deserved to have children like me and Randy. The greatest lesson you taught me is how not to be a mother and wife. Without Nanny (the best gift you ever gave us) we would not be the down-to-earth people we are today. I knew my dad was going to die, and I put it all out there. I wrote the e-mail out of anger, but I didn’t send it blindly. I reread it three times, although I did press send from a bar. It was an e-mail that had been building up for thirty-three years. It was a relationship-ending e-mail.
She never responded. Three days later my dad passed away.
In Toronto, the night my father passed, everyone in my life called me except my family. Finally my brother called at one thirty in the morning. He’d been on a plane from Miami, had gotten the news when he landed, and had gone straight to the Manor. Randy and I consoled each other.
Shortly after I spoke to Randy, I heard my mother’s statement on the news. It confirmed my father’s death and said that my mother and Randy were by his side when he passed. I knew it wasn’t true—that Randy had been on a plane
. It seemed my mother’s first message about my father’s death was a public condemnation of my absence.
The next morning Dean and I were at the airport on our way home when my publicist sent me an e-mail with my mother’s press release. It was from “Candy and Randy Spelling,” and it said that they were both grieving a great man. They thanked everyone who had reached out. If my mother’s first statement was a snub, this was a deliberate slap in the face. My publicist was already getting calls asking why I hadn’t been included in the statement. It made it sound like I wasn’t part of the family or even sad about losing my father! So now I had to issue my own statement saying, I’m obviously heartbroken that my father has passed…. In the middle of this airport-based press-release composition, I ran into the former Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda. When he gave me his condolences, he said, “At least you have your family. Give your mom my love.” Yeah, right.
When we landed at LAX, there was a covert operation to get us out of the airport—the paparazzi had been staking it out all day waiting for our return. We snuck out some back exit and headed to our house, where all our friends came over to be with us. The big topic was my mother. It had happened again—like the night Charlie asked for my parents’ blessing, like the brunch after my first wedding, like so many times in my life. Somehow every big moment in my life was all about my mother, even if she wasn’t in attendance.
The funeral was on Sunday. I pulled myself together and focused on my dad. The point was to honor him and his life. I wanted to be there with Dean, of course, and Jenny, Pete, and Mehran, who had grown up with my dad, to close this chapter. We arrived at the funeral service before my mom, Mark, and Randy. It was a small, private room, with maybe thirty chairs set up in rows. The front row was empty and, I assumed, reserved for immediate family members. Since I didn’t know where I stood in the family, I didn’t know where to sit—I didn’t want to be presumptuous. He was her husband. If she didn’t want to sit next to me, I wanted to respect that. So Dean and I slid into the next available row.
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