That's what Heather Locklear said Monday during her cameo appearance at soap star Hunter Tylo's wrongful termination suit against Spelling Entertainment in Los Angeles Superior Court.
Spelling, which hired The Bold and the Beautiful actress Tylo to play a "sexy vixen" on Melrose Place, claims she was fired because her pregnancy rendered her an unlikely candidate for that role. Tylo claims the studio told her to get an abortion or get lost--and that Spelling could have shot around her round condition, anyway.
Locklear, whose Amanda Woodward character pretty much started the vixen-seductress franchise on Melrose, didn't help her employer's cause. Five weeks after giving birth to her own daughter--and while wearing skin-tight pants and a black, sleeveless, midriff-revealing shirt--Locklear testified that when she told series producers she was pregnant in February, they dealt with it, arranging props and body doubles to conceal her condition. "They used a picnic basket, table tops and a waiter to hide my pregnancy," she stated.
In fact, while questioned by one of Tylo's attorneys, Nathan Goldberg (higher-profile Gloria Allred is also on the plaintiff's team), Locklear said MP producers started filming the show two weeks early so she could be free to have her baby, and that she was often filmed from the chest up.
Locklear drew applause from starstruck jurors at one point, when Goldberg asked if her role on Melrose required her to act. "Damn right," she responed.
All in all, it wasn't the best news for the Spelling legal team, headed by lawyer William Waldo. Waldo has contended all along that Tylo's contract clearly states "any material change in [her] appearance" gave the company the right to terminate the agreement. He also argued earlier that Tylo had gained 36 pounds by the time her first scenes would have been shot, and she would not have been a convincing temptress.
Curiously, Waldo didn't try to discredit Locklear by reminding the jury about her failed marriage to rock star and amateur videographer Tommy Lee.
Tylo, who now has a one-year-old daughter, has since returned to her bold and beautiful CBS daytime home.