Confessions of a Prairie Bitch

by Alison Arngrim

  And that was the day I knew Melissa loved me and I her. We went back down the hill to beat each other senseless. It was the beginning of a great friendship. The rest of the day was fainting-free, but to this day, the Little House cast and crew have never let me live it down—I truly made an entrance.

  So I had done it. I had gotten a series, arrived on set, made it through the first episode without getting fired, and lived to tell the tale. And now it was actually going to be on TV. I remember when I saw the first promos, I became hysterical. I was having my dinner in front of the TV, as usual, watching Columbo, when a promo for Little House came on. Suddenly, THERE I WAS! Nothing major, it was just me in those curls and that yellow dress, running. You almost couldn’t tell it was me with the bonnet. But I could tell. I screamed. I flipped over my TV tray, knocking my Swanson Hungry Man turkey TV dinner and my bottle of Dr Pepper to the floor. I was on television!

  As my mother reminded me while she helped me salvage my dinner and got me another Dr Pepper, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been on TV before. But those were just commercials and small parts. This was a series, and now it was on, and I knew in my bones that this was different, and there would be no turning back. Everything was going to be different.

  “Country Girls” aired on September 18, 1974. It was fantastic. Everyone in my house howled with laughter at my every haughty line, and they even thought I looked good in the dress and curls. It was a hit.

  The next day, I had to go to school. I was in the eighth grade at Bancroft Junior High. Would any of my classmates have seen it? I wondered. I walked onto the school grounds at about eight in the morning. I was a little late as usual, so there weren’t hordes of people around. The bell had just rung, and the students had already started heading into the building. I figured I wouldn’t hear anyone’s reactions, if they had any, until recess. I was wrong. As I walked alone across the playground, a girl way up on the second-story landing saw me. It was a girl I knew, but not someone I could call a friend. It was one of the popular girls. She spotted me. And then she opened her mouth. Her voice rang out, echoing off the buildings: “You biiiitchhhh!!!!”

  I froze. Surely this was directed at someone else. I looked around. There was nobody else there. Just me. Oh.

  I tried to think what to do. People had called me names before—skinny, shorty, shrimp. Being small, I was always fodder for bullies. But I don’t think anyone had ever yelled at me from the top of a building before. It occurred to me that this was technically my first review. And if this was the response I was getting at eight in the morning, what could I expect for the rest of the day? The rest of the year? The rest of…my life?

  I realized that if there was even the slightest possibility that people screaming obscenities at me from balconies was going to become a regular occurrence, I had to decide right now how I was going to handle this. There was no room for error. I had to take charge of the situation. I knew that whatever I did at this very second was going to set the tone for all future interactions. If I caved now, if I allowed myself to be intimidated or to show an ounce of fear, I was done for.

  There was only one thing to do. I stopped, stood up straight, turned toward the sound of her voice, stuck out my chin, and said as loudly and bravely as I could manage: “THANK YOU!” And then, as if I were onstage, I bowed, deeply. For the first time in my life, I marched into school with my head held high.

  I realized I would have to become much more durable if this show was going to continue—and so was my hair. After a few miserable weeks of sleeping in the dreaded curlers (which my nonhairdressing mother fumblingly crammed into my hair before bed after slathering my hair with Pantene setting lotion) and arriving at the studio at 4:30 in the morning to be tortured with curling irons for hours, someone on the set finally came to their senses and decreed that the only solution was to design and create a wig.

  This task was assigned to the lead hair stylist, Larry Germain. Another overly tan and weathered veteran of the golden age of Hollywood, Larry had worked with everyone, too, but his show-stopper credit was Bette Davis. He told me how one of his very first jobs at the studio was washing Bette Davis’s hair. What a thought! At the time, he was young and inexperienced, and had been told only that Miss Davis would be coming in for a shampoo and that he’d better see to it that her needs were met.

  Her reputation was already legendary, and he had no idea what she would want. He said he gathered up every brand of shampoo and hair product he could find in the entire studio makeup department, hoping that he had her favorite brand, gathered towels, cleaned up the place, and waited in fear. As she swept into the room, he tried not to stammer when he showed her the array of shampoos.

  She ignored the entire lot, grabbed a towel, and headed for the sink. “That’s okay, honey,” she said. “I’ll just rinse it out in the sink with some Dreft!” And the great Miss Bette Davis proceeded to wash her hair, right in front of him, with a box of Dreft laundry detergent. He said that they became great friends after that, that she was utterly down to earth and straightforward and never gave him a minute’s trouble.

  So it was only fitting that Larry would be the one most instrumental in designing the infamous Nellie wig. Larry called in a wigmaker, not just any wigmaker, but the famous “Ziggy,” aka Siegfried Geike, “Wigmaker to the Stars.” It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone in real life with a Salvador Dalí mustache. He was, after all, an artist. He arrived with an enormous black case filled with mysterious gear and numerous samples of hair. His aura was all very mad scientist.

  Ziggy and Larry sat me down in the makeup chair and began to design the wig, right there on my head. They placed a plastic bag on my head, wrapped it around my skull, taped it in place, and cut off the excess, making a plastic wig cap. They then began to draw on it with a black marker.

  They talked about how there would need to be a comb in the front and drew a large black symbol on the front of my head. They selected the site for each ringlet, making mysterious black markings accordingly. They continued with great solemnity conferring with each other, disagreeing occasionally on the location of a curl, negotiating each detail of this elaborate project. They um-hmmed and tsk-tsked and nodded as they went, Larry with his ever-present cigarette clenched in his teeth, drawing away on my head as if I weren’t even there.

  When they were done, my head was covered with what looked like the symbols a coach would draw on a blackboard to illustrate a football play. They carefully pulled off the cap, and Ziggy put it in his case to take back to his “laboratory” or wherever he made these things. Then Ziggy pulled out the hair samples, not small samples, but huge, thick blond locks of real human hair. Larry told me that this was “Swedish virgin hair.” I snorted, and Larry, seeing that I was already going there, made a crack about not knowing there were that many virgins in Sweden. He then explained that this, of course, really meant the hair was “untouched”—it had never been dyed or processed in any way.

  They held up all these different curls against my hair. They were matching it, not all at once, but strand by strand, shade by shade. Everybody has more than one color of hair, and mine ranged from very light Malibu Barbie blond to much darker “dishwater.” He and Ziggy found a hunk of hair for every single color on my head. They explained that these would be mixed together, then tiny strands would be individually hand tied to the base, which would be constructed using the custom design they had just drawn on my head.

  I have no idea what this thing actually cost, but I was told that at that time, it was considered one of the most expensive wigs ever designed for a TV show. And they were going to strap this thing to my head every day. Gee, no pressure at all!

  When it finally arrived, I had to admit, it was fantastic. It shone and shimmered, as if it were alive. It was thick and heavy. It fit my head perfectly, having been custom fitted to the last millimeter. But I wasn’t prepared for the metal comb. They’d mentioned the comb, of course, in the fitting, but I had no understanding of what tha
t meant. The metal comb is what kept the whole thing in place. It was a hunk of steel with teeth, like the ominous metal contraption in a parking lot entrance where the sign reads DO NOT BACK UP. It had precisely the same effect. As Gladys or Larry would place the wig on my head, I would hold the front, and they would pull the whole thing down in the back tightly onto my head. The metal comb would then be jammed into the base of the hair, at the very front of my hairline, right smack in the middle of the top of my forehead. Even after this, dozens of hairpins were strategically placed to hold it on.

  The number of pins was impressive. First, my real hair was coiled and wrapped around my head and pinned in place. Then a nylon stocking cap went on over that, and more pins were added, both little bobby pins and those old-fashioned long, straight metal hairpins. Lots and lots of them. There was a minimum number of hairpins that had to be inserted to hold the wig steady, and if they weren’t jammed in tightly and in contact with my scalp, it wouldn’t stay on.

  Two small pieces of hair were pulled out, one on each side to be combed into the wig. These were curled with the hot iron, making me look like an Orthodox rabbinical student with side curls and a yarmulke. My head would have easily set off a metal detector. The metal comb in front was the only way to hold it in place during all the mud fights and running around. And yes, it hurt all day. Not excruciatingly so; that was just in the morning when it first went on. But there was no point at which it felt comfortable, or when I didn’t turn my head a certain way and feel the pins dig in.

  The worst was lying down. If I had to lie down and put my head on a pillow in a scene, or if I tried to lie down for real and get in a nap at lunchtime, it took great effort to position my head just so as to not crush the bobby pins against my scalp, or to pull it on one side, causing the comb to rip into my flesh and pull my hair out.

  We found ways to have fun with the wig. When Gladys was having a hard time putting it on, she would sing and encourage me to sing along. I had to hold the front with the comb very tightly while she pulled it on, so she’d sing one of the old Andrews Sisters’ songs: “Hold tight, hold tight!…Fododo-de-yacka saki, want some seafood, Mama!” At twelve years old, I wasn’t familiar with the Andrews Sisters, but I became a fan, as the song seemed to fulfill its purpose. And then we’d do it again the next day.

  Some days, if I was in the wig for a very long time or had to do a lot of activity that caused my hair to get pulled in any way, the comb and the pins would dig in and cut my scalp in places. On those days, if I ran my hand through my hair and rubbed my scalp, when I pulled my hand out, there would be little flecks of blood on it. Gladys always made sure there was lots of Sea Breeze around for antiseptic. It stung and burned in the cuts at first, but it made my scalp feel better later. And it was better than getting an infection.

  The only thing worse than the constant pain was when it stopped hurting. Sometimes, at the end of the day, my scalp would be almost numb. The circulation had been cut off, which meant that when Gladys pulled the whole thing off, the blood would come rushing back into my skin along with sensation. Sometimes I screamed. But then Gladys would sing to me and gently massage my scalp, bending my hair back into place until my head stopped throbbing. And I would learn the words to yet another obscure Andrews Sisters’ tune.

  Forever connected to the endurance of pain, I still sometimes hum the songs when I’m at the dentist’s office.

  * * *

  THE PRAIRIE PLAYERS

  There were so many characters on Little House over its nine years on the air, it’s hard to keep them all straight. (Lars who?) So here is my cheat sheet:

  CHARLES INGALLS (MICHAEL LANDON): The poor but proud farmer, carpenter, and patriarch of the Ingalls family. In the original books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, he is the all-perfect Pa, hero to nine-year-old girls everywhere. But as played by Michael Landon, he is transformed into “The Big Hunk on the Prairie,” stripped to the waist, glistening with sweat, and grabbing his wife around the waist with a lust not normally publicly displayed in the 1800s. But don’t buy the macho man act completely; Charles also cries real tears in every other episode.

  CAROLINE INGALLS (KAREN GRASSLE): The epitome of the ideal American mother, Caroline is an endless font of unconditional love for her children—but she also won’t take crap from anyone (especially Harriet Oleson). My kind of woman! She can cook, sew, harvest crops…heck, she’s even prepared to cut oft her own leg with a hot kitchen knife in an emergency.

  LAURA INGALLS WILDER (MELISSA GILBERT): The real star of this extravaganza, as the whole story is told through her eyes (she wrote the books, after all). She is a freckled, buck-toothed, “everychild” girl or boy, since she acts as her pa’s surrogate son for most of her childhood: fishing, hunting, fighting, and spitting long distances. Despite her parents’ attempts at a proper Christian upbringing, Laura refuses to stifle her feelings of rage, joy, jealousy, or passion, or her right to act on them at any time. She is a fighter for truth, justice, and the American way. If Nellie Oleson wants to start something, Laura will finish it.

  MARY INGALLS KENDALL (MELISSA SUE ANDERSON): The beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed, and later blind as a bat older sister of Laura. An eternal goody-goody who does her chores and gets straight A’s, Mary can always be counted on to tell Laura that she’s wrong, then run oft to rat her out to their folks. Eventually, she manages to bag the most ridiculously hot blind guy ever born, Adam Kendall. They start their own school for the blind, which later burns to the ground, killing their baby. Mary temporarily loses her marbles, then regains her sanity, only to have her husband miraculously get his sight back, threatening their marriage.

  CARRIE INGALLS (LINDSAY AND SIDNEY GREENBUSH): An adorable but extremely accident-prone dumpling of a child, with no visible neck and a serious communication problem. Baby Carrie regularly falls into wells, mine shafts, outhouses, etc., and even manages to accidentally take off in a runaway hot air balloon. She smiles and gurgles, seemingly up to the age of ten or so, speaking an unintelligible dialect that only her family understands. In real life, Carrie Ingalls went on to become a successful real estate agent in South Dakota.

  GRACE INGALLS (BRENDA AND WENDI TURNBAUGH): Charles’s and Caroline’s fifth and final child (thank God!). Another cute blonde, she is so young, we do not have as much insight into her personality. But on first glance, she’s a genius compared to Carrie.

  JACK: The brave yet floppy family dog who was replaced by Bandit when he died in Season 4. Amazingly, he continued to appear in the closing credits long after his death, watching after the Ingalls girls as a ghostly presence.

  ALBERT QUINN INGALLS (MATTHEW LABORTEAUX): Orphaned Albert is a street waif, a stealing, gambling, Artful Dodger type that Charles brings into the Ingalls family. Sad eyed with pouty lips, he is a magnet for tragedy. If someone is going to accidentally burn down a building, befriend a teenage rape victim, get addicted to morphine, or come down with a bizarre fatal disease, it’s this kid. He’s such a hit, it starts a ghastly irreversible trend on the show: dozens of orphans and lost children being taken in by the Ingallses, the Edwardses, and eventually even the Olesons.

  JAMES COOPER INGALLS AND CASSANDRA COOPER INGALLS (JASON BATEMAN AND MISSY FRANCIS): Part of the tribe of orphans who populated the show in its last years. Their parents die in a horrible buggy crash. The episode is even called “The Lost Ones” in case any of us missed the point.

  NELS OLESON (RICHARD BULL): Proprietor of the Mercantile, the only store in town. Sure, there’s a feed and seed, but if you’re buying anything for humans, not horses, this is the place. A kind, sensible, slightly sad-looking man, Nels tries to run a fair business, make a pro—t, and still help the less fortunate, while enduring the total insanity of his crazy wife, bitchy daughter, and spaced-out son.

  HARRIET OLESON (KATHERINE MACGREGOR): The imperious co-proprietor of the Mercantile, Mrs. Oleson attempts to control everyone and everything in Walnut Grove, with positively grand operatic gestures and terrifying emotional ou
tbursts. As seen through nine-year-old Laura’s eyes, she is every child’s nightmare, the archetype of the school head mistress, the evil stepmother, the wicked witch. Her greatest pleasure is spoiling her daughter, Nellie, whom she has made into her own personal Barbie doll on the prairie.

  NELLIE OLESON (MOI!): Nellie decides to take out her misery on everyone in her path. Okay, maybe I’m a little prejudiced here, but can you blame her for being cranky? She’s stuck in a small town in the middle of nowhere in the 1800s with a bossy mother, an insipid brother, and a Shirley Temple do that she’s forced to wear way past puberty. She’s bored, frustrated, and ridiculously overdressed for the climate and the occasion. Feisty new girl Laura Ingalls pisses her off from day one, starting a seven-year spiral of cruelty, backstabbing, blackmail, and terror.

  WILLIE OLESON (JONATHAN GILBERT): Nellie’s small, weakling, not quite all there baby brother. Clearly the runt of the litter, he makes the perfect henchman, happily doing her bidding, if only to have something to do.

  PERCIVAL DALTON (STEVE TRACY): Five feet, four inches and all man. Don’t let the glasses and the conservative suits fool you; Percival doesn’t run from a fight. In his first episode, he achieves national hero status by telling Mrs. Oleson to zip her lip. Brought in to teach Nellie how to run her hotel, he wins her heart, not just because he loves her, but because he is the first to expect anything of her. She falls madly in love and becomes nice. He proposes to her in the middle of the street and informs Mrs. Oleson there will be no church wedding, because “I’m Jewish!” causing her to nearly fall out of a window. He and Nellie opt to raise their twins, Benjamin and Jennifer, in a mixed-faith household.