Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  “What?” I asked.

  “I have a pillow between my legs,” she said.

  “Why would you do that?” I asked in complete ignorance. “Is it like some contest to see if you can walk that way?”

  Alison looked at me dumbstruck.

  “Helloooooo! I have a pillow between my legs.”

  I shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means,” I admitted.

  She shook her head, mystified at my ignorance.

  “I got my period,” she said. “I had to use a maxipad.”

  In my defense, I knew what it meant to get your period; I’d just never heard of a maxipad. Luckily, Alison had provided a demo on tampons using a glass of water, given a lesson on hygiene, and demystified everything else by the time I got my period for the first time at fifteen. If she hadn’t, imagine how surprised I would’ve been when I told my mom that I got my period and she handed me a box full of things she’d said were for putting on makeup.

  I dealt with the confusion of those hormone-fueled changes, but hearing my girlfriends begin to giddily report about their make-out sessions with boys sent me into a near catastrophic panic that no one was ever going to want to date me. Forget the glam life of the young Hollywood star portrayed in teen magazines. (What turns Melissa on? How can you be her friend? Win a date with Melissa!) I spent my evenings lying on my bedroom floor, listening through my headphones to Janis Ian’s terribly sad song “At 17.” I played that song over and over again, crying as I sang the lyrics to myself, thinking they had been written specifically about me.

  “Oh, honey, you weren’t pathetic,” my husband said after I described that scene to him. “Everybody loved you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “everybody but me.”

  I was melodramatic. I feared my grandfather’s hugs and kisses on the weekend would be the only attention I’d ever get from a man. I envisioned spending my life alone, playing solitaire. No, it was worse than that. I pictured myself alone, pathetically cheating at solitaire.

  Little did I know there was one guy who had his eye on me. In all likelihood, he had had his eye on numerous other girls, too. But one day I went to CBS to tape a guest appearance on The Dinah Shore Show and fourteen-year-old Rob Lowe made a point of standing in the hallway so he could meet me.

  With a script under his arm so I would see he was an actor (he told me about his prop years later), he came over and introduced himself. I found out he’d recently moved to L.A. from Ohio to pursue a career, and he was already on the sitcom A New Kind of Family. I admitted having seen his picture in the teen magazines. After a quick chat, I left with the impression that he was cute (actually, he was almost pretty), sweet, and funny—just the kind of guy I could go for if he called me, which he didn’t.

  I wasn’t ready to answer that kind of phone call anyway. I was still living in the midst of my dorkdom. However, with plenty of other business-related calls coming in, my mother, in a stroke of well-timed brilliance (which came naturally to her), decided to hire a manager to help build my career outside of Little House. She introduced me to Ray Katz, a very large, very round man with an equally large office in a high-rise on Sunset Boulevard. He’d helped the Osmonds establish their empire, managed Cher, Dolly Parton, and KC & the Sunshine Band, and seemed at one time or another to have repped everyone of consequence in the pop universe.

  I’m sure the meeting was a fait accompli between my mother and Ray, with the only outstanding condition being my approval, which seemed a foregone conclusion when my mom introduced him to me as “Uncle Ray.” And why shouldn’t it have been a done deal? He had ridiculously successful clients.

  I remember sitting in his office, quietly listening to my mother and Ray talk about the fortunate position I was in, namely a key ingredient on a hit TV series, embraced by mainstream America as one of its favorite teenage sweethearts. As both agreed, there had to be a way to parlay it into something more.

  “I’d like her to show people her versatility as an actor,” my mother said.

  Granted, it was my mother talking, but that was the first time I heard anyone talk about my “versatility as an actor.” Ray, of course, agreed.

  “If you could hand-pick your dream roles for Melissa,” he began, “what would they be?”

  My mother rattled off Helen Keller, Anne Frank, and Joan of Arc. She said she’d love to see me in a remake of The Song of Bernadette. And that was how my movie career started. It was 1978, and I was about to turn fourteen. Suddenly my mother and I were sharing a production company, Half Pint Productions, and Ray set about producing The Miracle Worker for me.

  I watched the 1962 original starring Patty Duke as Helen and Anne Bancroft as her indefatigable teacher, Annie Sullivan. I wanted to know what my mom and Uncle Ray were getting me into, and I was blown away after watching performances that earned both actresses Academy Awards. I remember thinking, What if I can’t do this?

  I didn’t tell anyone, but the challenge of playing Helen scared me. It was beyond anything I’d done up till then. I couldn’t envision where or how to begin. But there’s this person in me who appears when my back is against the wall. She’s part show-off, part Wonder Woman, and part too dumb to know any better. She says, “You don’t think so? Well, watch this.” And then she dives in.

  And that’s what I did. Then I was told that Patty Duke Astin, as she was known at the time—her real name is Anna—was going to play Annie Sullivan, which was both thrilling and intimidating. Our first meeting was a key moment in my life. It was in Ray’s office, and it was the first time I sat down with someone who knew exactly what I was going through in my life. It was as if she could see into my brain.

  She’d been one of the most successful child actors ever, the youngest to win an Oscar and the star of her own TV show. Behind her stardom, though, was a lifetime filled with abuse, drug problems, screwed-up relationships, and, as she courageously revealed in her 1987 memoir, Call Me Anna, a triumphant coming to terms with bipolar disorder that ultimately allowed her to reclaim her real name and identity, which had been taken from her at age seven “when tyrannical managers stripped her of nearly all that was familiar, beginning with her name.”

  Though my life wasn’t anywhere near as troubled, at the very least she knew what it was like to be a porcelain doll. When I looked into her eyes, we had an instant connection beyond the normal exchange of fellow thespians meeting each other for the first time. I just knew she got me. Then she taught me how to sign the alphabet. I left thinking she was going to be great. She was more than great, and to this day remains one of my dearest friends and mentors.

  Not only was The Miracle Worker my first project as a producer as well as my first test as an actor, it was also my first play. In a stroke of genius, which may have been Uncle Ray’s doing, it was decided the best thing for us as a cast and a production in general would be to stage it as a play before we shot the movie. We’d get all the kinks out of the performances, all the nuances down, and then all we’d have to do is move it to a soundstage and shoot it.

  Once the Little House season wrapped, Ray booked the production at the Royal Poinciana Playhouse, in Palm Beach, Florida, and we began rehearsals in Los Angeles. Despite our many conversations, Anna had, unbeknownst to me, been told not to coach or talk to me about playing Helen. It was extremely difficult for her because she realized I was skating across the surface of the part.

  The problem was I didn’t know any better. I thought I could take on the role the same way I had for four seasons of Little House and my one movie, The Christmas Coal Mine Miracle, which was essentially me being me. In reality, there wasn’t much of a difference between Laura and Melissa. I didn’t have to stretch to imagine myself as her. But playing Helen Keller was an entirely different situation.

  At the core, I think all three of us—Laura, Helen Keller, and myself—shared a certain kind of tenacity. But I had no idea what I was getting myself into by playing this remarkable girl. Actors talk about their
process of building a character, of climbing into a person’s life and inhabiting him or her from head to toe, and I didn’t have any of those skills, nothing that could’ve been described as a process.

  With three weeks to go before we left for Florida, Ray and the director, Paul Aaron, met with my mother and told her that I wasn’t delivering at the level they needed. In fact, they put it more bluntly than that. They said that while the cast, which included Anna, Diana Muldaur, and Charles Siebert, had gelled, as they’d expected from seasoned pros, it was obvious that I simply didn’t have it.

  My mother, the source of my tenaciousness, whisked me to her former acting coach, Jeff Corey. After being blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, Jeff, a Shakespearean-trained actor with dozens of film and TV credits, turned to teaching and counted James Dean, Jane Fonda, and Jack Nicholson among his many students. He was an older, earthy type of hippie guy who lived and worked in Malibu. I adored him, and yet from the moment we met he scared the crap out of me.

  I had a sore throat the first day my mother took me to his place, and Jeff made me drink milk with acidophilus in it. We went into his house and he talked to me about the role. He asked my ideas and thoughts. Then he said, “We’re going to do something, and it’s going to be scary. How are you with that?”

  “Okay, I guess,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll make it through. I think it’s going to help you.”

  He then blindfolded me, turned off the lights, and tossed me around the room for about forty-five minutes. He let me trip over furniture, and when I couldn’t figure out where I was, he called to me from across the room, letting me stumble over furniture, fall, and cry through my frustration, until I found my way into his arms. He was Annie to my Helen. He also suggested I blindfold myself at home, have someone spin me around, and try to find my way around the house, which I did.

  Despite the black-and-blue marks, I stepped deeper into Helen than I imagined I could. As he promised, Jeff helped give me a process that let me develop a layered performance. Some of the critics even mentioned the tentative way I walked and moved, very much afraid to leave where I’d just been because I wasn’t sure where I was going.

  There was also a quiet moment on the plane to Florida when Anna tapped me on the head and said, “Listen, would you like to talk about Helen Keller?” Grateful and eager, I swung around in my seat and got some vital information from her, including help with the one line of dialogue I had to deliver.

  It was actually a single word, “water.” That was the one word Helen knew before she went blind and deaf as a child. I was having trouble saying it correctly. I knew it was something she hadn’t said for a long time, and it was also the crucial moment when she made the connection between the sign for water and water itself. I had to show the lightbulb of recognition going off in her head and also articulate the word much less clearly than normal but no less understandably.

  No matter how I tried, it didn’t sound like the voice of a person who hadn’t spoken since she was a toddler speaking her first words. I confessed as much to Anna on the plane, and she understood exactly my frustration. She’d struggled with the same thing seventeen years earlier.

  “Do you want to know the trick?” she asked.

  “Please tell me,” I said.

  She grinned.

  “Say it like you’re sitting on the toilet and really, really constipated,” she said.

  “Really?”

  She nodded. And lo and behold that most basic and embarrassing tip, along with the rest of her advice, unlocked a door to an acting dream. Each night during the play, I entered from the back of the stage and ran straight to the front, averting catastrophe by stopping just at the edge, and from opening night through the run, which was extended, the people in the front row stood to catch me, at which point I knew I had them. They really thought I was blind and deaf.

  I felt like a conqueror. My eyes opened to the possibility that this thing I was doing as a hobby was something I could actually learn about and develop into a serious craft.

  My eyes also opened to another reality about my life as an actor. On the flight to Florida, my darling sister Sara, who continued to be the most remarkable child, was absolutely wild. My whole family, including my grandmother, had come on the trip, and my mother, concerned about Sara’s comfort on the plane, had given her a spoonful of Benadryl to make her a little sleepy.

  Instead, it had the opposite effect and she ran up and down the aisle, this beautiful, three-year-old Botticelli child climbing under people’s feet, taking their food, and yelling “kill, kill, kill” as everyone tried to rein her in. My turn to wrangle her came at the airport after we landed. I wasn’t big; Sara was already half my size. As I tried to hold her in my arms, with our backs arching and my head dodging her flailing hands, a woman came up to me and asked if I was Melissa Gilbert.

  “Yes, I am,” I said above Sara’s screams.

  “Oh gosh, my daughter loves you,” she said. “Can I get your autograph?”

  I struggled to hold my sister, who was trying to wiggle out of my grasp.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t right now,” I said, wincing.

  “Oh, what a little brat you are,” she hissed, her sweet, friendly tone evaporating faster than a drop of water in the Mojave.

  She walked away, leaving me shattered by this, my first unprotected brush with my own celebrity. Later, I realized while everyone else in the airport had been able to behave in whatever way they felt like at the moment, including that woman who was insensitive, or just oblivious, and downright mean, I had to be perfect, smiley, kind, and polite, or else I was a little brat. That’s a hell of a message to give someone who already stuffed her feelings away.

  It wasn’t fair, and I was bothered by that encounter for weeks. No one had ever told me how to handle such situations, and to be honest, although I was around famous people every day, I didn’t have any understanding or awareness of celebrity, including my own. One day in Los Angeles, I was in the car with my mother when I asked her what it was like to be famous. She looked at me like I was out of my head.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “What’s it like to be famous?” I said again.

  “Well, you are famous,” she replied, kind of bewildered but trying to be matter-of-fact.

  “No,” I said. “I mean like really famous.”

  “Like who?” she asked.

  “Like Farrah Fawcett.”

  “You are,” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “No, Mom, you don’t understand. I’m talking about—”

  She put her hand up, signaling me to stop.

  “No, Melissa, you don’t understand,” she said.

  And you know what? She was right. I didn’t understand. But I’d find out soon enough.

  eight

  OH SHIT, THEY GOT A REAL MAN!

  Immediately after the run in Florida, we returned to Los Angeles and filmed the movie. We used the same crew from Little House, the same exteriors in Simi Valley, and by then we’d moved to MGM from Paramount and we shot the interiors for The Miracle Worker there. I felt surrounded by family, comfortable, and safe. Mike even visited the set a couple of times. Sadly, about three-quarters of the way through the production, Fred Coe, one of our executive producers and a legend in the business, passed away. But we moved ahead knowing that Fred, like the rest of us, believed we were doing something awfully special.

  There wasn’t a dry eye in the theater when the movie was screened for the cast, crew, and network executives prior to its airdate. That was back in the day when certain TV movies were still considered special events. We had a private screening room on the studio lot, and my whole family was there, as was Mike. Back then I still didn’t watch myself with any sort of critical detachment, certainly not the way I scrutinize every scene and every moment today. I was just a member of the audience watching the movie,
and I was destroyed at the end of it. Everyone was.

  The Miracle Worker is an emotional film, a total gut-wrencher, and as the music played over the credits everyone applauded and screamed bravo. Not me. Sitting with near paralytic stillness, I was dazed as the lights came on. I couldn’t believe the little girl on the screen had been me. I couldn’t comprehend that I’d turned in that performance. Rising slowly, I grabbed Anna, who was reaching out to me, and the two of us held on to each other and sobbed.

  Then I turned around and saw Mike, who had tears pouring down his face. I jumped into his arms and let him squeeze me till it seemed like I melted into his chest. He said, “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” It was hard to render him speechless, but I’d done it.

  At that point, I thought the sky was the limit. I didn’t think acting could get any better, and I had reasons for believing I might have hit the apex of my career.

  In the months that preceded the screening, Little House had started back up and I’d been having a difficult time with Laura’s more grown-up interests and desires. The new, sixth season introduced a number of new characters, including Almanzo Wilder, the young man Laura would fall in love with, marry, and start a family with.

  I knew this development was imminent. I’d read the books. Still, when on the first day I opened a script and saw the name Almanzo Wilder among the characters, I got a sick feeling in my stomach that didn’t go away for the next two seasons. The nausea was all nerves. I knew I was going to have to show affection, kiss, and at some point go to bed with a guy when in real life I was a knock-kneed, flat-chested fifteen-year-old who looked thirteen, still wore rubber bands and a retainer in her mouth, and had never gone out with, kissed, or even held hands with a boy.