Liftin Hilary - sTORI Telling

To Dean and Liam, my beautiful boys
you made all my dreams come true.

W hen youre a kid, you dont 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 youre gross, awkward, or ridiculous. That was mepicking my nose, snorting when I laughed, wearing white after Labor DayI just was who I was. 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 (doesnt everyone do that?), and I was getting frustrated with my bangs. I couldnt 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. Id never say something like that. Im sure she was telling the truth as she remembered it.

Nonetheless, I had my nose done the minute I turned sixteen. Or didnt you hear? But what I realized as a twelve-year-old was bigger than that I was destined for the plastic surgeons chair. I realized that how other people saw me wasnt necessarily how I saw myself. Feeling pretty or smart or happy wasnt all there was to it. What I hadnt considered before was how I was perceived . And it wasnt the last criticism Id 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 wasnt 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 Californias 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 fathers 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 Id 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.

Some of what you may have read about me is accurate (my father did hire a snow machine for Christmas), some false (I didnt live in that enormous house until I was seventeen), and some exaggerated (I wasnt 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. Its about time I told a few of my own.

H eres the part of my book where Im 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 Id be lying. My childhood was really weird. Not better or worse than anyone elses 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, its true that my father got snow for our backyard one Christmas. But thats only half the story, if anyones countinghe 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! Arent you a lucky girl?

Im sure that little white patch was as amazing to a five-year-old as seeing a sandbox for the first time, but my parents didnt stop there. Five years later they were thinking bigger, and technology was too. This time, again with Aunt Kays 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 courseit 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.

My parents didnt get the concept of having me grow up like other kids. When I was about eight, my class took a field trip to my dads studio. It was a fun daymy father showed us around and had some surprises planned, such as a stuntman breaking glass over some kids head. But then, at the end of the day, the whole class stood for a photo. My father and I were in the back row. Just before the shutter clicked, he picked me up and held me high above the class. My face in the photo says it all. I was beyond embarrassed that my father was lifting me up like that. I just wanted to fit in. When I complained to him, he said, But you couldnt be seen. He just didnt get it.

And then there were the birthday parties. The setting was always the backyard of our house on the corner of Mapleton and Sunset Boulevard in Holmby Hills, a fancy area on the west side of Los Angeles. It was a very large housethough not the gigantic manor where everyone thinks I grew upmaybe 10,000 square feet. It was designed by the noted L.A. architect Paul Williams, whose many public buildings include the famous Beverly Hills Hotel. A house he designed in Bel-Air was used for exterior scenes of the Colby mansion on my dads television series The Colbys . Our houses back lawn was probably an acre surrounded by landscaping with a pool and tennis court, the regular features of houses in that neighborhood.