Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (15 page)

The Gilberts’ kitchen was my favorite part. My family had lived in some places with big kitchens—some of the places we rented in the Hollywood hills were pretty impressive—but not like this. They had two refrigerators and an island, one of those huge structures in the middle of the kitchen that had its own stove burners and everything. I saw the caterers use it to heat up and arrange food when they had parties, but I never saw anyone cook on it, except Melissa and me, who used it to heat up pots of SpaghettiOs. I did not get the impression that Melissa’s mother, Barbara, cooked. Over the years I got a lot of strange impressions about Melissa’s mother. And not just from things Melissa said. Her mom did a swell job of being her own worst press agent all by herself.

I remember being there one day when she shouted across the house to her husband, Harold (husband number two out of a half dozen or so), that she wanted to go out to dinner. Well, what she actually said was, “Harrrrr-ooold! We gotta go out to dinner! The maid’s been cooking again! The whole house smells like GARRRR-BAGE!” Apparently she was not a fan of Guatemalan cuisine.

One evening I was sitting at the table with Melissa, her brother, Jonathan, and her mom. We were seated in a strange arrangement with Barbara at the head of the table, me at the other head, and Jonathan and Melissa side by side to my right, as if we had left one side of the table open for the camera or perhaps the studio audience. It was chicken-and-rice night, and I was very hungry. Melissa and I had been running around all day, and I had worked up an appetite. Melissa was, as usual, playing with her food and not eating. Exercise only seemed to make her less hungry. And with Jonathan, who knows, he could have snuck out for a three-course meal at some point, and no one in that house would have even noticed.

Melissa’s mom was becoming more and more upset. “Melissa! Eat your dinner! Jonathan, you, too!” She began to nag at the two of them, the usual rant about wasting food, don’t-you-know-children-are-starving-in-China, when the conversation took an odd turn. She suddenly said, “Melissa, why can’t you be more like Alison?”

What? I found out from Auntie Marion that she actually said this more than once. But then she really blew my mind. She was livid. “Melissa! Jonathan! IF YOU DON’T FINISH YOUR DINNER RIGHT NOW, I’M GOING TO GIVE IT TO ALISON!”

Give it to Alison? What was I now,
the dog?
I didn’t say a word. I was floored. Melissa and Jonathan didn’t say anything either. They both looked perfectly miserable.

“Fine! Alison, do you want this?”

Now, here was the rough part. I was really hungry. As I said, I had been running around all day (and I hadn’t eaten anything earlier at my house since I knew was spending the night at the land of Unlimited Free Food and Two Refrigerators). And it
was
chicken and rice. And it was
really good.

“Um…yes.”

“Melissa! Jonathan! Give Alison your plates!” And she snatched up their plates of chicken and rice and forcefully slid them down the table to me. And I ate them. I proceeded to eat both their dinners, in front of them, while they sat there in silence, looking as if they were going to cry, as their mother continued to harangue and berate them. She finally felt she’d made her point or wore herself out, and it all mercifully ended.

Later, when Melissa and I were alone in her bedroom, I apologized. I said, “I’m sorry I ate your dinner.” I felt that I should have protested somehow, but I can’t imagine what I could possibly have said to Barbara that wouldn’t have just gotten all of us in more trouble. “I didn’t know what to do. She was just so mad, and I was really hungry.”

Melissa said, “That’s okay, it’s not your fault. My mom pulls crap like that all the time. Are you still hungry? There’s popsicles in the fridge.” And then in the middle of the night, while her mother was fast asleep, we went into the magical giant kitchen and raided the two refrigerators to our hearts’ content.

Despite her mother, we still had fun. Melissa and Jonathan were very creative. One afternoon, a whole group of kids, some fellow show biz brats and other rich kids from her Encino neighborhood, were over there, and they proudly announced that “there was a monster living in their garage.” Now, I being the oldest, of course knew this was not a real monster, but I wondered what totally insane prank they had rigged, or what poor neighborhood dog or cat they had kidnapped and dressed up in costume. I figured I had better ask to see it right away so if it was really dangerous or involved some unsuspecting live animal, I could put an end to the prank quickly. (I also knew that, whatever it was, it would be a sight to behold and totally worth it.)

Jonathan kept swearing, on the Bible, on anything he could think of, cross his heart, that there was an actual monster in the garage. It was good to see that his total dedication to a performance was not confined to the set. The other kids and I gathered by the open garage door. Jonathan and Melissa explained that they had to put out “bait” to bring the monster out of its hiding place. “We feed it raw meat!” They proceeded to unwrap an enormous T-bone steak that they had pilfered from one of the infamous refrigerators. Now, this was the height of the 1970s’ meat price inflation. People were actually boycotting beef in some places due to the high prices. This steak was top quality and looked big enough to have made dinner for four.

I was trying to calculate what ridiculous amount of money this thing had to have cost, when Jonathan, without so much as blinking, dropped it on the garage floor. Jonathan, not surprisingly, disappeared at that moment. Suddenly, Melissa shrieked, “There it is!”

I looked, and there, crawling out of the darkness at the back of the garage, was something large and furry. Slithering, really. It didn’t seem to have any legs. Or a head. Just a large mass of lumbering, slithering shiny fur, inching across the floor toward its steak dinner. Really thick, shiny fur. Silvery, come to think of it. Kind of like a silver fox. Or a full-length silver fox fur coat. Melissa’s aunt Stephanie’s silver fox fur coat, to be exact. All $60,000 worth of it, on a fishing line, being dragged slowly across a filthy garage floor for the amusement of Melissa’s slumber party guests.

I had to admit, this was pretty good. It was certainly the most expensively produced “monster in the garage” trick I’d ever seen, if not the most convincing. After we all finished shrieking and clapping, Melissa and Jonathan quickly got the coat off the floor, cut the fishing line, and simply hung it back up in the closet. I was relieved to see Jonathan at least rinse off the steak before rewrapping it and putting it back in the fridge. I shuddered to think what adventures the rest of the food in that house went through before it got to the table.

I was amazed at Melissa’s and her family’s attitude toward food. I couldn’t imagine wasting food at our house. Like so many actors, we behaved as if every meal was our last, to the point that at “good” parties, my father would sometimes have to remind me, “Don’t eat like an actor!” At least I hadn’t resorted to carrying around Tupperware in my purse. I actually knew people who did that. They could be at a formal black-tie event, but when everyone turned their backs, they would snatch up as many hors d’oeuvres as they could grab and stuff them into the plastic container in their handbag.

I eventually saw the sense in this behavior when we ran out of money, which never happened permanently. Well, with actors, nothing is ever permanent, is it? My friend comedian Robin Tyler says, “Actors never say they’re poor. They’re always ‘broke.’ It’s always just temporary. ‘Broke’ is ‘poor with hope.’”

Then one day, when I was about fourteen, we went “broke.” It was an accident. We had it all worked out.
Gumby
and
Underdog
had folded years earlier, and my mother’s occasional guest spots on other cartoons were not frequent enough to pay the bills. So she was working downtown at a “straight job,” playing executive secretary to the head of a big shipping company. She didn’t like it, but she was good at it, and it paid well. At that time we needed the money. My father had left Seymour Heller and Associates to start his own management company, Arngrim and Associates, which, after squeezing out all of the other associates except his friend Jess, eventually turned into Arngrim and Petersen and became a perfectly viable business. A former actor and model, Jess was the taller, younger, good looking, and even more viciously sarcastic half of the management team. Whenever Arngrim and Petersen needed to play “good cop/bad cop” in a negotiation, Jess was the ultimate “bad cop.”

But like most companies, in the beginning it barely made a dime. My parents had also spent insane amounts of money over the years on my brother: special schools, psychiatrists, lawyers, bail bondsmen. (When I was in junior high, my address book was from a bail bonds company. I was the only kid on my block with a little black book that read, “twenty-four hours’ service—we’ll get you OUT!”) They had no savings to fall back on.

My mother’s paycheck paid the rent and a few bills, but there wasn’t much left over. My father was bringing in just enough to cover the car payment—a lease, of course (they still had yet to own anything). Where they came up short was on food. So my parents sat me down and explained the situation. It was temporary, they said. My father would be making more money in a few months, and they’d be out of debt soon. They weren’t about to start charging me rent, but as
Little House
was now well into its second year, and I was making more money than anyone in the house (or probably half the people we knew), would it be possible for me to kick in some cash?

They suggested groceries. It seemed fair, since, being a teenager, I ate practically everything in the house anyway. I enjoyed cooking—why not take up shopping as well? I would be free to plan whatever menus I liked and make purchases accordingly. I would learn about comparison shopping and food prices. Plus, we wouldn’t starve to death.

It worked perfectly for a while. I happily raced up and down the aisles of the grocery store, throwing in whatever I wanted. “Let’s have steak! And ice cream! And king crab!” I’d cry. “You’re buying!” replied my parents. At the checkout stand, they’d whisper to each other and then turn to me sheepishly and say, “Um, can we have some wine?”

“Sure!” I said. I was always happy to indulge them.

Paying for the food wasn’t financial hardship for me. A chunk of my money was always sent off safely to the trust fund before I ever got my paycheck, and in the weeks I wasn’t on the show, I actually received unemployment insurance. It wasn’t enough for someone to support a whole family on, but it was a lot to a teenager. So spending a hundred bucks at the supermarket from time to time was hardly going to break the bank.

Until the accident. The show’s accountants had made a mistake with my checks. They hadn’t taken the correct amount out for the trust fund for several checks. They had to fix this at once. So they took the amount to make it up out of my next several checks, which, with taxes and agent commissions, left absolutely nothing. My checks were for one or two dollars, for about a month. And, as fate would have it, I was suddenly in every episode back to back for several weeks. No paycheck, no unemployment, which, under the newly established monetary system at our house, meant no groceries.
No food.

“So now what the hell are were we going to do?” I asked.

“We’ll find a way,” said my mother.

It is amazing what you can do with leftovers. Other people’s leftovers especially. I brought home food from the set. When we were on location, and it was catered, I brought back chicken, meat, and vegetables. When we were at Paramount, and there was no catering, I brought back the donuts, and we ate those. Somebody bought us a bucket of chicken. And the next day my mother made soup from the bones.

Let me make this clear: fast food–style fried chicken, such as KFC, is not—repeat,
not
—designed to be used for soup like fresh chicken. It was absolutely horrible. But we ate it.

After a week of this nonsense, my mother told my father that since her paycheck wasn’t coming for a few days, it was on him to go get some cash and buy some real food. Now. Yes, she understood he was starting a new business, but tomorrow morning he was to go out and get additional employment or find some other source of immediate cash.
Or else.

Both he and Jess Petersen dutifully went out the next day and tried their best. Although Jess had much more classic “office experience” than my father, if Jess had been cut out for normal work, he would have stayed at Seymour Heller’s and not followed my dad. They tried some sort of phone sales gig, but it paid dismally, and they hated it. Determined not to return to the apartment empty-handed, they eventually went to a restaurant. They did not apply for jobs. They sat down and ordered coffee, about all they could pay for. Then, taking turns, one keeping watch while the other went from table to table, they stole every tip in the restaurant, and they used it to buy food.

That night, as we ate our delicious, much appreciated, if ill-gotten dinner, they solemnly promised to one day return to the restaurant and tip the staff heavily. Needless to say, I was ecstatic when about two months later my payment situation was resolved, and the money came pouring back into the house. My father was just not cut out for a life of crime.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE INFAMOUS WHEELCHAIR EPISODE

MRS. OLESON:
Laura Ingalls! What have you done with that filthy animal?

LAURA:
Nellie, your mother wants you!

T
here’s something about “Bunny.” Almost every single person I have ever spoken to about
Little House on the Prairie
has told me this episode, which aired October 18, 1976, during our third season, is their favorite. It’s the case with men, women, children, straight people, gay people, everybody. It is the favorite episode in the United States; it is the favorite episode in France; and I have heard it is the favorite in Argentina, Bangladesh, Japan, and the Middle East.
Everybody
loves this episode. And it is, without a doubt, the most bizarre episode, not just of
Little House,
but of any 1970s “family” TV show.

The gist of the story is this: Nellie, while beating the crap out of the poor horse she took from Laura in the previous Christmas episode, causes the animal to bolt and throw her. While regaining consciousness (insert lots of “Quick, get Doc Baker!” and dramatic music here), she overhears her mother ranting on about it being Laura’s fault. Never one to miss an opportunity to inflict misery on Laura, Nellie, of course, wakes up and announces that she can’t feel her legs. Doc Baker, ever the genius, makes some bizarre statement about these things sometimes going away on their own (she’s not paraplegic—it’s just a phase!), but Mrs. Oleson is off on another bipolar fit of hysteria and screams that Laura has crippled her daughter. This sets off an elaborate chain of events, where not just Laura but the entire town is dragged into Nellie’s narcissistic fantasy of the week. It’s not just that she has Laura doing all her homework—Doc Baker is helpless, Mrs. Oleson is in full nervous breakdown mode, Pa has to drop what he’s doing and fix up a wheelchair for Nellie, and even the normally rational Mr. Oleson is seen quietly weeping in a corner of the Mercantile. Sicker still, it appears that a large part of Nellie’s motive is to prevent Laura from dating a boy at school whom she has a crush on. (As if Nellie ever had a hope in hell of getting him in the first place!)

Of course, during all this, Nellie makes a point of getting out of her chair whenever she can to have a good stretch, get more candy, or dance with her favorite doll. Ruining everyone’s life is just all in a day’s work. Laura eventually catches her at it, and on the pretense of “getting some fresh air,” rolls her to the top of the highest hill in town near Hanson’s mill and shoves her over the edge, sending her bouncing and screaming down into the mill creek. Mrs. Oleson arrives just in time to see her daughter drag herself up to her feet. Discovering that she can now walk, she shrieks, “It’s a miracle!” faints, and falls off her horse onto her ass. The town is saved, and Laura gets her horse back and goes fishing with the boy from school. Nellie flips out, breaks a lot of stuff, and swears her revenge. And everyone lives happily ever after. Or until next week’s show. But it gets weirder.

Right before we were scheduled to shoot this episode, I, like a complete idiot, managed to break my arm while skateboarding. I say like a complete idiot for several reasons: (1) People on TV shows aren’t supposed to be skateboarding or skydiving or taking part in any other excessively dangerous sports. (2) I was not wearing a helmet or padding of any kind, not so much as a sweat band on my wrist. (3) I wasn’t even doing an exciting, death-defying stunt. What was I doing when I fell? I was standing perfectly still on my skateboard contemplating what to do next. And I tipped over. Yes, tipped over—
like a cow.
I slammed my arm down to try to break my fall so my head wouldn’t take all the weight. I managed to skin my knee, break my wrist, and give myself a huge purple lump on the side of my head. Very embarrassing. To make matters worse, when Jess Petersen scraped me off the pavement and drove me home, I was told my arm could not possibly be broken, and I most certainly did not need to go to a doctor. After all, everyone knew what a sissy I was: “If it was really broken, you’d be crying!”

A few hours later, when the swelling kicked in, and my wrist began to turn interesting colors and throb with pain, I did indeed start crying. This was solved by my brother (he was living with my parents
again
; over the years, he would often move back when his money ran out, bringing wife number one, two, or three with him), who cheerfully offered me a few samples from his pilfered stash of prescription drugs that had been randomly pulled from between the sofa cushions. I selected a pink pill (it looked pretty) and went to bed. I had no idea what it was, and for once I didn’t care.

Come Monday morning, there was no getting around it. I had to see the doctor. The X-ray showed what is endearingly called a “green stick” break of the big bone in my wrist. This means it’s not snapped all the way through, but half broken, like a green twig. That didn’t make it hurt any less. I was sent off to an orthopedic specialist, who looked at my X-ray with disgust and demanded to know why the hell I had waited three days to come in. “What did you think you were going to do, wish it away?” he snarled sarcastically. I reminded him that I was a teenager and didn’t have a car. It was up to my parents to take me to the doctor. I wasn’t the one suffering from a permanent case of denial. (“You’re fine!”) He stopped giving me a hard time and went about putting on a cast.

The fun was just beginning. While I was at the doctor’s, my agent, Lew Sherrill, called Michael Landon and Kent McCray, our other producer, to tell them that one of their lead actresses had had “a teeny little accident.” Nothing serious, of course, but she’s got “a tiny little cast on her arm.” I, of course, had to report to the office so they could see the extent of the injury and reschedule episodes if necessary.

Now, remember, this was the 1970s, when they still used the big, plaster bandage casts. The fiberglass stuff had just come out; my second cast for the last three weeks of healing was one of the new small fiberglass numbers. But the first cast was huge. It went from the base of my fingers, past the elbow, almost to my shoulder, and it was big and white and puffy looking. Everyone was very nice to me at the meeting. Michael made lots of jokes about my being clumsy or having been injured in some sort of fight. He proudly autographed it in a prominent spot, then looked me in the eye and said very seriously, with just a touch of menace: “Okay, but you’re not going skateboarding anymore…RIGHT?”

“Oh,
right.
No, no sir, no more skateboarding. No.”

Then he was back to his grinning, giggling self, and I was slapped on the back and told I could go. As soon as the door closed behind me, I could hear Michael shouting: “JESUS CHRIST! HE SAID SHE HAD A TINY LITTLE CAST! DID YOU SEE THAT FUCKING THING?” I could hear what sounded like fists being pounded on desks, wastebaskets being kicked across the room. “WHAT THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH THAT?” Then it quieted down to murmurs and whispers.

After a while the door opened again. Michael was all smiles, as if nothing had happened. I was invited back in and told that they had come up with a solution. Because the first part of the “Bunny” episode involved my being in an accident and faking a serious injury, they would write into the script that I did in fact have a minor injury. Nellie would break her arm and get bruised in the fall (lending some believability to her claims of paralysis), and the real cast would be covered in an 1800s version. The next episode would be delayed, by switching it out with one I wasn’t in, and by that time I would be down to a small cast or something easily dealt with through camera angles. Again, Michael tousled my hair and said, “Remember, no more skateboards, right?” And then this gem: “If you ever break your arm skateboarding again…” He paused, flashing me a dimpled Charles Ingalls grin, which then suddenly disappeared. “I’ll break the other one.” This was followed by his high-pitched maniacal laughter. A joke, of course, but I decided that skateboarding might be bad for my health in more ways than one.

Shooting the episode was like making an action film. There were all kinds of stunt people and special effects involved. Who would be beating the horse? Not me! I couldn’t ride to begin with, and in my current condition I was not going anywhere near a horse. I stood on a ladder, as the cameramen shot me from the chest up to avoid the cast, and using my good arm, I proceeded to whip the living daylights out of the side of the ladder. The editors crosscut this with footage of the professional stunt girl on a real horse pretending to beat him while he was doing all sorts of rearing and bucking maneuvers that would be utterly impossible for an amateur like me. She took off at a furious speed heading straight for a tree. Cut.

Now, how do you have someone ride face first into a tree branch at high speed and be knocked unconscious without killing them? You fake it. I sat on a box. Two grips held a piece of Plexiglas in front of my face. I bounced a little as if riding, and at the crucial moment, another grip swung a tree branch into the Plexiglas—slam! I simply rolled my eyes back into my head and fell off the box. I was good at falling over, and I was even better at playing dead or unconscious. I lay back in the nice, cool grass—a real treat, as usually in Simi we were stomping around in the hot sun, on the gravel road—and tried not to actually fall asleep. Here we were under the trees, and all I had to do was lie there with my eyes closed and look injured. And I was getting paid the same as I did for walking and talking. It was very relaxing. I nearly dozed off once or twice, as I listened to the two Melissas’ frantic whispers take after take: “She’s hurt bad!” “Quick! Get Doc Baker!” I greedily reveled in what it would be like to actually have anybody worry about me that much. (I sure as hell didn’t hear anything like that when I was lying on my back in the parking lot with the real broken arm.) I could see how Nellie would think this was the start of something good.

Just as I was thinking this was really the life, and I might never open my eyes, I felt a strange sensation in my nose. It wasn’t the blood—they had put a lovely cinematic trickle of fake blood running out of my nose for this shot. There was something else there now. In my nose! And then I heard “Shhh…keep it rolling and…cut!” followed by the infamous shrieking giggle. I opened my eyes. While I played dead, instead of just saying “cut” to end the scene, Michael had quietly reached over and stuck his finger up my nose and insisted that they get it all on film.

I got to spend most of the episode in bed. I liked the big Nellie brass bed I had on the show and developed quite a fixation on brass beds because of it. In fact, the first bed I owned when I had my own place was brass, and I insisted on nothing but brass beds for years. For my pretend injuries, the makeup artists did a good job re-creating my real skateboard-related wounds. I had a big bruise on my head in the same spot I had given myself the real one the week before. This was bigger and more purple and made out of a sort of waxy putty. At the end of the day, I could peel it off and stick it on the wall or on my bedpost like a piece of gum. The first day I wore it home and tried to convince my mother I’d fallen again and that it was real. (She didn’t buy it.) After that, I stuck it on my notebook and took it to school.

They managed to turn my 1970s cast into an 1800s version with wood and cloth by covering it with boards and bandaging up the whole mess. It looked very sturdy, which was a good thing, because even if they didn’t have to cover the cast, we certainly had to cover the autographs. After Michael, everyone on the show signed it. People wrote all sorts of rude things, drew pictures. It was great! And then came the wheelchair.

Propelling yourself in a nineteenth-century-era wicker wheelchair is not like pushing yourself around in an efficient streamlined chair. It requires a lot more effort, and steering is nearly impossible. In the scene where Doc Baker unveils the chair and lets Nellie try it out, he says, “It’s all right; you can use your other arm.” In the script, Nellie’s arm injury didn’t interfere with movement. But because of the way my arm was broken, and because the cast went up over my elbow, actually turning the wheel was extremely difficult. Every time he said that, I kept wanting to yell, “No, I can’t!”

I particularly enjoyed the scene where Willie catches Nellie out of the chair, and she has to threaten him to keep silent. Jonathan was still quite small then. I could practically pick him up and sling him over my shoulder if I wanted to, and he would go along with anything that was thrown at him in a scene. If I was supposed to hit him, I only had to tap him, and he would throw himself across the room and collapse on the floor as if I had punched him full force. When he got up, he would grin with pride and ask, “How was that?”

In this scene, when he came into the room, I had to figure out how to grab him, blow out the candle he was carrying, turn him around, shut the door, and clap my hand over his mouth, all while only able to use one arm. I don’t know how I did it, but it looked great. In one quick move, I wound up with my good arm wrapped around his throat, and my hand over his mouth like I was going to smother him. I held the candle in my other hand next to his face so I could hit him with it if I had to. I looked really menacing.

In later years, looking at this scene, I do get a slight case of the shudders. I watch how expertly I pin him, stifle his ability to scream, then threaten him and explain why we were going to do things
my
way. I would ask where on earth I’d ever seen anybody do anything so horrible to anyone, but I didn’t have to. And my imitation had been perfect.

After an entire hour of tormenting everyone in Walnut Grove with my fake invalid act, things finally hit the fan. Mrs. Oleson goes to collect Laura’s horse in order to have it killed. They even dressed her in an almost exact replica of the costume worn by the old lady who comes to take Toto in
The Wizard of Oz.
“You and your little dog, too,” indeed. She had on a black-and-gray-checked dress and a straw hat—just like Elmira Gulch. But who could resist the chance to put Katherine MacGregor in Margaret Hamilton drag? And with Melissa doing her best Judy Garland choked sobs (“Please don’t take my horse!”)? Well, it was priceless.