Tori Spelling

My love affair with Tori Spelling may be over. Oh, I’ll still read her next tell-all and look forward to her guest spots on 90210, but my days of defending her may be behind me.

As some of you know, I have a soft spot for maligned celebrities, especially women, especially if they are trashed for being slutty and dumb. Tori was, plus people said mean things about the way she looked and undervalued her contribution to 90210. Plus she’s Tori Spelling, showbiz cheese royalty, unable to escape her crown. Yet she seems nice. Funny. Very pro-gay a little ahead of the curve. My Jackie Susann gene loves her.

I read sToriTelling and LOVED IT. Lover HER. The book was fun and funny and juicy. It revealed a likable, neurotic actress. She had perspective on her privilege, and enough ugly family drama to be relatable.

Due to incredible happenstance I had the opportunity to attend the Mommywood release party here in New York. It was the cheesiest fucking thing I’ve been to since my cousin’s Bat Mitzvah. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was at a depressing aughts Am Psycho bar with weak free drinks and mostly awful seeming people making wholly unimpressive yet pretentious small talk. The whole thing was being filmed for Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood. We waited and waited and Tori arrived. She looked thin and scary IRL, her airbrushed makeup highlighting her skeletal cheekbones to goulish effect. I wish to god celebrity women weren’t so fucking scary skinny. She posed for a million years by the cover blow up in the front (the very one my connect later REFUSED to photograph me next to! Embarrassing, she said. W/E, we’re at Tori Spelling’s fucking book release party!) She was flanked by cameramen. She and Dean were slowly escorted through the crowd, with which they did not mingle, to a private back room we could look into but not enter, where she was greeted by Michael Musto and Christian Seriano and Christian Seriano’s bf who looks exactly like him but bigger. That was it for star power. I felt insulted. I didn’t even get a chance to try to work up the nerve to go meet Tori! To tell her that I respected her, that as a hip, young writer I would love the opportunity to properly profile her! We watched her do a phony meet and greet, some fans next to us yelled “We love Liam and Stella!” and Dean (not even Tori!) awkwardly acknowledged their affection. The book industry people seemed bitter or resigned to their degradation. The whole thing was amusing, yet depressing.

Then I read Mommywood. Or, rather, then I listened to the audiobook version.

While I felt sympathetic to Tori’s issues with her mother the first time around, hearing all the same evil anecdotes bitched about a second time made Tori seem a little less righteous and a little more vindictive. I hadn’t cared that she communicated with her mom via tabloids and tell-alls, family can be hard. But by the time I got to the end, where she actually spells out parts of her will and speculates as to how her mother will contest them, I felt abused as a listener. I’m not on your payroll! Don’t make your readership into a key witness in your imaginary future legal battle! Plus: tacky. Almost fabulously tacky (my love may return...) but slightly too vindictive. For the first time, I actually was curious as to what Candy Spelling had to say.

Then there’s the fact that 70% of the book is all swill about how “I’m just like every other mom except I had a full time live in nanny during my and my husbands joint 2 months off after the kid was born and now I’m talking about how easy babies are.” Then there are the parts that made me want to exclaim “that’s terrible parenting!” an unattractive sentiment I rarely express, rarely feel. But when TORI SPELLING with her resources and full time nannies can’t fold her own stroller or teaches her son to grope her while yelling “boobies!” as her husband looks on proudly, or feeds her infant candy and giggles about how none of us are perfect...I just don’t think it’s cute. Her disclaimers about her privilege sounded a lot more half-hearted and tacked on. And she gave awful advice about how to lose baby weight not through exercise but by just not eating anything. At least she’s semi-honest.

I suppose celebrity crushes are doomed to fail. Why don’t I learn my lesson? It’s class war 101, right? But while I come out of the long, proud history of Jewish commies, I also come out of the long, proud history of Jewish entertainers. Or at least wannabe entertainers. It’s in my blood, it runs in the family. My grandmother chose Marlene as her middle name, for christ’s sake. Couldn’t escape my attraction to the glittery if I tried.