Prairie Tale (28 page)

The suit would drag on for nearly another two years until finally we had to end it. The cost was staggering, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and by then all I wanted to find out was why—why they would print a story they knew was blatantly untrue and obviously damaging to my life and career, and my children’s lives. My attorney arranged a meeting with the
National Enquirer
’s editor in chief, Steve Coz, and their attorney, at their headquarters in Clearwater, Florida.

We flew to nearby Miami and checked into the Delano Hotel. I was a nervous wreck. Before the meeting, Larry took me for a long walk on the beach. He knew that despite my uncertainty, I was anticipating the face-to-face with the fuck who had approved the story about me. Larry told me what to expect and urged me to remain centered, focused, calm, and to keep my wits about me. I took his counsel to heart. It enabled me to contain my anger so that I could focus it and use it with laserlike precision.

The meeting lasted several hours. We agreed the details would remain confidential. However, I can say that it was a remarkable experience for me. I had the opportunity to confront someone who I thought had wronged not only me but my family.

And I learned a great deal that day, starting with the revelation that the
National Enquirer
’s attack on me was not at all personal. It was purely business for them. Stories like the one they wrote about me sold magazines, period. It convinced me more than ever that gossip rags were a cancer on our culture and individual sensibilities. I wanted to run to every newsstand and grocery store checkout line in the country and tell people how much pain they were inflicting on people by buying those pieces of trash.

I also learned how to walk away from a fight. At one point during the meeting the lawyer for the
Enquirer
said something that caused me to almost explode. I wanted to fly across the room and rip that guy’s head off. Fortunately, Larry squeezed my hand tightly and suggested that I go for a walk.

I did and went to my suite. I called Bruce at home and told him what was going on. He calmed me down and helped me see that the fight, whether or not I got everything I had wanted, was over. I had made my point. There was a deal on the table. As he said, it was time for me to agree to it and come home.

“In some victories, you don’t always get everything you want,” he said. “But this is a victory. It’s over. Walk away. Michael is fine.”

“He is fine, isn’t he?” I said.

“He’s better than fine,” Bruce said. “He’s exceptional. So are you. Now put your sword down and come home!”

S
ix months later, in the summer of 1997, I was battling for my children again. But this time it was for a movie.

I was in Calgary shooting
Seduction in a Small Town,
the story of a woman who moves to a small town with her family and fights to regain her two kids from foster care after being falsely accused of child abuse. I had Michael with me, and about halfway through the movie Bruce brought Dakota and Lee up for the famous Calgary Stampede. Little did Bruce know what he was walking into.

Before I left for location, Bruce and I were getting along, but there was a distance between us that made sense only in retrospect. My inability to express my feelings or needs was at a peak. I was overly self-sufficient and full of resentment at everyone and everything. I dealt with these feelings by ordering a glass of wine or two…or three at the end of the day. A couple drinks took me to another state of mind. It was like changing the channel during a commercial.

The cast of the film bonded instantly with one another and our director, Charles Wilkinson. We were together constantly on set and off, barbecuing, singing, and drinking…a lot. I became especially close to my leading man. Inappropriately so. I’d always developed little crushes on my leading men, but this was different and it was fueled by alcohol, which allowed me to pour my heart out. The problem was, I was pouring my heart out to the wrong person. I should’ve been sharing all of this with my husband, but I was too afraid.

I guess you could characterize my relationship with my leading man as an emotional affair. Just as wrong and dangerous as a sexual affair…maybe more so.

The film wrapped and I came home for a bit, then went to Toronto to shoot
Christmas in My Hometown
with one of my favorite leading men of all time, Tim Matheson. I was in a slightly better place mentally, especially on days when I could end the workday with martinis or wine.

Several months later, I began another film, this time in L.A., called
Childhood Sweetheart
. It was great to be shooting back in L.A. again and also to be working with Ronny Cox, whom I adored. Everything was going smoothly, until one afternoon, about three-quarters of the way through the movie, when Bruce got ahold of me on my cell phone. I was in my dressing room, and as soon as he heard my voice, he began to scream.

“You did this to me! I should have seen it coming! I can’t believe you did this to me. I hate you. I trusted you, and you abused that trust.”

His voice couldn’t have been louder or more full of rage and pain. At the same time, he sobbed in giant, wounded gulps. Panicked, I tried to get him to stop, take a breath, and tell me what had upset him. I started to cry, too. I could feel a giant seismic upheaval beneath my feet, and I didn’t know why. Finally, he said there was a tape.

“What?” I asked.

“Someone left a tape in the mailbox,” he said.

“So?”

“It was of you on the phone, talking,” he said. “I know you had an affair with that guy in Calgary. I know this—”

I had heard Bruce in various emotional states, but never this upset. He was nearly out of control. Somehow I managed to calm him enough that I could finish my scenes that day, but he was still in a volatile state when I walked in the door hours later. He could hardly look at me as I set my things down and asked for more details. He handed me a tape recorder and said, “Listen to it yourself.”

I looked down at the recorder and was about to ask which button to push to get it to play when I realized Bruce had left the room. I figured it out on my own.

Sure enough, the tape had me on the phone with various friends of mine—female friends and male friends—complaining about Bruce, complaining about our marriage, talking about how great I thought Calgary guy was, and asking why Bruce couldn’t be more like my movie’s leading man. Oddly, though, some of my conversations were intercut with other conversations that I couldn’t remember. Nor could I recognize the voices. I thought I was losing my mind.

I listened again. Yes, half of the conversations were between my friends and me, but I realized the other half of the conversations were recorded off a TV.

I went upstairs to the bedroom and got on my knees in front of Bruce. Trembling as tears rolled down my face, I said emphatically that I did not have an affair with Calgary guy. There had been nothing physical between us, ever. On the other hand, I admitted the relationship I did have with him, as he had heard on the tape, was an emotional one and inappropriately intimate. It was, I said, because of things going on between us that we weren’t addressing, which after a while Bruce understood.

“But this tape is more sinister than anything I did,” I said. “Please, let’s you and I figure out how we can get through this and move on together. I’m admitting this and willing to work on whatever I have to.”

By this point, I was crying from embarrassment, shame, and humiliation—and sorrow for the hurt I had inflicted on Bruce. The lid had been pulled back on me and I was exposed; this part of me that was an inappropriate, desperate daddy-seeker had glommed on to another guy and now I was found out. Bruce calmed down a bit, and we held each other tightly and cried for a long time.

“We’ll deal with this,” I said finally. “But let’s figure out what the hell this tape is, where it came from, and who would do this.”

It turned out the tape had arrived in an unmarked envelope left in the mailbox. Bruce had brought it in earlier in the day with the mail. When he showed me the envelope, I noticed our address was wrong and realized it had been hand-delivered as there was no stamp; someone had gotten inside our gated community in Hidden Hills. Later that day, Bruce’s friend Jerry called and told us that he had also received a tape in the mail, along with a note that said, “Better that you should tell Bruce about this. He should hear it from a friend instead of reading it in a tabloid.”

“Something really creepy is going on here,” I said to Bruce and Jerry. “This is freaking me out.”

I sat down and stared at the envelope as I listened to the tape again. While listening, I realized two things: first, most of the conversations had taken place while I was cooking dinner and talking on the cordless phone as I moved about the kitchen, and second, the envelope was addressed to another house in Hidden Hills and had no return address. Feeling suspicious, I flipped through the local directory and realized that the address matched a house less than a mile from us. I was familiar with it. It had an apartment over the garage occupied by a woman who had been obsessed with Bruce for years.

Long before I came into his life, she would cross paths with him on the trails when he was running or walking. She continued to run into him after we became a couple. One day she approached Bruce’s ex-wife, Kitty, and said she couldn’t believe Bruce was dating “that Melissa Gilbert. She’s fat and ugly and horrible.” She scowled at me whenever Bruce and I saw her, which was, as I thought about it, pretty often; I realized then that this psycho stalker may have recorded our phone calls for nearly a year and sent the tape to Bruce to try to split us up.

I was absolutely terrified. I wanted to shut the blinds and lock the doors. If she was willing to go that far, what was to keep her from hurting one of our children or killing me?

I grabbed Bruce and said, “It’s her.”

“What?”

He knew exactly who I was talking about.

“Look at the address,” I said.

I called my security expert and friend Gavin de Becker, who immediately went to work on the case. His people delivered flowers to her and saw she had a large antenna on her roof, which we surmised allowed her to tap into our cordless phones and pluck my conversations as they traveled through the air. According to the authorities, there wasn’t anything we could do legally. Those radio waves were public domain. But we brought pressure on her in our own way until she moved out of the area.

T
alk about your blessing in disguise. The crazy lady ended up doing Bruce and me a favor by forcing us to confront problems in our marriage before they grew too big to handle. We immediately started intensive couples counseling. In our first session, a three-hour marathon, we decided unequivocally that we were going to stay married, which, in our eyes, made our marriage the primary patient, and we moved on from there.

The biggest move was the work I did on myself in therapy to try to figure out what was going on with me. I was stuck in a pattern. I was always somebody’s girl. After my father passed away, it was Michael Landon, then Rob, then Alan, then Bo, and then Bruce. I was like the little bird in the children’s book
Are You My Mother?
Except my story was titled “Are You My Father?” I cozied up to a new daddy-substitute anytime I felt alone.

I was also desperately trying to prove myself to be lovable. My need to be loved and cherished was driving me to go out of my way to show people how “special” I was. I was the first to arrive during a crisis and the last to leave. If an acquaintance wanted to go toy shopping for their kid, I would get them a personal shopper at FAO Schwarz. I overextended myself for virtual strangers and at a cost to myself and my family:
Love me, love me, love me…aren’t I lovable…I’ll do whatever it takes.

To top it all off, Bruce and I had only been married ten months when we faced a life-and-death situation with our son, and we came out of it relating to each other in a much different, more distant manner, not an uncommon thing after couples go through a traumatic event. We loved each other, but we didn’t communicate. As a result, we misfired in a major way.

But I worked damn hard to turn that around. I wouldn’t realize until later, after I got sober the last time, that much of my behavior was subconsciously influenced by efforts to fill a deep, psychic hole that went straight to the core of my being.

Unlike my kids, who had been handed to me as soon as possible after birth, who were immediately welcomed into this world by my voice and my loving face, I arrived quite differently: I didn’t belong to anyone when I was born. For the first twenty-four hours of my life, I didn’t have a name. Strangers passed me back and forth. As silly and clichéd as it sounds, I carried around the idea that my own mother, for whatever reasons, didn’t want me. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t torment me. If your own mother doesn’t want you, who is going to want you?

Drinking took me away from these and other troubling thoughts. It was the calm from the daily storm inside my head.

My inner alarm clock rang at five on the dot, and I poured myself a glass of wine or a martini as I prepared dinner. By eight, I had the kids in bed and could sit down with Bruce in front of the TV to watch a movie. But my brain would still be racing from the groceries I needed, to what episode Bruce was working on, to his schedule the next week, to wondering what my parents had been arguing about that one time I heard them yelling thirty years earlier. I still needed that fourth glass of wine to quiet the racket and let me zone out in Bruce’s arms.

In early fall of ’97, we went to Dublin on a six-week shoot for
Her Own Rules,
a movie based on Barbara Taylor Bradford’s melodramatic saga about a writer who returns to her native England to search for her roots after having been adopted as a child and raised in America. Like many of my movies, it touched a raw nerve. But the story was so over the top it was easy to ignore.

I was able to turn the trip into a family vacation. We rented a cute home in Sandymount and had a happy time. Bruce and I were extremely close throughout that shoot. There was definitely healing going on in our marriage. To this day, he would say he didn’t notice anything inappropriate about my alcohol intake. But in hindsight, two or three Guinnesses, half a bottle of wine, and a couple of whiskeys over the course of an evening, that’s a lot, right?

And it was every day. At the end of October, I was in Utah, shooting an episode of
Touched by an Angel
. Bruce and I took Michael trick-or-treating. Michael dressed up as a cowboy, Bruce went as Eddie Bauer (he wore jeans and an Eddie Bauer sweatshirt), and I dressed up as Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
. After I put Mike to bed, Bruce stayed with him and I went down to the bar with my friend Amanda, who at the time was the director’s personal assistant/muse. I ended the night by getting ripped and singing backup with an amazing southern blues band on an overly emotive rendition of the Allman Brothers’ “Whipping Post.”

I couldn’t see where I was headed. But it definitely wasn’t Kansas.

S
oon after Utah, I wound up in Austin for the movie
The Soul Collector
, a great project with Bruce Greenwood and an entire cast that fell madly in love with each other. Everyone was a foodie, and between scenes, we planned our next meals. I grew especially close with actress Christina (Tina) Carlisi, who played my best friend in the movie. She was sort of an Italian version of me, without the drinking.

She and her husband, Jay, were gearing up to adopt a baby boy after having gone through the ups and downs of fertility treatments. All of us were thrilled when the birth mother went into labor. Then, at the last minute, she changed her mind and decided not to give up her baby. Tina and Jay were devastated. Not long after, they were notified of another adoption. They called me from Arizona, where the mother was in labor, and two days later they left with a beautiful baby boy.

I hung on every word as she described the birth mother handing her son, Will, to her and saying, “This is your son.” Everyone was crying, she said, as was I while listening to her recall the experience of one mother letting go of her child and another taking hold. In fact, that may have been the catalyst that would later allow me to heal a bit and reconsider my own birth mother’s decision to give me away. Maybe she had wanted me to have a better life than she could have provided.

Until then, I had no doubt that I was a good mother. My life wasn’t perfect or traditional, but motherhood was my top priority and I worked my ass off to give my own two kids the best life possible. But then something happened that put a major crack in my self-confidence. Bo called to tell me that he was moving back to Texas, and then he said the words that hit me like a sledgehammer: Dakota wanted to go with him.