Jason Priestley (7 page)

There were many similar rides ahead for me and Shannen, and not all of them were fun. But some of them actually were. Shannen, obviously, also had her good side; she was an amusing and entertaining girl, and we had a lot of good times together. We actually had a blast in New York City that afternoon, once we got going. A large part of her quirky charm was the fact that she really and truly did not give a shit. She would say or do anything. It was a very cool attitude, until it wasn't. I quickly realized that Yugo and town car—in her eyes—were one and the same.

E
verywhere I looked around me in Beverly Hills were designer boutiques like Cartier, Versace, and Hermès, along with upscale eateries like Mako and hotels like the Beverly Wilshire. The pressure to spend on luxuries was powerful. But I wasn't the kind of guy to throw my first big earnings away on Ferraris and yacht trips; that kind of rock star spending would never be me. My grandfather had been a highly successful Realtor in Canada, and my mother had eventually segued from teaching into real estate as a career. I'd grown up hearing about properties, mortgages, financing, curb appeal, and fixer-uppers, so I probably knew more than the average twenty-year-old about real estate.

I absolutely knew better than to just throw my money away on rent every month; the importance of owning property was ingrained in me. Why pay somebody else's mortgage? For the long haul, in an uncertain career, I needed a permanent place to live. With the money I'd saved from
Sister Kate
, I bought a sensible town house in a desirable area of Sherman Oaks, just south of Ventura Boulevard with its hundreds of shops and restaurants. It was centrally located, about ten minutes away from my new job. Official shooting on
Beverly Hills 90210
began immediately after the Fourth of July holiday that summer of 1990, and I was ready.

It was exciting. I was finally moving into my own place. And it truly was my place; I owned it. I had actually bought my first home at the age of twenty. And I was starting production on my first television series where I was the star—number one on the call sheet. I was working very hard to stay focused and prove to everyone that their belief in me was well founded.

As we prepared to shoot the first episode, called “The Green Room,” our executive producer hosted a table read at his house, so we could all get to meet one another and be a little more comfortable before showing up to the first day of work the following day.

I parked my Alfa in the street and walked up to Chuck Rosin's house. There was a guy standing on the front porch . . . the new guy who'd been added since the pilot. I stuck out my hand and said, “Hey, man, I'm Jason.” He shook my hand and said, “I'm Luke; I'm playing Dylan.”

“Great, great . . . so listen, Luke.” He cocked his head. My character, Brandon, was to befriend this mysterious surfer-dude character Dylan. “Do you surf?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Never surfed in my life.”

“Good. You and I are going to get along just fine.” It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Many good times lay ahead in our future.

I FELT AARON SPELLING'S
warmth and caring from my very first day on the set, and partly out of respect for him, I took my work very seriously. As number one on the call sheet—meaning the star, the cast member whose name was first in the credits every week—I took ownership of my job, and the show, from day one. Even before we went into production, I walked around the studio talking to the crew members, introducing myself, getting a feel for who did what at my new job.

I was incredibly happy to find out that my old friend David Geddes from Vancouver had been hired as the director of photography for the show. Just having David there gave me extra confidence and also gave me the inside scoop on what was happening with the show from a “below the line” perspective.

I discovered that our show was to be a nonunion show, as FOX was not a “network.” After talking with Dave and several of the crew about the situation, I went into the front office to meet our producer.

For whatever reason, this guy started lying right to my face. I couldn't believe it.

I walked out of his office and called Aaron Spelling. Aaron took my call, and I said, “Mr. Spelling, I don't know who this guy is who you have as our producer here on the stages, but you need to get rid of him.” I was furious but kept my tone calm.

Aaron thanked me for calling, and when I showed up twenty-four hours later for the first day of work, the man had vanished.

I had ambitions far beyond acting; someday I wanted to direct as well. I knew that in Aaron I could have a mentor with an absolute wealth of wisdom about the business. I meant to show him that I was ready for any challenge. He surprised me one day by showing up on set with a football jersey that said
QUARTERBACK
on it. “You're my quarterback, Jay. Every show needs one. You keep this show together—you're my MVP here.”

I took the responsibility and his faith in me very seriously.

W
e were young, we were beautiful, we lived in glamorous locales and lived dramatic teenage lives—but nobody was watching us. The ratings were so-so, and the reviews were absolutely brutal. Every single TV reviewer in the country, it seemed, felt the need to unload on just how dreadful television programming could be, using our show as their prime example. There were no Kids' Choice Awards back then; at that time it was quite revolutionary to aim a show at high schoolers. Teenagers and young adults still watched the same shows as their parents, often with their parents.
90210
was prime time for young people, focusing on issues young people cared about, in a very glamorous setting. Man, how the reviewers hated it. They
hated
it: the scripts, the writing, and the acting. They were particularly cruel to a bunch of young actors.

I kept my eye on the prize: the work, the work, the work. If what we as actors and producers and writers were doing on that soundstage was no good, there would be no fans. The better we could make the show, the more fans we would win and the more adulation we would get. Hopefully, we would even gain a little respect along the way. It was an uphill battle, believe me. Adult viewers hated our show. As the number one guy on the call sheet I felt the pressure. I carried the weight of all those reviewers who demolished us and said our acting was shitty. I took pride in my profession, and I was going to do my best to prove all of them wrong.

The bond I had established with Aaron continued to grow. Our relationship and the show were still new as the year came to a close and the holiday season rolled around. Probably only five or six episodes of
90210
had aired when I received an invitation to the Spelling Entertainment Christmas party.

Aaron, ironically, was Jewish, but he loved Christmas more than anybody I have ever known. He was simply fascinated by all things Christmas. There were no limits to what he would do to celebrate. This was the man who hauled snow to Bel Air so that his kids, Tori and Randy, could have real snow in their yards when they were children. There were a hundred stories like this, all well chronicled in the press, all true.

His annual Christmas party for Spelling Entertainment employees during the first year of
90210
was held in the back room of the show business hangout called Chasen's. Aaron hadn't had a show on the air for a couple of years, so he had a small staff. Before we came along it was generally assumed Aaron was finished; he would ride off into the sunset with his money.

The party was a fun, intimate affair. There was one little food table, with a beautiful turkey on display, and two tables for ten, which was enough seating for his entire staff plus invited guests, including Robyn and me.

Eight years later, when I attended my final Spelling Entertainment Christmas party, there would be more than four hundred people packed into the big events room at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

I
could not even begin to estimate how many different people had passed through that house on La Jolla over the years; Brad was the mainstay. Once he got his own place, he refused to leave. He lived there for years while everyone came and went around him. The place itself was your basic two-bedroom duplex furnished in late '80s frat house. There was frequently a third roommate for varying amounts of time who crashed on the sofa, and guests who might stay for a night or two weeks. Brad had a number of girlfriends who came and went . . . a supersweet girl named Jill, then actress Juliette Lewis.

When Bernie eventually left, Top Forty Gordie moved in. Gordie was a former male stripper from Vancouver whom I'd known forever. We'd been on a
21 Jump Street
episode together. He, along with Bernie and me, Paul Johansson, and Bruce Corkham, were the Canadian contingent of our group. Then there was Dave Sherrill, of course, and Bill “Bring-me-down-ziger” Danziger, a young agent at a small agency called Triad who represented Brad and Bernie. This was our core group of guys.

You can understand how I, standing next to Brad and Paul, a male stripper, was never the “good-looking one.” I was always thought of as a pretty-good-looking guy back home, but as soon as I got to L.A. and started hanging out with this crew, I was just another guy, and not special at all. Time to work on my craft . . .

A couple of weeks after Aaron's party, after the actual Christmas holiday, a bunch of us gathered at Brad's house for an informal holiday gift exchange. Brad had returned from his hometown of Springfield, Missouri, where he had spent Christmas Day with his family. All the regulars showed up ready to party. There was a lot to celebrate. Brad had recently wrapped his role in the highly anticipated film
Thelma and Louise
. It was a huge break, and we were all sincerely happy for him. For a group of actors, there was very little jealousy. We all wanted good roles, but if we didn't get them, we wanted our buddies to get them, not some stranger.

All the guys started arriving, each lugging in a cardboard box containing gifts. Brad took some good-natured ribbing over his supposedly secret relationship with Geena Davis. Ever since he'd returned from location, he was always sneaking off to see her. He went to her place, of course: she was a major movie star, recently split from Jeff Goldblum, who wouldn't have come near that duplex. Brad tried to keep it all quiet and on the down-low, but he had made the mistake of confiding in Bernie one night—which meant that we all instantly knew everything there was to know.

What a surprise: every single guy there gave every other guy a bottle of booze. Oh yeah, somebody gave everyone a carton of cigarettes. Except for our host. Brad had returned from Missouri with a box of Bibles. There was one for each of us, with our names embossed in gold on the faux-leather cover next to a tiny cross. He was handing out personalized Bibles while his cardboard box filled up with gifts of liquor bottles topped by a carton of cigs.

If you could have seen the looks on our faces. I mean everyone's faces! Brad was so pleased with himself he could not stop smiling. All the rest of the twentysomething actor guys were—for once—actually speechless. The whole crew had been laughing, joking, passing around holiday-edition bottles of Jack Daniel's and firing up Marlboro Lights . . . and then our host presented each of us with a Bible and stopped the party cold. For a second, anyway. It was quite a moment.

Six months later a firestorm would erupt when
Thelma and Louise
opened in every theater in the United States. Brad was on the brink of ten-million-dollar paychecks and film sets all over the world. My struggling show on a fledgling network would soon be beamed into ten million homes all over the world every week. And Bernie? He would become infamous—in our group at least—but for slightly different reasons. There are ten million
stories
I could tell about Bernie.

My Bible still sits on a bookshelf in my library. Every now and then a guest will see my name on the cover, pick it up off the shelf, and look at it quizzically, knowing I'm not a big churchgoer. They usually say something like, “I didn't know you were a Bible reader.” I smile and tell them it was a gift from an old friend.

I
t simply amazes me that twenty years later anyone would possibly care, but judging from the questions I get, plenty of people still want to know: during the shooting of
90210,
did everyone hook up with everyone else in real life? The answer to that is simple. We were a bunch of young, attractive people in our early twenties who were thrown together for ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. What do you think happened? Of course various combinations of people slept with each other over the years. If you were in that situation, trust me, you would have done it, too.

But the main thing to remember is this: in the grand scheme of things, all these hookups were very minor flings. Every single cast member working on that show was much too smart to let an “office romance” and what might happen one night after work impact what we did on the set. Our jobs and the show were much more important to all of us. Plus, we all saw enough of each other at work; we were constantly together. There were plenty of guest stars for distraction, as well as regular boyfriends and girlfriends. I was very caught up in my romance with Robyn; any limited spare time I had, I wanted to spend with her.

Shannen particularly had a complicated love life. For a while she was dating some real estate guy in Chicago, flying back and forth all the time. She eventually left him for his closest friend, another Chicago guy. None of this was surprising; Shannen was a very impulsive girl. She always seemed to be between houses or places to live. With three main girls on the show—Shannen, Jennie, and Tori—and their various boyfriends coming and going, there was always some drama going on. The guys—Luke, Ian, Young Bri, and I—did our best to stay out of it. We had an easier time hanging out together. Our end of the hallway was much calmer.