Almost the whole cast was in attendance. We filed in and wandered around uncomfortably for a minute before sitting down. When we settled and looked around, we all noticed it. We had taken our seats in exactly the same positions we sat in when we did church scenes on the show. The women sat down in the same pew as their TV husbands (except for me, of course—though Steve was there in spirit), and we all sat the same number of rows back from the front. It was as if Michael had called us with his old megaphone, and we’d all gone on autopilot and gotten into formation. My God, he had us well trained.
It was good to see my old friends and colleagues, even under these circumstances. Some of us hadn’t seen each other since the show ended in 1983, and nearly went to pieces.
And then there was Melissa Sue Anderson, looking absolutely beatific and holding her beautiful new baby. I thought, She’s married and has a baby now, so she must finally be happy. I approached her cautiously and said, “What a beautiful baby!” (No lie there.) “How old is she?” All mothers like to talk about their babies. Give them a chance, and they’ll talk your ear off about every single cute thing their kid has done since birth.
“Six months,” she said curtly and turned away. And she never said another word to me.
The eulogy was given by Merlin Olsen, who was a famous football player back when Los Angeles actually had a pro football team, the Rams. He had also played Jonathan Garvey on the show and was most famous at this point for his FTD flower commercials. His speech was absolutely brilliant, moving and funny at the same time. He started by saying, perfectly deadpan, “Hello, I’m Merlin Olsen. I sell flowers.” He then went on to do a virtual stand-up routine about Michael. Michael had insisted his funeral be funny, and he got his wish.
Some people had wondered if Michael would have a religious funeral when he died. He did. It was Jewish. But even the rabbi made fun of him: “Michael was not religious, in the traditional sense of the word….” He spoke of Michael’s response when the doctors told him that the chemo treatments would destroy his beautiful mane of hair. He said, “I’m rich, I’ll buy a hat.”
Friend after friend, story after story, people cried and laughed their heads off at the same time. I worried that poor Melissa wouldn’t get through her speech. She looked as if she’d locked her knees to keep from shaking, and I feared she’d pass out. She invoked the poem from the episode in which Academy Award–winner Patricia Neal guest stars as a character who finds out she’s dying and has to find a home for her children. It was an episode that Michael had written:
Remember me with smiles and laughter,
Because that’s how I’ll remember you all.
If you can only remember me with tears,
Then don’t remember me at all.
Afterward, when we were walking to the car, the paparazzi were taking pictures from across the lawn. They were at least being quiet about it and staying reasonably far away. Everyone just kept their head down and walked straight to their cars. Until I walked by. They started yelling. “Hey, Alison! Yoo-hoo! Over here!”
My dad, Don, and I ducked our heads and walked more quickly, but then we started to laugh. They didn’t harass anyone else like this, but for some reason they thought it was perfectly okay in my case. It had somehow been decided, for better or worse, that I wasn’t like the “other” celebrities. I was glad that I wasn’t seen as “too precious” or overly sensitive. Besides, I was with my father, the infamous Thor Arngrim. He wasn’t going to get upset about the threat of possible publicity, planned or not.
At least I knew one thing: Michael would have thought it was hysterical. There she goes again, that girl who crashed the party and her crazy old man. I’m dead, and they’re still hogging the camera!
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DIVORCE VIA FAX
MRS. OLESON: Well, in my case, Nellie and Willie were more than enough.
CAROLINE: In the case of Nellie and Willie, Mrs. Oleson, I’d have to agree with you.
My marriage to Don fell apart—maybe because I didn’t have Steve to vent to anymore. Perhaps if Steve had been around to talk to, I’d have left sooner. Four years into our marriage, I realized that Don and I were having the exact same arguments over and over. It was like being on some sort of emotional treadmill, where you run and run and never go forward. I was dizzy and exhausted from going in circles.
I don’t know how many things he actually lied about. I just know he started telling these ridiculous stories to cover up stuff I didn’t care about in the first place. He hid food wrappers and lied about what he ate. He lied about where he’d been even if he’d really been shopping or doing something totally innocent. I couldn’t trust him, and I knew it was time to go.
I went to my best friend Sharon’s house; she had been maid of honor at our wedding. She was happy to take me in. But before I could come in the house, I had to let her husband stand on the porch and say, “I told you so.”
I couldn’t believe I was getting divorced. Melissa Gilbert took me to lunch. She had just divorced her first husband, Bo Brinkman, and was prepared to offer any assistance necessary. I noticed that we had done so many things at the same time. We had gotten married around the same time, to writers, and we were both getting divorced the same year. We compared notes on our failed marriages, and I suggested that perhaps we were both picking the same kind of wrong guy.
She said, “No, silly, I just go for sexual compulsives. You marry gay guys.”
She offered to help me find a lawyer, but I had found out you could do the whole thing by fax. I called this service, 1-800-DUMP-HIM, and divorced my husband by fax. I know it was pretty harsh. I guess I can’t very well make fun of young people who break up via text. To this day, my friends still joke, “Don’t piss her off! You’ll get a fax!” But truthfully, Don would have had to be blind not to see it coming. We did go to counseling for several months, and even the shrink told him I was going to leave him.
I didn’t know what or who to believe anymore. Worst of all, I’d discovered a real whopper: Don had watched Little House on the Prairie—maybe more than Mary Tyler Moore. He knew exactly who I was when we met. In fact, the day after we met, he had gone to a friend of his, an entertainment writer who had interviewed me years before. He got the tape of the interview and went home and listened to it for “tips.” Creepy.
Don had some sort of fantasy that if he moved to Hollywood and married a blond actress, this would solve all his problems. But wait, who better, than, well, Nellie Oleson herself! Lesson learned: never, ever, get romantically involved with anyone who has watched Little House on the Prairie.
By contrast, among many of his refreshing characteristics was the fact that Bob Schoonover hadn’t the slightest idea who I was and, even when people told him, didn’t care. Bob was the director of the Southern California AIDS Hotline, where I had volunteered back in 1986 when Steve was diagnosed. When we met, he did ask for an autograph—my mother’s. He was a huge fan of Underdog and wanted to meet Sweet Polly Purebred.
Bob was an unusual person. When most people still didn’t know what AIDS was, he was applying for work at the AIDS Project Los Angeles. He was the sixth person they hired and the first straight man. When he started there, they gave him an office, a remodeled broom closet, and took great glee in ragging him about being “in the closet.”
We became great friends. We were often booked to speak on the same panels and hung out together so often that one volunteer took to calling me “the ever lovely Mrs. Schoonover.” At the time, I was married, and Bob had a girlfriend. Besides, he wasn’t my type. For starters, he was much too nice: intelligent, polite, well educated. And employed!
I knew Bob was twelve years older than I was, but that didn’t concern me. He was obviously an “ex-hippie,” complete with beard and ponytail. But not just any ponytail; Bob’s was curled into one, great, black ringlet. People at APLA actually used to whisper behind his back, “How the hell does he get it to do that?” He was a man of many mysteries. I called
his home number one day and got his answering machine. I was greeted with a terrible, high-pitched grinding sound, a screaming roar from the pit of hell. I later asked him what on earth it was.
“Oh, that’s my guitar solo,” he replied.
“A guitar solo?” I asked incredulously. I didn’t even know he played guitar.
“Yes. It’s from a song I’ve been working on. It’s called ‘Godzilla Christmas.’” He said this as if it was the most normal thing in the world.
“I swear when I heard it, I thought it was a blender.”
Strangely, he seemed to take this as a compliment.
When I got divorced, Bob and I went to lunch to commiserate. The same month I was getting divorced, he was breaking up with his girlfriend of many years. We compared notes on all the awful things that had gone on at our respective houses.
I said, “You wouldn’t want to go out with me, would you?”
Bob looked as if he’d just bitten through his fork. He stammered out, “In a New York minute.”
Our first date was March 31, 1993, Bob’s last day as director of the hotline. After nine years of dealing with death, disease, and bureaucracy, he was starting to burn out. The staff threw him a send-off party after an AIDS seminar, and we planned to go get coffee after it. Bob was presented with a huge cake, and our colleagues made speeches about how much they would miss him. I was the only one in the room who wasn’t saying good-bye. Afterward, we headed to a coffeehouse in Hollywood, just a few blocks from the AIDS Project. We sat uncomfortably on high stools with our lattes and muffins, in the deafening din of the coffeehouse, trying to think what on earth we should say to each other now that we were on a “date.” We kept getting the giggles. We never had any lack of topics to discuss before, but now we felt sort of silly and on display.
Nevertheless, we went on another date, and many more after that. All my friends told me it was a terrible idea to rush into a new relationship so soon after a divorce—and with someone I’d been friends with for nearly seven years. A former coworker, no less. They insisted it was a rebound and doomed from the start. But they didn’t know Bob. They hadn’t looked into those brown eyes of his, and, well, they certainly hadn’t kissed him.
One day Bob was out of town at some AIDS conference. He called me late that night from his hotel room, and in the middle of telling me how much he missed me, he said, “I was watching this movie, and, well, the interaction between the man and the woman reminded me of us.”
My mind reeled. What on earth was he watching? Casablanca? Wuthering Heights? What famous film couple did he see as us?
“It was just something the man said to the woman that got to me,” he continued.
“‘The world’s a much more interesting place with you in it.’”
I slumped off the sofa onto the floor still clutching the phone. Yes, he had just quoted me the last line from my favorite movie of all time, but not one I had ever thought of as a romance. He had just uttered Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s last words to FBI agent Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. In that scene, the evil doc is admitting that, in Clarice, he has finally met his match. And I knew I had finally met mine.
Bob and I were living together by June. In November we got married in the beautiful backyard of a friend’s house, a woman who had also been a hotline volunteer. Bob announced that he was going to wear a tuxedo. This was quite a surprise to those who knew him as someone who favored torn jeans and a T-shirt on an almost daily basis. I tried to explain to him that it was a small, daytime wedding, and that tuxedoes were for huge weddings, with dozens of bridesmaids and groomsmen. I explained also that, since it was my second wedding, I would not be wearing anything resembling a gown, so a tuxedo would not be appropriate. Bob was not swayed by this kind of reasoning in the slightest.
He insisted, “I don’t care how many times you’ve been married! It’s my first wedding, and I’m wearing a tuxedo!”
I protested, “But then, what on earth am I going to wear?”
“Why don’t you wear a tuxedo, too? You always look so cute in a dark suit,” he answered with a smile.
So I did. And I went barefoot, too. The wedding was in a garden, after all.
Bob had one more helpful suggestion: “Why not paint your toenails black to match your tuxedo?”
“Black toenails? Are you nuts?” I said. “You seriously expect me to paint my toenails black?”
And that’s when Bob looked at me with that grin and said, “I will if you will.”
For the walk down the aisle, I carried no bouquet. Bob and I both had on rose boutonnieres and red AIDS ribbons pinned to our lapels. Both the best man, Bob’s best friend, Timmy, and the matron of honor, my best friend, Sharon, wore tuxedos and had black toenails as well. Our friend David Taylor, a professional magician, was the ring bearer. Our rings appeared in a ball of fire and then sailed up into the air and floated over our heads. The Reverend Stephen Pieters, a friend and long-term survivor of AIDS, snatched them out of the air laughing and proceeded to marry us.
Months later, Bob and I went to a party where we ran into the volunteer who called me the “ever lovely Mrs. Schoonover.” He hadn’t heard about the wedding. He was standing by the swimming pool when we walked in. He smiled to see us and said, “Oh, look! If it isn’t Bob Schoonover and the ever lovely Mrs. Schoonover!”
We smiled and held up our hands with the matching rings and simply said, “Yes, actually.” He was so shocked, we nearly had to fish him out of the pool.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THEY LOVE ME—THEY REALLY, REALLY LOVE ME
NELLIE: I’ll fix you, Laura Ingalls!
January 18, 2002, my fortieth birthday, should have been a horrible day for me. This particular milestone is not a good day for a lot of women, and usually a bad day for actresses, particularly former child actresses. To top it off, I spent the day working at a temp job because, although Little House on the Prairie paid residuals, it wasn’t Friends money. Little House was a good gig for its day, but it wasn’t a free ride for life. And since I wasn’t going to go out and steal tips off tables like my father, I had long since adopted my mom’s outlook on being an unemployed actress: whenever she needed money, she did the honorable thing—she temped.
My mom had passed away less than a year before. Her death was very sudden. It was September 2001, and my father called from Vancouver. My mother had just been rushed to the hospital, something about an intestinal blockage. “It’s very bad,” he told me.
After I got off the phone, I began to make arrangements to fly up. Five minutes later, the phone rang again. It was my father. “She’s gone.”
Over the sound of the blood pounding in my ears, I heard him say in a broken voice, “Can you come up?” I remember I was so worried about his heart condition at that point, I made him promise not to leave the hospital alone. Bob and I flew up that night. We arranged a huge beautiful funeral, and hundreds turned out to pay their respects to Gumby, as well as to Norma. The place was packed. But because of the terrorist acts of September 11, the scattering of her ashes had been postponed, and I now had the cold comfort of knowing that she was at rest in a plastic Tupperware container in my father’s closet.
As if my mother’s death wasn’t depressing enough, after a couple of years of trying to have a baby with Bob to no avail, the doctors had officially informed me that the chances of my producing a child through the usual means were essentially slim to none.
Yet despite all these circumstances, I was strangely happy on my fortieth. Not exactly dance-in-the-streets happy, but I knew things could be worse, and I felt grateful for all I had.
Then the phone rang. It was my manager, Thomas DeLorenzo. After my dad retired, I had managed to find someone nearly as nutty and definitely as gay—if possibly gayer—to take over the job. He snarled into the phone, “Pack your shit. You’re going to France.”
I was booked to appear on the French talk show Les Enfants de Tele (The Children of Television). I would be ge
tting paid, and I would be staying at the George V Hotel, possibly the most expensive place in Paris. And there were two tickets in first class. But I wouldn’t even get a chance to ask Bob.
“I’m going!” my manager barked.
The plane was nearly empty. It was only January, just four months after September 11, and people weren’t running down to the airport to jump back on a plane yet. We were the only people in first class, and the only other passengers on the entire flight were six soldiers. We were booked on a wonderful airline called Air Liberté that went out of business during the post-9/11 travel-industry collapse. Too bad; they had a hell of a cheese cart.
Going to Paris for the first time was like going to Mars. Never having been on a transatlantic flight, when I looked out the window at night and saw this huge black nothingness populated by just the moon and a few stars, I felt as if I was traveling to outer space. This sensation only increased when I landed.
We were met by two absolutely gorgeous Frenchmen. One was working with the TV station, and the other was our chauffeur/bodyguard. As Thom and I climbed into the back of the black Peugeot, I laughed, “I’ll take the blond, you can have the brunette.” Always one for the blue-collar, rough-trade type, I, of course, preferred the bodyguard.
We checked into the hotel, and Thom insisted we must go out immediately for chocolate mousse. He was always insisting on things, but he was right this time. He had been to Paris before, and I deferred to him on what were the “must sees” and the “must eats.” Now, I had eaten a lot of chocolate mousse in my time, and I knew a good mousse when I tasted it. But this was orgasmic. Maybe they just use more cream, or maybe it’s something they feed the cows—I don’t know. But I took one bite, and my eyes bugged out of my head. I had been in France for only a few hours, and I knew my life was about to change radically.
Confessions of a Prairie Bitch Page 23
