Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (23 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DIVORCE VIA FAX

MRS. OLESON:
Well, in my case, Nellie and Willie were more than enough.

CAROLINE:
In the case of Nellie and Willie, Mrs. Oleson, I’d have to agree with you.

M
y marriage to Don fell apart—maybe because I didn’t have Steve to vent to anymore. Perhaps if Steve had been around to talk to, I’d have left sooner. Four years into our marriage, I realized that Don and I were having the exact same arguments over and over. It was like being on some sort of emotional treadmill, where you run and run and never go forward. I was dizzy and exhausted from going in circles.

I don’t know how many things he actually lied about. I just know he started telling these ridiculous stories to cover up stuff I didn’t care about in the first place. He hid food wrappers and lied about what he ate. He lied about where he’d been even if he’d really been shopping or doing something totally innocent. I couldn’t trust him, and I knew it was time to go.

I went to my best friend Sharon’s house; she had been maid of honor at our wedding. She was happy to take me in. But before I could come in the house, I had to let her husband stand on the porch and say, “I told you so.”

I couldn’t believe I was getting divorced. Melissa Gilbert took me to lunch. She had just divorced her first husband, Bo Brinkman, and was prepared to offer any assistance necessary. I noticed that we had done so many things at the same time. We had gotten married around the same time, to writers, and we were both getting divorced the same year. We compared notes on our failed marriages, and I suggested that perhaps we were both picking the same kind of wrong guy.

She said, “No, silly,
I
just go for sexual compulsives.
You
marry gay guys.”

She offered to help me find a lawyer, but I had found out you could do the whole thing by fax. I called this service, 1-800-DUMP-HIM, and divorced my husband by fax. I know it was pretty harsh. I guess I can’t very well make fun of young people who break up via text. To this day, my friends still joke, “Don’t piss her off! You’ll get a fax!” But truthfully, Don would have had to be blind not to see it coming. We did go to counseling for several months, and even the shrink told him I was going to leave him.

I didn’t know what or who to believe anymore. Worst of all, I’d discovered a real whopper: Don
had
watched
Little House on the Prairie
—maybe more than
Mary Tyler Moore.
He knew exactly who I was when we met. In fact, the day after we met, he had gone to a friend of his, an entertainment writer who had interviewed me years before. He got the tape of the interview and went home and listened to it for “tips.”
Creepy.

Don had some sort of fantasy that if he moved to Hollywood and married a blond actress, this would solve all his problems. But wait, who better, than, well, Nellie Oleson herself! Lesson learned: never, ever, get romantically involved with anyone who has watched
Little House on the Prairie
.

By contrast, among many of his refreshing characteristics was the fact that Bob Schoonover hadn’t the slightest idea who I was and, even when people told him, didn’t care. Bob was the director of the Southern California AIDS Hotline, where I had volunteered back in 1986 when Steve was diagnosed. When we met, he did ask for an autograph—my mother’s. He was a huge fan of
Underdog
and wanted to meet Sweet Polly Purebred.

Bob was an unusual person. When most people still didn’t know what AIDS was, he was applying for work at the AIDS Project Los Angeles. He was the sixth person they hired and the first straight man. When he started there, they gave him an office, a remodeled broom closet, and took great glee in ragging him about being “in the closet.”

We became great friends. We were often booked to speak on the same panels and hung out together so often that one volunteer took to calling me “the ever lovely
Mrs.
Schoonover.” At the time, I was married, and Bob had a girlfriend. Besides, he wasn’t my type. For starters, he was much too nice: intelligent, polite, well educated. And employed!

I knew Bob was twelve years older than I was, but that didn’t concern me. He was obviously an “ex-hippie,” complete with beard and ponytail. But not just any ponytail; Bob’s was curled into one, great, black ringlet. People at APLA actually used to whisper behind his back, “How the hell does he get it to do that?” He was a man of many mysteries. I called his home number one day and got his answering machine. I was greeted with a terrible, high-pitched grinding sound, a screaming roar from the pit of hell. I later asked him what on earth it was.

“Oh, that’s my guitar solo,” he replied.

“A guitar solo?” I asked incredulously. I didn’t even know he played guitar.

“Yes. It’s from a song I’ve been working on. It’s called ‘Godzilla Christmas.’” He said this as if it was the most normal thing in the world.

“I swear when I heard it, I thought it was a blender.”

Strangely, he seemed to take this as a compliment.

When I got divorced, Bob and I went to lunch to commiserate. The same month I was getting divorced, he was breaking up with his girlfriend of many years. We compared notes on all the awful things that had gone on at our respective houses.

I said, “You wouldn’t want to go out with
me,
would you?”

Bob looked as if he’d just bitten through his fork. He stammered out, “In a New York minute.”

Our first date was March 31, 1993, Bob’s last day as director of the hotline. After nine years of dealing with death, disease, and bureaucracy, he was starting to burn out. The staff threw him a send-off party after an AIDS seminar, and we planned to go get coffee after it. Bob was presented with a huge cake, and our colleagues made speeches about how much they would miss him. I was the only one in the room who wasn’t saying good-bye. Afterward, we headed to a coffeehouse in Hollywood, just a few blocks from the AIDS Project. We sat uncomfortably on high stools with our lattes and muffins, in the deafening din of the coffeehouse, trying to think what on earth we should say to each other now that we were on a “date.” We kept getting the giggles. We never had any lack of topics to discuss before, but now we felt sort of silly and on display.

Nevertheless, we went on another date, and many more after that. All my friends told me it was a terrible idea to rush into a new relationship so soon after a divorce—and with someone I’d been friends with for nearly seven years. A former coworker, no less. They insisted it was a rebound and doomed from the start. But they didn’t know Bob. They hadn’t looked into those brown eyes of his, and, well, they certainly hadn’t kissed him.

One day Bob was out of town at some AIDS conference. He called me late that night from his hotel room, and in the middle of telling me how much he missed me, he said, “I was watching this movie, and, well, the interaction between the man and the woman reminded me of us.”

My mind reeled. What on earth was he watching?
Casablanca? Wuthering Heights?
What famous film couple did he see as us?

“It was just something the man said to the woman that got to me,” he continued.

“‘The world’s a much more interesting place with you in it.’”

I slumped off the sofa onto the floor still clutching the phone. Yes, he had just quoted me the last line from my favorite movie of all time, but not one I had ever thought of as a romance. He had just uttered Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s last words to FBI agent Clarice Starling in
The Silence of the Lambs.
In that scene, the evil doc is admitting that, in Clarice, he has finally met his match. And I knew I had finally met mine.

Bob and I were living together by June. In November we got married in the beautiful backyard of a friend’s house, a woman who had also been a hotline volunteer. Bob announced that he was going to wear a tuxedo. This was quite a surprise to those who knew him as someone who favored torn jeans and a T-shirt on an almost daily basis. I tried to explain to him that it was a small, daytime wedding, and that tuxedoes were for huge weddings, with dozens of bridesmaids and groomsmen. I explained also that, since it was my second wedding, I would not be wearing anything resembling a gown, so a tuxedo would not be appropriate. Bob was not swayed by this kind of reasoning in the slightest.

He insisted, “I don’t care how many times you’ve been married! It’s my first wedding, and I’m wearing a tuxedo!”

I protested, “But then, what on earth am I going to wear?”

“Why don’t you wear a tuxedo, too? You always look so cute in a dark suit,” he answered with a smile.

So I did. And I went barefoot, too. The wedding was in a garden, after all.

Bob had one more helpful suggestion: “Why not paint your toenails black to match your tuxedo?”

“Black toenails? Are you nuts?” I said. “You seriously expect me to paint my toenails black?”

And that’s when Bob looked at me with that grin and said, “I will if you will.”

For the walk down the aisle, I carried no bouquet. Bob and I both had on rose boutonnieres and red AIDS ribbons pinned to our lapels. Both the best man, Bob’s best friend, Timmy, and the matron of honor, my best friend, Sharon, wore tuxedos and had black toenails as well. Our friend David Taylor, a professional magician, was the ring bearer. Our rings appeared in a ball of fire and then sailed up into the air and floated over our heads. The Reverend Stephen Pieters, a friend and long-term survivor of AIDS, snatched them out of the air laughing and proceeded to marry us.

Months later, Bob and I went to a party where we ran into the volunteer who called me the “ever lovely Mrs. Schoonover.” He hadn’t heard about the wedding. He was standing by the swimming pool when we walked in. He smiled to see us and said, “Oh, look! If it isn’t Bob Schoonover and the ever lovely Mrs. Schoonover!”

We smiled and held up our hands with the matching rings and simply said, “Yes, actually.” He was so shocked, we nearly had to fish him out of the pool.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THEY LOVE ME—THEY
REALLY, REALLY
LOVE ME

NELLIE:
I’ll fix you, Laura Ingalls!

J
anuary 18, 2002, my fortieth birthday, should have been a horrible day for me. This particular milestone is not a good day for a lot of women, and usually a bad day for actresses, particularly former child actresses. To top it off, I spent the day working at a temp job because, although
Little House on the Prairie
paid residuals, it wasn’t
Friends
money.
Little House
was a good gig for its day, but it wasn’t a free ride for life. And since I wasn’t going to go out and steal tips off tables like my father, I had long since adopted my mom’s outlook on being an unemployed actress: whenever she needed money, she did the honorable thing—she temped.

My mom had passed away less than a year before. Her death was very sudden. It was September 2001, and my father called from Vancouver. My mother had just been rushed to the hospital, something about an intestinal blockage. “It’s very bad,” he told me.

After I got off the phone, I began to make arrangements to fly up. Five minutes later, the phone rang again. It was my father. “She’s gone.”

Over the sound of the blood pounding in my ears, I heard him say in a broken voice, “Can you come up?” I remember I was so worried about his heart condition at that point, I made him promise not to leave the hospital alone. Bob and I flew up that night. We arranged a huge beautiful funeral, and hundreds turned out to pay their respects to Gumby, as well as to Norma. The place was packed. But because of the terrorist acts of September 11, the scattering of her ashes had been postponed, and I now had the cold comfort of knowing that she was at rest in a plastic Tupperware container in my father’s closet.

As if my mother’s death wasn’t depressing enough, after a couple of years of trying to have a baby with Bob to no avail, the doctors had officially informed me that the chances of my producing a child through the usual means were essentially slim to none.

Yet despite all these circumstances, I was strangely happy on my fortieth. Not exactly dance-in-the-streets happy, but I knew things could be worse, and I felt grateful for all I had.

Then the phone rang. It was my manager, Thomas DeLorenzo. After my dad retired, I had managed to find someone nearly as nutty and definitely as gay—if possibly gayer—to take over the job. He snarled into the phone, “Pack your shit. You’re going to France.”

I was booked to appear on the French talk show
Les Enfants de Tele (The Children of Television)
. I would be getting paid, and I would be staying at the George V Hotel, possibly the most expensive place in Paris. And there were two tickets in first class. But I wouldn’t even get a chance to ask Bob.

“I’m going!” my manager barked.

The plane was nearly empty. It was only January, just four months after September 11, and people weren’t running down to the airport to jump back on a plane yet. We were the only people in first class, and the only other passengers on the entire flight were six soldiers. We were booked on a wonderful airline called Air Liberté that went out of business during the post-9/11 travel-industry collapse. Too bad; they had a hell of a cheese cart.

Going to Paris for the first time was like going to Mars. Never having been on a transatlantic flight, when I looked out the window at night and saw this huge black nothingness populated by just the moon and a few stars, I felt as if I was traveling to outer space. This sensation only increased when I landed.

We were met by two absolutely gorgeous Frenchmen. One was working with the TV station, and the other was our chauffeur/bodyguard. As Thom and I climbed into the back of the black Peugeot, I laughed, “I’ll take the blond, you can have the brunette.” Always one for the blue-collar, rough-trade type, I, of course, preferred the bodyguard.

We checked into the hotel, and Thom insisted we must go out immediately for chocolate mousse. He was always insisting on things, but he was right this time. He had been to Paris before, and I deferred to him on what were the “must sees” and the “must eats.” Now, I had eaten a lot of chocolate mousse in my time, and I knew a good mousse when I tasted it. But this was orgasmic. Maybe they just use more cream, or maybe it’s something they feed the cows—I don’t know. But I took one bite, and my eyes bugged out of my head. I had been in France for only a few hours, and I knew my life was about to change radically.

And then there was the show. I had been told I would be interviewed, but I didn’t find out until I arrived on the set that the talk show was over three hours long and broadcast live. Who in their right mind does a live three-hour talk show? What the hell was this, the Jerry Lewis telethon? No, it was France. Three hours is a perfectly reasonable amount of time for a talk show, as far as they’re concerned. It just means you can have more guests.

The green room was filled with people drinking champagne and eating gourmet hors d’oeuvres, and the hair and makeup folks were extraordinary. They seemed happy to give us anything we wanted. Thom wasn’t even going on camera, and he was able to get a haircut while he was hanging out backstage.

On the show, the producers just kept bringing on guests from various French TV series and films. One group would get tired, leave, and a new set would be brought out. Every now and then a group of belly dancers would come out, and confetti would drop from the ceiling. The girls all had something written across their stomachs and backs. I asked what on earth this was about. I was told that since the show was live, the producers knew that people watching shows on other stations were going to switch over to them at the commercial break. So every time the other stations went to commercial, the confetti rained, and the girls came out. The message on their stomachs said, “Welcome, Channel 3 Viewers!”

The show kept presenting random clips of things, including an uncensored segment from an American newscast of Mike Tyson threatening another fighter on TV. Thom and I watched aghast as Mike Tyson was projected onto a giant screen screaming at his opponent, “I’m gonna fuck you till you love me!!” The French thought this was absolutely hilarious. Then the stage manager turned to me and said, “Okay, you’re next.”

The other guests on the set at this point were popular French comedians and actors, mostly from the new live-action movie based on the famous French comic book
Asterix.
It was just about to open, and its studio was doing a huge press campaign like we would have for the next
Batman
or
Spider-Man
film. One of the actors was a young man named Jamel Debbouze, a hugely famous star in France. I recognized him as the grocery boy from
Amélie,
the one with the crush on “Lady Di.”

The show’s host, another famous Frenchman who, like Madonna, went only by the name Arthur, had been teasing the audience for the last couple of hours with the promise of an upcoming special guest who had traveled all the way from the United States. He had been dropping hints, and Jamel had been trying increasingly hilarious bad guesswork to figure out who it was.

But now Arthur dropped the big hint:
“La Petite Maison dans la Prairie!”
The studio audience oohed and aahed. The screen began to display a slide show of pictures of various cast members. Karen Grassle had been a previous guest on the show, so they knew it wasn’t her. As each cast member’s picture appeared, the audience yelled out his or her name in unison. “Charles Ingalls!” “Doc Baker!” “Laura!” (pronounced “Lohr-rah!”) “Marie!” “Monsieur Edwards!” Finally, the screen showed a picture of Nellie. The crowd went berserk. The host told Jamel who the guest was. He roared in protest that it was not possible.

As the
Little House
theme music swelled, the audience began to sing. I was backstage about to enter when I heard the entire studio audience singing—chanting—the theme to
Little House on the Prairie.
And there aren’t any words to the theme from
Little House.
People don’t just start singing it spontaneously in America, but they do in France. Loudly, slowly, reverently, in unison, “Laaa la la laaa, la la lalala. Laaa, laa la la, la la la la laaa…”
My God,
I thought.
It’s a religious cult.

I walked out onstage, and everyone rose to their feet. I never got a standing ovation for walking out onto the set of
Geraldo
or
Sally Jessy Raphael
back in the States. I sat down on a high stool between Arthur and Jamel at an enormous triangular table that made the set look like a giant Ouija board. It was all so brightly lit and science-fictiony, I thought the whole room was going to take off at any minute. An assistant plugged the translation headset into my ear.

“Is it you? It is really you?” Jamel demanded in English.

“Yes, yes, it’s me,” I replied nervously.

He then tried to speak English. “Why you? Why!” he sputtered, searching for words. “
Why YOU SO MEAN TO LAURA?”
he screamed in my face. The audience howled with laughter. He breathlessly continued, “Why? Laura is nice, she’s pretty, but
you
…” He then said something that didn’t translate, something about
“why the footing of the girl?!”

I was afraid to even ask what that meant. He finally resorted to screaming and sign language. “You’re always, ARRRGGGHHHH!” And he mimed me hitting Laura. “In my room, I cry and I cry! Why?” I wasn’t sure if this was a rhetorical question or if I was actually supposed to answer him.

I tried to explain, slowly, so the translator could broadcast my statements to the television audience. “Nellie was jealous. I had this horrible mother, and my stupid brother, Willie, and my poor father, who couldn’t stand up to my mother. And here was Laura with her perfect family. I was jealous.”

The famous comedian Alain Chabat leaned over and in English said, “I am with you.” This sent him and the others into a frenzied discussion. The translator did her best to keep up, but I was getting bits and pieces of sentences, like it was coming in over an old radio. “Jealous.” “Poor thing.” “Unhappy.”

Finally, one of the actors made an impassioned speech that began with something like “Nellie, who was a child without a smile…” and everyone went “Ahhh!” The audience applauded wildly. They had analyzed Nellie’s situation and agreed she was a poor, unhappy, friendless little thing. It was as if they had just put Nellie on trial on national television and determined that her actions against Laura were motivated by jealousy, making them crimes of passion and therefore forgivable under French law.

Later I was hugged and kissed by a group of French fans backstage. For the next several days these encounters continued, until it was clear: things were different in France. They didn’t hate me here. They
loved
me. All those years of reading about France, all those years as a child living in the Hollywood version of a French castle, all the stories about all the talking mice and rats who lived there, all the drooling over French menus, all the dreaming about this mythical, romantic place with better food and prettier people—and all this time, they had been dreaming of me. Hell, they didn’t even think Nellie Oleson was “mean.” They thought she was French. When I left a few days later, I assured them, “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll be back….”

While France had granted me a birthday wish beyond my wildest imagination, New York was still wild, uncharted territory. For years I had been doing stand-up comedy, but I had yet to appear in New York. All the Los Angeles comedians I knew were terrified to play there. They all thought the audiences were “much tougher” than in L.A. I met Chip Duckett in Texas in the summer of 2001 at a bizarre promotion for Alizé liqueur, where different celebrities played hostess and introduced the evening’s entertainment. Chip booked a lot more than just celebrity booze busts, so we met for lunch a year later, and he explained the plan. He booked talent for Club Fez, a small but popular venue in Greenwich Village where Joan Rivers was doing shows at the time. Chip didn’t have to say much more; if this place was good enough for Joan, it was certainly good enough for me. And then he dropped the bomb.

“Okay, you’ll need to do at least an hour and a half, give or take a few minutes.”

What?
My brain locked up. I didn’t have an hour and a half of material to save my life. I had been playing so many clubs where the standard was fifteen to twenty minutes—if you were lucky. I probably had thirty minutes max of anything remotely useful. Then, just to make matters worse, he said, “Oh, and if you’re not already, you should be
really
dirty. You would not believe the things Joan Rivers says up there.”

So not only was I being asked to run a comedy marathon, but because old Joan was coming in a couple nights before me to curse the air blue, I would need to completely alter my material and amp up the profanity. I sometimes said the word
bitch,
as in, “Yes, I am commonly known as the Prairie Bitch.” But that was about it. I did not say
fuck.
I did not say
shit.
I didn’t even say
goddamn.
I had an almost totally clean act.

For this new show, I was going to have to come out of the closet as a person who swears. Fortunately, I had some material at my disposal to choose from in that arena: a pop-culture magazine called
Detour
had recently done an article about me. It was a lovely, complimentary piece with a great picture. But at the top of the page under my photo was an unexpected little poem:

When she was good, she was very, very good.

When she was bad, she was a cunt.

My agent nearly had a seizure when he saw the article. He sputtered and stammered over the phone, “I can’t send
this
out to people! It’s…it’s got…the…
the C-WORD
all over it!” I read it to my father. He didn’t stop laughing for a week. I decided the magazine article was going into the act. Let’s see Joan Rivers top
that
!