And then there was the show. I had been told I would be interviewed, but I didn’t find out until I arrived on the set that the talk show was over three hours long and broadcast live. Who in their right mind does a live three-hour talk show? What the hell was this, the Jerry Lewis telethon? No, it was France. Three hours is a perfectly reasonable amount of time for a talk show, as far as they’re concerned. It just means you can have more guests.
The green room was filled with people drinking champagne and eating gourmet hors d’oeuvres, and the hair and makeup folks were extraordinary. They seemed happy to give us anything we wanted. Thom wasn’t even going on camera, and he was able to get a haircut while he was hanging out backstage.
On the show, the producers just kept bringing on guests from various French TV series and films. One group would get tired, leave, and a new set would be brought out. Every now and then a group of belly dancers would come out, and confetti would drop from the ceiling. The girls all had something written across their stomachs and backs. I asked what on earth this was about. I was told that since the show was live, the producers knew that people watching shows on other stations were going to switch over to them at the commercial break. So every time the other stations went to commercial, the confetti rained, and the girls came out. The message on their stomachs said, “Welcome, Channel 3 Viewers!”
The show kept presenting random clips of things, including an uncensored segment from an American newscast of Mike Tyson threatening another fighter on TV. Thom and I watched aghast as Mike Tyson was projected onto a giant screen screaming at his opponent, “I’m gonna fuck you till you love me!!” The French thought this was absolutely hilarious. Then the stage manager turned to me and said, “Okay, you’re next.”
The other guests on the set at this point were popular French comedians and actors, mostly from the new live-action movie based on the famous French comic book Asterix. It was just about to open, and its studio was doing a huge press campaign like we would have for the next Batman or Spider-Man film. One of the actors was a young man named Jamel Debbouze, a hugely famous star in France. I recognized him as the grocery boy from Amélie, the one with the crush on “Lady Di.”
The show’s host, another famous Frenchman who, like Madonna, went only by the name Arthur, had been teasing the audience for the last couple of hours with the promise of an upcoming special guest who had traveled all the way from the United States. He had been dropping hints, and Jamel had been trying increasingly hilarious bad guesswork to figure out who it was.
But now Arthur dropped the big hint: “La Petite Maison dans la Prairie!” The studio audience oohed and aahed. The screen began to display a slide show of pictures of various cast members. Karen Grassle had been a previous guest on the show, so they knew it wasn’t her. As each cast member’s picture appeared, the audience yelled out his or her name in unison. “Charles Ingalls!” “Doc Baker!” “Laura!” (pronounced “Lohr-rah!”) “Marie!” “Monsieur Edwards!” Finally, the screen showed a picture of Nellie. The crowd went berserk. The host told Jamel who the guest was. He roared in protest that it was not possible.
As the Little House theme music swelled, the audience began to sing. I was backstage about to enter when I heard the entire studio audience singing—chanting—the theme to Little House on the Prairie. And there aren’t any words to the theme from Little House. People don’t just start singing it spontaneously in America, but they do in France. Loudly, slowly, reverently, in unison, “Laaa la la laaa, la la lalala. Laaa, laa la la, la la la la laaa…” My God, I thought. It’s a religious cult.
I walked out onstage, and everyone rose to their feet. I never got a standing ovation for walking out onto the set of Geraldo or Sally Jessy Raphael back in the States. I sat down on a high stool between Arthur and Jamel at an enormous triangular table that made the set look like a giant Ouija board. It was all so brightly lit and science-fictiony, I thought the whole room was going to take off at any minute. An assistant plugged the translation headset into my ear.
“Is it you? It is really you?” Jamel demanded in English.
“Yes, yes, it’s me,” I replied nervously.
He then tried to speak English. “Why you? Why!” he sputtered, searching for words. “Why YOU SO MEAN TO LAURA?” he screamed in my face. The audience howled with laughter. He breathlessly continued, “Why? Laura is nice, she’s pretty, but you…” He then said something that didn’t translate, something about “why the footing of the girl?!”
I was afraid to even ask what that meant. He finally resorted to screaming and sign language. “You’re always, ARRRGGGHHHH!” And he mimed me hitting Laura. “In my room, I cry and I cry! Why?” I wasn’t sure if this was a rhetorical question or if I was actually supposed to answer him.
I tried to explain, slowly, so the translator could broadcast my statements to the television audience. “Nellie was jealous. I had this horrible mother, and my stupid brother, Willie, and my poor father, who couldn’t stand up to my mother. And here was Laura with her perfect family. I was jealous.”
The famous comedian Alain Chabat leaned over and in English said, “I am with you.” This sent him and the others into a frenzied discussion. The translator did her best to keep up, but I was getting bits and pieces of sentences, like it was coming in over an old radio. “Jealous.” “Poor thing.” “Unhappy.”
Finally, one of the actors made an impassioned speech that began with something like “Nellie, who was a child without a smile…” and everyone went “Ahhh!” The audience applauded wildly. They had analyzed Nellie’s situation and agreed she was a poor, unhappy, friendless little thing. It was as if they had just put Nellie on trial on national television and determined that her actions against Laura were motivated by jealousy, making them crimes of passion and therefore forgivable under French law.
Later I was hugged and kissed by a group of French fans backstage. For the next several days these encounters continued, until it was clear: things were different in France. They didn’t hate me here. They loved me. All those years of reading about France, all those years as a child living in the Hollywood version of a French castle, all the stories about all the talking mice and rats who lived there, all the drooling over French menus, all the dreaming about this mythical, romantic place with better food and prettier people—and all this time, they had been dreaming of me. Hell, they didn’t even think Nellie Oleson was “mean.” They thought she was French. When I left a few days later, I assured them, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be back….”
While France had granted me a birthday wish beyond my wildest imagination, New York was still wild, uncharted territory. For years I had been doing stand-up comedy, but I had yet to appear in New York. All the Los Angeles comedians I knew were terrified to play there. They all thought the audiences were “much tougher” than in L.A. I met Chip Duckett in Texas in the summer of 2001 at a bizarre promotion for Alizé liqueur, where different celebrities played hostess and introduced the evening’s entertainment. Chip booked a lot more than just celebrity booze busts, so we met for lunch a year later, and he explained the plan. He booked talent for Club Fez, a small but popular venue in Greenwich Village where Joan Rivers was doing shows at the time. Chip didn’t have to say much more; if this place was good enough for Joan, it was certainly good enough for me. And then he dropped the bomb.
“Okay, you’ll need to do at least an hour and a half, give or take a few minutes.”
What? My brain locked up. I didn’t have an hour and a half of material to save my life. I had been playing so many clubs where the standard was fifteen to twenty minutes—if you were lucky. I probably had thirty minutes max of anything remotely useful. Then, just to make matters worse, he said, “Oh, and if you’re not already, you should be really dirty. You would not believe the things Joan Rivers says up there.”
So not only was I being asked to run a comedy marathon, but because old Joan was coming in a couple nights before me to curse the air blue, I would need to c
ompletely alter my material and amp up the profanity. I sometimes said the word bitch, as in, “Yes, I am commonly known as the Prairie Bitch.” But that was about it. I did not say fuck. I did not say shit. I didn’t even say goddamn. I had an almost totally clean act.
For this new show, I was going to have to come out of the closet as a person who swears. Fortunately, I had some material at my disposal to choose from in that arena: a pop-culture magazine called Detour had recently done an article about me. It was a lovely, complimentary piece with a great picture. But at the top of the page under my photo was an unexpected little poem:
When she was good, she was very, very good.
When she was bad, she was a cunt.
My agent nearly had a seizure when he saw the article. He sputtered and stammered over the phone, “I can’t send this out to people! It’s…it’s got…the…the C-WORD all over it!” I read it to my father. He didn’t stop laughing for a week. I decided the magazine article was going into the act. Let’s see Joan Rivers top that!
A comedian friend of mine once told me, “You know, I love your act, but the stories you tell in the bar afterward are ten times as funny!” I decided he was right, so I incorporated all of the crazy stories that made everyone, especially the critic in my head, say, “Oh, no! You can’t possibly tell people that!” into the show.
I had also noticed for years that no matter what I was talking about onstage, someone in the audience always had to ask a question about Little House on the Prairie. Usually, it was annoying and broke my rhythm, but now I thought, Well, there’s another solution. I can answer questions. That ought to kill some time as well. So I set aside a portion of my act for Q and A. I would hand out index cards and pens before the show and tell the audience to ask absolutely anything they wanted. What the hell, I’d even bring the wig! I didn’t have the real one, of course, but I had a fake one from a party. I called this part of my act “The Wig: A Psychological Experiment (Is It Me or My Hair)?” We could try to see if I was evil or if the evil was a result of the blond ringlets. Then perhaps we could see if it worked on the audience as well. That’s it! I’d let them try on the wig.
Armed with a whole bag of totally new, insane, and profane material, I prepared to make my New York comedy debut at the Fez. But I was shocked by what I saw when I climbed down into the small basement club/restaurant under the Time Cafe in the Village: my manager escorting his mother and aunt to their seats. Thom hadn’t paid much attention to the details of my act, since he was just interested in ticket sales. I hadn’t told him about the new material, and he hadn’t asked.
I was horrified to see his guests. I said, “Thom, you brought your mom? What the hell were you thinking? Do you have any idea what this show is going to be like?”
I showed him the magazine to give him a taste of what was to come. He went pale.
“Well, too late now!” he cackled. He said it would probably be good for the old girls to get their blood flowing anyway.
The place was packed with about two hundred people, mostly gay men, and several clearly crazed Little House fans, women who had even braided their hair and brought Little House lunch boxes with them. These people were ready for anything. I went onstage, and I didn’t say, “Good evening” or even “Hi there.” I said, “Tonight we’re going to answer some questions, starting with, why am I such a bitch? You people want to know why I’m a bitch? I’ll tell you why. Do you have any idea the shit I have had to put up with?”
I didn’t address the audience so much as rail at them. I complained to them. I chastised them. I gave them all manner of shit—and called it shit to boot. And I confessed to every insane, embarrassing thing I could think of. I told them about Michael Landon’s not wearing any underwear; I told them about my gay father and Liberace; I told them about my ridiculous appearance on Fantasy Island.
They loved it. They laughed, they screamed, they spilled their drinks. And then I pulled out the stack of index cards and answered their questions. I didn’t have written answers to any of them. I just read the question on the cards and answered them truthfully.
The crowd went berserk. Thom’s mother and aunt looked as if they could hardly breathe, they were laughing so hard. I didn’t do an hour and a half. I was onstage for over two hours, and when I was done, Chip came out and made me go back out onstage and answer more questions. I had to do an encore.
It was a complete smash. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. I knew I would never do my old act again. I would never again lie or have to make anything up onstage. I was free. All I had to do was tell them the fucking truth.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
FIGHTING FOR CHILDREN…AND LARRY “F-ING” KING
CHARLES (ABOUT LAURA FIGHTING WITH NELLIE): Now, Half-Pint, you heard what I said. You won’t do it again?
LAURA: Oh no, Pa, I promise. I won’t have to. Nellie’s scared of me now!
On December 28, 2002, I got an e-mail asking me to be on the advisory board of a new organization, the National Association to Protect Children (PROTECT), whose goal was political action to change laws that directly affect abused children. But the group wasn’t just planning to do this. The e-mail was announcing its victory in North Carolina; PROTECT had already gone into the state house and successfully changed the North Carolina “incest exception” law. And here was the most extraordinary part: PROTECT didn’t even have an office yet. Some guy down in North Carolina had basically done all this out of his car with a cell phone. They had no T-shirts, no brochures—they didn’t even have stationery yet. They had made a huge difference in child abuse laws with apparently nothing but fifty cents, a screwdriver, and a roll of duct tape. They were the MacGyvers of the children’s rights movement.
Hell yes, I wanted to hang out with these people! But there was one little catch. I knew that when I did press about my work with the organization, one question was bound to come up: “So, Ms. Arngrim, is this a personal issue for you?” I knew that if I said yes to the e-mail, yes to the board, eventually there would be an interview or a Senate hearing, and someone would ask this question, and I would have to put up or shut up. I was no liar; I would have to go public with my own abuse story. I took some time to think about it. I talked to Bob and my shrink, and then I said yes.
I began getting calls and letters from the executive director, Grier Weeks. He did not directly ask me if I had been abused in our first conversation, but he posed several vaguely leading questions, which I answered with uncomfortable pauses. I decided to move things along.
“Okay, let’s just clear something up right now,” I started. “How can I put this? Like they say in the commercials, ‘I’m not just president of the Hair Club for Men, I’m also a member.’ Get it?” He got it.
At first, PROTECT seemed like it was going to be a low-effort type of charity gig, until we decided to “do California.” It turned out that California was one of the thirty-odd states with the dreaded incest exception, a legal loophole that allows far lesser penalties than those normally given to perpetrators convicted of sexually assaulting children, sometimes not so much as one day in jail, as long as they are the “victim’s natural parent, adoptive parent, stepparent, relative, or a member of the victim’s household who has lived in the victim’s household.” It’s a fact that the majority of child molesters are someone related to or known to the child. It’s almost always a father, or a stepfather, or a brother, or the teacher, or the baseball coach who is molesting the child. This exception even included house guests. Why on earth would they call something an exception that allows the majority of child rapists to go free? Strangers make up the smallest percentage, which means this wasn’t the exception, it was the rule.
This was the law that Grier and a skeleton crew of volunteers had overturned in North Carolina. They had managed Arkansas and were almost done with Illinois. PROTECT was on a winning streak, but Grier said California might be more difficult. Little did I know how right he was.
When I went to see my
elected officials at the state capitol in Sacramento, I thought I would just go up there and explain this terrible mistake in the law books, and the nice elected officials would immediately rip this junk out of the book. Unfortunately, the scene did not play out as my fantasy script dictated it would. At my first meeting, I went with Paul Petersen from Minor Consideration and some friends of his, including other abuse survivors. They shared their stories. Afterward, a very nice Democratic female aide to a nice Democratic senator turned to me and said, “No one in Sacramento gives a shit that you were molested.” Ladies and gentlemen, may I present your tax dollars at work! To be fair, she was trying to be helpful. She was in no uncertain terms (or censored words) giving me Lesson 1 in Politics 101: politicians only respond to political pressure, and one person’s suffering is not considered political pressure.
The high point of my trip to Sacramento was meeting Republican senator James Battin, who told me that he thought this incest exception was one of the sneakiest things he’d ever heard of and was more than happy to take a shot at getting rid of it. He introduced a bill to remove it from California law but warned me that this was going to be a long process. We would have to go before the dreaded California Senate Public Safety Committee. He said that he had seen people “pour their hearts out, spill their guts in front of these people” only to be ignored and dismissed. “It could be a humiliating, soul-crushing experience,” he said.
“Oh, so it’s like going to an audition, then?” I replied. Senator Battin might be tough, but he’d never met a casting director before.
When I went before this committee, I was armed with a prepared statement, and I had both Grier Weeks and Dr. Bruce Perry from PROTECT by my side. I spoke from the heart about being raped by one’s own flesh and blood and pleaded for the civil rights of victims. Dr. Perry spoke about the terrible effects of incest, the damage done to victims who see their attackers protected instead of punished, and the total lack of difference in psychology between incest and nonincest offenders. He was brilliant.
Confessions of a Prairie Bitch Page 24
