I cannot, however, in all honesty lay the waning of career opportunities at the feet of Hollywood. Just as in the early 1980s, when my drinking got in the way of my pursuit of roles now something else had slowly worked its way into my world which meant spending less and less time on my career.
Something that rehab could not cure. Something I could not control and that would weigh more and more heavily on my heart and ultimately send my life into a crash.
After we got married, David and I continued to make our home in Sherman Oaks, otherwise known as the San Fernando Valley. The air there is often unhealthy and David began to notice that on some days he had trouble getting his breath. He’d quit smoking not long after our marriage in early 1992 so he blamed the issue on L.A. smog.
By about 1996 though the problem had grown to the extent that he could no longer fault pollution. Something else was going on. It wasn’t asthma and it wasn’t an allergy.
David hated going to the doctor so he resisted as long as he could and I didn’t pester him about it. I wasn’t his mother. He’d go when he was ready. When he finally went they ran him through a battery of tests and the diagnosis that came back wasn’t good — emphysema. The doctor suggested that David go on permanent oxygen, meaning he’d have to spend his life with an apparatus that connected his nostrils to an oxygen tank.
David came home and said there was no way in hell he’d ever go on oxygen.
About a year later though, much against his wishes, an oxygen tank showed up at our house. He’d hook himself up when he was at home — but never if we were out, say, shopping or going to dinner with friends.
Within a few years his condition had progressed to the point though that he could no longer maintain his end of the partnership at his construction company. He was in bed more and more of the time. And with the decline in his physical ability, the amount of medications he was prescribed went up and up.
As for income we were doing fine. I’d landed a huge deal with a pharmaceutical company as the face for a two-year campaign for a cancer-related drug called Procrit. At one point I was on a special advertising foldout on the front of Time magazine — and on the back cover as well. I was on billboards, on television, all over the place. I heard from friends that they couldn’t open a magazine or turn on their TVs without seeing me. The only downside was that my Procrit contract stipulated that during the run of the campaign I couldn’t do any other TV or film work. Apparently the drug manufacturer didn’t want the face of their ad campaign to run out and land the part of a 60-year-old stripper or brothel madam or something like that.
Career-wise, it was not a good time to be off the market but the income was impossible to turn down. After the Procrit campaign ended, I continued to find parts here and there. I spent a fun and memorable day on The Office set. It was pretty simple role. I was a shopper at a Best Buy-type store and I simply had to look over at Rainn Wilson like he was completely bonkers. Not hard to do when he was in character; off camera though he was a sweetie.
David’s emphysema steadily worsened to the point that the San Fernando Valley had become unlivable. The air was so frequently polluted that it made the simple act of breathing too difficult to be believed. We both knew it was time to move.
Yes it meant leaving Los Angeles, which had been home for me since the Eisenhower years. But rather than being a difficult decision, as many people have asked, it was in fact immensely simple. We had to find a place that was healthier for David. I couldn’t keep going to auditions and chasing parts while watching the guy I loved struggle for his next breath.
I told myself that it didn’t mean leaving acting behind. It just meant that I’d find parts as I could. Usually the actual shooting was only a day here and there. I could make it work.
With my family all in Northern California initially I thought we might move to Marin County near my sister Barbara Jean and my brother Lewis, but a friend gave us a tip on a house in Napa. It was a great size, affordable, and was located on a quiet, meandering street called Broadmoor.
I knew the town. Napa had been a favorite wine-country haunt for my parents and in more recent decades for me due to the fact that my niece, Mary, lived there where she was a veterinarian.
To our friends in L.A. the idea that a couple in alcohol recovery would move to wine country was the source of a lot of teasing. Still, the move was exciting. It may be a sign of insanity but I’ve always loved the challenge of a new start. God knows I’d had enough of them.
We arranged for a moving truck and I spent a month getting all of our stuff organized and packed. Once the truck pulled away from our house in Sherman Oaks, there was no going back. The following day we headed north, David driving one car, me driving the other, each with one of our dogs. That first night we made it as far as Harris Ranch. The next night we were in Napa in the Broadmoor Street house; we inflated an air mattress and slept in the living room. It was like camping and our spirits were high.
At the start there was a flurry of activity and there were times that my life in LA didn’t seem so far away. I recruited family and friends in the area to come over for a yard cleanup party and a few days later all my old friends from Lantana happened to be in Napa to celebrate a co-worker’s 50th birthday on the Wine Train. It was a real surprise when the chef on the train came out and introduced himself as having been one of the children in Miss Beadle’s classroom — as a child he’d been an extra on the show.
It was a novelty too to have family so close, to be able to call Barbara Jean or my brother Lewis and his wife and get together for lunch.
One morning, though, after the hubbub of moving was over, I was staring out through the kitchen window at the trees that overhung a stream just beyond the backyard. David was asleep. He was breathing from his oxygen tank and I’d helped him shovel in the box of pills he had to take each morning, including some pretty serious pain meds. Besides the emphysema, David had crippling back pain. When he’d taken Manhattan Transfer through Europe, he damaged his back multiple times moving heavy equipment from buses to trains to the backs of theaters and so on. He’d had so many surgeries his spine looked like it’d been hacked up by hatchets.
The only sound was the coffee maker sighing and bubbling its way through its morning obligations.
I remember thinking, “What now?”
And not “What am I going to do this morning?” but “What am I going to do with myself here? For the rest of my life?”
What does this life look like?
How would I fill the hours of my day?
Away from auditions and studios. Away from a world I’d lived in for the better part of 50 years.
The answer to that came in large part from David. Being his caregiver was nearly a full time job but that wasn’t going to be enough. I looked around my new town for things I could do, ways I could contribute, ways I could meet new faces and make new friends.
I found an alcohol recovery group where I felt comfortable and welcomed. For David, I organized four or five guys to come to our house to host a group meeting. Unfortunately this didn’t last as long as I’d hoped as David was gradually losing interest in the world around him as his pain medication was increased.
I became involved in an incredible program for cancer survivors, called Reach for the Stars. It is an annual fashion show that both raises money for The Cancer Wellness Program at the Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa and showcases the strength and vitality of those who have been fortunate enough to survive the disease — men, women, and children. Putting on a fashion show can, I suppose, sound like a pretty frivolous thing to do but in this case it’s an exercise in confidence-building for cancer survivors. Combating the disease can involve some pretty big changes to your body through surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. Those who survive often come out on the other side with their self-esteem in tatters, their self-assurance crushed. Learning to walk with poise side by side with fellow survivors down that catwalk and to say to the world (and to yourself) “t
his is who I am, this is what I’ve got — hear me roar” is spellbinding and beautiful.
I started to sew again, hitting on the idea of reusing and recycling feedbags as shopping bags. Finding outlets, such as craft fairs, to sell these became a project I enjoyed.
At some point, I took some good advice from a friend who’d been a caregiver, which was that it’s important to keep your own inner batteries charged if you’re going to be any good at helping your spouse. I fell into a routine of once a week, rain or shine, jumping in the car and driving to the di Rosa Preserve, one of the most electric and innovative collections of modern art I’ve ever seen. It’s located on the former di Rosa estate in the rolling green hills just outside of the town of Napa. I would go out there on my own and over the course of a couple of hours feel my soul get re-fueled among works of art that were thought-provoking, jarring, gorgeous, sexual, and playful.
Most of the works at the di Rosa had been produced in my lifetime from roughly the 1950s through the present. In ways I can’t quite put into words, the color-saturated photographs, the pop-culture-inspired sculpture, the arch nudes, seemed to connect to pieces inside of me. Where my parents had come to be known as part of “The Greatest Generation” I’d been part of a pretty amazing generation myself — and I’d known many of its leading lights. Wandering among this collection of artwork, with its LSD color palettes and experimental shapes and textures, was like seeing the music of those days when Hollywood had seemed to me like a college dorm.
Everywhere I went I met people who were very considerate and for the most part found my acting background, when it came up, interesting if not a bit of a curiosity. I got the sense that when people ran into an actor, they had the feeling that you’re only there because you’ve wandered out of your cage and really someone needs to pick you up and take you back to Los Angeles. Occasionally I ran into a person here or there in Napa who was a bit sniffy as though they assumed I was going to be some kind of diva. Hopefully I proved them wrong.
In conversations the question always came up, “So what are you doing now?”
It was a natural, normal thing to ask but a question that increasingly I dreaded.
I didn’t want to say, “Nothing — because I’m my husband’s caregiver.” First of all, it wasn’t nothing. It was a tough, demanding job. But it also wouldn’t be fair to David. He hadn’t asked to become ill. He didn’t want to be lying in bed while the world moved on without him.
If our situations were reversed I knew he would take the “in sickness or in health” part of our wedding vows as seriously as I did. That’s what you do when you love someone.
I didn’t want people to think that I wasn’t working because I wasn’t good enough to get parts any longer. Or because of my age. Or worse because I was lazy.
And still the question came, “What are you doing now?”
The answer finally came to me.
“I’m retired.”
Ugh. How I hated saying those words. Being retired meant “I quit,” “I’ve walked away,” “I’m done with all that.” And there was no part of me that wanted my career to be over. I was dying to work. I would kill to get a script in my hands, to have a character to tackle, to step into the lights and ugliness of a sound stage, to have a great scene partner like Peter Falk, Jimmy Stewart, Kevin Bacon, Melissa Gilbert, Karen Grassle, Kyle MacLachlan or Michael Landon. Hell, I’d have been happy with Dennis Weaver or Jack Lord.
I missed the cast parties. I missed watching dailies and the crew — those great guys who were like my dad’s old friends, guys who liked to tell jokes, work their butts off, and drink beer from a can. I missed hitting my mark and that feeling of my heart beating in my throat just before the director said, “Action.”
It all seemed so distant now, as though it had all happened to some other Charlotte whom I had only vaguely known. As time had moved on there were fewer and fewer reminders of the life I’d once lived.
So many people I’d known, loved, and worked with were gone. Victor French, Dabbs Greer, Kevin Hagen, and Mike Landon from Little House, Mory Schoolhouse from Damaged Goods. Jim Morrison, Jack Nance. David Blue and Mickey Fox from Human Highway. Mickey who thought I had a knack for walking away from life’s hard knocks unscathed. She once said to me, “Charlotte, I swear, you could fall down a manhole and come up with a set of dishes.”
You should see me now, Mickey, I thought. I’m not sure I’ve got that set of dishes any longer.
Saying the words “I’m retired” filled me with such emptiness and yet it proved a convenient response. It was short and believable even if I didn’t want to believe it.
Of course if you’re retired, now you’re put in the position of looking back on your lifetime of work. I’m not one for looking back, there’s something about that that feels so…old. But there was I was faced with “my legacy.”
Nothing worse than having legacy pushed in your face.
I was proud of the work I’d done. Well, most of it. If you force me to watch my scenes in Damaged Goods or with Elvis in Speedway, you will see me go into a full-on cringe. And, okay, it is hard to watch myself in general as I always see ways of improving the performance. Was my voice right in that moment? Could I have given more in that scene? Should I have pulled back in that one? But the question that tore at me was, had I done anything lasting? Anything memorable? If I had, wouldn’t I know it? Wouldn’t it be obvious?
Well, it wasn’t. And I hadn’t. And there it was.
I just needed to dive into this quiet life and forget about the past. It was gone. Half the people I’d known were dead.
I needed to be content with hundreds of wonderful photos and lots of good memories. I had been lucky and that needed to be good enough.
It was good enough.
I would sit by David’s bed holding his hand as he slept, listening to the sounds of his tortured breathing, and seeing all the pills and the medical apparatus keeping him with me from day to day.
Being forgotten isn’t so bad, I told myself. There are far worse things.
About this time I started hearing from Alison Arngrim, who’d of course played Nellie Oleson all those years ago. After Little House she’d continued to bump around with a great part here and there — including an episode of The Love Boat. What she had not done — as had so many other actors her age — was to wander around the Hollywood party circuit cashing in her celebrity on endless rounds of free drinks and a million lines of cocaine. All of which are readily available.
Instead since about the late 1980s she’d traveled around the U.S. with various AIDS charities raising awareness of the disease — putting her celebrity to use helping people at churches and meeting halls around the country come to understand what AIDS was and just as importantly was not.
Recently though she’d started emailing me about an entirely different sort of undertaking — a Little House reunion event.
“You mean a TV show?” I asked.
“No, it’s not a TV show. It’s a fan event.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s where a bunch of fans show up and you sign autographs and answer questions, stuff like that,” she said.
“Who would do that?”
Meaning who would take time out of their day to show up for something like this? I could picture a large high school gymnasium somewhere with about three people parked in a sea of folding chairs.
Alison made an exasperated noise. “You have no idea do you?”
Apparently not.
Once, a few years prior, a handful of the Little House cast had been invited to an event in Sonora, California, where the show had occasionally filmed. It was some kind of cowboy days event — featuring actors and stunt people from various old western movies and TV shows. Alison was there along with Melissa Gilbert and several others. It was a lot of fun but the Little House portion of things was pretty small, kind of off to one side of the main proceedings.
Beyond the question of what sort of event Alison
was trying to drag me to was the fact that it was in Nebraska.
Beatrice, Nebraska.
I’d never heard of this place and wasn’t even sure if a person could get there from here.
But Alison was on a mission. She was after me, after Karen Grassle, Matthew Labyorteaux, Dean Butler, Radames Pera, and others.
When Alison won’t let something go eventually everyone just has to freaking give in, which is what happened in this case. After finding someone to look after David for a couple of days, I was on a plane, my first ever trip to Nebraska for Homestead Days, which was sponsored by the U.S. Parks Service. All the cast members in attendance were given a stipend for our time, which Alison said made us all U.S. Parks Service employees. Like Smokey the Bear.
The day of the event a small group of cast members gathered in some kind of small anteroom in the park office outside of the town of Beatrice. God it was fun to see those guys again. Dean Butler was able to make it and was as good-humored and good-natured as always. Karen looked great and as she lived only about a half hour from me now, in Berkeley, we made promises to get together once we both got home. Alison looked so full of vitality and energy and as always turned the moment into a party. Radames — who you may recall was the one member of the Edwards family who did not survive the Mike Landon/Victor French break-up incident — looked handsome and was a pleasure as always to see. The twins who had played baby Carrie — Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush — are both so much fun. Matthew Labyorteaux showed up after we all thought he wouldn’t. So there we were hugging, laughing, eating pizza and catching up.
I was kind of disappointed when one of the guys from the Parks Service stuck his head in said it was time to go. We were having a great time.
As I filed out of the room with Alison, Karen, and the others into the outdoors it occurred to me that I had no idea what came next.
Little House in the Hollywood Hills Page 26