Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  “No,” I said.

  Now, nearly three and a half decades later, I can say that I’ve never gone into a scene on any project unprepared. Mike would’ve expected as much from me. He taught me not to settle for anything less than my best, especially if I demanded it of others.

  In the ensuing years, I’ve also realized his influence on me extended way beyond the set. As a kid, I didn’t know he sipped vodka from his coffee mug every day almost as frequently as he pulled me into his sweat-soaked torso for a giant bear hug, but I’m sure he’s one of the primary reasons why as a young woman, I almost always picked men who smelled like alcohol.

  Likewise, I’m sure Mike was responsible for my preference for physical men with a sense of humor. Here’s a perfect example: we shot exteriors on a Simi Valley ranch about ninety minutes north of Paramount, and if the sun was out, Mike would, by late morning, strip off his shirt and work in just his pants, boots, and suspenders. (In all fairness, it could be hellaciously hot in Simi Valley.) Well, women came out in droves to watch him work and to swoon, and he loved playing a certain prank on them.

  He would send me to catch a frog from the pond (I can still hear his surreptitious whisper, “Half Pint, go find me a little one”), then pop whatever I brought back in his mouth, walk over to where the women stood, say hello, and let the poor freaked-out frog jump out at them. As they gasped and shrieked, he flashed a naughty, self-satisfied grin that made him even more lovable.

  It would be years before I opened my eyes to Mike’s shortcomings; and until then I thought he was perfect. His daughter Leslie was one of my best friends. I was also close to Mike Jr., who was a year younger than Leslie and me. I slept at their house and they at mine, often enough that they felt like my weekend family, and I thought Mike and Lynn were the most glamorous, loving couple.

  As we went through the season, work seemed more like play. Various episodes required me to go fishing; fly a kite with a cute boy I kind of liked on-and offscreen (fellow child actor Eric Shea, who attended my school); do scenes with guest star Richard Basehart, a giant in my eyes for having starred as Admiral Nelson in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea; and pretend to fight with Alison, who, though cast as my on-screen nemesis, was one of my best friends in real life.

  When we had slumber parties at Alison’s house, we got to stay up and watch Saturday Night Live. At my house, the lights went out much earlier and my TV intake was carefully monitored for age appropriateness. My mom had a long list of rules that were impossible to explain to my friends. Among others, she didn’t believe girls should wear black or get their ears pierced until they were eighteen. I still haven’t figured that one out, though I lived by it, and when I turned eighteen I did what any girl in my position would: I pierced my right ear once and my left three times.

  I had no idea how she would’ve reacted to my first crush because I didn’t tell her that my heart went pitter-pat whenever I thought about Craig Botkin. Nor, at the end of the school year, did I let her see my sixth-grade yearbook, where friends wrote they were sure I’d marry Craig and they’d see me at the wedding.

  But that was the least of what went unspoken. In February, I was home from school with a bad cold when my mom came in with my brother and said she had to tell us something. The key words in that sentence were “had to,” because my mom wouldn’t have told us something if it wasn’t imperative and inevitable that we know, which this was.

  “Daddy died last night,” she said.

  For a brief second, I thought I’d misheard her, the way I had when she’d told us about his stroke. In fact, I almost ran to the phone to call him. Then it hit me. He wasn’t dying to talk to me. He was actually dead. My brother was already crying when I let out a wail that sounded like the air was screaming out of me. I collapsed into uncontrollable, racking sobs. My daddy was gone.

  For me, everything about my father’s passing is still blank and mysterious. One day I had a daddy; the next day he was gone. After my mother broke the news, we didn’t talk about it again. I don’t remember ever going to his house again. I wasn’t asked if I wanted any of his belongings. I wasn’t allowed to go to his funeral, nor was my brother. I’m sure my mother thought it would be too painful for us. She wanted to shield us from that kind of sorrow, preferring our lives to be beautiful all the time. It was a long time before I found out that my father had died after suffering a second stroke. To this day, I don’t know if he was at home or some other place. All I knew, all that mattered was that he was no longer alive and my life was never going to be the same again.

  It was like there was a hole in my soul. No one came to sit with me. None of my friends knew. No one at work ever mentioned my father’s death. No one put their arm around me, gave me a hug, or said they were sorry. I have a feeling people were told it would be too upsetting for me.

  Not even Leslie Landon, my best friend, knew. Many years later, we were having lunch, now parents ourselves, and I mentioned something about losing my dad. Leslie was shocked. All those years she had thought my father died before she and I met. I had a hard time believing Michael never gathered his kids, who were my closest friends, and said, “Listen, Melissa is having a hard time.” But he didn’t. I assume my mother didn’t want anyone to know lest they upset me by bringing it up.

  A year or so after my father’s death, my grandfather took Jonathan and me to the cemetery. We looked down at my father’s headstone. I looked over at my grandfather crying and saw my mother put her arm around him. I wouldn’t shed a tear that day. I wasn’t supposed to be sad—ever. At least that’s what I thought. So I just stood there. But I was very angry. I was angry that my mother would comfort her father, that she even had a father. That he could cry and I couldn’t and I had to be a soldier as we stood over my father’s grave.

  More time would pass, decades, in fact, before I would find out the details of my father’s funeral. According to my mother, hundreds of people turned out. Tony Curtis, who loved my father and tells me the most wonderful things about him whenever we cross paths, couldn’t even go into the service. He sat on a hillside outside of the Old North Church at Forest Lawn Mortuary. Years later my mom told me that Red Buttons delivered one of the eulogies; she said the tributes were amazing and I should always know that many people truly loved my father. I of course had no way of knowing whether this was true or more fairy dust. I’ve since chosen it to be true.

  My father’s death was handled so differently than I would handle it today as a mother myself. I’ve made sure that my children were exposed to death and grief from very early ages. They were given the choice to come along when we had to put pets to sleep. We even had a funeral for a pet mouse. I’ve tried to give them an understanding of loss and a sense of grief as a necessary part of life. I wanted them to realize that without such sadness and pain, there can be none of the love and happiness, and loss doesn’t mean you have to give up the good stuff in your heart. It means you cherish those memories that much more and think of the tears that may fall as smiles from the past. It’s as Mike said in the beautiful poem “Remember Me,” which he composed for the episode featuring Patricia Neal:

  Remember me with smiles and laughter,

  For that’s the way I’ll remember you all.

  If you can only remember me with tears,

  Then don’t remember me at all.

  seven

  WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?

  We moved on in the same way we moved on after my parents’ divorce, without acknowledgment that anything was different, or rather a tacit agreement that we’d believe everything would be the same even though it wasn’t. Over spring break, we began a yearly tradition of going to Hawaii with the Landons. We stayed at the Kahala Hilton, where we bumped into other families we knew and all of us kids swam together, helped one another build sandcastles, and played epic games of kick the can, Frisbee football, and ding-dong ditch.

  I was always the kid on the beach with cotton pajamas over my one-piece bathing suit and a thick slab of
white zinc oxide on my nose because I burned easily and severely. In other words, I was a total dork.

  To save a little money, my mother cleaned out the minibar in the room I shared with Jonathan or Patrice, depending on the year, and filled the fridge with milk, cold cuts, and bread. I can still picture myself at lunchtime, sitting in the sand in my pajamas, eating a bologna sandwich with mayonnaise dripping down my hand. Meanwhile, the other kids feasted on cheeseburgers and fruit salads served on a tray brought by the hotel staff directly to their rented poolside loungers. Dinner was more of the same while the adults went out. I was not a glamorous kid.

  Right after school got out, my mom and I went to Roundup, Montana, where I shot the movie The Christmas Coal Mine Miracle. The cast included Kurt Russell, Andy Prine, and Mitch Ryan, who played my father—yet another daddy figure with whom I bonded. He was, incidentally, the one who many years later sucked me into the Screen Actors Guild politics, something for which I’ll never forgive him.

  They were a pretty wild bunch and apparently one night something really crazy happened, because the next day everyone on the set, cast and crew included, were laughing about it. But nobody would tell me no matter how much I begged, pleaded, and connived. It annoyed the heck out of me while we shot the film and lingered in my brain afterward as one of my life’s great mysteries.

  Ten years later, I’d gone on location for a movie, suffered an attack of appendicitis, went back to work too soon, and developed a horrible infection in my blood that landed me in a bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Every time I opened my eyes my bed seemed to be surrounded by concerned people with red-rimmed eyes and forced smiles, standing over me. (Just so you know, the forced-smile thing doesn’t work. It just makes the patient sure he or she is going to die.)

  In the midst of this, I overheard someone say Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell were also at the hospital following the birth of their son, Wyatt. I scribbled a note to Kurt, congratulating them and asking him to come up and say hi. I gave it to a nurse, who got it to the hospital’s PR department, and later on Kurt came into my room.

  I gestured for him to sit next to my bed. He asked how I was doing. I could barely talk, but I managed to tell him that I was going to be fine. I used all my strength to prop myself up and say, “I have to ask you a question.”

  “Shoot,” he said. “What is it?”

  I gestured for him to come closer because I was too weak to speak above a whisper.

  “What the hell happened in Roundup, Montana, when I was a kid?”

  I had to know just in case I didn’t pull through, and Kurt laughingly told me the story. It turned out there was a lot of drinking and sex going on, with the guys playing the role of Hollywood big shots in a small rural town and going through the local girls with élan, particularly Andy. Kurt secretly wired a van with a microphone and hid with the sound guy in the bushes outside the town’s one bar one night while Andy was inside getting hammered.

  Kurt had also arranged for a girl to come on to his costar. Soon the two of them walked out of the bar, got in the van, and began to fool around. At that point, Kurt had a local police unit quietly pull up behind the van. At the moment the girl told Andy she was only sixteen, as Kurt had instructed her to do, Kurt cued the police, who flashed their lights. All of a sudden, Andy burst out of the van wearing only his underwear and took off in the snow.

  Though I wasn’t able to eat or drink anything in my sickbed, I found the strength to laugh. I couldn’t believe that story had been kept from me the whole time. Not that I would’ve understood it. I may have wanted in on the world of grown-ups, but I was still more comfortable in little-girl moments like the one on the first episode of our third season when guest star Johnny Cash beckoned me to where he and his wife, June, were sitting, put me on his lap, and said, “I watch your show all the time, and you just climb right into my heart.”

  I saw my classmates and peers start to go through puberty and wear bras, while my gingham dress hung on me as straight as it did on the hanger in my closet. Toward the end of my twelfth year, I had a double hernia operation and woke up only to be told that the three pubic hairs I’d grown had been shaved off by the nurses. That was how I heralded the onset of puberty…by being humiliated.

  After I watched the movie The Great Waldo Pepper, I developed a crush on Robert Redford. He overtook Batman’s Adam West as the man I wanted to marry. I went through my Tiger Beat and Teen Beat magazines and papered my school locker with photos of him, John Travolta, David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, Parker Stevenson, and How the West Was Won’s Bruce Boxleitner, my future husband. Only in this industry can a girl grow up and marry the picture in her locker! I was also in those magazines, not that I gave a shit. I devoured the articles on those young men and believed every word, knowing full well the stuff written about me wasn’t true.

  Unlike some girls, I wasn’t boy crazy. I was too reserved for such displays, which made me quietly selective. But I felt like my life might change the first time I saw Scott Baio on the Paramount lot. My friend and fellow Chachi devotee Tracy Nelson was even more excited. The two of us went to tapings of Happy Days whenever possible. Though she’ll kill me for admitting this, we rewrote the lyrics to Linda Ronstadt’s song “Blue Bayou” to “Scott Baio.”

  I started hanging around the commissary, waiting for him to show up so I could say hi to him, as if he might be remotely interested. He wasn’t. In fact, he couldn’t have been more disinterested.

  I had no such delusions when I heard John Travolta was shooting Grease on the lot, but I put myself on red alert for any sightings. When it finally happened, I was eating lunch with Katherine Mac-Gregor, who played Mrs. Oleson. Katherine’s nickname was Scottie, and she was hilarious, one of my favorite lunch companions for her openness and sense of humor. But her lack of inhibition made her a less than perfect choice to be seated across from me when I literally went into shock.

  “What is it?” Scottie asked, her back to whatever I’d seen that had caused such a reaction.

  “That-that-that guy over there,” I said.

  She turned and looked over her shoulder.

  “Him? With the greased hair?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s Vinnie Barbarino.”

  John was wearing the soon-to-be infamous Danny Zuko jeans and leather jacket. He was gorgeous.

  As he walked toward the food counter, Scottie twisted around in her chair, leaned back, and signaled him over to our table with an animated wave that could’ve guided a 747 to the gate, even as I pleaded, “No, no, no, please don’t do it.” Just in case he didn’t see her, she augmented her effort with a piercing warble: “Oh, young man! Young man! Over here!” If you watched Little House you can imagine how she sounded…just like Harriet Oleson calling out to some young man in town. Oy!

  I wanted to die. I literally slipped under the table. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t know who I was. I was on a highly rated TV program and I was in my Little House wardrobe.

  John came right over. He was warm and gracious as I crawled out from under the table, and I was grateful he didn’t laugh at me. Still, after he went to get his food, I turned to Scottie and said, “Please don’t ever do that to me again.”

  A few years later, Tracy and I had the Grease album, and we’d stage it and sing along like devoted cult members. More often than not I let Tracy play Sandy. Our performances also included Holly Robinson (an amazing singer), who I befriended that summer when my mom and Harold began a short-lived tradition of renting a house in the Malibu Colony.

  Joined by the Landons, I remember us girls—Leslie, Holly, Tracy, and me—decamped on the beach when we weren’t singing, eyeing the chiseled bodies of surfers, studying the older surfer girls in their bikinis, and sharing whatever shreds of information we knew or thought we knew about womanhood. Leslie reported that she’d found a book on her parents’ shelf that said yellow was the color to wear if you wanted to seduce a man.

  “Yellow?” I asked.

  “They
find it sexy,” she said.

  “Crap,” I sighed, “that’s the one color that doesn’t work on me.”

  It wasn’t like I was ready to seduce anyone. I didn’t know the first thing about sex—not what it was or how it worked. My mother never explained the facts of life. At ten, I’d found a box of tampons under the sink in her bathroom and when I asked what they were, she said they were for applying makeup. But now I was fourteen, and this other person inside my brain periodically clamored for details about how the different parts worked, not just generalities.

  One day I was in the car with my mom when my need to know wrestled my usual reticence into submission. Flushed and overheated by the breakthrough I was about to make, I asked her what it was like “to get Sara.” She went into the whole story about giving birth to my sister. But that wasn’t what I wanted to know, and I asked the question again. What was it like to get Sara?

  My mother’s expression revealed her sudden understanding of my question. I could almost see her brain go Oh, shit, here it comes.

  “It was very lovely,” she said.

  And that was all she offered. As she turned her eyes back on the road, she left me with my mouth agape with disappointment, confusion, and questions. What did “lovely” mean? And, more important, could it still be lovely for me even if yellow wasn’t my color?

  I don’t know when Melissa Sue got her period or began thinking about these same issues. But there was a certain point during the fourth season when all of a sudden she had really long fingernails (I bit mine ravenously), wore makeup, smoked cigarettes, and guzzled TaB. She was way beyond my league. Then when she began dating actor Lance Kerwin of James at 15 fame, forget it. She wasn’t just out of my league. She was in a different universe. It was like all of a sudden she was grown up. After that, she dated Frank Sinatra Jr. But we never talked about any of that stuff. Alison was my great source of information. She made sure I noticed her boobs on the day they popped out, and a short time later she came to work and whispered to me, “Guess what?”