twenty-one
Bo was in rehab when I got home and we started to see a therapist together. I also began attending Al-Anon meetings. After he finished rehab, he moved into the Oakwood apartments, where he would have his encounter with Shannen Doherty. I was convinced that most of his problems stemmed from substance abuse, and if he stayed clean and we kept going to therapy, we could give Dakota a two-parent home. It wasn’t the best decision, but I thought for Dakota’s sake, I would do what I could to put our relationship back together.
It seemed to be working. We were still separated when the holidays rolled around, and I took Dakota to my mother’s house for Christmas Eve. Despite my share of moments in the past when I wanted to strangle my mom, this was one of those times when her crazy zest for life and cockeyed wisdom made perfect sense to me, and I realized I would be absolutely lost without the love and nourishment she provided my soul.
Buoyed and hopeful, I invited Bo to Christmas dinner. My whole family was there, including my grandparents, who, at my mother’s insistence, agreed to be in the same room together. We had a warm, wonderful night together. As Bo prepared to go back to his Oakwood apartment, I felt a swell of emotion in my heart and invited him to come back home with us after the first of the year. He was sober and doing well and I wanted to try and continue down this path and make our marriage work.
That May, we celebrated Dakota’s first birthday while I was working on Joshua’s Heart, a movie about the effect of divorce on children. We relaxed with new friends Jack Scalia and his wife, Karen, and Sandy and David Peckinpah, all of whom had kids around the same age as Dakota. We went on walks together, arranged play dates, threw impromptu barbecues, and began the tradition of a rotating Christmas Eve dinner.
Sandy and I developed a fast and intense friendship, almost like we had been connected in a previous life. To this day she remains my best friend.
Life was almost normal. I had turned into a working suburban mom. We rented a way-too-large, way-too-expensive home in Hidden Hills, an exclusive community in the west San Fernando Valley that Bo had wanted to live in ever since going to a party there years before. That house was way beyond our grasp financially, but it meant the world to Bo and it was a fun neighborhood. Our doors were always open and we always had houseguests, mostly Bo’s friends and family.
I also exercised my independence in ways I never thought possible. First, I fired my longtime manager, Ray Katz, and then I called my mother and told her that I was ending our contract. Splitting from Uncle Ray was scary and breaking away from my mother was unpleasant and gut-wrenching, but necessary if the two of us were going to have a good relationship. I was no longer a child. I needed to take control of my career, along with my life, and that’s what I did.
That fall, Leslie Landon got married. Like me, Leslie had grown up considerably since our last days on Little House. She had earned a master’s in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University and practiced marriage and family counseling. I was so proud of her. And her wedding to Brian Matthews, held at a church in Westwood, was a beautiful affair.
The first person I saw there was Michael Landon. Quite a few years had passed since we had seen each other, but we bridged that gap instantly with hugs and kisses. It felt so good to have his strong arms wrapped around me again and to breathe in that familiar Mike smell, and I was filled with warm memories. He asked about Dakota and said, “You know, Half Pint, in the weird world of Hollywood, he’s kind of my grandchild.”
I knew what he meant and smiled broadly.
“When do I get to see him?” he asked.
“We’ll make plans,” I said. “We’ll figure it out.”
He said they were skiing over Christmas, but we’d make arrangements when they got back. He wanted me to bring Dakota to the house and spend time. Like a parent, he gave me a stern look and said he needed to see me more often. In February, I called to schedule that get-together and spoke to Cindy, who said they still had a full schedule, but promised to call me back when they settled in. In early April, Leslie called and said she wanted me to hear some news directly from her before I heard it on TV. I stopped and braced myself for I didn’t know what.
“Dad’s got pancreatic cancer,” she said.
“What did you just say?”
“Inoperable cancer of the pancreas and liver.”
I sat down.
“What does that mean?” I asked. “You have to explain to me what that means.”
I could hear her take a deep breath.
“Well, he’s going to try every treatment possible, but Schmoe”—her nickname for me—“you have to know it’s not good.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“He’s going to fight,” she said. “You know he’s going to fight.”
A few days later, Mike invited the press to his house and revealed his illness and determination to fight it. It was so characteristic of him to deliver the news on his own terms and try to keep the tabloids from printing rumors. I watched the press conference on TV. To me, he looked the same as he had at Leslie’s wedding. Maybe he was a little thinner. If he was, it was a negligible difference, perhaps the result of healthier eating and more exercise, which I thought might indicate he was winning his fight.
May began yet again with celebrations: Dakota’s birthday on the first and mine on the eighth. The night after my birthday, a little weary myself, I sat up in bed with Bo and waited for Mike’s appearance on The Tonight Show. I’d heard he was going on to tell off the tabloids for the sensationalized and inaccurate coverage of his illness. If one were able to give the middle-finger salute on television, he would’ve done it. Instead, he came out and said, “It didn’t do a helluva lot of good to hold the press conference.” His good friend Johnny Carson agreed. Mike was most miffed about one particular story that maintained he wanted to have another child, which would have been his tenth, so his wife would have something to remember him by.
“I have nine kids, nine dogs, three grandkids, one in the oven, three parrots—and my wife, Cindy, needs something to remember me by?” he said.
Johnny told Mike that he looked good.
“I feel good,” Mike said.
I didn’t buy it. He had lost a significant amount of weight since the press conference and much more since Leslie’s wedding. Though, in a turquoise shirt and khaki pants, he was as handsome as always, and he even professed to still work out, he looked completely different. His big, strong chest was gone. His voice was also thinner. Even his humor seemed forced to me, and that wasn’t Mike, though I did laugh when he acknowledged his alternative therapies included coffee enemas.
“I invited Johnny over for one,” he cracked. “But he wanted cream and sugar and I’m not pouring.”
Johnny then complimented his hair.
“I had my roots done yesterday,” said Mike, who had been dying his hair since before his days on Bonanza.
“You’re kidding,” Johnny said.
“For this show?” he said. “Sure. Two blood transfusions and my roots done.”
I thought the most poignant moment of the show came at the end when Johnny invited his other guest, George Foreman, back after his next fight in August and Mike said he would also come back then. I nearly burst into tears because I realized that Mike knew there was no chance he would be back then. Whatever he was doing to fight the Big C, as he called it, he knew he was going to die.
I did, too, and that was beyond anything I could comprehend. As far as I was concerned, Mike was the biggest, strongest, toughest, most determined person ever. If I had done the math and counted up the cigarettes and vodka he had consumed, I would have seen it add up to liver cancer. But I had been in denial up till the point I saw him with Johnny.
Then everything changed. I had not been able to say good-bye to my own father. I wasn’t going to screw this up. I turned to Bo and said, “I think I need to see Mike as soon as possible.”
“Let’s work it out,” Bo said. “Let’s make sure you see him.”
A couple days later I was inventing excuses why I couldn’t see him. I was scared. I didn’t know what to say, what not to say, or how to say good-bye to this person who had played one of the most pivotal roles in my life. Finally, at Bo’s insistence, I came around and we set up a time to see Mike. Then that was repeatedly postponed, as Mike either had complications requiring emergency treatment or was trying some alternative therapy.
At each juncture, I received a new update, and each time the prognosis was worse. It was always a variation of “He’s fighting but it doesn’t look good.” In early June, he basically said good-bye to fans in an interview that ran on the cover of LIFE magazine. About a week later, we finally set up a time to go out to his house. Knowing he was declining, I didn’t want to take away any precious moments his family could spend with him, but selfishly, I needed to see him.
On the morning we were scheduled to go, I sat on the bedroom floor playing Super Mario Brothers. I was like a gaming fiend. Every time Bo said it was time to leave, I pleaded with him to let me get to one more level. I didn’t want to come out of that make-believe world. Finally, Bo turned off the TV and practically carried me to the car. He put Dakota in his car seat. I was useless.
Once we arrived at Mike’s house in Malibu, I realized that I had never been there before. He had moved in after his divorce and that had been an unusual time for all of us. His house was breathtakingly gorgeous, a true palace for a man who had conquered the world on his terms. He had a beautiful saltwater swimming pool that Dakota jumped in almost immediately. The views went on forever.
Inside, I said hi to Mike, who was lying on a couch in the family room. I’d never seen anyone as sick as he was then. He was extremely thin and frail. He looked twice his age. His hair was white and his skin was gray; all of his color had vanished. It was like he was almost invisible.
A crowd of family, children, nurses, attendants, and helpers bustled around him. He was hooked up to a drip, which I assumed was morphine. I gave Cindy a basket of spa treatments; I figured the last thing she was doing was relaxing or taking care of herself. Since I had heard Mike say the one thing he wanted to do was laugh, I brought a tape of my grandfather and Jerry Lewis making crank phone calls back in the 1960s, the entire Three Stooges collection, and a fart machine.
We made small talk until Bo brought Dakota in the room and put him in my arms. Dakota was now two and a big, adventurous toddler, but he was perfectly calm as Mike pulled him close and gave him a kiss. Then someone told Dakota there were horses in the backyard. He wanted to go see them, and Bo volunteered to take him. Nerves caused me to chime in that we should all go. Bo gave me a look and very pointedly said, “I will take him to see the horses. You stay here.”
I don’t know if what happened next was planned or an accident of fate, but I sat down on the coffee table next to Mike and everyone else left the room. It was almost as if someone had said “Let them have their time.” I held his hand and pretended not to look at him. The TV was on, and both of us stared at it in silence. If he was like me, he was not just remembering but feeling all the time we had spent together—way too much to ever articulate—pass back and forth in the flesh of our hands.
I didn’t know what to say. A part of me felt like holding hands and being together was enough. Then he turned his gaze from the TV to me. His eyes were like blankets wrapping themselves around me, and whatever he was thinking made him smile. Finally, he said, “I want you to know, I’ve seen everything you’ve done.”
“You have?” I said, genuinely surprised.
“Oh yeah.” He smiled. “I’ve watched every movie. Every one.”
“You have? Really?”
“Yeah.” He was quiet for a moment or two. He appeared to be remembering something. Then he said, “I always knew it.”
“You knew what?” I asked.
“I knew you would be the one.”
I couldn’t contain the tears anymore. I’d been trying so hard not to cry, but they just overflowed.
“No, no, no,” Mike said. “We’re not going to do that.”
“Okay,” I said, sniffling and wiping my eyes. I recalled when, as a little girl on the set seventeen years earlier, I was unable to cry on cue and Mike had taken me aside, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “Do you know how much I love you? I love you so much.”
Now we weren’t doing that. We weren’t going to cry. Instead, he pulled me toward him and we hugged. Nothing else needed to be said. That hug was more than enough. That’s all he wanted. And that was pretty much all I was capable of.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone in the kitchen doorway gesturing for me to get up and go in there. It seemed urgent. I told Mike that I’d be right back. He was sort of drifting in and out at that point anyway. I was met in the kitchen by a nurse, Bo, and Dakota, who was crying hysterically. One of the horses had bit his fingers. I looked at his hand; his fingers were smashed, but kids’ bones are very soft, and after a couple of minutes they looked normal again and he seemed all right. I was worried, but when one of Mike’s nurses got Dakota to reach for a balloon that had been attached to a flower arrangement, I knew he was fine.
I told everyone that I didn’t want Mike to know what had happened. It would just upset him. A little while later, I went back into the family room and sat down next to him again. He asked what had happened. I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“No, I heard something happened to the kid,” he said.
“One of the horses bit him.” I shrugged.
“Was it bad?” he asked.
“No, he’s fine,” I said. “His fingers were kind of smashed, but he’s in the kitchen digging through a bowl of goldfish crackers.”
“Oh, thank God,” he said. “If something bad had happened, I’d feel just awful.” Then he grinned—that unmistakable Michael Landon grin—and added, “Wait a minute. I’m dying of cancer. How could I possibly feel worse?”
Soon after, he drifted back to sleep and I said my good-byes.
A week later I was with Dakota in the family room, which was really his giant playroom, as he scampered around, listening to his records and playing with balloons. The TV was on, tuned to CNN as it was every day. We were in the midst of the first Gulf War, but I wasn’t paying attention to the coverage, I was having fun with Dakota. Then the anchor came on and said that actor Michael Landon had died. I may have screamed; I don’t recall. But Bo immediately rushed into the room and asked what was wrong. I pointed to the TV screen, which was showing a retrospective of Mike’s career.
Bo scooped up Dakota, who was crying because I was upset. I was inconsolable for a few minutes, and then something in me switched. I needed more information than I was getting on TV. Maybe, I thought, CNN had it wrong. I became obsessed with finding Leslie and hearing for myself what had really happened.
Honestly, I don’t remember if I called her or she called me, but at some point that day we talked for a long time. She told me about the unusual things that happened during the last twenty-four hours of Mike’s life. He had seen the proverbial light that guides people onto the next phase of their journey. He had seen his late mother waiting to comfort him. As a family, they had shared moments that, on hearing them, didn’t lessen my sadness but reassured me that death isn’t a horrible, scary thing as much as it is a transition to something else.
Still, I was heartbroken. My mother came over and my sister, sweet thing, brought me a milk shake. After that, my phone rang off the hook with requests from reporters wanting a comment. It seemed everyone in the world wanted a quote. Yet I was incapable of communicating.
I finally gave my publicist a statement, something about Mike’s contribution to the world and a hole in my heart. Then I fell into a deep depression. I stayed in bed with the shades drawn. Anytime I got up and tried to move around, it felt as if I was moving through mud. I walked around dazed in my pajamas for days until Bo came home one day with two puppies and said I had to housebreak them. He told me that with a two-year-old and two puppies, I had my hands full. Bless his heart, he knew exactly how to gently get me up and moving.
About a week later, Kent McCray, who’d been an executive producer on Little House, called and asked if I would deliver one of the eulogies at Mike’s funeral. I said of course, no question. The second I hung up, I regretted it. What the hell was I going to say? Scratch that. There was so much to say. But how was I going to stand up in front of his family, his children, his friends, and talk about him without bludgeoning everyone with my feelings?
In my opinion, part of the responsibility of delivering a eulogy is to try to bring some comfort to the people who are grieving. It wasn’t about standing in front of everyone and bawling like a self-absorbed idiot, which was what I pictured myself doing. How could I not get up there and just cry?
I found it impossible to write a eulogy that articulated my relationship with Mike, what he meant to me, and also what his loss meant to me. I tried numerous times without success. Finally, on the night before the service, I managed to gather my various attempts—a bunch of notes—into a concise form. Then I prayed to Mike to help me through it. It also helped that I was married to a playwright, who gently nudged me forward. By midnight I was done, and then I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, terrified of what would happen the next day.
The service itself was a blur of familiar faces who, like me, were doing a relatively fair job of keeping their emotions in check. I saw Luke Tillman, our special-effects guy who was missing multiple fingers, which had always amused me as a kid. (Why was the guy in charge of our special effects missing fingers?) I saw Melissa Sue and Karen Grassle. Ernest Borgnine was behind me. I sat with the other speakers, including Mike’s business manager, Jay Eller, who recalled how after Mike was first diagnosed he had warned Mike that he could lose his hair if he did chemotherapy. And Mike said, “Jay, don’t worry. I’m rich. I’ll buy a hat.”
Then it was my turn. I walked up to the little platform with a huge lump in my throat and I began to read what I’d written the night before. I managed to get through my remembrance by focusing with laserlike precision on two people, one on each side of the room: former president Ronald Reagan and singer Al Jarreau. Since I didn’t know either one of them, I was able to deliver my eulogy without feeling an emotional connection. If I had looked at Karen, Melissa Sue, or one of Mike’s kids, I would have ended up a puddle of tears.
Afterward, we made a brief stop at the postmemorial reception at the Landons’ house in Malibu. I was able to spend some one-on-one time with Mike’s family and some of the Little House cast and crew people. There was a lot of hugging and crying, but there was also a lot of laughter as we all shared stories about Mike’s fantastic sense of humor. It was very comforting to be around people who’d known Mike so well and loved him as much as I did, if not more.
The rest of the year seemed to be taken up by requests for quotes to media outlets and shows doing Michael Landon tributes. Even when Bo and I were performing one of his plays at the Barn Theater in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I flew back to L.A. for a tribute to Mike at the Emmy Awards. That was when I ran into Shannen Doherty on the side of the stage. Aside from that pissing me off, I was upset that Mike never got an Emmy while he was alive. He was never even nominated. What was it that Marty Sheen had warned me about Hollywood?
Of course, Mike would have told me that stuff wasn’t important, which I had learned years earlier. He had his priorities straight. That’s why I responded with a quote every time a request came in. But eventually I reached a point where it felt like too much.
One day I was with Sandy and David Peckinpah when yet another show called and asked me to talk about Mike. I wanted to turn them down, but David urged me to think otherwise.
“You better do as many of these as you can,” he said. “After all, Michael Landon is not going to be dead forever.”
I had never heard such a sick and twisted comment in my life. It made me laugh. Mike would’ve laughed, too.