Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  Old photos in my mother’s albums show me in a bright wicker bassinet with hand-sewn lace and ribbon. I was dressed in adorable baby clothes. According to my mother, I never spit up or had even a crumb of food in the corners of my mouth. I was perfect. Everything was perfect.

  Everything but the suddenness and surprise of the way I entered the scene. It didn’t sit well with me. It was like a puzzle someone finished by forcing pieces to fit. The picture was nice, but the edges were off. My mother is not a spur-of-the-moment person. She plans and calculates. Like her artist mother, she treats life as a lump of clay she can shape and sculpt to suit her vision. Little is left to chance. So the revelation following my stepfather’s death rattled me. So did the revelation that came soon after—that my dad had been stepping out on her.

  I didn’t know what to make of this new twist. Nothing was out of the realm of possibility. Years earlier I had gone through the process of finding my alleged biological family, and this latest wrinkle sent me scrambling for my phone book. I called my alleged biological older half sister, Bonné, the daughter of my alleged birth father, David, and stepdaughter of my alleged birth mother, Cathy, and through her, I found out that David and Cathy had split for a spell in 1963. When they got back together in early 1964, Cathy was pregnant. A few months later, her baby was gone.

  During the period Cathy and David weren’t together she may have met my father, gotten pregnant by him, and then arranged to have him adopt me. Considering the man was married thirteen times during his life, it’s plausible. If it still doesn’t make sense, though, all I can say is welcome to my life.

  My personal “big bang” mystery aside, I was loved. That I know—and knew—without any doubt. My mother and father were entranced by the new addition to their lives. My mother was especially enchanted, and why not? I was pretty cute—chubby and freckly with the perfect little swirl of red Kewpie doll hair on top of my very round head. She would come home after a night out with my dad, wake me up, and play with me as if I were a doll, even changing my clothes, and then put me back to bed without hearing a whimper of complaint from me.

  For the first three years of my life, I was the center of everyone’s universe. I went shopping with my mom and I rehearsed with my dad. When people came to the house, I sang and danced for them, then bathed in their compliments about my red curls and freckles. My nickname was Wissy-do. I had a beagle named Sir Saul of Wissy, Saulie for short. It was all really very precious. Idyllic, even.

  Not much time passed before I entered show business, which was like the family business. I was just two years old when I landed the first job I went out for, Carter’s baby clothes. It was 1966, and my mom took me to the audition, where I met the director, who like many commercial directors of that era looked like an upscale hippie or artist, with long hair and a beard, which might have frightened most little children. Not me. The story goes that I ran straight up to the hirsute director, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, climbed right into his lap, threw my arms around him, kissed him, and started singing songs and telling stories.

  My mother was appalled at what she saw me do and heard me say. She feared the people in the room and the other mothers waiting with their little girls would think she’d told me to do that, but the truth was, she didn’t coach me one bit. It was all me, my predisposition for the spotlight presenting itself in an irrepressible gust of enthusiasm and blur of red curls. I saw that my excitement was infectious. So, in later auditions, whatever the product was, I told the director it was my favorite thing in the whole world. I loved whatever brand of mustard they were selling! I only ate McDonald’s! My daddy used that deodorant!

  At home, life was like a giant nightclub date. My parents had parties all the time, filling the house with talented, funny people. I remember sneaking onto the stairs in my nightgown, my legs dangling through the railing, and watching the grown-ups downstairs as they sang and danced, played charades, told jokes, and regaled one another with great stories.

  One time I was sound asleep when my mother came into my room and woke me up, urging me to follow her downstairs. It wasn’t “do you want to come downstairs?” It was “you have to come downstairs now!” She’d been to the ballet and Rudolf Nureyev and Dame Margot Fonteyn, two of the greatest dancers ever, were in the living room. A few years ago, I told that story to my godsister, Jenny Brill. She responded, “Ruth Buzzi slapped me once.”

  I became a big sister when I was almost four years old. Jonathan arrived to great fanfare and to my even greater annoyance. I had no idea how my parents got him, where they got him, or, more important, why they got him. As far as I was concerned, he was an interloper relegating me, the headliner, to opening-act status.

  Apparently I was pissed. According to my mother, we were in a rented house in Reno about a year later (my father had an engagement), and she set my brother up in a playpen and went to sit down nearby with my father while I ran around, seemingly content and happy. Moments later, she heard my brother screaming hysterically. She sprinted around the corner and found me standing beside the playpen, slapping Jonathan across the face. Right hand. Left hand. Right hand. Left hand. Just like I’d seen on the Three Stooges.

  She yanked me out and yelled at me to stop, which I did immediately. Hey, I was a good girl.

  My mom couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on or why her precious little daughter would do such a thing. I think one can safely wager I was jealous of Jonathan and wanted to get rid of him.

  As a little kid, I spent a lot of time riding in the backseat of the station wagon we traveled in when we accompanied my dad on the road, which we seemed to do frequently. I have quite a few memories of late nights on long stretches, headlights, and falling asleep with my head against the car window. It was always a delicious feeling to be carried from the car to bed, where I’d fall back into a deep, comfortable sleep, even if it was a new motel. It was the comfort that came from knowing a bed was waiting and both of my parents were there in case I woke up and found monsters in the closet. I felt safe and secure, like all was right in the world.

  Even now I have a hard time with long drives at night because the lights lull me to sleep. My mother drove a white Cadillac Eldorado, with white interior. She got a new version of it every few years. Triple white. A cloud on wheels. By rolling up the windows, she could close herself off from the outside world. It was like being sealed in a luxurious living room.

  So there I was one day, sealed in that living room, along with my brother, when my mother said something to the effect of “Your father is not going to be living with us anymore.” I don’t know about my brother, but my first thought was It’s no big deal, he’s on the road again, and we can’t go with him because we’re in school.

  Then I realized what my mom had actually said—that he wouldn’t be living with us anymore. I asked what she meant. She explained he was moving into a different house, adding as reassuringly as possible that it would be close by and that we didn’t have to worry because “nothing is going to change.”

  What?

  “It’s going to be exactly the same,” she said. “He’ll be there when you get home from school. He’ll stay to tuck you into bed. He’ll be with us on all the holidays. It won’t be any different.”

  And that was it. There was no hysteria, no crying, no grieving or even griping about the loss of what I believed was our cozy family unit. The pillars that held up my little world were splitting, but it was presented as something I shouldn’t be upset or concerned about, so I wasn’t. Which was weird. Because it was something to get upset about. Except I never did. My mother drove us home and life went on.

  That was the emergence of the porcelain doll, the little girl who did and said everything she was told, didn’t complain, and would learn to tell others that everyone in her life, whether at home or on a TV set, loved one another even when there were serious problems. The porcelain doll would wear outfits made of wool even though they gave her a rash. She would always smi
le, always have a perfect hairdo, and always say the right things no matter what else was going on in her life.

  I still have no idea why my parents’ marriage ended. It stayed between them. To their credit, they kept their promise. Family life was as close as possible to the way it had always been. If my dad wasn’t on the road, he was at my mother’s home, greeting us when we came back from school. We lived in a relatively new area in the hills above Studio City, and he moved nearby. We spent every other weekend at his house. He stayed with us when my mom traveled with her friends. At night, I still threw my arms around him and let him put me to bed. The lights went off and he or my mom said good night. I still knew I was loved. But it wasn’t the same as before. All of us knew it, too. We just didn’t acknowledge it.

  three

  SHOWTIME

  My mother made sure there were no limits when I was growing up. Life was like a rolling field for as far as you could see: all open spaces rising into hills that descended into a lush valley, and so on for eternity. Her philosophy could be encapsulated in a single word: yes.

  Bad news needn’t intrude on her reality. She wanted her life to be a big flower garden, and she wanted mine to be even bigger and more beautiful. When I was a baby, she stayed up at night and ironed the lace on my underpants, the frilly ones that went over my diapers. Later, after we moved to Studio City, she decorated my bedroom as if it were out of a children’s picture book, with a canopy bed whose fabric matched the room’s delicate red rose wallpaper. It was perfect.

  We got along well, much better than she got along with her own mother, with whom she had always had a contentious relationship, beginning when my mother was a very little girl and my grandmother was trying to feed her cereal, but she wouldn’t open her mouth. After repeated attempts, my grandmother gave up and dumped the whole bowl over my mom’s head. My mom laughed as she told me that and other, similar stories. Tossing her head back, she said, “It’s because we’re all Tauruses.”

  Indeed, my mom had a temper and could fly off the handle pretty quickly, but it was never unbearable, and she was pretty much the center of my universe, and in turn I was her quick-learning, quick-thinking protégé, especially as I got more into work. I was six going on seven when my curly red pigtails and slightly buck teeth began to charm one director after another, even if I had to lie (which I did, if it meant I got the job; I was often rewarded for my deceptions). Along with the lessons I’d learned from my mom and my own instincts, I was downright lethal at an audition.

  I racked up a ridiculous number of commercials—Crest, Clorox, Butterball turkey, McDonald’s, and many others. I continued to say whatever I thought would play well at the audition to the casting agents, and I never thought twice about it.

  It was always the same group of girls at the auditions, there with their moms, who would do little corkscrew curls on their daughters as they waited. My mom picked me up from school and took me to auditions no matter what condition I was in that day. If I had food on my face or dirt under my horribly bitten nails, that’s what the director and casting agent saw. I did have my interview outfit, though—a pair of overalls, a plaid shirt, and Keds. My hair was always in pigtails, too.

  Dozens of girls would come in for each audition, and the group would be cut down to the same handful of girls. Typically that small group included Jodie Foster, Kristy McNichol, Dawn Lyn, and me, and one of us always got the job. It reached a point where I would walk into an audition and see the other girls and their moms turn to one another and groan, “Oh, she’s here.”

  My mother was an unusual stage mom. She didn’t help me read lines, make me change my clothes, or tell me to clean up. In the early 1970s, the country was rife with change and upheaval, and she understood how it was playing out in the world of commercials and TV. Casting agents, directors, and their clients wanted a new kind of American family, one more realistic than the perfectly coiffed people of the fifties and early sixties, and my mom realized that with my buck teeth, freckles, and one ear that stuck out farther than the other, in other words my imperfections—as well as my bitten fingernails and dirty knees—I fit the bill perfectly.

  We were also a showbiz family. Between my mother, father, and grandfather, everyone in Hollywood seemed to be a friend, pseudo-relative, or acquaintance. Not much happened in town that didn’t get discussed and analyzed as if it affected us personally, or as if we were part of it, too, which I suppose we were.

  Even before I was old enough to understand who was who and what was what, I was absorbing information. I felt like a normal kid, but all around me, it was always showtime. The switch was flipped, the lights came on, and people did their thing. I was encouraged to show off whatever talent I had. My parents’ friends provided the best entertainment right in our living room, and I squealed with laughter when my grandfather showed me off to my “Uncle Danny” (Danny Thomas), and when I entered my teens, my “Uncle Miltie” (Milton Berle) dubbed me “baby Ann-Margret.”

  In the late sixties and early seventies, my grandfather was the head writer for the Dean Martin Show, and I used to visit him on the set. I didn’t know that my “Uncle Dean” was a superstar until many years later. To me, Uncle Dean was the slow-talking, very handsome man who had a great big tray of candy in his dressing room, which I loved since we didn’t have candy in our house. I knew as long as I sat on Uncle Dean’s lap and didn’t get too close to my mom, whose hands were like Venus flytraps, I could eat as much candy as I wanted.

  My first television show was a Dean Martin Christmas special. My grandfather put me in a number with a group of kids whose parents were in the cast and crew, and we sang a song with Dennis Weaver. It was preceded by a bit in which Dennis explained how the song was supposed to go. He listed how we would all play the instruments we had, and I realized he had made a mistake. Without hesitation I corrected him loudly, declaring, “No! The whistle first!” The audience and Dennis laughed and I was hooked. Funny followed my grandfather wherever he went, as if his sense of humor was an extra appendage, and quite often he was around others equally funny, and I was lucky enough to frequently be along for the ride. Like the time when I was a little older and already on Little House and he took me to an NBC affiliates function, where, at one point, he pulled me away from the action and said, “Listen, I want to introduce you to someone.”

  The intonation of his voice when he said the word “someone” led me to believe this was someone special, but I couldn’t imagine who could be more special than the man I’d only just met, Chuck Barris. So I was kind of grumpy as my grandfather escorted me into a back room and shut the door, closing us off from the din from the larger gathering. Across from us was a little old man in a beret with his back to us. My grandfather said, “Groucho,” and the man turned around. I was stunned. It was Groucho Marx.

  It was like encountering Abraham Lincoln, or Batman (hey, I was a sucker for Batman; still am, though I prefer my Batman in the form of Christian Bale these days), someone so legendary he couldn’t possibly be real, except he was—and he was only a few feet away from me. He stood about five feet four inches tall, wore a gray suit with a turtleneck, and held a cigar. It was like seeing Leonard Bernstein with his baton or Claude Monet with his brush. Having grown up watching Marx Brothers movies, I recognized Groucho immediately, and I asked God to please not let me turn into a blithering idiot. I saw Groucho’s face brighten when he saw my grandfather.

  “Hey, Hesch!” he said.

  Hesch. Only my grandfather’s most intimate friends called him Hesch. I had no idea they were close. They hugged and then my grandfather said, “Groucho, I’d like you to meet my granddaughter, Melissa.”

  Groucho stuck out his hand and said, “It’s nice to meet you. My daughter’s name is Melinda.”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “My name is Melissa.”

  He feigned bewilderment at my response.

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” he said. “Change my daughter’s name?”

  His light
ning-fast quip took me aback momentarily. I thought I’d said something that caused him to snap at me. Then I realized it was a joke and I relaxed. Later, in fact, we went back into the party and I danced with him for a little while.

  That was the first time I understood my grandpa was kind of a big deal. Everyone knew him—well, everyone of a certain generation. And the power of this fact remained undiminished for decades. Many years later, I would go with my friend Katie Wagner to see Frank Sinatra perform in New York. Afterward, Katie took me backstage. She knew the great singer through her father, Robert Wagner, and she wanted to say hello. Normally I’m shy about introducing myself to people, but he went around the room saying hi and shaking hands, and when my turn came, I said, “It’s nice to meet you. I think you know my grandfather.”

  Given all that statement conveyed, he sort of rolled his eyes and dutifully asked, “Who’s your grandfather?”

  “Harry Crane,” I said.

  He paused.

  “Hesch? You’re Hesch’s grandkid?” He turned to some of his cronies. “Hey, everyone, this is Hesch’s…”

  Being Hesch’s granddaughter provided entrée to Hollywood royalty, but my most special memories are from when I was younger and had Papa Harry all to myself. Like on Sundays when we went to Du-par’s coffee shop, where I always ordered pancakes and afterward we made up our own games, using whatever was on the table as playing pieces, shouting moves, arguing strategy, and drawing crowds of onlookers who tried to figure out the rules. It was just as fun when we stayed home and I fixed him lunch. I remember one time asking if he wanted some fruit for dessert, and I rattled off the choices.

  “I’ll just take an orange,” he said.