Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (5 page)

When I auditioned the fourth time, on Friday, May 17, 1974, I had dispensed with all manner of pretense, yellow dresses, etc. I was wearing cutoff shorts and a T-shirt—my usual wardrobe. I remember sitting on the stairs outside Paramount Studios with my father, going over the script. As I began to skim the pages, I noticed something odd—a tone I had never seen in any other role I had read for. This was not some ordinary, insipid child character, blandly responding to her parents and pretending the usual sickening cheer about incredibly boring things no actual child could possibly get excited about in real life. “Gosh, Mom, help you with the church bake sale? You bet!” “Wash the car? Gee, Dad, you’re the keenest!” This was a girl who wouldn’t be caught dead doing any of that crap, and would tell you so to your face.

I looked up at my father. “Uh, Dad?”

“Yes?”

“This girl’s, like,
a total bitch.
”

“Read it,” he told me. So I read the lines. My father laughed so hard, tears ran down his cheeks. He gasped, “God, whatever you do, don’t touch it! Just read it EXACTLY LIKE THAT!”

I went into the room for what was now my fourth tryout. Michael Landon was there, along with Kent McCray, the show’s producer, and a third man I can’t recall. The three of them asked me if I would be so kind as to please read for them. I sat down and proceeded to read the script. I remember the main part of it was the “My Home” speech, where Nellie, under the cover of writing an essay for school, gloats over every expensive item in her house and how much her family paid for it. I began to recite, “It’s the nicest home in all of Walnut Grove. We have carpets in every room…and three sets of dishes…one for every day, one for Sunday and one for when somebody special and important comes to visit—which we’ve never used….”

As I read, these men became hysterical, as my father had been minutes earlier. They actually threw themselves around on the couch and elbowed each other in the ribs. “Would you please read the last part again, dear?” one of them asked.

“Yes,” I replied politely, awaiting direction. “What would you like me to change?”

“Nothing,” said the trio, “just read the part about the house again.
Please!
”

And so I did, exactly the same way—with exactly the same shriek-inducing results. They hired me on the spot.

By the time my father and I made the ten-minute drive home and got in the door, my agent had already set a price, accepted the producers’ offer, and scheduled my wardrobe fitting for the following Monday. I can honestly say, this was the easiest role I ever landed before or since. I asked my father if I should be concerned that I was turned down for the parts of both Laura and Mary, but for the great bitch role of Nellie, I was hired instantly. Did this say something about me as a person?

“Hey, if the shoe fits, wear it,” was all he said.

Well, technically, he did say a few other things, like “This thing won’t last one season!” “Who on earth would actually watch this drivel?” “Why the hell are they spending so much money on sets? My God, if this is still on TV a year from now, it’ll be a miracle!” Needless to say, we didn’t take my dad to the track much. Unless we wanted to know what horse
not
to bet on.

To be fair, he was not alone in his disbelief at the success of
Little House.
Nobody, I mean
nobody,
except for maybe one person, thought for an instant that it would be the phenomenon it turned out to be. Obviously, crazy old Michael Landon was way ahead of us all on this one, but I don’t think even he anticipated this level of worldwide “cultdom.”

The first episode of
Little House on the Prairie,
titled “A Harvest of Friends,” aired September 11, 1974 (not counting the pilot, which aired March 30, 1974), and the last episode, “Hello and Good-bye,” aired March 21, 1983—plus they threw in some spin-offs and a few more TV movies for fans in withdrawal. Nine years in all on the air; 203 episodes. Insane! And
Little House
lingers; it’s syndicated daily in over 140 countries, including Borneo, Argentina, Iraq, and Sri Lanka. There’s even a sixty-DVD boxed set shaped like a covered wagon you can buy for two hundred bucks. The French set comes in a little house; it’s much prettier.

Back then (and even today)
Little House
was a bit of a rarity: a TV show that actually advocated morals, faith, and community. There was no T&A, no police chases, no bionic body parts, not even a musical number (unless you count the Walnut Grove gang singing “Bringing in the Sheaves” in church). What it was, was wholesome: churning butter, milking cows, helping your fellow man, that kind of wholesome stuff. And it was old; the actual children’s book series was written way back in 1935. As if that wasn’t bizarre enough, all the action took place in late-nineteenth-century Minnesota.

But there was something about this show that struck a nerve; at its core, even with all the crazy plotlines that Michael and company cooked up (Blindness! Rabies! Anthrax!),
Little House
was simply about a family trying to achieve the American dream. Maybe it’s what the world needed after the crazy, druggy debauchery of the late 1960s and early ’70s. In the ’50s and ’60s, country shows like
The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show, Hee Haw, Gunsmoke,
and
Bonanza
abounded; then they disappeared despite the fact that people loved them. The networks wanted to appeal to a younger demographic, so they “deruralized” TV. Only Michael Landon wanted to buck this trend. He realized that
Little House
was exactly what audiences were missing. Every episode was filled with family values, love, and friendship. The show made you feel good; it made you appreciate what you had and stop bitching about what you didn’t. You don’t have enough money to pay your rent? Buddy, those Ingalls girls didn’t have a penny between them to buy a slate pencil. Now, that’s poor.

Still, I was puzzled back then, and I remain in shock now.
Little House
was
big.
It was number one in the ratings in the 1974–1975 season and always held a spot in the top thirty; even up against shows like
Rhoda, Phyllis,
and
The Captain and Tennille
. It was a force to be reckoned with. An estimated forty million viewers watched us every week at our peak. There were dolls, lunch boxes, Colorforms, even a tea set.

I loved my first script, “Country Girls,” because I had the punchline: I got to read that haughty essay about how wonderful my home was. But the books were another story. For the life of me, I could never figure out how Ed Friendly or Michael Landon had read them and envisioned a hit TV show. We had to start shooting so quickly after my audition that I had no time to cram, no time to read the
Little House
books for more perspective on what I was doing. It was actually weeks before I went out and bought a copy of
On the Banks of Plum Creek.
When I read it, I was shocked; it was pretty slow and boring. But the Garth Williams illustrations were dead on. When I saw the picture of Nellie clutching her doll away from Laura, it looked exactly like me. She had my nose. It’s just spooky.

Because the books lacked soap operaesque drama, Michael took great creative liberty; poetic license ran rampant on
Little House.
Michael added adventure, excitement, and tears (even the men cried!) in nearly every episode. Someone once asked him, “So, why don’t you stick closer to the books?” He replied, “Have you read them? There’s an entire chapter on how to make an apple fritter. I can’t film that.”

Instead, he brought out the true nature of all the characters; he said things about them that Laura Ingalls herself only implied. And that is why the show was so brilliant and so well received: it spoke universal truths about human nature. Everybody’s problems were the Ingallses’ problems.

All I knew at age twelve was that I was just cast as one of the biggest brats on TV. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

CHAPTER FIVE

WELCOME TO WALNUT GROVE

NELLIE:
You know, the Oleson family goes all the way back to royalty. We come from heads of state, and there were titles for most of my relatives.

LAURA:
Like Nero and Ivan the Terrible?

N
o one could have prepared me for the
Prairie
. There had never been a set—and there will never be a set—quite like it. It was so enormous that we needed two stages—Stage 31 and 32 at Paramount Studios. In 1978, when we moved to MGM Studios, we actually needed the biggest set they had, Stage 15, where they filmed
The Wizard of Oz.

Paramount housed the indoor sets—places like the Mercantile, the store owned and operated by my parents on the show, Nels and Harriet Oleson, and the ornate Oleson living quarters, the church/school, Doc Baker’s office, and the Little House interior itself. The Little House and the barn existed in their entirety inside the building: there were dirt floors, haystacks, and Mary and Laura’s loft. When we had to shoot exteriors—in and around the school, anything at the mill, all the ring-around-the-rosies in the yard, and the endless running over the hills—we filmed at Big Sky Ranch in Simi Valley, forty miles from Paramount. All the facades of the buildings in the town, Walnut Grove, had four sides, but they were hollow. That’s why the scenes were always shot out of sequence; we had to shoot the exteriors and interiors days apart. On Monday, for example, I’d walk into the school and say hi to Miss Beadle. Then on Thursday, I’d take my seat in class.

After my victorious audition, I had just the weekend before I was to report to wardrobe for fittings. It was Monday, May 21, 1974, and Auntie Marion and I walked into a set of dark, musty rooms in the costume department, deep in the bowels of Paramount Studios. They kept bringing out dress after dress and pinning them on me, checking to see what was too big or too small. I started to feel a little giddy and light-headed—just how many costumes would I have? Were we making
Gone With the Wind
here? The few parts I’d had were all modern-day kids, and I’d worn my own clothes half the time. I’d never seen a petticoat up close and in person in my entire life. By the time I left, I’d tried on so many things, I had no idea what I would finally end up wearing.

Marion was my guardian on the set. She was my mom’s older, somewhat more socially conventional sister. Being retired, she was deemed to have more time on her hands. As far as my parents were concerned, that and owning a car were qualifications enough to be my set guardian. And it so happened, Auntie Marion loved me. She called me her “favorite niece,” even though she didn’t have any other nieces. She had been a classical singer and claimed to have always suffered from terrible stage fright. But she was the bravest shy person I ever met. Just ask the burglar. One night, in the early ’70s, a burglar attempted to break into Marion’s house in the Hollywood Hills. He was halfway through the bedroom window when she awoke and spotted him. She was completely alone in the house, my uncle Beach having died some years before. What did she do? She spoke: “And just what do you think you’re doing?”

The burglar was stunned. Instead of screaming for help or hiding under the bed, this woman was chastising him like his third-grade teacher. He pulled himself back out the window and fled. This was possibly also due to the fact that she was holding the samurai sword that Uncle Beach had brought home from World War II. The burglar likely didn’t feel up to confronting a woman who could stand there in a fuzzy pink housecoat, clutching a three-foot steel blade, and exhibit no fear whatsoever. So there was no doubt, as I braved my first day on the set, that I was in the best possible hands.

A few days after the wardrobe fitting, it was time to film my first episode, “Country Girls.” This was actually the third episode of
Little House
—Nellie didn’t make an appearance until then because the Ingalls are busy braving storms, fires, hostile Native Americans, etc., all en route to settling in Minnesota. In my episode they’re finally living in the Little House, and Mary and Laura are off to school, where they have to battle an even more terrible force: that would be me.

The first person we met on arrival at the set was Reed Rummage. Yes, that was his name, poor man. He was wearing polyester pants with a short-sleeved shirt, bearing some sort of stain (mustard?), tucked in. He had the utterly thankless job of second AD, or assistant director. This position has very little to do with “directing” as most people think of it, and everything to do with desperately trying to keep things on schedule, figuring out where the hell the actors and crew disappeared to after lunch, and generally yelling at people. It’s more of a factory floor foreman–type job. He was quickly nicknamed Reed Rubbish.

I was, thank heavens, not only on time, but early. Number one item on this man’s job description was “screaming at people who are late.” A good set boasts a well-defined chain of command. If several of the actors go missing or something is wrong with the shooting schedule, a director or producer doesn’t want to yell at a bunch of different people, so he just yells at the second AD. Hence, Reed Rubbish’s constantly pained expression and flawless timekeeping. He actually carried a stopwatch and a clipboard like some kind of demented gym teacher. (“You are three and one-half minutes late!”)

Reed greeted us not with “Good morning” or “Welcome to our set” or any such pleasantry one might fantasize about hearing if one were to arrive for one’s first day starring on a TV show. The moment my aunt explained who we were, he looked me up and down, glanced at her, and barked, “This child’s hair is supposed to be in curlers! Why isn’t she in curlers?” We hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about. They had never mentioned this when I was in wardrobe, and I had endured no hair or makeup tests like in the old studio days. I wasn’t even aware of Nellie’s whole “ringlet” issue, not having read the books. Reed then began snarling into a walkie-talkie to someone about my not being in curlers. My aunt desperately tried to explain that we really had not been told this, and, of course, had we been informed, we would have gladly complied.

He finally let out a long-suffering sigh and said, “Okay, never mind. Go get dressed!” We scurried away to my dressing room. With all of the gigantic
Little House
sets, the soundstage was not big enough to accommodate the dressing rooms. So we had to go out the back door, often into the rain, onto what appeared to be a loading dock of some kind, and walk down a wooden plank until we reached a series of small wooden structures. Each dressing room was maybe ten feet deep at most and about five feet wide. Mine contained a beat-up old motel couch, two end tables with a truly ugly lamp on one of them, a makeup table (more like a very small desk, really), and an old, rickety wooden chair. There was an old-fashioned wooden cupboard in the corner that held my costumes. I couldn’t decide whether it more resembled a small suite in a skid row hotel or a big bedroom in a mobile home. But, hey, it was clean and dry, and within a few weeks, I would find the sight of this room at the end of a long, hard day to be the most wonderful in the world.

Safely ensconced, Auntie Marion and I began the process of getting me into wardrobe. I had seen the clothes in their half-finished state at the wardrobe fitting, but they were even more lavish and beautiful now. Every outfit had lace and flowers on it (unless it was taffeta with stripes): lace at the collar, lace at the cuffs, lace on the hem. Gorgeous, really. Okay, incredibly scratchy and uncomfortable, but beautiful, just the same. On the first day, I already had four dresses: a blue one with short, puffed sleeves; a long-sleeved yellow floral number; an adorable pink one with a starched white pinafore, and my favorite, the dark purple-striped taffeta party dress.

My wardrobe offered a stark contrast to Laura’s two dresses, both of which seemed to be made out of sackcloth. One of the major plot points of this first episode was Laura and Mary getting their first remotely attractive outfits, the pretty blue calico dresses that Ma makes for them rather than sewing a dress for herself. They then proceeded to wear these dresses daily for the next several years. All our costumes were one-of-a-kind and dry-cleaned at the end of the week. We were given just one duplicate that was “the stunt dress.” Mine was the blue puffy-sleeved outfit—which is why anytime Nellie is in a fight, she’s wearing it.

All of those dresses had what seemed like hundreds of those little hook-and-eye catches. I also had these weird thigh-high stockings with elastic garters, which I’d certainly never worn before. I actually don’t think anyone had really worn anything like this in some fifty or sixty years. And I had pantaloons, of all things, plus the world’s largest, heaviest petticoat. I swear, if the dresses didn’t kill me, the underwear would.

Thankfully, Richalene Kelsay, a very kind, intelligent, down-to-earth woman who was in charge of the show’s wardrobe, suddenly materialized to save us. She strolled into my dressing room and showed my aunt and me how to operate all these elaborate trappings, then told us we were the lucky ones: “You just have black Mary Janes for shoes. Those other poor girls have high-button boots to put on. We actually had to go out and buy buttonhooks for everyone, so they could get dressed.”

My aunt was positively aghast. She was old enough to have put her shoes on with buttonhooks when she was a little girl in the 1910s. She had been relieved to see that and all the other complicated fashions go, and had applauded the advent of zippers and Velcro. She really thought she’d manage to make it through the rest of her life without having to deal with nonsense like buttonhooks ever again. And here she was, late in the twentieth century, at seven in the morning, helping me into pantaloons and garters and doing up hook-and-eye closures.

We had just gotten me into my straitjacket of 1800s finery, when there was yet another knock on the door. This time, I was greeted by a tiny girl with long braids, freckles, and the biggest set of front teeth you ever saw in your life. It was Melissa Gilbert. She was about nine years old. I was barely twelve and small for my age, but she looked as if she might fit in my purse—and could chew her way out if she had to.

She marched right in and introduced herself and began explaining things to us, all kinds of things: who was who, who did what, how everything worked. She was filling us in, in no uncertain terms, mind you, as to the way things were around here. We stood there openmouthed, paying rapt attention to her lecture. It was terribly surreal, yet informative. Then came her stern warning, delivered with the intensity of Edward G. Robinson, in the vocal range of Shirley Temple: “And whatever you do, you watch out for that Melissa Sue Anderson. She’s very dangerous. She’s evil, and I hate her.”

Now, my aunt could not sit still for this. Melissa Sue Anderson? The girl cast to play Laura’s big sister, Mary? She was a little girl, for heaven’s sake! My aunt chided, “Oh, honey, you don’t mean that! You don’t really
hate
her now, do you?”

“Yes, I do!” Melissa squeaked. “I hate her, and she hates me. She tried to kill me, you know. And she’ll kill you, too, if she gets the chance!” And then she ran off.

It was as if we were suddenly in the middle of a really bad prison movie with an all-midget cast. We had just been told to “watch our backs” by someone who looked like a talking Holly Hobby doll. And this “terror of the cell block” we were to fear? What was she,
ten
? Melissa Gilbert had to be putting us on. Obviously, this was not true. She didn’t mean “kill” for God’s sake—the kid was a major drama queen already. But there was something very unsettling and insistent about her warning. My aunt and I slowly turned and stared at each other. Just what sort of place was this?

After imprisoning myself in my fabulous costume, we proceeded to makeup. On some shows, depending on the studio, there might be a whole makeup room or department, but in most cases, it was more what you would call a “makeup and hair area.” That’s what
Little House
had, and entering it was like falling into a time warp. The makeup tables were the old white-painted wooden kind, with the huge mirrors lit up with dozens of bulbs like you’d see in the movies. There were wigs on old-fashioned cloth wig heads and manual curling irons—not those cute little thermostatically controlled things you plug in, but clattering, scissorlike iron rods (no Teflon coating here!) you put in the oven to heat.

The hairdressers put the irons in the oven until they were so hot, you could run a cloth ribbon through them to take out the wrinkles. And you always knew when you accidentally picked up a synthetic ribbon because it melted and smoked. This is what they announced they were going to run through my hair every morning.

All of the equipment was the same stuff they had been using for decades. Also apparently in continuous use for decades were the hair stylists, Larry Germain and Gladys Witten-Coy. They, along with the equally ancient makeup crew, Allan “Whitey” Snyder and Hank Edds, had worked with every major star since the beginning of time: Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford. Many child and teen stars fancy themselves divas and cop quite the attitude in hair and makeup. I would have paid money to have seen any of them try that on
Little House.
Really, go on, try it. Strike a pose with people who kept Bette Davis in line and told Joan Crawford where she could bloody well get off.

Makeup and hair quickly became known as a demilitarized zone. Absolutely no arguing, no yelling, no pushing, no shoving. Just “Yes, ma’am,” “No, ma’am, “Yes, sir,” “No, sir.” If you had somehow, God forbid, gotten into any sort of an argument with anyone elsewhere, you weren’t going to finish it here. Not only would the tribal elders of hair and makeup not put up with it, but absolutely anything you said and did while in the chair would be immediately reported to those in charge. You were cordially invited to leave your bullshit at the door. In a way, it was the safest place on the set.