Only once did I ever hear one of them make a remark indicating they had even noticed my development. I was wearing one of my usual lunchtime outfits. I didn’t dare eat lunch in my costumes because I was a notorious spiller of food and drink, and one spot would be a disaster. So I always took off the dress and wore the petticoats, tights, and boots, but topped off with a T-shirt. Sometimes, I ditched the petticoats, too, and wore cutoff shorts over the tights. This was a particularly fetching look—revealing yet functional, like some sort of odd dance rehearsal outfit, combined with the ringlets and high-heeled boots. I looked a little like a girl superhero in a Japanese comic book. I was drinking a pint of milk. I was one of the only teenage girls I knew who drank milk regularly and actually preferred it to soda. I was leaning back, taking a long drag of milk, when I noticed two crew members staring at me. They just stared and didn’t say a word. Finally, one turned to the other and said quietly, “I don’t know. Must be all that milk.” That is as close to a comment on my body as I got from any of them in my seven years on the show.
Some people, however, were another story. Poor Baby Carrie. Not only was she one of the most hapless, dopiest children in television history, but she was played by twins. It took two people to play someone that dumb. But they weren’t dumb. They were just babies. Adorable babies. Rachel Lindsay and Robin Sidney Greenbush had already had what could be called a successful career before Little House. Together, they had played the baby in the movie Sunshine. They were also from a crazy show-business family, as their father was Billy Green Bush from Five Easy Pieces and that weird Robert Blake movie, Electra Glide in Blue. But we didn’t really see much of him. We got Carol, their mother, instead.
People have often asked me, “Just what is wrong with Baby Carrie?” “Why can’t Baby Carrie talk properly?” The girls seem to be perfectly nice, intelligent, articulate young women now, so how come on the show, every line of Baby Carrie’s dialogue sounded like “Pah! Umma gumma boo gurble twee!” Well, if you ever met their mother, you’d understand. Even though she was a grown woman—an attractive, blond, heavily made-up woman, a twang-talkin’, southern-fried, good ol’ gal—a lot of what she said sounded very much like “Umma gumma boo gurble twee,” thanks to her countrified accent. Why does Baby Carrie fall down the hill during the opening credits? Because she was stupid and clumsy? No. Here’s what really happened.
They always switched the girls out every few hours, so they could take naps. It was the first season, the first episode, and when it was time to shoot the “Baby Carrie runs down the hill” scene, the director called for a “fresh twin.” Mother Carol grabbed up the resting child and quickly put her little shoes back on. On the wrong feet. So the poor thing, who had only recently mastered walking, tried to run down a steep, rock-covered, gopher hole–scarred hill with her clunky high-button shoes on the opposite feet. Not surprisingly, she went down like a ton of bricks. But since Michael decided it was much too hilarious to reshoot, it now runs forever and ever, over and over again, at the beginning of every show.
To this day, I have no idea how Carol’s daughters turned out as well adjusted as they did. She traumatized me, and I only had to be around her a few hours a day on the set. So there I was, during the taping of the fourth season, walking out of my dressing room in Simi Valley, wearing a T-shirt over my camisole. I had barely gotten the door open, when I heard a loud whoop. It sounded like some kind of waterbird coming in for a landing. It was the unmistakable voice of Carol Greenbush. As I stepped out onto the stairs of the trailer, she screamed in my general direction: “GET A LOAD OF THEM JUGS!” I froze in my tracks.
I was mortified. I was being screamed at, catcalled about my body parts in public, and it wasn’t even by a guy. Not a crew member, not some hairy construction worker, but Baby Carrie’s mother. I turned around, went back into my trailer, shut the door, and didn’t come out until after lunch. My aunt tried to reason with Carol about her behavior, but I don’t know that reason was possible with her. She never stopped coming up with gems like this.
Sometime later, when I was at least mercifully closer to eighteen, she marched into makeup and brayed at the top of her lungs, “Alison! Did you pose nude for Playboy?” It couldn’t have been later than seven in the morning. I finished cringing and answered her.
“Uh, no. Not that I recall. Why?”
“Well, I heard that somebody from Little House had posed nude for Playboy, and I knew it couldn’t be Melissa Gilbert cuz she’s too young, and I figured it couldn’t be Melissa Sue cuz who’d pay to see her? So I figured you being the only one with a good body, it had to be you!”
I sighed and tried to figure out through my morning haze if this outburst could possibly be construed as a compliment. I assured her that, however she felt about it, if she was looking for me to appear anywhere nude, Playboy or otherwise, she was in for a very long wait.
So I was the first one on the show to get boobs. What was strange for me was it wasn’t like that at school. I was always one of the youngest in my class, and it seemed that all the girls I hung out with were Jewish or Italian. They had training bras in the fifth grade. I was a skinny Scotch-Irish girl who was still flat enough to go shirtless like a boy while they were all wearing C cups. But on the set of Little House, I was the oldest, and both Melissas were of similar genetic stock, so I won the race. It shouldn’t have been a race, of course, but not only were we being compared all the time, there was the matter of the swimsuit.
Gladys had a swimsuit. It was from her glamour days, a genuine Schiaparelli gold lamé one-piece, Roman toga–style swimsuit. I couldn’t imagine anyone actually swimming in it. But it was fabulous. Gladys told us that “whoever could fit into the suit first” would get it. Clearly, one had to have breasts that filled out the top.
Melissa Sue wasn’t interested. It was me versus Melissa Gilbert in the battle of the boobs. Melissa wanted it so much, I actually caught her doing those isometric flexing exercises that are supposed to make your boobs bigger. They didn’t work. The swimsuit still hangs in my closet.
I was also the first to get my period. Melissa got hers much later. I have no idea when Melissa Sue got hers. (As far as I know, Melissa Sue Anderson does not even go to the toilet.) Despite all the films and brochures, my period still came as a total shock. I was nearly fifteen and had probably given up looking for it. And although all the material warned about “some discomfort,” it didn’t really tell the truth. It didn’t say it would hurt like hell.
I first noticed something was wrong after eating lunch one day at the infamously bad Paramount Studios commissary. They later redid the place, but at the time, it was well known as a good place to get food poisoning. So when on the way home from work I rolled into a ball in the backseat of the car and started moaning and complaining of violent cramping, all Auntie Marion could ask was, “Did you have the corned beef and cabbage?”
But I hadn’t had the corned beef and cabbage. And when I got home, I felt much worse. My parents were ready to call a doctor, until I came out of the bathroom and announced what was really happening. My mother, wanting to be progressive, said that it should be a cause for celebration; it was a sign of growing up, young womanhood and all that. Periods were treated as something shameful when she was a girl, and she wasn’t going to have any of that. She went to the corner liquor store and bought me a bottle of champagne and a box of Kotex pads, the kind with a belt.
I said, “Yeah, great. Whatever.” Taking the champagne, I used it to wash down a handful of Tylenol and locked myself in my room. I had never been in so much pain. I couldn’t believe women did this every month. But I would soon become an expert on the subject. I got rid of the horrendous bulky pads—they were like wearing a sofa cushion between my legs—and learned how to use tampons.
And then, of course, being the sharing type, I taught everyone else. I was the hit of Melissa Gilbert’s next slumber party, where I was the only girl who had started her period. All the other attendees were younger, like
Melissa, or even later bloomers than me. I demonstrated the Playtex tampon versus a regular Tampax tampon in a glass of water like in the commercial. Everyone “oohed” and “aahed” as the Playtex showed its superior absorbency. But there was one thing I hadn’t told them about: PMS. They had to find this out the hard way.
One night a few months later, the girls were staying up late talking, and I was exhausted. We were having the party in the “maid’s quarters” and were all laid out on sleeping bags in the main room. This meant I could conveniently crawl off into the bedroom and shut the door to sleep. They decided to play a prank. While I was asleep (out cold, apparently), Melissa and the others snuck into the room and put things in my bed: a rock, some hair curlers, a brush, some—unused, thankfully—Kotex pads. Then they all snuck back out and waited for the fun to start. They got much more than they bargained for. I was a day and a half away from my period.
In the middle of the night, I rolled over onto a rock. What the hell?! Then I found the brush. And the Kotex. What the fucking hell? I don’t wake up in the best of moods to begin with, but something about rolling over onto that rock really got me going. I wasn’t completely awake, but I remember picking up every single thing in the bed, going to the door and opening it, and then throwing everything as hard as I could into the main room. I didn’t look to see where any of it landed. I think my eyes were still closed. Then I stumbled back to the bed and fell asleep.
When I woke up, it was later, much later. Like noon. I walked out into the living room, which was empty. I went into the house and found the girls sitting around the kitchen table. They looked terrified at the sight of me.
“Hey, what time is it? How come nobody woke me up for breakfast?” I mumbled.
They just stared. Finally, Melissa recovered her composure and explained what happened. She said I had behaved like I was possessed, screaming at the top of my lungs—nothing in particular—just screaming. And throwing things. Rocks, curlers, everything. They had to dive for cover to keep from being hit. By the time I had gone back into the bedroom, they were all on the floor hiding under the furniture.
One of the girls had said, “Oh my God. What are we going to do? She is Nellie Oleson!”
Melissa told me they didn’t wake me for breakfast because they thought I might kill them. I assured them I wouldn’t but explained that it’s very, very dangerous to put foreign objects into the bed of someone with major PMS.
Fortunately, I was able to benefit from my PMS. I don’t know if the producers kept a calendar and charted my cycle, but miraculously, almost every one of the episodes where Nellie is at her most vicious, cruel, and obnoxious were shot while I was having my period. “Little Women,” the episode where I demand that god-awful black wig with curls? Yup. “The Music Box,” where I make the little stuttering girl cry? You betcha. “The Cheaters,” where I make my classmate Andy Garvey (played by Patrick Labyorteaux) steal the answer to the final exam from his own mother, who is subbing for Miss Beadle? Ouch. The one where Laura and I get into a fight over Almanzo and duke it out in the mud? That was a bad one. She’s lucky she lived.
That was one of our best fights, and Melissa and I loved it. It was the episode called “Back to School Part II,” in which Laura and Nellie fight over Almanzo. Laura, looking for a way to get out of her parents’ house, sets out to take the teacher’s exam and stupidly asks Nellie for advice on what to study. Nellie, not surprisingly, lies to her and almost totally ruins her chance at a teaching career. (Will Laura never learn?) Right before we started filming, the director told us, “There’s no sound, so don’t worry about saying anything.” They were telling this to the wrong girls. When we realized that nobody in the viewing audience would be able to hear us, we instantly knew what we had to do. Melissa grabbed me, threw me down in the mud, and screamed, “Take that, you BITCH!” I came up yowling and thumped into her full force, shouting, “Oh yeah? FUCK YOU!” We screamed and swore and called each other every filthy name in the book and beat the crap out of each other. We were laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe. And Melissa was strong! She was smaller than me, but a wiry little thing, and she tossed me around like I was a rag doll. At one point, she got me facedown in the mud in a headlock. Her other arm came around as I was screaming away, and as her hand came at my face, I saw too late that it was full of mud. She had grabbed a huge clot of filth and hit me with it square in the mouth.
People have actually asked me if that was “real mud.” I am perplexed by this; I did not know there was such a thing as fake mud. If they have fake mud, we did not use it on Little House on the Prairie. We only used live, genuine, organic dirt on our show. In Simi, along the road into town, there was a large sunken area. In the summer, it was a popular grazing area for cattle, a cow pasture, and in the winter rainy season, it quickly became a duck pond. Occasionally, when Nellie required a dunking, a hose was used to turn the hole into a large muddy soup. That was what we were fighting in that day, and if you watch the episode closely, you can see it happen. And at the end, when I’m screaming at Almanzo, “Look at me! I’m covered in DIRT!” you can see that I have said dirt between my teeth.
The set doctor was very concerned. He asked us if we had gotten any in our eyes. “My eyes?” I replied. “No, but I just swallowed a quart of it!” He said that wasn’t good. I did not get sick. I am apparently impervious to mud, duck shit, and cow shit. Melissa and I never worried about hurting each other during fights. We just had some kind of psychic choreography that allowed us to yell, “Go!” and start flailing away, without ever making real contact. Well, except once. It was this weird dream sequence in “The Fighter,” where Laura dreams about boxing with Nellie. We were outfitted in 1800s boxing gear, including gloves. Thinking they were making it safer for us, the prop men padded the gloves so that our hands weren’t really in them all the way. Instead, they were balled up at the base. Anyone who knows anything about fighting knows this is a terrible idea. We couldn’t tell where the ends of the gloves were by feel. So, sure enough, Melissa swung, meaning to miss me, and punched me right in the nose.
I could feel my nose bend. I really thought it was broken for a second. But it was okay, and we opted to put our hands the rest of the way into the gloves to prevent further injury. We knew we would have been safer if they had just let us fight bare-knuckled.
Someone I never did get to take a swing at (and would have liked to) was Melissa Sue Anderson. We technically had a match scheduled, but it was canceled at the last minute. It was one of the few times Mary loses it. Nellie suggests that Ma is having an affair with the handyman. In the script, Mary was supposed to actually hit me with her metal lunch pail, which would have hurt. Thinking ahead, the prop guys brought in a rubber one for this occasion.
Missy and I were in makeup getting ready for the scene, and we started “trash talking,” like a couple of TV wrestlers threatening their opponents. Melissa Sue turned to me and said, “I’m really going to hit you, you know.” She wasn’t smiling, and it appeared she might actually be threatening me. So I responded in kind: “That’s okay, because when I pull your hair, I’m going to rip it out by the roots.” And then I looked right at her and grinned.
When we got all the way down the hill, I got the impression that perhaps someone had called down on the walkie-talkie and warned them of our little “chat.” The director had dispensed with the entire lunch pail idea. Missy was now just to give me a simple slap, and I would take off. There would be no fight scene. Missy looked pissy that she missed the opportunity.
But Little House wasn’t the only war zone in my life. There was also school. At this point, I was a student at Hollywood High. Because of the demands of my job, I only attended classes sporadically, and eventually I managed to get into the “alternative school” program, which meant I didn’t really have to show up at all. I was quite good in some subjects. I loved home economics. It was all about cooking, and if I could get it as my first-period class, it meant free breakfast. Weirdly, one of my worst
classes was French. It shouldn’t have been. I loved French and everything about France. But at Hollywood High, I had what may have been the worst French teacher on earth. He was an American, not a native French speaker, and it was a little unclear if he had ever actually been to France. Unlike my junior high teacher, who conducted the whole class in French, at least trying for a sense of immersion, Mr. Haig spoke English. And he didn’t always talk about French either. He spoke a lot about his personal problems. Sometimes he discussed other subjects, like history and literature.
Mr. Haig seemed to have issues with my being on TV. I know that sounds like a line: “Oh, boo-hoo-hoo, my teacher hates me because I’m a child star,” but this guy was a real character. I told him I would be out of school for a few days to film. I asked him for my assignments in advance, as was the rule, and about getting a make-up test for the exam that had been scheduled while I was working. He became very angry.
“Filming a TV show is not an excused absence,” he sniffed.
I told him that it was and handed him the form from the State of California explaining the whole process, thinking maybe he wasn’t familiar with it. That’s when he went bananas.
“I know it’s an excused absence in the State of California!” he shouted. “It is not an excused absence in my class. It is not an excused absence if you are getting paid.”
I was slack jawed. What was he talking about?
Confessions of a Prairie Bitch Page 17
