Confessions of a Prairie Bitch

by Alison Arngrim

  Everyone always asks if Michael was like a father to me, if he loved me. I have no idea if he loved me, but he went one better as far as I’m concerned. He respected me. Respect is something very hard to come by for child actors. They are often treated as dumb animals or props, objects to be moved about in service of the plot or the other actors. They’re sometimes instructed to do no more than hit their mark and “act cute.” Making silly faces and repeating inane catchphrases is encouraged. In these circumstances, not much is expected of them, and “not much” is exactly what you get.

  I think this contributes to the rampant lack of self-respect we see so often in ex–child stars and the resulting self-destructive behavior. If you’re never asked to meet a standard, never held accountable for anything, sure, nothing’s ever your fault, but then nothing’s ever to your credit, either. It’s pretty much as if you were never even there. This was never the case for any child actor in Little House on the Prairie. Or as we like to say, “Cast of Little House: no arrests, no convictions.”

  And I do believe we owe that to Michael.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE PUBLICITY-SEEKING MISSILE

  WILLIE: I’m telling!

  NELLIE: You listen to me. You say anything, and I’ll say you’re lying. You know they’ll believe me, because you lie more than I do. But if you don’t say anything, I’ll give you chocolate and gumdrops. Lots of them…

  Anyone who was anyone was there. It was a big, glitzy Hollywood party in 1974, thrown by a media organization to celebrate the new season’s TV shows. The party was mainly for the “names” on the shows so they could hobnob with the press and get reporters and reviewers to write positive things. The only person on Little House’s cast who was deemed worthy of an invite was Michael—he knew how to charm the media. He had just come off Bonanza, and he was a bona fide star, while the rest of us cast members were still pretty unknown.

  This, however, did not stop my dad. A friend of his, a French-Canadian gossip columnist, was going to the party, and he said he could get us in—in a backdoor, under the table sort of way. The party was a serious black-tie affair, and my dad insisted that for the occasion I was going to get my first seriously expensive dress. My father, normally a great lover of bargains, insisted we shop at the famously overpriced department store Neiman Marcus (there’s a reason people call it “needless markup”). I was getting into this party, I was a star, and I deserved it, he explained to me. We ended up buying a beautiful gray dress, with little dark gray birds all over it. It was actually very Little House on the Prairie, and very Nellie Oleson in that it cost a fortune.

  My father accompanied me in a tuxedo that he had bought for two dollars at a Catholic church rummage sale. But it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. An actor had left his entire wardrobe to the church, including numerous designer suits. An elderly volunteer had been allowed to price everything, making it possible to purchase Ralph Lauren shirts for fifty cents—well, at least until lunchtime, when the other volunteers realized what she was doing and snatched the pen away from her in horror. But before they arrived and put a stop to the greatest designer clothes giveaway in history, my father had grabbed up pants, shirts, ties, and several suits, including a tuxedo, and the sweet little old lady had sold him the entire lot for about fifty dollars, which in reality should have been the price of one of the ties.

  So, I in my nearly thousand-dollar dress and my father in his two-dollar suit sauntered into the hottest A-list party in town and tried to act like we belonged there. It was a great success. I was photographed with every star in the place—Karen Valentine, Barbara Eden, Will Geer, even Mary Tyler Moore. And then Michael showed up.

  I have several beautiful pictures of him from that night, but I would give anything for just one photo of the look on his face when he saw that my dad and I had gotten into that party. No one from the show was supposed to be there but him—not Laura Ingalls herself, not Mary, not even Ma. And here, of all the people on earth to show up, was the kid who played Nellie Oleson, a girl no one had ever heard of, just standing there in her little Neiman Marcus dress like she owned the place, and behind her, some crazy guy in a tux who ran a talent management company out of his dining room.

  Michael’s mouth opened in shock, as if he was about to say, “What in holy hell are you two idiots doing here?” But before he could say anything, the photographers were grabbing us and saying, “Oh, yes! Michael! Stand next to her!” and happily shooting away. He looked at me with a glint in his eye and shook his head, laughing. Then he assumed his official publicity grin with those big white teeth, and we posed for photo after photo. With one look he had said it all. These two are going to be trouble….

  Strangely, this outrageous act of defiance did not result in retaliation. Michael not only knew chutzpah when he saw it, I think he admired it. For the duration of Little House, every time my father pulled some outlandish publicity stunt (such as having me pose in a bikini with a killer whale at Sea World or go on a morning talk show with my pet snake), or I had some scandalous article in the National Enquirer claiming I was romantically linked to some actor I barely knew, others on the set would be appalled, but not Michael. He would just look at me with that twinkle in his eye, grin, and shake his head. My dad’s abilities as a father are certainly in question, and his skills as a manager have received mixed reviews from different clients. But one thing was unquestionable: the man was a living, breathing, publicity-seeking missile. If there was an event, I was going to it.

  The first year of the show, Katherine MacGregor and I received a request from a very exclusive girls’ school to appear at their Easter-fair fund-raiser in full Nellie and Mrs. Oleson drag. We were to hold court and sign autographs at what was to be a charming, high-end event. This required coordination and logistical maneuvering on the part of many people. The costumes had to be brought in their entirety from wardrobe (I shudder to imagine the insurance issues). We had to be dressed, have our hair done in the full getup with bows by the set hairdressers, and arrive at the event along with all designated publicists and photographers—ours, theirs, NBC’s, the invited press, and the uninvited press.

  At first, it really did seem like a good idea. (I can’t begin to tell you how many disasters in my life have started with those words.) The location was beautiful: a posh private school in the Coldwater Canyon area of Los Angeles with lush gardens and rolling lawns. The school’s administrators had spared no expense for this event, bringing in a merry-go-round, filling the pond with baby ducks, and hosting an Easter egg hunt, complete with a guy in a bunny suit. Katherine and I looked fabulous. We posed for numerous pictures. There are shots of me with a baby duck and the two of us gaily cavorting on merry-go-rounds and the like. And then the school’s publicity director introduced us to the children, both the students and the adorable overdressed young ones of the moneyed families who were attending in support. And that’s when things began to go terribly wrong.

  “Look, it’s Mrs. Oleson and Nellie!” “Isn’t that great, kids?” Um, no. See, what the apparently delusional grown-ups had forgotten was, we played the villains. You know, the bad guys. The students didn’t like us. At all. A few older kids and their parents got autographs. Then the playground got really quiet. A woman brought over her daughter, a girl of maybe four or five, to meet Mrs. Oleson. Katherine smiled warmly and said hello, and the child promptly burst into tears. And then started screaming. Really, really loudly. I honestly don’t know who was more traumatized: the poor child being terrified by the spectacle of the actual evil Mrs. Oleson in person, or poor Katherine, realizing she’d just made a little girl cry by smiling at her. We were not entertaining anyone. We were just plain scaring people. No one in this transaction was having an even remotely good time. This was turning into a PR disaster.

  Katherine and I decided to back off and just play the rest of the event low-key. We would be present but would not attempt to directly engage anyone. Those who actually wished to meet us or get an autograph coul
d quietly do so on their own, but we would avoid any further public scenes. I decided now would be a good time to go get something to eat. I left the main hub of action and headed off to the area the school had set up as a food court. So there I was, walking down the sidewalk behind the main buildings, hoping to stay out of sight and enjoy my hot dog and grape slushee in peace, when, WHAM! A millisecond before, I had heard faint giggling and the sound of running footsteps behind me, but there just wasn’t time to turn around. Suddenly, I felt the strange sensation of being kicked in the ass by not one, but two feet. Either someone had jumped straight up in the air and onto my butt, or I was being kicked simultaneously by two people. The sheer force knocked me to the ground. I fell to the cement and landed facedown. I closed my eyes before I hit, so I wouldn’t get poked in the eye by anything, and my eyes were still shut tight when I heard my assailants giggle in triumph and run away.

  As I lay there, feeling the cool cement against my cheek and hearing the footsteps fade in the distance, I thought, Just how the hell did I get here? I mean, I don’t even know these people, and they kicked me in the butt. Really hard. And now they’re happy about it. Between trying to determine if I’d fractured my wrist or cracked a tooth in the fall, I slowly pondered the meaning of all this. I had pretended to be someone else on TV. I had pretended to do things that I don’t normally do and said a bunch of really awful things that I didn’t make up and didn’t really mean. I had pretended to hate a girl (Melissa Gilbert) I actually adored. I had pretended to be a fabulously rich and prissy girl in Mary Janes, when I was really dead broke and a tomboy in sneakers. I had pretended to be a confident, tough bully, when I was really an insecure, shy, frightened girl who got beat up a lot (like now, for instance). I had done these things because it was my job; they paid me to do it, and once again, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

  And now, it seemed, I had done it so well, pretended so convincingly, that these two girls really hated me. They hated me so much, I made them so angry, that just the sight of me inspired them to beat me to the ground. Now, this is certainly some kind of achievement. I realized at that moment, that even winning an Emmy could not provide more concrete proof of my ability to affect people as an actress. But then, it probably wouldn’t hurt as much either.

  I couldn’t get up. I was relieved that at least all these damn petticoats and excessive costuming had broken my fall, but I was horrified when I realized that they also, once I was facedown, virtually turned me into a turtle on its back. I could not get up without assistance. I also wasn’t really sure if I had injured myself. With that, and the sense of humiliation I felt having just been beaten up by small children in a public place, I decided to just stay down and wait for my dad to get there. I didn’t even have the nerve to open my eyes.

  “Are you all right?” he asked me minutes later when he arrived at the scene of the crime.

  “Uh, I think so.”

  He helped me up, and that’s when I saw that in addition to being attacked from behind and made to kiss pavement, I had been done out of a perfectly good hot dog and slushee, now splattered all over the ground. I managed not to start crying, as that would’ve just been too embarrassing on top of everything else, but my father said very sternly, “We’re going home,” and took me to get another hot dog and slushee on the way out.

  When we got home, I heard him on the phone with the publicists who had arranged this debacle, saying, with huge, dramatic emphasis, “She was attacked, for God’s sake!” It was agreed by all involved that I was never, ever, under any circumstances, to wear the dreaded costume in public again. It was simply too dangerous. It incited people.

  I felt a little better. In a way, I was relieved. That getup was not something I wanted to wear more frequently than I had to. But I also knew this was not just about the dress anymore. My act, Nellie Oleson, had inadvertently unleashed something in people’s psyches. The injustices that Laura faced on the prairie were too much like the injustices they faced in their own lives. They wanted to have someone to get mad at. And there I was, in all my smug, ringleted, smirking glory. Hell, I hated me.

  I was going to need to toughen up, quick. The meek might inherit the earth, but if the meek are going to play Nellie Oleson on TV, the meek are going to get pummeled. Perhaps these circumstances could be turned to my advantage. I mean, what if instead of just wanting to deck me, they were actually afraid of me? Hmmmm.

  Coming up with a way to avoid getting beaten up had always been a dream of mine. Between the school bullies and the frequent encounters with my psycho brother, I’d already perfected techniques like running, learning to take a punch without crying, and rolling into a ball and playing dead, but I couldn’t keep that sort of thing up forever. At my new school, finding a way to avoid a beating was about to become a much more pressing matter, because Bancroft Junior High, which I entered in the seventh grade, didn’t just have bullies; it had gangs—actual, real-live, weapon-toting, like you see on the eleven o’clock news, gangs. And in the early 1970s, Bancroft happened to be right smack in the middle of a major territorial gang dispute. The gang to beat was none other than the now world-famous West Side Crips.

  Unlike some of my classmates whose parents drove them to school, I, in the spirit of social egalitarianism (or more likely because my parents were too busy to drive me anywhere), took the bus. The RTD is the mainstay of the L.A. public transportation system. It stands for Rapid Transit Department—which it really wasn’t, but it was better than walking. I usually wound up on the same bus with some Crips members at the end of the day, when I was on my way home, and they were on their way to a fight. And that’s how I met “Godfather Crip.”

  I had heard of the Godfather for some time and always assumed he was some sort of big Scarface-style drug kingpin in a fur coat and Rolls-Royce. So I was a little surprised when one day he pulled up at the bus stop across the street from school in a Toyota. There was a great deal of excitement among the young Crips at the bus stop. Jubilant cries of “Godfather! Godfather!” greeted the little orange Toyota with the dirty windows. A thin, gangly teenage boy got out and walked around to the passenger side.

  “Dr. Scrooge!” someone yelled. This was apparently a high-ranking aide or bodyguard. He opened the door. Out stepped a boy no older than fifteen, in a full-length leather coat and high-top Converse sneakers. His face was almost completely concealed by a large leather hat. This was Godfather Crip. All five feet four of him.

  Godfather Crip, his many fans, and I all got on the bus together. I didn’t fully understand the sense of his taking the bus when he had a car and driver, but I think it had something to do with showing solidarity with his men before a fight. There were no seats left when I got on, so I headed to the back of the bus to stand. The Godfather asked me if I needed a seat. At this cue, Dr. Scrooge promptly threw a young gang member to the floor and offered me his now suddenly vacated seat.

  I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for turning down an offer like that, so I decided to take it. The Godfather asked if I wanted a cigarette. Dr. Scrooge started to violently remove one from the mouth of one of the gang’s smokers, but I told him it was okay, I didn’t smoke. The entire ride home continued like this, the Godfather’s polite attempts at making conversation punctuated by Dr. Scrooge’s outbursts of violently enforced chivalry.

  Eventually, they all got off at Plummer Park in West Hollywood, where a number of rival gang members, Los Rebels, were waiting. Both sides were carrying various weapons, such as bats, chains, some knives here and there, but the Crips liked to battle with canes and walking sticks. They all seemed strangely happy about the whole thing. These were still the old days, when some still fought for sport or territory and mostly without guns. Not that they didn’t sometimes kill each other; it just took longer. They also seemed to have little interest in killing anyone not directly involved in their disputes (like me). Now, anyone in range of an Uzi or an AK-47 is fair game. Ah, for the good old days. I wondered if any of these people h
ad any idea just how really screwed up they were. Did they really think this was a normal, healthy way of life, or did they have some inkling that this behavior might be symptomatic of some kind of deep, inner disturbance?

  I found that out when, along with several of my friends, I got thrown into detention. For refusing to kill an earthworm. Back then, even in a liberal California junior high, announcing that dissecting an earthworm was against your moral principles would still get you detention. The truth is, it wasn’t really against my moral principles. I just couldn’t do it without puking.

  Some of the Crips were in detention with me, and we struck up a conversation. No one stopped us; there was no supervision. (The idea of detention at Bancroft was to simply leave a bunch of strangers alone in a room for six or seven hours.) The young man I spoke to was so forthcoming about his affiliation, he even taught me a song:

  I’m crippin’

  And limpin’

  And damn sure pimpin!

  He explained that it was his ultimate ambition to be a pimp. He was thirteen years old. He went on to explain about “limpin’,” and demonstrated his signature walk, enhanced by his standard-issue Crip cane. I finally asked him what Crip stood for, thinking it had to be an acronym for something: “Cool Rebels in Prison”? “Cruising Regally in Pontiacs”? I pondered.

  “No,” he said. “It’s just Crip. It’s short for ‘crippled inside.’” Oh. I guess that answered that question. During our conversation, he did mention that the only thing that might dissuade him from being a gang member or a pimp would be if he could have his own show on television. I thought, If this is what goes on in detention, this school must have a very interesting drama department.