Tattoo: Look, boss, the plane! The plane!
Mr. Roarke: Yes, Tattoo, it is carrying a most unusual old friend. He came to me many years ago with a great wish. He was a skinny child, with large ears, and he had been severely tormented by neighborhood bullies. His fantasy was to pay them back.
Tattoo: I wish I could have helped, Boss. I'd have knocked those bullies for a loop! (Does jiu-jitsu moves.)
Roarke: Your impulse is admirable, my friend, but we cannot abide violence. The child had a gift, but he didn't realize it. It was the gift of storytelling. In his fantasy, I arranged for him to defeat his adversaries with his intellect.
Tattoo: Brain over brawn!
Roarke: Exactly, Tattoo. He held them spellbound with ghost stories, tales of suspense, the like. And when he returned to his world, he discovered that the gift was still with him.
Tattoo: He'd had it all along, right Boss?
Mr. Roarke: Yes, my little friend. And now he is returning to Fantasy Island to present me with his autobiography, and to fulfill one more wish …
* * *
"Thanks, Mr. Roarke, for making my dream come true," writes Aaron Spelling in the foreword to Aaron Spelling: A Prime-Time Life, his new autobiography. In a way, Spelling really does have Roarke to thank — or perhaps, a series of real-life Roarkes; persons who seemed to possess the power to turn his life into a fantasy that most can only imagine.
There was Emma Jones, the schoolteacher who roused young Aaron from almost catatonic trauma; there was the late actor Dick Powell, who took him under his wing and encouraged him to be a producer; Sam Peckinpah, who gave him a choice acting role from out of the blue; Alan Ladd, who bought him a suit and put him in charge of a feature film.
Of course, Spelling did a little work along the way.
The great writer/producer's fortunes, and misfortunes, all begin with the very limited English vocabulary of his grandfather. A Russian Jew arriving at Ellis Island, Grandpa was asked if he was acquainted with any of his adopted country's language. He responded with the two English words he knew: "New York," and "cowboy." As Spelling writes, "The immigration officials were trying to ensure that not all Jews would reside in New York, so when they heard 'cowboy,' they shuffled my family off to Texas. Makes sense to me."
Jews in Dallas, Texas, didn't exactly make sense, however — at least not in Spelling's neighborhood. Aaron, the fifth, smallest and sickliest of the Spelling kids, became a target. "I grew up thinking 'Jew boy' was one word," Spelling writes. "Every day I was chased home from school and got my butt kicked."
It's no exaggeration. Aside from being ill a great deal, little Aaron got the stuffing knocked out of him daily. After his sometime protector, elder brother Danny, transferred to another school, the poor boy had a breakdown. He went to bed, and didn't get up — for a year. Truth be told, he stopped walking altogether and resigned himself to staying in bed until … death.
Enter Roarke # 1: Miss Jones, a teacher from his school, who came to see if she could help the strangely stricken child. Reassuring the lad that he was a good student with a real talent for storytelling, she made an offer: turn in six book reports during the semester and he could advance to the next grade, along with his fellow students. That act of kindness and confidence-building roused Aaron; it was the catharsis he needed. He wrote six book reports, all right — and 58 more! He lost himself in a world of literature, including O. Henry and Mark Twain.
"When I think of my most thrilling moments," he said in an interview from, yes, that legendary Beverly Hills palace that the press is endlessly pestering him about (pssst, it's got a real bowling alley!), "Most thankfully, I remember the teacher who cared enough to say, 'Do the book reports.' Because without that, God knows where I would have been."
And, that's right, when the bullies came to kick his butt, Aaron fought back with a lot of ifs, ands, and a few hundred other words. He held the punks enthralled with ghost stories and invented tales of the exploits of the infamous bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde ("they were very popular in our neighborhood"). It was also during this time that Spelling discovered his second great creative influence — movies — including one that had a seminal impact on his future style: Tales of Manhattan — a series of short episodes (shades of The Love Boat and Fantasy Island!) about how a single tuxedo affected the lives of its various owners.
At 18 (1943), Spelling joined the Air Force where he began dabbling in scriptwriting, submitting sketches to camp revues. While a field correspondent in Europe for Stars and Stripes, his command car was struck by sniper fire. The driver was killed and Spelling was shot in the left hand and knee (he talked doctors out of amputating two fingers), for which he earned a Purple Heart. Things didn't calm down much from there. A fortuitous case of flu prevented Spelling from boarding a flight to Ohio; the plane crashed, killing all aboard. Aaron's mom made the young man promise to never fly again, and he keeps his word to this day, confining travel to boat, train, or car.
After the Air Force, Spelling returned home to Texas and attended Southern Methodist University on the GI Bill. No longer a retiring sort, he was elected head cheerleader and became the first student to direct a senior class production. And he never looked back. Spelling starred in a play, won the local Eugene O'Neill award for writing the year’s best original one-act play, formed a comedy team, and went on to direct at a local playhouse. His next theatrical experience was life changing — for unfortunate reasons. He directed a play at a black high school, and promptly found his father suspended from his tailor job at Sears, Roebuck, & Co. It was to hell with Dallas — hello, New York (yes, he drove).
Three months later, it was hello, Los Angeles! The Big Apple took a few bites out of him, so Spelling headed for more appetizing turf: Hollywood. His general nutrition had a lot to do with peanut butter. Then, as they say, one thing led to another. A job at Western Airlines on Hollywood Boulevard gave him a little breathing room. And he started fighting back, as always, with words. Used scripts bought from famed Larry Edmunds Books gave him an idea of script-style, and Spelling began grinding out pages on the proverbial battered old Royal typewriter.
A few of those pages were called Thorns in the Road (about GIs in Europe dreaming of going home), and won a local competition. Before long, Spelling was staging it at a claptrap theater above a bus station, and before much longer, it snagged a great review in the paper that had briefly kept the auteur in eggs-and-bacon, the L.A. Times. It also enabled him to direct a more ambitious project, Garson Kanin's Live Wire. Lo and behold, along came Roarke #2 in the person of (gasp) Preston Sturgess. On the skids as far as Hollywood was concerned, Sturgess had built a dinner theater on the Sunset Strip and was looking for a play to book. He booked Spelling's treatment of Live Wire, which happened to star a gorgeous young actress named Carolyn Jones. Who happened to become one of Spelling's greatest supporters and his first wife.
Along came Roarke #3, when Jack “Dragnet” Webb caught Live Wire and engaged Spelling not to direct, but act. (Asked by Webb if he could act. Spelling bluffed, "I've been acting all my life.") He wound up playing an array of the pathetic: the mentally handicapped, pyromaniacs, dipsomaniacs, sex maniacs — almost as often, it seemed, as Dragnet needed a twisted villain. There were also shots on I Love Lucy (with Tennessee Ernie Ford) and on Gunsmoke, courtesy of Roarke #4: Sam Peckinpah, who wrote a part specifically for Spelling as a shellshocked soldier ("my best role ever"). The anecdote bears repeating here:
"I'd just finished reading for the part at Paramount," Spelling remembered. “I was sitting on a bench waiting for the bus, and this guy with a beard walked up and said, ‘How'd you do?’ I thought, ‘Well. I'm either going to get robbed or assaulted.’ I said, ‘Fine, how are you?’ The guy said, ‘I didn't say how are you — I said, how did you do?’”
Spelling humored the scruffy vagabond. “What do you mean?" he asked. "On your reading," said the bearded one. "Well, I don't know whether they liked me or not," said Spelling, waiting for the gun to appear. "Well, you're going to get it," said the stranger. "How do you know?" said Spelling. "I wrote it for you!" said Sam Peckinpah.
Fortunately for television's future, Spelling's acting career took a turn for the worse in Kismet, where he was subjected to walking around in rags, repeating the phrase, "Alms for the love of Allah." The humiliation was such that he dejectedly packed up his stage make-up.
Enter Roarke #5: Four Star executive/actor Dick Powell, whom Spelling was introduced to through the William Morris Agency's Stan Kamen. Powell immediately took to Spelling, affectionately calling him "Skinny."
"Well," said Spelling (psst, his home has a screening room, an editing room, and a sports bar!), “I had never produced, and Dick Powell was looking for a Western … He said, ‘Hey, I read your script. It's good.’ He said, ‘Why don't you write me a western?’ So I wrote a silly thing called Johnny Ringo, and he said, ‘I love it, you're producing it.’ And I'm going, ‘Say what?’ So he's the one that made me a producer.”
Spelling went on to write host-spots for Powell on Zane Grey Theater (Westerns were big in the '50s), a number of full scripts for the program, and other projects for Powell's Four Star Productions. "Dick Powell," as he writes, "became the great mentor of my life." Their daily drinks and late-night chats produced what Spelling calls his best scripts ever.
"There was a very special relationship," he said, a trace of emotion in his tone.. “There was not a day that I remember that at 6 o'clock, he wouldn't call and say, ‘Hey, Skinny, come over.’ And we always had a drink. He was very, very dear to me. I remember, in the second or third year, when he said, ‘You're going to end up producing this show, aren't you?’ I thought he was just kidding. But that's what he made me do.”
In 1959, Carolyn Jones introduced Spelling to Roarke # 6: Alan Ladd, who asked the up-and-coming writer to rework a script for a new Western called The Guns of Timberland. Next thing Spelling knew, Ladd was on the phone to Jack Warner announcing Spelling as the film's producer.
And so on.
Aaron Spelling's producing career grew into what is simply one of the most stellar in television history. There were other Roarkes along the way: Leonard Goldenson and Elton Rule, who had the foresight to harness his powers for ABC; Barry Diller, who brought Spelling to Fox. Ultimately, it added up to a resume that includes such series as: Dynasty, Melrose Place, Beverly Hills 90210, Charlie's Angels, The Love Boat, The Mod Squad, Hart to Hart, Starsky and Hutch, T.J. Hooker, Burke's Law, Honey West, and Vegas (a personal favorite of Spelling's). Then there are the movies he is too seldom credited for: The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, with John Travolta, in 1976, the Emmy-winning Day One ("one of my all-time favorite projects") about post-nuclear war civilization, and And The Band Played On, the Emmy-winning HBO film based on journalist Randy Shilts' book about the AIDS crisis ("my most creatively important and thrilling accomplishment").
And yet, Spelling remains haunted by a quote that seemed a pretty good one at the time he made it, in the mid-‘70s: "What's wrong with sheer escapism entertainment — cotton candy for the mind?"
"I didn't know it was against the law to entertain people," he said. (Psst, that house has 12 bedrooms and a wine cellar!). “What bothers me most is when the press always mentions Charlie's Angels, but doesn't mention Family, or Day One or The Best Little Girl in the World about anorexia, starring Jennifer Jason Leigh. But they can use that ‘cotton candy’ line. I love entertaining people. I think they deserve it and need it.”
Cotton candy? Here's what no less a heavyweight than Stephen Bochco — he who stood and shook Spelling's hand when the man won an Emmy for And The Band Played On — had to say: “I'm a very big fan of Aaron's. Obviously, he and I do very, very different things, but he's remarkable. He's an amazing guy. His longevity, his real sense of what works is just remarkable." Spelling's reputation for unpretentiousness and integrity (this is a man who chats with the folks on the tour buses who stop to gawk at his fabled mansion, saying, "I can't tell you how many good ideas I've stolen from those tour buses") is well deserved. Ask Mr. Roarke himself — Ricardo Montalban:
"For many years — from the '50s, actually — Aaron and I would run into each other from time to time, and he would say 'I'd like to do something with you,'" remembered Montalban. “He had so many prospects, I figured he'd long forgotten about me. And then along came Fantasy Island — for seven seasons. I tell you, Aaron and his wife. Candy, have always been so very kind to me. Aaron has no airs of importance. He's unassuming and genuinely interested in you. His fear of flying is the only flaw I've ever noticed.”
Today, Spelling, or Tori's dad, as he is increasingly known (much to his delight), has as much work as he wishes, and as many laurels as he wishes to rest on. His son, Randy, is an aspiring writer; he and wife, Candy, have been together 26 years ("my wife never gets enough credit for my success; without her, I'd still be working for somebody"); and he's now in the Hall of Fame.
"I have to be honest," he said, with a chuckle. "For many years I've been hoping it would happen and disappointed when it didn't. So it's a real thrill."
Which leaves room, perhaps, for only one more fantasy.
Tattoo: So what does Mr. Spelling want from us this time, boss?
Mr. Roarke: Well, my diminutive companion, it is a most difficult challenge — one that is so vexing, so taxing, that just between you and me. Tattoo, I am not entirely confident we can bring it off. It will require a great deal of magic.
Tattoo: What does he want, Boss — the moon with a ring around it?
Roarke: Worse, Tattoo. He wants people to stop talking about his house.
This tribute originally appeared in the Television Academy Hall of Fame program celebrating Aaron Spelling's induction in 1996.
