Back in the greenroom, Darren was on cloud nine. He was so happy and proud. “This is such a great day,” he said. I couldn’t burst his bubble. (Or his papier-mâché balloon.) But I was so bummed.
AFTER MY DISAPPOINTING encounter with Martha, my desire to be the new, modern Martha Stewart surged. Who could relate to this woman? Sure, her work was great. But people want projects they can actually execute. They want to connect with the host. They want to know it’s okay to make mistakes. I burn things. I spill things. But then I find ways to recover and make it work. Martha Stewart, with her cold, relentless perfection, is a dying breed. Who wants that? Especially in a show about the hearth, for God’s sake! When I went to pitch at TLC, I was hoping (like many others, I’m sure) to create a show that would jump-start my “move over, Martha” campaign.
I told TLC that I wanted to do a broad lifestyle show. I cook, I bake, I decorate, I build, I craft, I design. And I love talking with women about all that. And relationships and mothering. I had the broad idea that I could do a show called something like At Home with Tori, where we did different segments in different rooms of my house. (Except not in Malibu, where I was living when I went in for the meeting. A single cameraman could hardly have fit in Malibu.)
TLC seemed particularly interested in my crafting. They were obsessed with a turkey costume I’d made for Hattie for Halloween and posted on my blog, ediTORIal. They came back to us saying that they were already developing a crafting show and that they thought I’d be the perfect host. Craft Wars, as it was to be called, would be produced by Super Delicious, the same company that did Cupcake Wars for the Food Network.
I told them that I didn’t want to be a competition-show host like Ryan Seacrest on Idol. I wanted them to know how closely I worked with World of Wonder on Tori & Dean. I wasn’t just an executive producer in name. I was hands-on. I had lots of ideas for how the show could work. TLC made it clear up front that the show was already pretty developed, so I asked to meet with Super Delicious to make sure my “executive producer” title wasn’t a vanity thing.
“I want to be in the room with you developing the ideas, picking contestants, consulting on wardrobe.” Everyone was excited and told me that yes, that was what they wanted too.
NOW, IMMEDIATELY AFTER we returned from shooting The Mistle-Tones in Utah, I started shooting on Craft Wars.
My belly was a problem. Someone had taken a picture of me when I was out shopping, and I’d instinctively put my purse in front of me. The universal celebrity pregnancy walk. The purse-block picture had run in the tabloids with “Is she pregnant again?” scrawled over it. It was still too early to go public with the pregnancy. Instead, I bemoaned the gossip to my stylist, Seth.
“Ugh. I still look huge!” I said. “People are going to think I’m pregnant.”
“Please. Who would be that fucking crazy to get pregnant so soon after having a baby? Give me a break,” Seth said.
I was like, Yeah, who would be that crazy?
This went on for a while, with me grilling him about whether he thought the producers would think I was pregnant and him saying, “Of course not. It’s ridiculous. If they say one word about your weight, I’ll remind them: you just had a baby.” He was my biggest supporter.
I always wanted to keep my pregnancies secret for as long as possible, but this pregnancy felt like even more of a fragile, personal condition. I was on pins and needles because of the bleeding. Even though I was told everything was fine, I was superstitious that if I announced it something would go wrong. Now rumors were circulating. Finally, Meghan, my publicist, said, “Everyone thinks you’re pregnant. We need to break the news. Better you announce it than they.” I knew her thinking: By announcing, we would put an end to all the speculation.
First I had to tell Seth the truth. It was the day before we started filming. I said, “Seth, I have to tell you something. I’m pregnant.”
He said, “Ha. Okay.”
I said, “No, really. I’m three months pregnant.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
AROUND THIS TIME, Dean and I broke the news to Stella and Liam. I had a feeling they were going to respond well. I hadn’t forgotten Liam’s recent response when a mom at school had asked him about Hattie. She was three months old and they had taken a bath together for the first time. Hattie had a diaper rash, and her wootle was bright pink. The mom had asked, “How do you like your new little sister?”
Liam responded, “I like her, but I don’t like when her pussy gets red.” He started pulling me toward our car.
The mom looked up at me, shocked.
I just shrugged and said, “ ‘Vagina’ is so clinical.” Was it wrong? We say the word “puss” the way people say “pee-pee” instead of “penis.”
Liam and I were halfway to the car, but I glanced back and saw that the look of shock hadn’t faded. I ran back to her. “Just to clarify: She had a diaper rash but we used some Triple Paste. Totally under control now.”
Now Dean and I sat with the kids on our bed in Malibu, preparing to break the news about number four. Dean took the lead: “You know when you open a letter and there’s good news? Well, we have some good news.”
Letters? What was he talking about? This wasn’t a Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes! We were having a baby. The more he went on about letters, the more baffled Liam and Stella looked. Finally I blurted it out point-blank: “We’re going to have another baby. A baby. Like Hattie.”
Liam said, “Why do you keep having babies?” From his mouth to God’s ears.
I said, “We love children. We love you guys. We want to give you brothers and sisters. You’re okay, though? Okay that we’re having another?”
Liam said, “Yeah, but when you’re done with this one, can we have pillow fights again?”
Maybe Liam was onto something. I’d lose my baby weight doing postpartum pillow fights. It’d be the new mommy craze.
BACK ON CRAFT Wars, not everything was going perfectly. If I learned anything from Tori & Dean it was that I am in some ways my father’s daughter, at least when it comes to looking at a show from the viewer’s standpoint. I don’t live in a Hollywood tower. I’m constantly talking to people through Twitter, my blog, book signings, even being out at the mall. I connect with viewers on a daily basis and feel like I have a clear sense of and instinct for what people want to see. On Tori & Dean, World of Wonder had given me a lot of freedom because they trusted me.
I thought Craft Wars was an excellent idea, but I didn’t agree with the execution. The set looked the same as the producers’ other show, Cupcake Wars. The name was practically the same. The judges sat in the same position. There were rows of crafting supplies like shears, glitter, ribbons, and fabric rolls on the wall where there had been cupcakes. The structure of the show was the same—the contestants worked at stations, participating in timed competitions on a stage. The cameras never recorded their personal interactions. They never followed them out into the real world or home. What worked for cupcakes didn’t completely work for crafting. I wasn’t sure about the contestants they’d picked or the ideas for the challenges. For instance, every challenge had a similar structure. We’re making birdhouses . . . but we’re going to do it using items found in a junk drawer. We’re going to make jewelry . . . out of a boom box. We’re going to make patio furniture . . . out of pool toys. As a viewer there was some intrigue—ooh, how are they going to pull this off? But for crafters, there should be a takeaway. It should give them ideas for things they could actually make and have in their living rooms. I wanted it to be aspirational.
In the producers’ defense, when they were pre-prepping I was out of town making The Mistle-Tones. By the time I arrived with all my brilliant ideas (that’s a bit of self-aggrandizing, people), the show was already prepped.
I had made it clear from the beginning that I was not the person to be the onstage host reading off a teleprompter. Being that impersonal voice telling you the rules of the game isn’t my strong su
it. What I’m good at is talking to people and bantering. If it were Project Runway, I’d be more the Tim Gunn than the Heidi Klum. They said that they wanted me, with all my offbeat personality, and we agreed that I would pop in and offer ideas as the contestants worked. But in the edit room they cut whatever jokes I made and left only technical comments like “Are you sure that’s the best glue to use?”
My fantasy was that Craft Wars would open the door for me to keep working with TLC, and maybe to grow my audience so that one day I would merit my own show. In the end, Craft Wars didn’t end up being the show I hoped it would be. And, not surprisingly, it didn’t get the viewers, it got canceled, and TLC lost interest in me. I’m only at four kids. Apparently you need nineteen to get a multiseason show with them.
To the Manor Born
In April, in the middle of filming Craft Wars, I went to New York to promote celebraTORI, my party-planning book. I was gone for two days, during which Dean moved us from Malibu to our elegant new rental in Westlake Village. I never said good-bye to Malibu. We’d lasted at that little house for less than six months, one of which was spent in Utah.
After selling our Encino house at a loss, we were hoping to make a bit of the money back on Malibu. We’d sunk a lot of money into it. There were all new appliances. And those gorgeous vintage wood floors I thought were my dream. Properties in Point Dume are hot properties. (Remember? That desirable school district?) That’s why we’d moved so fast to buy the house. But our house took a few months to sell, and when it did, it was for two hundred thousand dollars less than we had paid. You hear about those people who flip houses to make money? We were the opposite: flippers who lost major sums of money on every transaction. My restlessness would be our financial ruin.
Our Westlake Village house was in a gated community. I loved the privacy. For the first time since I’d moved out of my first apartment in a high-rise apartment building on Wilshire Boulevard, there were no paparazzi parked on the street outside my house. The house was spacious and grand. I loved that it was on a single floor. That was great for the kids. I loved that there was a big eat-in kitchen attached to a den that opened out to the pool. It was the center of the house and when the kids were playing or eating we could all be right there together. I loved that it was near a lake and that it had views of the lake. There was a mini movie theater, and I fantasized about having family movie nights with freshly made popcorn. (I even ordered a popcorn machine, but we never used it. We literally watched one episode of SpongeBob and The Mistle-Tones. After that we never got the projector to work again.) I loved a lot about the house, but I hated the grandness of it, just as I’d hated the grandness of our Encino house. There were columns throughout the house, a huge chandelier, leaded glass windows, and cold stone floors mixed in with the nice hardwood. And it was way too big. Nine thousand square feet. Crazy! After Malibu, I’d gone to the opposite extreme. Our family was spread out again.
We couldn’t afford to buy a house. Yet now we were living a lie in a grand house. Dean and I are usually good at balancing each other. But when I get excited, Dean gets excited. With this house I’d tried so hard to be careful. We came to look at it three times. It worked for us. But it was far away from everyone we knew and everything we did. Dean and I had to face the enormity of the mistakes we’d made. We never should have left Encino. We’d paid off that house. We’d had money in the bank.
In one of these hard conversations I said, “Well, it was part of our journey.”
Dean said, “Home is not about the house. It’s about the family.”
I said, “I don’t know if I’ve learned that.” If we’d sold Malibu at a profit and had the money to buy another house, I’m pretty sure I would have made another rash decision. Who moves to Westlake Village? It was so fucking random. But here we were.
Liam and Stella started a new school. Liam was in kindergarten and Stella was in preschool. On Parents’ Day, a mom came up to me and said, “We live behind the gates too.” People in the community knew that we were renting, but most probably assumed we could afford to buy if we decided we wanted to.
I said, “Oh, that’s great. We don’t know anyone yet.”
She said, “Have you joined the country club? It’s a great way to meet neighbors.” Our gated community had two clubs, the country club and the lake club. I didn’t really know the difference, but I’d assumed that both were too expensive and I said so.
She said, “The least expensive membership is if you join the Lake Club just for tennis. You can play tennis, use the facilities, and go to the restaurant—you just can’t use the golf course.”
I said, “Oh! That sounds good!” It would be great to have a restaurant we could walk to without leaving the gates.
She said, “It’s not bad at all. It’s like forty thousand dollars a year.”
Holy shit. Well, that was never gonna happen. I didn’t want to sound lame, so I said, “Oh yeah, that’s pretty good.” Then, because now I was really curious, I asked if she knew how much it was with the golf.
She turned to her husband to ask. He smiled and said, “They just reduced the cost from two hundred to one hundred.” One hundred thousand dollars to join the golf club. Good thing I can’t stand golf.
The saddest and most ironic thing about our move to Westlake Village was that it was the demise of our farm. The whole reason we’d left Encino was to indulge my fantasy of having a place to raise the animals. But the contract for the homeowners’ association explicitly said, “No livestock.” We’d moved from a farm with no house to a house with no farm.
It said no livestock, but I was hoping to bend the rules. We’d made an anonymous call to the homeowners’ association asking about pigs. They said that a couple owners had them and that they “turned the other way when pigs were involved.” Hank, it seemed, had a free pass. We didn’t ask about the chickens and the goats. I didn’t want to alert the authorities. But we knew from the start that our rooster, Jackson, had to go. He was really loud, what with all the cockadoodledooing at the crack of dawn.
Aw, Jackson. He wasn’t quite as friendly as my chicken Coco, but he was cute and fluffy and pretty domesticated. We’d raised him from a baby. He knew his name and would follow me around. I wanted to find a good home for him, but I had no idea where to begin. Who was dying for a rooster?
When we moved from Malibu we left Jackson there in his coop. Someone went to feed him every day. Meanwhile I asked everyone on the planet if they wanted a rooster. Then I had a stroke of genius. I remembered that my agent Gueran represented Patrick Dempsey. Gueran had once told me that I would love Patrick’s wife, Jill—because she loved farm animals as much as I did.
I e-mailed Gueran: “I know this is a long shot. This is Jackson. Do you think the Dempseys would want him?” I attached a picture.
Literally five minutes later I got an e-mail back from Gueran. “Bingo!” Jill had shown the picture of Jackson to her kids, and they loved him and wanted to take him. She told Gueran to give me her contact info.
The Dempseys decided to build Jackson his own coop. In the meantime, I tried to justify the move to myself. He’d be okay. He was upgrading celebrities. From McDermott to McDreamy.
Before I knew it, the Dempseys had agreed to take the two goats, too. My farm was being pulled out from under me. They had a huge space for them. The farm I dreamed of. See—it could be done! That’s the difference between starring on a network drama versus a cable reality show. But one thing I actually learned from my brief Malibu experience was that having the animals outside, with plenty of room to roam about, wasn’t my ideal either. I kind of liked it best when we lived in Encino and they were all bumbling around the kitchen with us. The goat chewed the corner of Liam’s “all about me” board. Every time anyone opened the fridge, Hank would burrow his head in and grab the leftover yellowtail scallion rolls. They felt like part of the family.
Months later, while I was in the hospital, Dean dropped Hank off at the Dempseys’ too. When he told
me, he said, “I did it for him. It wasn’t fair for him to live here.” I hate to admit it, but I was kind of relieved to see Hank go. He wasn’t the pig of my dreams. All he cared about was food. If you didn’t have food he wasn’t interested. In the yard he’d charge us to see if we had food. I was scared of my own pig.
Westlake Village was an answer, but in my heart of hearts I knew from the start that it wasn’t the end of my wanderlust. It was a stopgap.
Complications
Craft Wars was filming in downtown L.A., over an hour away from our new place. My call time was six in the morning, so we left my house at five. We frequently worked until nine P.M., and I spent most of the day on my feet, in high heels, pregnant. Sometimes, after a particularly long or grueling day, the production company would put me up in the Ritz-Carlton downtown so I wouldn’t have to drive all the way back home just to turn around and head straight back. (NB: It wasn’t a fancy Ritz—just one of those business-y ones that might as well be a Marriott. There might have been a pillow menu, but that was the only Ritz of it.) Halfway through, when they found out I was pregnant, they gave me a chair to sit down in between takes.
One night, at the end of April, I stayed at the Ritz after a super-long day. My makeup artist, Brandy, kept me company. The next morning, I woke up, went to the bathroom, and sat down to pee. It was like a horror movie. The toilet filled with blood. I had the same terror response as last time: my heart dropped into my toes, and my fingers went numb. I yelled for Brandy: “I’m bleeding!”
Spelling It Like It Is Page 9
