I like to think of Tori Spelling as the secret daughter I never had, my Hollywood love child. She is my fantasy little girl, my fairy princess, the stuff of dreams and tawdry, sentimental illusions. I call her the Virgin of Hollywood, and I hold her to be the blond avatar of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the goddess Mexican brujas call Little Mother or Little Goddess, and who is said to be a Catholicized Aztec goddess Tonantzin. The Virgin of Guadalupe has many guises, and you can buy candles to burn to these diminutive girl-gods at every local supermarket. There for ninety-nine cents is Guadalupe as La Purisima, dressed in white, the Virgin presiding over money, herbs, and hair growth. When Guadalupe appears in robes of cerulean velvet, she is called Nuestra Senora del Asuncion and helps in the entertaining of «higher thoughts» to help one rise above adversity. As Nuestra Senora del Nombre, in plain robes, Guadalupe offers improved memory and practicality. With a garland in her hair and rich robes, she is Nuestra Senora del Rosario, patroness of art, music, and a good singing voice. In purple robes and a gold crown, she is La Reina, ruling over wit, eloquence, and fine speech. Dressed in austere robes, as Nuestra Senora de la Presentacion en el Templo, she represents secrecy and privacy. It is striking how little difference there is between the idylls and idols of Hollywood and the slaughtered dreams of the Aztec nation. I wonder what kind of hieroglyphs will be made of the walls of the Spelling mansion many eons hence, and who will be worshipping, even as I do, at Tori's blond altar.

Sometimes I like to picture Tori in a baby-doll nightie, drifting on a sea of stuffed animals, all of which wear little floral-print animal clothes that match her California King bedspread.

Then there's my other Tori, kind of a Patty Duke identicalcousin thing, the Tori I imagine freebasing in the back seat of a Dodge Viper, or doing the nasty on Daddy's billiards table with some faceless cast member of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

My most touching, painful, and beloved Tori is a kind of Carrie Fisher manquee, writing poetry in her rococo bathroom with a dog-eared copy of Bataille's Story of the Eye and a carton of hardboiled eggs handy by the commode.

Tori is so utterly-imaginable.

As Raymond Chandler said, there are blondes, and then there are blondes. While everyone else is hunkered down over Melrose Place, I'm drawn over and over again to the afternoon reruns of Beverly Hills 90210. For me, Heather Locklear evokes nothing of the bombshell. Heather's just another grown-up mall rat! A rocker chick turned career girl, a nominal puppy-dog girl, boringly hardbitten underneath that shaggy trademark 'do and those big shoulder pads. Tori, on the other hand, is another order of blonde, the good kind, so vulnerable as to be egoless. Nothing bad can ever happen to Tori. No amount of surgery-gone-wrong can mar her dear, droll, Mr. Potato Head looks. Beneath the ungainly peroxide helmet, the sleek, store-bought tan, and the short, trendy-girl frocks, lies a blind, oceanic state of being, all hope and hurt, the very essence of girl.

***

I met my son's father when we wrote a screenplay together. I wrote another screenplay when Tyrone was three months old, swinging him with my foot while I typed on the computer.

Meanwhile, Tyrone's dad went out and took the Robert McKee Story Structure Seminar. It's like EST: you sit in a convention facility and are bombarded by hours of motivational jargon and promises of wild success. I was horrified at the time, but I have to admit in retrospect that for being a weekend crash course, the McKee seminar did a pretty good job of disabling most of Scott's quirky, instinctual artistic habits and replacing them with formulas and catchphrases. The blockbuster script remained elusive, but Scott became very good at keeping his son in line, fed, washed, and in bed by nine, while my own lack of story structure meant I still had peanut butter sandwiches in my file drawers and never got Tyrone to bed before eleven.

I went out on pitch meetings for bad cable-TV erotica shows and dallied with «producers» long before I knew that the idle rich young of minor movie stars are commonly referred to as producers.

I have a fantastic story, and you're the one to write it! Boys with wan, blow-dryer hair and ill-fitting khakis, living in that more and more familiar wealthy squalor of the Spanish-style stucco house with the pool and the ugly antique rugs and country pine furniture and the anodized black halogen lamp left over from the all-black boy-decor of college days. All of it anxiously presexual. They invite you over for endless breakfast meetings. I tell you what, I'll give you five hundred dollars to write a treatment. The cappuccino machine makes a sterile sucking sound in the kitchen.

I'd get home, dry-humped half to death, and proceed to slog and bark my way through the evening: as a mother, I was a hack. At this rate, my child would turn out as lame as any episode on late-night cable, an appalling exercise in wounded mediocrity.

H only I were more like Candy and Aaron. Why couldn't I have a child who sprang whole from my creative imagination like Athena from the head of Zeus?

I started to have dreams, always the same: I'm being chased through the Spelling mansion by a bunch of preadolescent Amway salesmen. Tori is there, wearing pink Dr. Dentons with feet in them and sucking her thumb. She seems catatonic, shuffling through the mansion's marble halls.

Suddenly Aaron and Candy are there, at the door to a giant ballroom full of metal folding chairs. Candy tells me I am enrolled in something at the Learning Annex called the Robert McKee Parenting Seminar, and that it will cost me five hundred dollars. Amazingly enough, I have exactly five hundred dollars!

I take a seat. At first I'm a little bit disappointed to see that most of the people here are wanna-bes like me, then I spy a couple at the far end who look a lot like Warren and Annette.

«Conflict! Conflict! Conflict!» the seminar leader exclaims, sketching an angry diagram ,on the chalkboard. The circles he draws at the bottom are kids, with good and bad qualities radiating out of them in little spokes. They look like the suns my little boy draws all over my phone bill.

The parent to my left is a scruffy-looking, Altmanesque soul in granny glasses and Gap khakis, a burnt-out case if ever there was one. «Hi,» I say, «great seminar, huh?» He smirks and says, «First time, eh?» I nod politely. «So you've been here before?» He coughs and beckons me closer w,th a crooked, dirty finger. I lean in close to listen, after glancing over my shoulder to make sure there aren't any Players watching us.

«What is it about children that gnaws away at the creative imagination?»

he asks in a broken, delirious tone. «Why is being a parent so draining and monotonous and seemingly futile, a rote recitation of rules and traditions that one is always a little too tired and frustrated to rise above? You start out thinking you're going to do something special, something fine, but in the end it's just get it done, get through it, and move on.»

I shudder and look away. But as the seminar drags on, I realize that this is never going to work. As a parent, I don't know a «Crisis» from an «Inciting Incident,» I have no «Moral Vision,» and I'm utterly incapable of «Establishing a Consistent Reality.» During a heated debate between two West Siders as to whether or not toilet training can be considered a subplot, I sit bolt upright in a cold sweat, screaming «Rosebud! Rosebud!»

Oh, how glad I was to wake up back in the hardscrabble reality of my life, which is more like a tedious Philip Glass opera than a Hollywood blockbuster. I wish Aaron and Candy all the best, (hey-Tori is now the only virgin on 90210, so don't try to tell me they're bad parents), but I will never be a Hollywood mom, nor do I any longer want to be one. I've learned my lesson, and I can also thank my quirky, astructural Tyrone for inadvertently putting an end to my other Hollywood career.

The next time some fetus-faced producer or other called me up saying that somebody or other had said I was a terrific writer, etc., etc., I promptly took off to Kinko's with two screenplays to be copied. Then something happened: I never went back to pick them up. Now, every few months, I get a message from a guy named Tony asking am I ever coming to pick up these screenplays. Last month the message was slightly more urgent: «Are you ever coming to pick up these, er, original screenplays?»

Well, it's been two years now, and I guess the answer is no. I no longer go to pitch meetings; instead I write magazine articles about things like moisturizer and child care. I even interview starlets for In Style, so I now know that all girls in Hollywood have overstuffed sofas from Shabby Chic just like Tori's. It's a living on the fringes, which seems to be where I belong. The screenplays I lay at the feet of the Virgin of Hollywood, long may she shine.

© 1997 by Hillary Johnson