Prairie Tale (9 page)

I’m sure the meeting was a fait accompli between my mother and Ray, with the only outstanding condition being my approval, which seemed a foregone conclusion when my mom introduced him to me as “Uncle Ray.” And why shouldn’t it have been a done deal? He had ridiculously successful clients.

I remember sitting in his office, quietly listening to my mother and Ray talk about the fortunate position I was in, namely a key ingredient on a hit TV series, embraced by mainstream America as one of its favorite teenage sweethearts. As both agreed, there had to be a way to parlay it into something more.

“I’d like her to show people her versatility as an actor,” my mother said.

Granted, it was my mother talking, but that was the first time I heard anyone talk about my “versatility as an actor.” Ray, of course, agreed.

“If you could hand-pick your dream roles for Melissa,” he began, “what would they be?”

My mother rattled off Helen Keller, Anne Frank, and Joan of Arc. She said she’d love to see me in a remake of
The Song of Bernadette.
And that was how my movie career started. It was 1978, and I was about to turn fourteen. Suddenly my mother and I were sharing a production company, Half Pint Productions, and Ray set about producing
The Miracle Worker
for me.

I watched the 1962 original starring Patty Duke as Helen and Anne Bancroft as her indefatigable teacher, Annie Sullivan. I wanted to know what my mom and Uncle Ray were getting me into, and I was blown away after watching performances that earned both actresses Academy Awards. I remember thinking,
What if I can’t do this?

I didn’t tell anyone, but the challenge of playing Helen scared me. It was beyond anything I’d done up till then. I couldn’t envision where or how to begin. But there’s this person in me who appears when my back is against the wall. She’s part show-off, part Wonder Woman, and part too dumb to know any better. She says, “You don’t think so? Well, watch this.” And then she dives in.

And that’s what I did. Then I was told that Patty Duke Astin, as she was known at the time—her real name is Anna—was going to play Annie Sullivan, which was both thrilling and intimidating. Our first meeting was a key moment in my life. It was in Ray’s office, and it was the first time I sat down with someone who knew exactly what I was going through in my life. It was as if she could see into my brain.

She’d been one of the most successful child actors ever, the youngest to win an Oscar and the star of her own TV show. Behind her stardom, though, was a lifetime filled with abuse, drug problems, screwed-up relationships, and, as she courageously revealed in her 1987 memoir,
Call Me Anna,
a triumphant coming to terms with bipolar disorder that ultimately allowed her to reclaim her real name and identity, which had been taken from her at age seven “when tyrannical managers stripped her of nearly all that was familiar, beginning with her name.”

Though my life wasn’t anywhere near as troubled, at the very least she knew what it was like to be a porcelain doll. When I looked into her eyes, we had an instant connection beyond the normal exchange of fellow thespians meeting each other for the first time. I just knew she got me. Then she taught me how to sign the alphabet. I left thinking she was going to be great. She was more than great, and to this day remains one of my dearest friends and mentors.

Not only was
The Miracle Worker
my first project as a producer as well as my first test as an actor, it was also my first play. In a stroke of genius, which may have been Uncle Ray’s doing, it was decided the best thing for us as a cast and a production in general would be to stage it as a play before we shot the movie. We’d get all the kinks out of the performances, all the nuances down, and then all we’d have to do is move it to a soundstage and shoot it.

Once the
Little House
season wrapped, Ray booked the production at the Royal Poinciana Playhouse, in Palm Beach, Florida, and we began rehearsals in Los Angeles. Despite our many conversations, Anna had, unbeknownst to me, been told not to coach or talk to me about playing Helen. It was extremely difficult for her because she realized I was skating across the surface of the part.

The problem was I didn’t know any better. I thought I could take on the role the same way I had for four seasons of
Little House
and my one movie,
The Christmas Coal Mine Miracle,
which was essentially me being me. In reality, there wasn’t much of a difference between Laura and Melissa. I didn’t have to stretch to imagine myself as her. But playing Helen Keller was an entirely different situation.

At the core, I think all three of us—Laura, Helen Keller, and myself—shared a certain kind of tenacity. But I had no idea what I was getting myself into by playing this remarkable girl. Actors talk about their process of building a character, of climbing into a person’s life and inhabiting him or her from head to toe, and I didn’t have any of those skills, nothing that could’ve been described as a process.

With three weeks to go before we left for Florida, Ray and the director, Paul Aaron, met with my mother and told her that I wasn’t delivering at the level they needed. In fact, they put it more bluntly than that. They said that while the cast, which included Anna, Diana Muldaur, and Charles Siebert, had gelled, as they’d expected from seasoned pros, it was obvious that I simply didn’t have it.

My mother, the source of my tenaciousness, whisked me to her former acting coach, Jeff Corey. After being blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, Jeff, a Shakespearean-trained actor with dozens of film and TV credits, turned to teaching and counted James Dean, Jane Fonda, and Jack Nicholson among his many students. He was an older, earthy type of hippie guy who lived and worked in Malibu. I adored him, and yet from the moment we met he scared the crap out of me.

I had a sore throat the first day my mother took me to his place, and Jeff made me drink milk with acidophilus in it. We went into his house and he talked to me about the role. He asked my ideas and thoughts. Then he said, “We’re going to do something, and it’s going to be scary. How are you with that?”

“Okay, I guess,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll make it through. I think it’s going to help you.”

He then blindfolded me, turned off the lights, and tossed me around the room for about forty-five minutes. He let me trip over furniture, and when I couldn’t figure out where I was, he called to me from across the room, letting me stumble over furniture, fall, and cry through my frustration, until I found my way into his arms. He was Annie to my Helen. He also suggested I blindfold myself at home, have someone spin me around, and try to find my way around the house, which I did.

Despite the black-and-blue marks, I stepped deeper into Helen than I imagined I could. As he promised, Jeff helped give me a process that let me develop a layered performance. Some of the critics even mentioned the tentative way I walked and moved, very much afraid to leave where I’d just been because I wasn’t sure where I was going.

There was also a quiet moment on the plane to Florida when Anna tapped me on the head and said, “Listen, would you like to talk about Helen Keller?” Grateful and eager, I swung around in my seat and got some vital information from her, including help with the one line of dialogue I had to deliver.

It was actually a single word, “water.” That was the one word Helen knew before she went blind and deaf as a child. I was having trouble saying it correctly. I knew it was something she hadn’t said for a long time, and it was also the crucial moment when she made the connection between the sign for water and water itself. I had to show the lightbulb of recognition going off in her head and also articulate the word much less clearly than normal but no less understandably.

No matter how I tried, it didn’t sound like the voice of a person who hadn’t spoken since she was a toddler speaking her first words. I confessed as much to Anna on the plane, and she understood exactly my frustration. She’d struggled with the same thing seventeen years earlier.

“Do you want to know the trick?” she asked.

“Please tell me,” I said.

She grinned.

“Say it like you’re sitting on the toilet and really, really constipated,” she said.

“Really?”

She nodded. And lo and behold that most basic and embarrassing tip, along with the rest of her advice, unlocked a door to an acting dream. Each night during the play, I entered from the back of the stage and ran straight to the front, averting catastrophe by stopping just at the edge, and from opening night through the run, which was extended, the people in the front row stood to catch me, at which point I knew I had them. They really thought I was blind and deaf.

I felt like a conqueror. My eyes opened to the possibility that this thing I was doing as a hobby was something I could actually learn about and develop into a serious craft.

My eyes also opened to another reality about my life as an actor. On the flight to Florida, my darling sister Sara, who continued to be the most remarkable child, was absolutely wild. My whole family, including my grandmother, had come on the trip, and my mother, concerned about Sara’s comfort on the plane, had given her a spoonful of Benadryl to make her a little sleepy.

Instead, it had the opposite effect and she ran up and down the aisle, this beautiful, three-year-old Botticelli child climbing under people’s feet, taking their food, and yelling “kill, kill, kill” as everyone tried to rein her in. My turn to wrangle her came at the airport after we landed. I wasn’t big; Sara was already half my size. As I tried to hold her in my arms, with our backs arching and my head dodging her flailing hands, a woman came up to me and asked if I was Melissa Gilbert.

“Yes, I am,” I said above Sara’s screams.

“Oh gosh, my daughter loves you,” she said. “Can I get your autograph?”

I struggled to hold my sister, who was trying to wiggle out of my grasp.

“I’m sorry, I can’t right now,” I said, wincing.

“Oh, what a little brat you are,” she hissed, her sweet, friendly tone evaporating faster than a drop of water in the Mojave.

She walked away, leaving me shattered by this, my first unprotected brush with my own celebrity. Later, I realized while everyone else in the airport had been able to behave in whatever way they felt like at the moment, including that woman who was insensitive, or just oblivious, and downright mean, I had to be perfect, smiley, kind, and polite, or else I was a little brat. That’s a hell of a message to give someone who already stuffed her feelings away.

It wasn’t fair, and I was bothered by that encounter for weeks. No one had ever told me how to handle such situations, and to be honest, although I was around famous people every day, I didn’t have any understanding or awareness of celebrity, including my own. One day in Los Angeles, I was in the car with my mother when I asked her what it was like to be famous. She looked at me like I was out of my head.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“What’s it like to be famous?” I said again.

“Well, you are famous,” she replied, kind of bewildered but trying to be matter-of-fact.

“No,” I said. “I mean like really famous.”

“Like who?” she asked.

“Like Farrah Fawcett.”

“You are,” she said.

I shook my head.

“No, Mom, you don’t understand. I’m talking about—”

She put her hand up, signaling me to stop.

“No, Melissa, you don’t understand,” she said.

And you know what? She was right. I didn’t understand. But I’d find out soon enough.

I
mmediately after the run in Florida, we returned to Los Angeles and filmed the movie. We used the same crew from
Little House,
the same exteriors in Simi Valley, and by then we’d moved to MGM from Paramount and we shot the interiors for
The Miracle Worker
there. I felt surrounded by family, comfortable, and safe. Mike even visited the set a couple of times. Sadly, about three-quarters of the way through the production, Fred Coe, one of our executive producers and a legend in the business, passed away. But we moved ahead knowing that Fred, like the rest of us, believed we were doing something awfully special.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the theater when the movie was screened for the cast, crew, and network executives prior to its airdate. That was back in the day when certain TV movies were still considered special events. We had a private screening room on the studio lot, and my whole family was there, as was Mike. Back then I still didn’t watch myself with any sort of critical detachment, certainly not the way I scrutinize every scene and every moment today. I was just a member of the audience watching the movie, and I was destroyed at the end of it. Everyone was.

The Miracle Worker
is an emotional film, a total gut-wrencher, and as the music played over the credits everyone applauded and screamed bravo. Not me. Sitting with near paralytic stillness, I was dazed as the lights came on. I couldn’t believe the little girl on the screen had been me. I couldn’t comprehend that I’d turned in that performance. Rising slowly, I grabbed Anna, who was reaching out to me, and the two of us held on to each other and sobbed.

Then I turned around and saw Mike, who had tears pouring down his face. I jumped into his arms and let him squeeze me till it seemed like I melted into his chest. He said, “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.” It was hard to render him speechless, but I’d done it.

At that point, I thought the sky was the limit. I didn’t think acting could get any better, and I had reasons for believing I might have hit the apex of my career.

In the months that preceded the screening,
Little House
had started back up and I’d been having a difficult time with Laura’s more grown-up interests and desires. The new, sixth season introduced a number of new characters, including Almanzo Wilder, the young man Laura would fall in love with, marry, and start a family with.

I knew this development was imminent. I’d read the books. Still, when on the first day I opened a script and saw the name Almanzo Wilder among the characters, I got a sick feeling in my stomach that didn’t go away for the next two seasons. The nausea was all nerves. I knew I was going to have to show affection, kiss, and at some point go to bed with a guy when in real life I was a knock-kneed, flat-chested fifteen-year-old who looked thirteen, still wore rubber bands and a retainer in her mouth, and had never gone out with, kissed, or even held hands with a boy.

And suddenly I was supposed to get it on prairie style?

Uh, no thanks.

Well, that’s not altogether true. I was somewhat excited about the idea of Laura growing up because I realized it was an easy way for me to gradually inch forward in my own life. And I was definitely excited to see who the producers chose for this all-important role of the person I was going to have to kiss. When I heard they cast an actor named Dean Butler, I freaked out a little from nerves, but in a good way.

But then came Dean’s first day of work, and when we finally met I was hit by a perfect storm of disappointment, fear, anger, and nausea. I can imagine what my face looked like. No, I don’t want to imagine. It couldn’t have been nice. I’d expected the producers to cast a contemporary of mine, someone like Eric Shea, someone close to my age. Instead, they had cast a man!

That’s right, Dean was a grown-up man. I looked at him as if he’d risen from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab. He was in his twenties. He shaved, drove a car, and lived in his own apartment. He must have felt so bummed upon meeting this dorky, freaked-out fifteen-year-old with peach fuzz all over her legs (I hadn’t even shaved them yet), and being told I was the one he had to fall in love with and marry. How inconvenient and disappointing for him.

I couldn’t have cared less. We were supposed to fall in love, but all I knew was that I wanted to run away and hide. Thankfully, today we’re great friends. He knows he scared the crap out of me and that as a result, I made a point of doing everything I could to make him as uncomfortable as possible.

I was also delighted when he messed up on his own. Take his first day on the job. Almanzo was supposed to drive a team of horses, and then stop and talk to me. For my part, it was supposed to be love at first sight. In real life, outside of rehearsal, Dean had no experience driving a team of horses. I could drive a team. I could drive a buckboard. I could drive a covered wagon. I could drive a six-up stagecoach. I probably could’ve driven an eighteen-wheeler. Anybody can with the right training.

The wranglers trained Dean and when he was ready, we began the scene. Almanzo drove his team down the road and came upon Laura. He was wearing this big hat I thought made him look like a doofus. Then his hat blew off. As he turned to grab it, he pulled the reins and steered the horses and buckboard into a tree. I collapsed in a spasm of giggles.

Mike was there, and he wasn’t happy. He’d been driving teams of horses for decades and his first time on
Bonanza
was too long ago to remember. I remember he gave Dean a look that said, “What the fuck is wrong with this kid?” Nobody should’ve had to endure that look. Or my not-so-discreet snickers.

A week later, life took another inevitable turn. I was at home when I got my period for the first time. When I told my mother, she lightly smacked me across the face with no explanation. Later that afternoon, my grandmother and my aunt came over and we talked about the responsibilities of being a woman. It was a lovely, emotional moment and I found out the slap was a Jewish tradition; now that your daughter is a woman, this is the last time you can punish her physically. From here on in, the only punishment allowed from your mother is the verbal kind. Then my brother arrived home from school. He looked at the four of us, daubing our teary eyes, and asked what was going on.

“Melissa got her period,” my grandmother said in a tone that seemed to convey he should’ve been proud or happy.

He was neither.

“That’s disgusting!” he said before leaving the room.

That season of
Little House
opened with a two-part episode, and the very next day after I got my period we were shooting part two, which is best known as the cinnamon chicken episode. Nellie was cooking dinner for Almanzo—his favorite, cinnamon chicken—and I sabotaged her dish by giving her cayenne pepper instead of cinnamon. The two of us had a confrontation, a big wrestling match in a mud hole, which was essentially an old watering hole for cattle. As they reset cameras, I whispered to her, “I’m a woman now.”

Alison, who had prepped me for everything I knew about getting my period, grinned.

“You’re also covered in cow shit,” she said. “How appropriate.”

E
arly one morning a few weeks later, I was sound asleep when my mother burst into my bedroom and shook me awake. I opened my eyes as she exclaimed, “You were nominated! Oh my God, you were nominated!” I sat up in bed and asked what I was nominated for. She said, “An Emmy! Best Actress in a Motion Picture or Miniseries.”

“Me?” I asked.

“Yes!” she said as she wrapped her arms around me.

“Wow,” I said from inside her hug.

I was elated. The screaming and excitement was nonstop throughout the morning as my mom fielded phone calls and I thanked people for calling to congratulate me. Then Uncle Ray called with news that spun the excitement in another direction. My mother spoke to him, or rather she listened for a moment and then said, “Are you kidding me? You’ve got to be kidding. Oh my God, I can’t believe it.”

I stood next to her, begging to know what Uncle Ray was telling her. Finally she turned around and looked at me with disbelief and pride.

“Anna is nominated for the same award,” she said, referring to Patty Duke. “So is Bette Davis and Lee Remick.”

I smiled and threw up my hands in a mock surrender to the combination of age and greatness that had just stepped into the room. I had two immediate thoughts. First, there was no way I wanted to win. It would be beyond the valley of embarrassing to give an award to a child in lieu of any one of those three women. And second, there was no way I was going to win. But my God, just to have my performance considered on a par with the performances by those three women, well, it was monumental for me.

You hear actors say all the time that it was enough to be nominated. For me, it really was. In an interesting move, my “team” took out an ad in the trades thanking members of the television academy for such an unbelievable honor. It read:

“This is my acceptance speech, because for me this special nomination is an award. Whichever of these beautiful ladies wins the award, I am proud to have been allowed to share the moment, and the loudest applause and bravos you hear will be mine.” Though that is exactly how I felt, the ad was not my idea. In retrospect, it was a pretty good play to get me the award. Thank the Lord it didn’t work!

It turned out no one heard anything from me. In July, the Screen Actors Guild went on strike, along with her sister union, AFTRA, and though the Emmy Awards aired on television, SAG boycotted the ceremonies. Like every other nominee except Powers Booth, who in his acceptance speech said, “This is either the most courageous moment of my career or the stupidest,” I honored the strike by not attending the awards, a show of my union stripes before I even knew what they meant.

I was sad I couldn’t go, but Michael Landon Jr., with whom I had begun sort of a budding romance, took me to dinner at El Torito that night. Not a bad consolation prize. Afterward, we watched the show at my house and cheered wildly as Anna won the Best Actress award. Quite unexpectedly, I won as a producer when the movie was named Outstanding Drama. (I recently took the statue home and had it restored after finding it on a hallway floor when I was cleaning my mom’s house before Warren’s memorial service.)

As for my relationship with Michael Jr., it was a sure sign of change. It hadn’t been contrived for PR purposes like so many teen romances in Hollywood. He was adorable; he had blond, curly hair and a great sense of humor. I would lie in bed at night and his face would flash before my eyes as I tried to fall asleep. It was the first time I experienced butterflies in my stomach when I thought about a boy.

It wasn’t quite a romance, though there was plenty of hand holding and eye batting. We went to events together, talked excitedly about getting our learner’s permits, and commiserated when our respective orthodontists gave both of us the same sad news that we had to keep wearing our neck gear at night.

One time he cooked dinner for me, spaghetti with, in lieu of marinara sauce, a can of Hormel chili poured all over it. It was actually quite delicious. My mother also sent a bunch of us kids on a ski trip to Sun Valley, where she had a condo. The gang included my brother and Mike Jr. Despite the fact I had multiple adult escorts, it was a big moment for me to be going away with a boy.

It was a little nerve-racking, and humor was my salvation in any tight situation. On that trip, I knew how to open the bathroom door when it was locked, and so Mike Jr. and I snuck in while my brother was in the shower and dumped a bucket of snow over him. Jonathan had never screamed as high or as loud in his life. I played similar pranks at work. My favorite was lifting the toilet seat and putting Saran Wrap over the bowl. As Alison Angrim once told
People
magazine, you didn’t see it—until it was too late.

Without such antics allowing me to keep one foot firmly planted in childhood, I probably would’ve been more confused than I was as I dipped the toes of my other foot in the waters of adolescence. I got scared when I heard stories of peers smoking cigarettes, experimenting with drugs (that meant smoking pot), and doing more than just kissing boys. In my world, nice girls didn’t let guys get to second base. For that matter, nice girls didn’t complain. They didn’t speak out of turn. They didn’t wear black. They didn’t dress provocatively. Nice girls took small bites, they sat up straight, they never called boys on the phone. Nice girls were nice girls. I didn’t know any, but I was damn sure going to be one.

Apparently nice girls were also thin. One day Leslie Landon and I were roller skating on the paddle tennis court in my backyard, and when I went inside to get something to drink, my mom looked at me, looked out at Leslie, then back at me, and said, “Why can’t you have a flat stomach like her?”

I was anything but chubby, yet because I was going through so many physical changes at the time, most of which I wasn’t even aware of until they’d already happened, her comment turned out to be one of those moments that shoved me into a revolving door I couldn’t escape.

Suddenly I was conscious of my body. I felt short and chubby. Whatever I was when I looked in the mirror, it was wrong—and the image I had of myself would only get worse. All of which made me covet my girlish ways even more. They were like a tortoiseshell I could pull my head into when I needed protection from maturity.

I
marvel at how innocent I was able to stay for so long. By fifteen, Tatum O’Neal had been involved in a threesome, Mackenzie Phillips had used cocaine, Scott Baio was getting it on with his costar Erin Moran, and I was always worried about having extra rubber bands with me in case one snapped off my braces.

Part of me is grateful for my mom’s overprotective ways. But it was getting harder, or rather impossible, to hide from the inevitability of change. A perfect example: my first on-camera kiss in the “Sweet 16” episode. I’d been kissed years earlier in another episode, but it had been an innocent little peck. This was Laura’s first real kiss, one she desired, and it made me sick.