A stint in TV with the baddest cat: Spelling

WHAT the world probably doesn’t need is another story about Aaron Spelling, who gave us such discriminating television classics as “Charlie’s Angels” and “The Love Boat” and who decided to die last week.

I use the word advisedly because I’m sure he had something to say about when his life should end, because he was always in charge of his own destiny. And while you may not need another story about him, I have one anyhow.

There was a compelling quality about the man who tapped into low-end pop culture to create TV shows that few critics liked but everyone else loved, and who cares what those uppity, petunia-sniffing dilettantes like anyhow?

Spelling died richer than anybody most of us know and lived in a mansion that was ugly and excessive, but he wasn’t in the business of taking votes on what was acceptable to those who surrounded him.

My association with the man came through a pilot I wrote called “B.A.D. C.A.T.S.,” which in cop parlance spelled out to be burglary auto detail, commercial auto thefts. It was a unit of the LAPD that I came across while researching a pilot for ABC.

It was in the 1980s when I was doing a good deal of writing for television, not because I necessarily liked TV but because writing scripts was a challenge that I couldn’t resist, even though I knew little about the format. I was like a stevedore hired to define nanotechnology to a well digger.

To cut to the chase, Spelling liked what I wrote, and we had a series of meetings to work out all of the steps it takes to get a series on the air.

One meeting was in the Bel-Air home he occupied before building the mansion. I was under the impression that we were all there to offer suggestions on the script, but that wasn’t the case.

I recall coming up with an idea during a pause in the conversation. Spelling looked in my direction as though my voice had come from an empty space between two of his assistants. He wasn’t really looking at me, if you know what I mean, as much as he was looking through me, as though I were a form of ectoplasm.

After a few seconds, he went on talking as though I hadn’t said anything, and thereafter I just sat there wondering if anyone would notice if I crawled out a window.

Segue from that meeting to another in which two men from the network’s standards and practices were present in Spelling’s studio office to offer their objections to places in the script that, in their judgment, were either obscene or commercial.

They could have been twins. Both wore the same sour expression that looked a little like Walter Matthau on downers and both had the kind of low, growling voice that seemed to rumble under the level at which most humans communicate. They were a form of Tweedledum and Tweedledee but less committed.

Their objections, presented in long lists to each of us, were minor. We could not, for example, use the word “hell” unless it was in a religious reference to the place where bad children go and could not say Coca-Cola or Tums, because they were commercial terms reserved for air space that had to be purchased.

The script also had to make clear that the show’s main characters, two car racers hired by the cops to catch thieves, buckled their seat belts every time they went streaking hellbent through the streets of L.A. after people who stole cars. I mean heck-bent, of course.

Spelling became more enraged with each comment by the censors and finally rose and announced he could not, and he would not, do the show under the burden that they were imposing on us. He stomped toward the door like an angry elf, his demeanor bristling with outrage. The censors whined puppy-like, called him back and proceeded to back off on almost every item to which they had previously objected. I think Spelling may have given in on Tums, but that was it.

After I turned in the script and an air date was set, we kept waiting for “Spelling’s magic,” the twist and turns he gave otherwise mediocre ideas and inadequate scripts to bring them up to the quality of, say, “Fantasy Island.”

What he did in my script was to delete all of the humor and humanity I had included and turn it into 90 minutes of car chases. It was without a doubt the worst project I had ever been involved in. Even though a talented though relatively unknown Michelle Pfeiffer was one of the stars, the project was flushed into the tank of failed shows after only four episodes.

I made money on the short-lived series, but that’s not what I look back upon today. It was my brief association with a man who defined television at the time and whose power within the medium made him a person to deal with. Relegated to silence, I could observe him more closely. He didn’t strut, and he didn’t strike Napoleonic poses, but there was a theatrical quality about him that made his life a performance.

In that sense, at least, he was worth writing about again because he was more interesting than most and because he was in charge of his own life and, I daresay, the time of his own death. Bravo, Aaron. Take a bow.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@ latimes.com.