Candy at Last

I met Aaron at The Daisy Club, which was a private night club and discotheque in Beverly Hills. It was the kind of place where “everyone who was anyone” went. Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Katherine Ross. Even Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. I was nineteen. 

Aaron was brilliant, charming, and quite the playboy about town with a different date every night, but we saw something in each other the moment we met. He had just left Four Star Television and formed a partnership with Danny Thomas called Thomas Spelling productions, and he had just made a pilot for ABC called The Mod Squad. At the time, I was working at a famous L.A. clothing store called Jax, and Jack Hanson, who owned Jax the store, was also a former baseball player for the Angels, and also owned The Daisy. I didn’t apply for the job at Jax. Jack Hanson approached me on the street one day, and asked if I wanted to work at his store. I had never worked at a store before and I said that I would if I could only work four hours a day. I’d come in at noon and leave at four because I liked to sleep late in the morning. Well, he gave me the job despite my demands, and I worked on commission. Here was the thing: you had to bring out all the clothes from the back and most of the girls were lazy and although they were all dressed up and made up, they never even got up out of their chairs to help a customer. I asked everyone if they needed help and I was adamant about being nice to customers whether they treated me well or not. I knew what working in retail was like and my attitude paid off. Working just four hours a day, I made more money than the other girls. 

I was still living at home on the night that I met Aaron at The Daisy. That night, I was staying at my girlfriend Ronnie’s house, though, because my parents were out of town. Ronnie had a date that night, and there was a guy named Lee who kept asking me out and I kept refusing, but it was either just give in and go out on a date with Lee that night or stay at home with Ronnie’s mother. I decided to go out on the date. Lee was as boring as I thought he’d be, but it was something to do. We all went to La Scala for dinner and then to The Daisy. When we got to The Daisy, we met up with Tina Sinatra and Wes Farrell.  Aaron was also with a date that night, but he knew Tina and Wes so he kept coming over to our table. What I learned later was that he was whispering that he wanted to meet “that girl,” who was me. 

Finally, Aaron asked me to dance. And we danced and danced, and eight or nine dances later, I finally came back to my table and my date was standing there with my coat, holding it open like, “OK, we’re leaving now.”  I have no idea what happened to Aaron’s date and I never asked him.