Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  Well, over the years, various people and members of the press had described my mother as determined, purposeful, strict, protective, and overprotective. And it was true. Every syllable was accurate. Suddenly, though, she took all of those qualities to a new level as she said, “You. Will. Say. No.”

  “What is it he’s going to ask?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Whatever it is, it’s no. No, no, no, no.”

  “Okay,” I said, and took the receiver from my mother. “Hello?”

  “Hi, it’s Warren,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m getting ready to go to the White House,” I said.

  “Would you like to have lunch?” he asked.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I can’t. I’m going to the White House. I have a meeting with Mrs. Reagan.”

  “All right,” he said. “Let me ask you one more question.”

  “Okay.”

  “When’s your birthday?”

  “May eighth.”

  With that, the conversation ended and I relayed everything to my mother, who asked, “Why did you tell him your birthday?”

  “Because he asked,” I said.

  My mom sort of shook her head, and we headed to Washington. (Three months later, I would get a phone call from Warren, who sang “Happy Birthday,” and we began a friendship that continues to this day.)

  At the White House, we were escorted through an entrance off-limits to the public and taken to the private quarters into a room done in a yellow floral theme, where Mrs. Reagan soon joined us. Over tea and cookies, my mother and I talked with her about the program. We also talked about Hollywood and Los Angeles, where she and the president had lived.

  I felt the mood in the room change as we talked. I wouldn’t call it intimate, but it was less formal and more personal. Mrs. Reagan started to talk about her life at the White House and how she thought people had misjudged her, and she said it was not just unfair but hurtful.

  My mother sympathized with her, noting Mrs. Reagan had been through so much since her husband had taken office, in the last eleven months in particular, since the assassination attempt on the president. Prompted by that comment, Mrs. Reagan started talking about the day her Ronnie was shot. As she shared details, she began to cry, which made me uncomfortable. Then her tears turned into a full-on sob and my mom scooted over on the couch and put her arms around her.

  My head was spinning. A few hours earlier, Warren Beatty had asked me out to lunch, and now the first lady of the United States was weeping in my mother’s arms. But it would get even weirder.

  The official reception for ACTION was the next day. My mother and I stood in the reception line to meet Mrs. Reagan. I grew more excited the closer we got because of the special bond we now had with her. I watched people ahead of us shake her hand and get their picture taken with her.

  Then I stepped up in my way-too-grannylike St. John knit suit, wearing way too much makeup—not quite drag queen level but close—and with my big hair. Mrs. Reagan said hello, and, while looking me in the eye, asked, “And you are?”

  It stopped me halfway through my own hello. Just fourteen hours earlier, she had been crying in my mother’s arms. Now she had no idea who we were. What was the deal? Had she been acting the previous day? But who would do that? And why? I’ll never know.

  Later, I assumed she was so overwhelmed by the number of people she met every day that she went on auto pilot, turning off everything but her smile, her handshake, and a scripted greeting. By the end of the tour, though, she no longer looked at me like a stranger. Able to recognize me through her thicket of handlers and Secret Service agents, she knew my name and complimented my increasingly strong and emphatic delivery to large groups of teenagers and their parents about the dangers of drug use.

  Indeed, I got into the part of America’s antidrug cheerleader. It was truly heartfelt. I had been tutored and taught about the evils of drug use virtually my entire life. The training I got from the White House was intense and I practiced what I preached. Never, ever, ever, ever would I do illicit drugs.

  What is it they say about good intentions?

  twelve

  I’M EIGHTEEN, AND I LIKE IT

  Around the time Rob turned eighteen (for the next two months until my eighteenth birthday, we joked that having sex with me could get him twenty years in jail), word was circulating through Hollywood that Francis Ford Coppola’s next project was a big-screen adaptation of S. E. Hinton’s classic coming-of-age novel The Outsiders. Everybody, and I mean every young actor in town, all the young lap maidens and princes, auditioned for the movie. Some of us went on to screen-test, including my brother and me.

  The buzz and chatter surrounding the project guaranteed it was going to start a new chapter in Hollywood’s history, usher in a new generation. It was palpable. For many involved, it was the last time they themselves would ever be outsiders looking in on the star-making process. Afterward, they would be the stars, full-fledged insiders, and way too involved to ever look back with detachment.

  Rob tested and was among those cast early; I was cut from the first group. While the cast was put together, Francis’s costly musical One from the Heart came out. It starred Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr, Raul Julia, and Nastassja Kinski. Rob and I went to see it. As I recall, he was barely interested in the neon-lit sets of Las Vegas that bankrupted Francis or the marvelous soundtrack from Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle that I still listen to today. He focused instead on Kinski. Several times, he remarked, “She’s really something.”

  Call it a woman’s instinct, but I was unable to find anything kind or desirable about her, and said so: “She’s not that great. She has kind of a weird nose.” If that wasn’t the pot calling the kettle black! After the movie, he brought her up again. I let it slide. Later, I would regret not having paid closer attention.

  In the meantime, the cast for The Outsiders was put together. It included Rob; Emilio Estevez, a friend from Santa Monica High School; Tom Cruise, whom we knew; Matt Dillon; C. Thomas Howell; Patrick Swayze; and Ralph Macchio. I bid Rob a tearful good-bye as he and the others embarked on a four-month shoot in Tulsa. He was excited; as far as I knew, all of them were. They had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

  I was on the receiving end of Rob’s many phone calls and letters, which started out mostly as complaints about the hardships on and off the set, though over time they changed into a sort of litany of triumphs, both personal and for the movie in general. The Outsiders told of the tensions and clashes between two groups of boys from different parts of a small town, the poor greasers and the rich kids known as the South Side Socs. Rob’s account of behind-the-scenes drama was often as gripping as the movie.

  From the time they arrived, Francis created tension among the actors playing the Socs and the greasers. The Socs were put up in a nice hotel and provided trailers with dressing rooms, while the others stayed in a place that was significantly more downscale and were made to change clothes in whatever public restroom was available. (Eventually, Gray Frederickson, one of the executive producers, put his foot down and screamed, “Francis, you fat-fuck pasta chef, these kids need dressing rooms!”)

  With this group, though, the hardships didn’t preclude hijinks. There were many phone calls where Rob, Emilio, and Tom, as well as other cast configurations, shouted into the phone all at once or passed it back and forth, letting me know they had been drinking and carousing, as if I couldn’t hear for myself. I also heard about the time they put bubble bath in the town’s fountain, about what Leif Garrett did when he was wasted, and how Diane Lane desperately tried to keep her head above water as the sole female among all these lunatic guys.

  It sounded like a blast, but I wasn’t allowed to visit. As my mother explained, nice girls didn’t travel alone.

  In May, I celebrated my eighteenth birthday on the roof of Uncle Ray’s building on the Sunset Strip. The party included a DJ, all my friends, and Rob’s younger brother, Ch
ad, who was like my own little brother. From location, Rob sent a couple dozen roses with a card that said, “To my legal baby.”

  I spread my wings by moving fourteen feet from the house into the guesthouse. That seemed like a big jump. I didn’t realize the implications of turning eighteen for a child actor who had been earning a couple million dollars or more for at least the past four or five years. I didn’t know I was responsible for my union membership or that I would receive my Coogan account, a percentage of the money I’d earned, which was considerable, that had been put away until I became an adult.

  I had some inkling that I was financially well-off, that I could handle some stuff on my own. Magazines reported my salary at thirty thousand dollars per episode. Despite my ignorance of the business side of my career, I knew that over twenty-two episodes (a full season), that added up to a pretty good sum of money.

  I’d only discussed money once with my mother. A few years earlier, I went to her and Harold as we were getting ready to go on our annual Easter trip to the Kahala, and I said, “Listen, I want to fly in first class with you guys.” Even though I was one of the most recognizable actors on TV, I still flew in coach with the kids when we traveled. My mother and Harold flew in first class. I also said that I wanted my own room—and room service, like the other kids in the other families we’d be with.

  “I’ll pay for it myself,” I said.

  My mom gave me a bewildered look and said, “Of course. Whatever you want.”

  Occasionally Rob referred to me as “Franchise.” It was one of the many pet names he had for me. I earned this one because I came with a complete package of people, everything a star needed: the manager, the business manager, the publicist, the mother, the manicurist, and the hairstylist. And they could be intrusive.

  But they were an extension of me, part of the way I did business. The deal was simple: love me, love my team. Though Rob had never seen anything like it, he understood. My mother was team captain and coach. The two of us had our difficult moments, disagreements, and communication problems, but we were impossibly close. A clinician would have called us codependent. Someone else would have defined our relationship as unconditional love.

  We had laughed our way through the Just Say No tour, and we would have won a gold medal if there’d been a competition for mother-daughter power shoppers. It had always been that way with us. I told her almost everything, certainly as much as she needed to know, and in turn I received a front-row seat to her one-woman effort to get the most out of life, whether she was guiding my career, Jonathan’s, or Sara’s, or chasing down another potential husband after she split from Harold.

  Over the years, we had numerous discussions about the myriad rules she imposed or made up under the guise of my well-being. But until I turned eighteen, I never questioned her role in my career. Then one day, shortly after my birthday, she sat me down and said we needed to take care of some stuff. She was very matter-of-fact about it. She said, “We’ve always been partners in your career, and I think we should continue to be partners.”

  “Absolutely,” I said without hesitation.

  I was surprised by the statement. I had never considered any other arrangement. I took the yin and yang of our relationship in my professional life for granted.

  “Absolutely,” I said again. “Of course.”

  “Good, and now that you’re eighteen, we need to make sure this is okay,” she said. “I think it would be a good idea if we drew up papers and, you know, shared everything like partners, fifty-fifty.”

  Turning eighteen didn’t mean I was more mature or smarter. It simply meant I was legally an adult. I could vote. And I had to take responsibility for my life. As for business, my mom was still my mom. She was still in charge, the oracle who guided me and who I turned to with questions. Beyond that, she was single, and she deserved to be taken care of. She had sacrificed a lot for me. As a result, we signed a contract, giving her half of everything I earned, including my Coogan account, till I turned twenty-five.

  Though I didn’t see anything wrong with it, Rob asked, “Are you sure you want to agree to that? I mean, are you really sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I owe my mother everything.”

  I signed the papers and we were good. My mom and I were partners and I was in love and nothing else really mattered.

  Actually, one thing was bugging me.

  My nose.

  Lord almighty, I hated my nose. When I was little, it was cute. But as I grew up, it grew wider and flatter and it had a little bump in it. And the fact is your nose keeps growing after the rest of you stops. I feared I would stop at five feet four inches but have the nose of a six-five NFL lineman. Every time someone did my makeup, they shaded the sides of my nose. The first time that happened I asked what they were doing. Then I made sure every makeup artist I worked with contoured it to look narrower.

  A couple of months after my birthday, I said, “Let’s make it permanently narrower.” The decision wasn’t a big deal. In my family, a nose job was a fairly common and accepted procedure. My mother and I began consulting with doctors.

  One day, shortly after we began the search process, my mom was at a luncheon in Beverly Hills when she saw a girl with an adorable nose. She stared as if she’d just seen a sweater at Nieman Marcus that she thought would look good on me. She approached the girl and said, “Excuse me, this is going to sound like a really rude question, but I’m going to ask anyway. Were you born with that nose or did you have it done?” The girl laughed, gave my mother the name of her plastic surgeon, and we made an appointment.

  Even though elective surgery, or luxury surgery as I call it, is much different than necessary surgery, I still came out of the procedure with my face hurting like hell. The doctor broke the bones beside my nose, drew them in to make my nose narrower, shaved down the cartilage and the bump, and rebuilt the tip. To stop the bleeding, I’m told they packed my nose with large strips of gauze that had been soaked in liquid cocaine. I was also sent home with a heavy dose of painkillers. As I found out later, those pills didn’t actually stop the pain. They just made it so I didn’t care. And I liked not caring.

  It was the first time I was ever really high on drugs, and though I was the girl who had crossed the country telling others to “just say no,” I enjoyed the sensation of my insides turning milky and calm. There was a real sense of belonging. All the edges in my life dulled. I loved everyone and everything. Though I didn’t abuse the painkillers, my reaction to them was more than typical.

  Despite the discomfort, I was chatty through my recovery. After I spent a few quiet days at home, the doctor pulled out the packing, slapped a bandage across my nose, and, after warning I would be a little bruised, said I could resume my normal life. I stepped back into the flow without giving a moment’s thought to hiding the fact I’d had my nose done. It wasn’t a secret.

  Oddly, it wasn’t even an issue when Little House started up again at the end of the summer. Though I returned with a completely different nose, not a single person asked me about it. Nobody said, “What did you do, Half Pint?” I assume it was because the change wasn’t drastic. I wasn’t like Jennifer Grey, who got her nose done and looked like a completely different person. My nose simply fit my face better.

  But there would be complications. As it healed, the tip became very puggy, making me look like everybody else who’d had a nose job, and about a year after the original operation I would go in again to have it fixed. After, it still wouldn’t be right. When I was about twenty, I would go in a third time and meet with a specialist who did nothing but fix botched nose jobs and other highly specialized prosthetic procedures. Because he had to redo the entire nose, as well as take cartilage from behind my ear, it would be the most painful of my recoveries.

  Again, I would hide it from no one. It wasn’t a big deal. Back then there weren’t any paparazzi stalking celebrities. Nobody gave a shit. (I certainly didn’t.) If they had, I would have wondered why.

  Af
ter Rob came back from four months in Tulsa, there was a little decompression, but we were really happy to see each other and be back together again. I didn’t know what he did or who he did while he was gone, but it didn’t have any bearing because he was home and he was mine. We knew there was a buzz around The Outsiders, but we were still somewhat oblivious to the way it would change our lives.

  Soon after his return, Rob wanted to buy a new car. He drove a beat-up Mazda 626 and traded it in for a spiffy new Mustang GT. It was the first big thing he bought for himself. A short time later, I bought a souped-up convertible Toyota Celica at a charity auction. Rob and I couldn’t have been happier. We thought those silly cars had changed our lives. We did drive many miles to see each other between Encino and Point Dume, but those cars were symbolic of a change that was taking place whether or not we knew it or liked it. We were moving into the fast lane.

  We were nervous. We were giddy, too. Having money, freedom, and fame was new to both of us. It was like a fast, powerful car itself, and we had to learn how to handle it.

  I spent weeks watching Rob loop his lines in a studio. The postproduction was long and hard. One day a couple girls showed up at the studio to see Rob, and he was uncomfortable. He stammered a surprised hello, until they got the message he didn’t want to see them. My antennae went up, and I made catty comments. I didn’t directly ask if he had slept with either or both of them; I didn’t want to know. It was still easy to ignore. But that would change pretty quickly.

  As press for The Outsiders began, Rob and the other guys in the movie bid good-bye to their last days of anonymity. The pendulum of fame had shifted. They were put on an elevator that began to take them to levels of fame few people ever experienced. We would walk into a room and practically hear the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of heads turning. People pointed and whispered.