twenty-two
In early 1992, Fox ordered seven episodes of Stand by Your Man, a sitcom starring me and Rosie O’Donnell, a young comedic talent just coming into her own. She had won Star Search, played Nell Carter’s neighbor on Gimme a Break! and who knows, if Stand By Your Man had taken off, she may not have had time to make the movie A League of Their Own, which accelerated her trajectory toward stardom.
But our show, a remake of the British series Birds of a Feather, was canceled less than two months after it debuted in April. It was too bad. From all the TV movies, the public knew I could cry. I wanted to show people that I had a sense of humor, too. Rosie saw it. Of course, she could make me laugh until I almost peed.
After we finished the pilot, I got a call from two guys with a business that helped adoptees reunite with their birth parents. Bo had hired Troy Dunn and Virgil Klunder a few months earlier, and after much digging, they had located my father, David Darlington, in Las Vegas, and they said my mother was not Susan Alabaster, the name on my birth certificate, but a woman named Kathy.
In photographs they sent soon after, I saw a strong resemblance to Kathy but not much to my father, whose phone number was included in the packet of information. I stared at the number as if it were the key to a long-lost treasure chest. I needed a day or two to work up the courage to call. A man picked up on the second ring. He confirmed he was David Darlington, and when I asked if he had given a child up for adoption in 1964, he paused and then said, “Well, I think it was ’63. But yeah.”
“No, it was ’64,” I said, as my entire body trembled from nerves. “And it was a girl.”
“Yes, it was a girl,” he said.
“And…and that baby was me,” I said.
After a long pause, he said, “Oh my God.”
He asked who I was and what I did. I told him that was the weird part and to brace himself.
“I’m an actor,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yes. And I’m on television. I was on a TV series for ten years when I was a kid and I’ve done a number of movies for television.”
“Well, what’s your name?” he asked.
“Melissa Gilbert,” I said.
There was another long pause.
“I know who you are,” he said.
“Yes, you do, and no, you really don’t,” I said.
As if the conversation wasn’t already weird, it got weirder when he asked me about work, Michael Landon, and other celebrities. He was like any person on the street. And I answered a few questions before interrupting to say that I would like to meet him. He was instantly amenable to that as well as to the date I suggested. I told him if he and his family wanted to see what I looked like now, they could see me the night before I would meet them on The Tonight Show.
“We’ll watch you,” he said excitedly. “And then we’ll see you in person.”
I have been doing talk shows since I was nine years old. I get a little nervous for a second before I walk on, but once I’m out there, I could care less. This time was different. I was terrified to walk out and talk to Jay Leno, who had recently taken over for the newly retired Johnny Carson. All I could think about was the whole Darlington clan gathered around their TV, watching me with brand-new eyes. It was the stiffest, worst interview I’ve ever done. I owe Jay an apology.
I woke up early the next morning and got on a plane with Bo and Dakota. We checked into a hotel room off the Strip to avoid any chance of the press getting wind of this very personal, poignant moment in my life. I paced nervously across the room, checking my watch and waiting for David Darlington, my birth father, to show up. As soon as I heard a knock on the door, I opened it and found myself standing opposite a very tall man who immediately opened his arms wide and gave me a hug. All I could say was “Oh my God, oh my God.”
It was an incredible moment, though it was also one of the strangest I had ever experienced. The whole time I was looking at him, hugging him, and saying “Oh my God,” a voice in my head was saying, Don’t be crazy. You’re not related to this man. He looks nothing like you. I was also saying to myself, This is the man who gave you away. No, he didn’t give you away. He just couldn’t keep you.
It was insane. My head was filled with more voices than a debate club. And all I could say was “Oh my God.” Then he asked if he could have a drink. It was noon. To me, that was a bit early for a drink. But I was scared shitless and thought a drink was probably a very good idea.
The two of us went to the bar and had Bloody Marys. I showed him a photo album of my life that my mother had prepared for the occasion. I’m sure she was secretly petrified that I might fall in love with these people and dump her. But she had shown me nothing but support in my quest for information and answers. And she needn’t have worried anyway.
As we relaxed, I learned that David Darlington was a sign painter in Las Vegas, not a Rhodes Scholar as my mother had always told me. As for Kathy being a prima ballerina, I found out over the course of the afternoon that she had indeed been a dancer, but not a ballerina, and like David, she’d had three kids of her own when they got together.
But these were not the Bradys. It turned out Kathy had died in 1980 after years of nagging injuries stemming from a serious motorcycle accident she and David were in shortly after my birth. Later that night, I ate dinner at David’s house, where his daughter Bonne shed more light on the family history, which included an unsettling amount of alcoholism and cancer.
Sadly, it was not the warm, loving, we’ve-been-waiting-for-you-to-show-up fantasy I had entertained ever since initiating the search for my birth parents. There wasn’t any meaningful discussion about my origins, my first twenty-four hours in this world, or whether, despite giving me up for adoption, either one of my parents had ever wanted me. Whenever I asked a question, David’s recall was fuzzy. The best and most memorable part of the whole night was the warm spinach salad with the hot bacon dressing. It was delicious.
Reality was a tough pill to swallow after believing for twenty-eight years that my birth parents were quite different from what I encountered. Not only was that bubble unceremoniously burst, but David by the end of the evening insisted that I had been born in 1963, not ’64 as my birth certificate said, which made me a year older!
By the time I got back to my hotel room, I was crying like a hysterical, inconsolable five-year-old. I couldn’t catch my breath. Bo didn’t know what to do, so he called my mother. She got on the phone and listened to me recount what had happened and how terribly disappointed I was by the outcome. Then she let me cry until I ran out of gas.
“This is part of your journey, Melissa,” she said. “You had to do this for you. And now you’ve done it. You can do what you want with what you know. Most important, you can move on.”
In addition to being right, she was very clear, supportive, and helpful, a life raft in a time of need, as only a mother can be. Through tears and sniffles, I told her how much I loved her and that good or bad, nobody would or could take her place in my life—ever.
Then I pulled myself together and focused on how to handle the situation going forward. I wouldn’t say meeting the Darlingtons was a Pandora’s box, but I had created a mess that needed management. I didn’t want it to become a story in the National Enquirer. I arranged to see them for brunch the next day before we left and I laid the cards on the table. I said the information we had shared belonged to them as much as it did to me. They could talk about it with whomever they liked, including the tabloids, who would probably pay for their story. But I cautioned that those same tabloids and papers had reported on my life for almost twenty years and already knew everything about me. If they came forward, they would be opening their lives to the same scrutiny. “They will dig into your pasts,” I warned. So I advised them to not talk about our fateful connection if there were things in their pasts they didn’t want out in the public.
Nothing ever made it into the press.
After our trip to Vegas, Bo got a role in Gettysburg, the first in a planned trilogy of features on the Civil War bankrolled by billionaire history buff and media mogul Ted Turner. It seemed like the perfect big break. Bo’s friend Ron Maxwell had signed on as director and Tom Berringer and Marty Sheen headlined a fine cast. When he left to shoot the movie, our lives were fairly well ordered in the new, smaller house we had moved into. Dakota was doing well. We had horses in the backyard.
Some things had changed. Bo was drinking a little here and there, which I thought may have been a byproduct of the pain pills he took for a knee surgery he’d endured following a ski accident. He’d stopped going to meetings, too.
Then there was the feeling within the house. With Bo on location, it was peaceful. I recognized it took two to whip up a tornado of drama, but I kind of liked the way things worked when he was out of the equation. As a result, I was full of excuses when Bo called and asked me to visit him in Gettysburg. Dakota was in preschool, and there was too much going on for me to leave. Bottom line: I didn’t want to go.
While there are much better ways to communicate disaffection in a marriage, one thing was clear: problems that we hadn’t dealt with for years were coming to a head. I don’t think either of us was consciously aware of what we were doing. Then one day my publicist and friend Colleen Schlatter called and said the National Enquirer was working up a story on Bo. She said they had photos of him drinking and carousing, as well as women leaving his hotel room in the middle of the night.
I asked her to try and hold them off from running the story, which she somehow managed to do. I didn’t have to fly to Gettysburg and get my own photos of Bo. When one or both people in a relationship drink to excess, it can be damn near impossible to tell the difference between reality and the stuff you make up in dreams. So I hired a PI. I wanted a definitive answer because I could feel the end of our marriage getting perilously close. If I was going to blow up my child’s life, I first wanted concrete evidence.
And I got it. The detective called from Gettysburg with news that Bo was definitely drinking; he had pictures of him serving drinks at a bar and getting wasted. He also had photos of girls going in and out of Bo’s hotel room.
Armed with that information, I took Dakota to visit his father, and after Dakota went to sleep I confronted Bo on the first night we arrived. We went back and forth a while before he finally owned up to everything. I had already decided that Gettysburg was going to be my Waterloo, and I matter-of-factly told Bo the same thing. I was finished—and it wasn’t even about the drinking or fooling around.
“I’m done,” I said. “I’m going to take responsibility for my life. I am unhappy. I am not functioning on all cylinders because I’m so miserable. I’m sucked into drama that I can’t stand and I can’t get out of—and I want out. I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m not going to do it anymore. It’s over.”
Bo stomped his foot and clenched his fist out of frustration like a four-year-old and screamed, “I didn’t do anything.”
“Believe that all you want,” I said. “But I did stuff, too. I contributed to this unhappiness. I own up to my half, and I’m done.”
I stayed for a couple days so Bo and Dakota could have a good visit. I watched one of the battle scenes. I also visited with Marty Sheen. It seemed like I was in an alternate universe. Everybody on the movie knew what Bo had been doing, and there I was, the moron wife with the kid. I hated every second of it, but it was important to me that Dakota have some time with his father.
Back in L.A., I began the process of moving Bo out of the house. My goal was to make it as easy as possible on everyone. Joint custody of Dakota was fine; Bo had been restoring a 1952 pickup, and I told him to take the truck, take his clothes, take the cactus, take everything. Take it all. He didn’t owe me anything, and I didn’t want anything.
After Gettysburg wrapped and we had been separated for a couple months, Bo moved in with Ron Maxwell, who had rented a home in our gated neighborhood, and I began the process of legally unraveling the marriage, which wasn’t difficult since we agreed on joint custody and had more debts than assets. I regrouped by diving into my favorite role, that of mom. I drove Dakota to school and arranged play dates with friends. My whole life revolved around kids and horses.
Through the tending of my horses, I met a woman named Cindy Bond, who had horses too. She introduced me to Kitty Ogilvy. One night Kitty and her husband, Ian, hosted a barbecue, and I was talking to her when she said, “God, I wish my ex-husband would date someone like you instead of the bimbos he’s been going out with.” I knew her ex-husband was Bruce Boxleitner. I immediately flashed on the picture of him I used to keep in my junior high school locker.
“Well, give him my number,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, nodding, “I will.”
At the time, Bruce was shooting movies, traveling, and enmeshed in his own drama with an ex-girlfriend and a soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, plus some peripheral hysteria with additional girls that occupied his spare time. Though he didn’t seem to be in the market for another relationship, Kitty told him that she had met an attractive, intelligent woman who she thought he should take on a date. But when she told him that person was me, he said, “Are you crazy? She’s twelve years old!”
“No, she is in fact twenty-eight years old,” Kitty said. “She’s a total hottie, and she lives here in Hidden Hills.”
“Yeah?”
“With her son.”
“Really?”
“And you should take her out.”
“You think?”
“I do.”
Several weeks passed, and I was getting on with my life as best as possible when Kitty called and said Bruce wanted to know if he could call me. I was surprised by the question, since I had already told her to give him my number, which was tantamount to an open invitation. But she explained that Bruce, who also resided in our neighborhood, was kind of old-fashioned in that regard. He wanted to double-check. I assured her it was okay if he called.
A short time later, the phone rang. Since I knew it was Bruce, I answered in what I considered to be my sexiest voice. His voice was way better. To this day, his voice still kills me. It sounds like whiskey and cigars, and it is flat-out sexy without him even trying. We made small talk before he asked if I wanted to go out sometime.
“Sure, I’d love to,” I said, trying to play it cool.
“When are you available?” he asked. “Dinner? Lunch? What do you want to do?”
Normally I would have been shy and reticent about such an invitation. Given the state of my life at the time, I didn’t feel at the top of my game. In fact, I had stuffed most of my self-esteem in drawers with my summer clothes and had been living like a semirecluse in baggy sweaters for the past few months. So I am not really sure where my response came from, but I somehow channeled some forties film-star moxie and said, “Well, I’m not doing anything right now. How about lunch?”
Bruce laughed.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll pick you up in about fifteen minutes.”
I grabbed my nanny, Gladys, by the arm and raced with her upstairs, taking clothes off, putting others on, and asking her what looked good. We were going to the Cheesecake Factory and I didn’t want to look too dressy or too casual. I couldn’t wear sweats, but a dress was too much. I finally settled on the right combination of jeans, a T-shirt, and cowboy boots, which was and still is my uniform. I put on mascara, pinched my cheeks, and waited for Bruce.
I was peering out the bay window in the kitchen with Gladys when he pulled up in a little convertible Mercedes. He didn’t get out of the car as much as unfolded himself from it; it was so small, and he was so tall and lanky. Gladys turned to me and said, “Oh my God, he’s handsome.” I agreed. Then the doorbell rang. I smiled at Gladys and chirped, “I’ll be back when I’m back.”
Lunch could not have been more comfortable. Within fifteen minutes, Bruce and I were laughing as I recalled the first time we had met, which he didn’t remember. It had been on a Battle of the Network Stars in 1981. Rob was with me, and I introduced myself to Bruce between swim races after having stared at him for most of the day. Bruce had said he knew exactly who I was; his then two-year-old son, Sam, who was with him, watched Little House, which he called “the horsey car show.” Then Bruce was summoned to an event.
“You said you had to go and patted me on the head,” I said.
“I did?” he said with a wince.
“You were also wearing a Speedo,” I said, smiling. “That wasn’t lost on me.”
Smiling sheepishly, Bruce laid his cards on the table, explaining his personal life was complicated. In an apologetic tone, he said his hands were full. I understood. In case he hadn’t read it in the tabloids, I reminded him that my five-year marriage had just blown up. I wasn’t even officially divorced. We laughed at each other over spinach and artichoke dip and by the time we paid the bill we knew there was an attraction and that something was going to happen. The question was when.
I wasn’t prepared for that attraction, and it blew me away. I didn’t necessarily want to be alone, but I thought it might be nice to have a series of friends with benefits. I had a child in my life and the last thing I wanted was to get involved with someone.
Yet as cliché as it sounds, I knew Bruce was the guy. Did I know the straits and narrows we would have to navigate, indeed survive, before we would get to that place of happily ever after? No, I had no idea. But things happened right away that convinced me my gut was right. On the way home from lunch, I asked him to drive me to Saks while I went to the Clinique counter and bought face cream. He didn’t come in with me, but he greeted me with a patient smile when I got back. In the driveway, I invited him to a screening of my latest movie, With a Vengeance.
“I have no idea why I’m asking you,” I said. “But it feels right—and I think we’ll have a good time.”
“I’d love to,” he said.
Going to those types of events with Bo had been unpleasant. He was terribly insecure and became upset if I had a conversation with someone other than him or forgot to introduce him. He also forbade me to disagree with him in public and once left me standing in the middle of Benedict Canyon because I had taken exception to something he had said at the dinner table. But the screening with Bruce was different. As I chatted with people, Bruce asked if he could get me a glass of wine and some cheese and fruit on a plate.
I was stunned. For years, I was Rob’s appendage, and then I was the woman who was trying to build up Bo. Now I was with a guy who was absolutely my equal, someone who understood my responsibilities that night and decided he was going to make it easier for me. It got even better. At one point, I lost track of Bruce’s whereabouts. When I looked around, I saw he was involved in his own conversation. He knew people, and if he didn’t know them, he introduced himself.
Moment by moment, I was falling for this guy whom I’d known for only a day. Then came the pièce de résistance. The movie ended and we went back to Bruce’s for some coffee. I was mesmerized when I walked into his house—it was a major, man-size house, which he owned, at the end of a cul-de-sac (he also owned the barn with horses across the street). From the way I gawked and gazed at each room, you would have thought I had never seen furniture before. I was impressed at how together he was. Also with the way he offered me freshly brewed coffee. Instead of taking it, though, I pointed toward the ceiling. He looked up.
“What?” he asked. “Do you see something?”
“You have a chandelier,” I said.
He gave me a questioning look.
“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “You have a chandelier.”
“Yeah, it’s nice,” he said. “Real antlers, too.”
I couldn’t articulate it, but that chandelier was so symbolic to me. It meant he had a home that he owned and a career that was flourishing. He was a full-grown man, confident, sexy, smart, independent, and together. Bruce was a grown-up but he still had that bad-boy glimmer in his eyes. He was trouble. Trouble with a capital T. I had finally met my match.