Authors: Melissa Gilbert
They didn’t go there. But I had them everyplace else, including my new beautiful boobs. I had a fever and my face was swollen up like I’d just done ten rounds with Mike Tyson. The therapy was to keep me sedated—on Benadryl, Valium, and Advil—with mittens on my hands so I wouldn’t scratch. I was swollen and totally out of it when Bruce came over to watch the Academy Awards with me. He had a bout of pink eye. Drooling, with pustules all over my face and wearing flannel jammies and mittens, I turned to him and said, “Gable and Lombard, my ass.”
A
fter my chicken pox cleared, I went to Toronto for the movie
Shattered Trust: The Shari Karney Story,
the real-life story of an attorney who, while representing a woman in an incest case, learns that she was molested by her father as a small child. Because I’d been doing so much traveling—three locations in six months—I arrived muddled. On my first day there, they dyed my hair black. I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, flipped on the light, saw a raven-haired woman in the mirror, and screamed. It was me.
I got back home soon enough, but within a month I left with Bruce for New Orleans, where we costarred in the movie
House of Secrets,
an eerie thriller about a woman who suffers after killing her abusive husband. It was the first time Bruce and I worked together and we had a blast. I was the suffering wife, he the abusive husband. NBC knew full well they were casting a real-life couple; they wanted the play in the press.
It was a violent movie, and Bruce and I had to get physical with each other, which was surprisingly fun. Doing violent stuff on film is so much easier when you really trust the actor you are working with. I was far more uncomfortable shooting our love scene. I felt like that was too personal and private to share with other people.
There was one sequence toward the end of the movie that called for me to wear a sheer, sexy nightgown. They made me a beautiful light green silky nightie, and I could wear nothing underneath but a skin-colored thong. Not a problem for me with my new boobs.
Interestingly, the network gave specific notes about my breasts. They wanted to see shape but not color. Which was another way of saying they wanted to see my tits but not my nipples. Because of the sheerness, I couldn’t wear breast petals, the little pads that make nipples disappear under clothing. Instead, my boobs needed their own hour in the makeup chair.
For one of the scenes, I had to run down Bourbon Street at night in nothing but my nightgown. At 2:00 a.m., the time we shot, Bourbon Street was a wild, fun, frenzied zoo, and the police were out on a blue flu strike that night, so there wasn’t an officer in sight. I was supposed to be terrified as I fled down the street, thinking that Bruce was stalking me from beyond the grave. But instead, I was just trying not to crack up, because as I ran there were a bunch of guys with wedges of cheese on their heads and carrying Hurricanes, running alongside me and screaming, “Hey, Half Pint, show us your tits!”
On one of our days off we had a crazy night out on the town, whose high or low point, depending on your perspective, came when Bruce pushed me into a strip club for women called Cajundales. I knew it was time to leave when I was yanked onstage by a male stripper and saw a woman with no teeth in the front row turn to her friend and say, “Ain’t that Melissa Gilbert from
Little House on the Prairie
?” As I hurried out, I saw Bruce in the back of the club, laughing his ass off at me.
The last few weeks of the shoot, Bruce and I stayed in a cottage at a bed-and-breakfast in Covington, Louisiana. It was a magical time for us. We’d come home from work and drink wine while listening to the frogs and bugs making a wall of sound outside while we decompressed and debriefed. Then we’d make love, sleep, and start all over again the next day.
I
was determined to bail myself out of the quarter-million-dollar debt I had when Bo and I split. We’d lived beyond our means for way too long. It was so bad that at one point, my then stepfather, Manny Udko, who owned a fantastic jewelry business, offered to loan me money. I loved Manny, he was a mensch. He had a great warmth and charm and he was generous and fiercely protective of those he loved. When he and my mom first got together, I loved listening to his stories about growing up in Boyle Heights in L.A. and how, as a young man, he hung with real gangsters, like Meyer Lansky and Ben (Bugsy) Siegel, and he remained a true friend years after he and my mom split.
My goal was to pay Manny back, dig myself out of the debt, and be able to buy a house of my own, so I crammed one more movie in before the end of the summer. It was a stinker called
Dying to Remember
that Ted Shackelford and I shot in Vancouver. There are a few reasons to do a movie: the location, the script, the director, the cast, or the money. The best projects have all or more than one of those elements. This was one I did strictly for the money.
It was so bad that Ted and I entertained ourselves between scenes and during rehearsals by inventing alter egos for ourselves: two pompous, overly stuffy English actors, Cecil and Gwenny.
Some unpleasantness with Bo crept into my life again during production, and Ted calmed me down one day by telling me that he had gotten divorced years before and had a deal with his ex-wife to pay her a percentage of his earnings. They didn’t have any children, so he just stopped working for a while. I thought that was hilarious.
On September 21, the one-year anniversary of my first date with Bruce, I had to be in New York for press and talk shows. To celebrate, Bruce came with and we went out to a romantic restaurant on the East Side. We were enjoying ourselves when Bruce suddenly leaned over the table to ensure privacy and said, “What would you say if I asked you to marry me?”
I was jarred by the unexpected question.
“What would you say if I said yes?” I replied.
“Oh, I’d be happy,” he said.
“Okay, then,” I said.
“So I guess this means we’re engaged,” he said, stopping just short of making it sound like another question.
“I think it—yeah, that’s what it means.”
“No, we are. We are now engaged.”
I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room and called my friend Sandy. I repeated the conversation I’d just had with Bruce and asked her to translate it for me.
“Am I engaged or not?” I asked.
“It sounds to me like he asked you to marry him,” she said. “But I’m not a hundred percent sure.”
“Well, I’ll just go with the flow and assume he did ask me,” I said.
When I returned to the table, Bruce suggested we go ring shopping the next day. I guessed that made the engagement official. I reminded him that Manny was a jeweler who would save us money. Instead, we picked out a little pear-shaped cubic zirconia and Bruce slipped it on my finger, making it official. I loved that ring. I had worked my ass off for it.
We called family and friends and very quietly rolled out the news. When the lease on my house was up, Bruce insisted I move into his place rather than get my own home, as I had planned. Despite my reservations, the move felt right. We had weathered storms and breakups. We knew each other well. We weren’t kids—I was twenty-nine, he was forty-three. We were good to go.
And then the shit hit the fan.
T
he next movie I was offered was about a doctor in Vermont who artificially inseminated dozens of women with his own sperm, fathering more than a score of children. I had many reasons for turning it down. I thought the script was awful, I didn’t want to tackle another project after making four pictures back-to-back, and it was close to Christmas. I passed four times. Each time, the producers offered more money. Finally, my team, Marc and Erwin, called together and told me to sit down.
“You really don’t want to do this movie, do you?” they asked.
“No, I don’t,” I said.
“Would you change your mind for half a million dollars?”
“That’s crazy money,” I said. “I’m still trying to dig myself out of debt.”
“That’s why we told you to sit down.”
“Oh God,” I moaned. “Hold on.”
I yelled to Bruce, who was upstairs. He knew I’d turned down multiple offers. “It’s up to half a million. What do I do?”
“You get on the plane tomorrow,” he said. “And you make it work.”
I did. I went to Toronto and starred in
Baby Maker: The Story of Doctor Cecil Jacobsen
with Tom Verica and George Dzundza. For five weeks, I thought,
Lord help us all!
The silver lining was that I developed a really close friendship with Tom Verica, who introduced me to Vietnamese food, pho in particular, and led a day trip to Niagara Falls. The time flew by until the end. Then, early in the morning on December 19, Bruce called, extremely upset. He said that my best friend Sandy’s sixteen-year-old son, Garrett, was dead. I turned ice cold.
“What?”
“I don’t know any more,” he said. “All I know is that Trevor”—Garrett’s little brother—“called here crying, ‘I don’t have a brother. My brother is dead.’ And there was screaming in the background.”
I called Karen Scalia, who confirmed the horrible news, but details were still sketchy. Garrett had just returned home from boarding school. He was excited to help his family prepare for Christmas, and now he was dead?
I finally got a hold of Sandy and listened to her wailing, keening grief with a sense of helplessness that made me physically sick and desperate to be home immediately to help her.
She said Garrett had come home with what they thought was the flu and they took him to the doctor. He had a terrible headache the night before, and he never woke up. It turned out he had meningococcal meningitis, which the doctor had missed, though Garrett hadn’t presented the normal symptoms and it was such a virulent killer that it wouldn’t have mattered.
For the last three days of shooting, I was a wreck because I couldn’t be with my best friend at a time when she needed me most. I was also unable to get on a commercial flight that would get me into L.A. the night before the funeral. Through my manager and agent, someone spoke to Treat Williams, who had a charter service, and thanks to him, I was able to go directly from the last scene of the movie to the airport. I didn’t know Treat personally but he sent me a lovely food basket for the trip, and because of his generous heart, I was able to be with my dearest friends when they needed me most. I will forever be grateful to him for that. I flew home wearing my wardrobe and makeup. Sandy and David had asked me to speak at the service, so I was able to write my eulogy on the plane.
I sat up that night with Bruce, Jack, Karen, Sandy, and David, who said he wasn’t going to cry the next day in front of everyone at Garrett’s funeral. Of course, he was the first one to break down. I remember helping Sandy’s other girlfriends get her dressed for the service, and as we were trimming the veil on the hat she was wearing, she broke down, repeating over and over that we should be dressing her for his wedding, not his funeral.
To this day, I have not witnessed grief so deep or so raw. I spent the next several days with Sandy. It was god-awful. When I tried to explain what was going on to Dakota, who used to play with Garrett’s sister (and my goddaughter), Julianne, he asked, “Will Garrett get better if we give him hot chocolate?”
I said no and sat down with him for a long talk about heaven and what happens when we die, but no explanation made the tragic loss any better or easier to understand or accept. I didn’t know how to make sense out of such a loss, and I wasn’t sure I ever would. It was a horrible time that left each of us indelibly bruised deep within our soul. We canceled our annual Christmas Eve dinner and never had it again. I helped Sandy wrap Christmas presents and cried with her. Bruce bristled at me for getting too involved in someone else’s grief, but that was the way it went with me. Now he’s used to it.
I didn’t have much of a Christmas spirit when we woke on the morning of the twenty-fifth to open presents, but I mustered enthusiasm for Dakota’s sake and tried to make it as festive as possible under the circumstances. After all the presents had been opened, Bruce handed me a little box. I thought I knew what was inside. We had discussed making my little pear-shaped CZ into a real ring.
I opened the box and instead found a huge oval-shaped diamond ring that Bruce had designed with Manny. It was gorgeous and extravagant. Bruce was scared to death to give it to me. He didn’t know how I’d react.
I burst into a full-bodied laugh, something I hadn’t done for days. I was amazed Bruce had been able to pull off the surprise. It caught me completely off guard, and I loved it.
That ring was my light at the end of the tunnel. He slipped it onto my finger as tears streamed down my face. I was living the dream. I envisioned our wedding and life together. It filled me with hope and joy.
O
n January 17, 1994, our lives were shaken again, though this time it was a 6.7 magnitude earthquake that struck at 4:30 a.m. and made our world seem like a speck of dirt on a string suddenly pulled so tight that everything on it fell off. Seventy-two people died in that quake, more than nine thousand were injured, and damage across Southern California totaled more than $20 billion.
The Northridge epicenter wasn’t that far from our community, but we were among the fortunate. Our house was seriously damaged, but not red-tagged as uninhabitable. Like everyone else’s, our nerves were frayed, and each aftershock put us more on edge. Beyond that, all of us were okay.
Looking back, Bruce and I handled ourselves quite differently throughout the crisis, and that in itself produced aftershocks in our relationship. He emerged with his pith helmet and knife, waiting for looters, while I was either more fatalistic or practical, depending on your perspective. I figured if an aftershock was going to kill us, there was little we could do about it.
I had just seen my best friend walk through the worst thing a human being had to endure, the loss of her child. I wasn’t going to make myself crazy over a bunch of broken stuff. Even when I saw valuable antiques in pieces, I would shrug and say, “It’s not a life.”
But Bruce didn’t like that nonchalant attitude, as he called it. A distance began to develop between us and then one night we had our worst fight ever. It was so bad that I took the dogs and stayed at my mom’s. I thought we needed to go to our corners and cool off. When I returned the next morning, I found Bruce sitting in the kitchen waiting for me. He said he wanted me out of his house. I sort of half giggled, thinking he was joking. He wasn’t—and he refused to talk about it.
“Are you kidding me? There’s nothing to talk about?” I asked in a rising tide of disbelief and anger.
“No, there’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “I want you out.”
I was stunned, hurt, and confused. Though his house was full of my furniture and belongings, I gathered my clothing and toiletries and moved back into my mother’s guesthouse. It was the craziest, most maddening situation. I gave him a couple days to cool off before calling again and asking if he wanted to work out whatever was bothering him. He didn’t want to talk. Nor did he want me back. He just kept repeating that it was over. I was incredulous.
Over?
He answered, ice cold, “Yes, Melissa. Over.” And he hung up the phone.
I was so incensed that I thought,
Fine, we’ll do it your way
. I hired movers to box up my belongings at Bruce’s house and move them into storage, leaving him with a bed, a futon, and a television. I also put my engagement ring into my safe. Somehow, amid the days I spent weeping about having landed with my four-year-old son back in my mom’s guesthouse, I was cast in
Sweet Justice,
a legal pilot for NBC, and soon after, I had my Scarlett O’Hara tomorrow-is-another-day moment, only stronger. I had a child to consider. He needed stability, something solid. Something he and I could count on…we needed a home of our own! Having made a ton of money on all those TV movies, I went out and bought my dream house, an adorable Cape Cod–style cottage with green shutters and a white picket fence.
As we were about to close, Bruce called and said he was about to leave for India and Montreal to work on a miniseries that would keep him away for four months. When he asked what was new with me, I told him that I was about to shoot a pilot in New Orleans. Then I said very calmly, “Oh, and I bought a house.”
“You bought a
house
?” he asked. “So it’s really over?”
“No, no, no,” I said. “You’re not going to do this to me. You ended it. I am doing what I need to do to take care of myself and my son.”
“Look, can we just have dinner before I go to India?”
“Fine,” I said.
At my suggestion, we met at an Indian restaurant that had been a favorite of ours, but dinner was a disaster. We got in a huge fight and I left, wishing him a good time in India. Before I took off for New Orleans, I started therapy. As I told my therapist, I didn’t want to live at the beck and whim of some guy. I didn’t want anyone other than me to be responsible for my happiness. Clearly, my way wasn’t working, and I was searching for a better course.
So I dove in, wanting to fix things and aware it wasn’t going to be overnight. But the feeling that I was at least addressing the problem by asking the right questions carried me through the
Sweet Justice
pilot in New Orleans. Well, that and the fact that the cast was fantastic. Ronny Cox, my dear friend, played my dad, the gorgeous Jason Gedrick played my ex-boyfriend, and my wardrobe consisted of Armani suits…lovely!
From New Orleans, I was to go to Wilmington, North Carolina, for the TV movie
Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story
. I picked up Dakota and our nanny, Rosa, who had been staying with Bo in South Carolina at Tom Berringer’s, and we stayed in a beautiful beach house throughout the filming, where my costar and friend Marlee Matlin helped me celebrate my thirtieth birthday. On my birthday, thirty red roses were delivered to my door, along with a card that said, “Happy Birthday. Thinking of you. Sending you love. Bruce.”
Knowing Bruce as I did, I recognized it was a miracle that he remembered my birthday. That he gave a shit was even more miraculous. And the fact that he figured out a way to call his sister from India and make sure she sent me flowers showed me the depth to which he was thinking about me. Later in the day, he called, which I found out was quite a feat from where he was in India. We caught up long enough for Bruce to tell me that his trip was life-changing—no embellishment, no I miss you, just that it was life-changing—and for me to tell him that in a few weeks I would be back in L.A. and starting another movie.
S
etting up my new house with Dakota, whom I adored and worshipped and found endlessly entertaining, was a thoroughly gleeful experience. It was a personal triumph and brought a sense of independence that was exhilarating to say the least. As I was settling in, I began work on
Cries from the Heart
, my third movie with Patty Duke, and was entertaining the idea of escalating a flirtatious friendship I’d struck up with George Clooney, when Bruce and I began talking frequently and rather intimately on the phone. He had called after moving to Montreal from India. A very healing initial conversation led to others, and finally I agreed to fly to Canada for the weekend.
I got to Montreal and had an extraordinarily romantic reunion with Bruce, who was shooting when I arrived. I napped in his trailer, as I’d flown all night and was exhausted. On his lunch break he climbed into the bed in that trailer beside me and we made love for the first time in months. The tone of the weekend was enhanced when we went back to the hotel and found the producer had sent champagne and strawberries to his beautiful penthouse suite. I showed Bruce a rough cut of my pilot. We talked, made love in a beautiful four-poster bed, and then as we sat up and talked some more, we could see fireworks out the window, lighting up the night sky in celebration of Bastille Day. But it was like they were for us.
By this time, I had heard Bruce confess that he’d kicked me out of his house and sabotaged our relationship because, in his words, he was a scared moron. He was panic-stricken that we would get married and have a child, and then he would find a way to screw things up, resulting in more children with parents who had split up. Then he played me a song. Bruce is not an overly romantic guy, but I could tell this song had a real impact on him. It was Marc Cohn’s “True Companion.” He said that hearing it is what had turned him around.
“I heard this song and all I could think of was you,” he said. “I can’t put anyone else in it. Nor do I want to. This is it—forever and ever.”
I went back home, opened my safe, pulled out my ring, and put it back on my finger. Bruce returned soon after and then was cast in
Babylon 5
. Then NBC picked up
Sweet Justice
. I don’t know that we fell back into a relaxed, normal life as much as we were swept up by the business of doing series and planning our wedding, but I was busy and happy. That was the other thing that had happened in Montreal: I made it clear I wanted a date, not an ambiguous reengagement with a wedding to be determined in the future.
“Call it,” Bruce said.
“Let’s pick something that neither of us will ever forget,” I said.