Authors: Candy Spelling
A couple of years later, Dean’s oldest son, Dean Paul Martin, was killed in a plane crash. Ironically his plane crashed in the same area where a private charter carrying Frank Sinatra’s mother had crashed ten years earlier. I don’t think Dean was ever able to recover from this loss. We heard from friends that ran into him that he had become a recluse. On occasion other friends saw him alone at restaurants he had always frequented, looking like a ghost of himself.
I will always remember Dean as the kind, talented, and generous person that he was. He was always taking care of everybody else. Aaron had to get used to the fact that Dean was always quick to reach for the check. He was quicker than even Aaron was, which was really something.
I used to say that Dean was truly a Mensch. In Yiddish this means he was a person of goodness and integrity. He wasn’t Jewish, but I liked describing him that way anyway. And because he wasn’t Jewish, in some way it was even more of an honor.
12
The Mother Is Born
I always wanted children. Not just because that’s what women from my generation did without even giving it a second thought, but because I really wanted to be a mother. Like most career-driven men, Aaron didn’t have children on the forefront of his mind. He was busy writing, shooting pilots, and selling shows. Children weren’t planned as meticulously as they are these days. I think we all just assumed it would happen naturally.
After our “Staycation Honeymoon” at the Bel-Air hotel, it seemed like every time somebody congratulated us, it was followed by the question, “When are you having a baby?” I was still writing out thank-you cards for wedding gifts and getting settled into our home and into our new life together. As time went on, I wouldn’t exactly say I had baby fever, but I was definitely taken aback by the question and felt the pressure.
Forty-one years ago there weren’t fertility specialists. I was only twenty-three years old and was counting on Mother Nature to do her part—but she didn’t. As time marched on, years even, I was so frustrated and felt badly about myself. Aaron wasn’t keen on adopting, but it seemed like our only viable
option. He loved me and knew what having children meant to me. He made it clear that he was willing to adopt, even though the process wasn’t an easy one.
We visited an adoption agency and subjected ourselves to all the rigors of the process. The next step was simple—you wait. We waited for what seemed like an eternity, and then finally our names had moved to the top of the list—and wouldn’t you know it, I found out I was pregnant! We were terribly excited.
I was fortunate to have had a healthy pregnancy. I had cravings for salty foods like pickles and caviar, of all things. I also made more than a few trips to my high-school haunt, Dolores’s, for burgers and fries. A month before my due date, on May 16, 1973, I gave birth to a baby girl weighing in at 5 pounds, 2 ounces. It was a very special day. She was such a beauty.
Aaron and I had already chosen her name: Victoria Davey Spelling. I’d had names floating around in my head for years. I gave it a lot of thought because when I was growing up, I knew kids with unfortunate names like Pepper Salters and Ginger Snap. I felt so badly for those kids. I don’t think anyone, least of all the kids, were charmed by those kitschy names. I knew if I had a girl, I wanted to name her Victoria. I always loved the name. It was so feminine, elegant, and regal. The middle name Davey came from Aaron’s father. I knew Victoria would be too long and too formal for people to use. It seemed inevitable that my daughter’s friends and teachers would call her by the nickname “Vicki,” which I really wanted to avoid.
Barbara Stanwyck was a very close and dear friend of ours, so we asked her to be the baby’s godmother. She bought us this gorgeous, giant pram that we used for both of our children and lent to friends over the years. It was actually Barbara who suggested that we take control of the nickname situation by calling our baby girl “Tori” right from the start. It was such a brilliant idea. There was no way to abbreviate Tori, and this name ended up really suiting her. So really it’s Barbara whom Tori has to thank for all the different ways she’s been able to brand herself over the years: InvenTORI, EdiTORIial, sTORI telling, and CelebraTORI.
Apparently my body was on a five-year cycle because in 1978, our son Randall Gene Spelling was born. Aaron and I both really liked the nickname
Randy, so it was easy for us to pick the name this time. We gave him the middle name Gene after my mother and my grandfather. Randy was born on October 9, more than two months ahead of his due date. We were so thrilled again and felt so blessed. Because he was born at six and half months, he was this tiny little baby weighing just over two pounds. It was two and a half months before we could bring him home from the hospital.
Motherhood was daunting but I happily settled into it. It was fascinating to see how fatherhood changed Aaron. When both kids were born, it was very difficult for him because they were such fragile and helpless creatures. Fatherhood also made Aaron more sentimental. He loved those babies more than he ever could have imagined. As they grew up, his favorite thing was to be with them and do anything that would bring smiles to their faces.
I always had a good sense of humor, and once I became a mother, I fully embraced it. I think it was also about this time that I became a fan of American humorist Erma Bombeck and her musings on the dangers of raising children and training husbands. In her May 12, 1974
Dayton Journal Herald
column, “When God Created Mothers,” Bombeck wrote, “When the good Lord was creating mothers, he was into his sixth day of ‘overtime’ when the angel appeared and said. ‘You’re doing a lot of fiddling around on this one.’
“The Lord said, ‘Have you read the specs on this order? She has to be completely washable, but not plastic; Have 180 moveable parts … all replaceable; Run on black coffee and leftovers; Have a lap that disappears when she stands up; A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair; And six pairs of hands.’”
Like any other woman who entered into motherhood, my life was forever changed when I became one. The day that I gave birth to Tori, I promised myself that I would be the perfect mother. I think especially because I had had such an unhappy childhood, I wanted my children to have perfect childhoods. I imagine that all mothers make this promise to themselves. We are convinced that we’ll take all the good qualities that our own mothers passed down to us and use them in even better ways with our own children. Likewise, we promise
to toss out all of the bad and do things for our children the way we wanted it done for ourselves when we were kids.
Aaron had been the skinniest member in a family of five children. When he was growing up, it fell on him to wait in the bread line for the day-old bread. Aaron’s mother, Pearl, was incredibly loving and self-sacrificing. He had many memories of her going to bed hungry so her children could eat. She would pretend she wasn’t hungry and turn in for the night. So for Aaron, giving to our children meant giving them every possible material object they might want. And every celebration, whether it was a birthday, holiday, or anniversary, was designed to be a magical experience that would bring joy to the whole family.
As for me, when I was a child I longed for a mother who would treat me like the child that I was and not like I was her pupil at a finishing school. When I was a little girl, I desperately wanted a dog, but my mother didn’t care for animals. She used to say to me, “When you get married, you can have as many dogs as you want.” Once I was a mother, I wanted my children to have the many things I didn’t have as a child, not the least of which was affection and, of course, a dog or maybe even two.
Our children were definitely allowed to have pets. In fact, I felt like Farmer Gray from the 1950s Terry-Toons comics. At one point we had six dogs, a mixed pack of poodles and bichons. We also had birds, fish, turtles, frogs, and tadpoles. I found the tadpoles absolutely frightening. I had nightmares of the full-grown frogs taking over the house like one of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. I could see them hopping all over the kitchen, in the oven, inside the refrigerator, and up the stairs into our bedroom. Worst of all, I envisioned them hopping up onto our bed and all over me while I was sleeping.
At one point, we also had rabbits. I naively thought they would make cute Easter presents and great pets. I had no idea rabbits would be such hard work. The cages were hard to keep clean, not to mention deodorized. Our fluffy Easter rabbits started off as adorable little bunnies with those unbelievably cute pink ears. Before too long they had evolved into these mad March hares that
fought at night. It was so awful, and I felt so badly for the sweet Angora rabbit who was always being attacked by the white New Zealand rabbit.
Even in separate cages, the rabbits seem to antagonize one another, so we’d wake up every morning to a big mess of hay, rabbit pee, and rabbit poop scattered all around the table where we kept the cages at night. I had been trying to enforce Tori and Randy’s responsibility for cleaning up after their pets, but after about the fourth consecutive day, the kids were done. I knew that we needed to find another home for the rabbits, so I called the owner of the pet shop to see if I could enlist his help. I explained that I didn’t want any money back, I just needed his assistance in rehoming the rabbits. The storeowner refused to help. He explained that Easter was over, and full-grown rabbits were not the popular commodity cute baby bunnies were.
Looking back, I’m sure I wasn’t the first frantic mother calling with a plea for help. In fact, hysterical mothers were probably part of his retail season. I was desperate and needed a solution, so I did what any desperate mother would do. I loaded the bunnies in their cages into the backseat of my BMW and drove straight to the pet shop. When there was no one around, I unloaded the cages and left them at the shop’s front door. I felt like none other than Lucy Ricardo as I sat in my car nervously waiting for someone to come out of the shop and take them in. Finally someone did. That was when I drove away. I called the owner later to confess and apologize. We had a good laugh, and he said he understood. He had been able to find them a new home, so I felt a lot less guilty.
If only the trials and the tribulations of the pet bunnies had been the hardest part of parenting, I would have been in pretty good shape. I honestly can’t think of anything harder than raising a teenager, except of course raising two teenagers. Compared to adolescence, late-night feedings and the “terrible twos” seemed like a cakewalk. The hormonal teenage years are truly the acid test for all parents.
I’ve always said that Tori has “the eye of the tiger.” This was true of her even as a little girl. She knew what she wanted and truly thrived on being Aaron’s daughter. Tori had lots of friends, did well in school, and was accepted
to the University of Southern California on her own merit. When she got serious about being an actress, she met with a talent manager who told her she needed to “be hungry.” Tori took this advice to heart, raised the bar on herself, and I think has exceeded expectations.
My son, Randy, was a different kind of child. He was a sensitive and emotional kid who didn’t like competitive environments. He may be more like his mom in that way. When we tried enrolling him at the prestigious Harvard School (brother school to Tori’s all-girl school), he was very clear that he didn’t want to go there. We got Randy a full-time tutor weeks before school was supposed to start and tried another school that wasn’t the right fit either. Finally we found Montclair Prep in the San Fernando Valley, and it turned out to be the perfect school for Randy. It was a much more nurturing and collaborative environment and truthfully not something I would have thought to look for in a school; I’d gone straight for the academics.
Hindsight really is twenty-twenty. I see now that in my quest to be the perfect mother and create the picture-perfect life for my children, I was too focused on the bigger picture and not enough on the smaller brush strokes. The poet Maya Angelou really hit the nail on the head when she wrote, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
I feel badly that my children felt I wasn’t affectionate enough. I thought I was. Having come from a family where there was no affection, my barometer was obviously off. I thought I was being nurturing by hiring a tutor for Randy and being open to different schools for him. I know now that he needed a different kind of nurturing.
Aaron and I definitely made mistakes, and if I had to do it all over again, I would change certain dynamics. First, and I think this goes on in a lot of households, I would not have allowed Aaron to be the “good cop.” I was always the “bad cop” and even when I wasn’t, Aaron hung the rap on me. I would definitely go back and institute a united front for the benefit of the children and the family as a whole.
With time, I see now that it would have been beneficial for the children to have had responsibilities around the house. It would have been a battle with my overindulgent husband, but we really should have taught the kids to do more for themselves. They should have earned the electronic gadgets, the designer clothes, and the fancy cars.
Both of my children are parents now with their own children. I think they are learning the complexities of being “Mommy” and “Daddy” and how as a parent you are graded on a curve. I don’t think Tori ever forgave me for returning the rabbits to the pet shop. A few years ago, she and her husband got rabbits for their own kids. Instead of fighting, her rabbits multiplied the way those rabbits are known to do.
I guess the good news for them is that these days, there are bunny rescues who can help rehome those rascally rabbits if the situation gets out of control.
13
Family Matters
Aaron’s father, David, died just before we met, but I had a wonderful relationship with Aaron’s mother, Pearl. When I met her, she was living on her own in Texas and used to come visit Aaron in Los Angeles with her sister Lena. The three of them were very close, so Pearl and Lena would come stay in his little two-bedroom house.