Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  I woke up in the guest room. When I opened my eyes, Bruce was sitting on the bed, staring at me. I heard him say my name and I broke into tears.

  “I have a problem,” I said.

  “Yeah, you do,” said Bruce.

  “I have a drinking problem,” I said.

  “Yeah, you do,” he said, nodding.

  I wiped the tears off my face and sniffled deeply.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “What do I do?”

  “Get help,” he said.

  “I don’t want to go to rehab,” I said. “I can already see the whole thing in the tabloids: Half Pint drinks a half pint per day, blah-blah-blah.”

  “Melissa,” he said emphatically, “let’s start at the beginning. You just said you have a drinking problem. Go deal with it.”

  I got into an emergency session with my therapist and told her the deal. My situation was dire. I felt like it was life and death. Certainly, my marriage and ability to mother was on the line. I couldn’t remember putting my kid to bed the night before. I had called my husband terrible names, words that had never come out of my mouth before. I had blacked out.

  “A blackout?” I said. “Me?”

  It had been awful.

  “Look, I have a drinking problem,” I said, talking a hundred miles an hour. “But I don’t want to go to rehab and have this conversation in front of strangers and have to worry about one of them selling it to one of the rags. This is my life. I’ve done enough of it in public.”

  We agreed to try rehabbing at home and if it got to be too much, I would check myself in somewhere. I was surprised to learn my therapist was twenty-eight years sober. She said there was a saying in AA that wherever two alcoholics are gathered, there’s a meeting. In fact, Alcoholics Anonymous began in 1935 with just two members, failed stockbroker Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, a surgeon. They talked, smoked, and drank coffee in Smith’s kitchen, and a worldwide movement grew from there.

  “The only way to get sober is with AA,” she said. “How you choose to do it is up to you.”

  I stopped drinking that day for almost the last time. To offset my body’s craving for sugar, she had me eat a spoonful of honey every hour till I went to bed starting at 5:00 p.m., the time I normally poured my first drink. I also drank fruit juice. My juice of choice was white cranberry peach. It took me almost two years to get off that stuff! But it kept me from having horrible physical withdrawals. I had a rougher time emotionally. All of a sudden I had to feel everything that I had been trying to avoid. I was insecure. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I feared I wouldn’t be funny anymore. I was irrational, short-tempered, paranoid, and angry, which was new for me. I hadn’t ever been an angry person. I didn’t recognize that part of me. All of it scared me to death.

  Whenever you see someone in a movie or on TV going through their first thirty days of sobriety in rehab, they are socially inept, inappropriate, and angry at the world. They chain-smoke and chew gum. I was like that, except I was rehabbing at home under the supervision of my therapist. It was unconventional, but I got through it.

  As I got into the second and third month I embraced my newfound clarity as a blessing. I didn’t enjoy all the difficult emotional crap I had to feel, but I took ownership of my life. For the first time ever, I was forced to say out loud if I was unhappy. Or angry. Or cranky. Or craving a drink, so watch out. Or sad. Or if I needed to talk to someone about why my mother didn’t love me enough to keep me. There was no running away.

  But as I articulated these issues, I could start working on them. And that was a good thing.

  I wasn’t staying sober according to AA’s Big Book. I wasn’t going to meetings. I wasn’t working the steps. I was sober, though, and that’s all that mattered to me. I was present for my kids, present in my marriage, and present in my life. And that was a good thing, too.

  In the fall I got elected to the Screen Actors Guild Board of Directors. I was completely naive when I started the position. I had served as an alternate once when Richard Masur had been president, and the meeting had been terribly boring.

  Then the commercial strike of 2000 piqued my curiosity. At the time, I was the face (or the head) of Garnier. Say what you will about me, I’ve had good hair my entire life. But that account fell apart during the 2000 strike. I instinctively knew the strike was too long. I also knew that the reputation of SAG within the industry had taken a beating. Something had to be done to restore its image; so when Richard called and asked me to run for the board of the Hollywood division, I agreed.

  I was excited when I came in among the top ten vote-getters, which was a win. My first call was to Anna. She had been a past president of SAG. She congratulated me and wished me luck, but I detected a slight edge to her voice. I would find out soon enough why. The first board meeting I attended was a Hollywood division board meeting and it was bloody awful. The strike had just been settled and a seemingly disinterested President Daniels sat at the dais while his vice president gave awards to people who had worked hard during the strike.

  The meeting was supposed to run about three hours; it lasted six. Two hours was consumed solely by a discussion concerning one board member whose photo had been left out of the previous year’s “class photo.” There was screaming and yelling. There was even crying as the awards were handed out. I had never witnessed such a colossal waste of time and energy. I ran a very tight ship at home. This was crazy. I couldn’t imagine what the national board meeting would be like.

  I attended a dinner at Bill Daniels’s house for new board members who were somewhat unaffiliated. Like the country, SAG was basically divided into two main parties. Bill Daniels and those at his home belonged to the neo-con Performers Alliance, later known as Membership First. They had taken the Guild into the commercial strike.

  Before dinner, Kent McCord spoke. I knew he had been on a series I didn’t watch when I was growing up, Adam-12. He spoke endlessly, quoting labor history and arcane rules like a walking encyclopedia. Valerie Harper, best known as Rhoda on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, sat next to me. She had the annoying habit of muttering “uh-hum,” “yeah,” and “uh-hum” as she listened to someone talk. Hers was always a second voice in the room. As Kent spoke, she muttered and stared like he was Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt rolled into one. I thought, Wow, this guy knows a ton of history. I was impressed with his breadth of knowledge. Then, about twenty minutes into his soliloquy, I realized that nothing he was saying was applicable to the topic at hand. He spoke a good game but it made no sense whatsoever. If you look up the word “blowhard” in the dictionary, you will find a picture of Kent McCord.

  By the end of the evening, I knew this was the wrong side of things. All these people were patting themselves on the back for running this great strike, which had crippled California’s economy and ruined the commercial industry, which had partially migrated straight to Canada and never returned. Tremendous monies were lost that would’ve gone toward pension and health plans. How was that a victory?

  I called Richard Masur and said I wanted to talk to his friends about this, because it struck me as weird, or wrong.

  In April 2001, I attended my first national board meeting. It was in a top-floor conference room at the Sheraton Universal Hotel. There were 106 national board members. At the time, the entire union totaled 98,000 members, nearly 90 percent of whom did not work full-time as actors. New York board members Paul Christie and Paul Reggio, both close allies of Richard’s, instantly embraced me, a move that would help shape my future. Some of the more moderate Hollywood division members as well as those from the Regional Branch Division also welcomed me. They were sane, rational, thoughtful people, who I quickly recognized as beacons of light in a thick fog of crazy.

  Before the meeting, I fixed a cup of tea at a buffet in the back of the room. That’s when I spotted Sally Kirkland, another newly elected board member. She was dressed in layers of multicolored Indian robes and had a rhinestone bindi in the middl
e of her forehead. She had come with an assistant who set up a special antigravity chair for her, and she had a foot-high stack of unwrapped, sliced American cheese on the table in front of her.

  Zino Macaluso, who ran the agency relations department, caught me staring at Sally and her cheese.

  “Welcome to the board, Ms. Gilbert,” he said.

  “Thank you very much,” I said.

  “You look perplexed.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that,” I said, nodding toward Sally.

  He laughed. “Just breathe.”

  Board meetings were known to be disruptive, what the Los Angeles Times later called “as peaceful as a food fight.” A month earlier, the LAPD had been called to break up a fight at a meeting of the finance committee. However, this board meeting was about as exciting as a coma. It went on for two days. Kent McCord droned on endlessly about procedure and statutes, quoting Robert’s Rules of Order and points from history that didn’t seem to relate to anything. A timer would go off, Bill Daniels would announce that his time was up, and Kent would keep going. The arguments back and forth in the language of Robert’s rules of parliamentary procedure were like Greek to me. Thank heaven for my friends who translated. I just listened, trying to learn as much as possible.

  By the end of the two days, I was cross-eyed. I had no idea what we had accomplished other than passing Global Rule 1, and I still had questions. I was never called on during the discussion, though, because someone was quoting laws from 1976 and some other putz was talking about when he was on Room 222.

  After the meeting finished, I gathered with Richard and others from the United Screen Actors Nationwide faction at Claudette Sutherland’s home to strategize ways to move forward. A couple hours later, I felt like we had accomplished something; I wondered why it had been so difficult with the larger group. As I walked to my car, Richard intercepted me and said he wanted to talk for a minute. It was a warm spring night, and we stood just beyond the yellow circle cast by the front porch light.

  “There’s a presidential election coming up this fall, and we want you to consider running,” he said.

  I took a step backward. He may as well have admitted seeing an alien spaceship zoom across the sky. This was the office Charlton Heston, the SAG president from 1965 to 1971, had called “a bitch of a job.”

  “Are you crazy?” I said. “I don’t have a clue what happened over the past two days. It was a zoo in there. I can’t be the president of this union.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Just think about it. You’ve got our support if you’re willing to do it.”

  Bruce laughed with me when I told him about Richard’s entreaty. I had driven home thinking that Richard was as loony as the rest of them. We had a really good laugh that they would even ask me. I could run a household. I could direct an After School Special. But what the hell did I know about running a union?

  After going to sleep that night still laughing my ass off, I woke up the next morning with an entirely different attitude. I wasn’t even out of bed when I turned to Bruce and said, “Screw it. If James Cagney can be the president of the Screen Actors Guild, I can be the president, too.”

  Bruce didn’t say anything. He already knew what had happened. Sometime in the night that little voice in me had said, Oh no? You don’t think I can do it? Well, watch this. No one taught you how to become president of SAG. No one in Hollywood ran classes on how to become a labor leader.

  “Patty Duke did it,” I said. “William Daniels has done it for the last two years, and I don’t think he’s done a very good job. Why can’t I do it?”

  “Do you really think you can?” he asked.

  “I honestly don’t see why I can’t.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Yeah, I’m thinking I just might.”

  I decided to explore the issue with people whose opinions I valued. My first call was to Anna, and she said, “Do it.” Not so much because the Guild needed me, which she said it did, but more because she said it would teach me more about myself than anything I had done before. My manager and agents gave their endorsement and assured me it wouldn’t negatively impact my career (ha!). Then I got a brilliant idea.

  I called actor Kevin Kilner, another newbie board member and a supporter of mine. He was a big, tall, good-looking, very smart, and reasonable guy. We had already bonded and we would cling to each other in the future, or rather I would rely on him many times as a life raft. I called him and said, “You know who would be great for this job, far better than me? Warren Beatty.”

  “Call him and see if he’ll do it,” Kevin said.

  “Yeah, I will,” I said. “And I can be his vice president.”

  I phoned Warren, who had supposedly once mulled a run for United States president, and told him that I had been asked to run for the presidency of SAG, but I wasn’t sure I had it in me. Then I made my pitch. After a long pause, which was common when speaking with Warren, he said, “Melissa, I would rather be the president of Cambodia.”

  However, he encouraged me to run. After some discussion, I said, “Okay, I’m going to run. But if it gets to be too rough or too much trouble, I’ll quit.”

  “No, you won’t,” he said. “I’ve known you for a long time. You’re tenacious. Once you get in there, you’re going to want to see things change, and you’re going to want to stay until those changes happen.”

  I laughed. “You don’t know me that well.”

  I took a drag off a cigarette. He chided me for smoking.

  “So I can count on your endorsement and support?” I asked.

  “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” said Warren.

  “Are you telling me that you’re not going to publicly support me in this?” I asked with an indignant tone.

  “I probably will,” he said. “But I don’t like stepping out publicly on stuff like this.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “To be honest,” he said with a chuckle, “it’s because I want people to like me.”

  “Fine, don’t support me,” I said. “I completely understand.” Then I jokingly added, “But I don’t like you.”

  “Yes, you do,” he said.

  “Okay, I like you,” I replied. “But I’m going to pretend I don’t.”

  One by one, I called people and gained support and encouragement. The last call I made was to my mother. She expressed surprise that I could become the Guild’s president and that pissed me off. I told her that I could run for SAG’s presidency if I wanted, or Congress for that matter. I sounded like I was fourteen years old.

  “Then do it,” she said. “I’m behind you all the way.”

  So that was it. I called Richard and told him that I would run—and do my best to win.

  twenty-eight

  MADAM HALF PINT

  Before I officially announced my candidacy or pulled the required paperwork, I realized Anna was right. I was already facing truths about myself, one in particular: I wanted to win.

  I wasn’t blinded by the fact, though. My own ego wasn’t anywhere close to becoming more important than the cause, a flaw I had observed in many politicians. But it was an interesting revelation. It brought back memories from numerous epic games of Monopoly with my brother, and competing against him on Battle of the Network Stars specials. I liked to win.

  However, this wasn’t a made-for-TV game. I met with a circle of people whom I began referring to as my cabinet of advisors. We hired a campaign manager and then we began to raise money. There were two ways to run for office at SAG. I could either go in front of the nominating committee, which was then stacked with William Daniels’s supporters, or I could pull a petition and get it signed by Guild members in good standing. Since there was no way I would get approved by the nominating committee, I pulled a petition and organized volunteers to gather signatures.

  I was already familiar with the big issues facing the Guild, including the TV/Theatrical agreement coming up for ren
egotiation—the collective bargaining agreement that covered all things shot for television and feature films—and the ATA franchise agreement between SAG and talent agencies (this agreement set rules and boundaries for the relationships between talent agencies and their clients, for commission percentages, etc.), which had expired. I wanted to curb productions running out of the country, especially to Canada. All of that was very important, but at the very top of my list was merging SAG and her sister union AFTRA. I saw where the industry was headed with respect to digital rights and royalties. Digital was a jurisdiction that was still up for grabs, and I knew with two unions vying for it, there was the very real possibility of a jurisdictional war—a tremendous problem, considering that forty-five thousand SAG members were also members of AFTRA. No one benefits in a jurisdictional war, as it is possible for each union to lower rates by using waivers and thereby undercutting contractual provisions—what is essentially a “race to the bottom.”

  In addition, and perhaps naively, I wanted to try to rid SAG of the divisiveness brought about by the two warring factions: Restore Respect (mine) and Membership First (Valerie’s). The constant fighting blocked any chance for progress. So when I heard that Valerie Harper was going to run against me, I decided to try something bold and unconventional. I called her up and reintroduced myself (we had met when I was a kid), and although I had seen her worship at the feet of Kent McCord, I proposed that the two of us unite SAG by running together.

  One of us would be president and the other would be vice president. We would work together. I even offered to let her pick which office she wanted, something my supporters would’ve freaked out about if I’d told them. (I had advisors and a cabinet, but I was still a very independent thinker.)

  “I don’t care,” I said. “Let’s just bring everyone together from the top down.”

  She said she had to speak to her advisors before giving me an answer. A few hours later, she called and declined my offer. She said she was already committed to the people around her. I interpreted that to mean her handlers had said no. Ironically, those same folks would later call me a puppet who couldn’t speak for myself. One of them actually said publicly that Richard’s hand was so far up my ass they couldn’t tell where his hand stopped and my mouth started.