His place was a hoarder’s paradise, filled with piles of magazines, weird knick-knacks, old books, garbage and overflowing ashtrays. Jack and I didn’t do anything. We stayed in the apartment and stayed drunk and watched the Summer Olympics on TV. This might have gone on until my liver gave out except that one day Jack woke up at 7 a.m. with wild hair and a dangerous, deranged look and said to me, “You better leave, Charlotte, or we’re going to go out into the desert and kill each other.” I knew Jack. He meant it.
The darkness was so thick around me it felt like I could hardly breathe. And I knew I had to only two options left: change or die.
So, yes, this is a story about playing Miss Beadle in one of the most successful TV franchises ever made. And frankly I’m surprised none of the other adult cast members has written about the Little House experience. Fortunately there’ve been books by some of the kids — Alison Arngrim and her delightful Confessions of a Prairie Bitch as well as books by Melissa Gilbert (Laura Ingalls), and Melissa Sue Anderson (Mary Ingalls). But nothing from Katherine MacGregor (Mrs. Oleson), Victor French (Mr. Edwards) or Karen Grassle (Caroline Ingalls) all of whom have had amazing stories to tell. Even Michael Landon never wrote a book — I’m not sure why.
Likewise, no one involved in David Lynch’s brilliant and ethereal Eraserhead or the cast of Twin Peaks has, to my knowledge, written a word about that experience. I hope they do.
But beyond the stories of playing Miss Beadle, this is a memoir about failures, collapses, trying to be good while enjoying being bad, aiming high and missing, and some of the general silliness of my life. It’s also a backstage look at Hollywood in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and beyond with a pretty wild cast of characters.
If I were to pitch the heart and soul of this story to a movie producer I’d say it’s more than anything the story of a girl who grows up out in the country with good but damaged parents. A girl with few obvious talents yet who manages to make a success of it in the treacherous, glorious, sexed-out, drugged-up, faster pussycat wonderland of Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s until addiction takes everything she’s earned, everything she’s built, and very nearly kills her. Then without missing a beat life deals her another blow — she’s diagnosed with breast cancer. And with mortality shoved in her face like never before, she turns 50, starts going through menopause. And that — that — is when she finds love.
Any good story, as my Shakespeare teacher used to tell us at the Pasadena Playhouse, begins in a kind of paradise, descends into hell, and through tragedy and life-or-death struggle our heroine emerges transformed. Is that the shape of my story too?
I guess we’ll find out.
It all begins in a peach orchard.
Chapter 1
Smoking on the Jungle Ride
My earliest memories are mostly cocktails and television.
Willis and Alice Stewart, my parents, were part of that era we now call the “Greatest Generation,” who defeated the Nazis, worked very hard, raised families, went to church, subscribed to National Geographic, ate red meat, smoked unfiltered cigarettes, and drank like there was no tomorrow. Life for these guys seemed to have two modes. You worked stoically. You raised kids stoically. You didn’t talk about bad memories or emotional turmoil. But on Friday and Saturday nights, you drank, danced, laughed, sang, told dirty jokes, made trouble, and painted the town red.
I was born in 1941 and so don’t remember wartime itself, the rationing, the black-out curtains, Walter Winchell, and all the rest. The world I recall most vividly begins on those Friday and Saturday nights in the late 1940s and early 1950s with my mother in pearls and a shiny cocktail dress hosting a houseful of boisterous adult friends and family. The men wore dark suits and white short-sleeved shirts (the jackets came off and ended up on the back of the sofa fairly early in the evening), with their hair brilled back just so and the ladies wearing stylish figure-hugging dresses with smart jewelry and their eyebrows penciled in.
They drank hi-balls and lo-balls with names like the Sidecar, White Lady, Colorado Bulldog, Tom and Jerry, Staten Island Ferry, and Gin Rickey. If you drank whiskey it was on the rocks or straight up and you got two fingers or three fingers. Or more.
You needed a special cabinet to house your cocktail essentials — low squat glasses for brown spirits and taller, narrow glasses for clear. You needed martini glasses, little bottles of bitters, cocktail olives, pickled pearl onions, and maraschino cherries. You needed ice tongs. You had your own secret recipe for Bloody Marys.
And you had proven ways of making it through the next day. My dad’s “hair of the dog” was bourbon, which he drank every morning at breakfast time. He kept cases of Jim Beam in the barn to make sure he’d never get caught short.
Alcohol was part of the secret club of adulthood along with gambling, politics, sex, and swearing. To me, alcohol was glamor. It was sophistication. It was laughter and celebration on ice. Except when it wasn’t and descended into anger and chaos. Such as when my parents, who were normally good and decent to each other, would end these long party nights behind their closed bedroom door shouting and arguing drunkenly.
Years later I found out that my older sister Barbara Jean couldn’t wait to go to college to escape these kinds of scenes. I had no idea they tore her up too.
I would take a pillow off my bed and lie down outside their door whispering, “Please stop…please stop…” over and over until I fell into a troubled sleep. When they fought it was my fault — so went my nine-year-old logic. If I was smarter, more obedient, or, I don’t know, just a better girl, they wouldn’t go at each other like this. This was partly the bewildered view a child has of the grown-up world and partly the fact that everything that happened in the world centered around me. (Yes, if you’ve been looking for the center of the universe, you’ve found it at last. Right here.)
I grew up on a 320-acre peach orchard in Yuba City, California, about 40 miles north of Sacramento, the state capitol. It was a place that hadn’t been much until after the war, when the population began to boom with the building of Beale Air Force Base. My dad sold one of our three orchards for a housing development, which was called Stewart Gardens and featured street after street of identical one-bedroom stucco houses that marched away into the distance in a repeating pattern of green, yellow, pink and blue. The town continues to grow and change as all things do and today there’s a Starbucks where our house once stood. You can order a Frappuccino in the space once occupied by my bedroom.
In my childhood years, I was surrounded by family of all kinds. My grandmother had a house on the same ranch as ours. Her grand old home was situated on a nearby knoll, which was fortunate because the Christmas of 1955 the levy broke on the Feather River and our area experienced massive flooding. All kinds of people came swarming over to stay in her house and I remember over the course of a couple of days eating all the food in her walk-in freezer — mostly venison from various hunting trips — while watching people in boats float past our property.
It was the kind of life where I played outdoors, rode tractors, helped feed and raise chickens, took care of our hunting dogs, climbed trees, and enjoyed big adventures in our orchards and on other neighboring farms. I had a rooster at one point, who each morning attacked my mother’s prized stockings. One day the rooster was gone under mysterious circumstances and we had chicken for dinner.
For a girl who would one day play roles on outdoorsy shows like Gunsmoke, The Waltons, Bonanza, and Little House on the Prairie, it was the perfect setting in which to grow up. Of course like most kids I also liked to lose myself in television (and was part of the first generation in all of humanity to do so). My daily ritual for years was to run home from school and watch The Mickey Mouse Club, which featured a series called Spin & Marty, about two kids like me who lived on a ranch. I had a huge crush on Tim Considine who played Spin. Later he appeared on another Mickey Mouse Club Series, The Hardy Boys. What a dreamy dreamboat.
My parents were successful and they expected their chil
dren to excel at something in life. As it turns out my brother, Lewis, who was seven years older than me, thrived in school and eventually graduated from University of the Pacific. He would go on to be the mayor of a small town here in California later in life. My older sister, Barbara Jean, nine years my senior, similarly, was a straight-A student who was accepted into UC Berkeley. She later worked for Senator Barbara Boxer.
And me? Well…. I liked to roller-skate. And I wasn’t terribly good at it.
When I was in the third grade at Sisters of Notre Dame Elementary School, my dad had taken me roller-skating at the College View Roller Rink and I fell in love with it hard and fast — the rush of speed, the camaraderie with friends, the cacophony of the wheels on the smooth wooden floor, and the raw joy a kid takes in discovering all the things that arms and legs and bodies can do. My dad was at the rink with me for every class and team practice. During open skate, he’d lace on a pair of skates too and was very graceful for such a large man. Mom tried skating but fell, bumped her knee, and that was it for her — she called it quits. But Dad was always there. When I’d look up from practice I would see my dad, the only man sitting with all the moms. I didn’t think a thing about it then but I realize now how unusual it was then for a father to spend time with his daughter that way. My dad, I need to tell you, was always called Honey by my sister, brother, and me. When my sister was very young she had realized that that’s the name my mom always used for him so she started calling him by that name too. My whole life he was always Honey. So there was Honey night after night watching and encouraging me.
Our roller-skate team competed around the region in events much like you see today in ice skating — singles, pairs, doubles, etc. — which required a lot of practice. Essentially it was dance on wheels. A few times we traveled to competitions in Southern California and once even in Denver.
To help pay for our travel, the team put on fund-raising exhibitions and Honey was always ready to build sets or to help out in any way. In one case the show was themed around “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe.” My dad built the set — a huge granny boot, which the other girls and I were able to enter and exit on our skates — and perhaps because my dad built the set, I was cast in the starring role as The Old Woman.
Honey was also responsible for my first brush with honest-to-God celebrity, which intertwined with my love of roller-skating. He owned a duck blind down in the Sacramento Delta where he and his buddies would go during the season to drink and swap stories and once in a while they’d shoot a duck. Well, apparently in the world of duck blinds this was a pretty good one because people would rent it from him; one weekend one of those renters was the famous singing cowboy Roy Rogers.
One day after roller-skating practice my dad told me that Roy Rogers was at our farmhouse. Wait — what? Roy Rogers? In Yuba City?! At our house?!?
It felt like 85 million volts of electricity shot through me.
Honey drove the car up the driveway and there was he was, Roy Rogers, an actual movie star standing in our front yard, and I was too excited to take my skates off. I burst out of the car and did an instant face-plant in our gravel driveway. I was so humiliated that I clomped tearfully into the house, refusing to come out and thus never met my idol (and more-or-less setting a lifelong pattern with me and celebrities).
Other than roller-skating I found that I was pretty good at, of all things, radio. During my high school years my best friends were nearly all guys who, like me, loved Mad magazine, and sports and goofing off. Two of these guys, Dick Catlett and Ben Price, hosted a Saturday radio show called “Teen Time” on the local ABC affiliate. One summer the guys called and asked if I’d like to take over the show as they were moving on to college. Are you kidding? Me and a microphone? Of course I said yes and while it was a ton of work, it was also lots of fun. I had an hour and a half to fill each week, plus had to find sponsors for the show. The part I loved most is that it offered the chance to meet and interview musicians in town for a day or two, directors and actors, who were traveling with a show, local entertainers, and others who gave me a glimpse of the gypsy-like world of performers.
Unfortunately none of this really seemed to solve the looming problem of my future. I wasn’t academic, as they say. The parts of school in which I excelled were spending time with friends and being in clubs. Reading, remembering the dates of battles, doing math, taking notes, and paying attention — those were the elements of education that didn’t go so well. As I got older I learned to dread revealing my report card to my mom and dad.
I wasn’t stupid, was I?
It would have been nice to know then that one day I would play a kind, empathetic school teacher on television and this all would be great emotional material to draw from. I knew intimately what it felt like to flounder hopelessly in reading, writing and arithmetic — and to so desperately not want to feel like the village idiot.
The sense of not being good enough that emerged in my teenage years would become the tape that would play in my head, forming my worst decisions, and shaping my unhealthiest relationships for decades.
As my high school years neared their end, I didn’t have the grades to go to college — not a good college anyway, certainly nothing like UC Berkeley. And yet I knew I wouldn’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t stay in Yuba City.
I felt embarrassed and thought I’d let my parents down. Both my siblings had distinguished themselves in so many ways. What was I going to do?
I flummoxed around for all sorts of ideas and possibilities and kept coming up dry until eventually my eyes fell on an advertisement in the back of Seventeen magazine for the College of Theater Arts at Pasadena Playhouse. I looked on a map and realized that Pasadena was basically Los Angeles and Los Angeles was, as far as I was concerned, Hollywood. Well, that sounded promising. And I liked the term “theater arts.” I’d been on-stage (sort of) with my roller-skating team and on radio with some, though not unbridled, success. People had said I was good. Not great. But good. But, come on, surely learning to act was something I could do. Right? God I hoped so.
Without a word to anyone — especially my parents — I sent off for an application and when it arrived, I filled it out, and mailed it back.
Then I asked permission.
Pretending it was something I’d just found, I showed the advertisement to my mother, who had a very different reaction. She thought a theater school sounded like a den of iniquity. (This happened to be among its top selling points as far as I was concerned, though kept that to myself.) I begged to go. I brought up the subject in a thousand ways. I worked on Honey, who, in his quiet fashion indicated that I needed to be working on my mom instead. Somehow I talked her into at least looking into it.
We flew down to Burbank, rented a car, and drove to the Playhouse, which still sits in the heart of old town Pasadena, a large, lovely Spanish mission style fortress on a quiet side street. I wonder now if that first impression helped soften my mother’s heart. We were Catholic and it really did look like at any moment a saintly Father Don Francisco would emerge out the front door with a white dove in one hand and a chastity belt in the other.
I’m guessing Mom was a bit stunned then to be met by Bea Hassell, one of the teachers, a short woman half of whom was made of a poof of wild red-dyed hair tied up in colorful scarves and who completed this look with lots of bling-y, jangly bracelets and bangles. She was cheerful, brightly-lipsticked, tirelessly theatrical and knew how to wear a pair of wedges. The whole of Yuba City contained not one single such person. But for all her eccentricities, Bea must have read my mom. She showed us the classrooms, theater spaces, and dormitory. The curriculum, it turned out, was intensive. Students were in classes all day in dance, movement, acting, fencing, diction, Shakespeare studies, theater history, and more. It was the first school on the West Coast to integrate theater-in-the-round and to offer classes in television production, both in front of and behind the camera. In the end my mother was impressed. It was a terrific program and seemed excee
dingly well run.
Once the Playhouse passed the “mom test,” the dad test was easy. The dad test was basically passing the mom test.
When my parents asked about filling out an application, I let them know that that was already taken care of, fudging the timeline in such a way that I appeared to have been proactive rather than devious.
So I was in. At long last I had a plan for my future. I was going to be an actress.
Going public with this information in Yuba City, in the late 1950s, was a bit like announcing that you’re going to strap on a pair of homemade wings and flap your way to Mars. What I got was a lot of very polite skepticism. People from our town went to movies, they weren’t in them. Nor were they empty-headed and ridiculous enough to ever wish to be. I could almost hear the eye-rolls.
I suppose too this reflected poorly on my parents. As the baby of the family, they’d always treated me with a far looser approach than my older brother and sister. When I was sixteen I took our Mercury station wagon filled with high school friends out to, what I told my parents, was a night at the movies. Instead we drove out to Burris Ranch, a shit-kicking cowboy bar, for an evening of music and dancing. On the way home I missed a curve, shot across the highway, smashed through a billboard and sailed down an embankment. Everyone was fine — miraculously — but the car was totaled and I was in big trouble. My dad blustered and fumed that I’d never drive a family car again. Well, when they bought their new Country Squire station wagon, guess who was the first behind the wheel? Yep. Miss Charlotte.
So the fact that they were going to now fund their indulged, air-head daughter — the roller-skater who could barely roller skate — the one with no prospects and a C-average — to follow her little theater pipe dream? That could not have looked good. I don’t doubt that there was a fair amount of incredulous head shaking and tongue clucking at my mom’s bridge games or among my dad’s drinking buddies.
Little House in the Hollywood Hills Page 2
