Prairie Tale (23 page)

Soon after, he drifted back to sleep and I said my good-byes.

A
week later I was with Dakota in the family room, which was really his giant playroom, as he scampered around, listening to his records and playing with balloons. The TV was on, tuned to CNN as it was every day. We were in the midst of the first Gulf War, but I wasn’t paying attention to the coverage, I was having fun with Dakota. Then the anchor came on and said that actor Michael Landon had died. I may have screamed; I don’t recall. But Bo immediately rushed into the room and asked what was wrong. I pointed to the TV screen, which was showing a retrospective of Mike’s career.

Bo scooped up Dakota, who was crying because I was upset. I was inconsolable for a few minutes, and then something in me switched. I needed more information than I was getting on TV. Maybe, I thought, CNN had it wrong. I became obsessed with finding Leslie and hearing for myself what had really happened.

Honestly, I don’t remember if I called her or she called me, but at some point that day we talked for a long time. She told me about the unusual things that happened during the last twenty-four hours of Mike’s life. He had seen the proverbial light that guides people onto the next phase of their journey. He had seen his late mother waiting to comfort him. As a family, they had shared moments that, on hearing them, didn’t lessen my sadness but reassured me that death isn’t a horrible, scary thing as much as it is a transition to something else.

Still, I was heartbroken. My mother came over and my sister, sweet thing, brought me a milk shake. After that, my phone rang off the hook with requests from reporters wanting a comment. It seemed everyone in the world wanted a quote. Yet I was incapable of communicating.

I finally gave my publicist a statement, something about Mike’s contribution to the world and a hole in my heart. Then I fell into a deep depression. I stayed in bed with the shades drawn. Anytime I got up and tried to move around, it felt as if I was moving through mud. I walked around dazed in my pajamas for days until Bo came home one day with two puppies and said I had to housebreak them. He told me that with a two-year-old and two puppies, I had my hands full. Bless his heart, he knew exactly how to gently get me up and moving.

About a week later, Kent McCray, who’d been an executive producer on
Little House,
called and asked if I would deliver one of the eulogies at Mike’s funeral. I said of course, no question. The second I hung up, I regretted it. What the hell was I going to say? Scratch that. There was so much to say. But how was I going to stand up in front of his family, his children, his friends, and talk about him without bludgeoning everyone with my feelings?

In my opinion, part of the responsibility of delivering a eulogy is to try to bring some comfort to the people who are grieving. It wasn’t about standing in front of everyone and bawling like a self-absorbed idiot, which was what I pictured myself doing. How could I not get up there and just cry?

I found it impossible to write a eulogy that articulated my relationship with Mike, what he meant to me, and also what his loss meant to me. I tried numerous times without success. Finally, on the night before the service, I managed to gather my various attempts—a bunch of notes—into a concise form. Then I prayed to Mike to help me through it. It also helped that I was married to a playwright, who gently nudged me forward. By midnight I was done, and then I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, terrified of what would happen the next day.

The service itself was a blur of familiar faces who, like me, were doing a relatively fair job of keeping their emotions in check. I saw Luke Tillman, our special-effects guy who was missing multiple fingers, which had always amused me as a kid. (Why was the guy in charge of our special effects missing fingers?) I saw Melissa Sue and Karen Grassle. Ernest Borgnine was behind me. I sat with the other speakers, including Mike’s business manager, Jay Eller, who recalled how after Mike was first diagnosed he had warned Mike that he could lose his hair if he did chemotherapy. And Mike said, “Jay, don’t worry. I’m rich. I’ll buy a hat.”

Then it was my turn. I walked up to the little platform with a huge lump in my throat and I began to read what I’d written the night before. I managed to get through my remembrance by focusing with laserlike precision on two people, one on each side of the room: former president Ronald Reagan and singer Al Jarreau. Since I didn’t know either one of them, I was able to deliver my eulogy without feeling an emotional connection. If I had looked at Karen, Melissa Sue, or one of Mike’s kids, I would have ended up a puddle of tears.

Afterward, we made a brief stop at the postmemorial reception at the Landons’ house in Malibu. I was able to spend some one-on-one time with Mike’s family and some of the
Little House
cast and crew people. There was a lot of hugging and crying, but there was also a lot of laughter as we all shared stories about Mike’s fantastic sense of humor. It was very comforting to be around people who’d known Mike so well and loved him as much as I did, if not more.

The rest of the year seemed to be taken up by requests for quotes to media outlets and shows doing Michael Landon tributes. Even when Bo and I were performing one of his plays at the Barn Theater in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I flew back to L.A. for a tribute to Mike at the Emmy Awards. That was when I ran into Shannen Doherty on the side of the stage. Aside from that pissing me off, I was upset that Mike never got an Emmy while he was alive. He was never even nominated. What was it that Marty Sheen had warned me about Hollywood?

Of course, Mike would have told me that stuff wasn’t important, which I had learned years earlier. He had his priorities straight. That’s why I responded with a quote every time a request came in. But eventually I reached a point where it felt like too much.

One day I was with Sandy and David Peckinpah when yet another show called and asked me to talk about Mike. I wanted to turn them down, but David urged me to think otherwise.

“You better do as many of these as you can,” he said. “After all, Michael Landon is not going to be dead forever.”

I had never heard such a sick and twisted comment in my life. It made me laugh. Mike would’ve laughed, too.

I
n early 1992, Fox ordered seven episodes of
Stand by Your Man,
a sitcom starring me and Rosie O’Donnell, a young comedic talent just coming into her own. She had won
Star Search,
played Nell Carter’s neighbor on
Gimme a Break!
and who knows, if
Stand By Your Man
had taken off, she may not have had time to make the movie
A League of Their Own,
which accelerated her trajectory toward stardom.

But our show, a remake of the British series
Birds of a Feather,
was canceled less than two months after it debuted in April. It was too bad. From all the TV movies, the public knew I could cry. I wanted to show people that I had a sense of humor, too. Rosie saw it. Of course, she could make me laugh until I almost peed.

After we finished the pilot, I got a call from two guys with a business that helped adoptees reunite with their birth parents. Bo had hired Troy Dunn and Virgil Klunder a few months earlier, and after much digging, they had located my father, David Darlington, in Las Vegas, and they said my mother was not Susan Alabaster, the name on my birth certificate, but a woman named Kathy.

In photographs they sent soon after, I saw a strong resemblance to Kathy but not much to my father, whose phone number was included in the packet of information. I stared at the number as if it were the key to a long-lost treasure chest. I needed a day or two to work up the courage to call. A man picked up on the second ring. He confirmed he was David Darlington, and when I asked if he had given a child up for adoption in 1964, he paused and then said, “Well, I think it was ’63. But yeah.”

“No, it was ’64,” I said, as my entire body trembled from nerves. “And it was a girl.”

“Yes, it was a girl,” he said.

“And…and that baby was me,” I said.

After a long pause, he said, “Oh my God.”

He asked who I was and what I did. I told him that was the weird part and to brace himself.

“I’m an actor,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yes. And I’m on television. I was on a TV series for ten years when I was a kid and I’ve done a number of movies for television.”

“Well, what’s your name?” he asked.

“Melissa Gilbert,” I said.

There was another long pause.

“I know who you are,” he said.

“Yes, you do, and no, you really don’t,” I said.

As if the conversation wasn’t already weird, it got weirder when he asked me about work, Michael Landon, and other celebrities. He was like any person on the street. And I answered a few questions before interrupting to say that I would like to meet him. He was instantly amenable to that as well as to the date I suggested. I told him if he and his family wanted to see what I looked like now, they could see me the night before I would meet them on
The Tonight Show.

“We’ll watch you,” he said excitedly. “And then we’ll see you in person.”

I have been doing talk shows since I was nine years old. I get a little nervous for a second before I walk on, but once I’m out there, I could care less. This time was different. I was terrified to walk out and talk to Jay Leno, who had recently taken over for the newly retired Johnny Carson. All I could think about was the whole Darlington clan gathered around their TV, watching me with brand-new eyes. It was the stiffest, worst interview I’ve ever done. I owe Jay an apology.

I woke up early the next morning and got on a plane with Bo and Dakota. We checked into a hotel room off the Strip to avoid any chance of the press getting wind of this very personal, poignant moment in my life. I paced nervously across the room, checking my watch and waiting for David Darlington, my birth father, to show up. As soon as I heard a knock on the door, I opened it and found myself standing opposite a very tall man who immediately opened his arms wide and gave me a hug. All I could say was “Oh my God, oh my God.”

It was an incredible moment, though it was also one of the strangest I had ever experienced. The whole time I was looking at him, hugging him, and saying “Oh my God,” a voice in my head was saying,
Don’t be crazy. You’re not related to this man. He looks nothing like you.
I was also saying to myself,
This is the man who gave you away. No, he didn’t give you away. He just couldn’t keep you.

It was insane. My head was filled with more voices than a debate club. And all I could say was “Oh my God.” Then he asked if he could have a drink. It was noon. To me, that was a bit early for a drink. But I was scared shitless and thought a drink was probably a very good idea.

The two of us went to the bar and had Bloody Marys. I showed him a photo album of my life that my mother had prepared for the occasion. I’m sure she was secretly petrified that I might fall in love with these people and dump her. But she had shown me nothing but support in my quest for information and answers. And she needn’t have worried anyway.

As we relaxed, I learned that David Darlington was a sign painter in Las Vegas, not a Rhodes Scholar as my mother had always told me. As for Kathy being a prima ballerina, I found out over the course of the afternoon that she had indeed been a dancer, but not a ballerina, and like David, she’d had three kids of her own when they got together.

But these were not the Bradys. It turned out Kathy had died in 1980 after years of nagging injuries stemming from a serious motorcycle accident she and David were in shortly after my birth. Later that night, I ate dinner at David’s house, where his daughter Bonne shed more light on the family history, which included an unsettling amount of alcoholism and cancer.

Sadly, it was not the warm, loving, we’ve-been-waiting-for-you-to-show-up fantasy I had entertained ever since initiating the search for my birth parents. There wasn’t any meaningful discussion about my origins, my first twenty-four hours in this world, or whether, despite giving me up for adoption, either one of my parents had ever wanted me. Whenever I asked a question, David’s recall was fuzzy. The best and most memorable part of the whole night was the warm spinach salad with the hot bacon dressing. It was delicious.

Reality was a tough pill to swallow after believing for twenty-eight years that my birth parents were quite different from what I encountered. Not only was that bubble unceremoniously burst, but David by the end of the evening insisted that I had been born in 1963, not ’64 as my birth certificate said, which made me a year older!

By the time I got back to my hotel room, I was crying like a hysterical, inconsolable five-year-old. I couldn’t catch my breath. Bo didn’t know what to do, so he called my mother. She got on the phone and listened to me recount what had happened and how terribly disappointed I was by the outcome. Then she let me cry until I ran out of gas.

“This is part of your journey, Melissa,” she said. “You had to do this for you. And now you’ve done it. You can do what you want with what you know. Most important, you can move on.”

In addition to being right, she was very clear, supportive, and helpful, a life raft in a time of need, as only a mother can be. Through tears and sniffles, I told her how much I loved her and that good or bad, nobody would or could take her place in my life—ever.

Then I pulled myself together and focused on how to handle the situation going forward. I wouldn’t say meeting the Darlingtons was a Pandora’s box, but I had created a mess that needed management. I didn’t want it to become a story in the
National Enquirer
. I arranged to see them for brunch the next day before we left and I laid the cards on the table. I said the information we had shared belonged to them as much as it did to me. They could talk about it with whomever they liked, including the tabloids, who would probably pay for their story. But I cautioned that those same tabloids and papers had reported on my life for almost twenty years and already knew everything about me. If they came forward, they would be opening their lives to the same scrutiny. “They will dig into your pasts,” I warned. So I advised them to not talk about our fateful connection if there were things in their pasts they didn’t want out in the public.

Nothing ever made it into the press.

A
fter our trip to Vegas, Bo got a role in
Gettysburg,
the first in a planned trilogy of features on the Civil War bankrolled by billionaire history buff and media mogul Ted Turner. It seemed like the perfect big break. Bo’s friend Ron Maxwell had signed on as director and Tom Berringer and Marty Sheen headlined a fine cast. When he left to shoot the movie, our lives were fairly well ordered in the new, smaller house we had moved into. Dakota was doing well. We had horses in the backyard.

Some things had changed. Bo was drinking a little here and there, which I thought may have been a byproduct of the pain pills he took for a knee surgery he’d endured following a ski accident. He’d stopped going to meetings, too.

Then there was the feeling within the house. With Bo on location, it was peaceful. I recognized it took two to whip up a tornado of drama, but I kind of liked the way things worked when he was out of the equation. As a result, I was full of excuses when Bo called and asked me to visit him in Gettysburg. Dakota was in preschool, and there was too much going on for me to leave. Bottom line: I didn’t want to go.

While there are much better ways to communicate disaffection in a marriage, one thing was clear: problems that we hadn’t dealt with for years were coming to a head. I don’t think either of us was consciously aware of what we were doing. Then one day my publicist and friend Colleen Schlatter called and said the
National Enquirer
was working up a story on Bo. She said they had photos of him drinking and carousing, as well as women leaving his hotel room in the middle of the night.

I asked her to try and hold them off from running the story, which she somehow managed to do. I didn’t have to fly to Gettysburg and get my own photos of Bo. When one or both people in a relationship drink to excess, it can be damn near impossible to tell the difference between reality and the stuff you make up in dreams. So I hired a PI. I wanted a definitive answer because I could feel the end of our marriage getting perilously close. If I was going to blow up my child’s life, I first wanted concrete evidence.

And I got it. The detective called from Gettysburg with news that Bo was definitely drinking; he had pictures of him serving drinks at a bar and getting wasted. He also had photos of girls going in and out of Bo’s hotel room.

Armed with that information, I took Dakota to visit his father, and after Dakota went to sleep I confronted Bo on the first night we arrived. We went back and forth a while before he finally owned up to everything. I had already decided that Gettysburg was going to be my Waterloo, and I matter-of-factly told Bo the same thing. I was finished—and it wasn’t even about the drinking or fooling around.

“I’m done,” I said. “I’m going to take responsibility for my life. I am unhappy. I am not functioning on all cylinders because I’m so miserable. I’m sucked into drama that I can’t stand and I can’t get out of—and I want out. I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m not going to do it anymore. It’s over.”

Bo stomped his foot and clenched his fist out of frustration like a four-year-old and screamed, “I didn’t do anything.”

“Believe that all you want,” I said. “But I did stuff, too. I contributed to this unhappiness. I own up to my half, and I’m done.”

I stayed for a couple days so Bo and Dakota could have a good visit. I watched one of the battle scenes. I also visited with Marty Sheen. It seemed like I was in an alternate universe. Everybody on the movie knew what Bo had been doing, and there I was, the moron wife with the kid. I hated every second of it, but it was important to me that Dakota have some time with his father.

Back in L.A., I began the process of moving Bo out of the house. My goal was to make it as easy as possible on everyone. Joint custody of Dakota was fine; Bo had been restoring a 1952 pickup, and I told him to take the truck, take his clothes, take the cactus, take everything. Take it all. He didn’t owe me anything, and I didn’t want anything.

A
fter
Gettysburg
wrapped and we had been separated for a couple months, Bo moved in with Ron Maxwell, who had rented a home in our gated neighborhood, and I began the process of legally unraveling the marriage, which wasn’t difficult since we agreed on joint custody and had more debts than assets. I regrouped by diving into my favorite role, that of mom. I drove Dakota to school and arranged play dates with friends. My whole life revolved around kids and horses.

Through the tending of my horses, I met a woman named Cindy Bond, who had horses too. She introduced me to Kitty Ogilvy. One night Kitty and her husband, Ian, hosted a barbecue, and I was talking to her when she said, “God, I wish my ex-husband would date someone like you instead of the bimbos he’s been going out with.” I knew her ex-husband was Bruce Boxleitner. I immediately flashed on the picture of him I used to keep in my junior high school locker.

“Well, give him my number,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, nodding, “I will.”

At the time, Bruce was shooting movies, traveling, and enmeshed in his own drama with an ex-girlfriend and a soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, plus some peripheral hysteria with additional girls that occupied his spare time. Though he didn’t seem to be in the market for another relationship, Kitty told him that she had met an attractive, intelligent woman who she thought he should take on a date. But when she told him that person was me, he said, “Are you crazy? She’s twelve years old!”

“No, she is in fact twenty-eight years old,” Kitty said. “She’s a total hottie, and she lives here in Hidden Hills.”

“Yeah?”

“With her son.”

“Really?”

“And you should take her out.”

“You think?”

“I do.”

Several weeks passed, and I was getting on with my life as best as possible when Kitty called and said Bruce wanted to know if he could call me. I was surprised by the question, since I had already told her to give him my number, which was tantamount to an open invitation. But she explained that Bruce, who also resided in our neighborhood, was kind of old-fashioned in that regard. He wanted to double-check. I assured her it was okay if he called.