Stories From Candyland (12 page)

The guard was speechless. I was proud. Annie and I got into the elevator.

Sure enough, the decision about whom to hire became clear. Even without a scorecard, without a word or a look, Annie’s body language told me which expert to choose. She let me know whom she would welcome into our home. We hired the appraiser on the spot.

I remembered that story when I recently started interviewing real estate agents to sell The Manor. I was looking for sincerity and warmth, because I’d spent seventeen years caring for this house. My puppy, Madison, liked—no, loved—almost everyone, so I didn’t know how effective she would be. But I thought it was worth a try. The real estate agent would be spending a lot of time showing my house. I wanted him or her to fit in.

At the beginning of every meeting, once everyone had settled in, I called my assistant and asked her to send in Madison.

Like clockwork, I would then hear footsteps on the marble floor—Madison running faster and faster down the hall as she got closer to the family room, where we were sitting.

Two agents were quite smart, and had really done their homework. One brought treats for Madison, so it was love at first sight. Another brought her a squeaky toy. I thought Madison would have gone anywhere with her. Those two were in like Flynn, as far as Madison was concerned.

It shouldn’t have been hard for all the real estate agents to figure out I was a dog person. They’d all toured the house before we met, and my home is full of paintings of dogs, including my favorite,
I’se Biggest
, with the girl and her Saint
Bernard, and even an oil painting of dogs playing poker, which hangs prominently in Aaron’s game room. We have statues of dogs, sculptures of dogs, topiaries shaped like dogs in the gardens, and even a dog grooming area of the laundry room, complete with adjustable table, sink, blow dryers, and the latest in products.

Of the remaining three real estate agents, Madison clearly didn’t like two of the teams. One man was obviously not a dog person, so Madison wanted no part of him. I think he was relieved that Madison didn’t want to be petted. I crossed him off the list.

Another agent was forcing himself to be friendly with Madison, but he was clearly uncomfortable. I didn’t like his marketing plan anyway.

Look, everybody, look.

Listen to the dogs.

They know who’s good and who’s not.

At least with appraisers and Realtors.

Thank you, Annie.

Thank you, Madison.

Thank you, Spot.

And thank you, God, not only for creating dogs, but for your generosity in allowing
GOD
spelled backward to become
DOG
.

Chapter 8
Size Does Matter, Especially in Hollywood

Dick Powell’s office was typical of big-shot digs. Once you entered, his desk was so far away that by the time you started walking toward the chair opposite his desk, he grew to be 15 feet tall and I shrunk to 15 inches.

M
y husband remmembred that life-changing 1956 job interview in his autobiography,
Aaron Spelling: Prime-Time
Life
. When he told me the story years earlier, I told him my own impressions of offices and how they defined the man.

Ozzie Nelson didn’t have one.

Jim Anderson’s was really tiny, and seemed to have only a desk, one pen, and a coatrack.

Ward Cleaver shared his with Lumpy’s father, and it was small.

Sheriff Andy Taylor not only shared his with his deputy, but the jail was right there, too.

Beverly Hillbillies
banker Mr. Drysdale’s was fairly large, but people were always charging in and disrupting his schemes.

Major and astronaut Anthony Nelson had an office that was big enough for a genie to pop in and out of all the time.

I realized that as likable and as good as these TV characters probably were, none was very successful. If they had been, they would have had much bigger offices.

It was going to be different when I had a successful husband. He’d have a big office.

I guess we succeeded. In a 1987 story, Stephen Farber of
The New York Times
alluded to Aaron Spelling’s “enormous office” and said that Aaron referred to it as “my own ‘Fantasy Island.’ ”

And then, of course, on-screen TV offices changed, thanks to my husband. Blake Carrington and Alexis Carrington Colby had “enormous” offices by television standards.

Of course, when I learned more about television, I realized
there was no point in characters in
Father Knows Best
or
The Beverly Hillbillies
having large offices, as it just would have wasted time to have the camera pan the office or make characters walk extra steps to get to their desks or phones.

One Hollywood office, however, stood above all others. From the minute I read my first movie magazine, I realized that the standard for all time for executive offices was the big office that belonged to little Louis B. Mayer.

When it came to exercising his power by intimidating people with his grandiosity, Mayer, co-founder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, didn’t seem to miss a trick.

My movie magazines recounted how when the stars were called to Mayer’s office, they would have to pass beautiful cinema artifacts, scores of movie posters, five or six assistants scurrying about, and then finally arrive at the mammoth desk of diminutive Mr. Mayer. I envisioned the glamorous Greta Garbo and dashing Clark Gable, usually so self-assured, heading to Mayer’s desk to ask for a raise or a favor and getting increasingly timid as they approached.

Now that was good mogul psychology. I knew I had to remember that for my future husband’s own office—never dreaming, of course, that my future husband would become a Hollywood mogul himself.

I kept notes: Mayer’s secretaries sat in an anteroom that could have passed for any successful executive’s office. But that was just the entry hall. The office itself had mammoth walnut doors that opened to a completely white room. Sixty
feet of white carpet transported visitors past white walls, under white ceilings, past white chairs and sofas. Touches of silver were everywhere, just to add some flash.

And then people would encounter Mr. Louis B. Mayer, all five-foot-five and 175 pounds of him, seated behind a white-leather-sided, crescent-shaped desk.

Wow! I knew no one was thinking, “He’s really short.” No, the image he projected was clear: “This is the most powerful man in show business.”

When I learned that the president’s office in the White House was less than thirty-six feet long and twenty-nine feet across, I appreciated Mayer even more. That man really knew how to make a statement. This showed in his movies, of course, including
The Wizard of Oz
,
Easter Parade
, and
Gone With the Wind
.

Over the years, whenever I visited an important person’s office, I made mental notes. I tried not to judge the executive by the size of his office, but I could never get the image of Mayer’s intimidating and daunting white office out of my mind.

Aaron and I both laughed about how much the size of an office colored our views of Hollywood and success. I made more and more notes, knowing they might be useful one day once my own mogul’s empire had grown. As my husband’s company became more successful, had more shows and movies, and added more and more staff, he always needed more space.

Finally, in the late 1970s, it was time to create the signature
Aaron Spelling office. I didn’t tell him that’s what I was doing. I just said that I wanted him to have an office that would accommodate all his needs and staff.

He loved Hollywood, so of course he wanted an office in Hollywood. Over the years he’d had offices at 20th Century-Fox, ABC, and on Wilshire Boulevard’s “Miracle Mile,” but he wanted to be in Hollywood proper.

We found space at the historic Warner Hollywood studios, and took over the space where some of television’s biggest successes had been produced. The offices previously housed Quinn Martin, whose QM Productions was responsible for
Streets of San Francisco
,
Barnaby Jones
,
Cannon
,
Twelve O’Clock High
,
The Fugitive
,
The FBI
, and others.

Warner Hollywood had many great Hollywood stories. In 1922 the newly built studio became the Pickford-Fair banks Studios, the home of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Several years later the studio was renamed United Artists Studio, after Pickford and Fairbanks united with Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, and Samuel Goldwyn. In the late 1930s, Goldwyn renamed it again, and it became the Samuel Goldwyn Studios. Over the years, Fairbanks’s
Robin Hood
and classics such as
Wuthering Heights
,
Guys and Dolls
,
The Best Years of Our Lives
, and
West Side Story
were shot there. Warner Bros. bought it, and the name became Warner Hollywood Studios just before Aaron moved in.

It was a perfect location. Aaron had built the amazing
Love Boat
set—complete with swimming pool and life-size
exteriors and interiors of the ship itself—at Warner Hollywood, and a lot of
Dynasty
was shot on a sound stage on the lot.

The space already had a great legacy, and Aaron was going to continue its tradition. We didn’t set out to top the last generation of moguls. We just wanted a space befitting a man who personified show business and where characters from Charlie and his Angels to the Carringtons and others from
Dynasty
would fit in; a place where the members of
The Mod Squad
would go to research the history of Hollywood for a case, or where Mr. Roarke could send an executive seeking the ultimate fantasy.

Let me walk you through it.

Guests would enter downstairs and then wait in a reception area and see the imposing
AARON SPELLING PRODUCTIONS
plaque. Very few of them saw the private dining room and other offices. The dining room was furnished in antiques, with a beautiful armoire and a buffet where we stored the china.

And then they would be escorted to Aaron’s top assistant’s office, and,
poof
, the Hollywood magic would happen.

The start of their journey to see Aaron began, with a flourish, when his assistant pushed a button and the offcenter wooden doors to his office swung open. There, forty-eight feet away, was Aaron sitting in his high-backed leather padded chair at his huge desk.

It was a long walk to get to him. Even I felt like what Greta Garbo or Katharine Hepburn must have experienced
walking toward Mayer, with every step, losing her confidence in getting whatever she was going to demand. Don’t worry. I always regained my confidence. I’m sure Garbo and Hepburn got what they wanted, too.

I’m not sure how we arrived at the distance of forty-eight feet. It was definitely a smaller space than Louis B. Mayer had, although larger than the Oval Office. But ours wasn’t taxpayer-supported, so we could spend whatever we wanted without having to worry about voters wondering how their taxes were being spent.

If you’re like me and not good at numbers, forty-eight feet is the height of the Garfield balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Each of the giant steel letters in the famous Hollywood sign is forty-five feet tall. The distance from Aaron’s office entrance to his desk was three times the length of Lady Liberty’s hand and a few inches longer than her right arm. Each column in the Lincoln Memorial is forty-four feet. Lindbergh’s
Spirit of St. Louis
, which in 1927 took him across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, had a forty-six-foot wingspan. (I saw the plane at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum later; forty-six feet is quite a distance.) The wingspan of the Wright Brothers’ 1902
Wright Flyer
was just over forty feet.