Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (8 page)

DR. HIRAM BAKER (KEVIN HAGEN): Poor Doc Baker. He tries so hard, but it’s the 1870s. There are no antibiotics, no X-ray machines, no ultrasound—they hadn’t even discovered antidepressants yet, for heaven’s sake. He’s smart and makes some very impressive educated guesses, occasionally keeping a few of his patients alive. But generally, the poor guy’s got nothing. You get sick, you die. Being a doctor in the 1800s totally sucked.

REVEREND ROBERT ALDEN (DABBS GREER): It’s never been clear what denomination the church in Walnut Grove was. Lutheran? Methodist? They’re the most likely for that time and location, but with Reverend Alden, it could be anything. He manages to work in an awful lot of 1970s liberated church–type talk for a Protestant minister in the 1800s. And he somehow keeps the congregation from getting bored, even though they seem to sing the same four hymns over and over again for nine years.

ISAIAH EDWARDS (VICTOR FRENCH): He’s the bearded, dagnab-it, consarned, baccy-chawin’, jug-swillin’ best friend of the Ingalls family. He even has his own theme song, “Ol’ Dan Tucker,” which he can be counted on to sing in most episodes. Famous for teaching Laura to spit, amazingly he later gets married to a very attractive woman (Grace Snider) and adopts three kids.

GRACE SNIDER EDWARDS (BONNIE BARTLET): The widowed postmistress who somehow decides that Mr. Edwards is a “good catch.” (Maybe she’s just turned on by guys with beards?) She’s proper, but with a sense of humor. Between Mr. Edwards and the tribe of orphans, she’ll need it.

JOHN SANDERSON EDWARDS (RADAMES PERA): The oldest adopted son of Isaiah and Grace, he is a handsome, high-cheek-boned, sensitive-artist type. A real tree hugger, he flunks hunting and all that pioneer stuff but teaches his dad to read. He goes on to become a writer and has an ill-fated romance with that uptight Mary Ingalls.

CARL SANDERSON EDWARDS AND ALICIA SANDERSON EDWARDS (BRIAN PART AND KYLE RICHARDS): Orphans come in sets on this show, so the Edwardses also get a cute, mischievous blond boy and a doll-like little girl.

LARS HANSON (KARL SWENSON): Why does anyone live in Walnut Grove, anyway? Because of this guy, the founder of Walnut Grove and proprietor of the Hanson Lumber Mill. A classic “yumpin yimminy” Swedish character, he returns to Walnut Grove in later episodes to die with dignity in a dramatic two-parter. Right before the episode aired, Karl Swenson died in real life.

JOHN CARTER, SARAH CARTER, AND THEIR ADORABLE KIDS, JEB AND JASON (STAN IVAR, PAMELA ROYLANCE, LINDSAY KENNEDY, AND DAVID FRIEDMAN): With Michael Landon wanting to spend less time on the show in the last year, the Ingallses move out of the infamous Little House and go to Iowa. Laura and Almanzo have long ago established their own homestead, so what are they supposed to do with the house? Tear it down? Instead, a handsome blacksmith and his family arrive from New York, just in time to move in and have all the same warm, laughing moments by the creek we’re all accustomed to.

JENNY WILDER (SHANNEN DOHERTY): Because Laura and Almanzo had to adopt someone, too, didn’t they? Jenny is played by a pre-
90210
Shannen Doherty, who tries her damnedest to do an impersonation of Melissa Gilbert in the early years. She is part of the “cloning process” that took place in the last years of the show, where new little girls with braids fought new little girls with ringlets.

NANCY OLESON (ALLISON BALSON): Speaking of clones…The Olesons are not left out of the orphan follies. After Nellie leaves, Mrs. Oleson, not surprisingly, has a breakdown and can only be consoled by finding another blond child to permanently screw up. She meets her match in little Nancy, who’s psycho-bitchery is more closely modeled on the movie
The Bad Seed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

PALACE ON THE PRAIRIE

MR. OLESON:
Sounds like Doc Baker.

NELLIE:
I wonder what he’s doing here.

MR. OLESON:
He probably heard your singing and thought someone was dying!

I
don’t like getting up early in the morning now if I can avoid it, but as a teenager, I considered it a fate worse than death. The days we were shooting at Simi, I had to set my alarm for two a.m. so I could shower. I was on the road by three and on set at four. It was brutal; there were days I begged for death. But other times, I did see the good side of getting an early start. At that hour, there’s virtually no traffic, which is a rarity in Los Angeles. It’s quiet, and you can actually hear the birds. There was something exciting about arriving at the set in the dark, as if we were doing something dangerous and secretive, like sneaking up on the enemy for a surprise raid at dawn.

The makeup trailer was like a cabin in the forest, the only source of heat and light for seemingly miles around, and it felt cozy at that hour. And you haven’t seen a sunrise until you’ve seen the sun come up over the set of
Little House on the Prairie.
Suddenly, for a moment, Laura Ingalls’s hometown is real. The light hits the church, and you expect the bell to ring, and you start wondering if there aren’t some crops you should be bringing in or some cows you need to milk. Then the sun ascends in the sky, and it’s just a big wooden set again. But for a minute…

Another saving grace was the coffee. God, I love coffee. Yes, I started drinking coffee much, much too young, at twelve. By fourteen, I was a full-blown caffeine addict. I think this is a common problem for many child actors. It’s just so hard to stay awake, and everyone is drinking the stuff constantly. The addiction potential is increased by the fact that the coffee on sets is not normal strength. It is made by and for the crew, the key grips and best boys—the electricians, horse wranglers, and truck drivers. It’s similar in blackness and thickness to the coffee served at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, the kind of stuff that could perk up even a stone junkie. I believe there are three strengths of coffee in this world: normal strength, AA strength, and grip strength. To this day, I take my coffee grip strength. This probably explains why I like France.

The big decision in the morning was “costume first, then makeup, or makeup first, then dress?” Multiple factors were considered: How busy were they in makeup, how cold was it, and how flimsy was the costume that day? Or conversely, how ridiculously hot was it, and how swelteringly suffocating was the costume? The weather never seemed to cooperate. If it was cold, we would be shooting some happy springtime episode, perhaps involving falling into some nice freezing water, and when it was hot, I would be wearing the dark scratchy wool dress with layers of petticoats.

Though it was a demilitarized zone, the hair and makeup trailer was always abuzz with conversation. Michael could be counted on to come barging in with a smart-ass remark or joke. He once told a guest star who was complaining about her age that his secret to youth was birdseed: he ate a cup of it every day. It was totally untrue; he wanted to see if she’d be gullible enough to do it. Of course she did, and when he spied her snacking on seeds a few days later, Michael shrieked with laughter. Mission accomplished.

But mostly I liked the smell of the makeup trailer. The makeup on sets smells a little different than the stuff in the stores. It’s a very distinctive, clean sort of smell, almost slightly medicinal, but sweet. And the sponges were real latex, not that weird nonlatex stuff that everybody insists on now. I know they came out with nonlatex sponges because so many people are allergic, but I absolutely love the smell of latex in the morning. I had smelled it before on the set of my brother’s show,
Land of the Giants,
and I swear it was one of my top ten reasons for becoming an actress. I would eat latex sponges soaked in pancake makeup if I could.

When I wore short sleeves, I had to have makeup put on my arms. This was a diluted solution made by dunking the sponge in water until it was sopping wet, not just lightly dampened as usual, and dragging it across the pancake, so that the stuff dripped off my arms as they applied it. Sort of like whitewash, but in tan. On cold mornings this was a very unpleasant procedure, so in an act of mercy, Whitey would dip the sponge in hot coffee instead. Then I was covered in warm, wet makeup, and I smelled like latex and coffee. I was in heaven.

So, painted, petticoated, fully caffeinated, bewigged, and in pain, I would march down the hill, or across the meadow, or to the other end of the soundstage and go to work. In the first couple of seasons of
Little House,
I was in only a few scenes in each episode; occasionally, I was absent from an episode’s plotline altogether. Then, my part got larger. Michael loved using me for comic relief. By Season 3, the battle between Laura and Nellie had become a focal point of the show, and there were several episodes where Nellie’s schemes or hissy fits were the main story. At that point, I had to put in about eight hours a day on the set—the maximum number of hours a minor was allowed to work by law.

The dinner scenes were my favorite. For one, they were indoors at Paramount, and I didn’t have to deal with Simi Valley; also, I got to sit down. A great deal of time on the show was devoted to me—and Melissa, Missy, and the other children—
running.
Endlessly running. Running up the hill, down the hill, running to school, running away from school. Taking turns running away from each other. Every single episode had at least two scenes involving running. It was even worse for Melissa Gilbert, since every time Laura got upset, she responded by running out the door and across the hills, sobbing, her braids flying. And to think people actually still ask us why we were such skinny little girls.

Any chance to spend the whole morning sitting on my ass was a welcome relief, even the church and school scenes that required sitting for hours on those wooden benches. They weren’t really the beautiful, fully grained dark wood they appeared to be on screen. Just like all the doors, molding, and hardwood floors on the show, they were just plain old lumber from the studio carpentry shop, painted brown with a swirly design to look more like real finished wood. But they were very authentic in their own way. I believe they were exactly as uncomfortable as the benches the Olesons and Ingalls would have sat on in the 1800s.

The chairs at the Olesons’ dinner table were the height of comfort by comparison. The Olesons’ digs were impressive, even by 1970s standards. The dominant decorating theme was red velvet: red velvet cushions on the mahogany chairs, red velvet curtains in the parlor, even a red velvet swag with enormous tassels hanging at the entrance to the dining room. Is it me, or did the Olesons’ abode look a lot like a brothel?

Everything on the Olesons’ set was luxurious, including the food. The first time I sat down to dinner in a scene, I knew I had really lucked out. My brother openly confessed his jealousy at the time. He explained that I had enormous good fortune to play a rich person on television, while he was always the poor boy, forced to eat Dinty Moore beef stew or that god-awful Van de Kamp’s pork and beans—
off tin plates
! “But you,” he said, “you bitch, you’re getting fucking leg of lamb with mint jelly on bone china!”

He had a point. We did have better food, not just better food than the Ingallses; I was getting better food than I got at home. Leg of lamb, roast beef, roast turkey with dressing, boiled new potatoes with butter and parsley, fresh green beans, peas, all kinds of gravy—and the biscuits: the greatest, fluffiest biscuits ever. One day, I finally asked the prop men where the hell they were getting this stuff. Some was brought in, ordered from restaurants, but most of the food was actually cooked by the prop men right there on the set. And the biscuits? They were just good old Pillsbury Poppin’ Fresh. With real fresh butter and strawberry jam or dunked in turkey gravy, they were heavenly. I swear, I still dream about them.

We ate off the most beautiful china, which looked so authentic. I had seen pictures of 1800s dishes, and these had the same pattern but were brand new. Where on earth did they get them? “The Broadway,” the prop men replied. I was amazed. “You mean you just went down to the department store and found these?” Turns out that the blue “Willow” pattern so popular in the 1870s had several revivals, and the company just kept coming out with new editions of the plates every few decades. They were apparently hot again in the ’50s and had just had another comeback in the mid-’70s, so the prop guys were able to just pop out to the local mall and buy a whole set. They’re back again. You can actually order them online today and eat in Nellie Oleson–style luxury in your own dining room this weekend.

The dinner scenes were also a hoot because you had all four Olesons in one scene. Rarely have such divergent personalities and schools of acting been thrown together at one dinner table. We had Richard Bull, playing my father, Mr. Oleson. A graduate of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, he’d been on every TV show from
Ben Casey
to
Mannix.
Always very matter-of-fact and low-key, he is hands down the person I would vote for as being “Most Like Their Character on the Show in Real Life.” He was the voice of reason at all times, sometimes rolling his eyes and letting out a Mr. Olesonesque long-suffering sigh when confronted with the continuously high-strung behavior of the one, the only, the often imitated but never equaled creator of the unforgettable character, whom the French call “La Belle Harriet,” Katherine MacGregor.

I have had people ask me, “Just what
was
that woman on?” I don’t know. She arrived in the morning like that, and that’s how she went home at night. She is still alive at this writing, and she has not changed one iota. She was not actually Mrs. Oleson incarnate, but my God, she was close. Fortunately, Katherine does not share Mrs. Oleson’s meanness—or her infamous prejudices against Jews, African Americans, circus fat ladies, poor people, and basically anyone who wasn’t Mrs. Oleson. Unlike Mrs. Oleson and her pretense at great culture and education, Katherine actually did go to college and was an accomplished stage actress. Her most fabulous movie-trivia claim to fame is her appearance in
On the Waterfront
. Despite her enormous stage experience, she possessed relatively little experience with TV work. Hence, she could be counted on to play every scene to the back row of the theater, even when the camera was six inches from her face. The woman was
loud
.

But she was also a fascinating person to watch in action. She often had trouble with her lines. She studied them, of course; she even had an enormous leather-bound three-ring binder with her name in gold letters on the front to hold her script. It went everywhere with her, and in every dinner scene at the Mercantile, it was on her lap under the table for the entire meal. We rehearsed every scene before filming, and yet, it was not uncommon to hear, “Nels! How many times have I told you…Oh, FUCK!! What is that line again?” Whenever any of us had a scene with Katherine, we knew to make ourselves comfortable. We were going to be there awhile.

Sometimes, if she didn’t care for the lines, she simply changed them. This drove Michael and Bill Claxton nearly insane, but she would not be swayed. They were also not terribly thrilled with her other little hobby: she greatly enjoyed directing the other actors. She had studied in New York with the famous acting coach Sanford Meisner, creator of the Meisner technique (who, ironically, was famous for telling actors, “Less is more”), and never ceased telling everyone within earshot. She would happily tell all the other actors—younger than her, older than her, less experienced, more experienced, it didn’t matter—exactly how they should be doing the scene, right down to how they should stand, what props they should use, etc. She even gave us
s
pecific line readings, demonstrating the precise tone and emphasis we should place on a line.

No, most actors do not do this, certainly not unrequested. I’ve never seen anybody do it to this extent, not before or since. And it wasn’t as if she was just tossing out a helpful suggestion. She was quite insistent and would tell people they were “doing it wrong.” This behavior was greeted with varying degrees of resistance by the other actors. Richard Bull was strictly “no sale.” He even spoke in an interview about how he loved her dearly, but that on the first day of shooting, he had to explain to her, “No, Katherine. You don’t tell me how to act. You can do anything you want, except
that.
”

Some people didn’t mind. Dean Butler, when he first started playing Almanzo, seemed to actively seek out her advice. Karen Grassle, Ma herself, even joined her at the acting class she was attending in the evenings. Katherine’s advice wasn’t bad, it was just constant and unsolicited. I sometimes took it, but many times I had already decided what I wanted to do in the scene, or the director had given specific instructions, and I was following them. When I would protest and try to explain this to her, she would shout, “He’s only the director! What the hell does
he
know?!”

Now, in theory, Katherine should have been an utter disaster. One would think that, with all of this lunacy and forgetting and overacting and ordering people around, her performance would be awful, that she would be fired. Nothing could have been further from the truth. When she came on the screen, there was no one else there. Her performance was mesmerizing, hilarious, outrageous, and, on those occasions when Mrs. Oleson was in one of her pouting and wounded moments, even weirdly moving. Her acting was absolute genius. There was no denying it. No matter what she said or did, it simply
worked.
The show could not function without her. We would all have to just get used to being ordered about from time to time.