Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (11 page)

Godfather Crip, his many fans, and I all got on the bus together. I didn’t fully understand the sense of his taking the bus when he had a car and driver, but I think it had something to do with showing solidarity with his men before a fight. There were no seats left when I got on, so I headed to the back of the bus to stand. The Godfather asked me if I needed a seat. At this cue, Dr. Scrooge promptly threw a young gang member to the floor and offered me his now suddenly vacated seat.

I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for turning down an offer like that, so I decided to take it. The Godfather asked if I wanted a cigarette. Dr. Scrooge started to violently remove one from the mouth of one of the gang’s smokers, but I told him it was okay, I didn’t smoke. The entire ride home continued like this, the Godfather’s polite attempts at making conversation punctuated by Dr. Scrooge’s outbursts of violently enforced chivalry.

Eventually, they all got off at Plummer Park in West Hollywood, where a number of rival gang members, Los Rebels, were waiting. Both sides were carrying various weapons, such as bats, chains, some knives here and there, but the Crips liked to battle with canes and walking sticks. They all seemed strangely happy about the whole thing. These were still the old days, when some still fought for sport or territory and mostly without guns. Not that they didn’t sometimes kill each other; it just took longer. They also seemed to have little interest in killing anyone not directly involved in their disputes (like me). Now, anyone in range of an Uzi or an AK-47 is fair game.
Ah, for the good old days
. I wondered if any of these people had any idea just how really screwed up they were. Did they really think this was a normal, healthy way of life, or did they have some inkling that this behavior might be symptomatic of some kind of deep, inner disturbance?

I found that out when, along with several of my friends, I got thrown into detention.
For refusing to kill an earthworm.
Back then, even in a liberal California junior high, announcing that dissecting an earthworm was against your moral principles would still get you detention. The truth is, it wasn’t really against my moral principles. I just couldn’t do it without puking.

Some of the Crips were in detention with me, and we struck up a conversation. No one stopped us; there was no supervision. (The idea of detention at Bancroft was to simply leave a bunch of strangers alone in a room for six or seven hours.) The young man I spoke to was so forthcoming about his affiliation, he even taught me a song:

I’m crippin’

And limpin’

And damn sure pimpin!

He explained that it was his ultimate ambition to be a pimp. He was thirteen years old. He went on to explain about “limpin’,” and demonstrated his signature walk, enhanced by his standard-issue Crip cane. I finally asked him what Crip stood for, thinking it had to be an acronym for something: “Cool Rebels in Prison”? “Cruising Regally in Pontiacs”? I pondered.

“No,” he said. “It’s just Crip. It’s short for ‘crippled inside.’” Oh. I guess that answered that question. During our conversation, he did mention that the only thing that might dissuade him from being a gang member or a pimp would be if he could have his own show on television. I thought,
If this is what goes on in detention, this school must have a
very
interesting drama department.

My brief experience in drama class was so horrible that I think I was better off in detention. At the beginning of each class, we would be given a scene to read, and the teacher would assign parts. It never progressed beyond a group cold reading. No instruction was given; and we engaged in no discussion about what anything meant. Not that it mattered, as far as I was concerned. I never got any parts, not due to any specific performance defect on my part, but because there was a girl in the class who decided she wanted first crack at any roles and wished to reduce the competition. She accomplished this by stuffing me into a broom closet every morning. It worked. She and a few friends would beat me into submission and stuff me in the closet and cover me with coats. By the time I crawled out of the closet and into the drama room, all the parts were assigned. (I don’t know why I never thought to try this technique at auditions. Think of all the roles I could have gotten had I had the good sense to shove Jodie Foster into a cupboard!)

I did finally tell the teacher what was happening. She was a bored, listless type who didn’t interact with the class much, but this time she did tell my captors that their behavior was going to cost them points off their final grade. They were very upset about this threat, and when class let out that day, they announced they were going to beat the crap out of me. Again.

I took off running and this time was lucky enough to run into a group of my friends. Unfortunately, they were my friends from the “gifted” algebra program: great if you needed to borrow a slide rule, but not the group you call to back you up in a fistfight. But what I didn’t know was that with all this violence at my new school, some of their parents had packed them off to after-school self-defense and karate classes. I don’t know if any of them really knew what they were doing, but they put on a hell of a show.

There was great yowling and shrieking, as the drama club diva and her friends found themselves set upon by a pack of future certified public accountants, all flailing about in their best Bruce Lee impersonations. Even if it was only the element of surprise, it worked and sent the drama bullies running. I was extremely touched that my friends were willing to jump up at a moment’s notice, and even though fighting wasn’t really their thing, they had been prepared to do their worst to protect me. I had been saved by geeks.

Then one day, the running, the hiding, and the pummeling came to an end. I was walking across the school grounds, when I was approached by a group of five girls, and I use the term loosely. They were very large teenagers, tall and muscular, and they looked like they had been in more than a couple of fights in their lives. In fact, they looked like they belonged to the Crips, or the “ladies auxiliary” thereof. They had these really fabulous 1970s’
Get Christie Love
!–style outfits, with big furry boots and miniskirts. I remember one girl had an enormous metal comb stuck in the top of her hair. It occurred to me that she probably used it as more than a decorative accessory.

They surrounded me.

“Your name Alison?” the tallest one asked.
Oh great,
I thought,
they have my name; it’s a contract hit.

“Yes.” I didn’t even bother to try to lie my way out of whatever was coming.

“Are you the one who’s on
Little House on the Prairie
?” she continued, still in hostile interrogation mode.

“Uh, yes.”
Now, this is taking an odd turn,
I thought.

“You play Nellie, right?” she asked.

Where the hell was this conversation going,
I wondered. “Um, yes, I do,” I answered, not sure if I was going to regret it or not.

“You’re Nellie? You are
bad,
girlfriend! You beat the crap outta that stupid Laura Ingalls!” They were all smiles. In fact, they were positively thrilled. They laughed and giggled and told me how much they enjoyed my “badness.”

I had been mistaken. These girls weren’t my enemies.
They were my fans.
After that day, I never had any trouble with people wanting to beat me up at school. Ever.

There seemed no end to the confidence-building exercises. But I was still working on my shyness issues on the set. I sometimes had trouble talking to “new people” one on one, and I was now faced with a cast and crew of over a hundred, some of them with rather intimidating personalities, to say the least. I had hoped at first I could just show up, do my job, and lay low, but it was not to be. I would be forced into confronting my issues. First I had Bill Claxton asking me to stop looking at the ground when I talked to people, and now I was about to be totally blindsided.

Midway through the first season, my agent called my father to report that my shyness had been taken for “haughtiness” or unfriendliness. I was stunned. But then it occurred to me, if I’m playing a bitch on camera, and then off camera I just sit there and don’t talk, what other information do my fellow cast mates have to go on? I could see where confusion could arise. But this was more than that. There were actually rumors that I was “difficult” or a diva. This was considered serious enough to possibly affect my employment. My parents told me that this was a serious situation that demanded immediate action. But what? I was going to have to try to be more outgoing.

I realize that to anyone who knows me now, this statement is possibly the most ludicrous request imaginable. But I really was shy back then. I asked my parents what on earth I was supposed to do. “Fake it,” was the answer.

First off, I needed to dress more casually. I had been wearing a simple white button-down shirt to work, so I would have something that I didn’t have to pull over my head, in case I had to put on the wig and makeup before dressing. I switched to something more colorful to make myself seem less stuck up.

My mother was not terribly helpful in this department. “Maybe you could a wear a hat?” she feebly suggested. I showed up the next day in a carefully selected cute outfit, complete with a spunky, tomboyish yet adorable baseball cap. Then I simply forced myself to talk to people. Auntie Marion was quite sympathetic to my plight. She had been terribly, almost pathologically shy growing up and had learned many tricks over the years to overcome it. She said the easiest one was to ask people questions. “Most people are perfectly happy to talk about themselves if you let them,” she counseled me.

I also did my research. I started reading various celebrity tell-all autobiographies and discovered that many famous actresses, usually those known for being loud and brassy, were actually horribly shy and had simply learned to mask it with another personality. I found out that this list included the actress Nancy Walker and one of my heroes, Bette Midler. And that was how I learned to embrace what I still refer to as the “Bette Midler School of Overcompensation.”

I took a deep breath, steeled myself, and simply did the opposite of what seemed instinctive. When I wanted to retreat, I barged up to people and started talking. When I wanted to look down, I looked up. When I wanted to cringe, I laughed. I even took to sitting on people’s laps if they seemed so inclined. I kept thinking,
This can’t possibly work. I feel like an idiot. Surely they will see through this ridiculous charade.

No one did. Within two days my agent called to say how happy he was to hear I was “fitting in.” My colleagues spoke about how nice it was I had “come out of my shell.” I learned that people see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe. It takes very little to help them along.

I did, however, have an extra ace up my sleeve: Melissa Gilbert. She had found out about the rumors and, having been the first to befriend me, knew they weren’t true. So what did she do about this at the age of nine? She called a meeting. One day, out in Simi, she went around the set and told all the little girls who were extras on the show, the ones who played the other girls in Miss Beadle’s class, that they were to come to lunch in her dressing room. We all crammed ourselves into the tiny trailer, sitting on the couch, the desk, and the floor, anywhere there was space. After a few minutes of chatting, one of the girls remarked that she was surprised at how nice I was, that she had heard I wasn’t any fun.

Melissa pounced on this statement. “I knew it! I already know someone’s been spreading rumors about Alison! Where’d
you
hear it?” she demanded. The girl nervously pointed at one of the other girls. “She told me!” The accused girl backpedaled furiously. “I didn’t start it!” They all seemed panic stricken at the thought of being interrogated by Melissa Gilbert. After an assortment of protests and cross-accusations, they finally narrowed it down to one of the girls who had not taken us up on the lunch invite. But then one of the older girls spoke up. “It wasn’t really her, though. It was her mother.”

Melissa was not surprised. She shook her head. She explained to the girls that in this sort of competitive environment, it would not be unheard of for a stage mother to start rumors about another girl in the hopes of getting her fired and furthering her own child’s career. But, she cautioned, we must not let them get away with it. “We have to stick together, okay?” she said. The girls nodded.

“There’s going to be a lot of stuff like this, people trying to turn us against each other,” she continued. “From now on, if
any
of you hear
anything
about one of us—especially if it comes from one of the stage moms—you come to me first, okay?”

We all agreed. Her motion passed unanimously. She had just successfully organized a group of child actors against the stage mothers. There were no more incidents of this kind. And from then on, anything that happened on that set did not happen without her knowledge. She was now Don Corleone. For some of us, her growing up to be president of the Screen Actors Guild wasn’t exactly a shock.

But then there was Melissa Sue. I tried to be nice to her; Auntie Marion insisted on it. It didn’t seem to work, though. Eventually, being nice to Melissa Sue Anderson became a Zen meditative exercise. Waiting for her to respond was like waiting to hear the sound of one hand clapping. I always said, “Good morning,” or, more accurately, a sickeningly cheerful “Good morning, Missy!” This was usually greeted with either a cold stare or a kind of “uh-huh” sound muttered under her breath. Often it was less than this. Sometimes she didn’t even look up from what she was reading, as if I wasn’t even there.

I did grow frustrated and sarcastic. I admit that, when one day, after what must have been months of this, she looked at me quizzically and said, “Uh, good morning?” I responded with “There! Now,
that
wasn’t so hard, was it?” I know, this is not what we call positive reinforcement, but she was just so damn exasperating.