Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  And there were the women. No matter where we went, they stuffed their phone numbers into Rob’s pockets. These were not girls my age with a crush on him. Grown women, including major celebrities, hit on him. They were very direct and frequently very graphic about what they wanted and were willing to do for him. At restaurants, I would go to the bathroom and when I came back there would be two or three women in my chair. I’d stand there and clear my throat and they wouldn’t move. And this was just the beginning.

  By this time, I was well into the ninth season of Little House. It would turn out to be the last full season. Did I know it was the end? No, none of us did. With Mike continuing as writer, director, and executive producer but essentially off as an actor, I was being rewarded for my loyalty. I was making a lot of money and a small percentage of the show itself had been negotiated into my contract. So I was in for the duration.

  The changes at Walnut Grove were ushered in immediately in a two-part opening episode aptly titled “Times Are Changing.” They included Ma and Pa’s bittersweet departure for Iowa, the introduction of Etta Plum (played by Leslie Landon) as the town’s new teacher, and the arrival of Almanzo’s dying brother and his ten-year-old daughter, played by Shannen Doherty.

  Shannen, then twelve, was an adorable little girl and very sweet. In her pigtails and dress, she would literally walk in my footsteps, following me closer than my shadow. She wanted to know what makeup I wore, what jewelry I liked, and did I prefer my Jordache jeans or my Calvin’s? (“Both, thank you very much…”) She looked up to me even though I was in many ways still a kid myself. In fact, she used to say she wanted to be just like me when she grew up. I would think to myself, Hey, I’m not a grown-up! But I understood: she had the stage mom, the pigtails, the dress, the show…she wanted to be like me.

  Nearly ten years later, as I was getting back together with my first husband, Bo Brinkman, after a trial separation, we attended therapy sessions. During our time apart, he’d moved into the Oakwood apartment complex in Burbank. Shannen, then a young adult, was living there, too. When Bo and I reconciled in therapy, he confessed everything that he’d done during our separation, and his laundry list of dirty deeds included a one-night stand with Shannen. That story in particular irked me.

  Then a few more years passed, and in 1991, the year Michael died, I was narrating a tribute to him at the Emmy Awards. As I came offstage, Shannen and Luke Perry were in the wings, getting ready to present an award. She looked at me and attempted to give me a hug. I pushed her away and said, “I don’t think so.”

  She looked surprised.

  “I know,” I said. “I know what you did with my husband.”

  She looked me square in the eye. I thought I saw a barely perceptible smirk. Then she said, “I told you that when I grew up I wanted to be just like you.”

  After that, I hurried away. It was too Single White Female for my taste.

  As originally established, Pa was the show’s patriarch, the one who made decisions and passed on advice, while season after season Ma did a lot of coffee pouring. They were not equal partners. With both of them gone, I watched to see how much coffee pouring I was going to do as Laura.

  Interestingly, in the ninth season, the writers made Laura a hybrid of the male and female protagonist. She wore a dress and poured the coffee, but she also worked, dispensed wisdom, and stepped into the middle of situations and defused problems the way Pa had when he was on the show. Her evolution both pleased and fascinated me. I felt like that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been able to pull it off. I wish the show as a whole had been able to step up in the same way.

  Toward the end, Mike returned for the emotional two-parter “Home Again.” Stepping back into the humble yet heroic shoes of Charles Ingalls, he brought his troubled son Albert back to Walnut Grove, thinking the good values of small-town life would turn him around. Then he discovered Albert’s real problem, a terrible drug addiction, and suddenly he had the fight of both their lives.

  Ironically, on the day we shot the scene where he came back and saw me for the first time, I felt guilty because I’d stayed up way too late partying. I hadn’t gotten much sleep, and I was hungover. Half Pint was half out of it.

  And so, it seemed, was the show. The ploy for ratings, so successful in the previous year’s “Get Doc Baker” episodes, didn’t work a second time. Nor did gimmicky guest stars from Billy Barty to an orangutan. And other blatant grabs for the viewers’ heartstrings, like the episode “A Child with No Name,” in which Laura gave birth to a son who died before she and Almanzo could name him, also failed; though it happened in real life, the episode had a been there, done that feel.

  After the season wrapped, I breathed a sigh of relief and returned to the splendid irresponsibility of my romance with Rob. He was the center of my universe. I wanted to hang out with him and goof around with our friends. In those days, before they were labeled the Brat Pack, they were a raucous, carefree boys’ club. Rob was the troublemaker; Emilio was the cruise director; and Tom was the one who’d say, “Guys, I don’t know if this is such a great idea.”

  The mischief we got into was harmless. We stayed up too late, watched TV, and on one particularly fun night, someone made pot brownies. I was not a pot smoker by any means. I had tried it a couple of times but either barfed or fell asleep. I ate one of the pot brownies with great trepidation and soon, I wasn’t asleep or barfing, I was laughing my ass off. We watched tapes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and laughed hysterically until we fell asleep on top of one another, piled up like little puppies. It was innocent, just a bunch of kids having fun, nothing weird or sexual at all. I woke up with sore abs from laughing so hard. I’d never had many friends my own age, and now I was suddenly part of a fraternity, this group that hung out together as if we were a bunch of friends at college. In a way, this was our college. We did the same things as our friends who were in school. Emilio dated a new girl every week, and Tom fell into a serious relationship with his Risky Business costar Rebecca De Mornay, who was a very serious actress herself.

  We made silly home videos, including a hybrid of Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of and Scooby-Doo. We shot it in the Sheens’ backyard, and it was about a mysterious monster called “La Pelou,” a name improvised by Charlie Sheen.

  One night at the Sheens’, the boys were telling stories about working with Coppola on The Outsiders. Sure, it was grueling, but their hardships paled in comparison to the stories Marty then told about working with Francis on Apocalypse Now.

  “You think you had it hard changing clothes in a gas station bathroom?” he said. “Let me tell you what it was like working with the same megalomaniac director in the jungle.”

  He recounted the now infamous stories about how he had been wasted while shooting the movie’s opening scenes, how he had lacerated his hand on the mirror and actually bled, and how production was shut down after he suffered a heart attack. But he also told a story that no one else knew. A couple months after his heart attack, he said, they were shooting scenes on the river in God knows where, and out of the blue Francis turned to him and said, “You know, I could cut that opening footage and make you look like Mickey Mouse.”

  Without missing a beat, Marty replied, “Well, that would make you Walt Disney, wouldn’t it, Francis?”

  There was a take-away to Marty’s story, of course, one he reiterated in a more direct manner another time. We were all together one night, all of us just hammered (Marty was still drinking then), when he turned to me and said very seriously, “Don’t be an actress. Quit now. Just get the fuck out of the business.”

  Don’t be an actress? Quit? Get out? I was baffled.

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “You don’t want to be a fucking actress,” he said with a pleading intensity that grew and grew as he focused his eyes on me. “It’s the worst job in the world. It will break your heart, and then it will break your heart again, and then just because it doesn’t give a fuck it will break y
our heart yet again.”

  I understood what Marty was saying, and why. Few businesses are crueler than show business. But as things turned out, acting wouldn’t break my heart. An actor would.

  thirteen

  CHOICES OF THE HEART

  Shortly after my nineteenth birthday, Uncle Ray brought me the TV movie Choices of the Heart, the true story of young American lay missionary Jean Donovan, who was killed along with three nuns by a military death squad while working in El Salvador in 1980. Until then, I was a wholly apolitical creature. I didn’t pay attention to the news, including the headlines about Jean’s murder. However, after reading the script, I was fascinated by this young woman from upper-class Connecticut who answered an inner calling to do relief work with poor, starving people in a war-ravaged country.

  To say the least, I had a very comfortable, insular, and safe existence. I wondered why this girl was willing to risk everything, and ultimately her life. I later found out Jean wondered the same thing, having once said, “I sit here and talk to God and say, ‘Why are you doing this to me? Why can’t I just be your little suburban housewife?’”

  Along with Rob, I was moving in some pretty rarefied air, and I wondered if I could ever give it all up to work with the Peace Corps. What would it take? Part of me wanted to be that person, which was interesting to acknowledge. Who wouldn’t want to be that pure and brave and giving of her heart?

  Doing it was another matter. I was the first to admit it required a leap of faith beyond what I was capable of. But I hoped to memorialize her courageous life and work in the movie. The project had a good pedigree: John Houseman was one of the executive producers, Joseph Sargent had signed on to direct, and there was a brilliant script by John Pielmeier, who had also written Agnes of God. We also signed Mike Farrell, Marty Sheen, Peter Horton, who had just married Michelle Pfeiffer when we shot Splendor in the Grass, Pamela Bellwood from Dynasty, and Helen Hunt, who I knew from a dance class I took.

  We set up production in Mexico City and a small town just outside of it that doubled as El Salvador. I’m convinced that if God ever gives the world an enema, he’s going to put the tube in Mexico City. I’d never been to a filthier place in my life. At our hotel, I was warned not to leave the windows open because the room would get dirty from the air.

  Don’t think for a minute, though, that that stopped me from having the time of my life there. I deeply liked and respected my director, Joe Sargent; as a former actor, he spoke my language. I wasn’t anybody’s kid on the set. There were no pats on the head. I was there by myself, and I felt the pressure to step up. During the shoot, I grew close to Peter. In fact, after he and Michelle divorced, she asked him if we’d had an affair. We didn’t, but we were probably closer than we should have been considering one of us was married and the other was, for all intents and purposes, living with a boyfriend.

  Once we got to Mexico, it was like a whole other world. It was my first experience traveling to what I now refer to as Pretendia. In Pretendia, everything is possible. In Pretendia, you’re always pretty. In Pretendia, you can make out with your costars and not get in trouble. In Pretendia, everyone works very hard and parties even harder.

  Pretendia is a very dangerous place for an addictive personality, though my addict self wasn’t yet at its self-destructive height. I was happy. Peter and I had fun exploring the nooks and crannies of that dirty, horrible city. Mike opened my eyes to politics, though to be honest, he was way too wonky and most of it sailed over my head. We saw Gandhi with Spanish subtitles, and it was still a moving film.

  I was miserable when I couldn’t be with Rob for the premiere of The Outsiders. Hearing about the fun over a terrible long-distance connection made me miss him even more. He flew to my side in Mexico as soon as he could break free from promoting the movie, and we had a wonderful time. All of us hung out together. I snuck Rob into a scene; he played a photographer at a press conference.

  At one point, a group that Mike and Marty were involved with, and I think Peter, too, tried to arrange for a bunch of us to travel to El Salvador. Because I was playing Jean, I was looked at, albeit briefly, as a symbol of what she was trying to achieve. It was all a little bit over my head, but I was game. Then word came that the Salvadoran government wouldn’t guarantee our safety, specifically mine. That jarred me. I’d grown up with some safety concerns, mostly as a result of crazies obsessed with Little House who wanted to take me away to some cave because they thought I was the second coming. But I had the hardest time understanding that someone might want to shoot me because a film I did was political in nature. I was naive.

  After we wrapped and were back in L.A., Jane Fonda decided it was time to mobilize young Hollywood. She had a function at her house that Rob and I attended. Melanie Griffith and Ed Begley Jr. were among the others there. Ed convinced all of us to cut up our gasoline credit cards to protest something. Pairs of scissors were passed around the room, and I blithely snipped my Chevron card in half. The next morning I called my business manager and asked him to get me a new one.

  “Why the hell did you cut it if you want another one?” he asked.

  “I don’t really know why,” I said. “Everybody in the room was doing it, so I felt like I should. But I need a new one, please.” I can be such a Gidget!

  Back in L.A., Peter and I went to see Scarface, which was Michelle’s movie. She was phenomenal, and the film blew both of us away. As the end credits rolled Peter said, “Oh my God, my wife is a huge movie star. My life is going to change.”

  I held his hand and nodded knowingly and sympathetically.

  “It is,” I said. “Just you wait.”

  What changed with me and Rob was our privacy. Although I was very recognizable when Rob and I fell in love, we were able to go about our lives, see movies, and have dinner in a restaurant without being stopped or interrupted for more than the occasional autograph. But after The Outsiders was released, Rob and I saw what privacy we had left get absolutely obliterated.

  Daily life went from ordinary to extraordinary. Restaurants comped meals, invitations to premieres, parties, and events arrived for every night of the week, the phone rang constantly, and women continued stuffing their numbers into Rob’s pocket with unnerving frequency. It was the first time I felt strong pangs of jealousy. The pretty surfer-girl blonds, beautiful, sexy, Farrah-like blonds, and supergorgeous, Catherine Deneuve–like blonds seemed to materialize wherever we went. I could never be that blond no matter how hard I tried.

  I felt threatened and I couldn’t possibly compete. In Eddie Murphy’s first standup movie, Delirious, he describes what it was like when he first became famous and all of a sudden women were coming at him from every direction. It was, he said, pussy, pussy, pussy. There was pussy falling out of his pockets. And that’s what it was like for Rob.

  I don’t know for sure, but I think he fooled around whenever possible. Now I’m a forty-four-year-old woman with a nineteen-year-old son, and I don’t know how any guy that age would say no. Boys that age are walking erections. Chicks are the whole reason they live. In addition, Rob was funny, charming, and gorgeous. He was irresistible. These stunning girls who looked great on the beach and didn’t have to wear pajamas over their bikinis pursued him. It was free candy. Of course he was going to sample them.

  The only way I could preserve what we had was to put blinders on. I didn’t want to know what he was doing. It scared the hell out of me.

  Even without the crazy female fans, I was uncomfortable being in this new world that was opening to us. Instead of bowling or hanging out at someone’s home, we found ourselves at much groovier social events, where, as we walked in, I prayed I wouldn’t blow it by saying something stupid, revealing my true self as a complete geek.

  To relax, I would have a glass of beer or a shot of tequila and a beer…or two…or three…. Cocaine helped, too. We were at a party in Malibu the first time I was offered coke. I said no thanks—and not because I’d been the youth spokesperson for the W
hite House’s Just Say No campaign. I was afraid I’d do it wrong. I pictured myself sneezing over the mirror, like Woody Allen in Annie Hall. But our friend said, “Just try it. You might like it.” So I summoned the courage and did a couple lines. I didn’t feel anything at first. About twenty minutes later, I did another little bump and took off. It was like walking through a door and stepping into a new, more confident, more gregarious skin.

  I immediately set out to find the best, most discreet dealers I could, and from then on, when Rob and I went to a party or a premiere, I’d do a bump, grab a drink, light a cigarette, bid good-bye to the image I had of myself as the dorky girl with the zinc oxide on her nose, and feel absolutely comfortable having a conversation about anything with anyone. I probably sounded like an idiot, but I was high enough that I didn’t give a shit.

  Nobody did. The talk was smarter, the music was better, everyone was more beautiful, and the sex was fantastic. The party-time atmosphere extended to the East Coast, too. In New York, Rob and I walked straight into the VIP areas at Limelight and Area. Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell gave me my first quaalude.

  In the spring of 1983, Victor French called and asked if I wanted to go on a talk show he was doing; it was either The Dinah Shore Show or The Tonight Show. He said, “You ought to do this thing to protest.” I heard the word “protest” and immediately said, “I’m down for a protest. What are we protesting?”

  “The cancellation,” he said.

  “The cancellation of what?” I asked.

  “The show,” he said. “Little House.”

  I had no idea.

  “What do you mean the show is canceled?” I asked.

  We spoke for a few minutes. Then I said I’d call him back after I talked with Mike. I got Mike on the phone and asked if we were canceled. He said he hadn’t received an official call from the network, but had heard Little House wasn’t listed among the shows on NBC’s fall lineup. I called Uncle Ray for more information and he confirmed we weren’t on the schedule.