Stori Telling Page 5

  Brian and I had something going (or not going) over the years we worked together. We dated on the show, but it wasn’t just on TV where we connected. We were always getting into fights, but it was the same kind of crush-teasing as when a boy pulls your pigtail. During one summer hiatus we made a personal appearance at Disneyland (Donna and David do Disneyland). Brian was being mean to me, and we had a huge fight in the middle of a crowd of fans. Finally I said, “I hate you and I’m never speaking to you ever again.” He grabbed my arms and said, “Did you ever consider that I start fights with you because I’m in love with you?” Whoa. This was news. I said, “Really? I love you too!” Then we realized that we were surrounded by people. He led me behind a concession stand and kissed me.

  There was some puppy love there, but I don’t think Brian was quite comfortable being himself—in the years we knew each other, he went from white rapper to spiritual to cool. With his shifting interests, sometimes I fit in and sometimes I didn’t. He’d flirt with me, then blow me off. One summer we kind of dated, in that undefined, group date, hookup kind of way. When we were involved, being together on the show made real life feel like more than it was, and it was nice to have an excuse to kiss. But other times we’d go out together, then he’d call me the next night and ask for my friend’s number. Then it was harder to be his loving girlfriend on the show. The next week he’d say, “But I like you.” We were always fighting, and making up, and having fun together, and hating each other. We were just young.

  All that back-and-forth was pretty much over by the time our characters got married. The series finale of the show was our wedding: “David and Donna get married,” and afterward I had a surge of wondering if I was still in love with him. It seemed so real on camera. I told Jennie Garth I still felt a connection with him, but she said it was probably a normal side effect of the plot. As we played out that fairy-tale wedding, I was swept up in the romance of it all. (And it wouldn’t be the last time a perfect wedding seemed like all I could ever want.) Afterward it faded away and I realized Jennie was right—it was just filming. Strangely, Brian is the only fellow cast member I haven’t seen since the day the show ended. There’s no real reason that I know of. Our characters may still be happily married somewhere, but whatever we had just faded away.

  Ryan was my first real boyfriend, and after him came the worst boyfriend: Nick. I met Nick out at a club with my friend Jennifer. They’d gone to elementary school together. I’d just come off dating Ryan, and if Ryan was a pushover, Nick was the opposite. He was charming and cool. He smoked cigarettes, drank, had a tattoo, and took me to clubs. Everywhere we went, he knew actors and club promoters. Ryan and I had walked side by side holding hands. If Nick took my hand, he led the way. Even though we were the same age, he seemed like such a man.

  Shannen’s boyfriend and Nick became best friends, so the four of us would go out to clubs and even take vacations together. We all went to Hawaii for an unforgettable vacation. We stayed at the Westin on Maui, and the first surprise was that the paparazzi had actually sent crews to photograph us. It was my first taste of being followed. In the beginning we had the standard Maui vacation: lying out on the beach, snorkeling, hiking, going to a luau. But then Shannen and her boyfriend did the drive to Hana, which is supposed to be the most beautiful road in the world. On a beach in Hana he asked her to marry him and gave her a huge five-carat ring. The next day I heard screaming and crashing coming from their room. Her boyfriend stormed out, and Nick followed him. I heard Shannen yelling at the top of her lungs and crying. I gathered something about him threatening to go home the next day and the engagement being in jeopardy. I stepped out in the hallway to see if I could help. The corridor was strewn with shattered glass, and maids were hurrying this way and that. Shannen informed me that she’d “gotten him back.” She told me that she’d gone down to the gift shop and asked for their most expensive item. It was a two-thousand-dollar crystal dolphin. She’d said, “Charge it to his room,” then had come upstairs and smashed it down the hallway. Hence the glass. Crystal dolphin? Two thousand dollars. That never-taken paparazzi shot of an enraged Shannen hurling it down the hallway? Priceless.

  Back in L.A., I’d been living with my parents in their house. Well, “house” is an understatement. My parents had purchased Bing Crosby’s old estate in Holmby Hills, a pricey, exclusive neighborhood in western L.A. I had my twelfth birthday party in Bing Crosby’s old house, but soon afterward they demolished it and started from scratch. My mother named it “The Manor” and had pens made that said STOLEN FROM THE MANOR. The Manor is supposedly the largest single-family residence in California—about forty-six thousand square feet (slightly over an acre) and 123 rooms. I mean, I can’t say I ever counted the rooms—that’s just what I read in the papers.

  Anyway, we didn’t move in until I was seventeen so, big as it is, it wasn’t exactly a huge part of my youth. And now my mother was encouraging me to move out. This was the woman who had insomnia and sat up every night, watching horror movies and waiting for me to come home. Now the inconsistency of my schedule was tough on her. I was out late clubbing. Or I’d sleep over at Nick’s house without calling home. It was too much. I was planning to move in with a friend, but Nick talked me out of it at the last minute. He said, “We’re always together anyway. Let’s just live together.” So just before I turned twenty, Nick and I moved into our own apartment.

  We rented an apartment in The Dorchester, a full-service building in the Wilshire Corridor, a two-block stretch of desirable condo buildings between Westwood and Beverly Hills. For dinner the night we moved in, I boiled pasta and served it with Ragú sauce from a jar. We ate it on two stools in the kitchen—we didn’t have all our furniture yet—but I felt so grown up. I was on my own for the first time. I was cooking my own meal, and soon I’d be doing my first load of laundry and ironing clothes, folding them and putting them away. I was only nineteen years old and I’d barely had time to fantasize about this life: shacking up with the man I loved. Now here we were. Alone.

  The show was doing well, and Donna was one of the main characters, but I was still one of an ensemble. Then something happened that put me in a different category. I got offered a TV movie. I was sent a script and an offer for one hundred thousand dollars. This was huge. Not only was that a lot of money—my dad still had me on a relatively low salary at 90210—but it was the first time in my life I’d been offered a job without having to audition. I took it.

  The script was called Death of a Cheerleader, though by the time the movie came out (in 1994), it had been changed to A Friend to Die For. It starred me and Kellie Martin, who was then on the family drama Life Goes On and was a big TV name. It actually wasn’t the first time Kellie Martin and I had been in a movie together. Years earlier we’d both been in Troop Beverly Hills, but she’d had a starring role and I’d only had a small part and felt excluded by her and the other child stars. But now that we were in a movie together and on the same level, she was perfectly sweet and seemed to have no memory of the early teen on-set cliqueyness.

  Ironically, in A Friend to Die For I’m a popular cheerleader and Kellie Martin’s character wants to be in my group—to be me—and winds up killing me. My character was a snotty bitch, which was a nice change for me since on 90210 I was “sweet Donna Martin,” the girl next door. In fact, I was so shy and sweet that it was a little scary to do that role. But I thought it might be the turning point for a career in which I’d prove my diverse range…. Well, not so much. To date, that’s essentially the only bitch role I’ve gotten to play.

  Years later, when I went to NBC to pitch my sitcom So NoTORIous, one of the executives said that he was working on TV movies for NBC when A Friend to Die For aired. He remembered its premiere as a milestone. He explained that TV movies come and go in popularity, and they hadn’t been doing well at the time. Only an older generation was tuning in. As I mentioned, before 90210 there weren’t really any teen dramas. Teens only appeared as the youngest players in fam
ily shows. The same thing was going on with TV movies. They all starred Valerie Bertinelli, who was in her mid-thirties. She wasn’t over-the-hill by any means, but definitely not a teen. According to this executive, A Friend to Die For was NBC’s attempt to test the market for TV movies with younger stars. They didn’t know what audience would watch, if any.

  At that time TV movies were on Monday nights up against football. The night it aired, A Friend to Die For took away more than half of the football game’s male viewers. I guess men who like football also like to watch blond cheerleaders die. It was the highest-rated TV movie of the year, and it would be years before another surpassed its numbers. In doing that single movie, I went overnight from being Aaron Spelling’s overprivileged daughter to being an in-demand actress who had scripts pouring in every day. It was a huge milestone in my career.

  Suddenly I was NBC’s golden girl. They wanted me to star in every single TV movie. Before and after work I was at home reading script after script. I did three movies in a row for NBC, but I also did them for the other networks. And no matter which network it was—CBS, ABC, NBC, et cetera—it was one woman-in-peril movie after another. How did they want me stalked? Let me count the ways. Stalked in high school. Stalked on campus. Stalked while skiing. Stalked while stripping. Stalked while skiing and stripping. Stalked while whistling Dixie on the White Cliffs of Dover.

  Because I was the key star, I had some power. Now I had some say in casting and production. I wasn’t smart enough to ask for producing credit, but I should have. There I was, nineteen years old, and I’d be sitting there with the producers, writers, and executives, giving notes like, “This line doesn’t make sense here because we already revealed this in the story.” I loved being a part of the process—guess all those years giving unofficial help to my dad had gotten into my system. (And I don’t mean helping him get rid of dog poo, though sometimes there were similarities.)

  I was crazy busy. On top of 90210, I did TV movies constantly—three a year for two years. The minute 90210 broke for Christmas I’d start shooting a movie, finishing right before we were due back on the set. And during summer break I’d do two more, back-to-back.

  The press started calling me the “TV movie queen,” saying that I was taking over where Valerie Bertinelli had left off. We (meaning my management) started worrying that I’d be pigeonholed, that all this TV queendom would interfere with my ability to get feature films. All I really cared about was playing a great role, no matter what medium. But a young actor’s management always steers her toward features because they’re what make you a big star. Hindsight likes to admonish me that I never should have stopped doing those stalker flicks. They were so lucrative, and at the time that I pulled back from them, I had the highest salary for a female actor in a TV movie.

  The first time I realized that people recognized me was in a mall in L.A. when I heard a group of girls screaming, “Donna!” I looked around for the other Donna, the person who had the same name as my character. Then I realized they were talking to me. To this day I’m still kind of oblivious when people come up and wave. I always think I must know them from somewhere and am about to get in trouble for not knowing their names. I’ve never gotten to the point where I just assume they know me from TV—in a way I hope I never do.

  Before my Monday-night stardom I’d been one of a bunch of young stars in a hit drama. Suddenly I was much more widely known. I’ll never forget being at the register of a store in the Beverly Center—my favorite mall at the time—waiting to pay for something and hearing two nearby girls talk about me. One of them said, “Oh my God! That’s Tori Spelling.”

  The other one said, “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is.” They went back and forth like this pretty loudly until finally one of them said with absolute certainty, “No, it’s not. That girl’s much prettier than Tori Spelling.” Thanks…I think.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  America’s Virgin

  My relationship with Nick changed slowly, but drastically. In the beginning it seemed a result of my increasingly hectic schedule. When we first started dating, we’d go out together. Now as I was arriving home from work, he was leaving to go out. I guess he missed having me with him, so he took my bank card to keep him company. And he must have missed me a whole lot, because to deal with the loneliness, he withdrew the maximum—five hundred dollars—every day. Nick was losing lots of money gambling. One year my whole season’s salary went to the gambling debts. He would play big-stakes poker games, lose twenty-five thousand dollars, and then I would write him a check.

  The concept of managing my money was completely foreign to me, but not to Nick. What better accessory for a high roller than a slick ride? When Nick and I started going out, I still had the same car my parents had given me when I was sixteen—a BMW convertible. Yes, I got a BMW convertible as soon as I could drive. Every teenager’s fantasy, right? Not me. What I really wanted was a red Volkswagen Rabbit convertible. I didn’t want some showy, expensive car that people would notice and hate me for. I was insecure enough as it was. The Rabbit was cute, cool, and, above all, normal. It was my dream car. My mom thought they were too unsafe. She said, “Well, if you were to get a BMW, what color would you want?” I said that I wanted a white or red Rabbit, but on the BMW lot, which my mother insisted we visit, she pointed to a BMW and said it was “great for blondes—that shimmery champagne color,” but I held my ground. Why should they spend three times as much money on a car I didn’t even want?

  At my sweet sixteen party, an all-girls’ luncheon, my parents presented me with…a champagne convertible BMW, with a big bow around it. Surprise! Far be it from me to complain about getting a luxury car for my birthday as a teenager. I’m fully aware that this story is unlikely to make the average reader go, “She wanted one car, but her parents gave her a different, more expensive car? The poor thing!” But, again, it was never about what I wanted. And for some reason, when Donna got a car on 90210, my father made sure it was the same champagne convertible BMW. I have no idea why. Maybe he agreed with my mother that it was the best color for my hair?

  Now, three years later, Nick convinced me we should get rid of the champagne mobile and have two cars for the two of us: a Jeep Cherokee and a black Porsche Carrera. A Porsche! Had I turned into a Porsche kind of girl? I didn’t think about it. I just followed his lead. The Porsche cost nearly half my annual salary. One week after we brought it home, Nick totaled it. To add insult to injury, someone told me that he’d left a club with a girl and was driving her home in our car. When I confronted him, he said, “You’re pathetic. What’s wrong with you? I was in a car accident, and this is what you care about?”

  Nobody had ever spoken to me like that before. But with the money drain came other changes. Suddenly Nick and I had a volatile relationship with crazy fights. He’d tell me I was ugly and, again, pathetic. I’d find notes in his pockets from girls. I’d break up with him, have all the locks changed, then he’d call and I’d take him back. I kept hoping that the guy I’d fallen in love with would come back. I knew he was in there somewhere, and I blamed myself for losing him.

  I didn’t really talk to anyone about Nick and our problems. He’d drawn me away from my family and friends to the point where I was either with him or home alone. It was hard to gain perspective. Part of me was scared of him, and partly I must have liked the drama, but eventually his name-calling came true: I was just pathetic and terrified. I’d give him money and beg him not to leave me.

  My dysfunctional home life eventually started to creep into my work. One time I did a cover shoot and interview for Sassy, the now-defunct kick-ass teen magazine edited by Jane Pratt before she did Jane. The article was supposed to feature me as a young, popular, rich, successful actress. The writer came to the photo shoot to do what writers normally do at photo shoots—write down stuff like, Tori arrives fifteen minutes late with her lapdog in tow. She’s cheerful and apologetic, wearing a babydoll dress, leggings, and Guess mule boots. You k
now the drill (early-nineties style—now every actress is always wearing jeans and a T-shirt).

  Nick was supposed to come with me to the shoot, but he’d gone out all the night before and was too hungover to join me. We got into some fight about him being out so late. I left. I cried on the way, then Nick showed up and the fight continued while I got ready in the dressing room. He accused me of telling people at the photo shoot that he wasn’t being nice. “They’re all looking at me funny. I’m sure you said something.”

  The writer overheard us arguing. What was she supposed to do, ignore it? Sassy wasn’t a fluff magazine.

  I was so excited for the magazine to come out. It was my first solo cover. But I was in for a surprise. There I was on the cover, looking sweet and angelic in a white flowing peasant top, with natural-looking hair and makeup. The photo was captioned America’s Virgin, but the headline read POOR PITTLE RICH GIRL. The article talked about how I had so much in my life but wasn’t exactly living the dream. It said I looked sad, like I’d been up all night crying. I’m sure I did, after my teary drive to the photo shoot. That article could have been a wake-up call, but it wasn’t. Instead, when it came out, all I could think about was how when Nick saw it, I’d get in trouble, and indeed I did. He blamed me, saying, “You provoked me, and now people think I’m a bad guy.”

  Sassy wasn’t the only bad press my relationship with Nick got. In part this was because we’d have fights in public, and he was no stranger to the barroom brawl. But also in the beginning I was young and suddenly in a difficult relationship. I trusted the journalists—I was open with them about what I was going through and how it felt. Turns out that wasn’t such a good idea. I talked too much and I was too honest. I had to learn the hard way that the press is not your friend (but not exactly the enemy either).