Confessions of a Prairie Bitch

T
he Los Angeles County Fair is probably not the first place you’d go if you were seeking to be forgiven of your sins, but I have a tendency to find strange things in strange places. Or, more accurately, they find me.

A few years ago, the fair decided to host a celebrity autograph show as a novelty attraction. Plunked down in a tent, right there with the Ferris wheels, prize-winning cows, and endless fried food, fairgoers could also find their favorite TV celebrities happily chatting away and signing our names to stacks of eight-by-ten glossies. My husband, Bob, and I thought this would be a fun way to spend the day (besides, they gave us free tickets, so we could go on all the rides afterward). So, as we were sitting there in the intermittently air-conditioned tent, passing the time with some of the more amusing celebs—Pugsley from
The Addams Family
is always a delight!—a woman strolled in and stopped dead in her tracks.

She stood, frozen in front of my table, not moving, not speaking, just staring down at the sign with my name on it. Then she slowly looked up at me. She was perhaps in her early forties, with long hair, casually dressed in jeans and some sort of vaguely western shirt, like 90 percent of the people I’d seen at the fair that day.

She looked like someone who’d spent a lot of time in the sun. But I couldn’t tell if she was really sunburned or not, because she was so incredibly angry that her face was turning several different colors, one after the other. She quickly went from what seemed to be abject shock and horror to boiling rage. She was even shaking. She shut her eyes and took several long, deep breaths through her nose, in an obvious effort to compose herself. She then swallowed hard and opened her eyes. I thought she was going to burst into tears, but she held her head up proudly, looked at me, and announced in all seriousness, “I forgive you!”

Then she turned on her heels and marched out of the tent. No autograph, no “Hi, how are you?” No “
Loved
your show!” Nothing.

Bob, who, after more than fifteen years of being married to me, had come to accept these scenes with a Zen-like sense of bemusement, said matter-of-factly, “You know, we
really
have to start bringing the video camera to these things.”

I was still openmouthed in amazement. “What the hell was THAT?!”

Bob looked on the bright side. “Well, she forgave you. Of course, she didn’t really say for what. Maybe for everything you’ve ever done? That’s great! My God, you’ve just been absolved at the L.A. County Fair! How many people can say that?”

“You have a point,” I replied. “Maybe they should advertise:

‘The L.A. County Fair—where you can receive complete absolution and eat a deep-fried Snickers bar at the same time!’”

We laughed, but we both knew what she meant. This woman didn’t know me. She had never seen me before in her life. She had no knowledge of what transgressions I may or may not have actually committed. But she knew what
She
had done. Bob and I knew she was talking about
Her.

Nellie Oleson.

A grown woman had been driven to a state of rage and was forgiving me for what I’d done on television…while pretending to be someone else…nearly thirty years ago.

Welcome to my world.

I live every day with the knowledge that what was supposed to have been simply a really good gig, a major role on a long-running TV series, with lots of good times and fun memories, has instead morphed into a bizarre alternate version of reality, where I am repeatedly held to account for the actions of a fictitious character as if they were my own. And not just any character. A bitch. A horrible, wretched, scheming, evil, lying, manipulative, selfish brat, whose narcissism and hostility toward others knew no bounds. A girl who millions of people all over the world had grown to hate. But she was a girl I grew to love.

And why wouldn’t I? She’s given me everything I’ve ever wanted and more. She put food on my table, clothes on my back, and a roof over my head for most of my life. She got me out of my house when I thought there was no escape. She aided and protected me like no other creature, real or imagined. She transformed me from a shy, abused little girl afraid of her own shadow to the in-your-face, outspoken, world-traveling, politically active, big-mouthed bitch I am today. She taught me to fight back, to be bold, daring, and determined, and, yes, to be down-right sneaky when I needed to be.

Despite the occasional outburst and stray can of soda thrown at my head, I meet people from all over the world who grew up watching
Little House on the Prairie
(and still watch it) and tell me the most amazing things about what the show means to them. There was the chef of a four-star restaurant who grew up watching it in Bangladesh and the bookstore manager from Borneo who told me his grandmother still watches the show in their village. Then there’s the man who grew up on an island near Singapore, where his family, who had electricity for only a few hours a day, used it to watch
Little House.
They had one of the few TVs in the town, and the neighbors would gather in front of their house and stare through the living room window to watch the show. I was in a bar in New York where the bartender was from Israel, the waitress was from Argentina, and the manager was from Iran. They compared notes on their favorite episodes. I receive fan mail regularly from Poland, Germany, Japan, Argentina, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and dozens of other countries. The show is popular in both Iran and Iraq. I am told that even Saddam Hussein was an avid fan and never missed an episode. (I have not heard from Osama bin Laden, but I read that he used to like
Bonanza
when he was young, so what are the odds? Did even he follow Michael Landon’s Little Joe all the way to the prairie?)

I know several totally unrelated people who have never met each other, who each told me a heart-wrenching story of terrible illness or incapacitation—horrible tragedies involving car accidents, full body casts, cancer, severe depression, blood diseases. But all their tales had one thing in common: each of them, while lying in bed, unable to move and on the verge of giving up all hope, had turned on
Little House on the Prairie.
They watched episode after episode, forgetting about their pain and gradually recovering their strength and sometimes even their will to live.

I cannot count the number of people who have told me that
Little House on the Prairie
saved their lives or the number of ways people have incorporated it into their lives, going so far as to name their children Laura and Mary and, of course, Michael. But no Nellies. I have heard from people who name their cats and even their cows Nellie, but they don’t dare name their daughters after her.

Well, I, for one, am happy I was “the Nellie.” No, not just happy, proud. And eternally grateful. All I can say is, thank you. It’s like I tell people at my stand-up shows: by making me a bitch, you have given me my freedom, the freedom to say and do things I couldn’t do if I was “a nice girl” with some sort of stupid, goody-two-shoes image to keep up. Things that require courage. Things that require balls. Things that need to be done. By making me a bitch, you have freed me from the trite, sexist, bourgeois prison of “likeability.” Any idiot can be liked. It takes talent to scare the crap out of people.

And if enjoying that as much as I do makes me a bitch, well,
goody.
Playing Nellie and being marked a bitch for life is the best thing that ever happened to me. I constantly hear actors complain about being strongly identified with a character they played ages ago. They reject the character, refuse to talk about “that old show,” and dismiss their fans as silly and “uncool.” Not me, buddy. It took me a long time to figure out which side my bread was buttered on, but once I did, I never turned back. I will happily, wholeheartedly embrace Nellie Oleson,
Little House on the Prairie,
and all the fans worldwide until the last bitchy breath leaves my body.

Perhaps now, in writing this book, I can finally explain how much it all meant to me. Sometimes people tell me that the reason they loved the show so much was because, sadly, their childhood just wasn’t like that.

Neither was mine.

And I’ve had people tell me they really needed Nellie Oleson in their lives.
Nowhere as much as I did…

CHAPTER ONE

MOM, DAD, AND LIBERACE

LAURA:
My pa works hard.

NELLIE:
So does a mule.

I
always envy people whose detailed memories extend back to the womb. What I remember mostly are places. When I was growing up, my parents, my older brother, Stefan, and I usually moved at least once a year, so I can always tell how old I was at a particular time by where we were living.

The Chateau Marmont? Ages three through five. Famous stage and screen comedienne Beatrice Lillie attended my fifth birthday party. Waring Avenue off La Cienega? Ages five through seven. Carlton Way in the Hollywood Hills? I was eight. That would be the party with the plastic Day-Glo Indian headdresses.

The earliest memory I can come up with is from when I was about three. We had only recently moved to L.A. from New York and were living at the Chateau Marmont in Bungalow B. (No, that’s not the one where John Belushi died. That was Bungalow D.) I was watching
Peter Pan,
not the Disney cartoon version, but the truly weird, almost creepy, televised play version with Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard. (I still like those old 1960s “teleplays,” Hallmark Hall of Fame, and that sort of thing. The video used at the time gives them a surreal, almost dreamlike quality.) I was totally fascinated with Captain Hook. He had all the best songs, like “Hook’s Waltz” (“Who’s the swiniest swine in the world?”). Every one was either a rollicking sea shanty or a tango. My favorite number in the whole show, however, was the bizarre sequence where Captain Hook and Peter Pan chase each other around a large papier-mâché tree, singing “Oh, My Mysterious Lady.” A grown-up, somewhat older woman, pretending to be a young boy, pretending to be a grown-up, younger glamorous woman by doing not much more than prancing around with a green scarf over her head and singing in a very high register, yet the guy in the pirate suit
believes her.
Wow. To me it was proof that grown-ups really are insane. And so began the launch of two major themes in my life: my love for and fascination with villains of all kinds and my total lack of respect for traditional definitions of gender.

By the time I was four, it was all over. My parents made a last-gasp effort to put those dainty ballerina candleholders on my birthday cake, but by that fall, the dreaded signs were there. Dainty was not my thing. I wanted to be a villain. Halloween was my favorite holiday. In previous years, they’d managed to stuff me into those cute Halloween baby-pajama costumes, so that I was dressed as a clown or some such cuddly character. But the minute I was old enough to pick out a costume, I wanted to be a witch with a big, pointy black hat. By the next year, I would insist on dressing as the devil himself.

I
looked
like a nice little girl. People were always getting me gifts like Mary Poppins dolls or tea sets. But I loved action movies and would have much preferred something like the
Krakatoa: East of Java
Exploding Volcano Set, complete with Maximilian Schell and Sal Mineo action figures. (Sadly, there was no such set—I just always wished there was.)

One of the advantages to growing up in Hollywood in the 1960s was that one was allowed a great deal of latitude as far as weirdness was concerned. And at my house, weirdness was the order of the day. I know everyone thinks their parents are weird, but I may have an unfair advantage in this department. To start with, both of my parents were actors. And Canadian. (New game show:
Weird or Just Canadian? You Be the Judge!
) They married each other essentially on the grounds that they would never have to “behave themselves.” I can honestly say, when it came to this promise, they both succeeded admirably.

My parents got married in 1954 at the height of an era of total repression. The rules and expectations for married people, especially women, were staggering. I think if I had been around then, I would have simply never gotten married at all. My mother, Norma Macmillan, as the daughter of a prominent Vancouver obstetrician-gynecologist, was expected to marry someone reasonably rich, educated, and preferably from the same type of neighborhood and private school background she had been brought up in. As a wife, she would be expected to severely limit, if not give up entirely, her career aspirations, such as acting and writing. She would also be expected to give up the usual things like drinking, partying, and sleeping around. And there was the dreaded “cooking and cleaning” clause.

My mother could not cook.
At all.
I remember as a child having to show her how to fold the foil back from the dessert on the Hungry-Man TV dinner. She told me that when she was growing up, her mother had forbidden her or her sister, my Auntie Marion, from participating in any cooking or cleaning around the house. They had staff for that sort of thing, don’t you know! Her mother told them, “Men will marry a woman to get free household help. I did not raise you to be maids. If a man wants to marry you, he can hire you a cook and a maid as befitting your station.” No, Grandma wasn’t kidding.

If my mother was considered all wrong as marriage material, my father would be a worst-case scenario. First of all, he was gay. Unlike most wives of gay men at the time, my mother was completely in on the game from the get-go. She had decided that gay, bi, or whatever, my father could offer her a better life than the stodgy Canadian straight boys available at the time. This doesn’t mean he was what you could actually call “out.” My father’s sexuality seems to have been something that was revealed to people on a case-by-case, need-to-know basis. (It was apparently decided that my brother and I didn’t need to know—although we figured it out pretty quickly.)

My father’s sexuality was hard to miss; he was a very, shall we say, “flamboyant” personality. He was always immaculately, fashionably dressed. As a child, when I first saw the TV show
The Odd Couple,
I thought the character of Felix Unger was based on my father. He had a lot of friends—male friends—most of whom seemed to be other handsome, well-dressed, flamboyant gentlemen in the artistic professions. Yet, if I or my brother commented about this, or even asked our parents outright if “perhaps there was something you would like to tell us,” we were given the brush-off. My father wasn’t gay. Oh yes, all of his friends were, of course. But no, not him. He was just…
theatrical
.

My dad had been born out of wedlock at the height of the Great Depression to a young Irish-Canadian woman who named him Wilfred James Bannin and put him in the Salvation Army orphanage. We later found out she did not simply abandon him; she worked in a restaurant and sent money to the orphanage every month for his upkeep. Sadly, it seems the orphanage totally ripped her off, and by the time my dad was adopted, he was suffering from rickets and malnutrition. (Yes, my father’s childhood
is
the plot of
Les Miserables
. This explains a great deal!)

He got adopted by an Icelandic-Canadian family with ten children, some their own, some adopted, and was quickly nursed back to health and put to work milking cows, feeding livestock, and tending the crops. His new family renamed him Thor—not for the comic book hero, but for the original god of thunder. When you’re Icelandic, being named Thor is like being named Joe. His full name was now Thorhaüler (pronounced “Tor-Huddler”) Marvin Arngrimson. When it came to names, my father could not catch a break. Arngrim (he eventually changed it legally) was a little shorter and snappier—and fit better on the theater marquees.

He went to classes in a one-room schoolhouse, where he was related to half the other students by adoption, and even the teacher was a cousin. He learned to chop wood and churn butter and survived not only the Great Depression, but blizzards, locusts, and tornadoes.

Dad left home at fifteen to pursue his dream of working in the theater, much to his family’s relief, no doubt. Between milking cows and plowing fields, he had insisted on putting on lavish spectacles in the barn, complete with stage lights made from milk cans. This sort of behavior was confusing to people in a small town like Mozart, Saskatchewan, and it frightened the animals.

He moved to Vancouver and became an actor and a producer and an entrepreneur and an “impresario”—basically, all of those things that don’t require a high school education. He did very well, because he was willing to do absolutely anything to keep the theater open. One summer, he decided to “invent” air-conditioning. Well, not really, but close enough. It was a hot, humid summer, and none of the other theaters on the same street had air-conditioning, so he saw a golden opportunity. He purchased a large block of ice and a really big fan. He positioned them in the attic of the theater, creating a primitive but effective cooling system, and proudly put out a sign:
WE HAVE AIR-CONDITIONING!
It was a smash. The other theater owners were terribly jealous.

But not for long. The ice was heavy and unstable, and the theater was very old. One afternoon, during a musical rehearsal, the block of ice came crashing through the ceiling and into the expensive rented piano. It just barely missed the actor and his accompanist who were rehearsing. They were not amused.

His “invention” of the drive-in theater went much better. The company was doing “Theater under the Stars,” major theatrical productions with well-known actors performed in the park. The audience would sit on blankets and picnic. It was very successful. In fact, it was sold out. Then during one performance, it rained, and people started demanding their money back.

“Not on your life!” said my father. He convinced everyone to simply pull their cars up onto the grass, close to the stage. Unlike a drive-in, however, there were no speakers. People rolled down their windows and leaned out of them, straining to hear. The actors simply projected louder over the storm. Everyone thought it was a great novelty, and not a single ticket was refunded, which was a good thing, because my father, I’m sure, had already spent every penny.

My father eventually founded his own theater, the Totem Theatre of Vancouver, with his friend Stuart Baker when one day in walked my mother. Dad and Stuart had become popular young producers in Vancouver, to the point that they were being referred to in the press as “The Gold Dust Twins.” The two of them were straight out of Mel Brooks’s
The Producers.
My mother showed up at the theater and announced that the two of them had no idea how to actually run a business, and that she, having just graduated from the local business college, was capable of keeping their books correctly and thus keeping them both “out of jail.” She told them she would happily keep the finances in order and run the office in exchange for the lead female role in
every
production. As my father said, “She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” So my mother became well known in Canada for her brilliant performance as Laura in Tennessee Williams’s
Glass Menagerie
and in any other role she felt like having. (She sometimes let the other girls have a turn.)

The theater eventually ceased to be as profitable as they wanted, and my parents, having worked their way romantically through the entire theater company and most of Vancouver, realized it was time to get out of town. My father proposed to my mother on a used car lot. He must have had a hell of a sales pitch, because she agreed. They were married right away, with Stuart as best man. Then the three of them moved to Toronto to get fabulous new careers in radio. Back then, a career in radio was the happening thing to have. Saying you wanted to be on TV in the ’50s would be like saying today that you wanted a show on the Internet. Interesting…but not yet profitable. My dad and Stuart were the ones with the contact; a friend had gotten them a meeting with a major producer. They only had a couple of radio credits between them, and my mother had none, but they decided to take her along to the meeting anyway, just in case. There might be a small part for her if they were lucky.

At the meeting, my father and Stuart gave their best pitch about why they should be big stars, and the producer seemed to be buying it. Then he asked my mother, “And what do you do?”

“I do children’s voices,” she replied without missing a beat. Stuart and my dad nearly had a seizure. They didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. Children’s voices? She’d never done any voices. The producer chatted with her politely, then told them he’d call.

When they left, my dad really let her have it. “Children’s voices? Where in the hell did you come up with that bullshit?” He and Stuart thought she was nuts and hoped she hadn’t ruined their chances.

The script soon arrived. They had all been hired to be in a new radio soap opera. They celebrated madly and began leafing through the script, seeing how many lines they had. My father shouted, “Look! I’m on page ten!” Stuart found his part: “I’m on page twenty and twenty-one!”

My mother sat silently, slowly turning the pages of her script. My father asked her, “Which page are you on?”

“All of them,” she replied calmly.

It turned out the entire plot of the soap opera revolved around a disturbed little girl and her family’s attempt to deal with the medical and psychological crisis. She was the little girl.

My father and Stuart soon learned to bow before her prowess in voice-over. Because she worked so much, she often had to run back and forth across the street from studio to studio in Toronto, recording several programs and commercials at the same time. My brother, Stefan, was born in Toronto in 1955, so she was doing all this while carting around a newborn.

In the early 1960s, my mother became the voice of Gumby, the walking, talking “little green ball of clay.” At this point, they had moved to New York and had been living there for a few years. She was also a ghost, Casper the Friendly Ghost, to be exact. Known by her maiden name, Norma Macmillan, she was one of the most prominent voice-over artists of the late ’50s through the ’60s. She played everybody. She was Sweet Polly Purebred, intrepid reporter and girlfriend of Underdog. She was Davey of
Davey and Goliath,
absolutely the world’s most religious Claymation program ever made. (My mother used to joke, “C’mon, Goliath, let’s go outside and
pray
!”) With her high, childlike voice, she was also, by default, Davey’s mom, his sister, and all his friends. She was Gumby’s mom, sister, and his blue friend Goo. She was nearly everyone in Casper’s town with a voice over middle C—Nightmare, Wendy, and even Spooky. In fact, she was so many voices, that sometimes I could sit in front of the TV on Saturday mornings and hear her in every third cartoon. She was even in commercials. Before the hyperannoying Cocoa Puffs bird, there was a choo-choo train that shouted, “Cocoa Puffs, Cocoa Puffs!” She was the little girl in that.

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