Authors: Melissa Gilbert
W
e 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.
L
ittle 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.