Confessions of a Prairie Bitch

by Alison Arngrim

  Katherine and Richard made an interesting couple, not just on screen, but off. They became great friends but were of such opposite personalities, well, sometimes I couldn’t tell when they were rehearsing a scene or having an actual argument.

  As if this wasn’t a surreal enough TV family for me to join, there was my baby brother, Willie. Hollywood being the capital of nepotism, nearly everyone in Little House on the Prairie was related to someone else on the show. The most outrageous piece of casting was Melissa Gilbert’s baby brother, Jonathan, as my little brother (and sometimes henchman), Willie. He apparently came along to her audition, and when the subject of Willie came up, their mother simply volunteered him for the job. He was six.

  It was his first job ever and, other than again being shanghaied into one of his sister’s other projects later on (he had a voice-over in her TV version of The Miracle Worker), his only appearance in TV or film of any kind. I never once heard him complain about this. He expressed no interest whatsoever in being in other movies or TV shows, the state of being famous, how much he was getting paid, the furthering of his career, or anything to do with Hollywood in any way, shape, or form. He was the living embodiment of “just along for the ride.” He was, however, absolutely, utterly adorable. When stuffed into one of little Willie’s “formal occasion” outfits, he was the cutest thing you ever laid eyes on: all floppy hair, grinning teeth, and huge eyes.

  His one noticeable fault, if you could call it that, was that he was what is known as a mouth breather. Jonathan was one of those children who never quite figured out that you’re supposed to close your mouth and breathe through your nose. But in these bizarre circumstances, it was all to his advantage. His wide-eyed, slack-mouthed stare became the trademark “Willie Oleson look” and made his character’s antics, such as smoking cigars behind the Mercantile or playing pranks in the school yard, all the more hilarious. To this day, I have to wonder if he didn’t really put on this act on purpose. Melissa was not impressed by any of it. To her, he was just her incredibly annoying kid brother. She frequently offered to let me keep him. I didn’t have a baby brother, so the thought was a novelty. She said I was welcome to him as far as she was concerned.

  He did come up with things to do just to drive people crazy. I particularly enjoyed his insistence in the show’s later years that he couldn’t read. He could, obviously, but he found it far more to his advantage to tell people he couldn’t. I remember him driving our normally calm set teacher, Helen Minniear, practically to drink with this act when we first started the show. She was going over his reading workbook with him. The word in the sentence was fez, as in the hat. There was a picture of a man wearing what was unmistakably a red, tasseled fez. Jonathan dutifully read, “The man in the picture is wearing a fuzz.” Over and over she said, “No, Jonathan, it’s fez—see the e?”

  “Oh, yeah, fez,” he’d reply, smiling. Two seconds later: “The man in the picture is wearing a fuzz.” He could keep this up for hours.

  One day after school, I pulled him aside and said, “What the hell are you doing in there, anyway? I know perfectly well you know what a damn fez is! You can read! What was that all about?”

  “Shhhh!” He looked around to make sure nobody overheard. “I can read, but it’s better if they think I’m dumb. Melissa’s smart, and she let them find out. Have you seen all the homework they give her? No way! I’m not doing all that!” I didn’t rat him out, but I did tell him to please give poor Mrs. Minniear a break.

  When he first started the show, he actually didn’t read much, so his mother would read his lines to him, and he would learn them that way. But as he got older, he continued to learn his lines only without reading the rest of the script. If he wasn’t sure what was happening, he’d just ask someone. That someone was usually his big sister, Melissa. She quickly got fed up with this nonsense.

  I finally asked him, “All right, I give up. Tell me, why in the hell don’t you just read the script?”

  In all seriousness he said, “I like to be surprised when I see it on TV.”

  I nearly peed my pants laughing. But he wasn’t kidding. I was at the Gilbert house one night to watch an episode, and I’ll be damned if Jonathan wasn’t shushing everyone in the room, saying, “Wait, wait, I gotta see this part!” He was the only one moved by the ending. He hadn’t seen it coming.

  It did make working with him quite the experience. Once we were doing a funeral scene. We were gathered around the Walnut Grove graveyard, dressed all in black. Fake rain was falling gently. The Reverend Alden was giving his sermon. Little Jonathan stood next to me in his suit, with his hands folded and his head bowed solemnly, looking as if he might cry at any moment. Between takes, he turned to me and whispered, “Who died?”

  I resolved to never tell him too much about an episode. Why interfere with brilliance?

  Meanwhile, Melissa Sue Anderson continued to remain a mystery. The entire time I was on the show, I never went to her house, and she never came to mine. I had no idea where she lived. For all I know, she could have lived in a tree. She never spoke of her home life. I knew she had a mother who came to the set with her every day. I don’t know what Mrs. Anderson was like at home, but what we saw was a woman acting the part of the classic stage mother. She followed her daughter everywhere. Her every waking moment seemed to be focused on her daughter. The license plates on her car read MISSY. Was there a father? Siblings? Pets? These things were never discussed. Everyone else on the set, down to the last crew member, would at least give you a peek into their lives, if only by muttering something like, “My wife, Ethel, she sure drives me crazy.” But this was not the case with “Missy.” For all I know, the girl was hatched from an egg.

  My aunt Marion seemed to know more. Always the one to befriend the friendless, and with a constant eye out for wounded sparrows of all species, Marion had picked up on the vibe surrounding Melissa Sue’s mom. The other stage mothers and on-set guardians were clearly suspicious and prepared to dislike her. The only thing worse than being a child actor thrown into the boiling cauldron that is a TV series is to find yourself surrounded by the pack of ravenous vultures that are stage mothers.

  Auntie Marion swooped in and made friends with her. How could she not? Melissa Sue’s mother was also named Marion. From her I got bits and pieces of information that hinted at why Melissa Sue wasn’t as eager to make friends as Melissa Gilbert. There was a father…somewhere. There had been a divorce. Things had not been easy for her and her mother. There were even whispers of a sibling—a sister perhaps?—but it was clearly just the two of them now, against the world.

  Auntie Marion was very clear about one thing: if Missy ignored me, or refused to play with me, or even insulted me to my face, I was to just walk away and not attempt to escalate the situation in any way. I must try to be understanding or at the very least patient. “She’s very unhappy at home,” was all Auntie Marion had to whisper.

  Well, I could certainly empathize with that. I hadn’t the nerve to tell Auntie Marion what life was like at my house. As adolescence began to spread on the prairie, things only got weirder at home. My brother, who was now nineteen, had moved back in. He had been living in an apartment with several other people, but it didn’t work out. Not only had they all run out of rent money, but when the police broke down the door and arrested them for possession of heroin, the landlord didn’t want them back. My brother didn’t go to jail. Even though he had been arrested for drugs before, he was still a minor, and also it seems that having your father right there with you when they raid the place does get you released sooner. It was a good plan, but I’m sure my father would have liked it better if they had told him about it in advance.

  My father got a mysterious phone call from one of Stefan’s then girlfriends who said that Stefan was very sick. He rushed over to the apartment without considering the potential for disaster. When he arrived, he found a man waiting on the doorstep as though he had just rung the bell. My father walked up and knocked anyway an
d waited with him. He thought the man looked very surprised to see him. He also thought there was something familiar about this man’s appearance. He pondered his “look”: longish hair, but not too long, mustache, jeans. He had that sort of ’70s Burt Reynolds chic, like a porn star—or an undercover narcotics officer.

  At the very moment that thought entered his brain, the door opened a crack, at which point, the rest of the narcotics officers leaped out of the bushes and went crashing through the door, and my father found himself lying on the floor underneath a pile of policemen and broken door parts.

  They cuffed him, along with everyone else, and searched his car. When the raid was over, and he had produced ID showing that he was not, in fact, the dealer making the big delivery, as they had hoped, but an incredibly gullible father in the wrong place at the wrong time, the cops let him go and released my brother to his custody.

  This led to a positively absurd encounter with my parents, when they attempted to “break the news” to me that my brother was on heroin. They actually took me to a park. I think perhaps they had seen this in a TV movie somewhere or read it in a brochure—“Try to break the bad news in pleasant surroundings.” They made a very dramatic production out of telling me, “Your brother has been arrested.”

  I said, “Uh-huh. For what, now?” My brother being in trouble with the cops was not exactly an earth-shattering event.

  “No, it’s serious this time. He’s on heroin.”

  “Uh-huh.” My lack of amazement seemed to get a rise out of them.

  “He’s been using heroin,” they repeated, as if I hadn’t heard.

  I sighed. “Well, yeah.” I really thought they knew. They didn’t.

  “You mean, you knew about this?” they gasped.

  Now I began rolling my eyes in earnest. Just how dense were these people? I explained to them that yes, I knew that he did heroin, and so did most of Los Angeles; that that’s what all those people who came over to our house at all hours of the day and night to see him were doing: bringing him heroin, shooting heroin with him, reviving him after too much heroin. My mind reeled. Had they really not noticed? Why exactly did they think all the spoons in the house were bent and had burn marks on the bottom? What did they think was going on when they came home and found him in a bathtub of cold water with all his clothes on and his panic-stricken buddies running out the back door? A college prank? When he nodded off at the dinner table, did they think he’d been up all night cramming for the LSAT? He had done everything short of asking them to tie off his arm and help him find a vein. And they were absolutely clueless.

  In a way, I took some comfort in seeing that my abuse wasn’t the only thing in front of their noses they chose to ignore. This type of blindness apparently didn’t discriminate. Just when I thought my parents couldn’t be more frustrating, they asked the dumbest question on earth: “But if you knew this was going on, why didn’t you tell us?”

  Oh good Lord. I don’t know which was worse, that they seriously thought that it was the job of their teenage daughter to keep them up to date on what was going on in their own house, or that they really hadn’t noticed the other problem. When it came to my brother, they never believed a single, solitary word I told them. I had given up telling them anything years before.

  Not being very popular with landlords and having no money left at all, my brother had now taken up semipermanent residence on the living room sofa. Well, it had been good enough for my parents all those years, I suppose it was his turn. He never let the fact that he was living with his parents and younger sister cramp his style, though. I frequently came home from school to find him and several other people of assorted genders sprawled nude and unconscious across the sofa bed and living room floor with bottles everywhere, ashtrays filled with cigarette and joint butts. I would just go to my room and watch TV.

  He had the strangest girlfriends. One of them was always trying to pass on “secret” information to me. She attempted to convince me one day that if women washed their hair when they had their period, they would bleed from the scalp and drop dead. I had been to health class; I knew she was off her rocker. Then Stefan met a tall blonde at a party, and he immediately announced that “I just met my future wife.” He wound up moving in with her, and they did get married. (She was his first of three wives.) I liked her. She was younger than Stefan, which made her closer to my age. She could have been my big sister. In fact, most people thought she was my sister, since we looked exactly, perfectly alike. People noticed, and remarks were made, but my family just laughed them off. There was nothing odd to them about a man marrying a much younger woman who just happened to look exactly like his sister. I was even a flower girl at their wedding, which was held in Auntie Marion’s yard.

  Really, they should have let me give him away.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MICHAEL: SINNER AND SAINT

  YOUNG CHARLES: I was a real dummy.

  YOUNG CAROLINE: What makes you say that?

  YOUNG CHARLES: My brother.

  For me, work was a refuge. Oh, to be safely ensconced on something as wholesome as the set of Little House on the Prairie! Well, maybe the entire set wasn’t completely wholesome by traditional standards, but in comparison to my family situation, it was heaven on earth.

  With the early hours, hard work, and being a teenager, I was constantly in search of sleep. I craved sleep like other people craved drugs or booze. I would grab it wherever I could get it, in any form. Then and now I have always been able to nap in the back of the car, on trains, planes, practically standing up. On the way to and from Simi Valley, I often slept in the back of the car, and I sometimes grabbed a quick nap at lunch. But on some days, I just needed more. The challenge then was to find new places to sleep undisturbed without getting caught.

  I soon discovered the prop truck. The prop truck was the great mecca, the paradise of the set. Everyone’s vices could be indulged in the prop truck. It was where they kept the candy, cigarettes, and liquor. The two gorgeous and charming men who did props for Little House were Danny Bentley, the blue-eyed blond, and Ron Chiniquy, with the black hair and dark eyes, who was quickly nicknamed “The French Wrench,” in contrast to the other Ronnie, key grip Ron Cardarelli, “The Italian Stallion.” The prop guys had the keys to the Little House kingdom, and they knew it. In keeping with their function, they had become marvelously nonjudgmental about all of our needs. So when I asked, of course I was allowed to sneak a nap in the front seat of the truck without being ratted out.

  I loved sleeping in the truck. It was warm on the freezing cold mornings and cool in the summer. I could hear what was going on outside as they filmed scenes I wasn’t in, but it was all dreamily muffled. I can still close my eyes and feel the sensation of being bundled up in a borrowed down jacket over my frilly clothes, curled up in a ball on the front seat, hearing the distant repetitive shouting of the second assistant director’s daily mantra, “Quiet, please!” “Speed?” “Speed!” “Rolling!” “Action!” and happily dozing off, breathing in the unforgettable smell of Simi, a combination of makeup, dust, horses, horseshit, human sweat, cigarette smoke…and alcohol.

  One morning I awoke to the sound of footsteps and the creaking of the truck. We had a visitor. I didn’t worry, as I knew whoever it was had come to see the boys, and catching lazy thirteen-year-olds copping a nap in the front seat would not be a priority. But when I heard the voice, I froze. It was Michael. I decided that not breathing or moving would be a good idea right then.

  But he was there on business. Ron cheerily greeted him with “The usual, sir?” I peeked around the seat to see Michael smiling in his Charles Ingalls boots and suspenders, extending a Styrofoam cup.

  “Hit me.”

  Ron produced a bottle of Wild Turkey from one of the endless warrens of cupboards. No, not a bottle, a jug—the huge refill size. He began to pour.

  “About four fingers,” instructed Michael, wanting to leave some room for the coffee, I suppose. It was no later than ten
-thirty in the morning.

  I was not shocked to see Michael doing this. I knew by then that he drank. They all did. Most of the crew of Little House on the Prairie drank constantly, and a few actors as well. I have no idea how they did this and managed to finish the show every week. They not only filmed the show, but most episodes were completed ahead of schedule and under budget. From their performance, you would have thought Coors beer was some kind of miracle drug or performance-enhancing steroid.

  Ron Housiaux explained the crew’s drinking habits to me one day when I was about fourteen. Housiaux, appropriately nicknamed “Hooch,” was one of the grips, second in command to Ronnie Cardarelli. (Yes, he was on a table tennis team with “The French Wrench.” They were known as “the two Ronnies.”) Housiaux was telling me that someone had been dispatched to go get more beer, as we were down to only one case. He explained that this was a major crisis because it took at least two and a half cases to get through a day of shooting. He talked about the beer supply with the same seriousness as he might about running out of film.

  “Okay, yesterday wasn’t so bad. That was a two-case day. Now, remember that day we had last week, with all those different setups that just never seemed to end?” I did and nodded solemnly.

  “That was a three-case day! But now we’re down to less than one case, and it’s only nine a.m.” He made sure I understood the serious nature of the problem. “If we run out of beer, this show comes to a grinding halt.” The two or three cases of beer were just to get them through the day. Of course, they didn’t take into account what happened at the end of the day, when work ended, and the prop men put a board up on sawhorses and set up the bar. Then the crew did some real drinking, joined by some of the more “manly men” in the cast, like Victor French.