Little House in the Hollywood Hills

by Charlotte Stewart

  Four years was forever. It was as long as high school. A presidential term. My marriage to Tim. I was stunned. It was like winning the lottery.

  Okay this just got serious, I thought. I’d better learn something about the books.

  A couple of days later at a swap meet in Topanga Canyon, I spotted one of the Little House books, bought it, sat down, and started reading. In Chapter One everyone has scarlet fever, Mary goes blind, Pa shaves her head, and the dog dies. “What the hell?” I wondered. And I thought Eraserhead was dark. Eventually I realized that I’d picked up By the Shores of Silver Lake, book 5 in the series, while the TV show was kicking off somewhere in the middle of book 4, On The Banks of Plum Creek. Things on the TV series wouldn’t begin in quite such bleak territory.

  Within a few days NBC messengered over a copy of the first script, I signed that lovely four-year contract, and on May 30, I drove to Paramount for my costume fittings. The costume department is a wonderland — rows upon rows of racks of clothes towering overhead and it just seems to go on for miles. This is where I first laid eyes on a girl named Melissa Gilbert, who would play Laura Ingalls but who was mostly called “Half-Pint,” a nickname that had belonged to Laura Ingalls but was so on-the-nose that it now belonged to Melissa both on and off camera.

  Half Pint was a buck-toothed, freckled, sparkly-eyed nine-year-old whose mouth was wide open as she stood gazing up in wonder at this towering cathedral of dresses and gowns. She was just adorable. I also met Melissa Sue Anderson, who everyone called Missy (to help clear up the confusion of having two Melissas in the cast) and she was poised and lovely with a bright smile that tended toward a shade or two of shyness. Maybe, I thought, working with these kids wouldn’t be too bad.

  The wardrobe crew took lots of measurements though I learned I wouldn’t exactly be drowning in dresses over the next four years. People who lived on the prairie in those days didn’t have a lot of money for life’s niceties — like clothes. As such Miss Beadle’s wardrobe in that first season would consist of a grand total of two dresses, one red plaid, and the other gray, along with four blouses and four skirts.

  In scenes that called for Miss Beadle to wear glasses, I got permission from Mike Landon to wear my own round wire frames, the same glasses I could be seen in when sewing and hanging out at The Liquid Butterfly. I’ve never heard any complaints that they weren’t right for the period. Apparently there was some stylistic crossover between 1870s schoolmarm and 1970s flower child.

  Later when shooting started I would realize that Miss Beadle was a fashion plate by Walnut Grove standards. By contrast Karen Grassle, who played Laura and Mary’s mother, Caroline Ingalls, always wore the same dress at home unless she went into town where she snazzed things up with a bonnet. Mike Landon wore the same thing show after show — woven britches, a flannel shirt and suspenders. The real fashionista was Alison Arngrim, playing uber-brat Nellie Oleson, who often went about her business in flamboyant, frilly dresses that were totally at odds with the plainness of everyone else’s clothes — to her eternal delight.

  Next it was time to do something about my hair and I met with Larry Germain, a hairstylist I’d bumped into very briefly years before when I did that episode of The Virginian. No one knew more about hair than Larry as he’d been in the business of making wigs, snipping, clipping, dyeing, and keeping secrets since the early 1940s. He’d done it all from To Kill a Mockingbird to The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.

  Larry and the producers of the show had a pretty clear idea of how they wanted Miss Beadle presented and that involved making a partial blonde wig. The tricky thing for Larry was two-fold: I had really straight hair and I had just cut it prior to getting the part. Larry and Mike Landon wanted their teacher to have some curls and whoop-dee-whoops in her hair that were right for the period. But in this case, unlike when I did the Toni Home Permanent ad, they couldn’t say “come back in a year.” I had to go in front of the cameras in just a few days.

  Because the wig would be for the top and back of my head (including a braid), Larry had to incorporate it seamlessly with the rest of my natural hair. To get the color right Larry and another hair stylist, Gladys Witten, took clippings from all over my head, giving them the overall color palate and they created a wig from there.

  Once the wig was complete, we had trouble getting it to stay attached because my hair is so pencil straight. I tried curling the front with curling irons but the thing just wouldn’t stay. Finally came the orders I had sorely hoped not to hear. I was told I had to get a permanent, which would give me some curl in front and would allow Larry to get the wig to stay attached for a full day of shooting.

  Ugh.

  A frizzy ‘70s perm.

  A perm I would have to maintain for the next four years.

  Suddenly I felt like Jack Nance having to sport that head of crazy hair for all those years of shooting Eraserhead.

  I wasn’t the only one with hair issues. Karen Grassle had short hair too and in the opening credit sequence of the show you can see her and Mike pull up in a wagon while Karen is busy tucking that short hair back inside her bonnet. The Oleson ladies, Katherine MacGregor, as Mrs. Oleson, and Alison Arngrim, as daughter Nellie, were also outfitted with wigs. To get the full story on Nellie’s wig — which was practically its own character in the show — you’ll have to do yourself a favor and go buy a copy of Alison’s brilliant memoir Confessions of a Prairie Bitch.

  Another part of the preparation was doing make up tests with Allan Schneider, whom everyone called Whitey. This guy was a legend who had been Marilyn Monroe’s personal make-up artist, working with her on films including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, and The Seven Year Itch. It was Whitey who had designed her signature bedroom eyes; it’s a very specific swoop of eyeliner that gives that look — what a virtuoso move. Whitey demonstrated it on me once for fun but ultimately you may have noticed that Miss Beadle did not get bedroom eyes on camera.

  My first day of shooting at Paramount Studios was on Sound Stage 30, an area of the lot formerly part of Desilu, where I’d filmed My Three Sons. If you take the Paramount tour today, there’s a sign on the exterior of Sound Stages 30 and 31, telling visitors that Little House on The Prairie was filmed there along with Top Hat and The Gay Divorcee both starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (back when the lot belonged RKO), The Godfather, and much later Addams Family Values, and about a ten thousand films in between. So it had been seasoned with a lot of great film and TV history.

  This sound stage, as nearly all I’ve worked in, was a large eggshell colored industrial building, not terribly interesting from the exterior, designed to block out all light and sound from the outside world.

  Sound Stage 30 measures 107 feet wide, 90 feet long and 35 feet high. Back in the 1930s, when it was RKO, the interior walls would have been sound proofed with mattresses behind chicken wire but by the 1970s that had been replaced with a thick material called Instaquilt. There’s an odd thick feeling to the air inside because of the complete deadening of sound. It takes a bit of getting used to. In the rigging overhead you’ll see dozens if not hundreds of lights of various colors, shapes, and sizes all designed to create a specific mood in whatever interior scene you’re shooting — whether it’s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on a gorgeous, glittery dance stage or the dim and menacing inside of Don Corleone’s office. It can make the world suspended above you, as an actor, look like a thick jungle of black light housings, armatures, and electrical cords.

  The huge “elephant door” at the front of the sound stage measured nearly 24 feet in height. Those big, sliding sound stage doors apparently got the name because back in the old days they were big enough to walk an elephant through — if that’s what your scene required. Mostly though they’re that size so that a crew can build sets and slide them in or out. Once those elephant doors close, the outside world is gone and there is only the world that has been painstakingly built, painted, costumed, and lit.

  On that day, Mon
day, June 24, 1974, it was the interior of the Walnut Grove one-room schoolhouse in the 1870s, which was welcoming two new students to the classroom — Laura and Mary Ingalls.

  My call time was 6:15 a.m. and after getting all put together — hair, make-up, costume — I took a look around the sound stage and saw the chairs set up for the various actors. There was one with Michael Landon’s name, one for Melissa Gilbert, Karen Grassle, etc. And finally I saw one that one that had the word “Teacher” on it. I made myself comfortable in that chair until an assistant director came by and said in a low voice, “I’m sorry you can’t sit there. That’s for the teacher.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “I’m the teacher.”

  “No, it’s for the real teacher.”

  Ah.

  With so many kids on the series there was in fact a real teacher who was running a real classroom each day on set after the kids had shot their requisite four hours.

  I eventually found a chair, though not one with my name emblazoned upon it.

  “Nellie Oleson was very pretty. Her yellow hair hung in long curls, with two big blue ribbon bows on top. Her dress was thin white lawn, with little blue flowers scattered over it, and she wore shoes.

  “She looked at Laura and she looked at Mary, and she wrinkled up her nose.

  “ ‘Hm!’ she said. “Country girls!’ ”

  On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura Ingalls Wilder

  My first episode on Little House on the Prairie was called “Country Girls,” which would first air on September 18, 1974. In this case “country girls,” as you can infer from the quote, was an insult hurled sneeringly by, of course, Nellie Oleson at Laura and Mary on their very first day at the schoolhouse in Walnut Grove.

  This was Nellie’s way of establishing the pecking order, letting the new girls know that she was a sophisticate who not only owned more than one dress but that all her clothes were store-bought and not — gasp — sewn by her mother. (Nellie Oleson was basically Walnut Grove’s Kim Kardashian.) It didn’t end there. Not only did Nellie have a closet full of fancy, flouncy dresses, she was smart and knew how to read. Laura by contrast could only barely get through a single sentence, a fact that she was at great pains to hide. Oh, and Nellie would be making Mary and Laura’s lives hell if they didn’t kowtow to her. And so the die is cast between the girls from the first moment.

  If a show’s success is fueled by its antagonist, Little House was off to a good start, I thought.

  What’s interesting is that this dynamic between Laura and Nellie is there in one of the books — On the Banks of Plum Creek — buried on page 148 (in my copy) in a chapter simply titled “School.” It’s a credit to the genius of Mike Landon to recognize that story element, practically tug it out of the book with tweezers, and make it the engine of a show that lasted nine seasons.

  The trio of kids that most people remember is of course that of Melissa Gilbert (Laura), Alison Arngrim (Nellie), and Melissa Sue Anderson (Mary). They had great chemistry on screen, which is all that really matters to fans. Like most children the world over, however, they did not always get along. Missy tended to do her own thing and keep to herself, while Alison and Half-Pint got along pretty famously. They were all terrific at playing their roles, bringing a lot of honesty and emotion to the screen. I doubt any group of kids would ever all get along without a hitch — if the trio of Barbara Jean, Lewis, and Charlotte Stewart back in Yuba City was any sort of guide.

  While shooting that first episode, I realized what a find Melissa Gilbert was. She was a great scene partner. There’s one moment in particular where it’s just Laura and Miss Beadle in the classroom. Laura is reading haltingly out of a book. Miss Beadle is encouraging her, gently trying to build her confidence, while kindly and evenly pushing her to do better. At one point Half Pint stops reading and fixes me with those big, brown, nine-year-old eyes and shy smile and the camera, the lights, and the crew all just vanished. You can feel the adoration pouring out of her. In that moment we weren’t at Paramount Studios on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. We were a teacher and student in Minnesota in the age of kerosene and wagon wheels. If America loved Miss Beadle, it’s because Laura Ingalls loved her first. Even watching those scenes today, I am struck by Melissa’s focus and authenticity. How do you do that when you’re nine?

  Maybe too it has something to do with the fact that Miss Beadle’s empathy was real. When filming those scenes I remembered how I had struggled in school back in Yuba City, how I’d felt stupid, felt like I was letting my parents down, and was fighting to hang on to a shred of dignity in the face of schoolwork that had seemed like a breeze for my brother and sister and other kids. I knew Laura’s embarrassment, I was rooting for her, and I wanted Miss Beadle to be the teacher I wished I could have had.

  “Country Girls” set a pattern for how Mike would construct nearly all of the shows. While Laura and Nellie were having their battle about who would call the shots in the schoolyard, their mothers, Caroline Ingalls and Harriet Oleson, were being snippy and passive-aggressive over their own pecking order. Caroline brings a dozen eggs to sell to Harriet at the mercantile and their bicker over the price is a not-so-thinly veiled power struggle. Later as Caroline fingers a pricey bolt of cloth on display in the store, Harriet says with a domineering smile and triumphant tone that that fabric is surely something the Ingalls family can’t afford. They both know it’s true but Caroline sets her jaw and buys it.

  Time and again you see mirrored storylines in which what’s happening with the kids is also happening with the adults, one storyline taking the more emotional and dramatic path, while the mirrored storyline usually serves as the comic relief.

  Another good example of this is “Bully Boys,” a show in the third season. When a boy and his two much older adult brothers move to Walnut Grove, the youth establishes himself as a bully at school, at one point punching Mary in the face and giving her a black eye. Meanwhile the two brothers are swindling everyone in town and when Pa physically goes after them (for making Ma spill her fresh eggs on the Walnut Grove bridge), they send him off in a wagon badly beaten up too.

  In the end the kids in the schoolyard finally have enough of their bullying and gang up and beat the living crap out of him — literally something like a dozen kids press in around in a scrum hitting and kicking him. (Miss Beadle is inside presumably cleaning chalkboards and spritzing herself with lemon verbena somehow not hearing the sounds of violence just outside her window.)

  In the adult world, the townspeople finally have a showdown with the two older brothers and march them out of town all singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

  After my first couple of days shooting interiors at Paramount, I had on June 27 my other big “first” with the show and that started at about 5 a.m. Getting up and driving an hour out to Simi Valley to Big Sky Movie Ranch.

  The Ranch is huge and hilly, more than 6,000 acres in size, and it looks like you’re a thousand miles from any city. By 6 a.m. I parked in a gravel lot with the other actors and crew. A van picked me up and drove me over a hill to a collection of white trailers for costume, hair, and make-up.

  There Larry Germain got my hair and wig just so, Whitey Schneider did my make-up, and Richalene Kelsey got me into that day’s costume. Once I was all packaged up as Miss Beadle in my wool skirt, petticoats and golden hair, I walked to the top of the next hill where the sky was sprawling and blue, the air was clean, and the only sounds were the crunch of dry grass and dry soil under my lace-up boots. There wasn’t a power pole, TV antenna, or a paved road in sight. I crested the hill and there spread below in a pretty little valley was Walnut Grove. My breath caught in my throat. The store, the mill, the church that doubled as the schoolhouse, all painted in early morning sunlight. I still get goose bumps thinking about it. I walked down and crossed the bridge spanning the busy stream and it was as though I’d passed through a magic doorway into another time. It seemed so real.

  I struggle to put into words why this had such an effec
t on me. In the late 1800s my grandmother, Nana, had come to California from Iowa in a covered wagon and I felt a powerful connection to her. The sight of that beautiful little frontier town, me in these 19th century clothes, the connection to my family, to the past, maybe even in some way it called up some of my deepest memories growing up in Yuba City with its farmland and broad valleys dappled with the same grasses and scrubby plants, the same bird sounds and scents of nature. I felt as though I’d been there before.

  Over the next four years, every time I would crest the hill and see the town, I would have the sensation that somehow I had been lucky enough to travel back in time to this very ordinary and yet very special place. Even now, some 40 years later, I’m nostalgic about that moment. I loved being out there.

  Eventually, of course, the moment would pass and I was indeed at work. There was the big camera on a dolly, reflectors, barrel-shaped HMI lights, make-up people, crewmembers hauling equipment, the usual hustle of a film set.

  As I explored the Walnut Grove set that first morning it reminded me of filming Gunsmoke or Bonanza in that the buildings were more or less false fronts. When you see cast members climbing the stairs into the church (or school), once the doors open there’s a dark wall in the center with entrances to the left and right. The positioning of that wall allowed actors in and out of the building but kept the TV audience from seeing that inside the building there was simply a hollow, open space. There were no church pews or chalkboards though there were modern folding tables and chairs set up as this is where the younger members of the cast had their actual on-set school on days we shot at the movie ranch.

  When we’d go up the steps into Oleson’s Mercantile, you can see a sprinkling of items for sale in the front window but it was a very shallow space inside. Any time you see the inside of the Ingalls’s cabin, the store, the school, etc., all those scenes were shot back at Paramount Studios.