Confessions of a Prairie Bitch

by Alison Arngrim

  In real life, neither of them would be Jewish, unless their mother, Nellie, had specifically converted, and no, you cannot in an Orthodox home say one baby is a Jew and the other isn’t. It simply does not work that way. But you go try telling Michael Eugene Orowitz Landon that. His mother wasn’t Jewish, but he said he was, and if he had to rewrite the entire Torah on national television to make it so, he would. (It’s probably why for Highway to Heaven he just went the rest of the way and became an angel.)

  So Steve and I had to lie there and laugh at all this religious confusion, which wasn’t that hard, given that we’d already seen each other’s underwear. We were in fits. We giggled and snorted all over the place. We laughed so hard, that Michael began to wonder what we were up to. He came up close to the bed and said, “What have you two been…Wait, are you guys…?” He wouldn’t complete the question. We weren’t sure if he was about to ask if we were sleeping together in real life, or if we were stoned, both of which must have seemed like reasonable possibilities at the time.

  This sent us into further hysterics. Steve looked at me, and I looked at him. We realized from the looks we’d been getting from the crew over the last few weeks that I was the only one (except for Melissa, who suspected) who truly knew for sure that he was gay. And not only did none of these people have a clue, they even believed that he and I were a romantic couple—that we were having sex. We burst out laughing. And could not stop. We howled until we were out of breath, then cracked up all over again as soon as we looked at each other.

  Michael gave up even trying to get us to shut up between takes. He just sighed and said, “Keep it rolling.”

  We knew we would be, like my panties said, “Friends Forever.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ON MY OWN

  NELLIE: You know, it’s not easy being the richest girl in town.

  I’m pretty good at endings—the result, perhaps, of my constant upheaval as a kid. I don’t usually let myself get too attached to material stuff; I don’t pine away for exes or scour Facebook for long-lost friends. I’m practical: I know that nothing lasts forever (unless you’re in syndication). There’s no sense in clinging to the past; it’s in the past. You let go, you move on. Life is about having the rug pulled out from under you, over and over again—or at least my life is.

  So when it came time for the end of my years on Little House, I thought I would be relatively comfortable kissing this phase good-bye. I reasoned with myself: Hey, it was a great gig, and there would be others. I’d had a long run—seven years is an incredibly long time to do anything. Most actors are not that lucky, not even close. So I should be thankful that it lasted as long as it did. Onward and upward!

  But what I didn’t figure into the equation was one small but important fact. These people that I had worked with day after day for seven years weren’t just my colleagues or even my friends. They were my family. And Little House was not just a show, it was my home for almost my entire adolescence.

  It was the end of the seventh season, and I was shooting the episode “Blind Justice,” where I wasn’t heavily featured. I had two scenes, most of which involved walking out of the kitchen in Nellie’s restaurant/hotel and saying, “Who had the lamb stew?” It seemed like a bit of a letdown. I knew lots of people who had been waitresses for seven years and ultimately became TV stars, but I had been a TV star for seven years and had somehow morphed into a glorified waitress.

  Nellie, now “reformed” by her marriage to Percival, had become bland and boring. I didn’t seem to have much to do. I loved having Steve as a TV husband, but I secretly hoped that perhaps Nellie would have a terrible relapse, some sort of post-partum depression, with wild mood swings causing her to scream at Percival, hurl things, have a few more mud fights with Laura. Some terrifying drama where she becomes a danger to the twins? “Quick, get Doc Baker!” But no such luck. I had become a tame prairie wife, happily serving up pie and coffee.

  So when my seven-year contract ended, and NBC and my agent, Lew Sherrill, began renegotiating, I felt a distinct lack of excitement. Was I really going to sign up for another several years of this? How many would they want? Two? Four? I hoped not another seven. That would make it a fourteen-year run! I would be nearly thirty years old before I got off this thing! When I mentioned that to my father, he snorted and said, “My God, you’ll be like Amanda Blake, who spent nineteen years as Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke!” I felt sick to my stomach at the thought.

  Apparently, NBC wasn’t that keen on the idea either. The network refused all requests from my agent for raises, extra episodes, or any type of concession he suggested, no matter how small. Their offer was four years, same money, same conditions—take it or leave it. Of course, both my agent and my father were appalled. For decades they had both prided themselves on being able to “broker a hot deal” with anybody, under any circumstances. But the lawyers at NBC simply refused to negotiate. It was unfair: I was loyal to the network for seven years, yet there was no loyalty being shown to me. My agent and dad were enraged, but despite their pride and anger, they told me the final call was up to me. I thought about how much of my life had been spent on Little House. I was nineteen now and had been on this show since I was twelve. I had gone all through junior high and high school, gotten braces on my teeth, had them removed, learned to drive, grown up, and I was still on this show. It didn’t take me very long to make up my mind: I was ready to take a chance on a career beyond the prairie. I said no to NBC’s last offer.

  But this meant there was no real “good-bye.” I had left on hiatus, at the end of Season 7, not knowing if I would be coming back for Season 8, and now I wasn’t. I was just…gone. The writers were able to build it into the plot seamlessly: Nellie, Percival, and their twins had simply moved to New York City to take over Percival’s father’s store upon his death. In case fans were missing Nellie, they added a whole new bitch. They called the first episode of Season 8 “The Reincarnation of Nellie.” And they weren’t kidding. In it, the Olesons adopt a new daughter from an orphanage. Little Allison Balson (yes, we even shared the same first name) was cast as Nancy Oleson, and she was a mini-me—ringlets and all, poor thing.

  I wasn’t the only one who had passed on a contract renewal. Melissa Sue Anderson had opted to leave as well. The writers took care of her sudden departure: Mary and her husband, Adam, moved to New York, too, so Adam could work at his father’s law firm.

  So that was it: no more Nellie. But my decision didn’t affect only me. No Nellie meant no more Percival. Steve Tracy had just started to become established on the show after two years, and now his time was up. He’d even gotten a phone call from the lawyers at NBC—they’d hoped to use him to pressure me into staying.

  Steve and I had become very close during our TV marriage. We had decided to capitalize on the rumors of our “affair” and used it to foil the tabloids in their attempts to find out if he was gay. We shamelessly lied to the National Enquirer (“Yes, we are deeply in love!”) and wound up becoming a “Hollywood couple,” appearing together at every charity event, red carpet, and photo op our publicists could get us into. We stuck it out through thick and thin, even marching the picket lines together during the long, terrible actors’ strike of 1980. In truth, we probably got along better and had more interests in common than many couples in Hollywood who actually slept with each other.

  So when we went to lunch to discuss my decision, I poured my heart out. I told Steve everything—the whole chapter and verse of the negotiations, who said what to whom, what was offered, what wasn’t. I told him how I felt after spending what was more than a third of my life playing one character and why I felt I was done. He listened patiently, then said, “Yeah, I freaked out when I first heard. I mean, of course I’d rather keep getting paid! But if I was in your shoes, I would have done exactly the same thing.” I was so relieved he was still my friend. Going out into the world without Little House, I was going to need all the help I could get.

  After it all went do
wn, I also called Melissa. She didn’t sound shocked by my news—but then again, the girl is a rock, and she knew everything on the set. She probably even knew before I did that I wasn’t coming back. She said that she had argued and held out as well—practically threatening to blow up the joint—just to get a nominal increase in her salary. But in the end, the network conceded. Hey, how could you have Little House without Half-Pint?

  “I don’t blame you,” she said, “but life is going to be pretty boring here without you.” Then she sent me a present for my birthday in January: a cute little gold charm of a screaming baby. She said it reminded her of me (well, there is some resemblance), and she wrapped the box in the want ads from the L.A. Times. On the wrapping she wrote, “You probably will need these now.”

  Right after I left, I felt a sense of wonder and excitement that I hadn’t felt in years. What would I do first? To listen to my dad or my agent, one would think producers would be banging on my door, asking me to star in this movie or that one. I could just picture it in my head: “Nellie Oleson is available? Get me her agent!” But I was delusional. Hollywood is all about sex and glamour, and Little House on the Prairie was considered decidedly not sexy or glamorous. I tried my best to convince them otherwise: I even played a teenage prostitute on Fantasy Island. (A truly horrifying experience that resulted in me being chased around by Hervé Villechaize. Yikes!) But no one was jumping up and down to hire me.

  It was a tough time for all us girls from the prairie. We were no longer children, we were young women, but people had a hard time visualizing us that way. We all felt this enormous pressure to “break out” of our “wholesome” image. Melissa Sue Anderson was playing an ax murderess in the lurid 1981 slasher flick Happy Birthday to Me, Melissa Gilbert was wearing twelve pounds of eyeliner and running all over town with Rob Lowe on her arm (among other body parts), and I was popping up in the National Enquirer every other week in a bikini. We were all doing our best to prove we were modern, sexy girls.

  But I guess I wasn’t sexy enough—not for the Farrah Fawcettized early ’80s. When I finally did land a role in a movie of the week, it was in I Married Wyatt Earp, an 1800s period piece costarring Marie Osmond, which didn’t exactly cast me in a different light.

  Between these intermittent gigs, I was doing stand-up at The Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard. I had first tried stand-up when I was sixteen. I was hanging out at The Comedy Store, where my dad was managing a comedy troupe called The Village Idiots, when one night a stand-up onstage dared me to try it, and I did. I told jokes about braces and puberty. (“I wear a training bra. See, you can tell.” And then gazing down at my boobs: “Sit!”) I was a hit, and they had me back. I added in a dead-on impression of then president Jimmy Carter’s young blond, slightly geeky daughter, Amy. I wound up playing every single coffeehouse and comedy club in L.A., most of the time four nights a week, while I was still working on Little House. Stand-up was always a rush—but at nineteen, I was still trying to be an actress. So I ran all the way to Edmonton, the capital of Canada’s Alberta Province, to do dinner theater for three months. I appeared in a French bedroom farce every night in my underwear (the poster for the show had a warning label: “Adults Only!”). If that isn’t challenging your wholesome image, I don’t know what is.

  When I came back to Hollywood, it was time for “the conversation.” This conversation has happened to almost every even remotely attractive actress in history, and it’s usually initiated by an agent or a manager. Sometimes the idea is relayed to the parents first, who then broach the issue directly with their daughter. In my case, my agent made a suggestion to my manager, who was my father. So it was his duty to tell me the ugly truth: that I would be much more “marketable” if I had surgery to make my nose smaller and my breasts larger.

  I believe my response was, “You’re fucking kidding me, right?” But no, he and my mother were serious. They even quoted me prices: the nose job would be fairly reasonable, the boobs would be more, of course, but considering the difference they would make, they could reasonably be expected to pay for themselves in a very short period of time. I sat there, stunned, appalled. My parents—my own parents—were essentially telling me I was ugly. It seemed particularly outrageous to me that my father of all people would complain about my nose. He had the exact same one! Yet I remained weirdly calm. I guess I just didn’t know how to respond. I asked if I could take some time and “get back to them on this one.”

  “No problem,” my father assured me. “It’s totally up to you.” I didn’t believe that for a minute. I knew they’d be sorely disappointed if I didn’t listen to their valuable career advice. But I was an adult. This was my decision and no one else’s to make. It was my body, my boobs. I was kind of attached to them.

  I went off to the only place truly appropriate to consider such a decision, the Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery (now the Hollywood Forever Cemetery), where I often ventured when I needed a quiet spot to be alone with my thoughts. It wasn’t in a great neighborhood at the time, so tourists steered clear, and I had the place mostly to myself. I sat cross-legged on the stairs across from Douglas Fairbanks’s dark, weed-choked reflecting pool. I prayed to God for some sort of wisdom, but what category of wisdom is required to determine whether or not to get plastic surgery? So I broke it down mathematically, binary code, if you will. There were two possible decisions and therefore actually only four possible outcomes to consider.

  DECISIONS?

  1. Get the surgery

  2. Don’t get the surgery

  OUTCOMES?

  1. You get work and become rich and famous.

  2. You don’t get any more work. Ixnay on the rich and famous.

  Therefore, the four possible combinations were: 1A, 1B, 2A, and 2B. I would simply work out how I felt about these possible scenarios, and the decision would be simple. Say I got the surgery, and it worked: I’d look fabulous, everyone would love the new nose and boobs, and I’d work like mad and get rich. Hooray! But what if I got the surgery, and my new look didn’t work? I’d have spent a fortune, undergone a major medical procedure, and…nothing. I’d still shuttle fruitlessly from audition to audition, year after year, finally throwing in the towel and getting some other kind of employment—but now with someone else’s nose and boobs.

  What if I didn’t get the surgery at all and, as a result, didn’t become a millionaire starlet? Would I be worse off than I was now? And what about that other possibility? That I not touch my nose one bit and still have a successful career? Can anyone say, “Barbra Streisand”?

  There was absolutely no way anyone could predict with any accuracy the likelihood of any of these outcomes. The variables were too great. There were thousands of women out there with perfect noses and huge racks who couldn’t get an acting job to save their lives. And there were famous actresses with flat chests and great, terrifying honkers, several times the size of mine, who worked all the time. I wasn’t getting anywhere.

  So I asked myself: How will I feel every time I look in the mirror and see my altered looks staring back? I am the only one who will have to live with this decision. The doctors, the agents, the managers, the producers, my parents will all go home at the end of the day. I will be left alone with my nose and my boobs for the rest of my life. And even if my new looks helped me achieve the career of my dreams, would I spend my life worrying about whether I was popular for my acting or for my plastic boobs? Here’s a dark thought: imagine people telling you that you’re beautiful and fabulous and that they love you, but you know that they’ve never seen the real you.

  Suddenly, I was overcome with a feeling of peace. I had made a decision and wasn’t the least bit confused about it anymore. I thanked Mr. Fairbanks and God and went home. I told my parents I’d thought about it, and I wasn’t going to do it; if I had to starve to death with this nose and these boobs, so be it. They didn’t put up much of a fuss. They may have privately fantasized about having a perfect sex-symbol daughter with a perfect nose and pe
rfect tits, but they were not prepared to drag me to a surgeon against my will. They had taken their best shot, and it was simply no sale.

  While I was trying to figure out my future, I moved out of my parents’ house and bought my own two-bedroom condo in West Hollywood, just above the Sunset Strip. I had cashed in my trust fund, and money was burning a hole in my pocket. I had an interior decorator fill the rooms with all this absurdly fancy Queen Anne furniture. I don’t know what I was thinking. The show was being rerun both in prime time and in syndication at this point, so the residuals checks were pouring in. I was a thousandaire! I had money and, for the first time in my life, no family to feed or share the bathroom with.

  I loved the idea of being “on my own,” but, frankly, I was never alone. I was surrounded by not only the occasional kooky live-in boyfriend but a never-ending parade of out-of-work actors, trust-fund brats, and assorted visiting Canadians and Euro trash. They all seemed to be trying to “find themselves,” and for some reason they all decided to begin their search from the comfort of my living room couch. I invited them, of course. It was actually a great system. True, none of them ever paid rent or a phone bill or anything like that (hence, my pad became known as “Auntie Alison’s Home for Wayward Boys”), but they fulfilled a number of important functions. First off, it was very difficult for me to find friends my own age who were not completely weirded out by the fact that I had money. I know everyone thinks that if you become rich and famous you’ll have more friends. It’s not true. Getting a lot of money, especially very suddenly, actually alienates most people, who worry that you won’t want to be their friend anymore, or who feel like failures by comparison. Not knowing quite what to say, they start to drift away. For the first few months after buying my own place, I couldn’t tell if I’d cashed in on my trust fund or caught a contagious disease.