Tori Spelling Is Telling All in New Book

Prologue:

When you're a kid, you don't worry what anyone thinks. You go around saying whatever pops into your head or picking your teeth, and it never occurs to you that someone might think you're gross, awkward, or ridiculous. That was me — picking my nose, snorting when I laughed, wearing white after Labor Day — I just was who I was.

(Tori Spelling)
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That all changed one day at the tender age of twelve when I was getting ready for a family photo. We were having a formal family portrait taken with our dogs (doesn't everyone do that?), and I was getting frustrated with my bangs. I couldn't get them to do whatever a twelve-year-old in 1985 wanted bangs to do.

So I went into my parents' bathroom, all dressed up, with my hair done as best I could manage, and asked my mother, "Am I pretty?" She looked at me and said, "You will be when we get your nose done."

I was stunned. My nose, as noses tend to be, was right in the middle of my face, and I had just been told that it was ugly. So long, innocence.

To be fair, let the record show that my mother has absolutely no recollection of making this comment. I know this because in high school I took a class called Human Development, taught by Mrs. Wildflower. In it we had to keep a journal (her name was Mrs. Wildflower — what did you expect?), and when Mrs. Wildflower read my story about the nose incident, she called my parents. That afternoon I came home to find my mother crying. She said, "I never said that. I'd never say something like that." I'm sure she was telling the truth as she remembered it.

Nonetheless, I had my nose done the minute I turned sixteen. Or didn't you hear? But what I realized as a twelve-year-old was bigger than that I was destined for the plastic surgeon's chair. I realized that how other people saw me wasn't necessarily how I saw myself. Feeling pretty or smart or happy wasn't all there was to it. What I hadn't considered before was how I was perceived. And it wasn't the last criticism I'd hear about my nose.

Little did I know then how huge a role public perception would play in my life. My nose, and pretty much every other "prominent" body part and feature, would be prey to gossip and tabloids in just a few years. But the unwanted attention wasn't limited to my body.

According to the press, I was the rich, spoiled daughter of TV producer Aaron Spelling. They claimed I grew up in California's largest single-family residence. They said that my father had fake snow made on his Beverly Hills lawn for Christmas. They said I was the ultimate example of nepotism, a lousy actor who nonetheless scored a lead role in her father's hit TV show. They pigeonholed me as my character on Beverly Hills, 90210 : Donna Martin, the ditzy blonde virgin. They later talked about my wedding, my divorce, and my second wedding. They reported that I'd been disinherited and was feuding with my mother. They told about the birth of my son. What I learned from my ugly nose was true times a million: The details of my life were and would always be considered public property.

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Some of what you may have read about me is accurate (my father did hire a snow machine for Christmas), some false (I didn't live in that enormous house until I was seventeen), and some exaggerated (I wasn't "disinherited"). But all the while the life I was living was much more than that. I lived in fear of my own doll collection. I let a bad boyfriend spend my 90210 salary. I planned a fairy-tale wedding to the wrong man. I begged casting directors to forget that Donna Martin ever existed. I was working hard and shopping like crazy. I was falling in love and getting hurt.

My life has been funnier and sadder and richer and poorer than any of the magazines know. Public opinion dies hard. To this day I still look in the mirror and hate my nose. Still, everyone else has been telling stories about me for decades now. It's about time I told a few of my own.

Chapter One: X Marks the Spot

Here's the part of my book where I'm supposed to say, Sure, my family had lots of money, but I had a normal childhood just like everyone else. Yeah, I could say that, but I'd be lying. My childhood was really weird. Not better or worse than anyone else's childhood, but definitely different.

Part of it was the whole holiday thing. My parents liked to make a spectacle, and the press ate it up. Like I said, it's true that my father got snow for our backyard one Christmas. But that's only half the story, if anyone's counting — he actually did it twice. The first time was when I was five. My father told our family friend Aunt Kay that he wanted me to have a white Christmas. She did some research, made a few calls, and at six a.m. on Christmas Day a truck from Barrington Ice in Brentwood pulled up to our house.

My dad, Aunt Kay, and a security guard dragged garbage bags holding eight tons of ice into the back where there was plastic covering a fifteen-foot-square patch of the yard. They spread the snow out over the plastic, Dad with a pipe hanging from his mouth. To complete the illusion, they added a Styrofoam snowman that my father had ordered up from the props department at his studio. It was eighty degrees out, but they dressed me up in a ski jacket and hat and brought me out into the yard, exclaiming, "Oh, look, it snowed! In all of Los Angeles it snowed right here in your backyard! Aren't you a lucky girl?"

I'm sure that little white patch was as amazing to a five-year-old as seeing a sandbox for the first time, but my parents didn't stop there. Five years later they were thinking bigger, and technology was too. This time, again with Aunt Kay's guidance, my dad hired a snow machine to blow out so much powder that it not only filled the tennis court, it created a sledding hill at one end of the court. I was ten and my brother, Randy, was five. They dressed us in full-on snowsuits (the outfits were for the photos, of course — it was a typical eighty-five degrees out). According to Aunt Kay, the sledding hill lasted three days and everyone came to see the snow in Beverly Hills: Robert Wagner, Mel Brooks … not that I noticed or cared. Randy and I spent Christmas running up the hill and zooming down in red plastic saucer sleds. Even our dogs got to slide down the hill. It was a pretty spectacular day for an L.A. girl.