Candy at Last (26 page)

“‘My first thought was, I can’t believe my mom didn’t call me!’ Actually, it wasn’t a total surprise since Tori, 33, and her mom, Candy have been in a longstanding feud. Because of the estrangement, the self-proclaimed daddy’s girl had only seen her 83-year-old father—whose health had been failing for months—on one occasion since last September.”

A month later there was another
US Weekly
feature story entitled
Her Mother’s Revenge,
and there I was inset on the magazine cover. Here is an excerpt:

“
US
has learned exclusively that the actress, 33, will get just 0.16 % of the Spelling fortune. Tori’s share—‘a cash inheritance payment of $200,000, combined with approximately $600,000 in private investments her dad set up for her’—is a brush-off Aaron Spelling would never have intended for his only daughter, says a family source.

“‘I believe Candy had a lot to do with what was left for Tori,’ the source says of Tori’s mother, who is sole managing executor of the estate.”

Soon every media outlet had copies of Aaron’s last will and testament. There were unfounded accusations that I had revised the will to disinherit my children. I was no longer the Marie Antoinette of The Manor. I had quickly been recast in the role of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth.

What nobody knew was that both Tori and Randy had already received disbursements from a trust while Aaron was still alive. In the meantime, the press were in copywriting heaven with headlines like
Dynasty in Distress
and
Dynasty Duel
. They also had a ball drawing parallels between Tori and Fallon Carrington.

On July 31, 2006, just over a month after Aaron passed away, Joel Keller of
Huffington Post TV
wrote the following:

“In today’s
New York Post,
resident yenta Cindy Adams mentions an article in the September issue of
Vanity Fair
that details the sad last days of TV legend Aaron Spelling, who passed away last month. According to the article, written by Dominick Dunne, Spelling was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, and lived pretty much alone in his 123-room mansion. Apparently no one visited, including daughter Tori, which confirms the rumors that there was a rift in their relationship.

“According to Adams, Spelling would ‘dine in pj’s, go to bed at 9, had lost control of the company he’d founded and nobody—especially his kid—ever came over. The daughter he’d lived for learned of her father’s death on television.’ Wow. A guy with all this money and power, who was a major player in entertainment, and he went out with a whimper. It’s too bad.”

It made me incredibly sad that even Dominick, whom Aaron had considered a dear friend, was hungry for a byline.
Aaron Spelling’s Season Finale
appeared in the September 2006 issue of
Vanity Fair.
In his column Dominick wrote, “For years, their marriage has been a topic of conversation. I think of it as an unhappy house, a complicated marriage, and an unhappy family.”

In Dominick’s version, Aaron was more
King Lear
than he was the Scottish nobleman Macbeth. “Two years ago, with only two programs on the air, after having been the leader of the pack for almost two decades, Aaron was left with little control of his company.” Aaron had never lost control of his company, though. As early as 1988, production costs were soaring, so Aaron was already looking ahead and trying to a form strategic alliance with a wealthy parent company. He told business reporter Mark Frankel that production companies like his “would have to branch out and do other things besides just producing for television—become miniconglomerates—in order to make sure that we can keep doing what we do.”

Through a series of mergers and leveraged buyouts, Aaron Spelling Productions came to be owned by Viacom. They put Aaron’s company on the market, but when it didn’t get the kind of bids Viacom was hoping for, they began all their corporate restructuring and consolidation of the different divisions.

On his website,
Head Butler
, author Jesse Kornbluth describes Dominick Dunne as “a professional hater, a scourge of the rich and criminal, a judge with a pen.” Apparently, Dominick also didn’t keep up with the financial papers.

All kidding aside, it was awful to read what Dominick wrote about Aaron because for more than forty years, Aaron had been had been so loyal to Dominick. When most of Hollywood had turned their backs on Dominick and he was
persona non grata
, Aaron stood by him and helped him earn a living by hiring him to write a couple of television movies.

According to his
Vanity Fair
article, Dominick, who had never been to The Manor, said Aaron “had become a deeply unhappy man, living sick and isolated in the biggest house in town, cut off from nearly everybody, estranged even from his daughter, and fearful that he was being betrayed.”

Aside from the fact that the columns written by Cindy Adams and Dominick Dunne were so humiliating to Aaron and hurtful to me personally, they were also insensitive to the millions of individuals afflicted with Alzheimer’s, not to mention their families. Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease. Just because he was Aaron Spelling, my husband was not spared the horrible, undignified symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

I was very concerned with protecting his privacy and preserving his dignity. He was a public figure, and I didn’t want him ridiculed. I knew from Nancy Reagan’s experiences with Ronnie that this was my job—to protect my husband. Aaron was bedridden but he was never alone. He had nurses around the clock. I was there and Randy was there.

Aaron had the erratic mood swings common with Alzheimer’s. He hallucinated and became paranoid as his health further declined. Here is a description from the Alzheimer’s Association website,
alz.org
, about the type of hallucinations Aaron had as he declined:

“These false perceptions are caused by changes within the brain that result from Alzheimer’s, usually in the later stages of the disease. The person may see the face of a former friend in a curtain or may see insects crawling on his or her hand. In other cases, a person may hear someone talking and may even engage in conversation with the imagined person.”

Aaron’s paranoia was something we lived with every day. The Alzheimer’s Association summarizes this symptom very succinctly:

“A person with Alzheimer’s may become suspicious of those around them, even accusing others of theft, infidelity or other improper behavior. While accusations can be hurtful, remember that the disease is causing these behaviors and try not to take offense.”

It was hard not to take what was being written personally. What could have been a platform to create awareness about Alzheimer’s disease and support for the families ended up being a media assault on our marriage. I never have figured out why it was so hard for the public to accept that I was named executor of Aaron’s will because I was the one he most trusted to manage our estate. We weren’t Anna Nicole Smith and her eighty-six-year-old sugar daddy. This was my husband of thirty-eight years.

With time, I’ve come to understand it better. Tori really is so much like her father. She is very talented and has the ability to capture the attention and imagination of the American public with her storytelling. Much like Aaron, she really has her finger on the pulse of pop culture tastes, and she was able to take our normal family dysfunction and turn it into years of record-breaking ratings in reality television.

It used to be that shows like
The Brady Bunch, Family Ties,
and
The Cosby Show
were the big ratings winners. Nowadays there is an awareness that most families are dysfunctional in some way, and shows that reflect this are more typical than the Norman Rockwell tableau created by so many of the scripted shows. We are flawed human beings, and life is complex. I think this is why so many of the reality shows like
Keeping Up with the Kardashians
and my daughter’s show,
Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood,
are so popular.

During the year that we were estranged, it was excruciating not hearing from Tori and not being able to get ahold of her. This was especially true at the Emmy Awards tribute to Aaron.

I can’t begin to describe the emptiness I felt inside when Aaron was honored at the 2006 Emmy Awards. It was two months after Aaron passed away. Randy was my date that night. I could see the cameras pan across to us sitting in the audience as we watched the highlights of Aaron’s career on the big screen. I don’t think there was a moment that I didn’t have my handkerchief in
my hand. I kept blotting my eyes and blowing my nose. I knew that I was on camera, but I couldn’t help sobbing. I didn’t even care that my mascara was running down my face on HDTV.

Aaron was at his best in the footage, and he was larger than life in that room at the Shrine Auditorium. The original stars of
Charlie’s Angels
made the tribute to him, and when Kate Jackson said she could still smell the cologne Aaron wore, I could too. Looking back on his life and all of his accomplishments was incredibly emotional for me, but it wasn’t the only reason I was crying. I was also sad because I knew that Tori was somewhere in the audience, and I wished so badly that we could have all sat together and shared that special moment.

One day women started approaching me on the street to share their own challenges as parents and their stories of estrangement from their children. It was right around that time that the tone of e-mails I received began changing from offensive to empathic. Women from all over the world were suddenly commiserating with me.

We have never discussed that painful period in our lives when we didn’t speak. We just tried carefully to move past it. I like to think it was her pregnancy that paved the way for us to resolve our issues. I think it was when she went into labor with her first child, Liam, that we both really let bygones be bygones and skirted right past the elephant in the room.

Tori was in the hospital in labor when the doctor came in and turned off the monitor. Something was wrong: the baby was not in the proper position, so Tori would need a C-section. When she called me, all I remember hearing was “Mommy.” I could hear the fear in her voice, so I dropped everything and went straight to the hospital to be with her. I had given birth to Tori a month early, and Randy was almost three months premature, so I remember vividly that terrifying feeling of the baby being at risk.

It was incredible to be there for the birth of my first grandchild. He was such a gorgeous newborn and brought so much joy and peace to our family. It was a wonderful time. That year we celebrated Christmas together at The Manor.

27

Crisis Management

I’ve always been an expert in compartmentalizing. They say men are usually better at disconnecting thought from feeling, but I’d probably give most of them a run for their money. In my family children didn’t speak unless spoken to, and emotions were labeled as something negative, so I learned at a young age to stuff everything down.

We also had a lot of secrets in my family. The big skeleton in the closet was of course my maternal grandfather leaving my maternal grandmother, Helen, for my paternal grandmother, Ada. But we also had a lot of everyday secrets that hung in the air. There were our shaky family finances and the fact that my father was what was known then as a flimflam man. He was a trickster who made at least part of his living by defrauding people. There were also my father’s infidelities. The letter I had found in my mother’s jewelry drawer as a teenager pointed only to one indiscretion, but even at that age, my instincts told me there had been more.

My mother’s depression and unhappiness were also secrets and more important, a topic I never would have thought to discuss with anyone. Probably the most confusing part for me was that I was expected to be so perfect for
both of my parents. I had to look the part and act the part. Ironically, the standard was set very low for my brother, Tony, who ended up in military school.

Any good psychologist will tell you that putting all these conflicting viewpoints into separate compartments isn’t healthy, and as a solution works only short-term. When Aaron became ill and Tori disappeared, I had limited emotional and mental energy to deal with these crises. I handled each one the best way I knew how—by continuing to stuff all of my feelings down—and I also chose never to discuss either situation with anyone but my therapist.

I didn’t have a lot of girlfriends when Aaron was still around. There wasn’t any particular reason for this except that I was a wife and a mother, and I just didn’t have time for girlfriends. I also didn’t like those luncheons where I had to get all dressed up in the middle of the day and make small talk. As we say in Yiddish, I didn’t like being
fartootst,
meaning discombobulated.

On the heels of Aaron’s throat cancer, my friend Nancy insisted I get a hobby. I was hesitant to leave Aaron, but Nancy was determined and managed to convince me that I needed an outlet. Nancy and I have been friends since kindergarten, and it was Nancy who decided for me that I would start playing Mahjong.

Mahjong is an ancient card game of Chinese origin. It is similar to American gin rummy and is usually played with four players, and instead of cards, it’s played with tiles. Nancy led the charge and assembled our Mahjong group that includes my longtime friend Willy Erlicht, whom I met when her husband was Vice President in Charge of Movies of the Week for ABC. Since ABC was Aaron’s network, we ended up going on quite a few retreats together, and we became fast friends. Her husband didn’t make friends as easily as Aaron did, so that was another perk of our friendship.

Fabienne Guerin became my neighbor in Holmby Hills when we moved into The Manor. Fabienne and her husband lived right across the street from us. After we met, I discovered that Fabienne had been one of the original “Lava Lava” girls from
Fantasy Island
. It seems we were destined to be friends, and when we moved into the neighborhood, she invited us to a party to welcome
us. When the invitation arrived, she was quick to call us to make it very clear that the Irmases and the Butlers were not invited, so we didn’t have to worry about anybody alerting the media and then throwing one of our gift baskets in the trash on camera.