Jason Priestley (24 page)

I was already far from enchanted with Tori's new husband. This was just icing on the cake.

The producers of Tori and Dean's ubiquitous reality show do make a point of asking me to appear on every single iteration. So far I haven't been able to find the time.

A
t the beginning of Naomi's pregnancy that came along in our second year of marriage, we had all these wonderful ideas that we'd be able to live in our 1928 house on a hill with fifty-two steps to the front door once we had kids. We figured, hey, we'll throw up some gates and the kid will be fine. We had no idea of the realities of strollers and diaper bags and all the stuff a baby would need.

Naomi was about six months along when I was sitting in the living room, watching the NHL playoffs on TV one day. All of a sudden, the front door swung open and my pregnant wife stood there holding five bags of groceries. Sweat had broken out on her forehead. She did not look pleased. “We're moving!” she said.

“Sure, baby, whatever you want to do. You want to move, let's move. Good idea!” I told her.

She was in serious nesting mode, all right. During that last trip up all those stairs, carrying bags of groceries—something in her just snapped. She got serious about finding the right place to live. Within a week, she called asking me to meet her to look at the perfect place she had found for us in the Valley. As I got closer and closer to the address, I realized that I was just a few blocks from where Frank Levy had lived when I first arrived in Los Angeles, in his picture-perfect neighborhood. Frank, sadly, had passed on in the 1990s. He was a good guy; it was a sad day for me when he died. After we parted ways, I did not have a manager again for ten years.

This neighborhood was still truly something special, the ideal small-town USA look and feel, hidden away behind the crossroads of some of the busiest freeways in L.A. In addition to looking like a movie set, it was a friendly and tight-knit community with lots of kids around. We put an offer in that day and bought it that night. Naomi was in no mood to fool around.

Next we were on to the great name search, which lasted for months. We had all the books full of baby names. We both loved the name Ava but kept discarding it because at the time there was a run on that name. Everywhere we turned, someone else was naming their daughter Ava. One night, a friend of ours was listening to our discussion and said, “Who cares what everyone else is doing? You love the name Ava, she'll be
your
Ava, call her what you want.” It was very good advice.

On the night our daughter was born in 2007, I spent the night in the hospital with both her and my wife. Seeing Ava's birth was a life-altering experience for me. Until that moment, our daughter had been very theoretical to me. Of course I watched Naomi's stomach expand and felt our daughter moving around inside, but the baby just wasn't real to me. The moment I saw baby Ava, everything changed for me in a profound and serious way. The gravity of the situation struck me: this tiny little being was completely dependent on her mother and me for her existence and survival. The weight of that responsibility struck me immediately, and all my loving and protective instincts kicked into high gear. Or to put it more simply: one look at her face and I was a goner.

Of course, we got very little sleep that night. I awoke early the next morning, said good-bye to my girls, and drove back to the Warner Ranch, where I was shooting my new television series
Side Order of Life
. I was completely scattered and emotional and for once in my life not well prepared. I had to do a long driving scene where I was in the car talking to someone on the phone. I pasted the dialogue pages all over the inside of the car so I could be “driving” and look casually down and remember what the hell I was supposed to say next.

My world had shifted on its axis; I would never be the same again.

N
aomi spent a couple of days in the hospital recovering, and then I wheeled my wife out to the waiting car. We carefully put Ava in her brand-new car seat for the very first time and I drove home. The three of us! Naomi and I kept looking at each other in shock, like we'd just gotten away with something.

Of course, outside the hospital, a group of photographers lay in wait, trying to get the first shot of Ava. We did a lot of maneuvering to sneak out of the place without a tabloid photographer chasing us down for the first newborn shot. My agent at the time recommended that we make a deal for an official photo shoot so that we could control the situation, not a tabloid person. It's an unfortunate reality of the world today that when anybody famous has a baby, it brings out aggressive tabloid photographers, trying to be first, looking for that money shot. Believe me, to them it's all about money. The main reason celebrities set up official “baby shoots” is to take any profit for aggressive photographers out of the equation. Nobody needs to be surrounded by flashbulbs as they try to take a days-old baby home for the very first time.

It was strange and wonderful and exciting to unload our tiny little infant and take her inside with us, but we were pretty sure we had it knocked. We'd both read plenty of parenting and baby books, not to mention we'd spent a great deal of time around friends with children. We were a bit overconfident, actually, because we knew nothing about having a newborn. Nothing. I got Naomi settled in bed, Ava resting in a bassinet next to her. Right from the start, Ava had an excellent appetite and breast-fed with no problems. Everything was fine, until she started crying—which she proceeded to do for the next twenty hours straight, no breaks. We had a colicky newborn on our hands.

As first-time parents, we were completely dumbfounded. We tried everything. Feeding her. Changing her. Picking her up. Burping her. Walking around with her. Putting her in her bassinet. Swaddling her. Nothing worked, and Naomi and I just looked at each other as the hours wore on, becoming more and more frantic. This baby had been an absolute angel in the hospital, with barely a peep out of her the first couple days of her life. Now this tiny little creature would not stop screeching at an earsplitting level. It was shockingly loud.

I finally found a way to carry Ava around, walking with a very slight bounce that seemed to soothe her; also, she had worn herself out. After her epic crying bout, she finally fell asleep the next morning, a full twenty hours after I had so happily put her and her mom to bed. Naomi and I were completely hollow-eyed, worn-out, and shell-shocked, and quite a bit less sure about our parenting knowledge than we'd been just a day or so before.

We quickly learned that the problem was Naomi's diet; she had to stick to very simple food while breast-feeding. Anything with the slightest amount of nuts or soy or dairy caused an immediate and dreadfully negative reaction in Ava. So Naomi lived on plain chicken, rice, and arugula for the next nine months. In less than two weeks, she was back to her prepregnancy weight—the strict diet plus breast-feeding caused any baby weight to disappear in a flash.

My job was head cook. I made sure that plenty of the extremely limited foods the girls could tolerate were stocked and ready to make at all times. Naomi and I went into full swing with our baby-raising diet, and our team effort really paid off. Ava was happy and healthy. Meanwhile, Naomi's mum and London friends sent real, truly English Cadbury chocolate for when she could eat it again and she got her stockpile ready. She'd given up everything else without a murmur, but when it came time, she wanted some chocolate, stat!

We were the absolutely classic new parents, completely spellbound by our baby. We spent hours just watching Ava, waiting to see what she would do next. We could not get enough of her. We snapped photos, shot videos, and took her everywhere—you name it, we did it. It was no surprise that my old friend Jann Wenner made a great offer for Ava's official baby pictures. He sent a first-class photographer over to our house, who took a stunning family photo of the three of us in the backyard. Then he put it on the cover of
US
magazine. Baby Ava was already a cover girl!

S
wifty held on for a week after Ava was born. He was old and sick with cancer, and an untreatable tumor was pressing against his lungs. There was nothing more the vet could do for him. They had told me I would know when the time came to put him down. Until then, as long as he was eating, I should just keep him comfortable and happy. I was grateful to have the warning so I had time to accustom myself to the idea of life without him.

Ava was less than a week old the day Swifty refused to eat. As we approached the twenty-four-hour mark with no food, I knew the time had come. I called the vet and carried Swifty out to the car with me for the very last time. As I pulled out and headed for the vet's office, Swifty stood up and looked directly at me. He was giving me a very fixed stare, as though he was trying to hold me in his memory. His breathing became very loud and labored. I knew he was dying.

I pulled over only a couple of blocks from my house, took him out of the car, sat on the grass, and gave him a big hug. I was holding him when I felt the very last beat of his heart against mine and saw the light go out in his eyes. My Swifty, who had been with me for fourteen years. That dog had seen some things in his life! He had more frequent flyer miles that most people I know.

That was really, really hard. In the midst of my elation about the birth of my first child, I lost one of my oldest and dearest friends. Swifty was such a good boy. I knew in my heart that he had held on until Ava arrived.

I
worked frequently as a director because I very much enjoyed taking material on the printed page and taking it all the way through to a finished product on-screen. That was my challenge as a director. Actors have to be very self-involved: worried about their timing, hitting their marks, their motivation, how they look, you name it. Looking at the big picture as director was a very different and rewarding challenge. Many, many actors think they want to be a director until they give it shot, and then they quickly decide it's too much work. It's an awful lot of painstaking mundane preparation and a tremendous amount of work for very little glory, toiling in the background to make it all happen. Acting of course is just the opposite—less work, all the attention.

I'd heard rumors about a remake of
Beverly Hills 90210
for a couple of years, and in 2008 it eventually got up and running. Once production became official, an offer came in for me to reprise my role as Brandon, something I had no interest in doing. I couldn't really see how Brandon Walsh would fit into this new version. Directing, however, was another story. I got booked to direct the seventeenth episode of the first season, so I watched every episode in order to be fully up to speed and know what was going on with the story line.

The show really had little to do with the original besides the title and original premise. It was a completely different production—a very good-looking show. They certainly had all the toys and bells and whistles to make it look superluxe and impressive—not exactly what I recalled from the original! Jennie was playing Kelly again on the new show. The woman who played her mother, the actress Ann Gillespie, was also back, and she was someone I was very happy to see again after fifteen years or so. It was a quick, enjoyable job but not even close to any kind of reunion; this new show was a completely different production from what I remembered.

I HAD KNOWN
producer Brenda Hampton since her first job writing an episode of
Sister Kate
. Over the intervening years she'd created the hit show
7th Heaven
and had become a powerful producer. Her latest project was a new show called
The Secret Life of the American Teenager
. I originally signed on to direct two episodes and while I was there, the show was picked up, so I signed on for three more episodes over the next six months. Obviously, the cast was a bunch of young actors finding their way, and I certainly had a bit of experience in that department. I hoped that having me around was a good experience for those guys, and I tried to help them out as much as I could.

In a great stroke of luck, the show was filmed literally ten minutes away from our new house, and my hours were extremely civilized for once. Brenda liked to wrap up work by 3:00
P.M.
every day, so that couldn't have worked out better. Naomi and I were determined to do it all ourselves, with no outside help, and fortunately my schedule worked perfectly with a new baby. I worked and then came home every afternoon to take care of Naomi and Ava and do all the shopping and cooking. It was an ideal situation for the whole first year of Ava's life.

V
anessa Redgrave slapped me in the face. It was my fault, of course.

I got offered a part in a BBC miniseries, called
Day of the Triffids,
that was to shoot in London. The series was based on the famous science fiction novel by British author John Wyndham, about a postapocalyptic London terrorized by flesh-eating plants. The story had been filmed before, several times; it was a classic B movie in the 1960s, as well as an earlier BBC production in the early 1980s. This new version updated and modernized the story while staying fairly true to the original material in the book.

The cast was all-star: Dougray Scott, Joely Richardson, Eddie Izzard, Vanessa Redgrave . . . and me! We were off to England for ten weeks. Naomi and I set up house in a rented flat in South Kensington. The work went well. I had one memorable scene that called for Vanessa to try to hit me; I was supposed to catch her hand before any damage was done. I felt pretty confident about my superior reflexes. “Go on, Vanessa, try to hit me. I'll get my hand up there and stop it.”