Personal Life
Spelling was born in Dallas, Texas. He was the son of Pearl (née Wald) and David Spelling. His father worked as a tailor. His paternal ancestors were immigrants from Russia and Poland. They chose to change their surname from Spurling to Spelling upon their move to the United States. Spelling had three brothers: Sam, Max, and Daniel, and a sister, Becky.
At the age of 8, Spelling lost the use of his legs psychosomatically, due to trauma caused by constant bullying from his schoolmates, and was confined to bed for a year. Spelling attended Forest Avenue High School. During World War II, he served in the United States Armed Forces. Spelling graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1949, where he was a cheerleader.
He married actress Carolyn Jones in 1953, in California. They divorced in 1964. Spelling remarried to Candy Gene (née Marer) in 1968. The couple had two children: daughter Tori (born 1973) and son Randy (born 1978). Spelling bought the home and 6-acre (2.4 ha) lot of Bing Crosby's former Los Angeles house. Following his demolition of the property, he built a 123-room home in 1988. Known as "The Manor", it was valued at US$11,000,000, has 56,500 square feet (5,250 m2) of floor space, and is the largest single-family dwelling in Hollywood (34°4'23"N 118°25'41"W). Spelling's widow Candy listed the home for sale in 2008 for $150,000,000, and heiress Petra Ecclestone purchased the property for $85,000,000 in 2011.
Read more about this topic: Aaron Spelling
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“There’s something tragic in the fate of almost every person—it’s just that the tragic is often concealed from a person by the banal surface of life.... A woman will complain of indigestion and not even know that what she means is that her whole life has been shattered.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)