Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

After breakfast, I was taken to the NICU for my first visit with Michael. I was shocked by the way the tiny infants were laid out in open beds—Michael, in particular, reminded me of the frogs we dissected in high school. He was lying with his arms and legs spread out and attached to various lifelines. One line went right into his belly button and into his heart cavity. He had a pulse oximeter light on his foot, measuring his blood’s oxygen level. He had one IV here, one there. A wire attached to the top of his head monitored his body temperature. He was the exact antithesis of the baby whose welcome to the world is a cozy swaddle in a warm blanket. It almost struck me as barbaric. And yet he was so serene, so peaceful. When I talked to him, he turned toward me and gave me a little peek out of his eyes. That’s how he got his nickname, Peeker. I thought, Okay, you’re going to make it.

  Fortunately, Michael’s next few days were unremarkable for a preemie, though there was nothing unremarkable about them for Bruce and me. Bruce has since confided that he refused to let himself become too attached to Michael in those first few days in case something happened. He didn’t want to care in case our son died. He also later admitted that he had actually feared losing both of us on the operating table.

  I was a focused soldier. On October 8, two days after giving birth, I was able to sort of hold Michael for the first time, along with the padding from his bed. The next day he was taken off the ventilator. On the tenth I went home, which was excruciatingly hard. Leaving my child behind, despite knowing he needed to be at the hospital, was gut-wrenching. My days fell into a blurry, methodical schedule. I got up, pumped breast milk, got Dakota off to school, went to the hospital, watched Michael, went back home, pumped some more, had lunch, checked in with Bruce, picked Dakota up from school, got homework started, pumped again, fixed dinner, spent two more hours at the hospital with Michael, came home, pumped one last time, and passed out. I was never as happy as the day I was actually able to hold him without the mattress pad.

  We weren’t out of the woods, though. Nine days after he was born, I showed up at the hospital and Michael had two big tubes up his nose. He’d been put on a CPAP, a special kind of ventilator, after having had trouble breathing the night before. They had to force air into his lungs because he’d been working too hard to breathe. I was assured he wasn’t as uncomfortable as he looked, but I saw that and fell apart.

  I was a jumble of emotions I couldn’t begin to figure out. Walking in and out of the NICU every day with other parents worrying about their child’s condition was a strange experience. We shared our love and fear in a communal silence that was like a fragile crystal bubble. It was as if we didn’t want to shatter the status quo by talking. Monitors beeped, lights flashed, parents whispered to doctors and nurses, and in between all of us prayed.

  If bad thoughts crept into my head, I would write out dosage charts for Michael’s medications or I would make detailed lists of things I had to do. I had never been so purposeful.

  One day I was at the hospital kangarooing with Michael—meaning I held him against my bare chest, with blankets on the outside, a practice adopted from Third World countries where modern NICUs weren’t readily available. The idea was the mother’s body would regulate the baby’s temperature. Suddenly his temperature dropped and the two nurses monitoring his vital signs came over.

  One nurse reached out for Michael and said it was time to put him back in his heated Isolette. Then the other, seeing the look on my face, said, “Let’s wait. Give her ten minutes.” Within a few minutes, Michael’s temperature regulated again. Then they took my temperature. It was 101. My body had heated up in order to provide him necessary warmth.

  I was aware that thirty-one years earlier I wasn’t held like that, nor was I wanted, but dammit, my kid was—and I just wanted to get him home.

  Michael thrived. On October 17, he received his first taste of breast milk through a tube in his nose. Six days later, he fed from a bottle. During this time friends and family would visit. His brothers made drawings and cards that I taped around his Isolette. My grandfather came to visit, took one look at the tiny boy, and said, “What’s he doing in that thing? He looks like he should be sleeping in a hollowed-out melon.” Things were not only on course but a little bit ahead of schedule. I felt like I took my first deep breath in nearly a month. I wanted to know when I could take him home.

  I pestered the doctors and nurses with questions, showed them that I knew all of his medications and doses, and had home nurses and special lights for his jaundice all lined up to care for him at home.

  On November 15, Bruce and I were finishing breakfast and talking about the day ahead when the doctor called and said we could bring Michael home. I screamed. Bruce canceled whatever appointments he had and we hurried to the hospital. Normally they don’t let babies leave the hospital until they weigh five pounds; Michael was only four and a half. But I knew if I could get him home, tuck him into my bed, dim the lights, feed him whenever he wanted to eat (every two hours, it turned out), and just love him up all day and night, he would do well. And that’s exactly what happened.

  Once I got him home, he blossomed. A nurse came every other day and assessed him, and I took him to the pediatrician once a week. On his first visit, he was in the seventh percentile for weight, if that. By Christmas, he weighed about ten pounds and was in the eighty-fifth percentile. The doctor marveled; I beamed. My little guy was an early overachiever, just like I’d been.

  So much attention had been given to Michael that I wanted to get Dakota a special present for Christmas. When I asked what he wanted, Dakota said he wanted his dad and me to get along. Bo and I had had little to do with each other since I filed the lawsuit, and what interaction we did have was fraught with strain and tension stemming from the fact that I knew he had fabricated the story for the National Enquirer, which I held responsible for creating the stress that had caused Michael’s premature birth.

  But for Dakota’s sake, I called Bo and invited him over to talk. Because nothing in my life ever happened the way I expected it to, he and Bruce hit it off immediately and I was pushed out of the equation. Their bromance robbed me of a chance to unload on him. And despite my considerable resentment, I dropped him out of the lawsuit without any satisfaction for the suffering he’d inflicted.

  I continued to pursue my claims against the Enquirer, though. I wasn’t about to quit that fight. For me, the issue was no longer about restitution for what they did to my reputation and me; it was about the fact that their disregard for both the facts and human decency had nearly killed my kid.

  I felt like David fighting Goliath. As the lawsuit moved forward, the tabloid’s attorneys pulled my medical records, starting from my first gynecological checkup when I was eighteen. They were threatening to use some of that information against me in court. I saw their gambit; they wanted me to meditate on the threat of not just public embarrassment but downright mortification. They couldn’t have tried any harder to make the situation more ugly.

  I tried to focus on the good stuff. At Michael’s one-year checkup, I was told that I didn’t have to bring him in once a month anymore. The doctor said he might still be a couple months behind developmentally, but he would catch up soon enough. To celebrate the good news, we threw a first-birthday bash for all of our family and friends who had prayed along with us for the past twelve months. Just before everyone arrived, though, I fell apart in our bedroom.

  Bruce came in and found me curled up on the bed, crying and unable to catch my breath. When he asked what was wrong, I told him that I was suddenly and unexpectedly overcome by thoughts of all the things that could have gone wrong with Michael—the heart problems, the bleeding in the brain, the drama of those first twenty-four hours, everything. It was a delayed reaction to the worry I had kept bottled up for the past twelve months. The dam just burst.

  I was feeling things and I didn’t like it. That’s when an occasional glass of wine turned into two at five in the afternoon. Three glasses was even better. My drinking esc
alated from there.

  The lawsuit wasn’t quite finished. At one point, after I won a small pretrial motion, I received a call from Screen Actors Guild president Richard Masur. He explained the union was working diligently on privacy legislation to curb the tabloids and paparazzi, and in exchange for speaking up on my plight, he offered me support from their government relations office and legal department. To thank Richard, I said, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” He would eventually take me up on that offer.

  The suit would drag on for nearly another two years until finally we had to end it. The cost was staggering, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and by then all I wanted to find out was why—why they would print a story they knew was blatantly untrue and obviously damaging to my life and career, and my children’s lives. My attorney arranged a meeting with the National Enquirer’s editor in chief, Steve Coz, and their attorney, at their headquarters in Clearwater, Florida.

  We flew to nearby Miami and checked into the Delano Hotel. I was a nervous wreck. Before the meeting, Larry took me for a long walk on the beach. He knew that despite my uncertainty, I was anticipating the face-to-face with the fuck who had approved the story about me. Larry told me what to expect and urged me to remain centered, focused, calm, and to keep my wits about me. I took his counsel to heart. It enabled me to contain my anger so that I could focus it and use it with laserlike precision.

  The meeting lasted several hours. We agreed the details would remain confidential. However, I can say that it was a remarkable experience for me. I had the opportunity to confront someone who I thought had wronged not only me but my family.

  And I learned a great deal that day, starting with the revelation that the National Enquirer’s attack on me was not at all personal. It was purely business for them. Stories like the one they wrote about me sold magazines, period. It convinced me more than ever that gossip rags were a cancer on our culture and individual sensibilities. I wanted to run to every newsstand and grocery store checkout line in the country and tell people how much pain they were inflicting on people by buying those pieces of trash.

  I also learned how to walk away from a fight. At one point during the meeting the lawyer for the Enquirer said something that caused me to almost explode. I wanted to fly across the room and rip that guy’s head off. Fortunately, Larry squeezed my hand tightly and suggested that I go for a walk.

  I did and went to my suite. I called Bruce at home and told him what was going on. He calmed me down and helped me see that the fight, whether or not I got everything I had wanted, was over. I had made my point. There was a deal on the table. As he said, it was time for me to agree to it and come home.

  “In some victories, you don’t always get everything you want,” he said. “But this is a victory. It’s over. Walk away. Michael is fine.”

  “He is fine, isn’t he?” I said.

  “He’s better than fine,” Bruce said. “He’s exceptional. So are you. Now put your sword down and come home!”

  twenty-six

  INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR

  Six months later, in the summer of 1997, I was battling for my children again. But this time it was for a movie.

  I was in Calgary shooting Seduction in a Small Town, the story of a woman who moves to a small town with her family and fights to regain her two kids from foster care after being falsely accused of child abuse. I had Michael with me, and about halfway through the movie Bruce brought Dakota and Lee up for the famous Calgary Stampede. Little did Bruce know what he was walking into.

  Before I left for location, Bruce and I were getting along, but there was a distance between us that made sense only in retrospect. My inability to express my feelings or needs was at a peak. I was overly self-sufficient and full of resentment at everyone and everything. I dealt with these feelings by ordering a glass of wine or two…or three at the end of the day. A couple drinks took me to another state of mind. It was like changing the channel during a commercial.

  The cast of the film bonded instantly with one another and our director, Charles Wilkinson. We were together constantly on set and off, barbecuing, singing, and drinking…a lot. I became especially close to my leading man. Inappropriately so. I’d always developed little crushes on my leading men, but this was different and it was fueled by alcohol, which allowed me to pour my heart out. The problem was, I was pouring my heart out to the wrong person. I should’ve been sharing all of this with my husband, but I was too afraid.

  I guess you could characterize my relationship with my leading man as an emotional affair. Just as wrong and dangerous as a sexual affair…maybe more so.

  The film wrapped and I came home for a bit, then went to Toronto to shoot Christmas in My Hometown with one of my favorite leading men of all time, Tim Matheson. I was in a slightly better place mentally, especially on days when I could end the workday with martinis or wine.

  Several months later, I began another film, this time in L.A., called Childhood Sweetheart. It was great to be shooting back in L.A. again and also to be working with Ronny Cox, whom I adored. Everything was going smoothly, until one afternoon, about three-quarters of the way through the movie, when Bruce got ahold of me on my cell phone. I was in my dressing room, and as soon as he heard my voice, he began to scream.

  “You did this to me! I should have seen it coming! I can’t believe you did this to me. I hate you. I trusted you, and you abused that trust.”

  His voice couldn’t have been louder or more full of rage and pain. At the same time, he sobbed in giant, wounded gulps. Panicked, I tried to get him to stop, take a breath, and tell me what had upset him. I started to cry, too. I could feel a giant seismic upheaval beneath my feet, and I didn’t know why. Finally, he said there was a tape.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Someone left a tape in the mailbox,” he said.

  “So?”

  “It was of you on the phone, talking,” he said. “I know you had an affair with that guy in Calgary. I know this—”

  I had heard Bruce in various emotional states, but never this upset. He was nearly out of control. Somehow I managed to calm him enough that I could finish my scenes that day, but he was still in a volatile state when I walked in the door hours later. He could hardly look at me as I set my things down and asked for more details. He handed me a tape recorder and said, “Listen to it yourself.”

  I looked down at the recorder and was about to ask which button to push to get it to play when I realized Bruce had left the room. I figured it out on my own.

  Sure enough, the tape had me on the phone with various friends of mine—female friends and male friends—complaining about Bruce, complaining about our marriage, talking about how great I thought Calgary guy was, and asking why Bruce couldn’t be more like my movie’s leading man. Oddly, though, some of my conversations were intercut with other conversations that I couldn’t remember. Nor could I recognize the voices. I thought I was losing my mind.

  I listened again. Yes, half of the conversations were between my friends and me, but I realized the other half of the conversations were recorded off a TV.

  I went upstairs to the bedroom and got on my knees in front of Bruce. Trembling as tears rolled down my face, I said emphatically that I did not have an affair with Calgary guy. There had been nothing physical between us, ever. On the other hand, I admitted the relationship I did have with him, as he had heard on the tape, was an emotional one and inappropriately intimate. It was, I said, because of things going on between us that we weren’t addressing, which after a while Bruce understood.

  “But this tape is more sinister than anything I did,” I said. “Please, let’s you and I figure out how we can get through this and move on together. I’m admitting this and willing to work on whatever I have to.”

  By this point, I was crying from embarrassment, shame, and humiliation—and sorrow for the hurt I had inflicted on Bruce. The lid had been pulled back on me and I was exposed; this part of me that was an inappropri
ate, desperate daddy-seeker had glommed on to another guy and now I was found out. Bruce calmed down a bit, and we held each other tightly and cried for a long time.

  “We’ll deal with this,” I said finally. “But let’s figure out what the hell this tape is, where it came from, and who would do this.”

  It turned out the tape had arrived in an unmarked envelope left in the mailbox. Bruce had brought it in earlier in the day with the mail. When he showed me the envelope, I noticed our address was wrong and realized it had been hand-delivered as there was no stamp; someone had gotten inside our gated community in Hidden Hills. Later that day, Bruce’s friend Jerry called and told us that he had also received a tape in the mail, along with a note that said, “Better that you should tell Bruce about this. He should hear it from a friend instead of reading it in a tabloid.”

  “Something really creepy is going on here,” I said to Bruce and Jerry. “This is freaking me out.”

  I sat down and stared at the envelope as I listened to the tape again. While listening, I realized two things: first, most of the conversations had taken place while I was cooking dinner and talking on the cordless phone as I moved about the kitchen, and second, the envelope was addressed to another house in Hidden Hills and had no return address. Feeling suspicious, I flipped through the local directory and realized that the address matched a house less than a mile from us. I was familiar with it. It had an apartment over the garage occupied by a woman who had been obsessed with Bruce for years.

  Long before I came into his life, she would cross paths with him on the trails when he was running or walking. She continued to run into him after we became a couple. One day she approached Bruce’s ex-wife, Kitty, and said she couldn’t believe Bruce was dating “that Melissa Gilbert. She’s fat and ugly and horrible.” She scowled at me whenever Bruce and I saw her, which was, as I thought about it, pretty often; I realized then that this psycho stalker may have recorded our phone calls for nearly a year and sent the tape to Bruce to try to split us up.