Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  DATES WE WILL NEVER FORGET

  The next movie I was offered was about a doctor in Vermont who artificially inseminated dozens of women with his own sperm, fathering more than a score of children. I had many reasons for turning it down. I thought the script was awful, I didn’t want to tackle another project after making four pictures back-to-back, and it was close to Christmas. I passed four times. Each time, the producers offered more money. Finally, my team, Marc and Erwin, called together and told me to sit down.

  “You really don’t want to do this movie, do you?” they asked.

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  “Would you change your mind for half a million dollars?”

  “That’s crazy money,” I said. “I’m still trying to dig myself out of debt.”

  “That’s why we told you to sit down.”

  “Oh God,” I moaned. “Hold on.”

  I yelled to Bruce, who was upstairs. He knew I’d turned down multiple offers. “It’s up to half a million. What do I do?”

  “You get on the plane tomorrow,” he said. “And you make it work.”

  I did. I went to Toronto and starred in Baby Maker: The Story of Doctor Cecil Jacobsen with Tom Verica and George Dzundza. For five weeks, I thought, Lord help us all! The silver lining was that I developed a really close friendship with Tom Verica, who introduced me to Vietnamese food, pho in particular, and led a day trip to Niagara Falls. The time flew by until the end. Then, early in the morning on December 19, Bruce called, extremely upset. He said that my best friend Sandy’s sixteen-year-old son, Garrett, was dead. I turned ice cold.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know any more,” he said. “All I know is that Trevor”—Garrett’s little brother—“called here crying, ‘I don’t have a brother. My brother is dead.’ And there was screaming in the background.”

  I called Karen Scalia, who confirmed the horrible news, but details were still sketchy. Garrett had just returned home from boarding school. He was excited to help his family prepare for Christmas, and now he was dead?

  I finally got a hold of Sandy and listened to her wailing, keening grief with a sense of helplessness that made me physically sick and desperate to be home immediately to help her.

  She said Garrett had come home with what they thought was the flu and they took him to the doctor. He had a terrible headache the night before, and he never woke up. It turned out he had meningococcal meningitis, which the doctor had missed, though Garrett hadn’t presented the normal symptoms and it was such a virulent killer that it wouldn’t have mattered.

  For the last three days of shooting, I was a wreck because I couldn’t be with my best friend at a time when she needed me most. I was also unable to get on a commercial flight that would get me into L.A. the night before the funeral. Through my manager and agent, someone spoke to Treat Williams, who had a charter service, and thanks to him, I was able to go directly from the last scene of the movie to the airport. I didn’t know Treat personally but he sent me a lovely food basket for the trip, and because of his generous heart, I was able to be with my dearest friends when they needed me most. I will forever be grateful to him for that. I flew home wearing my wardrobe and makeup. Sandy and David had asked me to speak at the service, so I was able to write my eulogy on the plane.

  I sat up that night with Bruce, Jack, Karen, Sandy, and David, who said he wasn’t going to cry the next day in front of everyone at Garrett’s funeral. Of course, he was the first one to break down. I remember helping Sandy’s other girlfriends get her dressed for the service, and as we were trimming the veil on the hat she was wearing, she broke down, repeating over and over that we should be dressing her for his wedding, not his funeral.

  To this day, I have not witnessed grief so deep or so raw. I spent the next several days with Sandy. It was god-awful. When I tried to explain what was going on to Dakota, who used to play with Garrett’s sister (and my goddaughter), Julianne, he asked, “Will Garrett get better if we give him hot chocolate?”

  I said no and sat down with him for a long talk about heaven and what happens when we die, but no explanation made the tragic loss any better or easier to understand or accept. I didn’t know how to make sense out of such a loss, and I wasn’t sure I ever would. It was a horrible time that left each of us indelibly bruised deep within our soul. We canceled our annual Christmas Eve dinner and never had it again. I helped Sandy wrap Christmas presents and cried with her. Bruce bristled at me for getting too involved in someone else’s grief, but that was the way it went with me. Now he’s used to it.

  I didn’t have much of a Christmas spirit when we woke on the morning of the twenty-fifth to open presents, but I mustered enthusiasm for Dakota’s sake and tried to make it as festive as possible under the circumstances. After all the presents had been opened, Bruce handed me a little box. I thought I knew what was inside. We had discussed making my little pear-shaped CZ into a real ring.

  I opened the box and instead found a huge oval-shaped diamond ring that Bruce had designed with Manny. It was gorgeous and extravagant. Bruce was scared to death to give it to me. He didn’t know how I’d react.

  I burst into a full-bodied laugh, something I hadn’t done for days. I was amazed Bruce had been able to pull off the surprise. It caught me completely off guard, and I loved it.

  That ring was my light at the end of the tunnel. He slipped it onto my finger as tears streamed down my face. I was living the dream. I envisioned our wedding and life together. It filled me with hope and joy.

  On January 17, 1994, our lives were shaken again, though this time it was a 6.7 magnitude earthquake that struck at 4:30 a.m. and made our world seem like a speck of dirt on a string suddenly pulled so tight that everything on it fell off. Seventy-two people died in that quake, more than nine thousand were injured, and damage across Southern California totaled more than $20 billion.

  The Northridge epicenter wasn’t that far from our community, but we were among the fortunate. Our house was seriously damaged, but not red-tagged as uninhabitable. Like everyone else’s, our nerves were frayed, and each aftershock put us more on edge. Beyond that, all of us were okay.

  Looking back, Bruce and I handled ourselves quite differently throughout the crisis, and that in itself produced aftershocks in our relationship. He emerged with his pith helmet and knife, waiting for looters, while I was either more fatalistic or practical, depending on your perspective. I figured if an aftershock was going to kill us, there was little we could do about it.

  I had just seen my best friend walk through the worst thing a human being had to endure, the loss of her child. I wasn’t going to make myself crazy over a bunch of broken stuff. Even when I saw valuable antiques in pieces, I would shrug and say, “It’s not a life.”

  But Bruce didn’t like that nonchalant attitude, as he called it. A distance began to develop between us and then one night we had our worst fight ever. It was so bad that I took the dogs and stayed at my mom’s. I thought we needed to go to our corners and cool off. When I returned the next morning, I found Bruce sitting in the kitchen waiting for me. He said he wanted me out of his house. I sort of half giggled, thinking he was joking. He wasn’t—and he refused to talk about it.

  “Are you kidding me? There’s nothing to talk about?” I asked in a rising tide of disbelief and anger.

  “No, there’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “I want you out.”

  I was stunned, hurt, and confused. Though his house was full of my furniture and belongings, I gathered my clothing and toiletries and moved back into my mother’s guesthouse. It was the craziest, most maddening situation. I gave him a couple days to cool off before calling again and asking if he wanted to work out whatever was bothering him. He didn’t want to talk. Nor did he want me back. He just kept repeating that it was over. I was incredulous. Over? He answered, ice cold, “Yes, Melissa. Over.” And he hung up the phone.

  I was so incensed that I thought, Fine, we’ll do it your way. I hire
d movers to box up my belongings at Bruce’s house and move them into storage, leaving him with a bed, a futon, and a television. I also put my engagement ring into my safe. Somehow, amid the days I spent weeping about having landed with my four-year-old son back in my mom’s guesthouse, I was cast in Sweet Justice, a legal pilot for NBC, and soon after, I had my Scarlett O’Hara tomorrow-is-another-day moment, only stronger. I had a child to consider. He needed stability, something solid. Something he and I could count on…we needed a home of our own! Having made a ton of money on all those TV movies, I went out and bought my dream house, an adorable Cape Cod–style cottage with green shutters and a white picket fence.

  As we were about to close, Bruce called and said he was about to leave for India and Montreal to work on a miniseries that would keep him away for four months. When he asked what was new with me, I told him that I was about to shoot a pilot in New Orleans. Then I said very calmly, “Oh, and I bought a house.”

  “You bought a house?” he asked. “So it’s really over?”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “You’re not going to do this to me. You ended it. I am doing what I need to do to take care of myself and my son.”

  “Look, can we just have dinner before I go to India?”

  “Fine,” I said.

  At my suggestion, we met at an Indian restaurant that had been a favorite of ours, but dinner was a disaster. We got in a huge fight and I left, wishing him a good time in India. Before I took off for New Orleans, I started therapy. As I told my therapist, I didn’t want to live at the beck and whim of some guy. I didn’t want anyone other than me to be responsible for my happiness. Clearly, my way wasn’t working, and I was searching for a better course.

  So I dove in, wanting to fix things and aware it wasn’t going to be overnight. But the feeling that I was at least addressing the problem by asking the right questions carried me through the Sweet Justice pilot in New Orleans. Well, that and the fact that the cast was fantastic. Ronny Cox, my dear friend, played my dad, the gorgeous Jason Gedrick played my ex-boyfriend, and my wardrobe consisted of Armani suits…lovely!

  From New Orleans, I was to go to Wilmington, North Carolina, for the TV movie Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story. I picked up Dakota and our nanny, Rosa, who had been staying with Bo in South Carolina at Tom Berringer’s, and we stayed in a beautiful beach house throughout the filming, where my costar and friend Marlee Matlin helped me celebrate my thirtieth birthday. On my birthday, thirty red roses were delivered to my door, along with a card that said, “Happy Birthday. Thinking of you. Sending you love. Bruce.”

  Knowing Bruce as I did, I recognized it was a miracle that he remembered my birthday. That he gave a shit was even more miraculous. And the fact that he figured out a way to call his sister from India and make sure she sent me flowers showed me the depth to which he was thinking about me. Later in the day, he called, which I found out was quite a feat from where he was in India. We caught up long enough for Bruce to tell me that his trip was life-changing—no embellishment, no I miss you, just that it was life-changing—and for me to tell him that in a few weeks I would be back in L.A. and starting another movie.

  Setting up my new house with Dakota, whom I adored and worshipped and found endlessly entertaining, was a thoroughly gleeful experience. It was a personal triumph and brought a sense of independence that was exhilarating to say the least. As I was settling in, I began work on Cries from the Heart, my third movie with Patty Duke, and was entertaining the idea of escalating a flirtatious friendship I’d struck up with George Clooney, when Bruce and I began talking frequently and rather intimately on the phone. He had called after moving to Montreal from India. A very healing initial conversation led to others, and finally I agreed to fly to Canada for the weekend.

  I got to Montreal and had an extraordinarily romantic reunion with Bruce, who was shooting when I arrived. I napped in his trailer, as I’d flown all night and was exhausted. On his lunch break he climbed into the bed in that trailer beside me and we made love for the first time in months. The tone of the weekend was enhanced when we went back to the hotel and found the producer had sent champagne and strawberries to his beautiful penthouse suite. I showed Bruce a rough cut of my pilot. We talked, made love in a beautiful four-poster bed, and then as we sat up and talked some more, we could see fireworks out the window, lighting up the night sky in celebration of Bastille Day. But it was like they were for us.

  By this time, I had heard Bruce confess that he’d kicked me out of his house and sabotaged our relationship because, in his words, he was a scared moron. He was panic-stricken that we would get married and have a child, and then he would find a way to screw things up, resulting in more children with parents who had split up. Then he played me a song. Bruce is not an overly romantic guy, but I could tell this song had a real impact on him. It was Marc Cohn’s “True Companion.” He said that hearing it is what had turned him around.

  “I heard this song and all I could think of was you,” he said. “I can’t put anyone else in it. Nor do I want to. This is it—forever and ever.”

  I went back home, opened my safe, pulled out my ring, and put it back on my finger. Bruce returned soon after and then was cast in Babylon 5. Then NBC picked up Sweet Justice. I don’t know that we fell back into a relaxed, normal life as much as we were swept up by the business of doing series and planning our wedding, but I was busy and happy. That was the other thing that had happened in Montreal: I made it clear I wanted a date, not an ambiguous reengagement with a wedding to be determined in the future.

  “Call it,” Bruce said.

  “Let’s pick something that neither of us will ever forget,” I said.

  “Fine.”

  “How do you feel about January first?” I asked.

  “Can you pull it together that fast?”

  “Pull what?” I asked. “We’re not having a big wedding. I just want family. We could probably do it at my mom’s.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” I said. “Are you good with that?”

  Bruce nodded. “Let’s do it.” Then he paused. “But tell me again—what’s the date?”

  Other than the fact that it was next to impossible to get roses and hydrangeas in Los Angeles the day before the Rose Parade, wedding plans could not have gone smoother. The ceremony took place in front of the fireplace in my mother’s living room with about forty-five guests, including family on Bruce’s side who had flown in from out of town. Votive candles gave the house a soft, romantic glow, the music was perfect, and the Jewish ceremony included five minutes of standup from the rabbi and his brother that left all of us laughing and crying.

  At the end of the evening, a decoy limo zoomed down the driveway to a chorus of fake good-byes, distracting the crew of paparazzi that had waited all night in the street for us to leave. Then Bruce and I hopped in his Ford Explorer and drove to my house without anyone following us.

  Dakota was being dropped off at Bo’s, so we had the place to ourselves. I had prepared the bed with fresh linens and rose petals, readied an ice bucket with champagne, and set out a negligee that I thought guaranteed our first night as a married couple would be memorable. Instead, we sat on the living room sofa and talked in a state of disbelief, wonder, and joy about how we had gone all the way.

  “I married you,” I said.

  “You married me, and I married you back,” Bruce said. “That means—”

  “You’re my husband.”

  “And you’re my wife.”

  Such iterations went on for hours. Sometime around three in the morning, we finally fell asleep in each other’s arms. Our honeymoon lasted all of the following day and then we were both back at work. But I wasn’t about to complain given what happened to me the day I returned: I was at an event for NBC affiliates, promoting Sweet Justice. George Clooney was also there. He apparently saw me giving interviews across the room and went up to my publicist, Colleen, and said, “You know your client broke my heart.”
r />   “What do you mean?” Colleen asked.

  “She went and got married,” George said.

  He couldn’t have given me a nicer wedding present. What woman wouldn’t want to hear that from George Clooney? But, my God, how I loved my husband! After all the work we had done together and separately to get to this point, I knew he was exactly what I wanted. I thought marrying him was proof that I could indeed live life on my terms—the good, the bad, and the surgically enhanced.

  Then, of course, I was reminded that every time you think you are in control, God taps you on the shoulder—or kicks you in the ass, depending on what you need—and shows you who’s really in charge.

  twenty-five

  DAYS OF MIRACLES AND WONDER

  Bruce and I were busy shooting our series. We stayed at my house during the week, when both of us worked, and we bunked at his place in Hidden Hills on the weekend. My hours on Sweet Justice were often in the fourteen-to sixteen-hour range, excruciatingly long by any standard, and I blamed Cicely Tyson for the delays, as did everyone else in our otherwise outstanding cast.

  Her mesmerizing performance in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was a gold star on her résumé, but she was extremely difficult. She insisted everyone call her by her character’s name, though she never remembered the names of any of our characters. She rarely knew her lines. One day she kept everyone waiting hours because she didn’t have the proper bra. Another time she slapped a director across the face. And still another time guest star Cotter Smith stormed off the set after a lengthy courtroom scene and fumed, “I’m never working with that woman again.”

  We had a giant makeup trailer where everyone gathered in the morning, listened to music, and drank coffee. Cicely would come in, turn off the music, dump the coffee because she hated the smell of it, and then make us sit quietly while she got her makeup done. I learned early on from my grandfather, whose mantra was “Don’t start,” not to start trouble. I was a team player; years later Aaron Spelling would refer to me as his quarterback. But this stuff with Cicely was out of control. Because of her, I was unable to spend quality time with my family.