As any scholar of American celebrity already knows, the problem lies with the sum left by the elder Spelling to his 33year-old actress-daughter, Tori Spelling.

Her take, as US Weekly magazine revealed last week, was $800,000, three quarters in stocks and only one quarter in cash.

No one is handing round the collection plate for Ms Spelling just yet. But if it is true, as the magazine says, that the blonde alumnus of Beverly Hills 90210 . . .

also produced by her father . . . is "hurt and confused", she may have cause. Her mother's interior decorator was left almost as much.

The financial context is indeed fairly striking. Aaron Spelling, who was also behind such institutions of American TV as The Love Boat, Charlie's Angels and Starsky and Hutch, was the owner of a 123-bedroom mansion in Beverly Hills and head of a personal fortune put at no less than $500m. The inheritance offered to Tori, in fact, works out at just 0.16% of all of Daddy's assets.

Will Tori take this lying down? Not according to US Weekly's west coast editor, Ken Baker. "Alzheimer's was listed as a contributing factor in his death, so he may not have been of sound mind when he revised the will, " he writes in the 8 August issue. "Tori, I'm told, will contest the will. However, the will has a nocontest clause, so it could be a really messy fight."

Messy would mean manna for the tabloids. What is for certain is that if Ms Spelling indeed turns to the courts for help, she will be starting a family dustup . . . her mother, Candy, is sole executor . . . that will attract higher ratings than any television episode forged by her father.

Step aside, Alexis Carrington.

The forensic investigation of what might have gone wrong here is already under way. We learn, for instance, that Tori and her dad went through nine months of mutual silence, roughly coinciding with the period when her ill-fated 2004 marriage to Charlie Shanian fell to pieces, and Tori took up instead with Canadian actor and father of two, Dean McDermott. They were married barefoot in Fiji in March, with nary a parent in sight.

A statement on Tori's website tells us that she and the old man nonetheless enjoyed a bedside reconciliation shortly before he died. "He was a great man and an even better father, " she informs her fans. But if she repaired things with her father, apparently she did not do the same with her mother, whom Tori, according to US Weekly, suspected of having an extra-marital affair while Aaron was confined to bed.

There seems to be nothing fictional to the stories of strain between Candy and Tori. In a very public rebuke, Tori claimed that her mother had failed to tell her when her father died, and that she had only found out through news reports. Candy shot back with an instant denial.

And now it is Candy who is trying to douse the wildfire started by US Weekly, suggesting late last week through a press agent, Kevin Sasaki, that its revelations about the will are all made up.

"I know that based on what I know, the claims made by the magazine were ridiculous and inaccurate. That's all that can be said, " he commented.