Confessions of a Prairie Bitch

by Alison Arngrim

  “You were, well, sort of a ‘buffer,’” she said. “Just when people would start getting really uptight, you’d do or say something silly, and everybody would start laughing and forget all about it.”

  “So you’re saying I was the ‘court jester’?” I didn’t think this sounded like a compliment.

  She insisted it was. “Believe me, it is a total drag around here without you!”

  I realize this “skill,” if you can call it that, is a psychological defense mechanism. In my own family, I knew that a well-placed gag could diffuse the tensest of situations—even save my life. Sometimes, I could make my brother laugh so hard I could momentarily distract him from what he was about to do next. (A hell of a way to learn comedy, but it does make the toughest audience seem like a breeze by comparison, doesn’t it?)

  “The Return of Nellie” was the reunion and homecoming I had hoped for, both on and off camera. I could finally let go of Little House and move on. The episode aired on November 15, 1982. It was very strange to watch. It was Nellie, but then again it wasn’t. Who this new girl really resembled, aside from the popcorn-shaped bouffant, was, well, me. It was as if, in a bizarre plot twist, instead of Nellie coming back, they decided to have Alison Arngrim just magically appear in the 1800s. I had never played myself before, and it gave me an eerie feeling to watch it. Seeing all the people of Walnut Grove so happy to see me was even stranger. I think in all those years of desperately trying to overcome my shyness, it hadn’t really sunk in that it was possible that most of these people just genuinely liked me.

  At the end, when Nellie boards the stage coach to go back to New York, and everybody starts tearing up, there wasn’t a faker in the bunch. Not even me.

  * * *

  I’LL BE SEEING YOU….

  Over the years, the cast of Little House has reunited several times-often because a fan group or an event planner wants to fly us all out to speak and sign autographs (most of us are happy to oblige, hang out, reminisce, and catch up on our lives). The first was in Sonora, California, in September 1998, fifteen years after the show went off the air. Some of us hadn’t even seen each other since—so it was an emotional get-together with tears and hugs as we suddenly caught sight of each other at the airport. I hadn’t seen Kevin Hagen (Doc Baker) in forever and I went all to pieces. And I couldn’t get over how gorgeous Karen Grassle’s skin was; she hadn’t aged a day! I remember also that I was wearing a hat from the musical Peter Pan that said “Never Grow Up,” and everyone teased me that I obviously hadn’t and declared that it must be my secret to looking young.

  Melissa Gilbert and I, inseparable as always, went together. We decided it would be a blast and were thrilled to see not just Karen Grassle and Kevin Hagen but also Char-lo The Stewart; Matt Laborteaux; Rachel Lindsay and Robin Sidney Greenbush, who brought their mom (we voted her “least changed”); and absolutely everybody else. The winner of “Most Changed” would be the the Carrie twins’ brother, Clay Greenbush. As a child, he’d been an extra on the show and was famous for being a real Bart Simpson–style brat, always in trouble. He has grown up to be an absolutely gorgeous big strapping man: smart, charming, and an accomplished actor and photographer.

  A few years later, much of this group, along with Dean Butler, would reunite in Beatrice, Nebraska, in June 2005 at the Homestead National Museum. A month later, Melissa brought her entire brood to the Tombstone, Arizona, Western Film Festival. (Her hubby, Bruce Boxleitner, had actually turned her on to it, and she had convinced the rest of us.) This one was a huge party: the Carrie twins, the Baby Grace twins, Charlotte, Dean, Hersha Parady, Pam Roylance, Stan Ivar, Brian Part, and even Allison Balson. Allison and I did a lunch presentation together where fans could finally see Nellie and Nancy settle their differences in a civilized manner. We even took turns trying on the Nellie wig!

  In May 2007 the Today show with Lester Holt gathered us together on national television. The call came completely out of the blue, and we all joked that the network was trying to make up for being so late on their residual payments. I was joined by Michael’s daughter Leslie Landon, who played Etta Plum on the show; Charlotte; Karen; Dean; Rachel; and my dear ol’ mom and dad from the Mercantile, Richard Bull and Katherine MacGregor! (Katherine said this was the last time she’d ever do anything like this, but between you and me…she loved it.)

  Just about every year since, someone has put together an event for us to congregate, and we’re all very grateful and look forward to it. Our last big event took place in Keystone, South Dakota, in September 2009. This one was called, of all things, “Holy Terror Days.” (I thought it was dedicated to me.) At this reunion, it was me, Karen, Charlotte, Hersha, Rachel, Robyn, Wendi, Brenda, and Patrick Labyorteaux. With Patrick and Hersha there, it turned into the Garvey mother and son reunion! We had a parade, autograph sessions, parties, and then we all went to see Mount Rushmore. It was like a family vacation!

  The only one who has never come to a reunion? Melissa Sue Anderson. Big surprise there.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A CHANGE IN THE RELATIONSHIP

  NELLIE: What will I say to him?

  MR. OLESON: Try “I love you.” It’s easy to say, and it’s right to the point.

  NELLIE: All right. I will. I’ll do it.

  MRS. OLESON: I’ll go with you, honey.

  MR. OLESON: No, Harriet. Now, let them be alone. Maybe Percival won’t stop to think who his new mother-in-law is going to be!

  I couldn’t marry Steve Tracy (that gay thing kind of got in the way), but I did marry a friend of his sister. I met Donald Spencer in December 1984. He was twenty-two, like me. He told me a friend of his back in Florida, a girl named Cindy, had a brother, Steve, who married a TV character named Nellie Oleson. Small world, I thought. But Don claimed to have never once watched an episode of Little House.

  Getting married seemed like a good idea at the time. I had gone through a whole parade of boyfriends, none of whom were exactly marriage material. With my childhood, I thought any guy who didn’t hit me was “a good catch,” and I tended to overlook things—things like huge age differences, boozing, drugs, chronic unemployment, severe mental illness. Then suddenly, it dawned on me that I wasn’t a teenager anymore. My friends, like Melissa, were getting married. (She married Bo Brinkman after knowing him a mere six weeks.) I thought maybe I should at least consider it. Don seemed like a good possibility—a guy who was classically tall, dark, and attractive, who didn’t smoke, drink, take drugs, or run around with other women. He was an actor and a writer. He was hilariously funny. He could both cook and sew. He had lived through a terrible childhood but was getting his life together. And he was definitely looking to settle down. In fact, Don asked me to marry him on our third date.

  I had to talk him out of it and urge him to slow down. Looking back on it now, the fact that I was dragging my feet should have told me something wasn’t quite right. It all sounded a bit too good to be true. I should have listened to my instincts. But we married in the spring of 1989 in a big Episcopal church. I even wore white. Well, whitish. I didn’t want my pals to fall out of the pews laughing and hurt themselves. So I went with a nice ivory, a shade slightly off of virginal white.

  The whole time I was dating and engaged to Don, I always referred to Steve Tracy as my “other husband.” In the years after we both left Little House, we stayed incredibly tight. It was as if our relationship picked up where Little House left off. We kidded around and told each other dirty jokes. We still could finish each other’s sentences—without a script. It was as if we never stopped being Nellie and Percival. Steve was my friend, my teacher, the confidant I ran to if I had a fight with a boyfriend. I needed him. He was the only constant in my crazy life, and I clung to him when everything else was spinning out of control.

  I came home one day in 1986, and Steve had left a message on my answering machine: “Um, hi, it’s Steve. Uh…call me.” Then he hung up.

  I felt the hair on the back of
my neck stand on end. It wasn’t what he had said, it was the way he said it. He sounded like someone who was being held hostage with a gun to his head. It was the scariest message I had ever heard. Frantically, I tried to reach him. I called and called until I finally tracked him down. But when he answered, he said in a hushed voice, “I can’t talk right now.”

  “Okay, fine,” I replied. “Then we’re going to play twenty questions, and you just say yes or no, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  My heart was now leaping out of my chest. “Are you being held hostage?” (I thought I ought to get that one out of the way.)

  “No.”

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “Yes.”

  “Physical, financial, or legal?” (I know. That wasn’t really a yes or no question, but this was taking too long.)

  “The first one.”

  “Shit! Are you sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have cancer?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What? Who the hell ‘sort of’ has cancer?”

  Then he said, “I have to get off the phone now.”

  I knew this was bad. Really bad. I was on pins and needles, waiting for Steve to call and fill me in. But he didn’t. I knew he wasn’t playing games or purposely trying to give me a nervous breakdown. Steve wouldn’t hold out on me. So I figured he was sorting it all out, and I gave him some time, although it was torture. He finally surfaced a few days later and explained that he had been diagnosed with cancer and had freaked out. He assured me it would be all right; he was getting treatment. But I knew he was lying his face off. I knew him too well and loved him too much not to know.

  Yet he desperately wanted me to believe everything was going to be fine; he needed me to believe so he could believe it, too. So I never contradicted him—if he smiled and cheerfully told me the radiation treatment was working, I replied, “You betcha!” But deep down, I knew that wasn’t so. He was a great actor, but it killed me every time I saw through it.

  Finally, a year later, Steve fessed up. He had AIDS, and he was going on AM Los Angeles, a popular morning news program, to go public with his diagnosis.

  “I wanted you to hear it from me, not on the news. I’m really sorry I lied to you,” he said softly. He explained that he was trying to spare me the worry and the pain. He admitted he had known it was AIDS for some time, before most of his doctors, in fact. In the early 1980s, few doctors were very knowledgeable about AIDS, whereas Steve had kept up with all the medical research from the first moment the disease was even whispered about in the gay community. In fact, when he initially got sick, he had a sinking suspicion what it was. There was no blood test yet, so he went to doctor after doctor until he got a proper diagnosis.

  I cried like a maniac at the news. He went on about fighting it and experimental treatments. He tried to reassure me, telling me not to be so upset, that “it wasn’t really a death sentence.” But the reality was that the average life expectancy for someone diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 was nine months. There was no “drug cocktail” to suppress the virus, no combination therapy, no protease inhibitors or any of the medical advances we take for granted today. Good Lord, there wasn’t even AZT yet. People with AIDS didn’t get better. I was going to have to watch my friend die.

  I told him I would be brave, but when I hung up the phone, I lay on the bed, facedown in the pillow, and screamed and screamed.

  I was twenty-four years old. Both of my parents were still alive, I wasn’t old enough to have lost friends in Vietnam, and I was born in an age when epidemics like diphtheria and polio were distant memories. Death was something that happened to very, very old people. Not your friends. Not people you depended on. And I was already in mourning—I had lost Auntie Marion the summer before.

  Marion had liver cancer. She remained very brave and dignified, right up until the end. When the medical transportation service came to take her to the convalescent home, she sighed and said, “Well, I guess I’d better go shave my legs.” She had already done her hair and didn’t want any part of her looking unkempt when the nice men loaded her into the ambulance. She refused to have a private room. She though it presumptuous, and, besides, she loved to talk to people. She remained beautiful; her skin was so perfect that staff at the facility would ask why this much younger woman was sharing a room with those two old ladies. She was seventy-seven.

  Ever polite and considerate, on the day she died she waited until the senior nurse came on duty in the morning. She looked up, smiled, and said, “Oh, good. You’re here.” She then closed her eyes and stopped breathing. She wouldn’t have thought it right to die in front of young trainees; it might upset them.

  As much as Marion had tried to prepare us, I was devastated. The person I could count on to know right from wrong, who had taken such good care of me all those years on the Little House set, was gone.

  Now Steve. He was more than my friend. He was also a mentor and protector. He gave me great confidence as an actress. Like Katherine MacGregor, he, too, had studied acting extensively, but rather than telling people what they were doing wrong, Steve took great pleasure in letting me know when I had it right. He was nine years older, but he treated me as an equal. When he was just starting out on Little House, a reporter asked him how it felt to play opposite a girl of no more than seventeen. The guy was digging for dirt. But Steve had nothing but good things to say about me: I was a breeze to work with, and I had impeccable comedic timing. He didn’t have to say that. Neither I nor my publicist was in the room, and I wasn’t going to get him fired. But he said it anyway, and he told me he really meant it.

  Steve was thirty-two when he was diagnosed with AIDS. The idea of anyone dying at thirty-two struck me as obscene. And for it to be my friend was downright unforgivable. He kept telling me not to, but I cried every day.

  Steve didn’t cry—at least not in front of me. He was not just brave, he was noble. He let the doctors experiment on him, and he agreed to be part of a radical new study, which required him to jam needles filled with experimental drugs into his thigh. He told me that most people had quit this study because the treatments were so excruciatingly painful. But he said he didn’t mind the pain. The doctors might find a cure, and even if it was too late for him, he could be saving someone else’s life down the road. His courage and compassion floored me. If the tables were turned, I don’t know that I would have the strength, stamina, or stomach to do what he was doing.

  And then the National Enquirer called—they had gotten wind of what was going on. Was it true about Steve Tracy having AIDS? How long did he have to live? How’d he get it? And the best one: Did I have it? After all, I had kissed him on TV. I was now in the “Linda Evans position”: When actor Rock Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis was revealed, people thought Linda Evans—who was kissing him constantly on the soap opera Dynasty—was in danger. I couldn’t believe how ignorant most people were about AIDS. You couldn’t contract it from kissing; you couldn’t catch it if someone sneezed or coughed on you. It was blood borne through sex, needles, and transfusions.

  Steve educated me day by day. Just as he had been my mentor and teacher in life, he was going to keep up the job while he was dying. At first, I was afraid to be around him if I had a cold. I thought his immune system was so fragile, he would pick up any germ—and that it could be fatal.

  “Relax, will ya?” he said and laughed. “I’m not the Boy in the Plastic Bubble.”

  I went with him to the doctors, to “healing workshops,” to candlelight vigils. We even checked out a Louise Hay workshop. Louise Hay was a cancer survivor who had written the book Heal Your Body about how positive thought patterns and meditation could affect one’s health. The AIDS community embraced her teachings. They were faced with a terrifying disease that the doctors barely understood and could offer no cure for. Happy thoughts had worked
for Louise; she was cured. People with AIDS wanted to believe this course of treatment could cure them as well.

  Louise Hay’s meetings were usually held in church basements or public recreation rooms in West Hollywood. They were insanely popular, and the attendees quickly dubbed them “Hay-Rides” for their cheery, upbeat atmosphere. I was highly skeptical of such things and feared they might only offer a big dose of bogus “faith healing” nonsense. Steve insisted I go with him. “I promise, you’ll be surprised,” he said.

  The recreation room at Plummer Park in West Hollywood was packed. There was a giddy feeling in the room like before a revival tent meeting, so my skepticism continued. It didn’t help that many of the longtime attendees were desperately ill. I was surrounded by people in wheelchairs, people whose friends had carried them in on stretchers. Some were even walking around with Hickman ports, the permanently attached tubes that deliver medicine through a hole cut in the patient’s chest. What on earth did these people think Louise Hay could do for them?

  When Louise walked onto the stage, the crowd went wild. She was a beautiful woman, with blond, almost white hair and porcelain skin. The meeting began with a lot of very churchlike meditation, repeating of affirmations, and whatnot—all stuff that confirmed my suspicion that this lady was really full of it.

  And then she spoke. After a few opening remarks, her beatific smile disappeared, and she became serious. “I have to talk to you about something,” she said quite sternly. She explained that, to her great disappointment, people were claiming that she could magically “cure AIDS” and other diseases; that they no longer needed anything from their doctors; that they could throw away their meds and just read her book. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” she said.