Then everything changed. I had not been able to say good-bye to my own father. I wasn’t going to screw this up. I turned to Bo and said, “I think I need to see Mike as soon as possible.”
“Let’s work it out,” Bo said. “Let’s make sure you see him.”
A couple days later I was inventing excuses why I couldn’t see him. I was scared. I didn’t know what to say, what not to say, or how to say good-bye to this person who had played one of the most pivotal roles in my life. Finally, at Bo’s insistence, I came around and we set up a time to see Mike. Then that was repeatedly postponed, as Mike either had complications requiring emergency treatment or was trying some alternative therapy.
At each juncture, I received a new update, and each time the prognosis was worse. It was always a variation of “He’s fighting but it doesn’t look good.” In early June, he basically said good-bye to fans in an interview that ran on the cover of LIFE magazine. About a week later, we finally set up a time to go out to his house. Knowing he was declining, I didn’t want to take away any precious moments his family could spend with him, but selfishly, I needed to see him.
On the morning we were scheduled to go, I sat on the bedroom floor playing Super Mario Brothers. I was like a gaming fiend. Every time Bo said it was time to leave, I pleaded with him to let me get to one more level. I didn’t want to come out of that make-believe world. Finally, Bo turned off the TV and practically carried me to the car. He put Dakota in his car seat. I was useless.
Once we arrived at Mike’s house in Malibu, I realized that I had never been there before. He had moved in after his divorce and that had been an unusual time for all of us. His house was breathtakingly gorgeous, a true palace for a man who had conquered the world on his terms. He had a beautiful saltwater swimming pool that Dakota jumped in almost immediately. The views went on forever.
Inside, I said hi to Mike, who was lying on a couch in the family room. I’d never seen anyone as sick as he was then. He was extremely thin and frail. He looked twice his age. His hair was white and his skin was gray; all of his color had vanished. It was like he was almost invisible.
A crowd of family, children, nurses, attendants, and helpers bustled around him. He was hooked up to a drip, which I assumed was morphine. I gave Cindy a basket of spa treatments; I figured the last thing she was doing was relaxing or taking care of herself. Since I had heard Mike say the one thing he wanted to do was laugh, I brought a tape of my grandfather and Jerry Lewis making crank phone calls back in the 1960s, the entire Three Stooges collection, and a fart machine.
We made small talk until Bo brought Dakota in the room and put him in my arms. Dakota was now two and a big, adventurous toddler, but he was perfectly calm as Mike pulled him close and gave him a kiss. Then someone told Dakota there were horses in the backyard. He wanted to go see them, and Bo volunteered to take him. Nerves caused me to chime in that we should all go. Bo gave me a look and very pointedly said, “I will take him to see the horses. You stay here.”
I don’t know if what happened next was planned or an accident of fate, but I sat down on the coffee table next to Mike and everyone else left the room. It was almost as if someone had said “Let them have their time.” I held his hand and pretended not to look at him. The TV was on, and both of us stared at it in silence. If he was like me, he was not just remembering but feeling all the time we had spent together—way too much to ever articulate—pass back and forth in the flesh of our hands.
I didn’t know what to say. A part of me felt like holding hands and being together was enough. Then he turned his gaze from the TV to me. His eyes were like blankets wrapping themselves around me, and whatever he was thinking made him smile. Finally, he said, “I want you to know, I’ve seen everything you’ve done.”
“You have?” I said, genuinely surprised.
“Oh yeah.” He smiled. “I’ve watched every movie. Every one.”
“You have? Really?”
“Yeah.” He was quiet for a moment or two. He appeared to be remembering something. Then he said, “I always knew it.”
“You knew what?” I asked.
“I knew you would be the one.”
I couldn’t contain the tears anymore. I’d been trying so hard not to cry, but they just overflowed.
“No, no, no,” Mike said. “We’re not going to do that.”
“Okay,” I said, sniffling and wiping my eyes. I recalled when, as a little girl on the set seventeen years earlier, I was unable to cry on cue and Mike had taken me aside, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “Do you know how much I love you? I love you so much.”
Now we weren’t doing that. We weren’t going to cry. Instead, he pulled me toward him and we hugged. Nothing else needed to be said. That hug was more than enough. That’s all he wanted. And that was pretty much all I was capable of.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone in the kitchen doorway gesturing for me to get up and go in there. It seemed urgent. I told Mike that I’d be right back. He was sort of drifting in and out at that point anyway. I was met in the kitchen by a nurse, Bo, and Dakota, who was crying hysterically. One of the horses had bit his fingers. I looked at his hand; his fingers were smashed, but kids’ bones are very soft, and after a couple of minutes they looked normal again and he seemed all right. I was worried, but when one of Mike’s nurses got Dakota to reach for a balloon that had been attached to a flower arrangement, I knew he was fine.
I told everyone that I didn’t want Mike to know what had happened. It would just upset him. A little while later, I went back into the family room and sat down next to him again. He asked what had happened. I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“No, I heard something happened to the kid,” he said.
“One of the horses bit him.” I shrugged.
“Was it bad?” he asked.
“No, he’s fine,” I said. “His fingers were kind of smashed, but he’s in the kitchen digging through a bowl of goldfish crackers.”
“Oh, thank God,” he said. “If something bad had happened, I’d feel just awful.” Then he grinned—that unmistakable Michael Landon grin—and added, “Wait a minute. I’m dying of cancer. How could I possibly feel worse?”
Soon after, he drifted back to sleep and I said my good-byes.
A week later I was with Dakota in the family room, which was really his giant playroom, as he scampered around, listening to his records and playing with balloons. The TV was on, tuned to CNN as it was every day. We were in the midst of the first Gulf War, but I wasn’t paying attention to the coverage, I was having fun with Dakota. Then the anchor came on and said that actor Michael Landon had died. I may have screamed; I don’t recall. But Bo immediately rushed into the room and asked what was wrong. I pointed to the TV screen, which was showing a retrospective of Mike’s career.
Bo scooped up Dakota, who was crying because I was upset. I was inconsolable for a few minutes, and then something in me switched. I needed more information than I was getting on TV. Maybe, I thought, CNN had it wrong. I became obsessed with finding Leslie and hearing for myself what had really happened.
Honestly, I don’t remember if I called her or she called me, but at some point that day we talked for a long time. She told me about the unusual things that happened during the last twenty-four hours of Mike’s life. He had seen the proverbial light that guides people onto the next phase of their journey. He had seen his late mother waiting to comfort him. As a family, they had shared moments that, on hearing them, didn’t lessen my sadness but reassured me that death isn’t a horrible, scary thing as much as it is a transition to something else.
Still, I was heartbroken. My mother came over and my sister, sweet thing, brought me a milk shake. After that, my phone rang off the hook with requests from reporters wanting a comment. It seemed everyone in the world wanted a quote. Yet I was incapable of communicating.
I finally gave my publicist a statement, something about Mike’s contribution to the world and a hole in m
y heart. Then I fell into a deep depression. I stayed in bed with the shades drawn. Anytime I got up and tried to move around, it felt as if I was moving through mud. I walked around dazed in my pajamas for days until Bo came home one day with two puppies and said I had to housebreak them. He told me that with a two-year-old and two puppies, I had my hands full. Bless his heart, he knew exactly how to gently get me up and moving.
About a week later, Kent McCray, who’d been an executive producer on Little House, called and asked if I would deliver one of the eulogies at Mike’s funeral. I said of course, no question. The second I hung up, I regretted it. What the hell was I going to say? Scratch that. There was so much to say. But how was I going to stand up in front of his family, his children, his friends, and talk about him without bludgeoning everyone with my feelings?
In my opinion, part of the responsibility of delivering a eulogy is to try to bring some comfort to the people who are grieving. It wasn’t about standing in front of everyone and bawling like a self-absorbed idiot, which was what I pictured myself doing. How could I not get up there and just cry?
I found it impossible to write a eulogy that articulated my relationship with Mike, what he meant to me, and also what his loss meant to me. I tried numerous times without success. Finally, on the night before the service, I managed to gather my various attempts—a bunch of notes—into a concise form. Then I prayed to Mike to help me through it. It also helped that I was married to a playwright, who gently nudged me forward. By midnight I was done, and then I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, terrified of what would happen the next day.
The service itself was a blur of familiar faces who, like me, were doing a relatively fair job of keeping their emotions in check. I saw Luke Tillman, our special-effects guy who was missing multiple fingers, which had always amused me as a kid. (Why was the guy in charge of our special effects missing fingers?) I saw Melissa Sue and Karen Grassle. Ernest Borgnine was behind me. I sat with the other speakers, including Mike’s business manager, Jay Eller, who recalled how after Mike was first diagnosed he had warned Mike that he could lose his hair if he did chemotherapy. And Mike said, “Jay, don’t worry. I’m rich. I’ll buy a hat.”
Then it was my turn. I walked up to the little platform with a huge lump in my throat and I began to read what I’d written the night before. I managed to get through my remembrance by focusing with laserlike precision on two people, one on each side of the room: former president Ronald Reagan and singer Al Jarreau. Since I didn’t know either one of them, I was able to deliver my eulogy without feeling an emotional connection. If I had looked at Karen, Melissa Sue, or one of Mike’s kids, I would have ended up a puddle of tears.
Afterward, we made a brief stop at the postmemorial reception at the Landons’ house in Malibu. I was able to spend some one-on-one time with Mike’s family and some of the Little House cast and crew people. There was a lot of hugging and crying, but there was also a lot of laughter as we all shared stories about Mike’s fantastic sense of humor. It was very comforting to be around people who’d known Mike so well and loved him as much as I did, if not more.
The rest of the year seemed to be taken up by requests for quotes to media outlets and shows doing Michael Landon tributes. Even when Bo and I were performing one of his plays at the Barn Theater in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I flew back to L.A. for a tribute to Mike at the Emmy Awards. That was when I ran into Shannen Doherty on the side of the stage. Aside from that pissing me off, I was upset that Mike never got an Emmy while he was alive. He was never even nominated. What was it that Marty Sheen had warned me about Hollywood?
Of course, Mike would have told me that stuff wasn’t important, which I had learned years earlier. He had his priorities straight. That’s why I responded with a quote every time a request came in. But eventually I reached a point where it felt like too much.
One day I was with Sandy and David Peckinpah when yet another show called and asked me to talk about Mike. I wanted to turn them down, but David urged me to think otherwise.
“You better do as many of these as you can,” he said. “After all, Michael Landon is not going to be dead forever.”
I had never heard such a sick and twisted comment in my life. It made me laugh. Mike would’ve laughed, too.
twenty-two
GETTYSBURG WAS MY WATERLOO
In early 1992, Fox ordered seven episodes of Stand by Your Man, a sitcom starring me and Rosie O’Donnell, a young comedic talent just coming into her own. She had won Star Search, played Nell Carter’s neighbor on Gimme a Break! and who knows, if Stand By Your Man had taken off, she may not have had time to make the movie A League of Their Own, which accelerated her trajectory toward stardom.
But our show, a remake of the British series Birds of a Feather, was canceled less than two months after it debuted in April. It was too bad. From all the TV movies, the public knew I could cry. I wanted to show people that I had a sense of humor, too. Rosie saw it. Of course, she could make me laugh until I almost peed.
After we finished the pilot, I got a call from two guys with a business that helped adoptees reunite with their birth parents. Bo had hired Troy Dunn and Virgil Klunder a few months earlier, and after much digging, they had located my father, David Darlington, in Las Vegas, and they said my mother was not Susan Alabaster, the name on my birth certificate, but a woman named Kathy.
In photographs they sent soon after, I saw a strong resemblance to Kathy but not much to my father, whose phone number was included in the packet of information. I stared at the number as if it were the key to a long-lost treasure chest. I needed a day or two to work up the courage to call. A man picked up on the second ring. He confirmed he was David Darlington, and when I asked if he had given a child up for adoption in 1964, he paused and then said, “Well, I think it was ’63. But yeah.”
“No, it was ’64,” I said, as my entire body trembled from nerves. “And it was a girl.”
“Yes, it was a girl,” he said.
“And…and that baby was me,” I said.
After a long pause, he said, “Oh my God.”
He asked who I was and what I did. I told him that was the weird part and to brace himself.
“I’m an actor,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yes. And I’m on television. I was on a TV series for ten years when I was a kid and I’ve done a number of movies for television.”
“Well, what’s your name?” he asked.
“Melissa Gilbert,” I said.
There was another long pause.
“I know who you are,” he said.
“Yes, you do, and no, you really don’t,” I said.
As if the conversation wasn’t already weird, it got weirder when he asked me about work, Michael Landon, and other celebrities. He was like any person on the street. And I answered a few questions before interrupting to say that I would like to meet him. He was instantly amenable to that as well as to the date I suggested. I told him if he and his family wanted to see what I looked like now, they could see me the night before I would meet them on The Tonight Show.
“We’ll watch you,” he said excitedly. “And then we’ll see you in person.”
I have been doing talk shows since I was nine years old. I get a little nervous for a second before I walk on, but once I’m out there, I could care less. This time was different. I was terrified to walk out and talk to Jay Leno, who had recently taken over for the newly retired Johnny Carson. All I could think about was the whole Darlington clan gathered around their TV, watching me with brand-new eyes. It was the stiffest, worst interview I’ve ever done. I owe Jay an apology.
I woke up early the next morning and got on a plane with Bo and Dakota. We checked into a hotel room off the Strip to avoid any chance of the press getting wind of this very personal, poignant moment in my life. I paced nervously across the room, checking my watch and waiting for David Darlington, my birth father, to show up. As soon as I heard a knock on the door, I open
ed it and found myself standing opposite a very tall man who immediately opened his arms wide and gave me a hug. All I could say was “Oh my God, oh my God.”
It was an incredible moment, though it was also one of the strangest I had ever experienced. The whole time I was looking at him, hugging him, and saying “Oh my God,” a voice in my head was saying, Don’t be crazy. You’re not related to this man. He looks nothing like you. I was also saying to myself, This is the man who gave you away. No, he didn’t give you away. He just couldn’t keep you.
It was insane. My head was filled with more voices than a debate club. And all I could say was “Oh my God.” Then he asked if he could have a drink. It was noon. To me, that was a bit early for a drink. But I was scared shitless and thought a drink was probably a very good idea.
The two of us went to the bar and had Bloody Marys. I showed him a photo album of my life that my mother had prepared for the occasion. I’m sure she was secretly petrified that I might fall in love with these people and dump her. But she had shown me nothing but support in my quest for information and answers. And she needn’t have worried anyway.
As we relaxed, I learned that David Darlington was a sign painter in Las Vegas, not a Rhodes Scholar as my mother had always told me. As for Kathy being a prima ballerina, I found out over the course of the afternoon that she had indeed been a dancer, but not a ballerina, and like David, she’d had three kids of her own when they got together.
But these were not the Bradys. It turned out Kathy had died in 1980 after years of nagging injuries stemming from a serious motorcycle accident she and David were in shortly after my birth. Later that night, I ate dinner at David’s house, where his daughter Bonne shed more light on the family history, which included an unsettling amount of alcoholism and cancer.
Prairie Tale: A Memoir Page 24