Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (21 page)

On that note, I ended the conversation. I had had enough.

I felt some relief, though. At least no one had denied what had happened to me—not even Stefan. But there was denial of another kind. My parents thought I should put it all behind me. We should go back to “the way things were.” They didn’t seem to realize that the good old days never existed; my childhood was a living hell. Besides, once you’ve announced that your entire relationship with your brother was a lie, that he beat and raped you for years, it’s a little hard to go back to playing “happy family.” It’s like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

The day I confronted my brother was just one of the many moments in my post
Little House
life when I questioned my wisdom in leaving the show. I missed it terribly; I missed my “family,” the people I had grown up with, who had always been such an integral part of my existence. I didn’t miss that awful wig, but I missed Gladys putting it on in the morning. I can’t say I missed the sweltering heat of Simi, but I missed the ritual of going to the set. I didn’t miss getting into those stifling costumes and under-garments, but I missed being Nellie in all her glory.

No, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life on
Little House,
but my leaving had been so sudden, it felt incomplete. There had been no official good-bye. One day, it was January, and I was taking off on our annual hiatus; the next day, poof! There had been no wrap party, no hugs, no kisses, no sobbing cast and crew members saying they’d miss me.

The story felt unfinished, too: Mrs. Oleson held up a letter from Nellie stating that she and Percival were now in New York. That was it. After all those years of campy drama, and that’s how the writers ended it. They hadn’t even pushed me down a cliff in a wheelchair or dumped me in a leech-infested lake. It was simply not enough—considering the seven long years of blood, sweat, and tears (on camera and off) I had given to this show. I needed some kind of closure.

Well, it took Michael a year, but he gave it to me. Out of the blue, I got a phone call from my father saying that my agent, Lew Sherrill, had just called him in a state of joyous disbelief. They wanted me back on the prairie. Michael had an idea for a show in which Nellie returns to face off with her rival, her newly adopted sister, Nancy. Lew had been so disgusted with the previous year’s negotiations, that when the call came, he snorted and harrumphed in disdain and boldly asked for a ridiculous amount of money. He though the network would never meet it. It was four times their top offer for an episode the year before.

Then the producers said, “Okay.”

“What? How in the hell…?” Lew sputtered.

The producers didn’t specify why they had such a sudden change of heart, but we knew. The network’s biggest concern was the bottom line. They were not thinking about the characters or the plotline. They were simply going to the store with a grocery list and a budget. I meant no more to them than a head of lettuce or a can of soup. But now, Michael had given one of his “decrees.” He had decided that the episode needed Nellie, and he barked, “Get her!” When Michael gave a decree, he didn’t care what it cost. He didn’t take no for an answer.

So, miraculously, I was back on the show—but just for this one episode. And it was at a rate of pay I could not have ever dreamed of. I was going to get to see all my friends again, to say good-bye, to have the hugs and tears and ending I thought Nellie deserved. My poor Percival (Steve) didn’t get to join me, though, which would have made it all the more wonderful—I guess the producers didn’t want to cut two paychecks. Still, “The Return of Nellie” was a very satisfying episode for everyone. Nellie comes back for a visit and meets her hideous new adopted sister, Nancy. Nancy flies into a jealous rage and runs away from home. In the tradition of Laura Ingalls and all the other girls who run away on the prairie, she runs all the way to the mountains and gets lost in the forest. Mr. Oleson and Nellie have to go out and find her.

I got to go up to Sonora, California, and shoot the outdoor scenes. I loved going there as a child, running through the woods, fishing for trout, and so on. Of course, this time I was twenty years old, and instead of being chaperoned by Auntie Marion, I brought my crazy boyfriend of the minute, who proceeded to get drunk with the crew and make a total fool of himself. Then again, how many of the crew could remember that the next morning?

I also got to work with my “replacement,” Allison Balson, who played the psychotic Nancy. Now, let me set the record straight: we were not rivals in real life. I get complaints from die-hard Nellie fans all the time: “We hated the new Nellie!” “She’s not as good as you!” and my favorite, “You are the only true Nellie!” As if this was some sort of religious cult, and this little girl and I were fighting over the role of Messiah. I think this is all perfectly ridiculous. I loved how Allison Balson played Nancy.

She got the role at age eleven, the same age I was when I first played Nellie, but she had the advantage of growing up watching the show and watching me. A conscientious young actress, she worked hard to avoid anything resembling an imitation. She became determined to create her own brand of bitch. She had done her research and decided not to make Nancy the proud, imperious type. Instead, she played Nancy as a deeply disturbed, miserable little wretch. While Nellie believed everyone loved her (or should, if they had any taste), Nancy was a ball of hysterical neurosis, prone to cries of “you hate me, you hate me, you ALL HATE ME!” I thought she was fantastic. My favorite scene with Allison was the one in which Nancy and Nellie shared a bed. Little Nancy snored, and I put a stop to this by holding her nose and nearly suffocating her. It was proof that, no matter how nice Nellie got after she got married, she still had some bitchiness left in her.

But clearly, Allison the Second won over me in one respect: she got my hair. I was cheerfully informed upon my return that I couldn’t have my old wig back. It was now firmly planted on the head of my successor. I had literally passed the crown! So I was given a new wig, a whole new hairdo, one that was apparently the height of fashion for wealthy New York shopkeepers’ wives in the early 1880s. Unfortunately, this meant a gigantic “Gibson Girl” blond pouf on top of my head, making me look as if I were wearing an exploded container of Jiffy Pop as a hat. I still get questions from fans who ask, between sobs of laughter, “What the hell was THAT?!”

But what really surprised me was what happened in the scenes with the rest of the cast. Melissa, Katherine MacGregor, Richard Bull, and Jonathan Gilbert, my little baby-bro Willie, who was now a grown-up, handsome man, even choked up for real to see me. Many of the scenes felt like real life, not like acting at all. When Nellie is at the hotel with practically the whole cast, and everyone is carrying on about how much they missed her, no one was pretending. It turns out everyone did miss me, and I missed them. There were a lot of new people now: Pamela Roylance and Stan Ivar (who played Sarah and John Carter, the new inhabitants of the Ingalls house) and all the new children. It was as if a whole new generation of freckle-faced child actors had come to replace us.

Melissa was the happiest, of course; she had her partner in crime back. At one point, she pulled me aside and whispered, “Things are really tense here without you.” She explained that until I left, she and the others didn’t realize the function I unknowingly performed on the set. I was not just comic relief in the series; I was the comic relief in real life. I remember that I made people laugh and enjoyed doing it, but Melissa said it was more than that.

“You were, well, sort of a ‘buffer,’” she said. “Just when people would start getting really uptight, you’d do or say something silly, and everybody would start laughing and forget all about it.”

“So you’re saying I was the ‘court jester’?” I didn’t think this sounded like a compliment.

She insisted it was. “Believe me, it is a total drag around here without you!”

I realize this “skill,” if you can call it that, is a psychological defense mechanism. In my own family, I knew that a well-placed gag could diffuse the tensest of situations—even save my life. Sometimes, I could make my brother laugh so hard I could momentarily distract him from what he was about to do next. (A hell of a way to learn comedy, but it does make the toughest audience seem like a breeze by comparison, doesn’t it?)

“The Return of Nellie” was the reunion and homecoming I had hoped for, both on and off camera. I could finally let go of
Little House
and move on. The episode aired on November 15, 1982. It was very strange to watch. It was Nellie, but then again it wasn’t. Who this new girl really resembled, aside from the popcorn-shaped bouffant, was, well,
me
. It was as if, in a bizarre plot twist, instead of Nellie coming back, they decided to have Alison Arngrim just magically appear in the 1800s. I had never played myself before, and it gave me an eerie feeling to watch it. Seeing all the people of Walnut Grove so happy to see me was even stranger. I think in all those years of desperately trying to overcome my shyness, it hadn’t really sunk in that it was possible that most of these people just genuinely liked me.

At the end, when Nellie boards the stage coach to go back to New York, and everybody starts tearing up, there wasn’t a faker in the bunch. Not even me.

I’LL BE SEEING YOU….

Over the years, the cast of
Little House
has reunited several times-often because a fan group or an event planner wants to fly us all out to speak and sign autographs (most of us are happy to oblige, hang out, reminisce, and catch up on our lives). The first was in Sonora, California, in September 1998, fifteen years after the show went off the air. Some of us hadn’t even seen each other since—so it was an emotional get-together with tears and hugs as we suddenly caught sight of each other at the airport. I hadn’t seen Kevin Hagen (Doc Baker) in forever and I went all to pieces. And I couldn’t get over how gorgeous Karen Grassle’s skin was; she hadn’t aged a day! I remember also that I was wearing a hat from the musical
Peter Pan
that said “Never Grow Up,” and everyone teased me that I obviously hadn’t and declared that it must be my secret to looking young.

Melissa Gilbert and I, inseparable as always, went together. We decided it would be a blast and were thrilled to see not just Karen Grassle and Kevin Hagen but also Char-lo The Stewart; Matt Laborteaux; Rachel Lindsay and Robin Sidney Greenbush, who brought their mom (we voted her “least changed”); and absolutely everybody else. The winner of “Most Changed” would be the the Carrie twins’ brother, Clay Greenbush. As a child, he’d been an extra on the show and was famous for being a real Bart Simpson–style brat, always in trouble. He has grown up to be an absolutely
gorgeous
big strapping man: smart, charming, and an accomplished actor and photographer.

A few years later, much of this group, along with Dean Butler, would reunite in Beatrice, Nebraska, in June 2005 at the Homestead National Museum. A month later, Melissa brought her entire brood to the Tombstone, Arizona, Western Film Festival. (Her hubby, Bruce Boxleitner, had actually turned her on to it, and she had convinced the rest of us.) This one was a huge party: the Carrie twins, the Baby Grace twins, Charlotte, Dean, Hersha Parady, Pam Roylance, Stan Ivar, Brian Part, and even Allison Balson. Allison and I did a lunch presentation together where fans could finally see Nellie and Nancy settle their differences in a civilized manner. We even took turns trying on the Nellie wig!

In May 2007 the
Today
show with Lester Holt gathered us together on national television. The call came completely out of the blue, and we all joked that the network was trying to make up for being so late on their residual payments. I was joined by Michael’s daughter Leslie Landon, who played Etta Plum on the show; Charlotte; Karen; Dean; Rachel; and my dear ol’ mom and dad from the Mercantile, Richard Bull and Katherine MacGregor! (Katherine said this was the last time she’d ever do anything like this, but between you and me…she loved it.)

Just about every year since, someone has put together an event for us to congregate, and we’re all very grateful and look forward to it. Our last big event took place in Keystone, South Dakota, in September 2009. This one was called, of all things, “Holy Terror Days.” (I thought it was dedicated to me.) At this reunion, it was me, Karen, Charlotte, Hersha, Rachel, Robyn, Wendi, Brenda, and Patrick Labyorteaux. With Patrick and Hersha there, it turned into the Garvey mother and son reunion! We had a parade, autograph sessions, parties, and then we all went to see Mount Rushmore. It was like a family vacation!

The only one who has never come to a reunion? Melissa Sue Anderson. Big surprise there.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A CHANGE IN THE RELATIONSHIP

NELLIE:
What will I say to him?

MR. OLESON:
Try “I love you.” It’s easy to say, and it’s right to the point.

NELLIE:
All right. I will. I’ll do it.

MRS. OLESON:
I’ll go with you, honey.

MR. OLESON:
No, Harriet. Now, let them be alone. Maybe Percival won’t stop to think who his new mother-in-law is going to be!

I
couldn’t marry Steve Tracy (that gay thing kind of got in the way), but I did marry a friend of his sister. I met Donald Spencer in December 1984. He was twenty-two, like me. He told me a friend of his back in Florida, a girl named Cindy, had a brother, Steve, who married a TV character named Nellie Oleson.
Small world
, I thought. But Don claimed to have never once watched an episode of
Little House
.

Getting married seemed like a good idea at the time. I had gone through a whole parade of boyfriends, none of whom were exactly marriage material. With my childhood, I thought any guy who didn’t hit me was “a good catch,” and I tended to overlook things—things like huge age differences, boozing, drugs, chronic unemployment, severe mental illness. Then suddenly, it dawned on me that I wasn’t a teenager anymore. My friends, like Melissa, were getting married. (She married Bo Brinkman after knowing him a mere six weeks.) I thought maybe I should at least consider it. Don seemed like a good possibility—a guy who was classically tall, dark, and attractive, who didn’t smoke, drink, take drugs, or run around with other women. He was an actor and a writer. He was hilariously funny. He could both cook and sew. He had lived through a terrible childhood but was getting his life together. And he was definitely looking to settle down. In fact, Don asked me to marry him on our third date.

I had to talk him out of it and urge him to slow down. Looking back on it now, the fact that I was dragging my feet should have told me something wasn’t quite right. It all sounded a bit too good to be true. I should have listened to my instincts. But we married in the spring of 1989 in a big Episcopal church. I even wore white. Well, whitish. I didn’t want my pals to fall out of the pews laughing and hurt themselves. So I went with a nice ivory, a shade slightly off of virginal white.

The whole time I was dating and engaged to Don, I always referred to Steve Tracy as my “other husband.” In the years after we both left
Little House,
we stayed incredibly tight. It was as if our relationship picked up where
Little House
left off. We kidded around and told each other dirty jokes. We still could finish each other’s sentences—without a script. It was as if we never stopped being Nellie and Percival. Steve was my friend, my teacher, the confidant I ran to if I had a fight with a boyfriend. I needed him. He was the only constant in my crazy life, and I clung to him when everything else was spinning out of control.

I came home one day in 1986, and Steve had left a message on my answering machine: “Um, hi, it’s Steve. Uh…call me.” Then he hung up.

I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. It wasn’t what he had said, it was the way he said it. He sounded like someone who was being held hostage with a gun to his head. It was the scariest message I had ever heard. Frantically, I tried to reach him. I called and called until I finally tracked him down. But when he answered, he said in a hushed voice, “I can’t talk right now.”

“Okay, fine,” I replied. “Then we’re going to play twenty questions, and you just say yes or no, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

My heart was now leaping out of my chest. “Are you being held hostage?” (I thought I ought to get that one out of the way.)

“No.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Physical, financial, or legal?” (I know. That wasn’t really a yes or no question, but this was taking too long.)

“The first one.”

“Shit! Are you sick?”

“Yes.”

“Very sick?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have cancer?”

“Sort of.”

“What? Who the hell ‘sort of’ has cancer?”

Then he said, “I have to get off the phone now.”

I knew this was bad. Really bad. I was on pins and needles, waiting for Steve to call and fill me in. But he didn’t. I knew he wasn’t playing games or purposely trying to give me a nervous breakdown. Steve wouldn’t hold out on me. So I figured he was sorting it all out, and I gave him some time, although it was torture. He finally surfaced a few days later and explained that he had been diagnosed with cancer and had freaked out. He assured me it would be all right; he was getting treatment. But I knew he was lying his face off. I knew him too well and loved him too much not to know.

Yet he desperately wanted me to believe everything was going to be fine; he needed me to believe so he could believe it, too. So I never contradicted him—if he smiled and cheerfully told me the radiation treatment was working, I replied, “You betcha!” But deep down, I knew that wasn’t so. He was a great actor, but it killed me every time I saw through it.

Finally, a year later, Steve fessed up. He had AIDS, and he was going on
AM Los Angeles,
a popular morning news program, to go public with his diagnosis.

“I wanted you to hear it from me, not on the news. I’m really sorry I lied to you,” he said softly. He explained that he was trying to spare me the worry and the pain. He admitted he had known it was AIDS for some time, before most of his doctors, in fact. In the early 1980s, few doctors were very knowledgeable about AIDS, whereas Steve had kept up with all the medical research from the first moment the disease was even whispered about in the gay community. In fact, when he initially got sick, he had a sinking suspicion what it was. There was no blood test yet, so he went to doctor after doctor until he got a proper diagnosis.

I cried like a maniac at the news. He went on about fighting it and experimental treatments. He tried to reassure me, telling me not to be so upset, that “it wasn’t really a death sentence.” But the reality was that the average life expectancy for someone diagnosed with AIDS in 1986 was nine months. There was no “drug cocktail” to suppress the virus, no combination therapy, no protease inhibitors or any of the medical advances we take for granted today. Good Lord, there wasn’t even AZT yet. People with AIDS didn’t get better. I was going to have to watch my friend die.

I told him I would be brave, but when I hung up the phone, I lay on the bed, facedown in the pillow, and screamed and screamed.

I was twenty-four years old. Both of my parents were still alive, I wasn’t old enough to have lost friends in Vietnam, and I was born in an age when epidemics like diphtheria and polio were distant memories. Death was something that happened to very, very old people. Not your friends. Not people you depended on. And I was already in mourning—I had lost Auntie Marion the summer before.

Marion had liver cancer. She remained very brave and dignified, right up until the end. When the medical transportation service came to take her to the convalescent home, she sighed and said, “Well, I guess I’d better go shave my legs.” She had already done her hair and didn’t want any part of her looking unkempt when the nice men loaded her into the ambulance. She refused to have a private room. She though it presumptuous, and, besides, she loved to talk to people. She remained beautiful; her skin was so perfect that staff at the facility would ask why this much younger woman was sharing a room with those two old ladies. She was seventy-seven.

Ever polite and considerate, on the day she died she waited until the senior nurse came on duty in the morning. She looked up, smiled, and said, “Oh, good. You’re here.” She then closed her eyes and stopped breathing. She wouldn’t have thought it right to die in front of young trainees; it might upset them.

As much as Marion had tried to prepare us, I was devastated. The person I could count on to know right from wrong, who had taken such good care of me all those years on the
Little House
set, was gone.

Now Steve. He was more than my friend. He was also a mentor and protector. He gave me great confidence as an actress. Like Katherine MacGregor, he, too, had studied acting extensively, but rather than telling people what they were doing wrong, Steve took great pleasure in letting me know when I had it right. He was nine years older, but he treated me as an equal. When he was just starting out on
Little House,
a reporter asked him how it felt to play opposite a girl of no more than seventeen. The guy was digging for dirt. But Steve had nothing but good things to say about me: I was a breeze to work with, and I had impeccable comedic timing. He didn’t have to say that. Neither I nor my publicist was in the room, and I wasn’t going to get him fired. But he said it anyway, and he told me he really meant it.

Steve was thirty-two when he was diagnosed with AIDS. The idea of anyone dying at thirty-two struck me as obscene. And for it to be my friend was downright unforgivable. He kept telling me not to, but I cried every day.

Steve didn’t cry—at least not in front of me. He was not just brave, he was noble. He let the doctors experiment on him, and he agreed to be part of a radical new study, which required him to jam needles filled with experimental drugs into his thigh. He told me that most people had quit this study because the treatments were so excruciatingly painful. But he said he didn’t mind the pain. The doctors might find a cure, and even if it was too late for him, he could be saving someone else’s life down the road. His courage and compassion floored me. If the tables were turned, I don’t know that I would have the strength, stamina, or stomach to do what he was doing.

And then the
National Enquirer
called—they had gotten wind of what was going on. Was it true about Steve Tracy having AIDS? How long did he have to live? How’d he get it? And the best one:
Did I have it?
After all, I had kissed him on TV. I was now in the “Linda Evans position”: When actor Rock Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis was revealed, people thought Linda Evans—who was kissing him constantly on the soap opera
Dynasty
—was in danger. I couldn’t believe how ignorant most people were about AIDS. You couldn’t contract it from kissing; you couldn’t catch it if someone sneezed or coughed on you. It was blood borne through sex, needles, and transfusions.

Steve educated me day by day. Just as he had been my mentor and teacher in life, he was going to keep up the job while he was dying. At first, I was afraid to be around him if I had a cold. I thought his immune system was so fragile, he would pick up any germ—and that it could be fatal.

“Relax, will ya?” he said and laughed. “I’m not the Boy in the Plastic Bubble.”

I went with him to the doctors, to “healing workshops,” to candlelight vigils. We even checked out a Louise Hay workshop. Louise Hay was a cancer survivor who had written the book
Heal Your Body
about how positive thought patterns and meditation could affect one’s health. The AIDS community embraced her teachings. They were faced with a terrifying disease that the doctors barely understood and could offer no cure for. Happy thoughts had worked for Louise; she was cured. People with AIDS wanted to believe this course of treatment could cure them as well.

Louise Hay’s meetings were usually held in church basements or public recreation rooms in West Hollywood. They were insanely popular, and the attendees quickly dubbed them “Hay-Rides” for their cheery, upbeat atmosphere. I was highly skeptical of such things and feared they might only offer a big dose of bogus “faith healing” nonsense. Steve insisted I go with him. “I promise, you’ll be surprised,” he said.

The recreation room at Plummer Park in West Hollywood was packed. There was a giddy feeling in the room like before a revival tent meeting, so my skepticism continued. It didn’t help that many of the longtime attendees were desperately ill. I was surrounded by people in wheelchairs, people whose friends had carried them in on stretchers. Some were even walking around with Hickman ports, the permanently attached tubes that deliver medicine through a hole cut in the patient’s chest. What on earth did these people think Louise Hay could do for them?

When Louise walked onto the stage, the crowd went wild. She was a beautiful woman, with blond, almost white hair and porcelain skin. The meeting began with a lot of very churchlike meditation, repeating of affirmations, and whatnot—all stuff that confirmed my suspicion that this lady was really full of it.

And then she spoke. After a few opening remarks, her beatific smile disappeared, and she became serious. “I have to talk to you about something,” she said quite sternly. She explained that, to her great disappointment, people were claiming that she could magically “cure AIDS” and other diseases; that they no longer needed anything from their doctors; that they could throw away their meds and just read her book. “Nothing could be further from the truth,” she said.

She explained that she had, in fact, during her cancer, done everything the doctors asked her to do, even surgery. It was only when these attempts began to fail that she knew she needed something more. Meditation and beliefs by themselves were not sufficient, she warned. One must also take care of one’s body in a concrete fashion. She explained that the instructions she was giving in her meetings were not just intended for the hour, but were meant to be used all the time—in their diets, their medical treatment, their living conditions. Getting happily blissed out for an hour a week was not going to produce a miracle. Fighting diseases like AIDS and cancer was just plain old-fashioned hard work. In other words, the sweet, beautiful, sainted healer stood there and read us the riot act.