Little House in the Hollywood Hills

by Charlotte Stewart

  To get there you had to drive way up the hill past lots of houses stacked practically on top of each other. I had a big backyard with a Jacuzzi and a sauna with a sun deck on top. In fact on the first night that the place was mine, before I’d even moved in, I took my Corgi, Elmer, and a sleeping bag up to the deck over the sauna planning to spend the night up there just soaking it all in — a girl and her dog. Elmer had less dreamy plans as it turns out. In the middle of the night he tore off barking like crazy at something, which set my heart racing. In the darkness I heard snarls, growls, hisses and all kinds of noise and then came the acrid, overwhelming, sickening stink of skunk.

  It was something like two in the morning. I didn’t have a single towel, blanket, scrub brush or anything in the house. I had to pack Elmer up, take him back to Topanga and give him a bath in tomato juice.

  Still. It was pretty cool to finally own a home and I owed it all to Miss Beadle and Mike Landon.

  Toward the end of my run with Little House, Mike came up to me one day with two photographs — headshots of two different male actors. He asked, “Which one would Miss Beadle marry?”

  This was in preparation for an episode I still get lots of wonderful fan reaction for called “Here Come the Brides,” which aired December 5, 1977. In it Miss Beadle is swept off her feet by a sweet, handsome pig farmer named Adam Simms. At the same time Nellie Oleson, now in her late teens, falls in love with his son Luke, a strapping country boy who goes about in overalls and bare feet. Mrs. Oleson’s full powers of outrage and disgust are given full vent (Katherine was never better).

  I looked at the two photos of the actors in Mike’s hands and saw that one of them was Josh Bryant, my long-time friend from Pasadena Playhouse. Of course I picked him.

  After all the years of knowing Josh, it was the first chance we’d had to actually work together.

  Josh and I rehearsed our scenes away from the cast and crew and were able to fall into those moments so easily. It was a lot of fun and I think that real friendship shows up on the screen.

  As with most episodes the two storylines mirror each other. The relationship between Adam Simms and Eva Beadle (yes, Adam and Eva) is reflected in that growing between Nellie and Luke. Of course Nellie and Luke’s was comedic and fraught with peril, thanks to Mrs. Oleson.

  Nellie invites Luke to the grand Oleson house for dinner. Thinking that Luke is going to be on their social level, Mrs. Oleson puts on a fancy spread and ensures that the entire family is dressed in their best. When Luke shows up in their doorway with his shaggy hair, overalls, and big, old bare feet — the very archetype of the sort of hayseed she despises — Mrs. Oleson cannot mask her revulsion and alarm.

  Nellie — her Nellie — falling for a hick?!?!

  The sky is falling.

  Meanwhile I got to shoot a fun scene with Josh out at the Simms pig farm. It’s one of the few scenes in which I got to pull up in my own little carriage pulled by my beloved Jack — he was my horse for the four years I was on the show. As I tug on the reins, slowing Jack, and pull into the farm, the horse goes out of frame, the carriage halts neatly, and I hop out.

  The reason it halts is because Hal Burton, our horse wrangler, is standing off camera catching Jack and holding him in place. It makes me look like an expert.

  A quick question though — where does Miss Beadle keep her horse and carriage? At her boarding house? And where is that boarding house exactly? Is it the one over Doc Baker’s office? Hmmm. Miss Beadle has secrets.

  Adam greets me warmly in his understated way and we chat about Luke and Nellie a bit. Miss Beadle has trouble masking her attraction for this kind, thoughtful farmer. As she’s gathering up her skirts to go, Adam presents her with a gift: a smoked ham.

  Well, ladies, I ask you — whose heart wouldn’t melt?!?

  Later the two couples enjoy a picnic together near one of the movie ranch’s manmade ponds. Adam and Eva go on a little walk and Adam can’t hold back his feelings any longer. In spite of her advanced years (Miss Beadle is in her 30s after all), he asks her to be his wife. For a schoolteacher who was pretty sure the joys of marriage had passed her by, it’s a big moment.

  Meanwhile Luke has proposed to Nellie but in an uncharacteristic moment of self-doubt, she says she needs to think about it.

  She finds Miss Beadle on a swing — God, if this was a musical imagine the big number they’d be belting out just then. She asks the schoolteacher questions about love and comes around to the idea of not being quite the right age. Nellie naturally means being too young but Miss Beadle’s mind is on the other end of things — the idea of being too old. With conviction, Miss Beadle tells her that age should play no part in love.

  Taking that bit of advice to heart, Nellie and Luke do the unthinkable — they elope.

  When Nels and Harriet Oleson realize Nellie has run off with Luke, they grab a shotgun, hop on a horse, and ride like thunder for the Simms pig farm.

  As the horse approaches the farm at a gallop you see Katherine slide off, pulling Richard Bull down with her. It’s a funny moment on screen however it was unrehearsed, not performed by stunt people, and not in the script. In fact Katherine got hurt pretty badly and they had to run her to a hospital. Richard, thankfully, was fine.

  As the scene continues you’ll notice that Mr. and Mrs. Oleson approach the front door of the farmhouse filmed from behind. While it is indeed Richard Bull as Mr. Oleson, the woman you think is Mrs. Oleson is actually Ruthie Foster in Katherine’s dress and bonnet. The trick works because Katherine later recorded her dialogue and they dubbed it in. Ruthie did a great impression of Harriet Oleson’s physical mannerisms and it all works pretty seamlessly.

  A few days later, when Katherine was up and around again, they filmed the remainder of her scenes.

  I would guess that the physicality of the role, along with injuries like this eventually took their toll, leading her to retire from film and television when Little House was over.

  While all that’s happening we see that Nellie and Luke have awoken a Justice of the Peace in the next town over in the middle of the night to marry them. He does so in his nightcap and then off they go to a hotel room where they awkwardly prepare for bed and presumably a pretty un-steamy night of amore.

  Before that can happen though, the Olesons, with Miss Beadle and Adam Simms in tow, have tracked them down. Mrs. Oleson bursts through the door of the hotel room with Nels holding the shotgun.

  Mrs. Oleson points at Luke and shrieks, “Nels, make her a widow!”

  When Nels characteristically shrinks from her, simpering that he can’t shoot Luke, she grabs the gun and blasts a hole in the ceiling. Luke makes an escape in his long underwear.

  Everyone ends up back at the Justice of the Peace where Mrs. Oleson demands that man who married the kids unmarry them. Which he does simply by tearing up the marriage certificate.

  At this point Adam Simms turns to Eva Beadle and says while they’re there at the Justice of the Peace’s office, they might as well get hitched.

  And they do and Josh and I share a lovely on-screen kiss.

  For reasons I can’t remember, Bill Claxton, the director, wanted to get one more take of that scene, which is when Josh and I cooked up an idea.

  We told the cinematographer that after Bill said ‘Cut,’ to keep the camera rolling. When he did, Josh and I kept kissing. And kissing and kissing and kissing. Until the whole crew was busting up. Every now and then we’d do stuff like this for “the party reel” — a collection of bloopers and pranks we’d show at a cast party. Usually it was moments when the set would fall over or someone would flub lines.

  Josh stayed on for several episodes in Season Four as my husband and, as you know, things move quickly in Walnut Grove. Two months later Miss Simms (as everyone now called Eva Beadle) was pregnant and Caroline Ingalls learned she was pregnant too in the episode “A Most Precious Gift,” which first aired on my birthday, February 27, 1978.

  There must’ve been something in the wa
ter.

  Miss Simms starts to feel her contractions in the schoolhouse and hands over the classroom to Mary (who is old enough now to be acting as an assistant teacher) and promptly and without drama gives birth to a boy — Matthew Adam Simms. Fortunately he was a much healthier child than Spike, the quasi-human baby-creature I had with Jack Nance in Eraserhead.

  After his stretch with Little House Josh invited me over for a party at his house, where I met his buddy Richard Dreyfuss. Richard and I had some chemistry and the next day he sent a limo over to pick me up so I could come over and play. What a fun guy to hang out with. Besides the fact that he’s devilishly smart, charming, and good-looking, we found we had a lot of mutual interests, such as sex, alcohol, and cocaine. Oh, and backgammon.

  We both liked going to a restaurant/bar called Ports, which was located across from Goldwyn Studios, where we’d do cocaine (in the bathroom) and play backgammon all night long. It was a surprisingly popular combination at the time. One night I played backgammon forever with the composer Paul Williams and I cleaned him out — we played for money. When he’d run out of cash he finally gave me a ring off his finger. (A couple of months later his girlfriend called and asked if he could have it back — not sure why Paul didn’t make the call himself. Of course I returned it.)

  I made a lot of friends at Ports, such as Nicholas Meyers, who wrote The Seven-Percent Solution and Coleman Andrews, who would go on to become the editor of Saveur magazine. Coleman wrote a great chapter on Ports in his book My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants. In it he recreates the feel of the place in which he says the patrons you’d run into there were people “you’d last seen in Tangier.” You would see Francis Ford Coppola at one table, Andrews writes, and Rip Torn, Kinky Friedman or young Oliver Stone at another. If Nickodell, where I’d enjoyed memorable lunches with Bill Frawley, was Old Hollywood, Ports was New.

  Richard Dreyfuss, you may recall, was having an amazing career stretch having filmed Jaws, The Goodbye Girl, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind one after the other.

  Even while we were partying together, Richard had some interest in getting sober. It’s hard to keep all the plates spinning on a successful film career and fully dedicate yourself to the twin cause of drugs and alcohol. There simply aren’t enough hours in a day. One time he checked himself into a well-known spa that had strict rules about vegetarian diet. He called me because he wanted me to try to sneak him a hamburger. So I bought a burger and drove over to this place; it was in a huge Victorian mansion in Venice Beach. I met him as he was coming down a grand stairway and as we were talking I heard a fruity, imperious voice boom down from the top of the stairway. It was Gloria Swanson, looking very much as she had in Sunset Boulevard, enunciating like a vampire, “R-r-r-r-r-richa-aaaaaard, who have you got there?”

  Richard and I eventually drifted out of each other’s lives though I did see him once more a few years later when he invited me to an event to hear people talk about getting sober — something that had transformed his life.

  At the time, I was happy to go, assuming that Richard simply wanted to spend time with me. My friend Jeanne Field pointed out to me in her blunt fashion, “It wasn’t a date, Charlotte, it was an alcohol recovery meeting.”

  It never occurred to me that he had perhaps invited me along because he thought sobriety was something I could benefit from. I just thought he had a thing for me.

  Jeanne was still busy, as always. She’d given up running Everybody’s Mothers in Topanga and had moved on to various other projects including a short-lived television show called TVTV, a sort of experimental guerilla comedy program that was way ahead of its time, using techniques like fake news and documentary style that would go on to be staples of comedy later on.

  She worked with a bunch of great young comedic actors on the show, including a guy named Bill, whom I only vaguely remember from TVTV. Unfortunately the show only lasted a short time, less than a full season, and everyone went their separate ways. Bill ended up going back to New York for a part on a TV show that he’d gotten.

  A few months later though he was back in town and Jeanne and Bill and I ended up going out for the night — went to Ports and then decided to head to a dance club in Hollywood. When we arrived I let out a groan. It was a really hot club and the line to get in was long. I thought we should go somewhere else — it would take forever to get in. But Bill was feeling confident and took us up to the front of the line where the bouncer recognized him. We got right it. Well, that was pretty cool. I made a mental note to check out the show he was on, as I’d not yet seen it.

  The three of us had a great time and at the end of the night Bill decided to go home with me. Rather than Jeanne. I could tell she was annoyed and hurt by this; I didn’t think it was a big deal.

  I liked Bill. He wasn’t conventionally handsome but he was a lot of fun, very smart, and sexy in a way all his own.

  The next day was Sunday and I wanted to go to Tim’s weekly soccer game. Bill said he’d see me there and took off in his car. I put on my soccer clothes and drove out to the field at UCLA expecting that all the fun of the night before would carry on into this morning. Once I got to the game though, it was like I didn’t exist. Bill and Jeanne hung out at the sidelines together and talking and laughing, having a lovely old time. I could tell Jeanne was still mad at me and she wouldn’t look in my direction or speak to me. And Bill didn’t give me the time of day. It was like he’d never seen me before in his life. I was crushed.

  And now I was mad at Jeanne.

  For the first time since we’d met — after rooming together on and off in Topanga Canyon, working together at Everybody’s Mother and The Liquid Butterfly, after all the men we’d slept with practically at the same time — now this. Now this one guy comes along and suddenly we’re not speaking to each other anymore.

  The angry silence between us lasted about three weeks. Which was just dumb. Finally I saw Jeanne at a party and thought, “This has to end.”

  I walked up and gave her a hug.

  “I miss you,” I said.

  She said she missed me too and we both cried a little bit.

  “No guy is worth this,” I said.

  Not even if Bill was a guy the rest of the world knew as Bill Murray from a show I finally got around to watching called Saturday Night Live.

  Back on the Little House set, another of my favorite co-stars was Victor French, who played Mr. Edwards. A lot of fans never got to see past the bearded, backcountry, yee-haw charm of the character he played to know what a passionate and fine actor he was.

  In 1959 French had worked with Leonard Nimoy, Richard Chamberlain, Vic Morrow, and others to found a nonprofit theater company in L.A. called Company of Angels, which offered Off-Broadway style productions in the intimate setting of a 99-seat theater. (It’s still open today and is the oldest repertory theater in Los Angeles.) He was also a private acting teacher with a great reputation. More than anything though, he was a big, sweet, funny, loveable teddy bear of a guy.

  Victor was very much inside the Mike Landon and crew frat group, and he wrote and directed quite a number of episodes. The two had a big falling out later in the run of the show when, without Mike’s blessing, Victor left to star in his own sitcom called Carter Country. You can’t blame Victor for taking a shot at some more income and giving his star a bit of a boost.

  But Mike was pissed off and felt betrayed and he wrote Mr. Edwards and his family entirely out of the show.

  Unfortunately for Victor, Carter Country did not do well in the ratings and after two seasons, it was history.

  He and Michael patched things up and Mr. Edwards and his family miraculously reappeared in Walnut Grove. Well, all but one — Radames Pera had played Mr. Edwards’s adopted son John Sanderson. When Radames heard the news of Victor and the Edwards family coming back to the show he naturally saw it as a return for his character as well. He drove over to Paramount to reestablish contact with the production and as he was walking onto the lot he
ran into another actor, who greeted him with the words, “Hey how you doing? We just buried you!”

  His character was dead and Radames was collateral damage of the Michael-Victor falling out.

  Unfortunately for Victor, it wasn’t the only relationship shake-up he would face while shooting Little House. At home he was dealing with the end of his marriage with his wife Julie and was absolutely devastated by the divorce.

  I knew it was hard on him but I had no idea until out of the blue he called me one night at home. Poor guy, it was clear how torn up he was. I told him to come over to my house in Beachwood Canyon. We sat up for a long time drinking, talking about marriage, divorce, and life. And he ended up spending the night. Which was the start of an occasional thing between us. Usually Victor would call and say he was having dinner with one of the producers, Kent McCray and his wife, and would I like to come along? We’d go out, have a good time and he’d stay over. It was never a romance — I was never after him — I simply adored him. We had a lot of fun together — how could you not with Victor? Sometimes we’d lie in bed and joke about what fans would say if they found out that Miss Beadle was hooking up with Mr. Edwards.

  Though I never drank during a day of filming, I showed up hung over more than once. I would ask my make-up guy, Whitey, if he could put make-up on my private life too. The drinking ritual I had on Little House was as soon as they were finished with me for the day, whether we were in Simi Valley or at Paramount, I would head to the prop truck where the bar was always open. I finished each day with a belt of vodka and would then head home for more.