Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (6 page)

It was probably for the best that this is where I had my initial encounter with Melissa Sue Anderson, the girl who had been selected to play the sweet, beautiful Mary Ingalls, the girl who, I had just been warned, might be dangerous. She didn’t look like a “killer.” She looked like, well, a little girl. But not just any little girl. She had a large, round face (what Auntie Marion would eventually take to calling “that great moon face of hers”), with her hair pulled back to show an enormous smooth, high forehead. She had the most gorgeous, huge blue eyes, small, perfect lips, and the same adorable, TV-ready pug nose that I saw on Linda Blair and all those girls at auditions who got the part of the cheerleader instead of me. Her hair was not mixed dishwater blond like mine; it was perfect, shining, yellow-white blond, like a Breck commercial. She was spectacular.

She was the prom queen, the head cheerleader, the girl with the perfect hair and teeth.
Oh crap,
I thought. Girls like this
always
hated me. As if on cue, Melissa Sue Anderson turned to look at me, her huge, round blue eyes narrowing to slits. Her cheeks puffed slightly, and her perfect nose wrinkled. As she was in the “makeup/hair safe zone,” she smiled in a disturbing, artificial way, like a well-trained beauty pageant contestant with smooth, perfectly polished teeth. “Hello, I’m Missy,” she said.

I was momentarily confused. I had never met anyone who used her nickname or anything other than her real name. Because of the two Melissas, the producers had been forced to create a system of identification: Melissa Sue Anderson was to be Missy, and Melissa Gilbert would be Melissa (until they started calling her “Half-Pint”).

“Um, good morning. I’m Alison.”

That appeared to be the end of the conversation. I was now even more confused by Melissa Gilbert’s warning. Where was this big, bad, menacing creature she had described? Not only was this girl about my age, she was actually a bit younger, closer to Melissa’s age. But she did have that eerie quality some girls have that makes them appear older than they are. Something in her eyes did make her look older. Much older. Like, about forty-two. I retreated to the safety of the makeup chair. I decided to suspend judgment but proceed with caution.

It was time to get my hair done. This was going to be a hellacious process, as I had not arrived “in curlers” and sported some of the straightest, most curl-resistant hair on earth. But it was no match for Gladys. Gladys Witten-Coy was a tale unto herself. With another long-term survivor of Hollywood stationed above my head, I learned to follow her advice, and over the next seven years, she was my protector, confessor, adviser—essentially the closest thing I had to a guru. She never steered me wrong.

Gladys Witten-Coy had grown up in terrible poverty, living in two rooms with something like fourteen brothers and sisters in Appalachia. Hers was pretty much the same as Dolly Parton’s childhood. The two women were not dissimilar in personality or blond glamour, although by this time Gladys’s hair was a blazing white, perfectly styled wig.

She had started in the business way back in the 1940s and worked with absolutely everyone. She told me, as soon as she got any money, she had bought a tiny shack. She soon sold that and found a slightly larger place, and so on and so on. This led to her not only owning her fabulous home in Laguna, but her getting—and keeping current—a real estate license. She explained to me that this gave her an enormous sense of independence and allowed her to tell any out-of-control diva actresses, “I don’t have to take any of this! I own my own home and have a real estate license!”

Gladys commanded my undivided attention and worship as soon as I found out that she had been the hairdresser on
Bonnie and Clyde.
The famous blond flippy bob of Faye Dunaway’s that I had imitated since childhood? That was her creation. Of course, it was also the source of one of Gladys’s greatest frustrations. She said it wasn’t authentic to the period at all; that none of the actors, especially Faye Dunaway, wanted to alter their looks to conform to the 1930s period in which the film took place and kept insisting on more attractive “modern” hairdos. Over the years, she regaled me with wild tales of the on-set antics of Faye Dunaway and others—and her zero tolerance for such behavior.

Gladys was single. Well, divorced. And widowed. And divorced. Her relationship history was sort of confusing. She had been married several times—“Not my fault!” she explained. But she still wore the various rings and wedding sets given to her by the various husbands. She would point to each in turn and explain to me, “Well, you see, this one died. This other one, well, he was an alcoholic….” She went down this list and matter-of-factly showed me how she had really tried, in good faith, to be married just once for life, but fate (and what sounded to me like the hopeless stupidity and daredevil lifestyles of the men involved) just made it impossible for her to achieve her goal. But the moral was, she never gave up. Gladys always kept trying.

My hair was going to need all her best efforts. Gladys put the curling irons in the oven until they were so hot that a drop of water on them sizzled and boiled away. If the irons were so hot they smoked, she cooled them by spinning them around by the handles, creating a metallic clanking sound, and looking and sounding just like a gunslinger twirling a couple of Colt pistols. Gladys was the Wyatt Earp of hairdressing. My hair gave up in terror and curled.

Having my makeup applied seemed merciful after this. With my one film experience,
Throw Out the Anchor,
I’d had makeup put on before and was familiar with the feel of the wet sponge and the smell of the typical film makeup, usually served up in a flat blue container labeled Max Factor Natural Tan. I always thought it was hilarious that they called this stuff natural. It was without a doubt the most unnatural color you could possibly paint a person. But the set lighting back then was so bright and harsh, if you didn’t paint people several shades darker than normal, we’d have all looked pale and deathly ill on your TV screen.

The run-of-the-mill makeup artist tended to just slap on a coat, indiscriminately covering your facial features, so that you went around all day looking weirdly brown and featureless and had to spend hours scrubbing this stuff off when you got home. The makeup was much better on
Little House
and improved year by year as both the actors and the makeup artists got more comfortable with each other, we girls got older, and our individual features got more attention. It was also hard not to feel more beautiful when we found out that the man doing our makeup had been the makeup man for Marilyn Monroe. Allan “Whitey” Snyder—we never called him anything other than Whitey—was a stout, white-haired, middle-aged man who looked as if he had spent the last twenty years crossing a desert. He was a cautionary tale of the dangers of excessive sun exposure. Not only had he done Marilyn Monroe’s makeup, though, he had been her makeup man from her very first screen test all the way to the day she died…and beyond.

Whitey always carried a gold money clip. One day when Gladys was telling me about how fabulous Marilyn had been to work with and how much they all loved her (this really kind of blew the lid off the whole “diva” mythology—those who worked with her described her as a sweet, vulnerable, almost delicate creature), she showed me the gold pendant necklace Marilyn gave her and told Whitey to show me what Marilyn had given him. He took a wad of bills out of his pocket; he didn’t just keep the money clip, he actually used it for its intended purpose on a daily basis. It was engraved with the words “While I’m Still Warm—Marilyn.”

I thought the inscription was very weird and started to open my mouth to ask what on earth that meant, when he put it away hurriedly, and Gladys gave me a “don’t you dare” look and shook her head. After Whitey left the room, she explained that he was very sensitive about the whole thing. What the engraving referred to was this: Marilyn used to laugh and tell Whitey, “Oh, Whitey, your makeup is so wonderful; when I die, I want you to make me up while I’m still warm!” One day, she gave him the engraved clip. The gift would have remained a cute, funny story, except that when she died, tragically and horribly at thirty-six, he in fact went to the funeral home and applied makeup to the face of his now dead friend.

According to Gladys, this task was extremely traumatic for him and required large amounts of alcohol to complete. She said he never fully recovered emotionally and told me that I should always be careful when discussing Marilyn in his presence and, if I had any sense, to never say anything else about the money clip again. I heard and obeyed.

The rest of the day flew by. I couldn’t keep track of all the people I met, although I could tell I was going to love our new teacher. Oh, not the real on-set teacher, Helen Minniear, who had the thankless job of making us child actors spend at least three hours a day in a room doing our homework when we all wanted to be elsewhere. I liked her, too. In fact, I admired her patience and fortitude. The kids of
Little House
were of all different ages and educational levels, and she was responsible not only for assisting all of us with our homework, but riding herd on the producers to make sure we all got in our required hours. Our “classroom” was basically any makeshift room that could hold a bunch of chairs and desks. When we were on location at Simi, they set up a long table behind the actual schoolhouse facade. Mrs. Minniear was the two Melissas’ full-time teacher since they were in thirteen out of thirteen episodes a year and could only attend a regular school during spring hiatus. I, on the other hand, was contracted for only seven out of thirteen episodes. I often had several weeks off at a time, so I could go to my local public school and just bring my assignments with me to the set on the days I was working.

Sure, I liked Mrs. Minniear, but like everyone else, I was utterly enthralled with Miss Beadle. The character of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s favorite teacher was played by Charlotte Stewart. She had blond hair, blue eyes, and the most radiant smile you ever saw. She was every little girl’s dream of a teacher. As soon as I saw her, I wanted to run out and buy her an apple. Later, we would all nearly
platz
when we found out that this smiling vision of innocence had just come from the set of David Lynch’s
Eraserhead
. Our Miss Beadle was secretly Mary X.

All in all, it took virtually no time to get into the groove of filming. We started in mid-May, worked all summer, had a brief Christmas break, then resumed shooting until we broke for the standard hiatus in late February. It took just seven working days to film a one-hour episode, maybe ten days if we had to go out of town on location. Things happened so fast, before I knew it, several episodes were in the can. Michael Landon liked to work at a breakneck pace. He was incredibly efficient; we were routinely ahead of schedule and under budget.

Thankfully, I had little trouble stepping into Nellie’s patent leather shoes. I look back now on one of my very first scenes in the schoolroom, when I snarl at Laura and Mary: “Country girls…don’t even know what a blackboard is.” I sound a little strange, like I just got off the plane from Brooklyn. It took me a few more days to nail Nellie’s prissy voice and evil inflection (a perfect imitation, if I do say so myself, of my mother’s upper-crust Canadian accent). To this day, when I call to reserve a flight on an airline or even check my credit balance, my voice is recognized over the phone: “Are you Nellie Oleson?” So I guess I truly became her.

WILL THE REAL NELLIE PLEASE STAND UP?

Laura Ingalls Wilder actually based the Nellie character on three tormenters in her life:

1. Nellie Owens of Walnut Grove, the closest to the Nellie we know. She had a brother called Willie, a father named Nels, and her parents did indeed run the Mercantile. But her mother’s real name was not Harriet, but Margaret (which is coincidentally my middle name). It seems that, after leaving Walnut Grove, the Owens settled in Tillamook, Oregon, where they became very big in cheese. Nellie married a Mr. Henry Kirry (sorry, no Percival), and she had three children, named Zola, Lloyd, and Leslie. Nellie later divorced Henry.

2. Genevieve Masters. It seems Genevieve was a real-live, card-carrying bitch, and much of Nellie’s nastiest deeds in the books were based on her. So why didn’t Laura simply name her character Genny as payback? Rumor has it that Genevieve’s family was in publishing, and since Laura wanted her books published, she decided to cover up Miss Masters’s misdeeds and blame them all on Nellie Owens.

3. Stella Gilbert (no relation to Melissa). She wasn’t as evil as the other girls, but she did try to make time with Laura’s boyfriend, Almanzo, so Laura captured some of her sneaky, underhanded antics when she was writing about Nellie.

CHAPTER SIX

TAKING SOME HEAT

NELLIE:
A chicken can squawk, and a bird can flutter, but Anna can’t talk, all she can do is st-st-st-st-stutter!

M
ost kids look forward to summer as a time to kick back, relax, veg out. For me—and for all of the child actors on
Little House
—summer vacation meant work. Intense work. The creative team took full advantage of the fact that we didn’t have to go to school during the day, and summer was our busiest time filming.

The heat only made things harder. In August and September, one hundred-plus degrees was a normal daytime temperature for Simi Valley. And I was wearing a wig…and a full-length dress with a five-layer petticoat…and tights and boots. I discovered that sometimes, just as you can be in so much pain that eventually you become numb, and the pain no longer bothers you, you can actually be so hot that everything stops, and you just feel this weird, neutral sense of having no temperature at all. It doesn’t really feel good, but at least you don’t feel hot anymore. Of course, a few minutes after that happens, you usually pass out.

That’s what happened my first day in Simi Valley. We arrived horribly early, so early that the crew was still hammering away on some of the sets. They had already shot the pilot, and we were now ready to film the first episode set in the town and the first one featuring Nellie. The episode was “Country Girls.” Not only was this the title, but it was in fact my very first line of dialogue on the show. I had to sit there for an hour and a half while Gladys curled and singed my hair into ringlets, and I got lacquered with Aqua Net. I was wearing the lovely yellow dress with the pointy lace.

Many other scenes were being shot that day, and they took longer than they should have, so there was a lot of waiting around. I didn’t get to do my scene until after lunch.
Little House
had fabulous catering for the most part, but I thought tri-tip steak was an odd selection for lunch, what with the suffocating heat. Maybe something lighter would have been a better choice. No doubt I should have just had a salad. But I hadn’t eaten breakfast—a terrible habit I would eventually come to change—and was hungry. The meat was heavy and greasy, and by the time lunch was over and I was back down the hill to work, all I wanted was a nap.

We were being directed in this episode by William Claxton. He had worked with Michael years back as a director on
Bonanza,
so Michael trusted him to direct nearly as often as himself. Claxton had had a very impressive career before that, directing some of the most prestigious TV shows, including
The Twilight Zone,
but Michael never let up teasing him about his great film “triumph”:
Night of the Lepus,
a ghastly horror film about a town overrun by a horde of giant, man-eating rabbits.

A strange, quiet, shy man, Claxton sometimes reminded me of a large white rabbit. He seemed ancient to me at the time, even though he was just around sixty. He was very pale with white hair. I wondered how he didn’t burn to a crisp instantly out there in Simi. He seemed almost albino, to the point I tried to see if he had pink eyes. They were blue, but he squinted so much in the sun that they were almost always half closed. When he spoke to me, or any of the other actors, he came up close, then looked down at the ground and spoke in a near whisper. He always seemed to be involved in a deeply personal and important conversation with his shoes.

Ironically, this was the man who taught me to stop looking at the ground and actually look people in the eye. At first, when he complained about my gazing down when he spoke to me, or the fact that I didn’t raise my chin and look grown-ups right in the eye, I thought this was positively bizarre coming from him. A man who never spoke over a whisper was telling me to speak up. A man who talked to his loafers all day was admonishing me to “look at me when I’m talking to you!” and complaining about my being shy.

But then I thought about it. If he didn’t know the drawbacks of living like this, who would? Maybe he knew what a drag it was to be shy and was trying to snap me out of it for my own good. In any case, he was right. Going through life with my chin up and staring down my adversaries is much more fun than all that skulking about I did with my head down and my eyes half shut.

Around one that afternoon, it was time for my big moment. This was it, Nellie’s historic entrance. This was the first time the audience would see her and the first time they’d hear me speak. And all I had to do was walk up to Melissa Gilbert and Melissa Sue Anderson, give them the look of death, and scoff, “Country girls!” Piece of cake.

I don’t know how hot it was under the lights; I’d approximate about 120 degrees. As we were standing there setting up the scene, I started to feel woozy, but I didn’t dare say anything. I didn’t want anyone to think I wasn’t up to the job or that I was some kind of wuss. I remember thinking,
Well, at least it can’t get any hotter
. But then it did. The sun was beating down on us. Not only was I suffocating in that long-sleeved frilly dress, it was so bright, my eyes were watering. The sun and lights reflected off the white schoolhouse and the Mercantile and the sandy dirt road so brightly, I felt as if I were going to go snow-blind. Finally, it was time for my scene. Claxton called action, and I staggered toward the girls. I suddenly realized I could barely see them. I continued anyway. I took a breath and said, “Country girls.” I was so weak I sounded like I was speaking from a hospital bed.

Understandably, Claxton was not satisfied with this performance (if you could even call it that). He approached me and began talking to his shoes once more. He quietly explained that he understood that I was nervous, but this was, after all, my entrance scene and that I really had to try to pull myself together. He was going on in this fashion, and I was nodding, but after a while all I heard was this thrumming noise. We tried to shoot it again, but then I saw the most amazing thing. The sky turned green like the grass and the ground blue like the sky. They just switched. Bing! Just like that. I was fascinated with this reversal, but then I realized it was not a good sign. In fact, this probably meant something really bad was about to happen, but I couldn’t think what.

So I staggered up to the assistant director, Maury Dexter, the closest person handy, and said politely, “Excuse me, I think I’m going to faint.” Then I blacked out completely and fell to the ground. For a few moments, everything was very dark and quiet. Suddenly, there was ammonia. And salt. I gagged. When I came to, I was flat on my back. Several people were leaning over me, including the set medic, who had just broken an ammonia capsule under my nose and shoved a salt tablet under my tongue. If you’ve never tried salt tablets, believe me, you’re not missing anything. They taste really, really terrible. And as much as I like the smell of a little ammonia in my cleanser when I’m mopping my kitchen floor, this is not something you want shoved up your nose—especially by surprise when you’re unconscious. But it is a surefire way to get someone un-unconscious in a hurry. And when you keel over from heat prostration, salt is one of the things your system needs. After the medic made sure that I could talk and knew where I was and that my pulse was within nonfatal range, Auntie Marion took me up the hill to my dressing room to recover. Oh no, I was not going home. There were several more scenes to film, not to mention the one I blacked out in before finishing.

I took a short nap and ate a peach. The air-conditioning kicked in, and I began to feel human again. There was some discussion of blood sugar, lack of breakfast, combined with excessive heat and high stress. When I finally emerged somewhere between a half hour and forty-five minutes later, I was greeted by Melissa Gilbert. She had waited outside my dressing room the entire time, pacing back and forth like an expectant father at a maternity ward. She had told Auntie Marion, in that little munchkin voice, “Please say she’s okay. She has to get better! She just has to!” Auntie Marion tried to comfort her. Melissa continued breathlessly, “We still have to film our fight scene!”

And that was the day I knew Melissa loved me and I her. We went back down the hill to beat each other senseless. It was the beginning of a great friendship. The rest of the day was fainting-free, but to this day, the
Little House
cast and crew have never let me live it down—I truly made an entrance.

So I had done it. I had gotten a series, arrived on set, made it through the first episode without getting fired, and lived to tell the tale. And now it was actually going to be on TV. I remember when I saw the first promos, I became hysterical. I was having my dinner in front of the TV, as usual, watching
Columbo
, when a promo for
Little House
came on. Suddenly, THERE I WAS! Nothing major, it was just me in those curls and that yellow dress, running. You almost couldn’t tell it was me with the bonnet. But I could tell. I screamed. I flipped over my TV tray, knocking my Swanson Hungry Man turkey TV dinner and my bottle of Dr Pepper to the floor. I was on television!

As my mother reminded me while she helped me salvage my dinner and got me another Dr Pepper, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t been on TV before. But those were just commercials and small parts. This was a series, and now it was on, and I knew in my bones that this was different, and there would be no turning back. Everything was going to be different.

“Country Girls” aired on September 18, 1974. It was fantastic. Everyone in my house howled with laughter at my every haughty line, and they even thought I looked good in the dress and curls. It was a hit.

The next day, I had to go to school. I was in the eighth grade at Bancroft Junior High.
Would any of my classmates have seen it?
I wondered. I walked onto the school grounds at about eight in the morning. I was a little late as usual, so there weren’t hordes of people around. The bell had just rung, and the students had already started heading into the building. I figured I wouldn’t hear anyone’s reactions, if they had any, until recess. I was wrong. As I walked alone across the playground, a girl way up on the second-story landing saw me. It was a girl I knew, but not someone I could call a friend. It was one of the popular girls. She spotted me. And then she opened her mouth. Her voice rang out, echoing off the buildings:
“You biiiitchhhh!!!!”

I froze. Surely this was directed at someone else. I looked around. There was nobody else there. Just me. Oh.

I tried to think what to do. People had called me names before—skinny, shorty, shrimp. Being small, I was always fodder for bullies. But I don’t think anyone had ever yelled at me from the top of a building before. It occurred to me that this was technically my first review. And if this was the response I was getting at eight in the morning, what could I expect for the rest of the day? The rest of the year? The rest of…my life?

I realized that if there was even the slightest possibility that people screaming obscenities at me from balconies was going to become a regular occurrence, I had to decide
right now
how I was going to handle this. There was no room for error. I had to take charge of the situation. I knew that whatever I did at this very second was going to set the tone for all future interactions. If I caved now, if I allowed myself to be intimidated or to show an ounce of fear, I was done for.

There was only one thing to do. I stopped, stood up straight, turned toward the sound of her voice, stuck out my chin, and said as loudly and bravely as I could manage: “
THANK YOU!”
And then, as if I were onstage, I bowed, deeply. For the first time in my life, I marched into school with my head held high.

I realized I would have to become much more durable if this show was going to continue—and so was my hair. After a few miserable weeks of sleeping in the dreaded curlers (which my nonhairdressing mother fumblingly crammed into my hair before bed after slathering my hair with Pantene setting lotion) and arriving at the studio at 4:30 in the morning to be tortured with curling irons for hours, someone on the set finally came to their senses and decreed that the only solution was to design and create a wig.

This task was assigned to the lead hair stylist, Larry Germain. Another overly tan and weathered veteran of the golden age of Hollywood, Larry had worked with everyone, too, but his show-stopper credit was Bette Davis. He told me how one of his very first jobs at the studio was washing Bette Davis’s hair. What a thought! At the time, he was young and inexperienced, and had been told only that Miss Davis would be coming in for a shampoo and that he’d better see to it that her needs were met.

Her reputation was already legendary, and he had no idea what she would want. He said he gathered up every brand of shampoo and hair product he could find in the entire studio makeup department, hoping that he had her favorite brand, gathered towels, cleaned up the place, and waited in fear. As she swept into the room, he tried not to stammer when he showed her the array of shampoos.

She ignored the entire lot, grabbed a towel, and headed for the sink. “That’s okay, honey,” she said. “I’ll just rinse it out in the sink with some Dreft!” And the great Miss Bette Davis proceeded to wash her hair, right in front of him, with a box of Dreft laundry detergent. He said that they became great friends after that, that she was utterly down to earth and straightforward and never gave him a minute’s trouble.

So it was only fitting that Larry would be the one most instrumental in designing the infamous Nellie wig. Larry called in a wigmaker, not just any wigmaker, but the famous “Ziggy,” aka Siegfried Geike, “Wigmaker to the Stars.” It was the first time I’d ever seen anyone in real life with a Salvador Dalí mustache. He was, after all, an artist. He arrived with an enormous black case filled with mysterious gear and numerous samples of hair. His aura was all very mad scientist.