Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  By the time I called Mike back, he had done his own reconnaissance work and he was furious that he had never received an official phone call from NBC president Brandon Tartikoff or anyone else at the network, letting him know the fate of the show. He had been on the network since 1959. Perceiving disrespect, Mike’s temper red-lined. He wanted to destroy all the sets—Walnut Grove, everything in Simi Valley.

  “I’m going to blow the whole fucking thing up,” he threatened.

  Uncle Ray called and asked him to put those thoughts on hold. He suggested they milk the situation for a couple of Little House movies.

  “Then do whatever you want,” he said.

  We got the go-ahead from NBC and then life took on a semblance of routine as we made three Little House movies, Look Back to Yesterday, Bless All the Dear Children, and The Last Farewell. The Christmas-themed Bless All the Dear Children, which was horrible, actually ran last. But we shot them out of order, and Mike saved his best for what the cast and crew knew as the show’s final curtain.

  For The Last Farewell, he devised a script where Charles and Caroline return for a nostalgic visit to Walnut Grove. But their reunion with Laura and friends sours when a coldhearted developer comes forward and reveals he owns the land on which the town is built. He offers to let them stay under his conditions, but the townspeople reject his proposal. Laura finds it so untenable she throws something through the kitchen window, prompting Mr. Carter, who’s there, to say, “You want to do something more than break windows? I got a wagon loaded to the gills with dynamite.”

  The whole town gathers in church the next day, and they devise a plan. Rather than surrender everything they worked to build, they decide to blow it up.

  That was Mike’s fuck-you to the network. He didn’t want to leave anything behind. TV and movie sets tend to get recycled over time, and none of us wanted to see Oleson’s Mercantile being used in some other production and have other people tromping through places where many of us had grown up.

  Certainly I had grown up there. I could look around and see memories everywhere: the first place I held a boy’s hand, my first kiss, the schoolhouse where I’d gone to school. Those were my places. They were all of our places.

  Mike shot everything except a few interiors and the final scene where the town residents say good-bye to their beloved Walnut Grove, which they’d blown up. On the day before we shot the good-bye scene, Mike and the crew went in with the special-effects guys for the demolition. Multiple cameras captured each building exploding in flames. None of us were allowed on the set that day. It was too dangerous.

  The rest of us arrived the following morning for our last day of work. Normally, at the ranch in Simi Valley, there was a spot on a hill away from the town where all the honey wagons and makeup and wardrobe trailers parked. We would get dressed and trickle into town, walking down either a path that led directly into town or a longer road that went to the lower portion of town by the mill and the footbridge.

  On this last day, though, no one wandered down. Without it being planned, all of us got dressed and waited until everyone was ready. We would make the final walk together. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

  The situation was ironic. I had spent the previous season forcing myself to go to work. I didn’t want to do it. Many days it was like pulling teeth and I had to tell myself, “Paycheck, paycheck, paycheck. You have to do this. You made a commitment. You’re a team player.” Once it was being taken away from me, I couldn’t fathom not doing the show every week. The implications of no longer being around all these people was unfathomable to me. It was like Joni Mitchell’s line in the song “Big Yellow Taxi”: Don’t it always seem to go / that you don’t know what you’ve got / till it’s gone.

  Finally, after the last one of us was ready, the entire Little House cast made their final trip to Walnut Grove. We walked in silence. I had no idea what to expect when we rounded the corner, but I didn’t expect what I saw. There was nothing there. All the businesses were gone. Only one structure was left: the church. I guess Mike didn’t have the balls to blow up a church. But chunks of its wall were missing as a result of shrapnel from the nearby Oleson’s Mercantile and Nellie’s Restaurant.

  I stopped and gazed in shock at the area where the town had stood. It was small. Just piles of rubble. There was something profound that struck all of us dumb. Seeing this town, albeit a made-for-TV town, reduced to dust made us feel like we had all lost a favorite relative. We were like a family that had gathered at a funeral. Everyone was in shock.

  They shot our reactions to the buildings being blown up. In between takes, we would tell stories, and every conversation triggered a flood of tears. One person would tell a story or bring up a memory, start to tear up, and within moments all two hundred of us were crying. Anytime one person cried, all of us cried. And I mean everyone—actors, makeup artists, wardrobe, grips, electricians, wranglers. It was like that all day.

  It was the longest good-bye, and it wasn’t nearly long enough as far as I was concerned, even though it was drawn out by a sumptuous steak and lobster lunch. The last shot of the day was all of us walking out of town from the church as we sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.” I would have chosen “The Long and Winding Road,” but John Lennon and Paul McCartney hadn’t written it in the 1800s.

  We finished shooting and the cast wound our way back to the trailers to change out of our wardrobe for the last time. I finished changing and came out of my room on the honey wagon. I hugged and kissed people, and cried with them, as they climbed into the shuttle that took people to their cars.

  But I wasn’t ready to go yet. I wanted one more look at the place where Walnut Grove had stood. I walked back to town, savoring this last time by myself. I felt as if I was retracing steps of my life. Everybody had taken mementos from the town. An idiot, I didn’t take anything. Instead, I wanted one last chance to gather memories, as if they could be scooped up and carried home in a basket like apples that had just fallen from the tree.

  When I rounded the corner, I saw Mike standing in the middle of the town. He was by himself, bathed in the orange glow of twilight. He had his back to me. I walked up to him without his knowing until he sensed me there. He turned around and he was crying. I immediately lost it, too. Standing by ourselves, we held on to each other and sobbed unabashedly until we ran out of tears.

  It was the healthiest grieving I’d ever done. I felt like I cried for everything in my life, including my father.

  “Thank you,” I said finally. After a deep breath, I added a drained and plaintive “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” he asked.

  “I don’t,” I said. “I don’t know. For all practical purposes, this has been my whole life. It’s weird.”

  “Well, don’t be scared,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. It’s not the end for you.” He enveloped me in his arms like a proud daddy, like someone who had genuinely watched me grow up. “For you, this is just the beginning.”

  I didn’t believe him. But he was right.

  HOLLYWOOD IS THE DEVIL’S TOILET

  fourteen

  THE WORLD ACCORDING TO…

  Aware I was feeling blue following the Little House sobfest, Rob invited me to visit him in Montreal, where he was shooting The Hotel New Hampshire. I flew up, excited for the change of scenery and to hang out.

  I was a huge fan of the earlier film made from John Irving’s sensational novel The World According to Garp. I identified with Garp, who didn’t know who his father was and was raised by a freewheeling, strong-willed woman. I don’t know if Rob knew it, but I had also read his Hotel New Hampshire script, as I did all his other scripts. I wanted to see what I was in for with the love scenes. Those were red flags.

  I liked New Hampshire. So did Rob. He was excited about working with director Tony Richardson, who virtually guaranteed the film would have the author’s oddball sensibility, and the talented cast led by Jodie Foster, Beau Bridges, Seth Green,
who was a baby, and Nastassja Kinski. When I learned she was involved, I thought, Uh-oh. I remembered Rob had drooled over her when we saw One from the Heart, and I had seen the guys go cuckoo over her exotic, overtly sexual, and very popular snake poster.

  My radar was on high alert when I got to Montreal. Everyone was in the same hotel, and I thought they were a madcap, loony group of people. Everybody was sleeping with everybody else, except for Rob, who I deluded myself into believing was an angel. I was able to visit him on the set until it was time for him to do his scenes with Nastassja. Then he didn’t want me there.

  At first, I stayed in our hotel room, stewing in worry and anxiety. Having never traveled by myself to a foreign country where I wasn’t involved in a project, I was scared to go out alone. I also have a notoriously horrible sense of direction (as in no inner GPS). Bored out of my head, I decided a good thing to do would be to teach myself how to smoke. After all, everybody smoked. So I buckled down and made a concentrated effort to smoke in a way that looked practiced and cool. I was such an asshole.

  At night, Rob would come back to the hotel for dinner, and on the weekend we would party like crazy with everyone else. We had such a good time that the four days I had planned to stay turned into two weeks. But he still wasn’t allowing me on the set. I began to sense something missing between us. All signs pointed to one reason, and I started to freak out about Nastassja. In person, she was gorgeous. I could only imagine her effect on Rob.

  One night I got really ripped and as the sun came up, I poured my heart out to one of Rob’s castmates. I said, “I don’t want to go home.” She asked why, and I opened my heart up to her.

  “It’s Rob and Nastassja,” I said. “It’s freaking me out.”

  “Don’t let it,” she said.

  “I can’t help it,” I said. “It’s going to happen.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said again.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Because,” she said, “she’s mine.”

  Relieved, I went back to the suite and wrapped up my visit on a good note. Despite my suspicions, Rob and I got along well that trip.

  Once I was back in L.A., though, I began to have a hard time getting ahold of Rob. He wouldn’t be in the room when I would call. Nor could the production office find him when I tried there. He would call me at his convenience, but then he skipped calling for a day or two. I knew what was going on.

  One night I called Rob’s room. After numerous rings, the hotel operator came on the line and asked if I would like to leave a message. Frustrated, I asked her to ring his room again. Instead of saying “of course,” she paused. She must have thought long and hard about what to do because a moment later she sighed and said, “Miss Gilbert, shall I ring Miss Kinski’s room?”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Mr. Lowe,” she said hesitantly, “just asked for a wake-up call from Miss Kinski’s room.”

  “Oh.”

  “Would you still like me to put you through?”

  I declined her offer and instead booked a flight to Montreal the next day so I could see for myself what was going on. I didn’t tell Rob. I was going to walk into a catastrophe or…something else. I had no idea.

  I let the hotel know in advance that I was coming and asked them to not mention it to Rob. I arrived before he finished work. The hotel let me put my stuff in his room and I went downstairs to surprise him in the lobby. I was by the entrance when I heard raucous laughter and saw Paul McCrane come through the door. Others from the film followed him in, including Jodie and her Yale roommate John Hutman, who was working on the movie.

  Then Rob and Nastassja walked in, talking to each other. Though it looked innocent enough, I knew it wasn’t. Shaking like a nervous Chihuahua, I called to him. Rob turned toward me, shocked by the sound of my voice. I saw the blood drain from his face, then his arms, and then his hands as he turned white.

  A moment later, though, his expression changed. It was as if he flipped a switch inside himself. Brightening, he yelled one of his pet names for me—Mouse, Bunny, Franchise, Baby Girl, I don’t remember which—and ran toward me, enveloping me in his arms and pushing me into a corner where he smothered me with affection, and at the same time hid me from the view of his castmates.

  His power of self-control was impressive, but his act didn’t work on me. We went up to his room and I confronted him.

  “I know you’ve been sleeping with Nastassja.” I said.

  Rob denied it. I said it again: “I know you have been sleeping with her.” Again he denied it. Finally, I said, “Look, last night I called your room and there was no answer. The hotel operator took pity on me and told me that you had just called down from Miss Kinski’s room asking for a wake-up call.”

  Rob was frozen; he stammered and stuttered, like a tire spinning in the snow. Finally, he said, “What? What the fuck? No way. I don’t get it. The hotel operator sold me out? Why the hell would she do that?”

  I walked up to Rob, put my finger in his face, and said very calmly and slowly, “You don’t fuck with America’s sweetheart.”

  With that, I walked out of the room and went to the airport, where I sat for the next twelve hours, waiting for my flight home.

  If I had felt beaten and humiliated before I left, I was in agony by the time I landed in L.A. My friend Kate Franklin picked me up from the airport and drove me straight to Jack in the Box. I bought a Chicken Supreme sandwich, took it back to my house, and gnawed at it while sitting cross-legged on the floor. Mayonnaise and snot ran down both sides of my face as I wailed, “Why? Why did he do it? What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t he love me?”

  For days I called Rob incessantly and hung up as soon as I heard his voice. I called her room, too. It became even more painful once the tabloids got wind of the affair. A broken heart is such a wonderful thing to share with the world. I loved going to the grocery store and seeing my face on the cover of tabloids just above a bright yellow banner that said DUMPED!

  I called Warren Beatty and asked what I should do. It was more like a plea. Tell me, what the hell am I going to do?

  He just said, “Oh, she”—meaning Nastassja—“is such a silly girl.”

  “What? This is not helpful,” I said. “What am I going to do? You don’t understand. My whole world is completely falling apart and all you can tell me is she’s a silly girl.”

  He was silent.

  “So apparently she’s a silly girl,” I continued. “Now what?”

  “It will pass,” he said. “It will pass.”

  “But he said he loved her.”

  “That, too, will pass.”

  “You’re not helping,” I said.

  Unfortunately, oracles typically communicate in riddles packaged as mysteries, and Mr. Beatty was among them.

  “What can I physically do right now to make this change?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do to change it. You’re going to have to ride it out and wait till he comes home. And he will come home.”

  “If he doesn’t?”

  “You move on.”

  My friends who were my age and relationship morons like me had said pretty much the same thing. But it seemed different coming from Warren. I managed to stuff away the Stalky Stalkerson side of my personality and try to maintain some dignity in a very painful situation.

  I was more upset after speaking to Rob, who said he wanted to think things over by himself in Paris and then Munich when he was done shooting, which, I assumed, meant he was going to follow her and continue their love affair. But he changed his mind and came back to L.A. By the time he arrived, I was mad. I had gone from crushed to perplexed to fucking pissed. He’d call and say he wanted to see me and talk, I’d tell him to go fuck himself. He called and pleaded.

  I said I didn’t want to see him. I told him that I hated him. I described how he had ruined my life, explaining if this was the way it was going to be between us, I wasn’t up to it. I
didn’t want to be that person who every time Rob went on location sat at home wondering who he was screwing.

  Eventually he convinced me to let him come see me. Once we were face-to-face, we talked and yelled and cried. He let me get everything out of my system, and then like two comets colliding, we kind of exploded in each other’s arms. When all was said and done, after something like fourteen or fifteen hours of crying, screaming, talking, making love, carrying on, and laughing, we got very quiet. I looked at him as if he had turned into a puzzle I couldn’t figure out.

  “Can you just tell me why?” I asked. “I get that she’s beautiful, but you’ve got to explain it to me.”

  Rob thought about it. I saw he wanted to provide real insight.

  “It’s like when you walk down the beach and you see a beautiful shell in the sand,” he said. “You either pick it up and listen to it. Or you walk by. I had to listen to the shell.”

  My eyed widened.

  “That is the stupidest analogy ever!” I said. We laughed our little asses off. Humor was our savior. With that, we were back together.

  I sometimes felt self-conscious about not landing feature films, especially as our circle of friends widened to include Sean and Chris Penn, Tim Hutton, and Matt Dillon, among others, all of whom were rocketing to movie-star status. Even Michael J. Fox, who Rob dubbed Money J. Fox, was making the transition onto the big screen. But my life was no less busy. I starred in the made-for-TV movie Family Secrets, a drama about three generations of women helping one another through problems. The cast featured Stephanie Powers and Maureen Stapleton. Again, I snuck Rob into a scene, this one where Stephanie and I are in the grocery store. As we walk past a cute guy in the produce section, I turn to check him out. It was Rob.