Stories From Candyland (11 page)

About an hour before my first guests arrived, one of the party planners was giving the servers a tour of the various rooms where food was being set up. He was also pointing out the downstairs bathrooms, in case guests asked for them.

I walked by as he was pointing to a powder room just outside the family room. “There’s a smaller bathroom,” he said. I watched as they all examined the bathroom. “Yes,” I heard one server say to the woman next to him. “That one is smaller, almost like a regular bathroom.”

Being Candy, I felt terrible about having a “smaller” bathroom. Darn. If only I had learned how to read blueprints. I was wounded. With all the great food, beautiful decorations, and wonderful music and games, this server would remember a small bathroom. And being a celebrity by accident, I feared that the tabloids would run a story about the tiny guest bathrooms in the Spelling household.

My guests were generous with superlatives about the menu, holiday decorations, ice sculptures, special lighting, entertainment, gorgeous trees, and even the snow we had arranged to fall outside the living room windows. Technicians had put a big machine and compressor on the roof, and snowblowing machines were positioned to make big snowflakes. The lighting was beautiful, too, highlighting the prop snow. I loved it because it was truly out of a Hollywood movie.

Lots of people visited the first-floor gift-wrapping room, and all sizes of bowling shoes and Christmas-colored bowling balls were used for the first time in years. Others played poker, some used the video arcade, professional singers performed karaoke, and everyone had a good time.

The tabloids never reported a word about any of the bathrooms. And not one guest said a word about one of the bathrooms being smaller than the others.

They liked my house; they really liked it. My house’s celebrity reputation remains intact.

Chapter 7
Stop, Look, and Listen to My Dog

I
think Spot, the dog who belonged to Dick and Jane and their family, was the smartest member of the household.

This idea initially came to me in the first grade, and my belief was reinforced chapter by chapter, book by book.

In the story “Dick and Spot,” Dick and Spot are walking home from the grocery store.

“Look, Spot, look.

“Look and see.

“Stop, stop.”

This is exactly what Dick says to his loyal canine when Dick’s little cap blows off his head and into the busy street.

Then, when the light at the corner turns green, Dick commands:

“Go, Spot.

“Go, Spot, go.”

Spot zooms into the street and retrieves Dick’s cap. Dick says,

“Look, look.

“See Spot.

“Come, Spot, come.”

But Spot is already there, cap in mouth.

I was told from a very young age that dogs were colorblind. So how was Spot supposed to figure out that he was to stop when the light was red and go when it was green? And he must have been confused further by Dick saying, “Come, Spot, come,” when he was already there.

Dick lost his cap. Spot retrieved it from a street and brought it back. Who’s smarter?

In “Guess Who,” the family spends most of the time talking to the dog:

“Oh, Spot.

“Did you see my ball?

“Where is it, Spot?

“Go get it.”

The red ball is in full view, yet Spot is the only family member able to find it. He brings it over. No one even thanks him.

Spot brought in clothes from the clothesline when it started raining without saying a word. The rest of the family was pointing at one another and giving weather reports.

Spot is the first one into the family car for a trip, thus avoiding having to carry anything heavy.

In “Who Can Help,” Dick is again carrying groceries, but this time without a cap, and Spot is waiting inside the house.

Spot watches and listens as Dick says:

“Mother, Mother.

“Come here.

“I want you.

“Come and help me.

“Oh, Jane.

“Oh, Father.

“Who can come?

“Who can come and help me?”

The monologue continues. Spot is obviously thinking, “Dick, just put down one of the bags and open the door yourself.”

Instead, Dick decides:

“Little Spot can help me.

“You can help me come in.”

And he does.

When I got home from school, I watched other smart dogs. Lassie always saved the day, Rin Tin Tin saved the West, and Bullet saved Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and their friends.

Back at school, I would read all about this family who spoke mostly in single syllables and asked questions, but rarely did anything. They needed Spot to find the ball or open the door or run into traffic for them.

Growing up, I was allowed only one dog. I was eight years old, and my parents gave me Sammy, my first true love (other than Rock Hudson), a handsome beige-and-black pug. We were inseparable. I’d walk him down our street every day, and I could tell he really enjoyed getting to know the lawns on our block. His tail didn’t curve, and he wasn’t wrinkled like most pugs, but it didn’t matter; he was my Sammy. I thought he’d grow into his curves and wrinkles, like people did.

Unfortunately, Sammy and I didn’t get to grow up together. When we went to Palm Springs for Easter, my mother’s hairdresser, Bessie, offered to watch Sammy. When we got home,
Sammy wasn’t there. My parents told me he had heart problems, which they said explained why his tail didn’t curl. The problems got worse, they said, and he had died of a heart attack while we were away. The truth was he had been injured in an accident and died, but I didn’t find that out until years later.

I was heartbroken. I was hysterical. There was no consoling me. Sammy was my best friend, and now he was mysteriously gone. My mother was so distraught by my sadness and grief that she said I would never be allowed to have another dog. “You can have all the dogs you want when you grow up,” she promised. When I was eight, I couldn’t imagine being grown up enough to have my own dogs. I only wanted Sammy. Reading about Spot made me sad. I wanted someone like Spot or Lassie to watch over my family, and we had no one.

My mother kept her promise not to let me have another dog, but as soon as I was on my own, I started adopting dogs.

When the kids were little we had as many as six at a time. That was the first time we bought an “extra-large California king-size bed.” We had all sizes, every mix: purebreds, barkers, lickers, jumpers, each one more loving and special than the next.

Most of them had stories. Pepper came home with Tori when she was a guest star on
Fantasy Island
. She had told me she was working with an adorable terrier mix, but never mentioned a word about bringing it home. She and Aaron walked in one night and introduced me to “our” new dog. “Oh, no,” I said. “We have a whole houseful already.”

“But, Mom,” Tori said, “he’s a present from Ricardo Montalban, so I had to take him.”

“Yes, Candy,” Aaron added, “Ricardo gave Pepper to Tori. I couldn’t say no.”

Pepper started out as Tori’s, but like all the others, he soon became a family dog. Then Randy wanted Tiffany, a bichon frise. She was exclusively Randy’s for three weeks, and then joined the ranks of family dogs.

Shelley was another bichon frise, and not to belittle the others, not only did we love her dearly, but she was the best dog ever. She never stopped entertaining us, and was truly funny. Everyone loved Shelley, and she loved everyone. Shelley soon became best friends with Muffin, our apricot poodle.

We always loved dogs. One of our saddest days was at the pet cemetery when Tori insisted on a funeral for Vic, one of our dachshunds. (We also had Trola, as in Victrola. Get it?) The dachshunds’ most memorable feat—other than being lovable—was ganging up on Angel, our white poodle. Angel, though, got back at them. She did tricks, and everyone who visited us would head right for Angel to say hello.

My last dog before my current dog, Madison, was Annie, a wonderful terrier mix who passed away suddenly last year from a pancreatic attack. She was only ten, and she had been with me for almost nine years, since I rescued her from a puppy mill.

Annie liked to hang out with my security guards. There was always someone ready to play with her, and she had a
great view of my driveway. The security room has a wall of monitors that show different views of my house and beach house. I never saw Annie pay much attention to the monitors. Her job, at least how she defined it, was to entertain the security staff and keep an eye on the driveway.

One morning Annie started barking furiously at one of the monitors. The guard on duty tried to quiet her down, pointing out that there was no one outside. He then realized she was looking up at the monitor that had views of my beach house. Inside the house was—hmm, how should I put this?—an ex-friend of mine. I hadn’t seen him for months. Summoned to the security room, I asked them why Annie was barking. “You’ll see,” he said, pointing to a monitor.

There was my ex-friend wandering around the beach house, moving from camera to camera, obviously not knowing he was being watched. My guard called the beach house to see if the guy would pick up the phone. He didn’t. The guard then called my ex-friend’s cell phone.

We watched the monitor as my ex-friend answered his cell phone and my guard told him that an alarm had gone off and he wanted to make sure everything was all right. His eyes darted around the room; it was clear he had spotted one of the cameras. He stammered, “Why are you calling me? I’m home,” he lied. “I was sleeping.” The guard apologized and shrugged his shoulders. I laughed. Annie seemed proud.

Annie was not only smart like Spot and Lassie, but she was a great judge of people, too.

After my husband passed away, I had to have appraisals done on our home and some of our property. My lawyer lined up the foremost experts and offered to send them to the house for me to interview.

No, I thought, there’s nothing I like about this whole process. While there’s nothing wrong with appraisers, this was happening because I’d lost my husband, and the last thing I wanted to do was conduct business at home around his passing.

I decided I’d interview these experts at my lawyer’s office in Century City, and back-to-back appointments were scheduled. I knew they would all say the same thing, and that probably all were adequately qualified. What I really wanted to see was who was the most sincere. Hollywood is full of characters and con artists. I wanted the real deal, and I knew Annie could distinguish among the candidates who would spend a lot of time in my house seriously assessing Aaron’s and my life and possessions. So I brought Annie with me to the interviews.

When the building’s security guard saw Annie, he stopped me, something I hadn’t counted on. I instantly remembered a joke from Bette Midler’s show about her pretending her dog was a Seeing Eye dog, but I couldn’t pull that off.

“She has to go into the building,” I told the guard. “We’re going to the lawyer’s office because she is the beneficiary of a will. The reading is today, and she has to be there.”