Confessions of a Prairie Bitch

by Alison Arngrim

  She explained that she had, in fact, during her cancer, done everything the doctors asked her to do, even surgery. It was only when these attempts began to fail that she knew she needed something more. Meditation and beliefs by themselves were not sufficient, she warned. One must also take care of one’s body in a concrete fashion. She explained that the instructions she was giving in her meetings were not just intended for the hour, but were meant to be used all the time—in their diets, their medical treatment, their living conditions. Getting happily blissed out for an hour a week was not going to produce a miracle. Fighting diseases like AIDS and cancer was just plain old-fashioned hard work. In other words, the sweet, beautiful, sainted healer stood there and read us the riot act.

  I turned to Steve and said, “She’s fabulous! Why didn’t you tell me she was like this?” He replied, “Well, I did say you’d be surprised, didn’t I?” We gave her a standing ovation.

  For the record, Louise Hay is still alive and well, and so are some of the people who went to her workshops. Just not Steve.

  No matter how bad the disease got, Steve insisted on being self-sufficient. Even though his mother and sister flew in to be by his side (a rare occurrence back in the 1980s, when parents routinely abandoned their sick and dying children out of fear or prejudice), he would only let them do so much. I asked him what I could do. He explained the “volunteer schedule” he had worked out: “Well, I’ve got a guy from the AIDS Project Los Angeles Buddy Program coming over. He helps me with a whole bunch of stuff and even takes me to the doctor. The maid’s still coming to clean, and what with APLA and Project Angel Food, I’ve got no problem getting food delivered. Oh, then there’s this poor guy they sent over from Shanti, but he’s a complete idiot. So I make him do my laundry.”

  What was left for me? Steve thought about it for a few minutes, then decreed I would be “the goodtime girl.” I would hang out with him; we’d go to dinner and the movies. My job was to continue to help him enjoy life. I liked my assignment.

  Through it all, Steve never lost his sense of humor. He even taught me a few AIDS jokes, including this one:

  So this woman goes to a nutritionist and says, “Can you help me? My son has leprosy, bubonic plague, and AIDS. Is there any diet that will help?’”

  “Leprosy, bubonic plague, and AIDS?” says the nutritionist. “Let me see…Okay, we’re going to start him on a diet of pizza and pancakes.”

  “Pizza and pancakes?” asks the mother. “How interesting! Will that help?”

  “I don’t know,” says the nutritionist, “but it’s the only thing we can slide under the door.”

  Though it was meant to be funny—and it was—this joke accurately captured where people’s heads were at when it came to AIDS. Fear and misinformation were rampant, and AIDS patients were looked upon as lepers. I couldn’t believe the stuff people were asking me—about toilet seats, mosquitoes, all sorts of silliness. And they were people who should know better: not just other actors, but everyone from my best friend’s aunt in Boston, to tabloid reporters, to reporters from so-called legitimate newspapers, even friends. For some reason, I was suddenly a noted authority on the subject. But why me? Who cared what I had to say about it? I was an actress, not an epidemiologist, for Christ’s sake. And then I remembered the scene from one of my all-time favorite movies, Network. TV news anchor Howard Beale, played by Peter Finch, has cracked up and thinks he’s hearing the voice of God when Ned Beatty’s character tells him why he wants him to carry his message. He says, “Why me, Lord?” And the answer is: “Because you’re on television, dummy.”

  So, I thought, all right, if everyone’s going to insist on getting their medical news from somebody on TV—namely, me—what if I did something totally crazy, like providing correct, possibly life-saving information? So I went to AIDS Project Los Angeles and signed up for hotline training, which consisted of weeks of classes with homework and a five-page final exam. I had hated school, but now I was finally studying for a reason.

  I more than passed the final exam; I got the highest score anyone had gotten on it. I not only worked the phones but also wound up at the food bank, the hospice, and ultimately the speakers’ bureau. I was sent all over Los Angeles to speak on AIDS and HIV—schools, offices, even prisons. Many of these had turned away AIDS speakers before. They didn’t know them, they were strangers, and they worried—crazy as it was—that they’d bring AIDS with them. But they knew me. I had been in their living rooms. I wasn’t a threat; I was a TV star. I’d sign autographs, I’d quote Nellie-isms, I’d do whatever they wanted—as long as they listened to me and wised up about AIDS.

  Skeptics said I wouldn’t keep up my activism for long. “They always quit when the friend dies,” the old-timers at the organization said. I didn’t even allow that thought to enter my mind. I wasn’t blind—I saw that Steve was getting worse. He looked so pale and gaunt, as if a strong breeze might blow him away. We both knew the end was coming, though we never discussed it. Good-time girls don’t talk about dying. That wasn’t in my job description.

  Then one night in November 1986, Steve called. He told me what I had been dreading for several months: he had very little time left, and his mother and sister were coming to take him home to Florida. He wanted to die at home. I was inconsolable. I wanted to rush to his side and keep him here with me. I thought if I could just hold on to him, I could stop death in its tracks.

  But then Steve said, “Don’t worry, this isn’t the end; it’s just a change in the relationship.”

  Less than a week later, on Thanksgiving Day, Steve Tracy died. I didn’t get the call from his family until a few days later. But I already knew. I was heading home from Thanksgiving dinner at my parents’ house, when Donald and I stopped for gas. It wasn’t terribly late, and we weren’t in a particularly bad neighborhood, and yet I was suddenly hit by the most overwhelming sense of danger.

  When Don got back in the car, I said, “I think something’s happened.” He didn’t dismiss this feeling. He sensed it, too. We drove home in silence. So when the call came from Steve’s family, it wasn’t a surprise.

  Steve’s death was very hard on his mother and sister, who had stood by him through his illness, even though they lived in Tampa, Florida, a city that was not exactly what you would call enlightened about the AIDS crisis. When he died, their local funeral home refused to cremate him. They wouldn’t take the body. Nor would the next place his mother called. Or the next one.

  We’d had trouble like this in Los Angles, too. The AIDS hotline even made a list of funeral homes you could call that knew that you didn’t get AIDS from preparing a dead person for cremation. But Steve’s mom wasn’t in Los Angeles. She finally found a funeral home that would help her: the one funeral home that took people who had died of AIDS was the only African-American-owned funeral home in town. Having been the target of discrimination and hatred for so many years, back to the days when white-owned funeral homes wouldn’t touch the body of a black person, its owners understood what it was like to have someone tell you that you can’t bury your loved one, because “we don’t serve your kind.”

  After they got him cremated, Steve’s mom and sister brought him back to L.A. They fulfilled his final wish and scattered his ashes under the Hollywood sign. If you’re ever looking up at it, that’s Steve, right there under the D.

  There was a small memorial for Steve at the home of a friend of his. His mom and sister got to meet their now famous son’s Hollywood friends. Melissa Gilbert and I stood in the kitchen drinking wine from plastic cups and toasting Steve’s memory. He was the first of our Little House cast to die before his time. We didn’t know then how many more we would lose.

  Despite the old-timers at AIDS Project Los Angeles’ predictions, I didn’t quit when Steve died, and I still haven’t. Instead, I’ve spent the past decades working with different AIDS organizations all over the country. I eventually met my soul mate, my second husband, Bob, through my activism, and I made a couple of hundr
ed best friends along the way. Of course, I lost most of them to the disease, but I still see all of their faces—and hear all of their voices—clear as day. Steve’s is the brightest and loudest among them. And he has all the best lines.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MICHAEL GETS THE LAST LAUGH

  MRS. OLESON: You have to learn about men, Nellie dear—they’re all as fickle as weathervanes!

  “Michael Landon just died.”

  It was July 1, 1991. I was volunteering at Tuesday’s Child, an AIDS organization that provides services to children and families dealing with HIV. Even with the plethora of AIDS organizations in Los Angeles, babies and little kids had managed to fall through the cracks. At Tuesday’s Child, we did our best to catch them. A fellow volunteer heard the news from her mother, who’d just seen a report on TV. My stomach was churning, and I felt that awful chill I had felt when Steve died.

  Michael had battled cancer for three months now, since April. But not just any cancer; it was pancreatic, the worst, inoperable kind. Brave and crazy as always, he made his final appearance on the Tonight Show with his old buddy, Johnny Carson, on May 8. He joked with Johnny that he’d been told he could cure his cancer with coffee enemas. When Johnny grimaced, Michael roared, “Then I guess I won’t ask you to come to my house to pour the cream!”

  When I watched him on TV that night, he was a shadow of the man I knew on Little House. He looked awful, pale, thin as a rail, but acted like having terminal cancer was the funniest thing that ever happened. It gave me terrible flashbacks to Steve Tracy and his unstoppable bravery in the face of death. What was it with guys from Little House? They all greeted death like mad Viking warriors.

  It was months since I had last seen Michael. I never did have the fun of working with him again, and I regret that. I ran into him once in a while if I was auditioning for something out at the MGM lot, and he was always glad to see me, full of his usual grins and hugs. He knew I was making fun of him in my stand-up act almost every night and thought it was the world’s greatest compliment.

  I didn’t have the strength to go visit him when he was sick. Melissa did, but I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing the one man I truly believed to be indestructible lying on his death bed. Over the last couple of years I had watched dozens of friends die of AIDS. I was at the point where I could look at someone’s face and know exactly how many days they had left. I wasn’t going to stare into Michael’s eyes and start counting.

  The day Michael died, I was booked to do an interview with Entertainment Tonight about Tuesday’s Child. I knew what was going to happen now. The interview would be only about Michael. There was not going to be time for any sort of “private” grieving; just moments after I heard the news, the ET crew was in the elevator coming up to my office.

  Knowing I had only few seconds before the media onslaught, I grabbed the phone and quickly dialed Melissa. She had just heard also via the television and was utterly hysterical. I tried to say something comforting, but what was there to say? We both knew Michael was the only real father she ever had. All I wanted to do was hang up, jump in my car, drive to her house, and bring her a Slurpee.

  But by the time I hung up, the ET crew was already in my office setting up. “I’m sorry,” said the producer, “but you realize what part of the interview we have to do first.” I knew perfectly well this meant “instead” and, as sad as I was about Michael’s passing, I felt disappointed not to be able to impart the message I had intended about Tuesday’s Child. I already understood that the purpose of TV shows is not to inform the public or perform some sort of educational service but rather to make audiences stay tuned long enough to see the commercials. And people don’t generally stay tuned to hear about sick and dying children. They do, however, stay tuned to hear about sick and dying celebrities. If we were lucky, Tuesday’s Child might get mentioned. But Michael Landon’s death was going to be the lead story everywhere, and this crew would be able to say they had interviewed Nellie Oleson within seconds of Michael’s death.

  The questions were the same ones interviewers always asked—“What was he really like?” “Was he fun to work with?”—except now, for the first time, they were being asked in the past tense. It was a little too quick for me. I stopped the reporter at one point and said, “You know, he’s only been gone for thirty minutes.” It was almost impossible to imagine someone who’d been that almost alarmingly alive just not being here anymore. It seemed very wrong, incomprehensible.

  Then the phone began to ring. Every other news crew in town was coming to pick up where Entertainment Tonight left off. In general, I was happy to talk about my experience working with Michael, because he meant so much to me, but one reporter in particular really got under my skin. My Tuesday’s Child coworkers who were still in the room were horrified at this woman’s lack of tact. The body wasn’t cold yet, and she was swooping in like a vulture to get a trashy tabloid sound bite. She had already made up her mind exactly what she wanted me to say and was going to keep asking the same stupid questions several different ways until I told her what she wanted to hear. Finally, she asked, “Was he like a father to you?”

  I found this to be an utterly perplexing question. Perhaps she got her notes mixed up, and this was meant for Melissa Gilbert’s or Melissa Sue Anderson’s interview. Michael didn’t play my father; he played the father of my mortal enemy. And unlike the two Melissas, I had a real, live—if crazy—actual father in my house the entire time.

  “Why would he be like a ‘father’ to me?” I said. “Um…no.”

  She hated this answer. “Did you not get along then?” Yikes! In this woman’s universe, were there only two possible types of relationship? “Substitute father” or “intensely disliked”?

  “No, no, I liked him very much,” I tried to explain.

  She seemed genuinely excited by the possibility of a down-and-dirty negative angle. “Were you afraid of him?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

  At this point I just burst out laughing. “Hardly!” I snorted. I then tried to explain his wonderfully outrageous sense of humor and how much we had all enjoyed that. She seemed terribly disappointed by this. My remarks were cut almost entirely from the interview.

  When this interview wrapped up, I headed straight for my car. I had to get out of there and decided to drop off some supplies at PAWS (Pets Are Wonderful Support), the volunteer group who took care of pets for people too sick from AIDS to manage. PAWS was founded and run by the famously eccentric Nadia Sutton, a woman who loved animals and people with a fierce passion. She had a wonderfully exotic foreign accent and personality to match.

  She had heard the news as well. “Dahling, come in and sit down!” she cried when I walked into PAWS’ office. She took the bag of cans from me and hugged me. I slumped into a chair and blurted out the whole awful story, how the press was asking all these ridiculous questions and nobody seemed to understand how I felt about Michael, and how all I wanted was to be able to hear that crazy, hysterical laugh of his one more time. I told her the media were trying to mourn the image of the Michael they had known, Pa Ingalls and Little Joe. Nobody wanted to hear about the real flesh-and-blood person I had known.

  “Oh, dahling!” Nadia cried. “I understand perfectly.” And she did. “Your friend was a real person; he was good, and he was bad, and you loved him anyway. And they want to make him a saint! But that’s not the person you loved!

  “Look at me,” she continued. “Everyone says I am so nice, I help all these people and animals, yes? But I am also sometimes the bitch, yes?” She understood. Of course she did. She was French. And that was just it. I wondered to myself: Why is it that when people die, we make such an effort to turn them into saints? Especially when the entire reason we loved them so much in the first place is because they weren’t.

  I didn’t feel like I could tell the interviewers about the seven years I spent working for a guy who smoked, drank, swore, told horrible jokes, never wore underwear, and celebrated the end of
the season by taking us all to the racetrack. And I certainly couldn’t tell them I enjoyed every minute of it. Or that even at his most erratic, Michael taught me valuable lessons that have served me all of my life. Michael Landon was not really Charles Ingalls, and the world is a much better place as a result. “Pa” might have been the world’s greatest dad, but he would have been a terrible producer. Little House on the Prairie would likely have never made it to the screen. And where would I be, quite frankly, without Little House?

  Michael’s funeral was to be at a secret location. Enormous subterfuge and expense had been employed to keep the ceremony private so as not to let the press get wind of it. Naturally, it was the National Enquirer that called to give me the address. They always knew everything first. But the reporter did have one question for me since he had me on the line. The Enquirer had taken photos over the fence of Michael’s house when his body was carried out to the mortuary’s hearse. They wanted to know why the body bag was red. Did that mean Michael Landon had died of AIDS? They had heard this rumor and wanted me to clear it up before it spread nationwide. I told him they were a bunch of idiots and immediately called my mortician friend, who was appalled, but explained the situation, which I later relayed to the Enquirer.

  “Different mortuaries use different brands and colors of bags. I know his mortuary. The bag wasn’t red, it was burgundy. It’s one of your better body bags.”

  If you’re famous, don’t expect any peace, even when you’re dead.

  The funeral at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City was beautiful, even with the five helicopters whirring furiously over the building during the entire service. Don and my father came along with me. Ronald and Nancy Reagan were there. As Nancy walked in, she gave my father a strange look. There were so many celebrities in the room, she may have thought she recognized him and was trying figure out who he was. My father turned to me and in a very loud stage whisper said, “Help! I’m being cruised by Nancy Reagan!”