by Jennie Garth
Dan was a nice, nice guy with a big heart, and so the people around me accepted him (at least, most of them did, anyway), and even my family, who put him through the “So what, exactly, do you want from our daughter/sister?” paces, grew to like him, too, I think.
When I look back at the twenty-year-old me now, I realize that so much of the anxiety I felt wasn’t about the sudden fame or the crazy fans, though all of that was pretty stressful for sure, even when I learned to dodge most of that stress by working my butt off on set for more than half of every day, or by burying myself in a big-ass home-remodeling project. No, the biggest source of stress in my life was my near-crippling fear that I’d lose my dad. By then, he’d suffered several more heart attacks and had undergone more surgeries, and his poor body was just beaten up and falling apart. It was clear to us all, including my dad, that he was never going to get better, that his health was on a pretty precarious slope, and that there was no chance of things reversing course. It was really just a question of how many blows his poor old heart could take before the jig was up. My dad, poor guy, was saddled with a ticking time bomb of a heart, and I was always holding my breath, waiting for that awful, dreaded phone call to come.
I was afraid that if I lost him, I would lose all sense of who I was and where I’d come from. And my fears, as it turns out, weren’t unfounded: Once, when my dad was visiting me and Dan, he had a heart attack right there in front of me. The ambulance came, we whisked him to the hospital, and he was immediately admitted into the ICU. However traumatizing this event was for me, it turned out to be a great stroke of luck for my dad, because he’d been so sick and hospitalized so many times in Arizona that his insurance was pretty much maxed out there, but in California he was covered. Phew! Another bullet dodged.
I was so grateful I had Dan to lean on when all of this was happening, and so it doesn’t surprise the forty-one-year-old me that, even though I was so young, I pretty much ran down the aisle with him as soon as I could, marrying him just two weeks after my twenty-second birthday. I can see now that my reasons for that first marriage weren’t very mature, and certainly there were people around me who gently tried to persuade me that maybe this wasn’t the best way to go. Luke, for instance. He liked Dan—I mean, there wasn’t much not to like—but he just didn’t see him as husband material. He didn’t come to the wedding, but he did give us a gift: a Mister Loaf bread maker, and the message in this wasn’t lost on me. And later, Mr. Showbiz told me that before the ceremony started, Aaron Spelling turned to him and said, “When they ask if anyone objects, who is going to speak up? You or me?” I couldn’t see or say this clearly back then, but the truth was, marrying Dan, sad to say, wasn’t about Dan. It was about looking for security. It was about wanting to feel looked after. So when Dan asked me to marry him, I said yes.
Adele, who’d been with me only a very short time, took over and planned the whole thing. With a ten-thousand-dollar budget, she put together the most beautiful, sweet wedding, to which we invited only a handful of our nearest and dearest. The writer Marianne Williamson married us, and the whole thing was pulled off in complete secrecy. It was private and quiet and beautiful. Because of how crazy things had become around the show, we had our wedding in my friend Damon’s mom’s backyard (Damon had introduced me and Dan) in Beverly Hills, away from the prying eyes of the paparazzi. I remember it was a gorgeous, clear Southern California day, and my dad was there to walk me down the aisle, just as I’d hoped. We were happy, Dan and I, at least for those first few months, when being newlyweds was so novel and fun. But once the energy and adrenaline of all that wedding planning wore off, and it was just the two of us again, it hit me pretty quickly that I had no business being married, that I was still, despite what my life looked like, extremely young and unworldly and not at all prepared to be someone’s wife. Plus, I was working crazy long days, and Dan was out doing the musician thing at night. What were we doing being married? We never saw each other, for God’s sake. I think I was a pretty excellent girlfriend, and the last thing I wanted to do was to hurt Dan, but in the end, I knew deep down that we just didn’t have enough in common to build a future on. I wasn’t happy. Was Dan? I honestly didn’t even know, because he was busy doing his thing, while I did mine. Maybe, I was starting to think, running down the aisle wasn’t the best thing to have done . . . but you know what? Now, looking back, I’d say it was. I had the classic “starter” marriage, and anyone who has had one of these knows that they’re excellent labs for learning exactly what you don’t want your married life to look like. It was a pretty invaluable lesson, and because of that, it’s a decision I don’t regret for a second. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t cause me some serious agony.
I’d be on the phone with Adele late at night, crying and so stressed out about my failing marriage, and she’d talk me down and tell me that I’d get a handle on it. So while all of this confusion about my marriage was going on, I made another big family decision that I needed to have my mom and dad closer. So I bought a ranch in one of the incredibly beautiful rural valleys a couple of hours north of Los Angeles, and I persuaded my parents to pack everything up—including all the animals—and come to California.
Now I owned not one, but two properties in California, which meant, I guess, that I was putting down some roots and staking a pretty serious claim here.
With my parents nearer, I was hoping that I would finally be able to stitch my family back together again. I was figuring it out. Slowly but surely, little by little.
But I still had to figure out what to do about Dan. There was a work hiatus coming up and I would be executive producing and starring in a made-for-TV movie called An Unfinished Affair. I’d be heading off to Arizona for a month, and this would give me the time away I needed to sort things out.
At least, that was what I thought.
THE REAL DEAL
When you’re an executive producer, you’re involved in all aspects of putting a project together, and so one of the tasks I had to take on for An Unfinished Affair was helping to select the cast. There was a part for an actor about my age, who would play one of my love interests in the movie. (In fact, he’d play the son of my primary love interest. . . . I know, right? How could I not seize the opportunity to play a true bad girl, after more than five years of clicking my heels together on 90210?) I sat down with Mr. Showbiz, who was my co–executive producer on this project, and together we watched a handful of audition tapes and there he was: Peter Facinelli, a young actor out of New York. He was perfect for the part, so we hired him.
So off I went to Arizona, with Adele and a huge need to both clear my head and immerse myself in work.
Heady, heady stuff.
But guess what. Sometimes, when you’re all about minding your business, you can leave a little back door to your heart unattended, and sometimes, when this happens and you’re not looking, the wildest, most unexpectedly wonderful things can happen.
When I stepped onto that movie set and met Peter . . . kaboom! It was like getting flattened by a meteor. I had never felt so bowled over in the presence of a guy before. Never.
Thank God Adele was with me, because before I could lose my head completely, I had to address the situation with Dan. I had been thinking we needed to separate for some time, but I kept pushing it off, always finding an excuse and telling myself I would deal with it soon. Well, apparently, soon was now. I remember Adele handing me this giant, awkward cell phone (remember those things? they looked like you were holding a brick up to your ear) and standing there, holding my hand, as I made that incredibly grown-up call.
Dan couldn’t have been more gracious and understanding—and in full agreement. With that one call, I had ended my marriage, and I spent the rest of that month bonding with my new costar, my new best friend, my new love. Oh, my God—we had a blast.
When I was in LA, working five days a week on 90210, it was all about business. I used my hiatus time to branch out and do other projects. These jobs were al
ways on location, and these little monthlong shoots sometimes served as a way for me to let my hair down. And Adele would come along and we’d just get silly, and . . . a little wild. I mean, remember, people, this was 1995. I was twenty-three! We’d hang out with the cast and crew of the movie, drink a little more than we would back home; then we’d go out and listen to live music. There might be a game or two of strip poker, a few late-night skinny dips in the hotel pool—that kind of thing.
Peter and I couldn’t have been more different, at least on the face of things. He was first-generation American, having grown up in a big Italian family in Queens, New York. He was the youngest of four, the only boy, and he was the apple of everyone’s eye (including, pretty much right away, mine). He was so adventurous and playful, a city kid through and through. He was young and a perfect mix of cool and dorky, and so open and alive.
We were like two peas in a pod, two kids in a candy shop. We just wanted to play and explore and get to know everything we possibly could about each other. With Peter, I felt like I was discovering that the world was, indeed, big, fat, and round, but more than that, I was discovering that you could feel terrified and wonderful, all at the same time. This was big, big, happy news to me, given how anxious I’d been for so much of my life.
Now I felt kind of like an astronaut in outer space: still safely tethered to the mother ship, yet way, way out there, floating free among the stars. It was the best feeling in the world.
He was adorable. Handsome. Gorgeous. God, we were young when we met: I was twenty-three and Peter was twenty-one. Man, when I look back on it now . . . I mean, we were so freakin’ young! And even though I’d been married before, I had never felt this way about a guy.
Our love affair was so passionate, so sweet, so wonderful. Peter moved out to Los Angeles pretty immediately. He rented an apartment in West Hollywood but we spent all of our time together. It was such a blast being with him: We’d found each other and we were finding ourselves.
It was the most beautiful, exciting time of my life.
BEAUTIFUL LIGHT
You know how one day you can just wake up and before you know it your whole life has taken a crazy, fantastic, unexpected turn? How all of a sudden, you find yourself going down a road you never even imagined, a road that leads you to the most beautiful, soulful, meaningful stuff possible?
Well, that happened to me when I was twenty-four. I was fully immersed in my career and felt like I was finally doing a better job of riding the fame wave. I’d just recently fallen completely head over heels in love with a really great guy. I think we’d been seeing each other for about six months or so when we found out I was pregnant. I was stunned. He was stunned. But as soon as we got over the initial shock of it, we were a hundred percent thrilled and excited about it. It definitely felt like one of those moments when the universe taps you on the shoulder and says, “Look: I’ve got this incredible gift for you.” And luckily, we both knew that and were grateful for it. Besides, we were just so madly in love. It just made all that sweeter.
My parents were supportive, too, and Peter’s family, to their credit, also embraced me and our news with gusto and great love.
Now I just had to figure out how to tell Mr. Spelling our happy news, which you’d think wouldn’t be that big a deal, since I’d been working for him for about seven years at that point.
But right around the time that I found out I was pregnant, another actress, a woman named Hunter Tylo, was embroiled in a huge, messy lawsuit with Aaron and the producers of the show she’d been on—a show she’d promptly been fired from when she told them she was pregnant. I think she’d just been awarded the whopping sum of $4.8 million (the jury had actually doubled what she had been seeking in damages), and so I felt pretty certain that I wouldn’t lose my job, but still . . . it was an awkward time to be bringing up the “p”-word with this particular group of executives.
Besides, what are you supposed to do when you play a high school girl who wears superfashionable (i.e.: slightly slutty) clothes and you find yourself staring down the prospect of packing on fifty or sixty pounds over the course of a few short months, while the cameras are still rolling?
First, I had to tell the big boss, and if I’m remembering this correctly, I actually called him myself. Aaron couldn’t have been more gracious, more supportive of me, and he assured me that he’d take care of breaking the news to the whole company, which he did in a way that was completely awesome and wonderful, because everybody—and I mean everybody—was excited about the big news (or else).
We were in the midst of filming our sixth or seventh season at that point, and I think Kelly and Brandon were paired up at that time in the story line, but rather than try to figure out how to write the pregnancy into the script, the powers that be decided to conceal it completely from our young, impressionable audience, and of course, this was totally fine with me. I didn’t want to become the prime-time poster girl for an underage character getting knocked up.
The first few months were no big deal, in terms of hiding the pregnancy, but after that first trimester, everything started to pop: my belly, my boobs, my nose, my feet, my hands. My wardrobe fittings were never a picnic to begin with—think of a weird form of torture where you’re asked to hold your arms straight out from your body for inexplicably long stretches of time, while fabric is tucked and pinned and pinched around you. I don’t know what it is, but costume fittings give me the worst backaches of all time. But as I started to swell up, they became superchallenging. The costumers would do this crazy kind of origami where they’d swathe me in a ton of fabric, then pin and tuck it so that the top part looked kind of stylish, while below my bust there was usually just so much fabric that you couldn’t even tell I had a body, never mind one that was packing on the pounds and inches at an alarming rate. Once I was in costume, I’d be shot from the waist up, or holding a giant shopping bag, or, say, sitting on a couch with a pillow in my lap. The camera crew became really skilled at hiding my growing bump.
Then, at around the month-six mark, my bump became a mountain. I started to feel like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, staggering and lumbering around the set, trying to look all cute and seductive but just superaware that I always had to pee and that I might explode all over my castmates at any given moment.
I did not feel like a hot young thing. I felt like a hot, giant mess.
Toward the very end of my pregnancy, when I was about eight and a half months along, we were filming our final episode of the season and Jason was directing. The story line revolved around some Beverly High event, like a prom or homecoming, and so I had to wear a tentlike gown that was strategically folded and pinned to hide what Jason began to affectionately refer to as Bob. At that point we knew that I was pregnant with a girl, but that didn’t matter to Jason. My bump—I mean my Mount Everest—became almost like another character during filming that week, and Jason would confer with the camerapeople about how to handle Bob in this or that scene in a way that was pretty funny, and pretty sweet. I spent most of that “dance” or whatever it was standing behind a high table, acting all chipper and girlie and teenagery, while my back ached and my feet swelled. I had just turned twenty-five, but here I was, pretending to still be in high school. When they finally called it a wrap, I was so relieved. I swear I could hear all those pins and clips that held all that fabric together on me pop and give.
With that we were finished for the season, and we would be heading into a short hiatus, which, clearly, was a huge blessing for me. I badly needed to prop my puffy ankles up and take care of a few things . . . like buying diapers and getting a crib set up. I’d been so busy at work that I hadn’t done any nesting, and so we had to scramble to prepare for the blessed event.
Once I found out I was pregnant, I sold the Woodstock house and Peter and I rented a really secluded house up off of Mulholland Drive. The house was down a narrow little driveway that led through a dark, slightly foreboding jungle of trees. This house w
as so remote, so tucked away on a really lushly landscaped lot, that you really did forget the rest of the world when you were up there. I loved this.
When my break finally came, Peter was off on location, making an independent film somewhere in Texas, so my mom and dad moved into the small guesthouse on the property to be there for me while Peter was away.
My mom dived right into those nesting chores with me, helping me to wash teeny-tiny clothes and little blankets, and when it came time to set up the nursery, she gasped when she opened the door to the baby’s room to find that nothing had been set up. The only thing in the room was a giant pile of unopened boxes stacked up in the middle of the room. With my mom taking the lead, we tore through all of that stuff and set that room up in no time, complete with homemade curtains, which was a good thing, because it wasn’t too long after that, maybe only a day or so, that I went into labor.
One night, sometime in those really quiet early hours of the morning, I woke up and felt a strange twinge. Then I felt another one. And another one. So I called over to the guesthouse and told my mom that I thought I might be going into labor. She and my dad immediately got up and came to get me. I remember my dad was just so excited, like a little kid at Christmas. While my mom drove and I rode in the passenger seat, my dad, who was riding in the backseat, was all squished up between the seats, his head poking out between me and my mom, and he was backseat driving like mad as we made our way through those dark, still canyons and down into the city, to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
The job of tracking Peter down fell to my GBF (gay best friend), Bryan, and he was able to reach Peter and get him on a flight out of Texas, but then Peter got stuck in Phoenix for a layover. He called me from a pay phone there and labored right along with me, saying all sorts of encouraging birthing things to me, while my mother held a giant, primitive cell phone up to my ear.