Then one day the three of us—Dean, Mike, and I—were out together at a little coffee shop in Beverly Hills. This was before the news about the end of my marriage and the start of my relationship with Dean had broken (well, the Enquirer had run a story, but it had passed without the rest of the press taking notice). But now, while we were having coffee, the paparazzi appeared at the parking structure directly across the street as if they knew where to find us. This was a big deal. We were doing our best to lay low, and it hadn’t been hard. At that time the paparazzi didn’t follow us everywhere; it was something of a paparazzi lull in my life. So where had they come from? How did they know where to find us? Had Mike tipped them off? We couldn’t be sure, but Dean talked to Mary Jo about our concerns. Ultimately we stopped being friends with him and his wife, and Mary Jo moved back to Toronto, so their friendship dropped off as well.
Then recently Mary Jo moved back to L.A. We heard through Jack that she had picked up her friendship with Mike and his wife again. The two families were together every weekend. But time had passed. Besides, it wasn’t exactly our business who Mary Jo was friends with anyway.
When Mary Jo moved into her new house in L.A., Dean helped furnish Jack’s room. He bought Jack a bed, a desk, new curtains. Then Mary Jo decided that Jack needed an armoire since the room didn’t have a closet. She told Dean that she wanted to hire Mike to build it. This made sense: Mike had always done construction on the side. In fact, he and Dean had done some construction jobs together. Dean told Mary Jo that he’d pitch in to pay for half the armoire.
A while later, Dean got an email from Mike asking for money for the armoire. Dean explained, “This is between you and Mary Jo. I told her what I’d contribute.” Mike persisted and started to get personal, rehashing things from when Dean and I first met. Dean stopped responding to Mike and called Mary Jo to remind her that they’d had an agreement about how much he would contribute to the cost of the armoire. He told her that she’d have to work things out with Mike.
Three weeks to the day after Dean and Mike’s final exchange, there was a front-page article in Star magazine with the headline, “Inside Tori’s Loveless Marriage. Best pal tells all.” And there it was, inside Star, a photo of Mike and Dean, arm in arm. Mike didn’t even try to hide that he’d given the magazine the story. He quoted Dean as saying that I had the face of a horse and that marrying me “was going to be good for my career. I’m going to have millions now.” It was hard-core. Really shitty stuff. Was that stressful enough to give someone severe stomach problems? I’ll say.
If that weren’t enough, Mike had given Star snapshots of me that had been taken at his family’s Christmas party during the six months that we were friends. A bunch of us were standing on his front lawn. He’d put a wire reindeer out on the lawn. I was tipsy and we were all joking around. I can’t have been the only one who thought it would be funny to pretend to hump the reindeer. Now here it was, his photo of me humping a reindeer like a girl gone wild.
The whole article was so boldly outrageous that I had to wonder if there was anything to it. I said to Dean, “Is it at all possible that you ever maybe said something to him that he maybe misconstrued, like ‘At least I’ll always have money to support Mary Jo and Jack’ or anything like that?”
Dean said, “No way.” But that didn’t matter. From the day that article appeared, through the rest of the summer, every magazine was obsessed with our “loveless” marriage. No, not stressful at all.
When these stories come out, Dean always wants to say something. But my publicist always tells us, “Say nothing. If you say nothing, it goes away faster.” So we didn’t make a statement. I tweeted about it, saying “Star magazine says we have a loveless marriage.” I told my tweeps not to believe it. Dean did something similar. But the injustice lingered.
Was it a coincidence that Mary Jo’s book, Divorce Sucks, was published a few weeks after the Star article? The article mentioned her and the forthcoming book and included a photo of her with Jack as a baby (though the caption said it was Lola, Jack’s adopted sister). A few weeks later Star had the exclusive on excerpts from Mary Jo’s book, which they ran three weeks in a row. Which was also not stressful in the least. It was like a weekly massage.
In the middle of all of this, Jack went home to his mother’s backyard Labor Day party. One of the guests was Mike. A month later I was in the hospital for my stomach.
The loveless marriage story was only half the tabloid trouble. Before they bought Mike’s story, Star had decided that I had anorexia. They ran a few stories about it and the other tabloids followed suit. I took all the negative commentary about my weight to heart. I wasn’t starving myself. When I made an effort to lose the baby weight, my body just kicked back in. I returned to the same weight I’d been before I had babies. People had seen me pregnant for two years. They might not remember, but I’ve naturally always been super tiny.
People didn’t think they were being insulting when they told me I looked too thin. For the record: “too thin” is not a compliment. It may be more socially passable than “too fat,” but to me it said something was wrong with the way I looked. Maybe I’d gone too far when I tried to lose the baby weight. Maybe I was too thin. I didn’t have an eating disorder. But I decided I could stand to gain five or ten pounds. So that summer in Malibu I let myself eat whatever I wanted. I had fun. I gained weight and outgrew my tiniest jeans. I was kind of proud that I’d gained weight. I knew I wasn’t too thin anymore.
During the summer all the tabloids were obsessed with my weight, and then it died down. Then came the pictures of me humping a reindeer and the loveless marriage. That became the new big news. Then that died down too. But when I went into the hospital, it all started up again. I was ninety-five pounds and living a loveless marriage all over again. My publicist says that I started it by tweeting about my health. She told me not to tweet about my health anymore. Instead of taking her wise advice (Sorry, Jill!), I got mad at the tabloids. One week I’d seen the same photo in two magazines. One magazine said, “Tori’s anorexic,” and the other magazine wrote, “Look how fab this mom looks!” Then the next week that magazine had joined the anorexic chorus. I wanted to call them to say, “But last week you thought I looked great!”
So now, just after I was released from the hospital, I lashed out at Star magazine in my own not-very-aggressive way by tweeting that they should check their facts. I wrote, “They should come weigh me. I weigh 107 pounds.”
I’m honestly not hung up about my weight. I’m not anorexic. But 107 wasn’t my actual weight. My scale said I weighed 104. But Star said I was 95 pounds. Nine pounds didn’t seem like a big-enough difference, so I added a few pounds; 107 sounded like a good number. Nobody would make up 107.
The next day I got an email from my publicist saying, “How should I respond?” (So professional, she chose not to remind me that I brought this on myself.) Attached was an email from Star magazine saying, “We want to take up Tori on her weight challenge. When can we come weigh her?” Shit. Now I was busted.
I’d been out of the hospital for a week. When I got the email from my publicist I was on my way to my gastroenterologist for a follow-up visit. Emails had been flying back and forth all day between Star and my publicist. She was saying, “Tori’s fine. She’s healthy.” So by the time I went into the doctor, I was feeling very sensitive about the whole weight issue.
I’d been to this doctor twice before for my stomach problems, and each time the same nurse had weighed me. This time she said, “We can get your weight or we don’t have to.” Why was she offering me a choice? Had she read the tabloids? Did she think I had an eating disorder? Enough!
I let forth a defensive stream: “Why would you not want to take my weight? Don’t you take everyone’s weight? I’m not different. You can take my weight.” The poor nurse looked terrified. I was a crazy person.
Defiantly, I took off my boots and got on the scale. It said 103. Then the nurse wrote down 101 on my chart. I s
aid, “Why’d you put one-oh-one?”
She stammered, “Two pounds for clothing . . . ?”
I said, “Two pounds! But I took off my boots. I’m wearing leggings. I didn’t even wear a bra today, for God’s sake!”
The poor nurse—she was going about her day, doing what she always did, and I was attacking her, a complete psycho. She said, “Don’t worry about it. Most people like when I take their weight down a couple of pounds.”
I backpedaled, back to my meek, overpolite self. “Oh, you’re right. Okay, thanks.”
As I drove home, my publicist called. She said, “So, what did the scale say? If it’s one-oh-seven, we can send it to Star and the whole thing will be resolved.”
I said glumly, “It wasn’t the right weight.”
• • •
While I was in the hospital, I was in pain, I missed Patsy’s surgery, and the tabloids had (another) field day speculating on my afflictions. But for all that, the hospital was kind of nice. They had excellent mac ’n’ cheese, which I ordered every night. I watched soaps, Oprah, and The View. It was very relaxing, although I will confess that I was a little annoyed to see that Heidi Montag was cohosting The View. When I had cohosted a year or two earlier, I felt like I’d been handpicked, that I was being groomed to be a talk show host. Now I watched the show for two days in a row and saw first Heidi Montag, then Khloe Kardashian cohosting. Apparently the bar for guest hosts wasn’t fantastically high. So much for my talk show host fantasies. And Heidi got to cohost when Barbara Walters was there. She sat right next to her. Barbara Walters wasn’t present when I cohosted. That added envy to my disappointment.
During my convalescence Mehran visited; Jenny visited. Bill and Scout came in as I was being wheeled into my room after a battery of tests. Sticking out from behind the closed curtains I saw a pair of white stockinged feet lying on the bed. As I rolled closer I saw that it was Bill decked out in a costume. He was a nurse-stripper. Scout was next to him, wearing a doctor costume. They’d gone to such lengths to cheer me up, but the truth is I was in good spirits. If stress was the root of my stomach pain, well, the hospital was the perfect place to recover. I was sleeping more than I ever did at home. I was taking a break from my BlackBerry. I had my weeklies and my soaps. Dean stayed with me every night. It was much more relaxing than Malibu. Pitiful though it was, the hospital was my real vacation.
Just Tori
Patsy’s surgery had happened without me, but as soon as I got out of the hospital, all the McDermotts embarked on a pilgrimage to Patsy. Seeing Patsy was the point, but I’d always imagined driving across the country with my family while the kids were still young. I definitely wanted to stop everywhere to shop, but I mainly loved the idea of taking two weeks to decompress, to just be a mom traveling with my family without flying. We would make scrapbooks, full of leaves and souvenirs and crafts we made along the way. It would be a trip that we could repeat, a tradition that would grow with the kids. The Guncles signed on right away, our film crew decided to come along, and we were off.
Our first stop was Peggy Sue’s 50’s Diner in Yermo, California. Peggy Sue’s was an original restored diner with a huge collection of Hollywood memorabilia, a “dinersaur” park, and the vast souvenir shop of my dreams. Peggy Sue, a former starlet, and her husband, Champ, run the place. We ate, shopped in the souvenir shop, visited the dinosaur sculptures, fed the ducks in the duck pond, then walked to the parking lot. As we approached our RV, a huge tour bus pulled up and ejected a pack of about fifty tourists, all with cameras. One middle-aged woman waved frantically at me, shouting “Tori! Over here! Tori!” I turned and smiled. Fifty cameras bobbed up all at once. I waved at them. Then the first woman came closer and whispered, “Nobody here knows who you are but me.”
I said, “Oh, that’s okay. I’m just Tori.” I smiled and posed for all the tourists who had no idea who I was, then climbed into the RV, where Scout was in hysterics. Between gasps he said, “A bunch of people want to take your picture—so flattering—but someone has to ruin it by telling you that nobody has any idea who you are. That’s your life in a nutshell!”
When we planned the trip east, we researched stops along the way that seemed kitschy and kid-friendly, so our next major stop was not far from Peggy Sue’s—a place on Route 66 called Stewart’s Petrified Wood in Holbrook, Arizona. It was a quirky place that sold petrified wood, meteorites, and dinosaur bones. Scattered through the desert land were large plaster tepees and, incongruously, more of the dinosaur sculptures that were emerging as a tourist trap phenomenon. So random. This place also had an ostrich farm. I couldn’t help picturing the owners sitting on some porch, drinking beer, watching the sun set, and coming up with the next crazy feature to lure drivers roadside.
In the shop we were welcomed by a funky-looking character named Gazelle. She showed us beautiful polished meteorites that looked like sliced agate and cost over $500. As soon as I saw the price tags, I picked Liam up. I couldn’t believe that people driving along the highway would drop big bucks on these rocks, but Gazelle told me that “everyone” came there. Tom Cruise had stopped by, Jerry Seinfeld had bought one of her meteorites, and she was bringing in a million dollars a year. I was impressed. That sounded like good business to me. I told Gazelle that I might try to find some meteorites and go into the meteorite business for myself. She got all worked up and said, “You’re funny. I want you to live next door to me. You could be my neighbor.” Then she saw me looking at agate bookends and said, “I like you. I’m going to give you a discount. I like you and you’re funny.” She sold me the $250 bookends for $75.
Then some more customers came in and I heard Gazelle saying to them, “I like you. I’m going to give you a discount because I like you.”
I felt betrayed. When the other travelers left, I said to her, “I thought you liked me, Gazelle. I thought we had something special. Then you went and said the same thing to those people.”
Gazelle said, “Maybe I liked them too.”
In addition to the bookends, I bought some arrowheads and pieces of what Gazelle told me was petrified dinosaur poo for Liam and Stella’s scrapbooks. Then we went out to the ostrich farm, where Dean held out Liam’s hand to help him feed the ostrich. I watched in silence, impressed and horrified at the same time. I never would have allowed that perfect little hand near that unpredictable beak.
Then, as we were leaving the ostrich farm, a couple walked in. It was an older couple, both with gray hair. As soon as I saw the woman, I gasped. Oh my God, she looked exactly like Dean’s mother. I never had a chance to meet Dean’s mother—she died when he was fifteen and she was in her fifties—but I’d seen many pictures. I was certain that this was exactly what she would have looked like as an older woman if she’d lived longer. It took my breath away. I couldn’t stop staring at her. They were identical.
We were wrapping up our visit. Dean was already in the RV with the kids. Scout, Bill, and I were finalizing our purchases. I told Bill and Scout about Dean’s mother. They thought I should bring Dean out to see her, but I wasn’t sure. What if he didn’t see the resemblance? Would it bother him that I was presuming to recognize his mother, the mother I’d never met?
I decided I couldn’t let this opportunity pass. I went to the RV to get Dean. As I led him back to the shop I said, “I could be totally wrong, please don’t get mad at me, but there’s a woman here who reminds me of your mother.” I brought him to her and we started chatting. She and her husband had an RV too. They collected something—rocks or stones—and ran a business. I asked if we could take a picture with them and they agreed. Then we went back to our RV. I said to Dean, “What did you think?”
He said, “Yeah. Wow. It’s different, because she doesn’t have a Canadian accent, but her face looks exactly like my mom.” He wasn’t angry, but he also wasn’t as excited or emotional as I was. For me it was like she’d come back from the dead, but it didn’t feel like that for him since he (obviously) knew her so well in life. But later
we’d have reason to think twice about this woman and what that short encounter meant in our lives. It had been a full first day.
Our first night we went to a motel. It was my first time staying in a cheap motel. (I’ve stayed at resorts where you enter your bungalow through an outside door, but those are fancy resorts. I’m pretty sure they don’t count.) And at $29.99 per night, I’m pretty sure it was the least amount of money I’ve ever spent to stay anywhere, including my own house if you amortize the mortgage.
The kids were fine. They could sleep anywhere. The same wasn’t true for me. All I know about motels I learned from the movie Psycho. The friendly guy at the front desk—wasn’t he a little too friendly? But I was game. This was part of the adventure. I wanted to see America. Until we got to our room. The air conditioner was a box sitting on the rug. Next to the box was a stain that looked like blood. What else could it be? It had to be blood! I pointed it out to Dean. He laughed and said, “Stay here while I grab the luggage?” I nodded and gulped.
The door closed behind Dean. As I stood in the doorway my vision panned from the bloodstain over to the kids. They were on the bed, rolling on the comforter like happy puppies. How cute . . . Holy crap, the comforter! I’d seen Dateline or some other show talking about the skankiness of hotel comforters. They were worse than a communal bowl of after-dinner mints. My children were probably playing in a germ pit of fecal matter and dried semen (no offense to Motel 6). I grabbed Stella and Liam and snatched the comforter out from under them, throwing it in a heap in the corner.
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