Stories From Candyland (23 page)

I asked my son, Randy, how much he remembered about our 1984 vacation in Europe, since he was only five. He remembered some of it, and of course we documented every moment in pictures, but he said he would never forget the trip he and I took in 2006. He’s a writer. I’ll let him tell the story:

When we were packing up to go somewhere else, I would have to help you pack due to the enormous volume of clothes . . . I mean
ENORMOUS
. You just kept bringing them out of the closet, and I thought, this is
CRAZY
! Not to mention, everything had to be unpacked when you got there.

Then, everything had to be packed exactly how it was. This means tissue paper folded around and in between everything!

I would have thought you had a side business in Italy and Paris wrapping gifts with the amount of tissue paper you had.

Then I would have to sit on the tops of the suitcases to make sure they closed. The most disturbing part was everything we would pack would be so meticulously placed in the suitcases, the thought would hit me that all this has to be unpacked just to be repacked up again. It was a vicious cycle.

One morning, in Venice, I woke up and called Randy’s room. He wasn’t there, and I got worried. When he returned, I told him how scared I was.

“I couldn’t sleep, Mom,” he told me. “I had a nightmare about packing your clothes in another hotel room, and had to go out for a walk around the city to clear my head.”

My lawyer, Stephen Goldberg, thinks Aaron and I should have been a comedy team. He wasn’t sure if I should tell the story, but hey, Steve, you brought it up, so here goes:

In early 1993 Aaron and I went to Las Vegas. A friend told us that the Dunes Hotel was closing in a few days, but they were letting in a few guests, and it might be a nice private place for us to get away.

It was. They gave us the entire sixteenth floor, and the seventeenth-floor pool and gym were ours, too.

We looked forward to spending some time off together and took our six-month-old bichon frise, Shelley, with us. Aaron reminded me that Shelley wasn’t quite housebroken, but I assured him it wouldn’t be a problem. We’d always had wooden flats made for our dogs that we would place outside the house, and doggie doors so they could get out to “go” anytime. We’d put grass on top of the wooden flats, and we and the dogs were happy.

I shipped a flat ahead of us with our luggage, and the hotel arranged for lawn and seed to be put in the flat before we arrived. All set, I told Aaron. His only responsibility would be to take Shelley to the seventeenth floor, where we had the flat, so she could do her business.

The first night, my husband, the most successful executive in television history, was awakened by the puppy, and the message was clear. “I have to go.” While putting on a robe over his pajamas, Aaron said he was worried someone would see him with Shelley. “No,” I assured him. “We’re alone on the floor, and no one will be at the private pool at four
A.M.
” “No one but me,” he replied, as he headed out.

My husband was not happy when he returned. “She won’t go. It was freezing up there on the pool lobby, and the dog wouldn’t go.”

I asked him if he’d told Shelley to go on the flat.

He assured me he had.

“Go back, Aaron. The dog has to go.”

Aaron was a nice man. He and Shelley headed upstairs again.

They returned. It looked to me as though the dog’s eyes were watering. Aaron’s eyes were red. He told me something must be wrong with the dog because she just wouldn’t go.

I called my vet at home in L.A. and woke him up. Looking back, I have to give him credit for being so polite.

“Candy, she won’t go on the flat because there are no smells. She doesn’t know she’s supposed to use the flat or that the lawn is hers. Someone has to pee there first, so she can pick up the scent.”

I told Aaron this.

He refused.

“Aaron, look at her. She’s going to burst.”

“Candy . . .”

The standoff finally ended as it was getting light outside. Aaron and Shelley disappeared.

When they returned, the dog looked happier.

“Did you do it?” I asked my husband.

He refused to answer except to say, “The dog went.”

To this day, I still don’t know what happened. And I just can’t visualize my prim and proper husband peeing on a flat of grass on a hotel pool deck. I don’t think he went into the bathroom or left the suite with any kind of container.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he found someone and paid him to pee on the flat. I didn’t ask. But Shelley went from then on.

“Candy, can we leave the dog home next time we travel?” Aaron asked. “This was not the relaxing, romantic start to our getaway you promised me.”

“Of course,” I assured him. “Let’s go back to bed.”

Shelley jumped into the bed with us. She spotted the mirror over the bed, now that it was daylight, and she apparently determined the reflection was another dog in the bed with us. She barked for an hour. Aaron didn’t speak to me the rest of the day.

I wonder if Aaron told anyone how he got the scent on the flat, or if this will remain one of life’s mysteries.

My friend Willy Ehrlict, whose husband was also a successful television executive, said, yes, I had to tell my stories. She says she gets scared every time she hears the words
Candy
and
vacation
. The first story was when we decided to go to Palm Springs, and even though I rarely drove, I decided to drive. Willy looked like she was going to hide under the dashboard, and claimed I was going a hundred miles per hour on the freeway.

With all due respect to Willy, we were going faster—110 miles per hour—and I had two good reasons for driving so fast. When I had had my car serviced, the mechanic said I
should drive it really fast once in a while because of its big engine. And I needed the driving practice.

I didn’t realize we were going 110 until I glanced at the speedometer. I was gripped by fear, so I think I pushed down even harder on the accelerator. I just remember Willy turning the color of the white dividing lines on the freeway. We were in the fast lane, and suddenly, I was afraid I would hit the middle barrier. I swerved to change lanes. It felt instead as if we’d changed states, as the car was really flying! I felt like a teenager again, driving along to one of those Beach Boys songs about Daddy taking the car away if I got caught.

Aaron made me get rid of the Corvette I had when we got married. One time, when we were driving to his house, I went so fast around a curve that the car did a wheelie. “That’s it,” he declared. And my Corvette was history. I was relegated to my mother’s used sedan, which lacked the glamour and speed I wanted.

Willy drove home from that weekend trip. I didn’t look at the speedometer, and she seemed calm. Now that I think about it, I don’t think she’s been in my car since.

Willy thought I should tell another travel story. She ended her e-mail with, “The more I think of it, I am pretty lucky to have survived our friendship SO FAR. First you lock me out of my room in the middle of the night and then you take me on a joy ride at 100 mph.”

As Willy knows, I didn’t deliberately lock her out of the two-bedroom suite we were sharing in Las Vegas. (We flew, not drove, by the way.)

Willy and I went to Las Vegas for a jewelry trade show. During the day we’d go our separate ways, then catch up in the suite’s living room at night. I liked to stay up late and gamble, and she liked getting a full night’s sleep.

One night, I was ready to go to bed early, so I took a sleeping pill. Willy was already in her room. After a while, when I still couldn’t sleep, I decided to go downstairs to the twenty-four-hour, all-sweets-and-junk-food-and-magazines-all-the-time store to get some goodies. I knocked on Willy’s door and said, “I just took a sleeping pill, so if I’m not back in fifteen minutes, come down to the lobby and look for me.”

I was awake enough to buy a large Hershey bar, cheese puffs, Junior Mints, and assorted packages of cheese and crackers. I returned to our suite, double-locked the door, sat down at the bar, and proceeded to eat my treats.

I thought I heard someone knocking at the door a few minutes later, and thought how rude it was for someone to knock in the middle of the night. I kept eating. About ten minutes later, the phone rang.

“Candy, let me in,” Willy said.

“Where are you?”

“I went downstairs to look for you. I looked everywhere and finally came back upstairs, and I was locked out.”

I let her in. We both ate sweets. My sleeping pill never did kick in.

On that same trip, I won a lot of money on a slot machine. My friends say that I have a kind of special “communication skill” with the machines. I don’t. There
is
some rubbing of the machines involved, but we won’t go into that. That night I sat at the machines for many hours raking in the wins. The casino was so happy with the amount of time I was playing the slot machines that they delivered ice-cream sundaes right up to my machine just to keep me there.

I remember the night well. I was using my “money management” method, starting with a five-dollar slot machine, then a ten-dollar, then twenty-five, all the way to the hundred-dollar slots. My method is to play with the casino’s money. Every time I win, I take back part of my winnings, so I’m always playing on their money. (That is, when I’m winning.)

I’d worked my way up to the “top dollar” machine, which had a little picture on the left side that advised the player whether to take an offer. I ignored their recommendation. I knew they weren’t on the player’s side. And, lo and behold, I hit the big jackpot.

Willy was already back in the suite, so I called her and said I needed to show her something. When she saw the machine, she screamed so loud that people came from throughout the casino to see why she was screaming. I was sitting there in
shock. There was so much hoopla and celebrating, and I remember saying I’d take my winnings in cash. I wasn’t thinking clearly.

The casino officials started piling up the money. It didn’t stop. Bills were everywhere.