Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  We were doing a scene where he was supposed to be watching television and change the channel with the remote control. During rehearsal, he refused to do it. The director pleaded with him to change his mind, but Bill refused. He said he would gladly walk across the room and change the channel. He just wasn’t going to use the remote. The director explained that getting up from the sofa would break up the scene. Bill didn’t care.

  “I’m not holding the fucking remote,” he said.

  “Why?” asked the frustrated director. “Why the hell won’t you hold it?”

  “I don’t hold anything that looks like a phaser,” he said. “Got it?”

  I had to run off the set, lest I upset the poor schmuck director even more with my laughter.

  Bruce was a ray of sunshine during that experience, though he hit me with a surprise on his first day visiting me. He said he had something to talk to me about. I always hate when people start a conversation like that, especially when they are as serious as Bruce was. It’s a preamble for bad news. Bruce said he had seen Annie, one of his exes, a few days earlier. I was surprised, obviously. But I played it cool and very intentionally appeared calm and collected, even though I could feel the acid begin to churn in my stomach.

  “How’d that go?” I asked as nonchalantly as possible.

  “Well, I just wanted to make sure it was really over,” he said.

  “And?” I remained blasé, as if the answer would not faze me either way.

  “It’s really over.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, not daring to look at him; otherwise he might see that I was freaking out.

  “Because the whole time I was sitting across from her, and she was going on and on about stuff, I could only think about you,” he said. “I wondered where you were. I wondered what you were doing. I wanted to be with you.”

  That was it. I leapt into his arms, wrapping my legs around his waist, smothering him with kisses. Mine, mine mine…he was all mine!

  I had that next weekend off and we snuck off to the Hastings House on Salt Spring Island, a gorgeous hideaway in an out-of-the-way cove that was like something out of a romance novel, it’s so perfectly charming and peaceful. We were on fire for each other. It was intense, passionate, and hot. Then, back in Vancouver, we spent hours walking around Stanley Park and I realized we were even more compatible than I’d thought.

  Bruce had been back in L.A. for a couple weeks when he called and said he had been out to dinner with friends and run into his ex again. It had been an ugly scene, he said, but the gist was that he was lonely. Since I had Saturday and Sunday off, I offered to fly home and spend the weekend with him.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “If you’re lonely,” I said, “yeah, I’ll come home for the weekend.”

  “No one has ever done that for me before,” he said.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever done that for anyone before,” I replied. “But I’m willing.” I spent a lovely weekend with Bruce, then went back on location.

  It sounds like it was all moonlight and roses, perfect and beautiful, but there were glitches along the way. Sometimes I would drink too much and say something out of line. Bruce, who’s half Irish, knew how to argue right back, especially when alcohol was involved. We didn’t clash on the epic scale of Colleen Dewhurst and George C. Scott, but on occasion we rattled the walls.

  I was hesitant but hopeful when we began getting the kids together. Bruce and I had different parenting skills, but the family meet-and-greets went pretty seamlessly. I credit the boys, my son Dakota and Bruce’s boys, Sam and Lee. They got along like long-lost best friends. As I told Bruce then and many times since, the best gift he has ever given me are his remarkable sons.

  Only one person had a difficult time with our relationship, and that was Bo. He came over to my house one day to pick up Dakota and flew into a rage after seeing a copy of the Hollywood Reporter on the table with Bruce’s address on it. He threw open the front door with such fury that the doorknob punched a hole in the wall, then he fishtailed his truck across my front lawn and took off.

  The melodramatic craziness continued a few nights later when he called and screamed at me until I cried. Bruce was there at the time, and he grabbed the phone. I could only hear his side of the conversation, which went something like this: “Son, son, son…leave the lady alone…son…yes, I am…yes, I am…in your bed…go ahead, because I’ve got a safe full of my own.”

  Bo blamed me for many of his problems, including his difficulty getting work in Hollywood. He claimed I had destroyed his career by calling him an alcoholic. That made me laugh. The entertainment industry may be the only business in the world where it’s not only okay to be an alcoholic, it may be a requirement.

  No, he had to take responsibility for his own behavior. But he wasn’t ready to do that just yet.

  In the meantime, Bruce earned raves from my friends, the Scalias and the Peckinpahs, and that year, we enjoyed a fabulous and loving Christmas and New Year’s Eve. But the good times were too much for Bruce to handle. One night, as we watched TV at his house, he turned to me and said, “I hate to say this, but I think we’re better friends than lovers, and I think we should just be friends.”

  I didn’t understand. He might as well have punched me in the gut.

  “Drive me home,” I said.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Drive me home,” I said. “I’m not staying here.”

  My house was only a few blocks away. We got dressed and in the car he said, “I think I just put my foot through the Rembrandt.”

  “Oh, you did worse than that,” I said.

  A few days after his blunder, Bruce attempted a rapprochement. We had plans to go on an all-expenses-paid celebrity ski vacation to Austria, and he called and asked if I still planned to go with him. I did not respond kindly. I wanted to know how he saw my role on the trip—as his ski valet, his pal, his golf partner…I rattled off a long list of possibilities. He begged me to let him come over and talk.

  Within minutes, Bruce was at my house, pleading with me to forgive him and explaining that he was scared to death about getting into a serious relationship. He was already a failure at marriage, he said. He didn’t want to tie the knot again. He didn’t want more kids. He didn’t want to get deeper into something he thought he would eventually screw up, so he got it over with.

  “But here’s the problem,” he said. “I can’t not be with you. So what are we going to do?”

  “Did I say I want to get married? Did I say this was for the rest of our lives?”

  Even though I had a sense that it would be for the rest of our lives, I realized my big, strong cowboy was a scaredy cat when it came to relationships. I could imagine him breaking into a rash when he heard the word “commitment.” I thought about what pussies men are and I wanted to laugh; but I didn’t.

  Instead, I told him that we should just take it a little bit at a time and see where we ended up. In the meantime, I advised him to just live the dream. I told him that over and over. Don’t worry. Just live the dream.

  “I don’t know what the dream is, but live the dream,” I said. “It can all be yours, whatever you want.”

  We went to Austria, and we were having a good time up until the point when I learned that Bo had filed a report with Child Protective Services, claiming that my nanny was abusing Dakota. Apparently the guy who took care of my animals said he had witnessed it when I wasn’t around. It didn’t seem possible to me. But as I said to Bruce, what if it was true? And if it was true, what was I doing in Austria?

  I became hysterical. I burned up the long-distance phone lines, trying to regain control of the situation. If Bo’s intention was to make me crazy, he did a good job. I downed glasses of wine and schnapps. I took my frustration out on Bruce. We got into one of our big knockdown, drag-out fights and didn’t speak to each other for two solid days.

  I was a mess until we got back home. Then I fired the nanny, got my lawyer involved,
and waited for more bad news. I was like one of those women in Westerns, standing behind the front door with a rifle and waiting for the bad guys to show up. Just to add to the bizarreness, I went into the hospital for some elective surgery. Okay, I went in for a boob job.

  I thought about canceling the surgery given the circumstances. But hey, the procedure had been scheduled for months and I didn’t see how postponing it would help. In fact, I thought new boobs would make me feel better. I was pretty comfortable with my body, but Dakota had destroyed my breasts after nursing for more than a year. Bo had once described them as socks full of marbles with knots at the top, and I was so uncomfortable about the way my boobs looked that I rarely took my shirt off around Bruce.

  So I had the surgery, and two days later, the investigator from Child Protective Services showed up at the house to interview me. Her timing couldn’t have been worse. When she arrived, I was in the midst of having a severe reaction to the pain medication and residual anesthesia. I wanted this woman to think I was normal and my home was a paradigm of well-being. Instead, I looked like the psycho, junkie actress who got new tits for Christmas.

  Apparently that was acceptable. The complaint went away after her investigation, as it should have. There was no story. It was bullshit. My chest healed without a story to tell, either. I was glad I went in for the lift, perk, augmentation—whatever you call it. Bruce was even happier. For months afterward, he asked, “How are the girls?” Then he asked how I was. I was great. With my new boobs, I had the body I had wanted my entire life.

  I played a cop in my next movie, With Hostile Intent. Bruce came to the Florida set to visit and enjoyed seeing me in a uniform. At the end of the shoot, Dakota was also on the set with me.

  Like many working mothers, I had my hands full trying to juggle my job and my number one role, being a mom to my nearly four-year-old son. One night he was cranky from what looked to be a bite on his stomach. By the next afternoon, he had a full-blown case of the chicken pox. I called my mother and asked if I had ever had the chicken pox. She cavalierly said I had, which was a relief. I took care of Dakota, letting the poor itchy kid sleep in my bed and waking up with him several times to reapply the Caladryl lotion.

  Dakota healed and flew back to L.A. with Bo’s mom, Lou, aka Moomoo. A couple of weeks later the film wrapped and I got on the plane to go home. A half hour into the flight, I started to feel achy and sick. I looked at myself in the lavatory mirror and my face was blotchy with spots. By the time we got home, my entire body was covered with them, head to toe. I called my doctor, who said, “You are going to be one miserable puppy.” He was right; I was. He also warned me to call him if I got a headache. If that happened, he said it could mean the chicken pox were in my brain. Oy!

  They didn’t go there. But I had them everyplace else, including my new beautiful boobs. I had a fever and my face was swollen up like I’d just done ten rounds with Mike Tyson. The therapy was to keep me sedated—on Benadryl, Valium, and Advil—with mittens on my hands so I wouldn’t scratch. I was swollen and totally out of it when Bruce came over to watch the Academy Awards with me. He had a bout of pink eye. Drooling, with pustules all over my face and wearing flannel jammies and mittens, I turned to him and said, “Gable and Lombard, my ass.”

  After my chicken pox cleared, I went to Toronto for the movie Shattered Trust: The Shari Karney Story, the real-life story of an attorney who, while representing a woman in an incest case, learns that she was molested by her father as a small child. Because I’d been doing so much traveling—three locations in six months—I arrived muddled. On my first day there, they dyed my hair black. I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, flipped on the light, saw a raven-haired woman in the mirror, and screamed. It was me.

  I got back home soon enough, but within a month I left with Bruce for New Orleans, where we costarred in the movie House of Secrets, an eerie thriller about a woman who suffers after killing her abusive husband. It was the first time Bruce and I worked together and we had a blast. I was the suffering wife, he the abusive husband. NBC knew full well they were casting a real-life couple; they wanted the play in the press.

  It was a violent movie, and Bruce and I had to get physical with each other, which was surprisingly fun. Doing violent stuff on film is so much easier when you really trust the actor you are working with. I was far more uncomfortable shooting our love scene. I felt like that was too personal and private to share with other people.

  There was one sequence toward the end of the movie that called for me to wear a sheer, sexy nightgown. They made me a beautiful light green silky nightie, and I could wear nothing underneath but a skin-colored thong. Not a problem for me with my new boobs.

  Interestingly, the network gave specific notes about my breasts. They wanted to see shape but not color. Which was another way of saying they wanted to see my tits but not my nipples. Because of the sheerness, I couldn’t wear breast petals, the little pads that make nipples disappear under clothing. Instead, my boobs needed their own hour in the makeup chair.

  For one of the scenes, I had to run down Bourbon Street at night in nothing but my nightgown. At 2:00 a.m., the time we shot, Bourbon Street was a wild, fun, frenzied zoo, and the police were out on a blue flu strike that night, so there wasn’t an officer in sight. I was supposed to be terrified as I fled down the street, thinking that Bruce was stalking me from beyond the grave. But instead, I was just trying not to crack up, because as I ran there were a bunch of guys with wedges of cheese on their heads and carrying Hurricanes, running alongside me and screaming, “Hey, Half Pint, show us your tits!”

  On one of our days off we had a crazy night out on the town, whose high or low point, depending on your perspective, came when Bruce pushed me into a strip club for women called Cajundales. I knew it was time to leave when I was yanked onstage by a male stripper and saw a woman with no teeth in the front row turn to her friend and say, “Ain’t that Melissa Gilbert from Little House on the Prairie?” As I hurried out, I saw Bruce in the back of the club, laughing his ass off at me.

  The last few weeks of the shoot, Bruce and I stayed in a cottage at a bed-and-breakfast in Covington, Louisiana. It was a magical time for us. We’d come home from work and drink wine while listening to the frogs and bugs making a wall of sound outside while we decompressed and debriefed. Then we’d make love, sleep, and start all over again the next day.

  I was determined to bail myself out of the quarter-million-dollar debt I had when Bo and I split. We’d lived beyond our means for way too long. It was so bad that at one point, my then stepfather, Manny Udko, who owned a fantastic jewelry business, offered to loan me money. I loved Manny, he was a mensch. He had a great warmth and charm and he was generous and fiercely protective of those he loved. When he and my mom first got together, I loved listening to his stories about growing up in Boyle Heights in L.A. and how, as a young man, he hung with real gangsters, like Meyer Lansky and Ben (Bugsy) Siegel, and he remained a true friend years after he and my mom split.

  My goal was to pay Manny back, dig myself out of the debt, and be able to buy a house of my own, so I crammed one more movie in before the end of the summer. It was a stinker called Dying to Remember that Ted Shackelford and I shot in Vancouver. There are a few reasons to do a movie: the location, the script, the director, the cast, or the money. The best projects have all or more than one of those elements. This was one I did strictly for the money.

  It was so bad that Ted and I entertained ourselves between scenes and during rehearsals by inventing alter egos for ourselves: two pompous, overly stuffy English actors, Cecil and Gwenny.

  Some unpleasantness with Bo crept into my life again during production, and Ted calmed me down one day by telling me that he had gotten divorced years before and had a deal with his ex-wife to pay her a percentage of his earnings. They didn’t have any children, so he just stopped working for a while. I thought that was hilarious.

  On September 21, the one-year anniversa
ry of my first date with Bruce, I had to be in New York for press and talk shows. To celebrate, Bruce came with and we went out to a romantic restaurant on the East Side. We were enjoying ourselves when Bruce suddenly leaned over the table to ensure privacy and said, “What would you say if I asked you to marry me?”

  I was jarred by the unexpected question.

  “What would you say if I said yes?” I replied.

  “Oh, I’d be happy,” he said.

  “Okay, then,” I said.

  “So I guess this means we’re engaged,” he said, stopping just short of making it sound like another question.

  “I think it—yeah, that’s what it means.”

  “No, we are. We are now engaged.”

  I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room and called my friend Sandy. I repeated the conversation I’d just had with Bruce and asked her to translate it for me.

  “Am I engaged or not?” I asked.

  “It sounds to me like he asked you to marry him,” she said. “But I’m not a hundred percent sure.”

  “Well, I’ll just go with the flow and assume he did ask me,” I said.

  When I returned to the table, Bruce suggested we go ring shopping the next day. I guessed that made the engagement official. I reminded him that Manny was a jeweler who would save us money. Instead, we picked out a little pear-shaped cubic zirconia and Bruce slipped it on my finger, making it official. I loved that ring. I had worked my ass off for it.

  We called family and friends and very quietly rolled out the news. When the lease on my house was up, Bruce insisted I move into his place rather than get my own home, as I had planned. Despite my reservations, the move felt right. We had weathered storms and breakups. We knew each other well. We weren’t kids—I was twenty-nine, he was forty-three. We were good to go.

  And then the shit hit the fan.

  twenty-four