For one of my movies I did an interview with Playboy. Plenty of major actors do it. As part of the interview Playboy likes to pose semi-risqué questions such as “What’s your favorite body part?” or “Where have you had sex in public?” I was as candid and irreverant as usual. One of the questions was “If you could have a threesome with a famous Hollywood couple, who would it be?” I said Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Next thing you know, it was all over the National Enquirer and other tabloids: “Tori Spelling is looking for a ménage à trois.” Hello? They asked.
The day that Playboy interview came out, Army Archerd, a Variety columnist who was an old friend of my father’s, called him at the office. My dad had no idea about the interview, and Archer took him off guard, asking, “How do you feel about her article in Playboy? Did you know she says her butt is her favorite body part?” My dad didn’t know that it was a respectable interview to give. I mean come on, Jimmy Carter did it. Regrettably, my dad replied, “It certainly doesn’t sound like Tori. It’s certainly not the Tori I know.” The next day Variety’s gossip column announced that my father was ashamed of my candid “sex article,” and every other magazine followed suit.
At the time I was new to being tabloid fodder, and this seemed like a big deal. Since we never talked directly about feelings in my family, when difficult issues arose, we often wrote letters back and forth—even when we were all in L.A. and/or reachable by phone. Now I wrote my father a letter saying, Don’t you know when you’re talking to press you can’t say things like that? It always gets misconstrued. I did nothing wrong and now look what I’m dealing with. My being in the public eye had triggered an in-print family conflict. This time it was short-lived—my father quickly apologized. But in the not-too-distant future the tabloids would be the primary medium in which my family drama played out.
Some of the snark I faced had nothing to do with my inexperience dealing with the press. It was just the nature of the beast. There was a story in the Globe when I was seventeen or eighteen. I saw myself on the cover and bought the tabloid for the first time. I thought it was cool that I was now considered a big enough star to be tabloid fodder. I waited only until the first red light on my drive home to flip to the page where I appeared. There I found a photo of me when I was maybe twelve next to a current photo. Circles and arrows pointed out all the plastic surgery I’d supposedly had done. It was no secret that I’d had my “gigantic” self-image-demolishing nose done when I was sixteen. But the article went on to say I’d had my chin reshaped, cheek implants added, and some ribs removed. There were quotes from people saying, “I went to grade school with her and she looks totally different now.” Um, it’s called puberty. Idling at the now-green stoplight, I started to cry. And that was before I knew that the plastic surgery myth would shadow me for years, effective immediately.
The next time I learned about my own plastic surgery in the press came after I’d gone to Hawaii with Nick, Shannen, and her boyfriend. In Hawaii, Nick and I had been seduced into buying a parrot as a pet. It was an eclectus parrot we named Charlie even though it was a girl. She was gorgeous: bright red with a rainbow tail. When we were home, we’d let her out of her cage, and she’d fly around the apartment imitating me, saying, “Hi, Charlie bird. Charlie’s a pretty girl.” But I was working long hours, and Charlie wasn’t getting enough attention. Not only that, I suspect that Nick was mean to her. I heard him screaming at her, and one time I saw him blow cigarette smoke in her face. Poor Charlie started to rebel. Out of her cage, she’d sneak up behind you very quietly, then lunge and bite your Achilles tendon. One time she literally chased me and my friend Jenny down the hallway, squawking and flapping. We hid in the bathroom as she hurled herself at the door for forty-five minutes. It was scary and heartbreaking.
Despite the bad behavior, I still loved Charlie. Every night when I came home, I’d go up to her cage, say, “Hi, Charlie bird,” and kiss her through the cage. But one night when I walked in, she didn’t say hello. When I put my face up to the cage, instead of tapping me gently with her beak, she grabbed my nose and wouldn’t let go. When she finally released me, I thought, God, that really hurt.
I walked into the bathroom to assess the damage, and all I could see was blood pouring onto my shirt. In a panic, I called Nick. “Charlie just attacked me. Can you take me to the emergency room?” He said, “I can’t do it. I’m on the freeway on my way to the casino. Call your mother.” Then he hung up. Far be it from me to stand in the way of him spending thousands more of my hard-earned dollars.
My mother came to pick me up. On the way to the hospital she had the presence of mind to call a plastic surgeon. When he examined me, he said that if the bite had been any deeper, my nose would have come off.
Back at 90210 they temporarily wrote me out of the scenes, but after a couple days I had to go in and be on camera with a Band-Aid on my nose. The story on the show was that Donna’s foster dog had nipped her. But the story in the tabloids was that I’d had another nose job. VENGEFUL PARROT BITES TORI SPELLING! As if I’d make that up.
A few years later I had almost the opposite experience. Instead of being mauled by an animal and requiring plastic surgery, I…well…it really starts with me lying flat on my back at my parents’ house. Right after you have your boobs done, your whole chest is tightly bound. You’re immobile, eating ice chips and painkillers, unable to sit up on your own. There I was, watching TV, when a light went on in the hallway. The door opened, and my mother was standing there, holding Gracie by the collar. Gracie was a dog I rescued off the street when I was filming House of Yes. She was a sixty-pound wheaten terrier mix, and now she was panting and lunging toward me, eager to jump on my compromised chest. I still see it now: my mother in the doorway, the dog anxiously lunging and pawing the air in my direction. My mother said, “Gracie’s here!” and, as if in slow motion, I saw her hand release Gracie’s collar.
Gracie leaped. I screamed. Help arrived. I was convinced that my mother had done it on purpose. My mother was outraged, saying, “Here I am taking care of you. I can’t believe you’d think I would try to hurt you.” We didn’t speak for two days. And then it went away, but I still always wonder whether, consciously or not, she brought that dog up and let her go on purpose. (And, by the way, I never tried to claim that my boob job was the result of a dog attack.)
Back in TV land, Donna was still a pure vestal virgin. In this case, rumors are true. My dad couldn’t stand the thought of making my character sexually active. All the other characters were coupling and uncoupling, so the writers figured they’d make something of Donna’s innocence. She’d be a popular high school girl who was proud to be a virgin and didn’t care if people thought it was uncool. Her friends would support her. All those chaste viewers could relate to her.
As a teenager when all of this went down, I initially worried that I’d be the only character who didn’t get to have a cute boyfriend on screen. But the writers were onto something. As soon as Donna’s commitment to virginity was revealed, there were some amazing reactions. People my age would come up to me on the street and thank me for being a role model. Girls and guys alike. And this was L.A., not Utah. Suddenly I felt like I was doing something important.
But at home things weren’t so inspirational. After a night of partying Nick wound up in the emergency room. While I waited for him to be released from the hospital, a girl called to find out if he was okay—she’d dropped him off at six a.m.
Nick was seeing other women rampantly, flagrantly, and a bunch of other adverbs I never imagined I’d have to use to describe my boyfriend’s behavior. It was to the point where a few days into a press tour in New York, I got a call from my friend Melissa. She told me that she’d called our apartment (where I paid all the rent and bills and bought all the furnishings and food) and some girl who answered the phone identified herself as Nick’s girlfriend. As insane as it sounds, the next day I hurried out to buy him a Rolex watch. I was so worried that he’d leave. You may find this hard to
believe, but giving him a gift when he cheated on me didn’t seem to stop the cheating. Crazy, I know.
Meanwhile, Nick was aggressively jealous of me. When Casper Van Dien, who went on to star in Starship Troopers, came onto 90210 to play my boyfriend for a few episodes, he flirted with me. Casper was a heartthrob, sweet and absolutely gorgeous. One time he called me at home and Nick picked up the phone. When Casper asked for me, Nick freaked out, threw the phone at me, and pushed me into the kitchen counter. I picked up the phone and shut myself in the bathroom. On the other end of the line Casper was distraught, insisting that I call the police, but I told him it was nothing, that I was fine. Still, back on set, he made me take pictures of the huge purple bruise on my thigh in case I decided to press charges.
Casper wasn’t the only cast member expressing concern. The cast of 90210 cared about me and was never pro-Nick. Jennie regularly got into fights with him in front of me, all of which started with her saying she couldn’t let him speak that way to me. Luke and Jason were also protective. Jason was always pleasant to Nick’s face, but Luke made no effort to hide his hatred. I’d get in trouble for that: Nick would yell at me, saying, “What lies are you telling them? Why do you make people hate me?” Even Shannen would say, “Nick is bad news,” but never to his face, since we always socialized with her and her boyfriend. That’s right, the notorious Shannen Doherty was telling me my boyfriend was bad news. You’d think it would have sunk in. But it didn’t.
Nick and Luke finally came to blows at my parents’ annual Christmas Eve party. It was an extravagant event, of course, but on a more intimate scale. The guests were a mixture of my parents’ friends, my father’s business associates, cast members, and my brother and my friends. There was caviar and shrimp cocktail, but also sandwiches from Nate ’n Al’s, an old-school Hollywood delicatessan. The bartender refilled your glass between sips of champagne, so everyone got wasted. The same piano player played every year, and carolers would make an appearance to sing Christmas songs. I loved those parties. They were relaxed and, despite the extravagant touches, normal. It was the most normal thing my family did.
So on this particular Christmas Eve, when Luke and Jason arrived, I went over to say hi, and I asked them to say hello to Nick. I knew he’d make a big deal out of it if they didn’t. Jason dutifully went over and shook his hand. Luke started to make his way toward Nick, but didn’t make it there. I don’t know if he got distracted or changed his mind. Regardless, Nick went up to him and said, “What’s your problem?” Luke said, “You’re my problem. I love her and you should not be in her life.” Then Luke pushed Nick, and suddenly they were having a full-on brawl. At the Manor. In our living room. In front of the eighteen-foot Christmas tree. (Did I say “normal”? It took days to decorate that enormous tree. Crews of workers came in. It was practically a union job.) At any rate, before the tree could topple, Jason pulled Luke off and sent him outside to cool down. Nick stormed out of the party. I cried and told Luke I hated him. Then, surreally, it was over and the party went on as if nothing had happened. My parents never mentioned anything.
Not long after the Christmas Eve fiasco, the cast called me into a dressing room. When I came in, I saw that everyone was there. Then they went around the room, each saying how he or she felt about Nick and me. Luke led the effort. The upshot was that they loved me, they thought I deserved better, and enough was enough. They didn’t want him on the set anymore. It was amazing and touching that they all cared about me enough to do this, but at the time I was still so young and naive. I’d never known anyone who had such problems and had no idea how to deal with it. All I could think was, Don’t they know this is just making it worse on me? When he heard that he wasn’t welcome on set, Nick would certainly take it out on me. He’d said it a million times: “What have you been telling them, what lies?” I pleaded with my friends, “Don’t do this. You don’t understand. You’re just going to make this harder on me.” But they stood their ground. They said they wouldn’t condone the relationship. Still I didn’t break up with him. After that Luke and I didn’t speak for months.
My parents were beyond distraught. My relationship with Nick totally separated me from my family. I went from living at home with them to sporadic phone calls. They had no idea how to help me, so they went to a therapist to figure out how to get me out of the relationship. But they never said anything to me. Years later my mother told me that she wanted to maintain our relationship instead of judging me. Ironically, she was the one person who might’ve gotten through to me.
I knew what my friends were saying, but like the women in peril I was playing on TV, I didn’t have the strength to leave. (A couple years later Donna would struggle with similar issues when her boyfriend Ray Pruit, played by Jamie Walters, turned abusive. But I didn’t make the connection back then—probably because Ray was physically abusive and I never thought of Nick that way. Now I’ve got to wonder if the 90210 writers were making art imitate life.) The way I dealt with the Nick situation was to put up a front of being fine and say that my friends were the ones acting badly and making the wrong judgments. The longer I did that, the harder it got to admit that they were right.
CHAPTER SIX
Confrontation Is Inevitable
When I was little, I learned quickly that trying to take control of my own life never got me very far. As a kid I was dying to grow out my hair. My mother’s hairstylist would come to the house to cut her hair, and she’d have him do mine at the same time. For a while, when he sat me in the chair, I’d tell him what I wanted. Although he seemed to listen attentively, he would proceed to cut my hair into bangs and a bob. The same bangs-and-bob cut that I loathed every single time. Once he bent down and whispered into my ear, “Sorry, your mom told me to cut it short.” I didn’t choose my own Halloween costumes. I got my mother’s favorite dolls as birthday presents. I drove the car my parents thought looked best on me.
So why bother trying to argue my case? By the time I was an adult, nonconfrontation was a way of life. Even now, if it’s been a while and I should call a friend, I worry that there’ll be some kind of direct discussion of thoughts and feelings, and I can’t bring myself to pick up the phone. Thank God for my BlackBerry, without which I would lead a very lonely life.
This nonconfrontational approach to life was in full swing when I met Shannen Doherty on the set of 90210. I was younger than most of the cast and grateful for her friendship. For a long time I saw her treating people in ways that made me uncomfortable. She was constantly coming in late to work with crazy excuses. She’d say someone broke into her house the night before, and I’d sit there getting my makeup done, knowing it wasn’t true. I’d been at her house the night before—and I was an invited guest. It was one grand story after another. Shannen never just admitted, I fucked up. I overslept. And when a pretty brunette extra appeared on the set, Shannen had her fired. I never had the gumption to say what I thought.
I cared about Shannen, but I feared she was on a downward spiral, and I wanted no part of it. After a couple years I was pretty much over wanting to go to clubs all the time. I’d been club-curious, but the fast life wasn’t exactly my style. I was more of a TV-watching, takeout-scarfing couch potato. So Shannen and I were hanging out less and less. But we were still friends until one day on set when I finally took a stand. Shannen was doing off-camera for a guest star, meaning they had a scene together, and the guest star was shooting a close-up while Shannen said her lines off-camera. Shannen was throwing away her lines, making a joke of them. I took her aside and said she shouldn’t be acting that way. It was the first and only time I’d ever dared say something about her behavior. She shot me a terrible look, a How dare you? look. Given that look, I think I was right to think twice before speaking my mind for all those years. It was pretty scary.
Later I was in my dressing room getting ready to go to lunch. Shannen came in and closed the door behind her, blocking my way. She let me have it, saying I’d better watch my back. I totally believed
that she’d have someone kick my ass! When I came home that night, I was so clearly terrified that my fourteen-year-old brother demanded to take the next day off from school so he could come to the set and protect me. My sweet little brother, Randy—he hadn’t even had his growth spurt yet. But, indeed, in the morning he came to work with me and followed me around like a 250-pound bodyguard. After every scene he’d give me a professional nod, as if to say, You’re okay.
Not long after that Shannen came in late for the gazillionth time. You know what they say: A gazillion strikes and you’re out. Being late to set is a big deal. Everyone is waiting for you: the crew, the cast, the producers, loads of people. And time is money. On this particular day she was about four hours late. Four hours! It’s pretty much unheard of unless tragedy strikes your family. This was the last straw. Everyone was saying they’d had enough. Shannen started to make up one of her excuses. Ian turned to her and said, “You’re a C-U-N-T.” Ian was the sweetest guy. He never said a harsh word to anyone. There was a long, awful silence before he tapped his forehead and added, “Can’t Understand Normal Thinking.” Shannen made some retort, then stormed into her dressing room and slammed the door.
Everyone wanted Shannen gone. The rest of the cast—Jennie, Ian, Brian, Jason, Gabrielle, and Luke—told me they had decided to go into the producer’s office to call my father and say that she had to go. But they needed a consensus. They wanted me to come with them. It was a hard moment. She’d been my friend, and I didn’t want to betray her. And I definitely didn’t want anyone to ever say that it had happened because I was part of the group phoning my father. I said I wouldn’t go into the office. They said, “But we have to all agree. Do you agree?” Finally I said that yes, I agreed, but that I wouldn’t be part of the call.
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