Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  On the set, though, I would quake watching veteran TV director Boris Sagal, who was a screamer given to tantrums and dropping the F-bomb, including on days when we were visited by high-ranking dignitaries from the United Nations, Israel, and Great Britain. I’d never worked with anyone like him. Mike had a smoldering temper—he could kill you with a look—but he masked his intensity and perfectionism with a world-class sense of humor. Not Boris. One day a visitor made a noise and he whirled around and screamed, “What the fuck is this here, some sort of shit house?”

  By contrast, the cast was a seamless group of talented, lovely actors led by Joan Plowright, Maximilian Schell, James Coco, Doris Roberts, and Scott Jacoby in the role of Peter. Scott was the first of my leading-man crushes, and it was my big secret. He was considerably older and beyond my reach. I was still listening to Barry Manilow. He was into Led Zeppelin.

  With high ratings and three Emmy nominations, the movie turned out to be another respected achievement for my production company and me, but to tell you the truth, I was occupied by other, more personal milestones. Like turning sixteen. First, I celebrated the big occasion with a cake on the set of Diary of Anne Frank, and then I had a more fittingly girlish luncheon for all my friends at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The beautiful party made me realize I wasn’t in any hurry to grow up, but I finally felt ready for this next baby step.

  In one respect, I was like every other kid who turns sixteen. I couldn’t wait to get my driver’s license and then I wanted a car. A car meant freedom. A car meant escape. Of course, my mother set out strict rules before I even got one: No driving alone at night. No driving outside a five-mile radius. If I drove farther than that, I had to have a parent or my on-set guardian in the car with me. There were so many restrictions I might as well have bought a bicycle.

  I’m sure my mother would’ve liked it if I had. But I was intent on having my own set of wheels. My mantra was simple: freedom and escape. I made enough money to afford any number of cars, including a cute BMW convertible, which, if I could live my life over again, would be my first choice. However, my mother talked me into getting a brand-new…station wagon.

  For reasons that escape me, I went along with her plan. As I recall, our conversation was kind of rhetorical. My “uncle” Bud Barrish owned a Chrysler dealership, and Harold and I both got new cars at the same time. He got a LeBaron convertible and I got a cream-colored LeBaron station wagon, which was delivered to the driveway with a big red ribbon on it. It couldn’t have been dorkier.

  All my friends drove sporty cars like Mazda RX-7s. I pulled into school in a friggin’ station wagon, singing Barry Manilow’s “Mandy,” which was cranked on my eight-track. Any chance I had to be remotely cool was again instantly squelched.

  From across the set, the object of my horror looked to me like some sort of medieval torture chamber. In reality, I was staring at a bed—the bed Dean and I were supposed to get into for our first scene in our house after getting married. My head was full of vivid images of the vile things that could happen to me in there. Not that I had a clue what any of those things looked like; for me it was all imagination, and what I was imagining scared the shit out of me.

  The seventh season of Little House had opened with Laura and Almanzo pledging their troth to each other for eternity. Their wedding, which aired in September 1980, was one of the major events of the fall TV season (from behind the cameraman, my mother sighed, “Oh, my baby’s growing up”), and this scene in bed, like their wedding and their first kiss, was a highly anticipated moment that was supposed to convey their special love. But make no mistake, this was no love scene per se…this was prairie lovin’.

  We were lying under the covers, reading the Bible and eating popcorn. Even Kermit and Miss Piggy had spicier scenes on Sesame Street. But just as we were getting ready Dean turned, put his mouth close to my ear, and like a slimy lounge lizard crooned “Strangers in the Night.” He cracked up, thinking it was the funniest thing ever. Had I been a little older and more experienced, I probably would have laughed with him, but that was not the case. Singing that song in that place at that time was a fatal mistake. All my fears were confirmed. I thought I was in bed with Chester the Molester.

  From that day on, any time I saw a script in which Almanzo was supposed to kiss Laura, I begged whoever was standing near me to find Mike and I’d ask him if we could change it to a hug. I was petrified by having to pretend to be in love when I’d never been in love. Obviously I wasn’t experienced in everything I did as an actor, but love was different. Showing it required exposing more of myself and more places within myself than I was ready or able to do.

  I was also questioning the concept of love itself. One morning my mother came into my room with a look on her face that clearly meant bad news. She prefaced her remarks by saying, “Something’s happened,” which made me sit up straighter, since that phrase was akin to an airline pilot coming on the PA and telling passengers to buckle up because the plane had hit serious turbulence. Whenever something happened, it was usually horrible. Something happened when my dog died and when my dad died, and so I looked at her, wondering, What next?

  “Auntie Lynn and Mike are separating,” she said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Mike is seeing someone else,” she said.

  Everything about my mom—her voice, her expression, her gestures—was very dramatic and kind of defeated as she told me the news. She said he was seeing Cindy, whom she referred to alternately as the makeup artist and the girl who used to be a stand-in. I think she said Auntie Lynn had thrown a bottle of vodka at Mike’s head. She also said we had to be supportive of Auntie Lynn, as well as Leslie, Mike Jr., and their little ones, Shawna and Christopher, because they were going through hard times and it was going to get even harder.

  I was obviously concerned for my friends, who were like a second family. They did go through a tough time, too. Mike Jr. was hit hard, as was Leslie. I didn’t know what to say to either of them. I had never been talked to about feelings, so how could I begin to discuss my friends’ feelings with them? The split also rocked my world, which was dominated by Mike. At a certain point, I thought, Hey, wait a minute. What about me? I have to work with Mike. I can’t take sides, yet he’s done something that’s turned my world into angry, opposing sides. I was put in a horribly uncomfortable position.

  Worse, I’d seen it coming. I’d expressed my suspicion about Cindy to my mom. I’d told her something didn’t seem right about the time Mike spent with her, but it had been like walking over a dead body in a room and no one commenting on it. My mom had said I was crazy. Not Mike and Auntie Lynn, they were the devoted, loving parents of children whom they adored.

  In public Mike was seen as a pillar of morality and family values, a real-life incarnation of Charles Ingalls, not someone who would leave his wife for a younger woman. The public believed it. So did close friends like my mother. And to some extent so did I. Then, bada bing, the picture cracked. At home, the phone didn’t stop ringing. My mother talked nonstop to Auntie Lynn. Hard as the news was to believe, it was really happening. It was like the Titanic hitting an iceberg.

  Then the shit hit the fan in the tabloids and celebrity magazines. Mike lost lucrative commercial endorsements. He admitted he wasn’t perfect and warned people not to confuse him with the character he played on TV. I watched it all unfold. Though it wasn’t my family breaking apart, I still went to work every day with Mike and on weekends hung out as always with Leslie and Mike Jr., so I was more than peripherally involved. Yet no one said a word about it to me. I wasn’t given any advice or direction.

  It was so strange to watch this drama play out around me while being left on my own to figure it out. But that’s the way it always was with me. After my mother and Harold married, they rushed Harold’s daughter Patrice to therapists to help her through the difficulties she had with her parents’ split and subsequent fighting. In the meantime, I wasn’t asked if I needed help coping with this newly b
lended family situation. Nor did anyone ask how I felt about Harold.

  No, there was an assumption that my life was perfectly fine—Melissa’s good. She’s a trouper. The same was true after my father died. I appeared to make it through that tragedy without consequences (“She’s remarkable,” my mother told people), though if anyone had asked they would’ve found out that getting up and going to work every day without complaint doesn’t mean you’re accepting and adjusted. It just means it’s all stuffed away, ready to explode at any moment.

  Likewise, it was assumed I could soldier on as always with Mike after he’d left his wife—and my mother’s dearest friend—kind of date his son (who’d begun seeing other girls), and remain best friends with his daughter as their world crumbled and changed. Indeed, it was assumed I could manage all those relationships on my own without any guidance. I was given only two instructions: don’t talk about Mike in front of Auntie Lynn, and don’t mention Auntie Lynn or my mother in front of Mike.

  I was caught in the middle as the people all around me chose sides. Everyone on the crew supported Mike and so did I. He was our boss and our pal. At home, though, we sided with Auntie Lynn. At the dinner table, my mom preached girl power and talked about what “a shit” Mike was being to Auntie Lynn.

  Sometimes I would catch myself staring at Mike and wishing he would take me aside and say he knew it was awkward for me but things would turn out well. He didn’t. I don’t think he ever talked about it to his own kids either. He moved out of the family’s home in Beverly Hills and got a house in the Malibu Colony. At work, his parts got smaller and he directed fewer episodes. He became less involved in the show. His name dropped down the call sheet from number one to…whatever.

  He was creating a new life for himself—one that didn’t include me. I get it now. My family’s allegiance was with Auntie Lynn and the kids, so my relationship with Mike began to dissolve. No explanation. No discussion. No acknowledgment that I might be feeling confused, betrayed, and abandoned. To me, it was like a death but without the grief, since I’d never been allowed to experience that.

  I wasn’t supposed to feel anything because he wasn’t my father, because it wasn’t my family, because if you asked my mother, my life was charmed and perfect. I was on a hit TV show, met amazing people, and acted in movies during my time off. What complaints could I have?

  Amid that upheaval, Harold suffered a brain hemorrhage. He collapsed one day in his bathroom and was rushed by paramedics to the hospital. My mother was a wreck. Brain trauma is very unpredictable, and Harold developed various issues that kept him hospitalized for quite a while. I resented being dragged to the hospital to see Harold when I knew it was mostly to impress the nurses who would give him better care if they knew he was related to a celebrity. But I didn’t say a word. Why start now? I thought.

  Look, I understood. My grandmother still lets people know her relationship to me and my sister if it means getting her air-conditioning unit fixed faster. But I didn’t have any emotional investment in Harold other than he was my sister’s father and I didn’t want her to go through the same kind of pain I did when I lost my dad. At one point, Harold pulled out a shunt that doctors had implanted to drain fluid from his brain. He also went through a phase where he was combative and pulled out tubes from his arm.

  Through all of this, he maintained the one thing about him that I did admire: his humor. One day a priest came in and asked if he wanted any counseling. Harold said no, but he introduced his doctor, who happened to be in the room, to the priest as “Dr. Antichrist.” He was also delusional due to his condition, but we never knew when he was joking or when he was hallucinating. On his way to the operating room for a procedure, he told my mother not to worry because she owned the Rams. (This was back when L.A. still had a football team.) The ordeal, quite unexpectedly, inspired me to want to become a doctor. I felt comfortable in the hospital and fascinated by what went on there.

  When Harold finally came home he seemed pretty much back to normal. He did, however, get hepatitis from a blood transfusion. All of us had to get a gamma globulin shot, which pissed me off because I wasn’t fond of needles, and the fact that I had to get a shot because of him made me even madder.

  That’s awful to admit. Horrible, in fact. But it’s true. This was around the time I told the press “I had my crying moments” over Harold, which was a lie. As I said, I didn’t want Sara or my mom to suffer, but beyond that I really didn’t care.

  Did that make me cold? No, it made me brutally pragmatic, like a female Holden Caulfield, someone who woke up one morning and found that nothing in her life fit the way it used to. It was as if Mike’s divorce and Harold’s brush with death pushed me outside my old comfort zone and into a new place where I thought about myself a lot, if not all the time, which filled me with anxiety and confusion.

  None of that showed on Little House, which was experiencing its own growing pains. As it moved toward the end of its seventh season, Ma was going through menopause, Laura announced she was pregnant (I jokingly thought of myself as the first pregnant virgin since the Virgin Mary), and we added two babies to the cast. Off camera, Mike was emotionally done and preparing to exit the show; at season’s end, Melissa Sue also decided to leave and pursue a feature film career. At Sunday dinner the week of her announcement, my grandfather said, “What a moron this is! Who leaves a hit show?”

  Not me, that’s for sure. I had a career beyond Little House. In fact, Uncle Ray and my mother had already lined up a remake of Splendor in the Grass for my summer break. All I craved was to be cool and have a boyfriend. Despite my efforts, both seemed hopelessly out of reach—even when I took Scott Baio, by that time a good friend, to the homecoming dance my junior year. I thought he’d give me a modicum of cool; everyone would see Chachi and want to talk to us. But no one came near us. At my twentieth high school reunion, I found out that none of the boys asked me out because they figured I was dating movie stars, like Scott.

  What was wrong with me? So much, as far as I was concerned. When I looked in the mirror, I saw a girl with squinty eyes, a chunky body, no boobs, thin lips, a big, fat nose, ugly yellow teeth, and unhip hair (I wasn’t allowed to cut it, ever). I tried to improve the picture with makeup, but I wore too much and I looked like a drag queen.

  Adolescence is torturous at best. For a repressed, dorky child star it is a living hell. I had no idea who I was, or what I was doing or feeling. I just knew that I was overwhelmed and ugly and unlovable. My mother described me as young for my age. “She’s not what you’d call streetwise,” she once told a reporter. Ya think? My days were fully scheduled. I was sheltered, overprotected, and rarely alone. In some ways, I was like the princess in the tower looking out the window and wondering what was going on out in the world. I craved information and wanted to be around people who were more open and honest, and spoke about things other than what “nice girls” would do.

  I started to spend more time with my godparents, Mitzi and Charlie, and their daughter, Jennifer. Their house was funkier than mine, their friends were edgier, and things were looser, wackier, and louder there. Uncle Charlie drank and smoked grass, and he was open about it. Unlike the people in my house, they kept few things hidden. One time, Mitzi and Jenny got into a fistfight on the floor right in front of me. They would tell each other to fuck off, call each other names, and have screaming arguments. Five minutes later, they’d be kissing and hugging each other. They were like Eugene O’Neill rewritten by Neil Simon. I thought they were fantastic. I still do.

  I also gravitated toward Uncle Ray’s associate Alan David and his wife, Bunny. They were barely ten years older than me, very hip, and on the cutting edge of Hollywood, as typified by their modern-style, glass-and-steel home in the Encino hills. They actually lived near my house, but I may as well have been light-years away.

  From their house to their lifestyle, they had a contemporary edge that drew me in. Alan was plugged into everything in town, and Bunny was effortlessly funky and
elegant. Professional stylists got paid huge money to produce for magazines a look she was able to put together by herself. At their house, we listened to the Rolling Stones and the Who, as did Mitzi and Charlie (he liked Cream, too), but Alan and Bunny were also into the Cars, Elvis Costello, and other New Wave groups. I needed major help graduating from Barry Manilow, and they knew what was cool.

  I didn’t tell my mom or Uncle Ray about anything we did or said there, not that I did anything that had to be kept secret. But Alan and Bunny smoked and drank and talked about doing drugs and sex with even more openness than at my godparents’ house. It was exciting and liberating to be around them and occasionally ask a question containing a word or words I wouldn’t use at home.

  At my house, no one talked about LSD. Bunny and Alan told me that when she got pregnant with their son Ari, Alan said, “What if what they say about acid is true? We might as well just go ahead and name this kid Bambi.” Just that snippet of conversation blew me away. It referenced two of the biggest taboos in my world, sex and drugs—and not just drugs, which typically meant smoking pot, but acid. Through the combination of my mother and school, I’d been brainwashed into believing two things: (1) Charles Manson–like killers lurked in every canyon in L.A., and (2) doing acid or LSD would turn you into a vegetable. It was to your brain what salt is to a slug: instant fizzle.

  Apparently, that wasn’t true; at least the part about acid wasn’t. According to what I picked up from Alan and Bunny, you could take LSD, not wake up with the IQ of a zucchini, have a pretty wild time in bed, and lead a normal life, too!

  They realized I was a good girl struggling with normal issues. I think they saw that I felt things I couldn’t articulate, that I was at that point in adolescence when a little voice inside me was about to whisper in my ear, “Get ready, we’re going to go a little faster now. We’re going to try a few new things. And, uh, your mother doesn’t have to know.” They used to tell me not to worry because I was going to turn into a whole different creature when I had my first serious relationship. Years later, in fact, they told me that one night they were having dinner when Alan made a bold but prescient prediction. He said, “Everything’s going to change the first time that girl has sex.” Bunny agreed.