Prairie Tale: A Memoir

by Melissa Gilbert

  She insisted on hiring a woman to help with wardrobe who was inexperienced, and I paid dearly for her lack of qualifications when she failed to wet me down properly for a scene where I was supposed to walk inside from a rainstorm. My feet went out from under me, and I landed flat on my back and head. I got my first ride in an ambulance that day. It was scary as hell. Production shut down for a few days while I healed, though ultimately that fall caused damage in my neck that would lead to surgery years later.

  I finally snapped. I called NBC president Warren Littlefield and insisted he get a separate trailer for her and do something about the delays. Having grown up with Michael Landon, one of the biggest stars in TV history, who insisted that no one get their own trailers or any other special treatment, I never understood Cicely’s divalike temperament.

  Sweet Justice debuted the same year as Friends and ER. Early on, it was pretty clear the show wasn’t going to make it, but we got in a full twenty-two episodes and I made some really great friends.

  During hiatus, as we waited halfheartedly for the pickup that never came, I was cast as the lead in Danielle Steele’s miniseries Zoya, a lavish historical romance based on a novel about a Russian ballerina/countess who flees the 1917 revolution for Paris and then America. Bruce also landed a costarring role as one of my husbands, though he wouldn’t be able to join me until he wrapped Babylon 5.

  To prepare, I vowed to get in the best shape of my life. I quit smoking, adopted a mostly vegan diet, and worked out with my childhood ballet teacher, who got me back up on pointe for the first time in fifteen years. By April, I felt wonderful. I was so healthy, in fact, that I got pregnant.

  I want to say I was delighted, and I was, but truthfully, I was also mystified. We weren’t trying, and there were so many barriers in place that either Bruce had supersperm or I had crazy eggs or it was a combination of both. A few days before I left for Russia, I was in ballet class and doing spins across the floor when I felt unusually dizzy. I stopped the lesson early, went home, and tried to figure out why I felt crappy. I flipped through the old Filofax and saw I was two weeks late.

  “Of course,” I blurted.

  I immediately knew I was pregnant, but I didn’t want to say anything to Bruce or my family until it was confirmed. After a blood test at my doctor’s office, the nurse came in and said, “Congratulations!” I turned white and began to hyperventilate. I had to sit down. I was leaving in a few days for a three-month shoot in Russia and then Paris, London, New York, and Montreal. I would be gone the entire first trimester, playing a ballerina/countess from age seventeen to seventy. It was hard to fathom.

  On the way home, I started making a mental checklist of the things I had to do to take care of myself now that I was pregnant, including taking vitamins and adding stuff to my diet. I had a little laugh as I realized Bruce and I would be shooting a scene where my character loses her virginity to his character. I was going to be playing a virgin while pregnant, whereas years ago on Little House I was a virgin playing a pregnant woman.

  But there was a problem. I had to tell Bruce, who had the day off and was waiting for me at my Valley Village home. After I broke the news, he looked at me for an uncomfortably long time and then in a calm but firm voice said, “No.” I said, “Yes, I’m pregnant.” He replied, “No. You’re. Not.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “No. No. No, no, no, no.”

  “Are you telling me I’m lying?” I asked.

  “You can’t be pregnant,” he said. “How could you be pregnant?”

  “Do I need to explain it to you?” I said sarcastically. “I think I have a pretty good idea how it happened.”

  “But—”

  “I guess both of us are fertile people.”

  I saw that Bruce was on a slow boil and decided to wait it out while he cycled through his emotions, which he was entitled to do. First he accused me of getting pregnant to trap him into marrying me. Hilarious! I pointed out, of course, that we were already married. Then he began to pace, muttering to himself. I heard a lot of “Oh my God” and “How am I going to take care of this kid?” coming from him in a barely discernible, guttural mumble. Then he stopped and turned toward me, looking like a helpless ten-year-old boy in a jam.

  “Another child,” he said. “I’m not ready to do this right now.”

  “Look,” I said. “Let’s take a breath and just sit with it for a while. We’ll see how you feel.”

  Two hours later I was sifting through clothes and starting to pack when Bruce came into the bedroom looking very different—almost satisfied with himself.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “I think it’s time to call our parents,” he said. “My baby is having a baby.”

  “Really?”

  “Even with all the preparation in the world, you’re never ready, so I might as well just roll with it,” he said.

  The rest of the evening was filled with joyous screaming and carrying on as we told our parents and our boys. A couple days later, I took off for St. Petersburg, Russia, by myself. Well, not by myself. I had someone else growing inside my tummy.

  When I first heard I was going to be shooting in Russia, I was excited. I would be working with producer Douglas Cramer, who did everything first-class, and Diana Rigg, one of the coolest actresses ever (I mean, Emma Peel—come on, it doesn’t get better than that). I also pictured myself drinking vodka, eating caviar, and whooping it up between visits to the Hermitage and other sites. Instead, I got there and my morning sickness was so bad that all I ate was porridge.

  Plus, St. Petersburg wasn’t at all what I expected. I thought it might be like Paris, only less sophisticated. But it was dirty and bleak. As for the people, what I saw was either extreme, ridiculous wealth or extreme, horrific poverty; either young girls in Chanel and Dior spilling out of limos with mob dudes trailing behind them, or an old woman with missing teeth pulling a cart down the street. I ate at one restaurant where an offering on the menu was “neck.” Not whose neck or what kind of neck or how it was prepared. Just neck.

  The highlight of my ten days there was shooting with the Kirov Ballet in the famed Mariinsky Theatre. Then we went to Paris, where I met up with Bruce, who played my first husband. It was his first trip to that romantic city, and luckily we found ourselves with an unexpected day off when the Russians held up all of our film equipment for some unexplained reason. I whisked him through the Louvre, down the Champs-Elysées, and up the Eiffel Tower, cramming three days’ worth of sightseeing into eight exhausting but thrilling hours.

  We were in New York for my birthday and Mother’s Day, and then we settled into Montreal for the bulk of production on the miniseries. The director was an interesting guy, an ex-hippie sort with long hair. We had met privately before shooting and had a nice, flirtatious talk, and though I was married, I detected a you’re-my-leading-lady-so-I-can-have-you kind of thing. But once he found out I was pregnant, every day was ridiculously adversarial.

  On the bright side, Jennifer Garner played Bruce’s and my daughter in what was her first job. She was especially beautiful, amazingly talented, and sweet. On the third day, Bruce and I predicted she would become a big star. I remember saying to him, “Just watch. She’s something special.” I am so very proud of her.

  Despite all the hard work on the movie, we enjoyed some beautiful, peaceful early summer days in Montreal as well. At night and early in the morning, when we had time for ourselves, Bruce and I began trying to figure out what we were going to name our new baby. I bought books full of baby names. We knew right away if it was a girl we would name her Ruby. We also knew the middle name was most likely going to be Garrett, since we wanted to honor Garrett Peckinpah. But neither of us could come up with a boy’s name that we liked. Every day we riffled through the pages of the naming books, as if a name we had overlooked would miraculously jump out.

  It didn’t. But one day I turned the page, looked up, and slapped myself on the side of the head. Bruce asked why I was ups
et and I shook my head and simply said, “Michael.”

  “Of course,” he replied. “I can’t believe we didn’t think of it earlier.”

  We returned home in June and moved into my Valley Village home for about a month while I gutted and redecorated Bruce’s place to make it more family-friendly and reflective of my taste. I wanted to rent out my house, but I let Bo move in when I heard he didn’t have anywhere to stay. I thought I was going to be able to kick back between July and the baby’s due date on Christmas Eve; Bruce was returning to Babylon 5, and I envisioned myself getting fat and shopping for baby things in his absence.

  But the stress-free environment I craved didn’t materialize. In mid-July, my publicist, Colleen, called and told me to brace myself for a scathingly bad cover story in the National Enquirer. I took a deep breath and asked, “Again?”

  She warned it wasn’t like before. This time the tabloid quoted Bo as saying I was a “deadbeat mother.” They claimed Dakota ran up to strange women on the street and asked them to be his mommy. They said Bo had had to get up at night to feed him when he was an infant. It also said I refused to take care of him when he had the chicken pox, and I forced him to watch reruns of Little House.

  Over the years the tabloids had called me manipulative, accused me of having people fired on Little House, followed Rob and me like vultures, and paired me up with people I never dated. But this was beyond the pale. It planted a seed. For instance, Bruce’s relatives in the Midwest didn’t know this was untrue, and they received calls from people delicately inferring that maybe Bruce shouldn’t be having a child with me. It was ugly. I decided I wasn’t going to shrug it off and walk away.

  I hired powerhouse attorney Larry Stein and sued the National Enquirer and Bo for defamation, invasion of privacy, and infliction of emotional distress. The suit would drag out for nearly three years. I went to a couple hearings and opened every facet of my life, including my entire financial history. I felt like I’d been pinned and dissected without anesthesia. The lawyers were cold, crude, and unflinchingly callous.

  At one hearing in early September, I was plainly sick and uncomfortable. I asked my attorney if we could postpone the session for another day. After he made the request, the attorneys for the National Enquirer and Bo conferred with each other, and then the Enquirer’s attorney said, “We’ll move forward. We have no sympathy for Ms. Gilbert.”

  I thought, Okay, you motherfuckers, game on. I was already committed to seeking justice, but at that point I vowed to see the suit through and win, come hell, high water, or severe nausea.

  Unlike me, the tabloid had limitless resources and money. It was a mess, and it filled my otherwise perfect life with an unhealthy dose of daily stress. The stuff they threw at me was brutal. But I soldiered on, knowing I was in the right. On October 1, I had my baby shower. Five days later, I woke up and was lying in bed, plotting out my day, which I thought would include writing thank-you notes, when suddenly I heard my water break. I knew the sound. Then I felt wet. I thought—hoped—that maybe I had lost bladder control, as that happens to some pregnant women. I was still in denial when I stood up and watched water gush out of me. I thought, This is wrong, very wrong.

  Thank God Bruce was home. I called out to him and I was crying and shaking when he ran into the bedroom. I said, “We have a problem.” Though it was early in the morning, I called my doctor and had her paged. She called me right back, listened to me describe the problem, and calmly said, “Why don’t you come into the office and we’ll see what’s going on before we get hysterical. Just have Bruce bring you in.”

  “Okay,” I said. “When?”

  “Right now. I’ll meet you there,” she said.

  Thus began an unforgettable ordeal.

  I felt panic surge through my body as soon as I stretched out on the examining table in her office and began the wait for my doctor to tell me what was going on. Tears dripped into my ears as she did a litmus paper test on the fluid and confirmed that my water had broken. She did an ultrasound and estimated Michael—by this time, we knew the baby was a boy—weighed about three pounds. She called ahead to Los Robles Regional Medical Center and told us to go straight there. I left her office shaking with fear but managed to mutter, “I’m not going to have this baby now.”

  At the hospital, they put me in a room and gave me an IV of magnesium sulfate to slow down the labor. The doctor came in and said they needed to keep the baby in me for at least a day, and in the course of that day they were going to give me three steroid injections to speed up development of the baby’s lungs. They also put me in bed in the Trendelenburg position, but turned on my side, with my feet higher than my head, to remove as much stress as possible from my uterus.

  Bruce and I called everyone and told them what was going on, and that we were in a holding pattern. The magnesium sulfate gave me a wicked headache, which wasn’t fun. It also made my lips puff up, which I didn’t mind. Around 1:00 p.m., I sent Bruce home to go for a run, pick up some of my stuff, and come back around dinnertime. My mother, Sandy, and my midwife, Sage, took his place. Sandy put makeup on me, saying I’d thank her later when I looked at pictures. It was also very comforting feeling her hands on my face.

  A while later the doctor did another ultrasound, which showed that I had lost all my amniotic fluid. The head of the neonatal intensive care unit, Dr. Paul Hinkes, came in and explained that he wanted my doctors to do a C-section as soon as possible. Keeping the baby in me any longer, he said, posed numerous risks. He pointed out that Michael’s heart rate was dropping, and he also cautioned that his lungs weren’t going to be able to breathe on their own, so he’d have to be hooked up to a ventilator. Then he ran down a list of things that might be wrong with him after they got him out, such as a cerebral hemorrhage, blindness, a perforated intestine, or a hole in his heart.

  At the time, none of these horrible things registered in me. They would later, for sure. But I didn’t hear a word after he said “If he makes it through the first twenty-four hours, it’s good. If he makes it through the next twenty-four hours, it’s better. And if he makes it through the next twenty-four hours, we’ll be okay.” I just wanted to get him out. I said as much over and over. “Let’s get him out.”

  By then it was four o’clock. Bruce rushed back to the hospital and got into surgical scrubs. On my way to the OR the nurses were kind enough to stop the gurney so I could see my mom and Sandy one more time. We all kissed one another, crying and repeating that everything was going to be fine. As I was wheeled into the operating room, I started to panic a little. Bruce put his mouth right next to my ear and kept whispering, “It’s okay, baby. Everything’s going to be okay.” Both partners from my ob-gyn office, Dr. Ambe-Crain and Dr. Taylor, performed my C-section. There was also a respiratory therapist, a neonatologist, and the NICU nurse in the room. I’d had an epidural and was awake through the surgery. As with Dakota’s birth, the doctor asked if I felt the first cut. I said no, and she said, “Okay, then, here we go.”

  With Bruce holding my hand, I listened to the doctors exchange procedural small talk. Then I heard one of them say, “Here he is.” The other said, “Oh my goodness, isn’t that silly.” I asked what was happening and someone said he had reached his little hand out of the incision. Then it got very quiet, too quiet. I heard whispering, and then I began to get scared.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  My doctor walked to the side of my head so I could see her and explained it was hard to get him out. There was no lubrication, she said, and he was hiding from them. She warned, “He might be a little bruised, but we’ll get him out.” Though it seemed like an hour had passed, it was only several minutes later that I heard them say, “He’s out.” I waited to hear him cry. I knew he would be okay if he cried; it would mean that he could breathe.

  Sure enough, I heard a cry. It was barely audible, but it was the first glimmer of hope that things would be all right.

  They whisked him to the side of the roo
m and put him in an open incubator, where they began to work on him with practiced precision and determination. From where I was lying, I could only see his foot—one little blue foot sticking out from all the activity. Then his foot turned pink and I thought, Okay, he’s getting oxygen. I heard another little cry, and the people in the operating room cheered.

  “He looks so tiny,” I said.

  “He looks beautiful,” Bruce replied.

  They quickly put a breathing tube into his lungs and brought him to where I could see him. He was the tiniest thing, like a little bird that fell out of a nest. At just twenty-eight weeks, he already had a head full of blond hair. He also had Bruce’s profile, his exact nose. He was unmistakably a Boxleitner. My God, he was so beautiful. He was also pink, and I heaved a sigh of relief. He certainly wasn’t out of danger, but I had a feeling that he was going to pull through.

  Bruce didn’t know where to go. He wanted to stay with me, but ultimately, we decided he should go to the NICU with Michael. I told Bruce to watch him and take pictures while I was sewed up and taken to recovery. After a little bit, the neonatologist came in and reported that Michael was a fighter, but not out of danger. I gave him a steely look and said, “It’s not going to happen. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

  I barely slept that night, and in the morning I called friends and relatives with the latest news before it hit the tabloids. I didn’t want a repeat of what had happened ten years earlier when I had my appendectomy and it was reported in a dozen different ways by the media. As I later joked to People magazine, “I think my internal organs actually got higher ratings than my face.”