Confessions of a Prairie Bitch

by Alison Arngrim

  Michael didn’t seem to bother with the beer. Always one to cut to the chase, he simply went straight to the hard liquor and stayed there. I know no one will believe me, but I never saw him get drunk on set, just at the parties: the Christmas party, the big end-of-the-year wrap party, when there was food and wine and champagne and everyone was drinking. Under what would be called normal circumstances. Even then, he was only somewhat inebriated and still quite coherent.

  As for work, you would never suspect he’d been swilling Wild Turkey all morning; on the contrary, he was so keyed up and energetic, and had such stamina, you’d think he was on an amphetamine IV. He positively bounced off the walls with energy. He was usually the first one to arrive and the last to leave. He oversaw everything, from the direction of the actors to the lighting to the camera angle. At lunch he would finish writing next week’s episode. He never stopped working. Being just an actor could never be enough for him. He had to produce, write, and direct. And if another director was hired? Well, Michael never let that get in his way. No one but no one messed with Michael Landon. No one challenged his opinion or authority. No one told him he was wrong. This was understood—unless, of course, you were new to the Little House set.

  Such was the case for Alf Kjellin, a popular TV director who had worked on everything from Hawaii Five-O to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Kjellin was invited to direct the “Town Party, Country Party” episode, which involved Nellie throwing a party, then Laura throwing one to get even with her.

  At her own bash, Nellie wrangles the other kids into teasing and taunting Olga Nordstrom, a sweet Swedish girl (played by Kim Richards of Nanny and the Professor and Escape to Witch Mountain). Olga has one leg that’s shorter than the other, causing her to limp. (No running down the hills for Olga!) Laura hurts her ankle and is forced to sit out with her, and they bond. Laura gets a brilliant idea. She and Pa conspire to make Olga “magic shoes” (basically, one is higher than the other, eliminating her limp), and Laura saves the unveiling for her own party. Everyone sees that Olga can now run and play (it’s a miracle!), and they begin suggesting other games so she can try out her new “feet.”

  Nellie, deciding this is a threat to her constant need for undivided attention, says, “I know, let’s all take off our shoes and go wading in the creek.” She might as well have said, “Hey, let’s all leave our wheelchairs and other mobility aids here and go skiing” for all the subtlety involved. I am always amazed that neither Laura nor any of the other girls said, “No, if she takes off her shoes, she won’t be able to walk; that’s why she’s wearing them, you dumbass bitch!” But it’s hot, and the girls can’t resist the creek, so they feebly go along with this, recrippling their friend at Nellie’s request. Never fear; as on most Little House episodes, good ol’ Laura has the last laugh and gets to teach that nasty Nellie a lesson.

  The producers tossed around the idea originally presented in the books, of Laura luring Nellie into a pond inhabited by leeches. Thankfully, they dropped that one pretty quickly. For one, leeches are disgusting, and people ate dinner while watching this show; besides, in 1974, how many city-dwelling children even knew what a leech was? So the leech was replaced by a crab. Nellie gets freaked out by the crab and falls into the muddy pond. Take that!

  When we began filming the “Town Party, Country Party” episode, it seemed we were going to all have a pleasant, if uneventful, week. I was happy because it was one of the episodes in which I got to wear the “party dress,” which was purple-striped taffeta and made me look like a big piece of Christmas ribbon candy. To get everyone into the spirit of the episode, the director was a real-live authentic Swede. Alf Kjellin was doing a fine job; all was going quite smoothly, the real and imagined Swedes working together in harmony for several days. Then we got to the part where Nellie gets her comeuppance. I was to be spooked by the crab and run, falling face first into a pile of pond muck. For this, a stunt girl was brought in. It was only the seventh episode, and the producers were still going easy on me. In the near future, I would handle any falls, beatings, or dunkings on my own, and stunt girls would be used only in the most dire, life-threatening circumstances. But today, the stunt girl was to do the run and fall. I was to dunk my head under, then get up, spit water, and cry miserably. This eventually became my specialty.

  Because I wanted my shot at doing the fall myself, Mr. Kjellin told me we would film two versions, one with the stunt girl running and doing the fall at full speed, and one with me, with less trajectory, but definitely splashing down. After lunch, Michael called me over to the pond. He said we were now going to shoot the “come up and spit” sequence. He told me that the stunt girl’s fall was perfect (I had watched it, and it was fabulous), and we could just get on with the aftermath. It sounded reasonable, and, hell, I wasn’t about to argue with him. I climbed into the pond and sat down.

  Ewwww. It was cold and damp and very muddy, almost quicksand. I felt myself sink into the goo, and I knew right away I wasn’t going to be getting up very soon, or very easily. Michael then began the process of “decorating” me. He had a bucket of that green, stringy algae that floats on top of ponds. He began carefully arranging hunks of it over my head and face, occasionally wetting it down by pouring some of the filthy pond water over my head. He grinned and giggled maniacally throughout this process. I sat there stone-faced; I didn’t dare move.

  Suddenly, Mr. Kjellin appeared. “What the hell are you doing?” he shouted at Michael. Michael, without putting down the bucket or getting up, or even so much as looking over his shoulder at him, said, “I’m getting her ready for the shot; what does it look like I’m doing?”

  This enraged the visiting director. “But we were going to have her do the fall as well!” he shouted. Now Michael turned to him (still with a handful of algae) and said, “No, the fall was perfect. Why shoot it twice?” This was a telling statement. Michael was very much a fan of the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy, and if something worked well enough in the first take, don’t bother tinkering with perfection—just say “print” and move on.

  Mr. Kjellin came right up to him and began ranting furiously about how he was the director, not Michael, and so on. Michael replied with a crack about “having to do his job for him,” and the two of them went on like this for several minutes. They left me helpless to get up and remove myself from the situation. I just sat and watched, openmouthed, my head moving back and forth like I was watching a tennis match as the two grown-ups yelled and swore at each other.

  About me. Yes, I understood it wasn’t really about me. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but the argument was all about the scene I was in and what they were going to do with me. And now they appeared about to kill one another right in front of me.

  It ended with a mutual “fuck off”—the gist was generally one of those “You can’t quit, you’re fired!” “You can’t fire me, I quit!” situations. Alf Kjellin stomped off and called for his family. (Yes, to make all of this even more excruciatingly uncomfortable, his wife and children were visiting him on the set that day.) A car was summoned, and they were driven off.

  I sat there aghast. I had never actually seen anyone fired before, certainly not eighteen inches from my nose and definitely not because of an argument concerning me. My mouth continued to hang open in shock.

  Michael turned to me, still breathing through flared nostrils and red in the face. “What are you looking at?” he said coldly.

  “Nothing. Nothing, sir. Nothing at all,” I stammered. I tried to get up, to not much avail.

  “Get. Back. In. The. Pond.”

  He then shifted gears and went back to happily applying algae to my head. During all of this, he had never put down the bucket.

  When he cried, “Action!” I leaned forward and submerged my head in the pond. I felt water go up my nose and into my mouth. I gagged. I came up out of the water like the creature from the black lagoon, dripping and covered in muck. I screamed and spat and shrieked, in what was eventually t
o become the iconic Nellie howl of protest. “PRINT!” Michael shouted, grinning victoriously.

  Michael Landon was one of the biggest walking bundles of contradictions I have ever met. He was a “family man” and talked endlessly about Lynn, his second wife, and his children, to whom he seemed utterly devoted. He had divorced his first wife, with whom he also had children, when he got caught having an affair on the set of Bonanza with Lynn (she was working as an extra and stand-in). He went on to divorce Lynn for Cindy (a Little House stand-in—and, even more bizarrely, my stand-in) when Lynn caught them at it. I can’t imagine what must have gone through her mind then, after having gotten her start the same way.

  Charles and Caroline Ingalls represented for all of America the ultimate perfect parents, and their brood had the happiest of childhoods. Yet Michael’s own childhood had been utterly miserable. Little House was one of the most religious—and most specifically Christian—shows ever on television. Yet Michael was Jewish and had grown up in a home filled with religious conflict, including ugly battles over how he was to be raised. Michael’s real name was Eugene Maurice Orowitz. His father was a well-known publicist in Hollywood. His mother, a former dancer and comedienne, was Christian. Well, let’s just say “not Jewish,” as her behavior was hardly what one thinks of as a definition of “Christian.”

  Michael wet the bed. His mother punished him viciously for this, even though it was a medical problem and not under his control. She would hang the soiled sheets out his bedroom window for the entire neighborhood to see, knowing that the school bus pulled up right in front of their house. Michael would try to wake up earlier and earlier each day to take the sheets down the street to the local Laundromat and wash them, then get back home without his mother knowing. If that wasn’t possible, he would walk home rather than take the bus, then try to outrun it and get home to retrieve the sheets from the window before his friends saw them. Years later, he became a powerful runner and went on to become a track-and-field champion in high school. His specialty was the javelin throw. He eventually went public about his problems and the abuse and made an autobiographical TV movie called The Loneliest Runner.

  A story that was not in the film, but that I heard on the set, was that in addition to the bed-wetting, his mother objected to Michael’s adopting his father’s religion, so much so that when he was finally allowed to have a bar mitzvah, his mother pulled him out of the room during the party and sneered, “I just want you to know that when you were a baby, I had you baptized. So this is all just a big joke!”

  I remember that when I heard that story, I felt terrible for him. And now here he was, every week, standing up in church with the Reverend Alden, happily singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.” What on earth could that have been like for him?

  And, yes, he was gorgeous, absolutely breathtaking; all muscles and tanned skin, big white teeth, and a wild mane of shining, curly hair. He was like a male version of a Farrah Fawcett poster. I sometimes wondered what he would look like in that red swimsuit. He knew he was sexy, and he made sure everyone else knew it, too. I got the impression he had not been sexy or popular when he was a teenager, and this was the great payback of all time.

  He was hard not to notice. He didn’t walk. He strutted. He swaggered. Like a peacock. His aura annoyed some people in the cast. I remember Katherine MacGregor telling me she disliked him on sight, when, at her audition, he strutted into the room. “Like a baby bantam rooster!” she howled. I never minded it. I thought it was sort of cute. His somewhat overly macho posturing also struck me as dreadfully funny because he was so small. Michael Landon was short, really short. I don’t know his actual height, because he was never without the enormous lifts he wore in his boots. I really think that much of his swagger was not to impress, but to keep from tipping over in those shoes.

  In every scene with another male actor, he was always positioned on a staircase, up on a ladder, anything. They did everything but dig a hole for the rest of us to stand in. His image was of a big, protective father figure, but he was really more of a cute, cuddly, giggling little thing. And in the tightest pants you ever saw—with not a stitch of underwear.

  This did give even me a shock the first day. It was the 1970s, so tight jeans and no underwear was a popular fashion statement in Hollywood. But no underwear beneath his Charles Ingalls homespun trousers? In the 1800s? What on earth was he thinking?

  What he was thinking was that NBC had done research on the demographics of our show and determined that the largest part of our viewing audience at that point was women age forty-plus. And Michael knew exactly what they liked. So the pants remained tight, the underwear remained in the drawer, and the shirt stayed off, displaying his even, perfectly tan chest, totally hairless, with the wide suspenders crossing right next to each nipple (in case you hadn’t noticed them and needed a hint where to look). Usually just a tiny rivulet of sweat, strategically placed, ran down his pectorals. Sigh.

  Little House was a family show, but for a large part of our audience, it was also like one of those “bodice ripper” paperback romance novels. No actual sex, nothing dirty, but there was a handsome, sweaty, dashing hero who could scoop you up in his brawny arms and carry you into his rough-hewn cabin and…Then the moon went behind a cloud.

  One of the most popular questions I get asked over and over again is “What was Michael Landon really like?” In truth, I’ll never know. I was not married to him, I didn’t date him, he wasn’t my father; I didn’t have to live with him day in and day out. Those who did know much more than I or anyone else ever will. And they have my sympathy. I loved him and loved every minute of working with him, but I have to think that being around someone that driven, that focused, that, well, just plain intense, on a regular, day-to-day basis would be enough to drive most people completely out of their minds.

  Michael was like Charles Ingalls. Except when he wasn’t. He believed in hard work for everyone. We child actors were expected to show up on time, know our lines, put in our best performance, and call our elders “sir” and “ma’am.” When the AD called us to come do our scenes, we came running and said, “Yes, sir!” On location these requests were shouted over a megaphone, but always with the word please: “Alison, please!” “Melissa, please!” and so on. It was best if they only had to call you once. Because the location was huge (the ranch covered over 6,500 acres, and the Little House was a mile and a half from town), it was excusable, if you were very far away when called, to come dashing in by the second please. But you didn’t want to wait for a third, because after that, the next voice coming though that megaphone would be Michael’s. And he would not be a happy camper.

  I recently met a young woman who plays a teenage daughter on a popular sitcom. She was telling me how much she enjoyed doing her show and asked about the conditions on our set. The people on her set were particularly nice to her, so she asked, “Did they treat you like little princesses, too?”

  I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. No, I had to tell her. We were not “princesses” on Little House. We were soldiers. None of us had our own trailers on location. I have been to sets where the lead actors in Michael’s position and those playing the lead family, including the young girls, would each have enormous Winnebago-type trailers, lavishly furnished, complete with wet bars. Such a thing might easily be in someone’s contract. But not on our show. We each had a place to change our clothes and go to the bathroom with barely enough room to turn around.

  That’s what we all got, including Michael. And on those days when we had a cast of thousands—those episodes involving ball games, Founder’s Day picnics, etc.—we doubled up and shared, including Michael. Of course, we shared with people we liked: Melissa and I were always together, and Michael only shared with his best friends, either Victor French or his stunt man, Hal Burton, but double up he did, just like everyone else. We didn’t need fancy dressing rooms. We all knew we wouldn’t be spending that much time in there anyway, with the pace we worked at. There was an air
of disdain for all “perks” in general. Hard work was its own reward. Well, that and your paycheck. This was true for us kids as well.

  At one point there was an attempt to further motivate the children with rewards of gum and candy. This nonsense was brought to an abrupt halt by Michael. One of the ADs, a man who insisted on being called “Uncle Miles,” a trait I always found disturbing, started handing out gum and candy at the end of the day if everyone was “good.” It was mostly for the kids who were day players and background or extras, but some of the younger regulars got in on the action as well. I was a bit old for this, and gum chewing was at that time off the list for me, as I had braces. I also thought it was kind of lame, if not downright creepy.

  “Okay, boys and girls; now, if everybody’s good today, Uncle Miles will give you gum!”

  Michael was not amused. I wasn’t supposed to find out about his reaction, but between my aunt Marion and me, we had ears everywhere. Michael told Miles this gum business was to stop and stop immediately, that it was a horrible idea. “Gum if you’re good? What if some kid says, ‘Screw it, I don’t feel like gum today; I don’t have to be good’?” He said, “They don’t need gum. They’re here to do a job like everyone else. They’re getting paid—they can go to the store and buy their own damn gum! They don’t need to be given gum if they’re good. If they’re not good, they’re fired.” The gum campaign was over. A few very young children complained briefly, but most didn’t care that much.

  I did. I thought it was one of the greatest things Michael ever said. I wanted to run up and hug him when I heard. He didn’t want us treated as if we were stupid—or worse, like trained animals performing for treats. We were to be treated as thinking human beings, as actors, equal to anyone else on the set and just as accountable for our actions.