Karen was one of the few cast members from Little House that I hung out with outside of work, having dinner occasionally with her and her boyfriend at the time, who I knew as Tuie, but discovered later went by William Kinsolving on the covers of his novels.
Another one of my favorite people on the Little House set, and one I also spent some memorable time with, was Katherine MacGregor, who was brilliant at playing the preening, self-centered, peacock Harriet Oleson, the proprietress of the Walnut Grove dry goods store.
Katherine’s background, like Karen’s, was largely in theater and she brought an almost academic seriousness to her work. She’d gotten her start in New York as a dance instructor in the 1940s and went on to work steadily in regional theater and on Broadway. By the start of Little House her film and television resume included a small, uncredited role in the Elia Kazan film On the Waterfront, and then a smattering of guest roles on TV shows including Mannix, All in the Family, and Ironside.
At some point in the series I was having a respiratory problem and decided to do what you did in the ‘70s, which was to go to a health farm; Katherine and I thought it’d be fun to go together. She was a great aficionado of health spas with a special preference for The Golden Door in Escondido. The place we went on this trip was down near San Diego called Hidden Valley Health Spa (or something like that). We drove down and spent five days at this place sharing a room, which is when I discovered Katherine was a devout Hindu. She didn’t make a big deal about it but it was an important part of her life. In our shared room she set up a little shrine with a candle where she’d meditate each day.
Meditation was also part of our daily regime at the health farm as was eating almost entirely tasteless vegetarian food. After a day or two we got such a strong craving for flavor she and I hiked up to a garlic farm that we found nearby and did a little surreptitious harvesting. We took back these huge garlic bulbs that had a delicious, delicate flavor and soon everyone at our table was clamoring for a slice or two.
Every day the health farm staff had us walk barefoot through green grass, then through a trough of cold water, then a trough of sand, and finally back across on the grass. All of this was to stimulate our feet.
So Katherine and I got our feet stimulated, foraged for garlic, and laughed a lot on that trip. The whole thing was so ridiculous, but because I was with her it was a hoot.
You really couldn’t find someone more different than the character she played. I found her to be such a serene soul, very warm, funny, and unpretentious.
I learned too that she was also so kind to her fans. Even though she was in one of the top shows on television, there she was listed in the Hollywood phone book. Fans would call her up at home and she’d chat with them for hours.
She loved playing Mrs. Oleson and threw everything she had at the part, physically and emotionally. Once the show was over she says she just felt wrung out. She didn’t do any more television or film, instead she got involved with a children’s theater company in Hollywood and moved into a little apartment on Vine St. across from her beloved Vedanta Society, a Hindu temple and worship center.
I have a feeling that Mike secured so many of his actors from the theater world — Karen, Katherine, and Richard Bull, who played Mr. Oleson — because they were so solid and so right-on-the-money. At the same time a television audience wouldn’t associate them with any other previous TV roles or shows.
Even those of us with long backgrounds in TV and film were not, in the minds of a general audience, associated with any other characters or shows. Although someone like Dabbs Greer, who played the Reverend, and whose TV and film credits went back to the late 1940s, or Kevin Hagen, playing Doc Baker, who’d gotten his start in the 1950s, were at most only vaguely familiar faces.
Ultimately this approach to casting accomplished a few things. First, Mike got us pretty inexpensively by Hollywood standards. (Mind you, these were the biggest and most consistent paychecks of my career.) But even Kevin Hagen said publicly once that they “got us cheap.” The second thing is that since none of us brought any identification with other shows or films, it was easy for the audience to see us more purely as characters in the world of Walnut Grove. For example, you didn’t look at Mr. Oleson and say to yourself, “He’s good here but he was great in My Favorite Martian” or anything like that. Finally, and I’m not trying to be snarky by saying this, it ensured that Mike was the star of the show — though it was a billing he would eventually share, quite comfortably, with Melissa Gilbert.
The show, it should be said, was Mike’s from start to finish — every piece of it. On that first day at the costume department, I realized that all the costumes were new, nothing had been borrowed from any previous film or TV production as is a common practice especially with period pieces.
Later I realized that Mike allowed none of the Little House costumes to be sold or rented to any other productions. He didn’t even want anyone to use the outdoor sets. In the last episode of the show, he actually blew up Walnut Grove. (I’ve never watched that episode and never will — there’s no way I want to see a place that precious to me destroyed.)
The crew was even his, in a sense. They were completely devoted to Mike. Nearly all of them had come with him from Bonanza and would eventually follow him to Highway to Heaven. They were all Western guys, good with horses, expert builders, comfortable and effective working at a fast pace, and they liked to drink and cuss and play pranks and do, well, guy stuff. I got along really well with them because they reminded me of my dad’s drinking buddies, like the man who owned the local chicken hatchery or ran a Yuba City plumbing company.
Mike was very much the leader of this troop of cowboys and most of the time Victor French, who played the mountain man Mr. Edwards and who directed a lot of episodes, was right there in the mix. And yet in the middle of this testosterone funhouse Mike also managed to, in my opinion, create a new kind of masculinity on television.
Charles Ingalls was tough and hard-working, he was quick to defend his family and his town. Remember when he got the crap beaten out of him in “Bully Boys?” He was a fighter who wasn’t afraid of taking a hit.
Being a good dad was important to him. He had fun with his kids. He would listen to them and tried to answer their questions. He was patient. He cared about not just their physical well-being but their feelings. He was fair and optimistic.
Pa wasn’t a drinker, didn’t swear, didn’t gamble, didn’t even flirt with other women, much less alley-cat around with them. He adored his wife, his kids, his house, land, horses, his town, his profession, going to church, his fiddle, and Christmas.
He didn’t hesitate to say, “I love you,” or to hug, hold hands, or cry. Lord, Pa cried all the time. And yet Mike had come from the same world I had — raised by those tough-as-nails parents who’d grown up in the Depression and had kicked ass in World War II. Boys didn’t cry. Boys didn’t hug or express “girly” emotions. That was unmanly and weak.
Mike totally broke that mold.
Mike said you could be loving, funny, sentimental, silly sometimes, emotional — and yes you could cry. And still be a man.
Had television ever seen a guy like this before?
Fred MacMurray on My Three Sons and Ward Clever of Leave It to Beaver were both cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking, problem-solvers, who loved their families but were both a bit aloof and untouchable. Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show was a good listener, a great dad, and was insightful in the ways of the human heart but even he didn’t have the emotional openness and availability of Charles Ingalls. Perhaps closest was my friend Ralph Waite, as John Walton, Sr., on The Waltons. Even so, no one came close to the shiny eyes or outright tears down the cheeks of Mike Landon as Pa.
He was like the embodiment of the Robert Frost poem “A Door with No Lock” — there were no barriers between Charles Ingalls and his emotions.
The thing that amazes me is that Mike seemed to know how to maintain a balance between being a bona fide TV hun
k and the greatest dad ever. He managed to be sexy and yet an upright citizen. Those tears always seemed earned and were a reflection of the viewer’s own emotions.
People ask me all the time, what was it like to work with Michael Landon. The truth is it was a lot of things.
I admired him for so many attributes — his ability to create, shape, and execute a story that millions of people could relate to. His gift for creating moments on screen that — even if they crossed the line into pure fantasy — rang true and made emotional sense.
He was always looking for ideas, always had a legal pad with him jotting down notes. In fact, I gave Michael an idea for an episode in season two based on my godmother, Pauline, who had been the only teacher in the 1930s in Ft. Bragg, California, a lumber town. A lot of the older boys in the area would work part of the year with their fathers in the lumber business and part of the year they would attend school. It was a difficult transition for everyone. These boys, who were used to sawing, hauling, and milling logs, weren’t always happy about being made to sit at desks and learn the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
One night some of the older boys decided to have fun terrorizing her by hurling rocks at the door of the schoolhouse while she was inside feeling trapped, unsure what would happen to her if she tried to leave. Life as a pioneer teacher was tough and the everyday challenges weren’t always pretty.
I could tell Mike liked the story idea because after I told it to him, I watched him go to work on that yellow legal pad, writing very quickly, outlining the basis for an episode that would be called “Troublemaker.”
As a writer Mike always worked at terrific speed. It seemed like the words he wrote in longhand couldn’t ever come out of the pen fast enough to keep up with his thoughts. The dialogue he wrote always had great rhythm and music to it and even though we were playing characters from 100 years in the past, the lines always fell so easily out of me. I don’t ever remember having a moment thinking, “Wait, this doesn’t make sense” or “This doesn’t work” or worse, “Miss Beadle would never say this.” The dialogue matched the character and the situation. Mike never overplayed the script, never tried to show off as a writer. It was all clear, clean, and direct. And because he was running the show, if dialogue could ever be cut and the scene played better for its emotion without it, that’s where he would always go.
The episode Mike created from my godmother’s experience remains one of my favorites because we got to see so many sides of Miss Beadle. The way Mike structured the final televised version the townspeople — mainly Mrs. Oleson — decide that Miss Beadle isn’t up to the task of managing a classroom with older boys in the backbenches. The trouble that’s brewing is that with the end of harvest even more older boys from outlying farms will return to the schoolhouse and God knows what will happen then.
The school board decides that a man would be better suited to handle the classroom management situation and they vote to fire Miss Beadle. As she is not present at the meeting, it’s up to Pa to deliver the news.
We see Miss Beadle waiting for the verdict in what appears to be a small, pretty boarding room seated on her fancy brass bed reading a book.
When Pa knocks, she opens the door and there he is, his face filled with regret and she already knows the news. He lets her know that the vote was not unanimous. There are tears gleaming in his eyes.
Victor French, who was not only a tremendous actor but one of my favorite directors on the series, took me aside after a take or two filming this scene and gave me a great note. He said quietly, “Don’t let him see you cry.” It turned out to be a moving way for the audience to see both Eva Beadle’s strength and her vulnerability at the same time.
So the unthinkable happens — Miss Beadle leaves the school, much to Laura’s regret, and is replaced by the imposing Hannibal Applewood, played by Richard Basehart, who had such a great, powerful voice and presence. Richard had been in movies going back to the 1940s such as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, La Strada, and Moby Dick. He’d even played Hitler. Well, he certainly brought a touch of the Third Reich to Walnut Grove, focusing his sadism and ill-will on Laura Ingalls, punishing her by making her fill the chalk boards with spelling words, slapping her hand with a ruler (twice!), and even expelling her from school — all for crimes she had not committed. Well, you don’t treat Half-Pint like a juvenile delinquent and not expect Pa to eventually open a can of whoop-ass. Which he does demonstrating the truth of the words “Beware the anger of a patient man.”
Miss Beadle is looking pretty good about now to the townspeople as well as the kids in the school — even the boys in the back who like to cause trouble.
The school board meets again and there is a showdown with Applewood in which he reveals himself, under questioning, to be a complete crackpot. They don’t get the chance to fire him because he quits. They bring back Miss Beadle and all is well in Walnut Grove once again.
Beyond his ability to put together the building blocks for a captivating story, something else I admired about Mike is how he valued efficiency. He’d never shoot anything he didn’t have to. Most directors will work their way through a scene getting a master shot and then shoot close-ups, a medium shot, a three shot, whatever, so the editors will have lots of footage to work with; it’s a kind of safety net should something be missing or if, say, a reaction doesn’t work well. Not Mike. He’d shoot a quick establishing shot and then move in for close-ups and other shots as needed. No extra footage, no safety net. He edited in his head all day as he went and I doubt he gave his editors much to do. Not a moment was wasted. He consistently came in under budget and every day — unlike any other show I’d worked on — we wrapped at 6 pm. He valued time with his family and friends — he wanted to have a life. He valued our time as well, which we all adored him for.
Years later I heard a classic Mike Landon story. He was guest starring on a show in the 1990s, I believe it was Touched by an Angel. And he grew restless and irritated by how slow the director was working. Without asking anyone’s permission, he grabbed some crew and went off and shot a bunch of second-unit material for the show. The director was, apparently, furious but was of course checkmated. NBC appreciated all of Mike’s extra, cost-saving work and it all ended up onscreen.
Having said all of these things, Mike was not a saint nor do I think he aspired to sainthood and would, I believe, balk at the level of glow-y virtuousness that is becoming his legend.
He could be a bit vain. The hairdressers were always at their wit’s end with what to do with Mike because he dyed his own hair at home — covering up the onset of gray with color out of a box. They hated the result. I suppose, though, if you’re Mike while you may be okay weeping in front of the crew you may not be as cool with them seeing you get your hair treated. That’s just my guess.
He did wear those wool pants pretty tight and if you’ll notice — as Alison pointed out in her book — whenever Pa gets injured, it’s never in the shins, it’s always his ribs. This necessitates the shirt coming off, bandaging, and sexy winces, while Doc Baker, tells him he’ll be fine in a couple of weeks.
I remember at one point maybe in the second or third season, the show was becoming popular in Europe, especially in France and Spain, and Mike was dragging his feet at going over to do publicity. While he was a big star here in the U.S., he wasn’t famous over there. Over there he was no more well-known than anyone else in the cast.
Beyond all those very normal traits Mike did, just once, let me know that he was up for a roll in the hay, if I was interested. It was the end of the day and I was gathering myself up to leave the set. I could tell he’d been drinking. And this was a time in his life between marriages so he wasn’t breaking any rules; maybe he was just seeing what a quickie here and there would be like. I don’t remember the exact words he used but it was specific enough to let me know what he had in mind and yet vague enough to let me wriggle out if I wished. I was shocked — there had been no lead-up, no hint in our past to s
uggest this was coming, no flirting. And it took what felt like a long time for my mind to process what exactly was happening.
I liked Mike and I know Mike liked me. He always called me “Beadle” on the set, which I enjoyed. But we didn’t hang out. We didn’t socialize on weekends. Ever. One time in the week before Christmas I happened to run into him in Beverly Hills where we were both doing holiday shopping. It was really fun to see him away from work — it was a totally different feeling from how we interacted on the set. He was very sweet asking what I was buying, whom I was buying it for, and all that. We walked together for a little way and that was that.
To Mike I was a chess piece that he moved around the Little House game board. I was an underling. An employee. Sleeping with the boss wasn’t my idea of a good time and I’ve never regretted that choice and I don’t believe he held it against me.
I don’t mean to be unkind by saying this. I mean to make the point that Mike — like all of us — was human. He worked in an industry in which sleeping around, at least in the ‘70s, was as remarkable as going out for ice cream. There was plenty of alcohol on the set and lots of guy-talk. The fact that this only happened once is probably more noteworthy than the fact that it happened at all. Context being everything.
Honestly I would think that, rather than being remembered as a saint, Mike would rather be known for his incredible work, his work ethic, his friendships, his jokes, and his devotion to his crew, his friends, and his family rather than being remembered for something false — that he lived some kind of idealized life that came with a halo.
In my personal life I was also grateful to Mike for casting me in the show, as it gave me house-buying income. While I’d loved my rented home in Topanga Canyon, the drive was killing me. With my Little House paycheck I was able to purchase a home in Beachwood Canyon located just below and to the left of the H in the famous Hollywood sign. It not only gave me homeownership but it positioned me minutes away from Paramount and the other studios.
Little House in the Hollywood Hills Page 15
