Jason Priestley (8 page)

Toward the end of an official FOX event one night, Luke and I were getting ready to take off when Aaron came over to speak to us. It had been some sort of promotional party, with plenty of alcohol flowing. Aaron was in a happy, expansive mood. “Jason. Luke,” he said in that gruff voice. “You guys need to come back to my house! You've got to see it!”

The final touches had just been completed on Spelling Manor, and he could not wait to show it off. He was like a little kid with a new toy—absolutely delighted. The three of us had been doing some drinking that night . . . we were all half in the bag as we pretty much stumbled out of the back of his limousine and into Spelling Manor.

“Look, look, the Renoir,” he pointed out immediately as we opened the massive wooden front door and walked into the cavernous entrance hall. A tiny original Renoir painting hung on the wall in plain sight, within arm's reach.

“Holy crap, Aaron, somebody's going to pocket that one day on the way out!” I said.

“No, no . . .” He waved his hands around vaguely. “There's security, Jason, and cameras all over the place,” he said as we took in our surroundings. Luke and I were literally in shock as the house tour proceeded. Our reaction to the sheer immensity and opulence of the Manor could be accurately described as What. The. Fuck!

Aaron was particularly anxious to take us to the basement. We made a quick stop in a room downstairs with wall-to-wall glass cases holding a vast array of hundreds of dolls of every imaginable size, shape, and costume. “Candy's doll collection,” he said. Of course there was a private bar in the basement level, where we stopped to have another drink. There was an extensive alcohol selection; more brands were available than at most high-end hotel bars, including draft beer. “Dude! He's got a tap in his house, unbelievable!” With all the wonders surrounding us, Luke and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

We all grabbed a beer—none of us needed another—and proceeded to the pièce de résistance: the bowling alley. Aaron snapped on the lights, and a full-size two-lane bowling alley came to life. He pushed a couple more buttons, and the official scoreboard lit up, the pins reset, and bowling balls popped up in the machine. Unable to contain himself, Aaron proceeded to kick off his shoes and head in his stocking feet over to the lanes. He grabbed a bowling ball, ran up to the line, heaved the ball down the lane, and slipped on the highly polished wood floor and landed in a heap, groaning.

Luke and I were flipping out. Our first year on a new job with Aaron! Had our elderly, slightly frail boss just broken his hip in a freak bowling alley accident with the two of us just standing by? We ran over and picked him up and anxiously set him on his feet again.

“Aaron, Aaron, are you all right?” Thankfully, he was fine. Nothing was broken; he was just a bit shaken up. Though not nearly as shaken up as the two of us. We wanted out, pronto. “So that was supercool, Aaron; this was an amazing tour. Maybe it's time for you to go to bed now. We better take off . . . it's late . . .” We were backpedaling like crazy. We wanted our boss safe in bed and ourselves off the premises. We got the hell out of there. That little tour/party ended rather abruptly.

Aaron was such a good guy; he retold that story fifty times, cracking up every single time. How he loved that house. That quality of childlike enthusiasm and the sheer delight he took in the things he loved was a wonderfully endearing trait.

O
ur first season, there just weren't that many people watching the show. I could go anywhere and do anything completely unrecognized and unbothered. I don't think one person approached me the entire first year
90210
was on the air. I certainly wasn't famous, although L.A. was not the best barometer as people tend to be fairly jaded about actors and leave them in peace.

Back then, a standard television order was pilot plus twelve episodes, for a total of thirteen—half a season, to see how well the show does. Cast and crew are then waiting on pins and needles to see if the network would order another nine episodes—a back-nine pickup order—to make it a full twenty-two-episode season. At the last minute,
90210
got a back-nine pickup order for its first season.

In the early months of 1991, the Gulf War was drawing to a close, and all the TV stations at the time—NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN—showed round-the-clock nonstop coverage. Operation Desert Storm was the first “televised war,” and for a while the whole country, it seemed, tuned in. It was huge. FOX was the only network that continued to broadcast regular entertainment programming most of the time.

As the war wound down we saw our numbers slowly, slowly start to climb as the viewing audience got sick and tired of watching war coverage. People were now looking for the opposite of reality. They wanted to be distracted and entertained. FOX was there; and it was pretty much the only network airing entertainment.

Barry Diller had the brilliant idea of having
90210
return to the air early the following season. We started shooting new shows at the end of May so FOX would have new original programming to air starting in the middle of July. That was quite a bold move at the time; he was looking to capture the teen audience who had nothing else to do in the summertime. With the right show, they would watch TV—we often forget that back then, there was no Internet or cell phones, and watching movies meant going to the theater or going to a video store to rent videotapes to put in a VCR. There was a huge untapped market of teenagers out there looking for entertainment, for sure.

So we started filming the summertime-themed shows: Brandon started working at the Beverly Hills Beach Club . . . Dylan got into a surfing accident . . . stuff like that, and it worked. That summer the show really began to take off. The first episode of season two premiered at number 14, which was a very big deal for FOX at that time. It resulted in an invitation for Shannen, Luke, and me to present at the Emmy Awards. Our own show was never nominated for an Emmy, but I was a presenter three times.

I was still new to the game; my change in status was so sudden and surprising that when my new publicist, Eddie, asked me, “You've been invited to the after-party at Spago—want to go?” my response was “What Spago party?”

“Jason, you know what that is. Everybody goes there!” I had heard of the restaurant on Sunset, but I was not at all clued in to any after-parties anywhere. I made a brief, unmemorable stop there, because I thought I should, but I was just so unhip to the whole scene. I didn't know who Wolfgang Puck was. I had no idea about Spago's famous pizza. I was a very naive kid who worked all the time. Luke and I drank in craphole Valley restaurant/bars like Marix Tex Mex and Casa Vega after work some nights, surrounded by forty-year-olds who had no idea who we were and would not have cared one bit if they had known.

Still, my life was suddenly moving and changing and picking up momentum rapidly. It was both exciting and unsettling. I began to feel a bit under the gun. I was twenty-two years old; I had no idea how to balance a full-time career on a successful show with a romantic relationship. It seemed to me, at the time, that what I needed was to be as commitment-free as possible so I could be nimble and agile when necessary. The breakup with Robyn crushed me, even though I initiated it. To her credit, Robyn seemed to understand what I was going through. She knew it was best to let me go off to deal with this whole new life that was barreling my way. We parted as a couple, though she remains a friend to this day. But it was a very, very long time before I stopped torturing myself with bittersweet what-ifs.

For years I grieved over the loss of this relationship and wondered if I had made a mistake. Though everything certainly turned out fine in the end—we are both happily married to great spouses with beautiful kids—we were still not much more than kids ourselves back then. So when I look back, I can forgive myself for what happened.

T
he first half of the second season of the show was a perfect balance: the show was successful and gaining fans and momentum every week, but there was no hysteria surrounding us. It was clear we were on the right path, an enviable situation for cast and crew alike as we all really settled into our jobs. Kevin Caffrey was best boy electric on
90210
. I walked into his office one day and saw a bunch of racing posters on the walls. “Dude, I've always wanted to race rally cars,” I told him. “Is there a rally series here in Southern California?”

“I'm sure there is, let me find out.” Kevin looked into it and found out that there were all kinds of races in the area, sponsored by the California Rally Series.

Rally races are car races on rough dirt roads driven by teams of two. Each car leaves the starting point at one-or two-minute intervals. The various “stages” of the course are connected with “transits” on public roads, where the cars must obey the posted speed limits and rules of the road. The courses go hundreds of miles in two-day rallies. The team with the best combined times from every competition stage wins. It's a very popular sport worldwide; I had been following it since I was a kid.

I finally had enough money to buy a rally car and start competing. Kevin and I started looking for the right car. Eventually, we settled on a Honda CRX that we bought for about three thousand bucks and tinkered with endlessly. We “campaigned” that car for a year. That's not a political term; in performance rallying, “campaign” simply means to race. Performance rally races were held on weekends, day and night, on the distant outskirts of Los Angeles, way down dirt roads you'd never seen before and had no idea were even out there. The roads were so remote and primitive they were maintained by the Forest Service, and barreling through those ridges late at night could most definitely be dangerous.

Kevin and I would haul our car to the track in a trailer, unload it, prepare it, jump in, and race as fast as we could. I drove while he navigated. Our Honda was cheap and slow, but we raced the crap out of that car all over California for an entire year. Ridgecrest, Glen Helen, Gorman, Santa Rosa, the high desert. This was grassroots, mom-and-pop racing. Rally racing is the most fun you can have with your clothes on!

One weekend I was going out of town to promote the show and told KC he should take a turn as driver. “You drive it this weekend, buddy,” I urged him. I left, and of course he immediately drove our car off a cliff and wadded it up. We had to literally cut the car in half and scrap the wrecked half. We searched all over California for another wrecked CRX so we could basically weld the two halves together and have a car again.

The two of us were just having fun together, competing in these races for a good time. It was very much a hobby, and not an extremely hazardous one. Our car just didn't go fast enough; it maxed out at approximately 135 miles per hour and had a full roll cage, race seats, and seven-point harnesses. Of course, we also wore full-on racing suits and helmets. Somehow, somewhere along the way we started winning our class, and eventually even won some rallies. Next thing we knew, Toyota called and said, “How would you like to race for us next year? We'll set you up with a Celica GT4. We'll build it out for you, and you go campaign that next year.”

“Yeah, sure. Okay!” We both jumped on this offer. KC and I had become very close; we worked long hours on the show together during the week and raced together most weekends. None of my cast mates were particularly interested in racing, and I was careful not to talk much about it at work. That was the whole point, to me, of racing: to take me away. Driving leaves you no room to worry about anything else. It concentrates mind and body in a way that nothing else I had ever tried did. Racing was all-consuming; it required every bit of my focus and attention. There was no room to think about the show when I was in a race.

I loved being on
90210,
but the hours were long and the pressure on me was intense. Just like everybody else with a stressful job, I needed an outlet. I loved racing cars because, to me, it was so pure. A race is a race. There's only one winner. It was straight-up competition all the way to a finish line, down to a stopwatch and winning or losing by hundredths of a second. There was a clarity to racing that I couldn't find anywhere else in my life, and I cherished it.

I
ronically,
Beverly Hills 90210,
a show featuring the lives of kids in one of the country's richest, most exclusive neighborhoods, was actually shot in the most unglamorous places imaginable. Mainly we filmed at a studio in Van Nuys, a suburb of the Valley known for being the porn capital of the world. Sherman Oaks, Altadena, Pasadena, Glendale, Eagle Rock—we shot everywhere
but
Beverly Hills!

FOX producers had approached the real Beverly Hills High School for permission to film the show on their campus before the pilot and were turned down. So Torrance High School—another suburb out by Los Angeles International Airport—stood in for West Beverly High. During the first season and the beginning of the second season, our presence was no big deal to anyone there. We were just some random television show that showed up now and then to shoot some scenes.

Los Angeles residents are accustomed to filming, so no one really paid much attention to us. But, as the show blew up, we started spending more time shooting at Torrance High School. By this time the students there most definitely knew who we were, and they all loved the show. Well, let me clarify that statement. Girls loved the show; guys did not.

Our production company had only one assistant director and a trainee AD managing the whole set, so keeping people away from us while we were working wasn't a big priority. In all fairness, it wasn't exactly a problem at first. It was one thing to have giggling high school girls coming over and asking for autographs and pictures and stuff. It was another when the senior-year boys started hurling insults and doing their best to start shit with Ian, Brian, Luke, and me. There were quite a few girls with crushes and quite a few pissed-off, jealous boyfriends.