Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  “Not a big deal,” I said, though my nonchalance didn’t ring true with me and I corrected myself a moment later. “To tell you the truth, it was very romantic.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was.”

  We were silent for a little bit.

  “Where’d you do it?” she asked.

  “In my motel room. In Forsyth, Georgia.”

  “Are you still together?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Really?” she asked.

  I smiled, thinking back on those few months, which had already assumed a dreamlike status in my brain.

  “I think in my heart of hearts I saw Cyril and it was kind of a Romeo and Juliet thing,” I said. “You know, raised by the Capulets and the Montagues and never the twain shall meet.” I thought of how romantic that sounded, and then added, “It was doomed from the start. But it was so good for me.” Ah, ever the little drama queen, wasn’t I?

  Though I didn’t intend it to be public knowledge on the Little House set, the effect on me was noticeable when the show regrouped for production of its eighth season. In an interview, Dean, who had to have heard gossip from someone on the crew, said something along the lines of “I don’t know what happened to Melissa over the hiatus, but she sure is different.”

  I didn’t think so, but maybe it was true. At any rate, my life would shortly become very different.

  eleven

  MEET CUTE

  Given L.A.’s immense size, you would think the odds of falling in love with the person in the car stopped next to you at a red light would be next to impossible. Except that drivers in L.A., when not talking on their cell phones, drinking coffee, putting on makeup, reading, or doing all of the above, are also checking one another out, as if the freeways are a singles bar, which raises the odds slightly.

  I should know. It happened to me.

  It was a beautiful day late in the summer of 1981, and I was on my way to pick out a dress to wear to an upcoming black-tie gala. I’d left MGM after work and my friend Katie Daley was with me in my car. I turned up La Cienega Boulevard, one of the city’s main north-south arteries. I was complaining to Katie about my makeup, which I hadn’t had time to wash off. Because Mike was always tanned, the makeup artists made the rest of us a few shades darker. My makeup was called Natural Tan, but it looked orange, and I used to call myself Pumpkin Face. I hated it. In truth I looked more like an Oompa-Loompa.

  Katie cracked a joke about my sunglasses. I didn’t do much reading those days, since reading was my job and I found nothing about it relaxing, but I read Lolita. Several times. Mercy me, did Mr. Nabokov churn my imagination. My shades were large, red, and heart-shaped. I called them my Lolita sunglasses. There we were, laughing about that and my clashing orange skin, as I came to a red light. After stopping, I looked over at the car next to me and saw this absolutely gorgeous guy. Ordinarily I would have turned away after a quick glance. After all, I’d been trained by my mother not to make eye contact with anyone lest he turn out to be a serial killer.

  But I thought I knew this guy, so I continued to stare at his profile, trying to come up with his name and how I knew him. My synapses were crackling as I tried to place him when he turned and looked at me straight on. It was Rob Lowe. I immediately blurted out his name—“Rob!”—and said hi. Except that he couldn’t hear me. He motioned for me to roll down my window.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m on my way to buy a dress for whatever the hell thing I’m supposed to go to next week,” I said. “I just finished work. What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to an audition,” he said.

  “Well, I’m going to be at Holly’s Harp looking at dresses,” I said. “Meet me there when you finish your audition.”

  He said okay, and I told him where the boutique was located on Sunset Plaza. I went directly there and tried on dresses, purposely taking longer than was necessary in the hope that Rob would show up. I kept telling Katie how gorgeous I thought he was, and when I wasn’t telling her, I was asking her to validate my opinion.

  “Don’t you think he’s so good-looking he’s almost beautiful?”

  Of course she did. Who wouldn’t?

  When Rob didn’t show after nearly two hours, I was disappointed. I wrote down my phone number and asked the women helping me to be on the lookout for a very handsome young man who might come in and ask for me.

  “Please tell him to call me,” I said.

  I waited anxiously the rest of that day and night for him to call. He didn’t. Nor did he call the next day or the next. I had given up. Then, several days later, the phone in my room rang and it was Rob. We had a fun, easy conversation and he asked me out on a date. I said yes, and I don’t remember a thing after that. Not where we went or what we did. All I remember is that I felt like I got hit on the head with a brick. I fell instantly, hopelessly, and stupidly in love.

  I wasn’t expecting it. Between Cyril and Rob, I had dated a few boys, including Tom Cruise, who I met at an event he’d attended with Emilio Estevez. We went on a couple of dates and made out in my mom’s living room. He was nice, funny, and sweet. But it wasn’t like being hit with an arrow.

  From the moment Rob and I went out, I never wanted to be away from his side. We went from first date to instant couple—just add water. Almost overnight everything was suddenly all Rob or all Rob and Melissa. I thought my feelings for Cyril had been intense, but this was crazy. I remembered my acting teacher Jeff Corey describing love as a hunger throughout your entire body. He was right. I felt like I was starving for Rob. I wanted to bite him. He felt the same way about me. He wrote me poetry. He left notes. He cooed the sweetest messages into my answering machine.

  Rob lived with his family north of Malibu on Point Dume and still attended Santa Monica High School. Since I was out of school and not that busy on Little House, I would meet him there for lunch and hang out with his friends. At night, he came to my house and we ate dinner, watched TV, and talked for hours.

  In November, by now a couple months into our relationship, Rob and I were still having intensely personal conversations and quivering inside with excitement and desire as we showed each other parts of ourselves that no one had ever seen before. One day I told him that I wasn’t a virgin. I wanted him to know everything about me. I didn’t want there to be any secrets. I also wanted him to know that while I was no expert in the ways of lovemaking, I was game.

  The following weekend he came over for dinner. After my mother, now separated from Harold (there’s no story; one day she simply said, “Harold and I are getting a divorce”), and my brother and sister were safely asleep, Rob and I moved into the family room to watch Saturday Night Live. Bernadette Peters was the host and Billy Joel and the Go-Go’s were the musical guests. As Billy Joel finished his song “She’s Got a Way,” Rob looked at me and said, “That’s how I feel about you. That song. That’s exactly it.”

  I melted, and with Saturday Night Live playing in the background, we made love for the first time on the sofa in my mother’s family room. It was sublime. We connected on a level that I’d never experienced before. He was sweet and intense. He wouldn’t let me close my eyes. He made me look right into his eyes the whole time. It was profound. Beyond sex, it was free and honest and vulnerable and it was ours.

  We were like that in every way. We had our own special words, our own signals, and our own secrets, especially after that night. Above all else, the physical attraction between us was palpable, almost intrusive. People would get between us, see the way we looked at each other, like two sides of a vise closing in on them, and you could see them think, Uh-oh, watching the two of you hurts the back of my head. It’s painful. I have to get away from this.

  At seventeen, we were still babies and learning how to handle that highly combustible combination of serious feelings, unbridled passion, and raging hormones. I started to climb out of my bedroom window at night and drive up to Point Dume.
After several trips, we decided it was too dangerous for me to make that trip by myself at night. Too many things could go wrong.

  Rob worried about my safety on the roads. I worried about my mother catching me. Having experienced her anger and the punishment that sometimes ensued, I didn’t want to risk it. My biggest fear was that she would catch me doing something and forbid me to see Rob. I didn’t know what I would do in that case.

  So we devised a system where Rob would come for dinner pretty much every night. Then he would say good night, I’d walk him to the front door, and he would back out of the driveway and park down the street, where he would sit in his car for thirty or forty minutes. I would excuse myself to go to my room and watch TV in bed. In the meantime, I would be listening for a rustling outside my window.

  It would be Rob climbing up the ivy-covered wall outside the house. He would hop our fence, come around to my side of the house, shimmy up the wall, and finally climb through the window into my room. It was sneaky and forbidden and delicious. No one ever really came to my room after I said good night, but the few times my mom did knock on my door, Rob scrambled into the bathroom or the closet. Otherwise he spent the night without anyone ever knowing he was in my bed.

  Or so we thought.

  About six months into this routine, my mother went out of town with friends and left my grandmother in charge of Jonathan, Sara, and me. That first night Rob—or Robbie, as my grandma called him—came over for dinner. Following dessert and some TV, he got up to leave. I walked him to the front door. My grandmother trailed behind us. At the door, Rob turned around and said, “Well, I guess I’ll see you soon.”

  “Bye,” I said. “Talk to you tomorrow.”

  Suddenly my grandmother took hold of Robbie’s shirt, stopping him from going any farther.

  “Robbie, don’t be silly,” she said. “I know you’re just going to drive down the driveway, park your car, and climb in Melissa’s window. You should stay here.”

  “Really?” I said, shocked.

  My grandmother nodded.

  “I like the idea of having a man in the house,” she said. Looking at me, she added, “And so do you.”

  Rob stepped back inside, shut the door, and put his arm around me. I put my arm around my incredibly cool grandma.

  “Just none of you tell Barbara,” she said. I thought, How cool is this? My grandmother had basically just given me permission to have sex.

  On the Little House set at MGM, it was easy for me to feel like things on the show were no different than they had been when we began. But there were changes. The beloved Walnut Grove of the Ingalls and Wilders, which had survived floods and tornados and other disasters, was facing its biggest challenge ever from NBC executives, who were mulling the previously unimaginable: cancellation.

  Although melodrama was still the core element, story lines in the eighth season strayed from the biblical struggles of Charles Ingalls and his family, causing ratings to slip. They brought in new kids because the rest of us had grown up, and they tried to create a new family around Ma and Pa with James, Cassandra, and Albert. They also brought in a new Nellie—Nancy—to create tension with the kids. But people had always tuned in to see Laura, Mary, and the original Nellie, and we just weren’t there like before.

  Most of that was unavoidable. While some, like Melissa Sue, had left the show, the rest of us had grown up, especially me.

  Rob entered the prairie picture. He visited frequently, and Mike and others let me know they approved of him. He came to the Simi Valley set (which he dubbed Screaming Valley) often, and was there when we shot the epic two-parter “Days of Sunshine, Days of Shadow.” In terms of ratings, it was that season’s savior. Viewers were riveted as Laura and Almanzo faced a tidal wave of disasters, maladies, and mishaps, a juggernaut of doom and gloom not seen since Noah said “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Consider: Almanzo had diphtheria, our first crop was destroyed by hail, and Almanzo had a stroke and suffered partial paralysis; then Laura gave birth, a tornado destroyed the house, and Almanzo got terribly depressed until Pa arrived and slapped him back to reality, when he realized he had to be a man and rebuild our house and our lives. As we shot those episodes, Rob joked they should be retitled “Get Doc Baker!”

  I contended that episode was when the show jumped the shark, but I have since learned that all those things did actually happen to Laura and Almanzo. Except we made it seem like it all happened in a matter of two weeks. Mike, who was finalizing the financial part of his divorce with Auntie Lynn and was about to find out his new wife, Cindy, was pregnant, wrote a season finale befitting a man who often appeared not only like he carried the world on his shoulders but like he could save it. Another two-parter, it began with James, Pa’s adopted son, played by thirteen-year-old Jason Bateman, getting shot during a robbery and Pa, Mr. Edwards, and Albert tracking down the criminals.

  In part two, James was in a coma and everyone thought he was going to die—everyone except for Charles. Refusing to give up hope, he took his adopted son to the top of a mountain, built a temple, and prayed for a miracle. At the end, there was a huge explosion as a bolt of lightning struck nearby, waking James and returning him to life. By this time, Mike had made up his mind he wasn’t going to be back the following season. He literally left Little House with a bang…a really bad computer-generated bang.

  For the first time in three years, I didn’t have a movie lined up during the show’s hiatus. But I was still just as busy. Somehow, through my mother, I got hooked up in early 1982 with First Lady Nancy Reagan, who was launching her Just Say No drug awareness campaign. I was named the youth spokesperson for her ACTION Drug Prevention Program and I traveled across the country with Mrs. Reagan, speaking to groups about the evils of drug use.

  Prior to our first appearance, her people gave me an intensive tutorial on the subject, which scared the shit out of me, and then invited me to meet the first lady at the White House in February. On the way to Washington, D.C., my mother and I stopped in New York, where I participated in Night of 100 Stars, a benefit for the Actors Fund of America. The gala took place at Carnegie Hall and assembled a once-in-a-lifetime group of famous actors, athletes, and artists.

  At one point during the taping of the show, my mother and I stepped into an elevator with Grace Kelly and Gregory Peck. My mom was paralyzed. Gregory Peck was her example of the perfect man: gorgeous, dashing, tall. And Princess Grace, well, she was the woman my mother, and consequently I, wanted to be. After a moment, Princess Grace turned to me and said, “Hi, Melissa. Remember me? I’m Stephanie’s mother.” My mother nearly passed out. She’d forgotten that on one of our Hawaiian vacations a few years earlier, I had spotted Princess Stephanie sitting on the beach amid her security and looking bored. I approached her as I would have any kid (“Hi, I’m Melissa”) and asked if she wanted to play ding-dong ditch with us. She did, and we had a fun time. (Princess Stephanie would come to play a role in my life later on. What is that famous line? “All past is prologue.”)

  “Hi,” I replied to Princess Grace.

  “Isn’t this fun?” she asked.

  “It is,” I said.

  And it truly was. In addition to star-studded elevator rides, there were dressing rooms overflowing with celebrities, including Bette Davis, Olivia de Havilland, Sidney Poitier, Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Whoopi Goldberg, Dinah Shore, Joe DiMaggio, Hank Aaron, Donnie Osmond, Raquel Welch, Barbara Walters, Rosa Parks, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, Rock Hudson, Jim Henson, Orson Welles, Cher, and Dr. Seuss.

  At one point during rehearsals, all hundred stars were directed to particular spots on bleachers for the big finale, and in a rare moment of silence, Bette Davis cracked, “If a bomb goes off in this building, Charlene Tilton is going to be the biggest star in Hollywood.”

  Brooke Shields collected autographs. On the day we shot the show, I ran around with her. We met Lena Horne, and Brooke dragged me along as she asked Diane Keaton and Warren Beatty for their signatures. As a result, W
arren sort of locked onto me and we talked for a bit as Brooke bopped around getting more autographs. Then she caught up with me and gasped, “Oh my God! You aren’t going to believe it.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Can’t tell you here,” she said, motioning for me to keep walking.

  “What?” I asked again a few steps later.

  “Warren Beatty was looking at your butt,” she said.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Yes, I swear,” she said. “I saw him.”

  My mother had me dressed in a skin-colored, ruched column Halston gown. My hair was huge. My makeup was crazy. I had a gold-snake arm bracelet. It was a pretty progressive look for a seventeen-year-old. I remembered Warren asking how old I was. After I said seventeen, he asked when I was turning eighteen. “Hmmmmmmm…” And that was the end of the conversation. I walked away, and a few moments later, Brooke told me the backstory.

  The next day, as my mom and I got ready to leave the hotel and catch our train to D.C., the phone rang. I heard my mother in the other room say, “Hello, yes, it is,” and then ask, “Who’s calling, please?” There was a pause, and then I heard her say, “Yeah, right, and I’m the queen of England. Who is this?” After another pause, she said, “No, really, who is this?”

  I listened from the other room. I was both fascinated and intrigued. Then she called me into the room. She put her hand over the receiver and said, “Warren Beatty is on the phone for you.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head.

  “He’s not?” I asked.

  “He is,” she said. “But I want you to say no. Whatever he asks you, no matter what it is, you’re going to say no.”

  I knew damn well who Warren Beatty was. I’d watched him in Splendor in the Grass, obviously. I’d marveled at him in Reds, which I considered a masterpiece. I’d drooled over him in Shampoo and Heaven Can Wait; hell, I’d spoken to him the night before. He was gorgeous, brilliant, and iconic. What was this business with no? I gave her a puzzled look.