seven
We moved on in the same way we moved on after my parents’ divorce, without acknowledgment that anything was different, or rather a tacit agreement that we’d believe everything would be the same even though it wasn’t. Over spring break, we began a yearly tradition of going to Hawaii with the Landons. We stayed at the Kahala Hilton, where we bumped into other families we knew and all of us kids swam together, helped one another build sandcastles, and played epic games of kick the can, Frisbee football, and ding-dong ditch.
I was always the kid on the beach with cotton pajamas over my one-piece bathing suit and a thick slab of white zinc oxide on my nose because I burned easily and severely. In other words, I was a total dork.
To save a little money, my mother cleaned out the minibar in the room I shared with Jonathan or Patrice, depending on the year, and filled the fridge with milk, cold cuts, and bread. I can still picture myself at lunchtime, sitting in the sand in my pajamas, eating a bologna sandwich with mayonnaise dripping down my hand. Meanwhile, the other kids feasted on cheeseburgers and fruit salads served on a tray brought by the hotel staff directly to their rented poolside loungers. Dinner was more of the same while the adults went out. I was not a glamorous kid.
Right after school got out, my mom and I went to Roundup, Montana, where I shot the movie The Christmas Coal Mine Miracle. The cast included Kurt Russell, Andy Prine, and Mitch Ryan, who played my father—yet another daddy figure with whom I bonded. He was, incidentally, the one who many years later sucked me into the Screen Actors Guild politics, something for which I’ll never forgive him.
They were a pretty wild bunch and apparently one night something really crazy happened, because the next day everyone on the set, cast and crew included, were laughing about it. But nobody would tell me no matter how much I begged, pleaded, and connived. It annoyed the heck out of me while we shot the film and lingered in my brain afterward as one of my life’s great mysteries.
Ten years later, I’d gone on location for a movie, suffered an attack of appendicitis, went back to work too soon, and developed a horrible infection in my blood that landed me in a bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Every time I opened my eyes my bed seemed to be surrounded by concerned people with red-rimmed eyes and forced smiles, standing over me. (Just so you know, the forced-smile thing doesn’t work. It just makes the patient sure he or she is going to die.)
In the midst of this, I overheard someone say Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell were also at the hospital following the birth of their son, Wyatt. I scribbled a note to Kurt, congratulating them and asking him to come up and say hi. I gave it to a nurse, who got it to the hospital’s PR department, and later on Kurt came into my room.
I gestured for him to sit next to my bed. He asked how I was doing. I could barely talk, but I managed to tell him that I was going to be fine. I used all my strength to prop myself up and say, “I have to ask you a question.”
“Shoot,” he said. “What is it?”
I gestured for him to come closer because I was too weak to speak above a whisper.
“What the hell happened in Roundup, Montana, when I was a kid?”
I had to know just in case I didn’t pull through, and Kurt laughingly told me the story. It turned out there was a lot of drinking and sex going on, with the guys playing the role of Hollywood big shots in a small rural town and going through the local girls with élan, particularly Andy. Kurt secretly wired a van with a microphone and hid with the sound guy in the bushes outside the town’s one bar one night while Andy was inside getting hammered.
Kurt had also arranged for a girl to come on to his costar. Soon the two of them walked out of the bar, got in the van, and began to fool around. At that point, Kurt had a local police unit quietly pull up behind the van. At the moment the girl told Andy she was only sixteen, as Kurt had instructed her to do, Kurt cued the police, who flashed their lights. All of a sudden, Andy burst out of the van wearing only his underwear and took off in the snow.
Though I wasn’t able to eat or drink anything in my sickbed, I found the strength to laugh. I couldn’t believe that story had been kept from me the whole time. Not that I would’ve understood it. I may have wanted in on the world of grown-ups, but I was still more comfortable in little-girl moments like the one on the first episode of our third season when guest star Johnny Cash beckoned me to where he and his wife, June, were sitting, put me on his lap, and said, “I watch your show all the time, and you just climb right into my heart.”
I saw my classmates and peers start to go through puberty and wear bras, while my gingham dress hung on me as straight as it did on the hanger in my closet. Toward the end of my twelfth year, I had a double hernia operation and woke up only to be told that the three pubic hairs I’d grown had been shaved off by the nurses. That was how I heralded the onset of puberty…by being humiliated.
After I watched the movie The Great Waldo Pepper, I developed a crush on Robert Redford. He overtook Batman’s Adam West as the man I wanted to marry. I went through my Tiger Beat and Teen Beat magazines and papered my school locker with photos of him, John Travolta, David Cassidy, Shaun Cassidy, Parker Stevenson, and How the West Was Won’s Bruce Boxleitner, my future husband. Only in this industry can a girl grow up and marry the picture in her locker! I was also in those magazines, not that I gave a shit. I devoured the articles on those young men and believed every word, knowing full well the stuff written about me wasn’t true.
Unlike some girls, I wasn’t boy crazy. I was too reserved for such displays, which made me quietly selective. But I felt like my life might change the first time I saw Scott Baio on the Paramount lot. My friend and fellow Chachi devotee Tracy Nelson was even more excited. The two of us went to tapings of Happy Days whenever possible. Though she’ll kill me for admitting this, we rewrote the lyrics to Linda Ronstadt’s song “Blue Bayou” to “Scott Baio.”
I started hanging around the commissary, waiting for him to show up so I could say hi to him, as if he might be remotely interested. He wasn’t. In fact, he couldn’t have been more disinterested.
I had no such delusions when I heard John Travolta was shooting Grease on the lot, but I put myself on red alert for any sightings. When it finally happened, I was eating lunch with Katherine Mac-Gregor, who played Mrs. Oleson. Katherine’s nickname was Scottie, and she was hilarious, one of my favorite lunch companions for her openness and sense of humor. But her lack of inhibition made her a less than perfect choice to be seated across from me when I literally went into shock.
“What is it?” Scottie asked, her back to whatever I’d seen that had caused such a reaction.
“That-that-that guy over there,” I said.
She turned and looked over her shoulder.
“Him? With the greased hair?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s Vinnie Barbarino.”
John was wearing the soon-to-be infamous Danny Zuko jeans and leather jacket. He was gorgeous.
As he walked toward the food counter, Scottie twisted around in her chair, leaned back, and signaled him over to our table with an animated wave that could’ve guided a 747 to the gate, even as I pleaded, “No, no, no, please don’t do it.” Just in case he didn’t see her, she augmented her effort with a piercing warble: “Oh, young man! Young man! Over here!” If you watched Little House you can imagine how she sounded…just like Harriet Oleson calling out to some young man in town. Oy!
I wanted to die. I literally slipped under the table. It wasn’t like he wouldn’t know who I was. I was on a highly rated TV program and I was in my Little House wardrobe.
John came right over. He was warm and gracious as I crawled out from under the table, and I was grateful he didn’t laugh at me. Still, after he went to get his food, I turned to Scottie and said, “Please don’t ever do that to me again.”
A few years later, Tracy and I had the Grease album, and we’d stage it and sing along like devoted cult members. More often than not I let Tracy play Sandy. Our performances also included Holly Robinson (an amazing singer), who I befriended that summer when my mom and Harold began a short-lived tradition of renting a house in the Malibu Colony.
Joined by the Landons, I remember us girls—Leslie, Holly, Tracy, and me—decamped on the beach when we weren’t singing, eyeing the chiseled bodies of surfers, studying the older surfer girls in their bikinis, and sharing whatever shreds of information we knew or thought we knew about womanhood. Leslie reported that she’d found a book on her parents’ shelf that said yellow was the color to wear if you wanted to seduce a man.
“Yellow?” I asked.
“They find it sexy,” she said.
“Crap,” I sighed, “that’s the one color that doesn’t work on me.”
It wasn’t like I was ready to seduce anyone. I didn’t know the first thing about sex—not what it was or how it worked. My mother never explained the facts of life. At ten, I’d found a box of tampons under the sink in her bathroom and when I asked what they were, she said they were for applying makeup. But now I was fourteen, and this other person inside my brain periodically clamored for details about how the different parts worked, not just generalities.
One day I was in the car with my mom when my need to know wrestled my usual reticence into submission. Flushed and overheated by the breakthrough I was about to make, I asked her what it was like “to get Sara.” She went into the whole story about giving birth to my sister. But that wasn’t what I wanted to know, and I asked the question again. What was it like to get Sara?
My mother’s expression revealed her sudden understanding of my question. I could almost see her brain go Oh, shit, here it comes.
“It was very lovely,” she said.
And that was all she offered. As she turned her eyes back on the road, she left me with my mouth agape with disappointment, confusion, and questions. What did “lovely” mean? And, more important, could it still be lovely for me even if yellow wasn’t my color?
I don’t know when Melissa Sue got her period or began thinking about these same issues. But there was a certain point during the fourth season when all of a sudden she had really long fingernails (I bit mine ravenously), wore makeup, smoked cigarettes, and guzzled TaB. She was way beyond my league. Then when she began dating actor Lance Kerwin of James at 15 fame, forget it. She wasn’t just out of my league. She was in a different universe. It was like all of a sudden she was grown up. After that, she dated Frank Sinatra Jr. But we never talked about any of that stuff. Alison was my great source of information. She made sure I noticed her boobs on the day they popped out, and a short time later she came to work and whispered to me, “Guess what?”
“What?” I asked.
“I have a pillow between my legs,” she said.
“Why would you do that?” I asked in complete ignorance. “Is it like some contest to see if you can walk that way?”
Alison looked at me dumbstruck.
“Helloooooo! I have a pillow between my legs.”
I shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what that means,” I admitted.
She shook her head, mystified at my ignorance.
“I got my period,” she said. “I had to use a maxipad.”
In my defense, I knew what it meant to get your period; I’d just never heard of a maxipad. Luckily, Alison had provided a demo on tampons using a glass of water, given a lesson on hygiene, and demystified everything else by the time I got my period for the first time at fifteen. If she hadn’t, imagine how surprised I would’ve been when I told my mom that I got my period and she handed me a box full of things she’d said were for putting on makeup.
I dealt with the confusion of those hormone-fueled changes, but hearing my girlfriends begin to giddily report about their make-out sessions with boys sent me into a near catastrophic panic that no one was ever going to want to date me. Forget the glam life of the young Hollywood star portrayed in teen magazines. (What turns Melissa on? How can you be her friend? Win a date with Melissa!) I spent my evenings lying on my bedroom floor, listening through my headphones to Janis Ian’s terribly sad song “At 17.” I played that song over and over again, crying as I sang the lyrics to myself, thinking they had been written specifically about me.
“Oh, honey, you weren’t pathetic,” my husband said after I described that scene to him. “Everybody loved you.”
“Yeah,” I said, “everybody but me.”
I was melodramatic. I feared my grandfather’s hugs and kisses on the weekend would be the only attention I’d ever get from a man. I envisioned spending my life alone, playing solitaire. No, it was worse than that. I pictured myself alone, pathetically cheating at solitaire.
Little did I know there was one guy who had his eye on me. In all likelihood, he had had his eye on numerous other girls, too. But one day I went to CBS to tape a guest appearance on The Dinah Shore Show and fourteen-year-old Rob Lowe made a point of standing in the hallway so he could meet me.
With a script under his arm so I would see he was an actor (he told me about his prop years later), he came over and introduced himself. I found out he’d recently moved to L.A. from Ohio to pursue a career, and he was already on the sitcom A New Kind of Family. I admitted having seen his picture in the teen magazines. After a quick chat, I left with the impression that he was cute (actually, he was almost pretty), sweet, and funny—just the kind of guy I could go for if he called me, which he didn’t.
I wasn’t ready to answer that kind of phone call anyway. I was still living in the midst of my dorkdom. However, with plenty of other business-related calls coming in, my mother, in a stroke of well-timed brilliance (which came naturally to her), decided to hire a manager to help build my career outside of Little House. She introduced me to Ray Katz, a very large, very round man with an equally large office in a high-rise on Sunset Boulevard. He’d helped the Osmonds establish their empire, managed Cher, Dolly Parton, and KC & the Sunshine Band, and seemed at one time or another to have repped everyone of consequence in the pop universe.
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.