Little House in the Hollywood Hills

by Charlotte Stewart

  One of the producers very nicely asked if I wanted my new husband Jordan to work on the film and I said absolutely not. Which I realized later was not a good sign.

  I played Charlotte Goodheart, a waitress in the greasy spoon café, who dreams of becoming a chanteuse and is the object of Lionel’s goggle-eyed, slack-jawed desire. I wore heart earrings, a heart necklace, and a heart apron. I was blonde and breathy and had a ball.

  Early in the film Lionel Switch drops by the café to see Charlotte and for a full minute of screen time (time it if you don’t believe me) we are treated to the sight of his eyes bugging, his face twitching, his mouth open and moving, trying to form words at the sight of his heavenly Charlotte.

  Well, what actress doesn’t want a bit of that?

  Human Highway was the first and only time I got to sing on film. Before shooting the scene where I sing “Moonglow” to Neil as Lionel (he joins in whistling) I sang that song everywhere I went — in the car, cleaning my house, walking down the street. When we finally filmed the scene everyone was stunned that I could actually carry a tune. Nailed it on the first take.

  The film also includes a subplot with guys from the New Wave band Devo as jump-suit wearing workers from the local nuclear power plant — the one that’s about to blow. They glow red as they move red glowing barrels of nuclear waste in a truck that also glows red, all the while performing their version of the Kingston Trio hit “A Worried Man.”

  Devo were big at the time, thanks to popularity of “Whip It.” Elliot had been Neil’s manager for a long time and now also managed Devo, so he was bringing a lot of his clients together on this. Plus, Neil really like the Devo guys and loved performing with them.

  Dennis Hopper, who played Cracker, the twitchy, talkative short order cook, was always high, drunk or both during filming and was usually a pain in the ass. This was, I believe, the last movie he did before going into drug and alcohol recovery. On set he was not that different from his character in Apocalypse Now, always in his little kitchen banging stuff, pots, pans and implements and always jabbering away maniacally and nonsensically and driving us all crazy.

  One day Sally Kirkland had had it with him. Dennis was banging the metal counter in his kitchen with a large knife. She grabbed it by the blade, thinking perhaps that it was a dull prop, but no, it was good and sharp and it sliced right through her, severing a tendon in her right index finger. It was pretty bloody and awful.

  They got her off to the hospital and bandaged up. A day later several of us from the film went to see her in a play and there she was on-stage with a cast on her hand and arm, gamely ensuring that the show would go on, seeming to do pretty well.

  Something like five years later, in December 1985, she filed a $2-million lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against Dennis claiming that he’d intentionally knifed her. She also named Neil and Elliot in the suit, claiming they had been negligent in not keeping Dennis under control. My friend Mickey Fox, who played Mrs. Robinson in the film, and I had to go testify.

  In court Dennis’s lawyer didn’t dispute that the knife incident had happened or that his client had been high at the time but maintained that it had been an accident.

  In February 1986, Superior Court by Judge Stanley Malone found Dennis not at fault along with Neil and Elliot and the whole thing was dropped.

  The final film, meanwhile, was released in September 1982, shown first at the Mill Valley Film Festival and later in Los Angeles. The reviews weren’t great and it wasn’t embraced by the film industry at all.

  The tone, the look, the feel of it, the politics, it just wasn’t cool in the way things were supposed to be cool at that moment. Perhaps if it had been released 10 years earlier or 10 years later it would’ve received a different reception. In 1982 Ronald Reagan was president. Margaret Thatcher was the prime minister in the UK. Punk music was on the rise. The world had shifted since Human Highway had first started filming back in 1978. The average moviegoer was seeing E.T., Poltergeist, Blade Runner and Porky’s. Film connoisseurs were seeing Diner, Gandhi, and Sophie’s Choice. No one that year was in the mood to see a group of Topanga friends sing and dance their way through a comedic, experimental, anti-nuclear-power film.*

  * I am thrilled that as I’m sending this book off to the publisher, I’ve just learned from Elliot that Human Highway is slated to show in 400 theaters in March, 2016 — finally getting the spotlight it deserves.

  Chapter 10

  Henry and Mary X, Part 2

  By the time I’d started Human Highway, my life had taken on a new reality. For the first time since the late 1950s my indomitable work ethic was faltering. My appointment books from this era offer a glimpse of this. A normal year for me was, say, 1975, in which in addition to filming Little House, I also managed to appear in more than 20 television commercials, including Bounty, Shake-N-Bake, Mr. Clean, Cool Whip, Pillsbury, Morning Star Farms, Mountain Bell Telephone and more. In 1978, page after page is empty, with only a notation here and there for a dinner party or a visit to my therapist.

  In September of 1978, I was hospitalized as I’d done so much cocaine I ended up with vaginal bleeding that wouldn’t stop, and had to get a D and C.

  About the worst thing you can give a person with addiction issues is lots of money and free time. Idle hands, as my mother would say, are the devil’s workshop.

  When I had lived in Topanga the hour-long, winding trek between my house and just about every studio in town mandated, though reluctantly, a level of sobriety. Even when I moved to Beachwood Canyon, though the commute was dramatically cut, the work on Little House demanded specific periods of sobriety. Sometimes for two or three weeks at a time I had to be to work at 6:00 a.m. either at Simi Valley or at Paramount and know my lines and perform at a high level. I felt responsible to the cast and crew to show up ready to go, even if I was hung over.

  For four years the show gave structure to my life and put money in my bank account. With the end of the Little House and with nothing like it in sight, it was now up to me to get out there and hunt down more work.

  Unfortunately it seemed that four years on a hit show had done little to give me a career boost. Little House was not widely watched in the entertainment industry. It wasn’t a show that other producers or executives were watching. It didn’t get reviewed and it didn’t win Emmys or any other notice at the awards shows.

  Alison Arngrim likes to joke we were “the ugly stepchild of the entertainment industry” and to find actual viewers you had to leave Los Angeles County — once you crossed the county line there they were.

  A few years after my stint on the show had ended, I went to a bar on Melrose where I often ended up around lunchtime. The bartender and I had become good friends. One day a young, LA, hipster couple were at the bar next to me and the bartender, by way of introducing me to them said, “Do you know who this is?”

  They said no.

  She said, “This is Charlotte Stewart, she played Miss Beadle on Little House on the Prairie.”

  And they burst out laughing. Snotty, derisive, “How stupid is that?” laughter.

  Which put the whole thing in perfect context.

  What I’d done for those four seasons on the show counted for nothing. My work on Human Highway went unseen and wouldn’t see the light of day again until the mid-1980s when it got a limited video release.

  If I wanted a job, I’d have to get out there like the thousands upon thousands of other working actors in Hollywood and beat down doors, show up to auditions, and all the other legwork that goes into finding a job.

  You know what’s a lot more fun than spending the day sitting in producers’ outer offices chasing parts you’re not going to get? Staying home and drinking and doing cocaine and watching TV.

  Especially when you’re married to someone who wants to do exactly the same. It’s a bonding thing.

  At least for a while. And then something clicked and I started to get mad and disgusted and bored with him.

 
While the truth is that neither of us were working or looking for work, in my mind Jordan was more negligent than I in this regard. His not-working meant that he was living more and more off my income, which was the accumulation of decades of hard work.

  I decided to go on a trip to Mexico with my niece and I told him that I’d come back when he’d found a job. About a week later over the phone he told me that he’d landed a part-time gig at the Magic Castle so I moved back in.

  By the time I’d finished Human Highway though, I wanted to get away permanently. I wanted to end my second marriage and I decided the best thing to do was to leave town. Employing a kind of magical thinking, I labeled all my issues “L.A. Problems” reasoning that all I really needed to do was to get out of town.

  I met with my financial manager and long-time friend, Syd Crocker, whom I’d worked (and partied) with since about 1973 when he’d moved to Los Angeles from the Carolinas and was in the first flush of discovering that he could live openly there as a gay man. The freedom and joy he felt were infectious — I adored Syd. He’d done a great job of managing my monetary affairs all the way through Little House. Over the years Syd had helped invest my money so that I owned a house, I owned an apartment building, and had other holdings to secure my long-term future. I liked him so much I talked him up to friends and as a result quite a few made him their financial manager too — friends such as Josh Bryant, Stuart Margolin, Tim Considine, and several others.

  Syd was a ball of energy, he was a lot of fun, and he took some pride I think in the idea that he wasn’t a stodgy, boring accountant. Financially he’d make moves that were probably more creative than most, like I remember him doing things like moving a few thousand from my account to Josh’s account to cover a temporary shortfall and then moving it back. But he always checked with me when making a move like this, so I didn’t mind.

  When I told Syd I was going to move to San Francisco, he set up a system in which he would take care of all the monthly payments in L.A. for things like the mortgage on my Beachwood Canyon house and the building I owned, plus various forms of upkeep etc., and at the same time he would take care of paying my rent for my San Francisco apartment, the utilities, and so on.

  I packed up my yellow Pacer (complete with 8-track player) and drove to San Francisco, found an apartment just off Haight Ashbury, where I would live for more than a year — an era which comes back to me now in not much more than a blur, which is why the details in this portion of the story become a bit thin.

  One night I remember drinking so much at a restaurant that a waiter had to walk me home. Once I got there I couldn’t get my key into the lock and I stood there stabbing at it unsuccessfully and he kindly and patiently took the key, unlocked the door and helped me inside.

  On another occasion I had been out drinking and woke up in the morning with a horrific hang over. Once I stumbled out of bed, the sunlight pounding my eyes, I discovered that my front door was standing open — anyone off the sidewalk could have come in. My car was parked at a sideways angle to the curb, the driver’s side door was standing open and my purse with all of its contents lay on the sidewalk as I had apparently left it the night before.

  I had moved to San Francisco to escape L.A. and to be closer to my family but at the same time I was drinking myself into a kind of blindness. My family was very worried about me. I knew somewhere in my haze that I wanted to quit. Or at least slow down.

  I went to a health spa in the South Bay to try to pull things together. The place offered transformation through meditation and a vegetarian diet — and of course drugs and alcohol were not on the menu. As part of the in-take, I was asked to fill out a personality profile. The next day the director asked me into his office to discuss the results. The answers, he said, indicated that I was suicidal. Which I thought was crazy. How could that be? Something was laughably wrong with their test.

  Later I went to another health spa, this one down south outside of San Diego. The staff asked us all to do a skit on Saturday so I asked Dolly Parton, the country singer, who was also staying there at the time, if I could borrow her wig. She was more than happy to offer one up — a large blonde thing — and I did a skit in which I played Holly Spartan.

  But health spas weren’t solving my problems.

  Jordan and I divorced when I was living in San Francisco and I managed to do a miniscule amount of work. I had a small part in the Billy Wilder film Buddy, Buddy with Jack Lemon and Walter Matthau. I also managed to pull myself together enough to play roles in a couple of episodes of Eight is Enough. But if you look up my career on IMDB.com, you’ll see work was scant.

  I cannot blame this on Hollywood. I can’t fault the industry for having a built-in disinterest in actresses over the age of 35. This was good old-fashioned substance abuse doing its career magic.

  And then things got worse. The owner of the apartment where I lived in San Francisco contacted me looking for a rent payment. Huh? Syd was taking care of that. I called his office to see had happened but I couldn’t get him on the phone. This game went on for a few days.

  Then I came back to Los Angeles to find something totally frightening. Without my knowledge, my Beachwood Canyon house had gone into foreclosure. It now belonged to the bank, not to me.

  I was panicking and got a call from a friend, Liz Barron, who’d known Syd nearly as long as I had. Syd had encouraged the former model and single mom to go to law school, which launched a law career that lead to a position as a state judge. She adored Syd as much as I did.

  “You’ve got to get away from Syd,” Liz said. “The statements you’re getting aren’t real.”

  She meant the monthly statements of income and payments, which he’d prepped and sent to me for years.

  The question then was — what happened to all the money? Where had it gone? He was still somewhere in town but I couldn’t track him down.

  Soon I discovered that Syd’s cocaine habit had spun wildly out of control and that to fund his addiction he’d been moving funds around from one client’s bank account to another — as he had in the past from time to time but now he didn’t pay it back. It had all gone up his nose. He had been desperately trying to hide it all in a kind of shell game in which the statements were falsified and the numbers were cooked.

  He’d ruined me financially but worse, he’d ruined all my friends — people who were only with Syd because I was with him. And I’d been too drunk and too high in San Francisco to maintain a solid hold on the situation.

  I felt sick and scared for myself and I felt heartbroken and utterly responsible for what my friends were now dealing with.

  Syd wasn’t a bad guy. He was a good guy with a bad addiction. Everyone was doing cocaine — everyone. But unlike most people he’d become completely dependent on it. And like so many addicts — like me — he’d chosen drugs over friendships, drugs over career, drugs over doing what was right.

  A spiral had started. My house was gone, the building I had owned was gone, and my investments were gone. Everything I had worked for and earned since the early 1960s had vanished. I had gone from a beloved role in one of the biggest TV series in history to a homeless alcoholic.

  Not sure where to go or what to do, I talked everything over with Jeanne. Her new husband Stephen Peck (Gregory Peck’s son) had an idea and introduced me to French director Jean-Pierre Dutilleux, who said I could have a room in his large house on Mulholland Drive in exchange for maid duties such as mopping, picking up his clutter, and scrubbing his toilets. That only lasted until a friend of mine and I threw a small party when Jean-Pierre was away for the weekend. That got me thrown out.

  I reached out to my old Pasadena Playhouse teacher, Kenneth Rose and his wife Helen. They had a one-room apartment unit on their property in the Hollywood Hills, which they said I could rent. With what money? I didn’t get that far.

  So my dog Fudge and I moved into that little apartment. But soon after Ken made a comment like, “Are you sure you should be drinking so much?”
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  And that was it.

  Anyone who pointed out the fact that I drank too much was cut right out of my life. I found out years later that Jeanne and Mickey Fox would often say to each other, “What are we going to do about Charlotte?” They knew I needed help, needed an intervention but were afraid to do it because they knew what would happen — they’d never see me again.

  I left Fudge at Ken and Helen’s apartment assuming they’d take care of him and I tracked down someone I knew I could drink with and wouldn’t have a stick up his ass about it — and that was Jack Nance. He still lived in the apartment house I had once owned on Pico near the 405, where I’d set him up as the building manager, a job he was uniquely suited not to do. He had developed an elaborate capacity to hide when tenants needed him.

  The success of Eraserhead as a midnight movie classic hadn’t worked in Jack’s favor. He’d only managed to land a couple of small film parts, one in a Chuck Norris movie called Breaker, Breaker. The truth is he was far more interested in drinking than working, which made him precisely the sort of person I wanted to hang out with.

  I told Jack I really needed a place to stay and he was as agreeable as a curmudgeon can be. His apartment looked like the site of a bombing — piles of magazines, weird knick-knacks, old books, garbage and overflowing ashtrays.

  Jack and I didn’t do much. Mostly stayed in the apartment with the drapes shut and stayed drunk and watched TV. Other than the calories from alcohol, our food supply came from shared hotdogs at the Wienerschnitzel a couple of blocks away.

  At one point Jack decided he wanted to go fishing in Mexico so we packed his car with booze and took a road trip. There for a few days in Ensenada he fished and I soaked up the sun.

  Once we got back to L.A. we did manage to roust ourselves out of the apartment for the running of the Olympic torch through Los Angeles. In a highly intoxicated state we dashed out in front of the torch runner, dancing and skipping and strewing handfuls of rose petals in his path.