She just gave birth to her first child, but her son, Liam Aaron McDermott, isn’t Tori Spelling’s only new baby—she and her husband Dean McDermott have opened a bed and breakfast called Chateau La Rue (after her pet pug), and the new venture is the subject of a new Oxygen reality series, Tori & Dean: Inn Love, premiering March 20.
“My life is out in the media every day, so I figured, instead of going by what they write, why not put the truth out there and put ourselves out there, and at the same time open up a successful business?” says Spelling, the Beverly Hills 90210 alumna whose last series was VH1’s So NoTORIous, a scripted comedy loosely based on incidents in her life.” This is very different,” she compares. “I thought [cameras] just follow you around [when you do a reality show]. There’s a lot more entailed.”
The pair, who are executive producers on the series, came up with the idea last summer when they stayed in an Ottawa, Canada B&B while filming the TV-movie Housesitter, sold it to Oxygen, and started scouting locations. The inn they’d stayed in “was old and musty,” say Spelling, “but we came away with the idea that we would like to reinvent the B&B, do a modern take on it for our generation.” Although Spelling says she was hoping to find something in wine country, Napa was too expensive, so they explored the “up and coming” Temecula area and found an inn on nine acres in Fallbrook, 100 miles southeast of Los Angeles.
Admittedly, the newlyweds (they wed last May in Fiji) are hotel management tyros, though McDermott claims restaurant experience, “and I’ve renovated four homes in Toronto.” “And I have really good style,” Spelling chimes in.
They insist they’ll be hands-on operators, but do have help. “We just have to build a solid infrastructure so that we can leave for two weeks at a time, a month at a time, when we’re filming,” says McDermott. “Our goal is to really get it up and running, get it down to a science, and have a good back-up staff. We have a cleaning staff that comes in twice a week to clean the whole place top to bottom but we will be at our guests’ beck and call. I’ll be doing the breakfast stuff,” he adds, while his wife is “more into happy hours and hors d’oeuvres.”
Despite growing up the privileged daughter of Hollywood royalty—producer Aaron Spelling—Spelling has no problem serving others. “I was born into that lifestyle, but it’s never been a part of who I am and I’ve never really felt very comfortable with people waiting on me at all,” she claims. “I usually am the first to say ‘I’ll do that myself.’ I like to do for other people and prepare and cook, so I’m excited to serve other people.”
She sunk a large chunk of her nearly $800,000 inheritance into the B&B, and famously sold off a lot of her possessions in a headline-making yard sale in December. “We wanted to downsize, and my tastes have changed. I had a lot of shabby chic stuff, and now we’re modern—thus the idea of the B&B going modern,” Spelling explains, adding that sales were only fair. “I was hoping we’d sell these beautiful pieces but it was more like people wanting little knickknacks of mine. We did not expect the media circus, the helicopters. But it gave us a good laugh, and it was great to interact with people.”
Spelling reveals that she’s downsized her shopping budget as well. “All I can say is Forever 21 rocks,” she laughs, insisting that she won’t spoil her son, whose middle name will be Aaron. “The only thing I can really spoil him with is love. And that’s the most important thing so I have no worries with that.”
The newlyweds, each married at the time, met on the set of the Lifetime TV-movie Mind Over Murder in Ottawa in 2005. Spelling was married to Charlie Shanian for a year and McDermott divorced Mary Jo Eustace after 12 years and two children. Both say their relationships with their exes are amicable, but Spelling admits that she and Shanian don’t maintain contact: “We don’t share children and when you don’t it kind of ends because you have nothing in common anymore.”
Both believe their relationship will survive the very public fishbowl existence of a reality show, despite the abysmal track record of “celebreality” couples like Nick and Jessica, Whitney and Bobby and Britney and Kevin. “We’re going to be the exception, not the rule,” insists McDermott, noting that the longest they’ve been apart is four days, “and it was torture.”
“Horrible,” nods Spelling, “From the day we met, we’ve just wanted to be together, and do everything together. Since we met doing a movie together we thought it was the ideal situation, to work together all day, and go home together at night. He’s my partner in crime. So getting to do business and bat creative ideas off each other? I’m having the best time ever.”
Although Chateau La Rue is their home base at present, Spelling and McDermott aren’t leaving L.A. or their Hollywood careers behind. “We’re not severing ties from Hollywood at all,” insists McDermott, who has a small role in an indie romantic comedy Spelling shot called Kiss the Bride. “We’re still going to maintain our acting careers while we’re trying to run a business. We hope it does well because we want to brand it and branch it out. We want a whole chain of these things. We’d like to get it up and running and get it self-sufficient and move on to another B&B or business venture.”
Adds Spelling, who recently played a gossip columnist on Smallville, “We are dead set on being able to juggle a business, children and career.” And, apparently, extended family. Spelling has been estranged from mom Candy, who didn’t appreciate the way the mother character (played by Loni Anderson) was depicted in So NoTORIous. The relationship chilled further after Aaron Spelling’s death, but the two have communicated of late and reconciliation seems likely.
