Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  And suddenly I was supposed to get it on prairie style?

  Uh, no thanks.

  Well, that’s not altogether true. I was somewhat excited about the idea of Laura growing up because I realized it was an easy way for me to gradually inch forward in my own life. And I was definitely excited to see who the producers chose for this all-important role of the person I was going to have to kiss. When I heard they cast an actor named Dean Butler, I freaked out a little from nerves, but in a good way.

  But then came Dean’s first day of work, and when we finally met I was hit by a perfect storm of disappointment, fear, anger, and nausea. I can imagine what my face looked like. No, I don’t want to imagine. It couldn’t have been nice. I’d expected the producers to cast a contemporary of mine, someone like Eric Shea, someone close to my age. Instead, they had cast a man!

  That’s right, Dean was a grown-up man. I looked at him as if he’d risen from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. He was in his twenties. He shaved, drove a car, and lived in his own apartment. He must have felt so bummed upon meeting this dorky, freaked-out fifteen-year-old with peach fuzz all over her legs (I hadn’t even shaved them yet), and being told I was the one he had to fall in love with and marry. How inconvenient and disappointing for him.

  I couldn’t have cared less. We were supposed to fall in love, but all I knew was that I wanted to run away and hide. Thankfully, today we’re great friends. He knows he scared the crap out of me and that as a result, I made a point of doing everything I could to make him as uncomfortable as possible.

  I was also delighted when he messed up on his own. Take his first day on the job. Almanzo was supposed to drive a team of horses, and then stop and talk to me. For my part, it was supposed to be love at first sight. In real life, outside of rehearsal, Dean had no experience driving a team of horses. I could drive a team. I could drive a buckboard. I could drive a covered wagon. I could drive a six-up stagecoach. I probably could’ve driven an eighteen-wheeler. Anybody can with the right training.

  The wranglers trained Dean and when he was ready, we began the scene. Almanzo drove his team down the road and came upon Laura. He was wearing this big hat I thought made him look like a doofus. Then his hat blew off. As he turned to grab it, he pulled the reins and steered the horses and buckboard into a tree. I collapsed in a spasm of giggles.

  Mike was there, and he wasn’t happy. He’d been driving teams of horses for decades and his first time on Bonanza was too long ago to remember. I remember he gave Dean a look that said, “What the fuck is wrong with this kid?” Nobody should’ve had to endure that look. Or my not-so-discreet snickers.

  A week later, life took another inevitable turn. I was at home when I got my period for the first time. When I told my mother, she lightly smacked me across the face with no explanation. Later that afternoon, my grandmother and my aunt came over and we talked about the responsibilities of being a woman. It was a lovely, emotional moment and I found out the slap was a Jewish tradition; now that your daughter is a woman, this is the last time you can punish her physically. From here on in, the only punishment allowed from your mother is the verbal kind. Then my brother arrived home from school. He looked at the four of us, daubing our teary eyes, and asked what was going on.

  “Melissa got her period,” my grandmother said in a tone that seemed to convey he should’ve been proud or happy.

  He was neither.

  “That’s disgusting!” he said before leaving the room.

  That season of Little House opened with a two-part episode, and the very next day after I got my period we were shooting part two, which is best known as the cinnamon chicken episode. Nellie was cooking dinner for Almanzo—his favorite, cinnamon chicken—and I sabotaged her dish by giving her cayenne pepper instead of cinnamon. The two of us had a confrontation, a big wrestling match in a mud hole, which was essentially an old watering hole for cattle. As they reset cameras, I whispered to her, “I’m a woman now.”

  Alison, who had prepped me for everything I knew about getting my period, grinned.

  “You’re also covered in cow shit,” she said. “How appropriate.”

  Early one morning a few weeks later, I was sound asleep when my mother burst into my bedroom and shook me awake. I opened my eyes as she exclaimed, “You were nominated! Oh my God, you were nominated!” I sat up in bed and asked what I was nominated for. She said, “An Emmy! Best Actress in a Motion Picture or Miniseries.”

  “Me?” I asked.

  “Yes!” she said as she wrapped her arms around me.

  “Wow,” I said from inside her hug.

  I was elated. The screaming and excitement was nonstop throughout the morning as my mom fielded phone calls and I thanked people for calling to congratulate me. Then Uncle Ray called with news that spun the excitement in another direction. My mother spoke to him, or rather she listened for a moment and then said, “Are you kidding me? You’ve got to be kidding. Oh my God, I can’t believe it.”

  I stood next to her, begging to know what Uncle Ray was telling her. Finally she turned around and looked at me with disbelief and pride.

  “Anna is nominated for the same award,” she said, referring to Patty Duke. “So is Bette Davis and Lee Remick.”

  I smiled and threw up my hands in a mock surrender to the combination of age and greatness that had just stepped into the room. I had two immediate thoughts. First, there was no way I wanted to win. It would be beyond the valley of embarrassing to give an award to a child in lieu of any one of those three women. And second, there was no way I was going to win. But my God, just to have my performance considered on a par with the performances by those three women, well, it was monumental for me.

  You hear actors say all the time that it was enough to be nominated. For me, it really was. In an interesting move, my “team” took out an ad in the trades thanking members of the television academy for such an unbelievable honor. It read:

  “This is my acceptance speech, because for me this special nomination is an award. Whichever of these beautiful ladies wins the award, I am proud to have been allowed to share the moment, and the loudest applause and bravos you hear will be mine.” Though that is exactly how I felt, the ad was not my idea. In retrospect, it was a pretty good play to get me the award. Thank the Lord it didn’t work!

  It turned out no one heard anything from me. In July, the Screen Actors Guild went on strike, along with her sister union, AFTRA, and though the Emmy Awards aired on television, SAG boycotted the ceremonies. Like every other nominee except Powers Booth, who in his acceptance speech said, “This is either the most courageous moment of my career or the stupidest,” I honored the strike by not attending the awards, a show of my union stripes before I even knew what they meant.

  I was sad I couldn’t go, but Michael Landon Jr., with whom I had begun sort of a budding romance, took me to dinner at El Torito that night. Not a bad consolation prize. Afterward, we watched the show at my house and cheered wildly as Anna won the Best Actress award. Quite unexpectedly, I won as a producer when the movie was named Outstanding Drama. (I recently took the statue home and had it restored after finding it on a hallway floor when I was cleaning my mom’s house before Warren’s memorial service.)

  As for my relationship with Michael Jr., it was a sure sign of change. It hadn’t been contrived for PR purposes like so many teen romances in Hollywood. He was adorable; he had blond, curly hair and a great sense of humor. I would lie in bed at night and his face would flash before my eyes as I tried to fall asleep. It was the first time I experienced butterflies in my stomach when I thought about a boy.

  It wasn’t quite a romance, though there was plenty of hand holding and eye batting. We went to events together, talked excitedly about getting our learner’s permits, and commiserated when our respective orthodontists gave both of us the same sad news that we had to keep wearing our neck gear at night.

  One time he cooked dinner for me, spaghetti with, in lieu of marinara sauce, a can of Hormel chili po
ured all over it. It was actually quite delicious. My mother also sent a bunch of us kids on a ski trip to Sun Valley, where she had a condo. The gang included my brother and Mike Jr. Despite the fact I had multiple adult escorts, it was a big moment for me to be going away with a boy.

  It was a little nerve-racking, and humor was my salvation in any tight situation. On that trip, I knew how to open the bathroom door when it was locked, and so Mike Jr. and I snuck in while my brother was in the shower and dumped a bucket of snow over him. Jonathan had never screamed as high or as loud in his life. I played similar pranks at work. My favorite was lifting the toilet seat and putting Saran Wrap over the bowl. As Alison Angrim once told People magazine, you didn’t see it—until it was too late.

  Without such antics allowing me to keep one foot firmly planted in childhood, I probably would’ve been more confused than I was as I dipped the toes of my other foot in the waters of adolescence. I got scared when I heard stories of peers smoking cigarettes, experimenting with drugs (that meant smoking pot), and doing more than just kissing boys. In my world, nice girls didn’t let guys get to second base. For that matter, nice girls didn’t complain. They didn’t speak out of turn. They didn’t wear black. They didn’t dress provocatively. Nice girls took small bites, they sat up straight, they never called boys on the phone. Nice girls were nice girls. I didn’t know any, but I was damn sure going to be one.

  Apparently nice girls were also thin. One day Leslie Landon and I were roller skating on the paddle tennis court in my backyard, and when I went inside to get something to drink, my mom looked at me, looked out at Leslie, then back at me, and said, “Why can’t you have a flat stomach like her?”

  I was anything but chubby, yet because I was going through so many physical changes at the time, most of which I wasn’t even aware of until they’d already happened, her comment turned out to be one of those moments that shoved me into a revolving door I couldn’t escape.

  Suddenly I was conscious of my body. I felt short and chubby. Whatever I was when I looked in the mirror, it was wrong—and the image I had of myself would only get worse. All of which made me covet my girlish ways even more. They were like a tortoiseshell I could pull my head into when I needed protection from maturity.

  I marvel at how innocent I was able to stay for so long. By fifteen, Tatum O’Neal had been involved in a threesome, Mackenzie Phillips had used cocaine, Scott Baio was getting it on with his costar Erin Moran, and I was always worried about having extra rubber bands with me in case one snapped off my braces.

  Part of me is grateful for my mom’s overprotective ways. But it was getting harder, or rather impossible, to hide from the inevitability of change. A perfect example: my first on-camera kiss in the “Sweet 16” episode. I’d been kissed years earlier in another episode, but it had been an innocent little peck. This was Laura’s first real kiss, one she desired, and it made me sick.

  The episode came toward the end of season six, and I didn’t want to do it. To those who came up to me and asked, “Hey, Half Pint, how do you feel about your big kiss?” I quipped that I would’ve preferred to kiss Scott Baio or Shaun Cassidy. I knew those teen-idol guys were unattainable and therefore safe to mention, though the truth was, I didn’t want to kiss anyone. Especially Dean Butler. I didn’t want to kiss a man. I didn’t want to kiss anyone with stubble!

  I was too scared to talk to anyone about it or ask questions. Nor did anyone offer information. For instance, how was I supposed to kiss this guy? How was I supposed to convey passion? Should I kiss him as if I was on The Brady Bunch? Or should I go for something closer to what I saw on Dynasty? How did they do it on the prairie? All I knew for sure was that the expectations were high. This was the real beginning of Laura and Almanzo’s romance, which was one of the great romances of all time. When the time came to kiss Dean, I shut my eyes (inside, they were blank screens) and gently puckered up, letting him find the target.

  I was never as relieved as when I heard Mike, who directed the episode, yell cut. I felt like I took my first real breath in a week. I turned and saw my mother, the woman who’d once told me tampons were for makeup, standing just off camera, smiling with tears in her eyes. She gave me a hug before I hurried off to the craft service table and popped some chips in my mouth to get rid of any cooties.

  One bad taste lingered through the rest of the season, though it wasn’t openly discussed by anyone until it was too late. Mike had become very friendly with a new stand-in on the show, a pretty young blond named Cindy Clerico. I first noticed her during production of The Miracle Worker when Mike visited the set one day and said hello to her before he did to me. I wondered who she was, then someone said, “Oh, she’s a stand-in. I guess they know each other.”

  Though it didn’t register with me then, I’m pretty sure that was the start of their romance. As the season progressed, I noticed they spent a lot of time together. It was nothing untoward; they weren’t ever in a closed-off room, not that I saw. But Mike would walk around holding her puppy, and she was a pretty young thing who wore stylish tight jeans, leotards, and high-heel boots.

  Their friendship hit my radar as something that might be wrong. I mentioned it one day to my mother and she snapped, “Oh, you’re crazy.” And so it seemed. Mike still bought Auntie Lynn gifts, thanked her when he picked up awards, told everyone how much he loved her, and fawned all over her when we went to Hawaii.

  Things seemed perfectly normal during that year’s vacation. Though that trip proved he wasn’t the only one with a secret: I got drunk for the first time and didn’t tell anyone. The event was the brainchild of Helen Reddy’s daughter, Tracy Wald, whose family was also vacationing at the hotel. She came up with the idea of raiding the hotel room minibar while our parents were at dinner. Leslie pointed out mine was off-limits since it was full of cold cuts, sandwich spreads, and milk. But they figured out an alternative. Tracy was light-years ahead of Les and me in experience. They were both ahead of me physically; at seventeen and sixteen years old, they were girls who looked great on the beach in teeny bikinis, and knew it, while I was a year younger and still wearing a one-piece with pajamas over it. Anyway, the three of us parked ourselves in front of the minibar and drank everything in it. We had vodka, rum, wine, champagne, Crown Royal, and Baileys Irish Cream, which I liked.

  We got rip-roaring drunk. Sick drunk. We were out of control and running through the hallways of the Kahala. Little did I or any of us know you weren’t supposed to mix different types of alcohol or drink till you puked, passed out, or both. We did it all, and paid the price the next morning when Leslie and I decamped to the beach, feeling like we were an inch from death and wishing with each throb of our heads that we were dead.

  We slumped in chairs on the sand and shielded ourselves from the world under layers of towels. We were probably groaning, too. At one point I peeked out from under my towel and saw a pair of legs—they looked like a man’s legs—next to our chairs. I looked up and saw Mike, who stood next to us holding a tray with two glasses of what appeared to be tomato juice.

  “I hear you two had a little adventure last night,” he said.

  Leslie looked out from under her towel. I could see her headache as she stared up at her father, then at me with a look that begged me to tell her when he had found us. I shrugged.

  “Yes, we did,” she said.

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed.

  “Well, I’m assuming you don’t feel very well today,” he said.

  “No, I don’t,” I said, and started to cry.

  Leslie burst into tears, too, though I think both of us were crying from the pain we felt and the relief we hoped he could provide, rather than from fear or shame. Mike handed each of us a glass. They were Bloody Marys.

  “This will make you feel better,” he said.

  ‘Thank you,” I muttered.

  “I trust neither of you are going to do this again,” he said.

  “No,” Leslie replied.

  “No way,” I said.r />
  Beyond that, there weren’t any more repercussions. My mom never mentioned it to me. I’ll bet she didn’t have a clue. No further punishments were necessary, anyway, since we were already paying a steep price for our stupidity.

  Back then, I was relieved. Now I’m not so sure I shouldn’t have been given a talking-to. Put aside the potential benefits of a theoretical discussion about whether my biological parents might’ve had a drinking problem, something that would’ve been useful to know but was clearly beyond my mother, who still had not yet broken with the story that my birth mother was a prima ballerina and my father a brilliant scholar. It would’ve been good for me to hear that my actions, like anyone else’s, had consequences for both me and those around me. Such a lesson can’t be underestimated; none of us live in a bubble, even those among Hollywood’s most privileged. I would have to learn this basic lesson myself, as did so many others around me, old and young.

  nine

  NOT SO SWEET SIXTEEN

  After Hawaii, I went to work producing and starring in my second TV movie, The Diary of Anne Frank. As on the previous movie, I prepared with acting teacher Jeff Corey, who scared the crap out of me when he asked my thoughts on boys and tried to bring up issues of female sexuality. I understood the points he wanted to get at by alluding to Anne’s relationship with Peter van Daan, the sixteen-year-old boy whose family hid out with the Franks until they were all given up by informants and taken to Nazi prison camps. But I didn’t feel comfortable opening up to him or anyone else. Maybe it was his intention to make me uncomfortable.

  Prior to filming, we rehearsed as if we were doing it as a play, and then we went through it scene by scene on a soundstage. As you’d expect from working on one of the most moving human tragedies of modern times, the daily expenditure of emotional energy took a toll on me. I would take a short nap as soon as I got home; it was a transition back to real life, which playing Anne made me appreciate so much more.