Little House in the Hollywood Hills

by Charlotte Stewart

  Alcohol did get me in trouble a few times during this era, though. In mid-1977 I landed a role in a TV movie called Murder in Peyton Place, which was shooting during the same week I was scheduled on Little House. My part was small in that particular episode — I was only supposed to appear in a Walnut Grove church scene to satisfy my contract — so I asked Mike if I could get out of that week’s shoot and he had no problem with it, so off I went.

  The night before I was supposed to appear before the Peyton Place cameras I was at home drinking rum-and-cokes and snorting cocaine (as one does), when I was overcome with the need to move my television from one side of the room to the other.

  This was a big TV set I’d gotten out of the blue the Christmas before. Mike Landon often cooked up a surprise for the cast each year of one kind or another. One year we all got special Little House on the Prairie belt buckles, all specially made for us. I wish I knew where mine was today! The following year the show must’ve been doing well because just as shooting ended on Christmas Eve, a truck pulled up stacked with television sets for adult members of the cast.

  Not bothering to take off my high heel wedges, I hefted the bulky thing, which must have weighed somewhere around 50 lbs., and I tottered around the room. A heel went sideways and I fell backward. As the TV came down with me, a corner drove into my forehead just between my eyes. I think I must have passed out for a little bit and when I came to I was drunk and bleeding everywhere and flying high from all the cocaine and knew that somehow I needed to get myself to an emergency room.

  I called my financial manager, Syd Crocker, and he and his boyfriend came over and drove me to General Hospital, where I got five black, Frankenstein stitches in the middle of my face.

  I dreaded showing up at 6 am the next day for my call time at the studio. As fate would have it, the train tracks in my forehead actually played second banana to a bigger disaster — our director had died at home the night before.

  The whole production was put off for a few days in order to find a new director who could pull the project back into shape. This lull in production allowed me to go to a plastic surgeon who took out my original ER stitches — ouch — and do a much more skillful and subtle job of sewing me back together. Nevertheless, I ended up with a Harry Potter-like scar that I carry to this day.

  Fortunately the first scene of me on the movie was a long shot and they covered my stitches with flesh-colored tape. Throughout the remainder of the shoot the hairdresser employed strategic use of my blonde bangs to cover the damage.

  Murder in Peyton Place aired on October 3, 1977 in the time slot just after Little House on the Prairie. Another Charlotte Stewart double-header.

  My last day shooting Little House was August 22, 1977. The final scene was at Paramount on the Oleson’s store set for the episode “I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away (Part 2),” which would air on March 13, 1978.

  Mike made sure I had a good moment to end on.

  Mary Ingalls, who had lost her sight in the first of this two-part episode, has been away at a school for the blind and has come home one more time before leaving Walnut Grove for good to go teach at a new school for vision-impaired children.

  Eva and Adam Simms are also leaving Walnut Grove to find their fortunes elsewhere.

  Mrs. Simms (the schoolmarm formerly known as Miss Beadle) comes into Oleson’s mercantile to say goodbye to Mr. Oleson, Pa, and Mary. She presses a cameo brooch into Mary’s hand, saying that it was one that her teacher had given her long ago.

  She looks at Mary with tears in her eyes and says simply, “I watched you grow up. And I’m going to miss you.”

  She turns to Charles Ingalls and Mr. Oleson. “I’m going to miss all of you.”

  I give Mary a hug and then pull back to look around one last time.

  The tears in my eyes were real. Those lines from the script were words from my heart. I had enjoyed being part of this ensemble so much, had treasured my time working at the movie ranch in Simi Valley and on the sound stages at Paramount — had loved the make-believe world of 1870s Walnut Grove.

  And I had indeed watched Missy, Half-Pint, and Alison grow up. Their storylines had gone from fights in the schoolyard to first loves and marriage.

  And then reality crashed the party.

  When I walked out the door of the store the director, Bill Claxton, called, “That’s a wrap for Charlotte.” And there began the usual flurry through the teardown and set-up for the next scene.

  And that was that. Four years with Little House had, for me, come to a close. Everything and everyone around me plunged forward at the usual, formidable pace. Costume and make-up people busy doing their thing. The crew hustling. Actors moving off to their trailers or to prep for what came next.

  The Little House set wasn’t a place where there were a lot of parties so I had no expectations of Champagne and confetti. But a hug — a real hug, not a scripted one — would have been very welcome at that moment. Some well-wishes for the future. But I knew I couldn’t really expect that either. Everyone had a job to do — there were only so many hours in a day and there were always more script pages to get through and a million details to attend to. Putting together a show of that size and scope requires everyone’s complete focus at all times.

  And it’s the nature of the business. People come and go. And sometimes you’re the one who goes.

  I had been inside Mike Landon’s Little House typhoon since 1974 and in an instant I was now on the outside, it seemed.

  A feeling of numbness came over me. As I walked toward the prop truck I realized that all the relentless forward movement of filming here would continue without me. A new actress was coming in to play the schoolteacher. The cast would continue to grow and change. I suppose in some way that’s hard to explain it was like the death of a dear friend.

  I reached the prop truck, had my last vodka, and then left my pretty prairie dress and golden wig behind for a final time.

  A person has to console themselves after a loss like this and I helped myself through this difficult time by flying to New York a couple of days later where I had a fling with a pilot I knew who flew with the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds. Like all the other pilots in the squadron he was in amazing shape and all the guys wore beautiful uniforms designed by Yves St. Laurent. Needless to say he was hot and it helped massage my feelings of loss.

  New York was a place I liked to escape to although I generally got myself into various kinds of trouble. My friend Erica Spellman was and still is a literary agent there who would drag me around to various parties where, inevitably, I’d drink too much and engage in bad behavior and as a result our friendship, sadly, drifted apart. One party in particular comes to mind because I got the chance to meet writer-director Paul Schrader, an AFI alum, on whom I hoped to make an impression and didn’t. In the other room was director Martin Scorsese, who was having an asthma attack and was simply trying to breathe. Poor guy. I’d met Scorsese years prior when he was doing sound with Jeanne and Larry on the Woodstock documentary. I don’t believe I managed to make an impression on either occasion.

  Once a friend had asked me to show the writer Anthony Haden Guest around Los Angeles — he’s the brother of Christopher Guest, who’s created so many great films such as Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. Well, Anthony Haden Guest was a bit of a snob as far as I was concerned, although I was probably just intimidated by his writer-cred and his connections with British and American aristocracy and with his literary circles, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I was in New York once in the late ‘70s and Anthony had invited me to meet him for dinner. Feeling nervous, I had a drink or three before I went to the address he gave me, a brownstone which I assumed was his house, where I knocked on the front door. I was in for a surprise when it wasn’t Anthony who answered the door but his friend, the writer Tom Wolfe, wearing his signature white linen suit.

  Tom, his wife, and Anthony Haden Guest and I sat around Wolfe’s place making conversation while I drank wine. We went to din
ner at Elaine’s where I snozzled down a few cocktails and got to that very special place of intoxication that puts one on the dividing line between loss of inhibition and loss of consciousness. I knew that if I tried to excuse myself to the ladies room, I would trip over someone, probably Elaine herself, and make a complete ass of myself. Thus without lead-up or explanation I stood in the middle of dinner, walked out of the restaurant in an alcohol-induced zombie state, hailed a cab, and returned to my hotel. Anthony Haden Guest never called to inquire about my whereabouts or well-being nor did I call to check in with him. That was that.

  Except that it wasn’t exactly. A few years later I was lying in bed in Los Angeles reading Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and came across a scene in a restaurant that was pretty clearly Elaine’s (though given another name) in which a priggish writer with three names is at dinner with a friend when the three-named writer’s date who is drunk gets up and leaves without explanation. She is described as “a humorless little American dimwit…” and the writer is humiliated in front of his friends.

  My contribution to great literature. You’re welcome.

  Remember Eraserhead?

  Throughout my sojourn in 1870s Walnut Grove, Henry, Mary X, and Spike lived on.

  My involvement with the film had ended at some point in the first half 1974 — in fact on a few occasions I would rush over from Paramount to AFI, where I would scrub off my Miss Beadle make-up and get prepped to inhabit the skin of Mary X. In terms of film sets and characters this represented two worlds that were about as far apart as you can get.

  When David Lynch had shot everything with me that he needed, shooting and then editing continued on and off through late 1976. I may have my dates a little wrong since I wasn’t there but I continued to hear about the progress of the film through Doreen and Jeanne, who were both involved much longer than I.

  After about the first year of production, David’s AFI grant ran out and he had less and less money to work with. Apparently he got some funds from his Dad and he built sheds around town to make money (Hollywood needs sheds — who knew?). Both he and Jack got a paper route, delivering copies of the Wall St. Journal in the small hours of the morning. If David was excruciatingly slow to set up a shot, he apparently exhibited lightning speed when it came to his paper route. It was supposed to take about four hours and he whipped through it in two. Jack only lasted a few weeks as a paperboy.

  David secured financial help from actress Sissy Spacek, who was art director Jack Fisk’s wife (they had met while working on the Terrence Malick film Badlands). Sissy covered the cost of film stock, without which the movie would not exist. Jack Fisk helped pay for things out of his own pocket too.

  At one point David moved in with Jack Nance and Catherine Coulson and at another he was actually living on the Eraserhead set, making the bed the Henry and I shared his own.

  Eventually, even though Catherine and Jack divorced, they stayed friends and her relationship with David remained strong.

  When funding ran short, Catherine pitched in financially with wages from her waitressing job at a restaurant in Beverly Hills called Barbeque Heaven. She also went around and raised money from friends, family, and even her dentist.

  Sometimes David would come to the restaurant where Catherine worked and she says he’d do odd jobs, like repair the roof, in exchange for a sandwich and fries.

  It was clear, to me and I think to all of us from early on, that not finishing the film was not an option for David. And not simply finishing it but completing it in a way that remained true to his vision. After the AFI money was gone I’ve heard him say that he actually considered building miniature sets and creating a small Henry figurine and filling in unfilmed portions using stop-motion animation. He’d successfully mixed live action and animation with some of his early experimental films and I could see him making something like this work.

  It was a long, challenging haul for David and I have nothing but admiration for that kind of unbreakable will, that I believe marks a lot of true artists.

  The thing, I think, that has made the film an enduring success is that you can’t pin it to any particular era. Given the style of filmmaking it could have been made any time between the 1940s and today. It doesn’t look “’70s.” Unlike a lot of my friends — the guys from Crosby, Stills and Nash for example — David wasn’t a hippie. He wasn’t especially political either in life or in his work.

  The thing you do see in his films is the return, over and over again, to certain ideas, images, and sounds. The industrial hiss and clang so much in the background of Eraserhead is heard in The Elephant Man. The chevron carpet that you see in the “red room” in Twin Peaks makes its first appearance in the lobby of Henry’s building (albeit in black and white).

  A great example, that a lot of people don’t know about, is the connection I see between David’s 30-minute film The Grandmother and Eraserhead.

  David showed me The Grandmother before we started filming Eraserhead and it’s tremendously odd and idiosyncratic but I really liked it. I was already a fan of a lot of the avant garde film coming out of Europe and what I saw in The Grandmother helped me see where David might be headed.

  What I didn’t realize until much later was the amount of connective tissue between the two films. Like Eraserhead, The Grandmother starts with lots of birth imagery, much of it animated — two adults emerge from the leaf-covered earth and then a boy of about 11, all of whom are pale white with Kabuki style makeup. The parents, if that’s who they are, are primitive. They grunt, growl and bark. The mother has seizures. The boy, by contrast, always wears a black suit, white shirt, black bowtie and we see him over and over in isolation in a small, dark bedroom with only a bed with gray-white sheets, a dresser and a few stick-dry plants. Sound familiar? It’s like Henry Spencer’s boyhood.

  In his parents’ bedroom the boy finds a bag labeled “Seeds.” He finds a large one he likes, piles dirt on his parent’s bed, puts the seed in and waters it. Something like a large potato grows and grows until it gives birth — very wetly — to another person, also dressed in black, also with Kabuki makeup — a woman looking to be in her late 60s. At last there’s someone in the boy’s life like him. She’s loving and sweet to him in total contrast to his parents who are like wild dogs.

  There are shots in which the grandmother’s white face with its bright eyes and large round cheeks I swear she looks like the woman in the radiator without the skin disease.

  Perhaps I’m reading too much into this but The Grandmother feels a lot like a prequel to Eraserhead and anyone who loves David’s films should check it out. It’s one of the many great extras on the Criterion edition of Eraserhead that came out a couple of years ago.

  A few months before Eraserhead had its premiere in Hollywood in 1977, David showed a few of us an early cut. At that point the film was still about three hours long. David asked me what I thought and I said, “David, it’s like a toothache.”

  “Swell!” he said, beaming, considering this an immeasurably high compliment.

  Even so, he kept refining it and eventually cut quite a bit until the final version was just 89 minutes. Gone was a scene of Catherine Coulson tied to a bed being tortured connected to battery cables. Gone was a scene when Mary X’s parents force her to return to Henry and the baby. Also excised were things like Henry stroking a dead cat.

  Good riddance. It was all extraneous. The final version holds together like a sonnet.

  No one had ever seen anything like Eraserhead before; it was a film of enormous intelligence combined with visceral brutality, like an opera glove filled with organ meat.

  Like all great art it can be viewed and understood in lots of different ways. It comes as close as I’ve ever seen to diving down into the dreamy subconscious with a camera and capturing it on film.

  While I still can’t claim to understand the film, you can see David’s take on a lot of themes and influences. At the start when you see the diseased god-like “Man in t
he Planet” pulling the train-yard switching levers, for me that has the feel of Shakespeare. Like Macbeth, Henry finds himself caught in the machinations of fate — something outside himself, something supernatural, like Macbeth’s entire life being spun into a whole different direction by the Weird Sister’s prophecy (the word weird in Shakespeare’s time meant fate). Henry’s passive reaction to everything around him for nearly all of the film feels like Hamlet. And like Hamlet, that apparent inability to do anything turns suddenly into an act of gruesome violence at the very end.

  There’s also an element of virgin birth. In the first minutes of the film a sperm-like creature (one of Catherine’s umbilical cords) seems to emanate from Henry’s head and then drops to the planet. Soon afterward it’s revealed that Mary X has given birth. When Mary’s mother corners Henry and demands to know if he and Mary had sex, both seem very confused by the question and neither of them actually admits to it.

  There are elements of Frankenstein. Near the end, with lights blinking on and off and electricity sparking — like a mad scientist’s laboratory — Henry examines “the creature,” the thing that he created.

  Henry finally reaches for a pair of scissors, cuts open the swaddling clothes that bind the baby (another infant Christ visual) and he finds that it has no skin and inside the wrapping is a salad of organs and mush. When he stabs the baby, its death becomes a transformation and seems to return to The Man in the Planet.

  These are just a handful of images and ideas that the film brings to my mind but of course the beauty of it is that Eraserhead isn’t just a collection of literary symbolism and cannot be reduced to any one interpretation. It challenges you with its combination of familiar and alien, it images of disease, isolation, and desire. Yes, it’s influenced by Kafka and other writers and artists, but ultimately, Eraserhead is its own macabre, horrifying, wonderful thing.

  For those who are reading this as fans of Little House on the Prairie, I completely understand why Eraserhead may not be your idea of a good time. It’s disturbing and dark. But I would like to suggest that Eraserhead is not just about bleak isolation, an exploration of the subconscious, and gross-out weirdness but in an important way, it’s about love.