NOT JUST DADDY'S GIRL

By BRUCE HANDY/LOS ANGELES

The lobby of the Chateau Marmont, a venerable Hollywood hotel located on the grungy end of the Sunset Strip, is one of Los Angeles' prime celebrity loci. It's a place where young male movie stars skulk about on bright, hot days in dark leather jackets and knit O.J. caps, as if they were second-story men in an old Dick Tracy comic. And here too, representing the not so tormented, not so still-living-in-James-Dean's-shadow side of stardom, we find Tori Spelling. She bounces in on top of a pair of bright-orange platform flip-flops, plastic daisies affixed to their toe straps. Clutching a baby-blue handbag the size and shape of a lunchbox, she is wearing baggy denim overalls and a floral-print T shirt. In short, she is the spitting image of a jolly, schoolbound kindergartner, although at 24 she is better coiffed and more skillfully made up than most.

She has a tabloid reputation as a party girl, but after meeting her one comes to suspect that her girlish veneer may be more than just an actressy affectation. That wouldn't be surprising in someone whose childhood was spent sheltered in the famously vast Spelling mansion (her father is TV producer Aaron Spelling), who was escorted to school by bodyguards, who hasn't traveled much and who has been working what are often 18-hour days since the age of 17. Chatting with her, one learns she is afraid of ants, likes "crafts" (she is a practitioner of the nearly lost art of decoupage) and keeps sea monkeys as pets. "They're really kind of gross," she admits. "I came in one day, and they were having sex. They were attached, and they were like, 'Uhh...' and I was like, 'Ohh... ' Three days later, they ate their babies."

The "Yuck!" is left unsaid. And while it is easy to imagine this actress playing television's most famous ex-virgin, Donna Martin of Beverly Hills, 90210, it is less easy to imagine her starring in an independent movie like The House of Yes, a new black comedy from Miramax in which Spelling's character, Lesly, discovers that her fiance has been re-enacting the assassination of John F. Kennedy with his twin sister by way of foreplay. For Spelling, at last, the kitsch is overt, and thus The House of Yes represents what is known in the business as an opportunity to stretch.

Can she really act? This is an oft debated question to which, as with that of nature vs. nurture, it is hard to give a definitive answer. Despite a career forged in nepotism--90210 is dad's show--Spelling has endured, projecting an odd combination of goofy sincerity and trashy glamour that has also carried a string of popular movies-of-the-week. Is this skill? Or her luck in having an arresting face, pretty yet shovel-like (she cops only to a nose job)? Whatever one thinks of such fare as Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?, her longevity is a feat that transcends mere patronage; just ask Sofia Coppola. "Tori's got acting chops--she's just been doing awful material," says House of Yes director Mark Waters, who had seen Spelling only in Co-ed Call Girl before casting her. As it happens, The House of Yes is a Spelling Films presentation, but Waters says the filmmaking wing of Aaron's empire came aboard long after Tori was attached.

The actress says she will be happy to keep plugging away on 90210, now in its eighth season, as long as Fox keeps renewing it. The best reason to keep watching may well be her newly dark-red hair, a fetching revelation after years of blondage. Her real color, she says, is "light mousy brown. But I haven't seen it since I was 16." Spoken like a survivor.