And what if someone did get caught back then? Did he go to jail? Not terribly likely. Jail for child molesters is actually a new concept. Until 1950, the penalty for child rape in California—not “fondling,” not “molestation,” but flat out, unquestioned, forcible rape of a child by an adult—was (drum roll, please) thirty days in the county jail. After all, child rape was only a misdemeanor. The victim was only a child; it wasn’t like raping a real person. But then, in November 1949, Linda Joyce Glucoft, a six-year-old girl in Los Angeles, was raped and murdered by a man named Fred Stroble. The story was front-page news in the L.A. Times for a week as police and the FBI searched for Stroble. Turns out he had just finished his thirty days for raping another child. The public went berserk, and the law was changed, so that the rape of a child could at least be considered a felony.
I found out that I might have some recourse entirely by accident. I was at day camp and heard some older campers joking about someone having “gotten raped.” I asked my father what rape was, and he gave me an explanation about someone making someone else have sex “when they didn’t want to,” and that this was actually illegal. I was floored—not by the illegal part, but by the “didn’t want to” part. My brother had gotten so good at making everyone cater to his slightest whim, that the very idea of my “wanting” or “not wanting” anything had become an alien concept. I didn’t know that sex was something people did because they wanted to. I thought it was something you had to do when you were told. And I could hardly imagine anyone wanting to do that on a voluntary basis.
So I refused Stefan’s next “request.” When he started the usual ranting and raving and threats, I took a deep breath and informed him that I had just found out that making me do this was against the law, and that if he didn’t get out of my room, I would call the police. Bluffing? You bet. Even then I figured the cops probably weren’t going to do much about a “familial” molestation case. I would have been right. Stefan laughed and taunted me, but then decided not to take the risk, and walked out of my room, zipping up his pants on the way out. How long would this reprieve last? I didn’t know, but I knew I had to do something to make sure he never touched me again.
What I really needed was to get out of town. As luck would have it, I got a movie part in a real honest-to-God feature film. I was the lead. Well, the lead kid anyway. It was called Throw Out the Anchor, and the stars were Richard Egan and Dina Merrill. It was a poor imitation of a typical Disney flick: handsome, widowed dad and his two adorable kids—the precocious, blond tomboy (yours truly) and her teen idol–type brother—go to Florida to “get away from it all” and rent a houseboat. Dad meets gorgeous heiress type, and romance and adorable high jinks ensue.
Oh wait, this sounds familiar. That would be because somebody already made this movie, in 1958. It was called Houseboat and starred Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. But I was too young to know that (and thankfully too young to compare Richard Egan to Cary Grant—yikes!), so I thought it was great. The best part was the whole movie was going to be filmed in Florida for three months. Hooray!
My mother and I moved to Orlando for the summer of 1972. We stayed in a nice hotel called the Park Plaza. I was thrilled because the room had a kitchen, so I could stock the fridge with Dr Pepper and pickles and all the other ghastly things I liked that nobody else could stand. On the set, I had not just my own dressing room, but an entire Winnebago. The set was in the middle of nowhere on the St. Johns River; not quite the Everglades, but close enough. The whole area was crawling with thousands of frogs, fish, armadillos, raccoons, possums, snakes, and, yes, alligators—real-live alligators that could actually maim and kill. And unlike California, whose only poisonous breed of snake is the rattler, Florida is home to every kind of poisonous snake you can name: rattlesnakes, water moccasins, coral snakes, and copperheads. As a huge fan of nature’s villains—not to mention all things weird and scaly—I was in heaven.
My character, Stevie Porterfield, also liked wild animals, even snakes, and one of the movie’s subplots was her quest to save their habitat from being destroyed by developers. Like me, Stevie was a tomboy, who preferred jeans and sneakers to dresses and romping through the underbrush to playing with dolls. For the next three months, I got to play a character who could be my real-life best friend, and I didn’t have to see, hear, speak to, or so much as smell my brother.
This was probably the healthiest I’d been in years, because I was sleeping eight hours a night and, during the day, getting more exercise and fresh air than I ever had. And I was certainly eating. The impossibly thin Dina Merrill and I drove everyone crazy by making a show of how many hot dogs, hamburgers, and Twinkies we could eat without gaining weight. (We both apparently had the metabolism of hamsters.) We just burned them off as fast as we could scarf them down.
I gained a little weight, which was a good thing. Until then, I was always in trouble at school whenever the school nurse decided to check everyone’s height and weight. I was always at least twenty pounds under whatever the number was supposed to be. Notes were sometimes sent home. I ate constantly, but I suppose it was stress. During Throw Out the Anchor, I had a growth spurt, and I proudly went all the way up to fifty-eight pounds.
To top everything off, I even got a pet, just the kind of inappropriate pet every kid wants: a possum. On the way to the set, Dina Merrill found a dead mother possum and her babies. Some were still alive, so she rescued one and presented me with an adorable baby possum in a laundry basket full of Spanish moss. It sat there hissing, spitting, and snarling as all baby wild animals do. I was thrilled; my mother wasn’t. She admonished me not to get too attached, as this probably was not going to be a big hit at the hotel. Several older cast members said that possums were very dangerous—they bit, had rabies. They encouraged me to return this creature to the wild immediately.
Before a decision could be made, a boat pulled up on the river. Sometimes visitors arrived on the set this way, as it was actually easier to get in by boat than by car, and this stretch of the river was a vacation spot for rich tourists with houseboats. An older couple disembarked. The lady had white hair and tons of jewelry and even carried a small poodle. The man wore a neck scarf and captain’s hat. They looked like Mr. and Mrs. Howell from Gilligan’s Island. They wanted to drop by and see “the movie stars,” they said.
The woman suddenly looked down at my basket. “And what do you have there?”
“A possum,” I replied.
“Oh, how adorable!” she squealed.
My mother interrupted. “Yes, well, it may be cute, but I think they’re not going to feel the same way at the hotel!”
The lady brightened. “Oh? What hotel are you staying at?”
“The Park Plaza,” replied my mother.
“Ahhh!” The rich lady said and laughed. “What a coincidence! We own it.”
They thought the possum was darling and absolutely insisted that we bring it back to the hotel as an honored guest. My mother looked at me and asked, “How do you always manage to do these things?”
So what did I name my new pet? I named him after a bizarre subplot in the film. In Throw Out the Anchor, there’s a scene in which an old man tells me a convoluted story about “second chances in life” and how this all has something to do with an egg cream soda. Since my furry little friend had been facing certain death when I got him, I figured this would be a good name for him. So he became Eggbert Crème II, or Eggy for short. When we finished filming, I knew I couldn’t bring Eggy back to Los Angeles, so I left my pet with the director’s daughter, who was about my age and also an avid animal lover. She had a rat named Sweetheart that she had taught to run up her sleeve. She happily took Eggy into her menagerie. Later she wrote to me that, when Eggy got too big to keep in the house, they took him out to the location where they first found him and let him go. Somewhere in the forests along the St. Johns River in Florida, there is a possum sitting on a stump trying to tell the other possums and squirrels and raccoons, “No! I am not maki
ng it up!! I really did live at the Park Plaza Hotel!”
By the time my mom and I returned to L.A. from the movie, it was, of course, time to move again. My brother was also sort of out of the house. I say sort of, because he couldn’t seem to make it stick. He would find an apartment, move out of my parents’ house, usually trading up for an apartment with a girl, a couple of guys, and a big pile of drugs. He’d pay the first and last month’s rent and then stop. This became a joke around our house: “With Stefan, the first and last month’s rent really are the first and last month’s rent.” He and his friends would stay until the landlord threw them out or until someone got arrested for drugs. It was a toss-up as to which happened more often. But it was decreed that Stefan “lived on his own now,” even though my parents wound up paying for everything, and he spent more time moving back home than he did out. His time at home with us was considered “just visiting.”
My family moved to an apartment, a fabulous place in West Hollywood called Hayworth Towers. It was built in the early 1930s, and each apartment had high ceilings, white art deco moldings, a fake fireplace, and floor-to-ceiling mirrors. My room even came with its own bathroom. I particularly loved that it was in the heart of West Hollywood, where there were 7-Elevens, Thrifty Drug Stores, and Baskin-Robbins as far as the eye could see. There was so much sidewalk, I even got a skateboard.
Sadly, though, I was unemployed. I continued to go to auditions. After the movie, I was considered a marketable commodity, and my parents and I thought my career would be off and running. No dice. Auditions, even callbacks, came and went with no bookings. Was I doing something wrong? Was the market glutted with blond eleven-year-old girls? Hmmm…and there was always that damn Jodie Foster. My God, she got everything! She was fantastic, an unstoppable force. I loved her movies, but every little child actress in Hollywood knew that if they saw her at an audition, it was time to go home.
My father, having now started his own management business, Arngrim and Associates, soon to become Arngrim and Petersen, sat me down for a managerial talk. “It’s not going well,” he began. “It happens. Sometimes people do a movie and work like crazy afterwards, and sometimes they never work again. You may need to accept the idea that you might not work until after you’re eighteen.”
He was right, of course. Show biz is inherently an unpredictable business, but for child actors, it’s downright impossible. You grow, you age. You might have a “look” that sells, then wake up one morning looking like someone else entirely. Children are often hired as “accessories” to the grown-up members of the cast. A child might get a role because he or she bears a physical resemblance to the star playing one of the parents in the film or TV show. If that star stops working for some reason…well, so much for the kid. Was this me? Was I “done”? It was possible: I could be washed up, over the hill, past my prime. At eleven.
It was less than a week after my dad’s speech that I auditioned for the part of Nellie Oleson on Little House on the Prairie. Now, it was not my first trip down to this particular office. I had been called in when the concept of the show was first being discussed. I remember wearing my frilly, girly yellow dress, the one I deemed nauseating and only to be worn for special occasions or at gunpoint. I was not asked to read any lines. It was a bizarre meeting where producer Ed Friendly showed me a set of Little House books and asked ominously, “Do you know what these are?”
“Um, books?”
I figured I didn’t get the job, as I had not read the Little House books and had actually never heard of Laura Ingalls Wilder until that day. But this, apparently, didn’t destroy my chances. Weeks later, I returned to read for the part of Laura. Obviously, no sale there. I was called back yet again, a week later, to read for the part of Mary. The only thing I found surprising about any of this was that I kept getting called back. As I said to my father at the time, “What could they possibly be thinking? I am so not the farm girl type.” So when I got the call that my presence was requested yet again, I thought, How the hell many people are in this thing? It must have a cast of thousands!
When I auditioned the fourth time, on Friday, May 17, 1974, I had dispensed with all manner of pretense, yellow dresses, etc. I was wearing cutoff shorts and a T-shirt—my usual wardrobe. I remember sitting on the stairs outside Paramount Studios with my father, going over the script. As I began to skim the pages, I noticed something odd—a tone I had never seen in any other role I had read for. This was not some ordinary, insipid child character, blandly responding to her parents and pretending the usual sickening cheer about incredibly boring things no actual child could possibly get excited about in real life. “Gosh, Mom, help you with the church bake sale? You bet!” “Wash the car? Gee, Dad, you’re the keenest!” This was a girl who wouldn’t be caught dead doing any of that crap, and would tell you so to your face.
I looked up at my father. “Uh, Dad?”
“Yes?”
“This girl’s, like, a total bitch.”
“Read it,” he told me. So I read the lines. My father laughed so hard, tears ran down his cheeks. He gasped, “God, whatever you do, don’t touch it! Just read it EXACTLY LIKE THAT!”
I went into the room for what was now my fourth tryout. Michael Landon was there, along with Kent McCray, the show’s producer, and a third man I can’t recall. The three of them asked me if I would be so kind as to please read for them. I sat down and proceeded to read the script. I remember the main part of it was the “My Home” speech, where Nellie, under the cover of writing an essay for school, gloats over every expensive item in her house and how much her family paid for it. I began to recite, “It’s the nicest home in all of Walnut Grove. We have carpets in every room…and three sets of dishes…one for every day, one for Sunday and one for when somebody special and important comes to visit—which we’ve never used….”
As I read, these men became hysterical, as my father had been minutes earlier. They actually threw themselves around on the couch and elbowed each other in the ribs. “Would you please read the last part again, dear?” one of them asked.
“Yes,” I replied politely, awaiting direction. “What would you like me to change?”
“Nothing,” said the trio, “just read the part about the house again. Please!”
And so I did, exactly the same way—with exactly the same shriek-inducing results. They hired me on the spot.
By the time my father and I made the ten-minute drive home and got in the door, my agent had already set a price, accepted the producers’ offer, and scheduled my wardrobe fitting for the following Monday. I can honestly say, this was the easiest role I ever landed before or since. I asked my father if I should be concerned that I was turned down for the parts of both Laura and Mary, but for the great bitch role of Nellie, I was hired instantly. Did this say something about me as a person?
“Hey, if the shoe fits, wear it,” was all he said.
Well, technically, he did say a few other things, like “This thing won’t last one season!” “Who on earth would actually watch this drivel?” “Why the hell are they spending so much money on sets? My God, if this is still on TV a year from now, it’ll be a miracle!” Needless to say, we didn’t take my dad to the track much. Unless we wanted to know what horse not to bet on.
To be fair, he was not alone in his disbelief at the success of Little House. Nobody, I mean nobody, except for maybe one person, thought for an instant that it would be the phenomenon it turned out to be. Obviously, crazy old Michael Landon was way ahead of us all on this one, but I don’t think even he anticipated this level of worldwide “cultdom.”
The first episode of Little House on the Prairie, titled “A Harvest of Friends,” aired September 11, 1974 (not counting the pilot, which aired March 30, 1974), and the last episode, “Hello and Good-bye,” aired March 21, 1983—plus they threw in some spin-offs and a few more TV movies for fans in withdrawal. Nine years in all on the air; 203 episodes. Insane! And Little House lingers; it’s syndicated daily in over 1
40 countries, including Borneo, Argentina, Iraq, and Sri Lanka. There’s even a sixty-DVD boxed set shaped like a covered wagon you can buy for two hundred bucks. The French set comes in a little house; it’s much prettier.
Back then (and even today) Little House was a bit of a rarity: a TV show that actually advocated morals, faith, and community. There was no T&A, no police chases, no bionic body parts, not even a musical number (unless you count the Walnut Grove gang singing “Bringing in the Sheaves” in church). What it was, was wholesome: churning butter, milking cows, helping your fellow man, that kind of wholesome stuff. And it was old; the actual children’s book series was written way back in 1935. As if that wasn’t bizarre enough, all the action took place in late-nineteenth-century Minnesota.
But there was something about this show that struck a nerve; at its core, even with all the crazy plotlines that Michael and company cooked up (Blindness! Rabies! Anthrax!), Little House was simply about a family trying to achieve the American dream. Maybe it’s what the world needed after the crazy, druggy debauchery of the late 1960s and early ’70s. In the ’50s and ’60s, country shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, Hee Haw, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza abounded; then they disappeared despite the fact that people loved them. The networks wanted to appeal to a younger demographic, so they “deruralized” TV. Only Michael Landon wanted to buck this trend. He realized that Little House was exactly what audiences were missing. Every episode was filled with family values, love, and friendship. The show made you feel good; it made you appreciate what you had and stop bitching about what you didn’t. You don’t have enough money to pay your rent? Buddy, those Ingalls girls didn’t have a penny between them to buy a slate pencil. Now, that’s poor.
Confessions of a Prairie Bitch Page 5
