Chapter 8
For me, shooting Eraserhead was never a full time job. It was always a night here, a few nights there, so I was still involved in a lot of other things. While I was Mary X in the wee hours, by day I was appearing in commercials for Kool-Aid, Cheer laundry detergent, Jiff peanut butter, Dial soap, Clairol shampoo, Scope mouthwash, Three Musketeers candy bars, the postal service, Gravy Train dog food, etc., playing exuberant moms, cheerful pet-owners, and grateful deodorant wearers.
Eraserhead also overlapped with filming The Waltons pilot episode, which caused some problems. As I said, we filmed Eraserhead all night, and I drove to a friend’s nearby apartment, slept for an hour, then at 6:30 a.m. I had to be on-set at Paramount for The Waltons. By mid-afternoon of the third such day in a row we were filming one of those scenes in which every single person in the cast is crammed into the living room and I was so tired, I was practically cross-eyed. I blew a couple of lines and apologized to everyone. Be assured, no one in either cast or crew had any sympathy for my screw-ups because I’d spent the night slumming on a student film.
How did I manage then to also have a fling with Ralph Waite at the same time, you ask? It’s that farm girl work ethic.
In addition I was also still making and selling dresses at The Liquid Butterfly and because that still wasn’t enough, I had taken up a new occupation — I was a proud waitress. Jeanne Field had opened a café in Topanga Canyon called Everybody’s Mother, which featured large photos of the moms of everyone who worked there. My mom, the late and beloved Alice Stewart, was of course properly recognized and celebrated. Jeanne liked to call Everybody’s Mother “food as theater,” including the featured role played by Mickey Fox at the front counter. With her Venus of Wilendorf figure and larger than life personality, most patrons assumed Mickey was in fact “Everybody’s Mother.” During the gas crisis in 1974 people would get up early, line-up their cars at the gas station and walk across the street and have breakfast at the café. It was a Topanga thing.
Actually what I was doing at Everybody’s Mother was a swap with Jeanne. She was working at The Liquid Butterfly for nothing and so I was supporting her by serving up piping hot breakfasts for nothing. That’s what hippies used to do in the ‘70s. God, I miss that sometimes — sharing work, sharing homes, sharing weed, sharing boyfriends.
Not everything in my life was groovy though and I would open up to Jeanne and other friends about this. Even though Tim and I had separated in 1969 and our divorce finalized in early 1971, I still felt terrible about what had happened. No matter what else was going on in my life — how fun or adventurous things were — my role in the downfall of that relationship, how I had hurt him, stuck around inside me like a dark cloud.
Then I got a dinner invitation from Tim’s brother John — remember John who had been such an angel going with me to Mexico for that horrific abortion? He had a great heart. Anyway, John and his wife, Toby, invited me to their house in Pacific Palisades for dinner and I learned they had invited Tim. Knowing John, this was no accident.
We had a great time. It was fun, relaxing dinner and afterwards John and Toby just sort of disappeared and Tim and I went outside at sunset and took a walk there along the ocean, which was spread out gigantic and gold. I was able to pour out my heart to Tim and tell him that I knew I’d done so much to hurt him and how terribly sorry I was. By now Tim had gotten to a new place in his life. He was happy again and it seemed like he enjoyed being on his own, making new friends, and having fun again. Finally the rift between us closed and that miserable chapter ended. A new one began as friends.
Tim started coming to the Friday night poker games at my house in Topanga Canyon, becoming one of the regulars along with Kit Carson, an actor friend, Peter Butterfield, who lived with me, and others. Tim even spent the night a few times. And now I had an open invitation to the soccer games he organized on Sunday mornings at the UCLA fields with family and friends. No one famous, just people from all parts of his life of every size, age, and sports ability.
I’m so happy that Tim and I have remained good friends ever since. When he married Willie, his wife of many years now, they had a small family wedding followed by a larger reception, to which I was invited.
I’ve been a guest at their house many, many times and it usually ends up being Willie and me in the kitchen making food or cleaning up while Tim and his “car buddies” are outside checking out engines and kicking each other’s tires or whatever the hell car guys do.
In November of 1973, I spent four days shooting an episode of Gunsmoke called “The Schoolmarm,” in which I played the role of Sarah Merkle, a kindly teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in Dodge City in the 1880s. Sarah cleans black boards, she’s gentle with students, and she looks mighty fine in a prairie dress. Hmmm. Sound familiar? At the time I didn’t think much about the role and in fact when I see the episode today I can’t even remember filming it. But looking back I can’t help but wonder if that guest role, which aired on February 25, 1974 on CBS, put something out there in the ether, a vibe that resonated a couple of months later.
In early May of that year I got a call from my agent with an audition for a project being created by Michael Landon with Ed Friendly’s production company. It was called Little House on The Prairie set in the late 1870s in Minnesota.
Having never read the books, I knew little about the character, other than she was a teacher who worked in Walnut Grove’s one-room schoolhouse. With so little to go on it can be challenging to breathe life into the dialogue on the page but I’d learned to go with my gut and that it never hurt to display a little audacity, which nearly any character needs in one way or another.
I drove over to Ed Friendly’s office at the appointed time and found a waiting room filled with actresses in prairie dresses, bonnets, and other outfits of the period. I’m sure it sounds ridiculous outside of Hollywood but with so much talent to choose from a producer is often less concerned about acting ability — that’s taken as a given — but on a person’s look, their skin tone, eyes, hair color, facial structure. With so much riding on appearance it can make sense to “dress the part” for an audition to help the sometimes overworked, tired, high, bored or otherwise unfocused producers choose you over someone else.
On this occasion I hadn’t bothered to track down the right dress or any of that. I just showed up in one of my usual flowy, flowery, running-around-Santa-Monica outfits. I’d been playing roles on TV and film since the 1960s and had lost interest in the various tricks actors can employ. These guys had seen my work. Part of being a professional, in my opinion, is to let the work speak for itself.
At least that was what I told myself. The real reason I didn’t go to great lengths to get the part is that I thought it was just a “movie of the week” and if I didn’t get it, no big deal. But as I looked around the waiting area at all the other actresses decked out in period hats and dresses, I did begin to wonder if there was something they knew that I didn’t.
When it was my turn, I went into the office, said hi to Ed Friendly, the show’s producer, and to some of the assistant producers. But it’s a funny thing, with all those other people, my eyes went straight to Mike Landon. His presence owned the room. Some people just have that kind of enigmatic eyeball-drawing magnetism and he had it in a way only a few people do. I met both Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington years later and they had it too. What is that?
When given the chance to do my lines, I first asked Michael and Ed if I might re-arrange things in the room a little bit. Michael grinned and said, “Sure,” and wanted to know what I had in mind.
Well, what I had in mind was to be a teacher and take charge of the classroom. I scooted Michael and Ed out from behind the big desk and arranged everyone like they were my pupils. I scolded them for talking and laughing and making noise. I mandated that they all be quiet and mind their manners while I ran my lines. Michael was giggling and I figured if nothing else I’d broken up their afternoon with a little comic relief.
By the time I arrived home an hour later, my agent called and let me know I’d gotten the part — then came the real surprise. This Little House gig wasn’t so little. What I’d thought was just a quickie “Movie of the Week,” was instead slated to be a major television series and they wanted me to sign a four-year contract which guaranteed seven out of 13 episodes per season. I believe my jaw actually, physically dropped.
Four years was forever. It was as long as high school. A presidential term. My marriage to Tim. I was stunned. It was like winning the lottery.
Okay this just got serious, I thought. I’d better learn something about the books.
A couple of days later at a swap meet in Topanga Canyon, I spotted one of the Little House books, bought it, sat down, and started reading. In Chapter One everyone has scarlet fever, Mary goes blind, Pa shaves her head, and the dog dies. “What the hell?” I wondered. And I thought Eraserhead was dark. Eventually I realized that I’d picked up By the Shores of Silver Lake, book 5 in the series, while the TV show was kicking off somewhere in the middle of book 4, On The Banks of Plum Creek. Things on the TV series wouldn’t begin in quite such bleak territory.
Within a few days NBC messengered over a copy of the first script, I signed that lovely four-year contract, and on May 30, I drove to Paramount for my costume fittings. The costume department is a wonderland — rows upon rows of racks of clothes towering overhead and it just seems to go on for miles. This is where I first laid eyes on a girl named Melissa Gilbert, who would play Laura Ingalls but who was mostly called “Half-Pint,” a nickname that had belonged to Laura Ingalls but was so on-the-nose that it now belonged to Melissa both on and off camera.
Half Pint was a buck-toothed, freckled, sparkly-eyed nine-year-old whose mouth was wide open as she stood gazing up in wonder at this towering cathedral of dresses and gowns. She was just adorable. I also met Melissa Sue Anderson, who everyone called Missy (to help clear up the confusion of having two Melissas in the cast) and she was poised and lovely with a bright smile that tended toward a shade or two of shyness. Maybe, I thought, working with these kids wouldn’t be too bad.
The wardrobe crew took lots of measurements though I learned I wouldn’t exactly be drowning in dresses over the next four years. People who lived on the prairie in those days didn’t have a lot of money for life’s niceties — like clothes. As such Miss Beadle’s wardrobe in that first season would consist of a grand total of two dresses, one red plaid, and the other gray, along with four blouses and four skirts.
In scenes that called for Miss Beadle to wear glasses, I got permission from Mike Landon to wear my own round wire frames, the same glasses I could be seen in when sewing and hanging out at The Liquid Butterfly. I’ve never heard any complaints that they weren’t right for the period. Apparently there was some stylistic crossover between 1870s schoolmarm and 1970s flower child.
Later when shooting started I would realize that Miss Beadle was a fashion plate by Walnut Grove standards. By contrast Karen Grassle, who played Laura and Mary’s mother, Caroline Ingalls, always wore the same dress at home unless she went into town where she snazzed things up with a bonnet. Mike Landon wore the same thing show after show — woven britches, a flannel shirt and suspenders. The real fashionista was Alison Arngrim, playing uber-brat Nellie Oleson, who often went about her business in flamboyant, frilly dresses that were totally at odds with the plainness of everyone else’s clothes — to her eternal delight.
Next it was time to do something about my hair and I met with Larry Germain, a hairstylist I’d bumped into very briefly years before when I did that episode of The Virginian. No one knew more about hair than Larry as he’d been in the business of making wigs, snipping, clipping, dyeing, and keeping secrets since the early 1940s. He’d done it all from To Kill a Mockingbird to The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.
Larry and the producers of the show had a pretty clear idea of how they wanted Miss Beadle presented and that involved making a partial blonde wig. The tricky thing for Larry was two-fold: I had really straight hair and I had just cut it prior to getting the part. Larry and Mike Landon wanted their teacher to have some curls and whoop-dee-whoops in her hair that were right for the period. But in this case, unlike when I did the Toni Home Permanent ad, they couldn’t say “come back in a year.” I had to go in front of the cameras in just a few days.
Because the wig would be for the top and back of my head (including a braid), Larry had to incorporate it seamlessly with the rest of my natural hair. To get the color right Larry and another hair stylist, Gladys Witten, took clippings from all over my head, giving them the overall color palate and they created a wig from there.
Once the wig was complete, we had trouble getting it to stay attached because my hair is so pencil straight. I tried curling the front with curling irons but the thing just wouldn’t stay. Finally came the orders I had sorely hoped not to hear. I was told I had to get a permanent, which would give me some curl in front and would allow Larry to get the wig to stay attached for a full day of shooting.
Ugh.
A frizzy ‘70s perm.
A perm I would have to maintain for the next four years.
Suddenly I felt like Jack Nance having to sport that head of crazy hair for all those years of shooting Eraserhead.
I wasn’t the only one with hair issues. Karen Grassle had short hair too and in the opening credit sequence of the show you can see her and Mike pull up in a wagon while Karen is busy tucking that short hair back inside her bonnet. The Oleson ladies, Katherine MacGregor, as Mrs. Oleson, and Alison Arngrim, as daughter Nellie, were also outfitted with wigs. To get the full story on Nellie’s wig — which was practically its own character in the show — you’ll have to do yourself a favor and go buy a copy of Alison’s brilliant memoir Confessions of a Prairie Bitch.
Another part of the preparation was doing make up tests with Allan Schneider, whom everyone called Whitey. This guy was a legend who had been Marilyn Monroe’s personal make-up artist, working with her on films including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, and The Seven Year Itch. It was Whitey who had designed her signature bedroom eyes; it’s a very specific swoop of eyeliner that gives that look — what a virtuoso move. Whitey demonstrated it on me once for fun but ultimately you may have noticed that Miss Beadle did not get bedroom eyes on camera.
My first day of shooting at Paramount Studios was on Sound Stage 30, an area of the lot formerly part of Desilu, where I’d filmed My Three Sons. If you take the Paramount tour today, there’s a sign on the exterior of Sound Stages 30 and 31, telling visitors that Little House on The Prairie was filmed there along with Top Hat and The Gay Divorcee both starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (back when the lot belonged RKO), The Godfather, and much later Addams Family Values, and about a ten thousand films in between. So it had been seasoned with a lot of great film and TV history.
This sound stage, as nearly all I’ve worked in, was a large eggshell colored industrial building, not terribly interesting from the exterior, designed to block out all light and sound from the outside world.
Sound Stage 30 measures 107 feet wide, 90 feet long and 35 feet high. Back in the 1930s, when it was RKO, the interior walls would have been sound proofed with mattresses behind chicken wire but by the 1970s that had been replaced with a thick material called Instaquilt. There’s an odd thick feeling to the air inside because of the complete deadening of sound. It takes a bit of getting used to. In the rigging overhead you’ll see dozens if not hundreds of lights of various colors, shapes, and sizes all designed to create a specific mood in whatever interior scene you’re shooting — whether it’s Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on a gorgeous, glittery dance stage or the dim and menacing inside of Don Corleone’s office. It can make the world suspended above you, as an actor, look like a thick jungle of black light housings, armatures, and electrical cords.
The huge “elephant door” at the front of the sound stage measured nearly 24 feet in height. Those big, sliding sound stage doors apparently got the name because back in the old days they were big enough to walk an elephant through — if that’s what your scene required. Mostly though they’re that size so that a crew can build sets and slide them in or out. Once those elephant doors close, the outside world is gone and there is only the world that has been painstakingly built, painted, costumed, and lit.
On that day, Monday, June 24, 1974, it was the interior of the Walnut Grove one-room schoolhouse in the 1870s, which was welcoming two new students to the classroom — Laura and Mary Ingalls.
My call time was 6:15 a.m. and after getting all put together — hair, make-up, costume — I took a look around the sound stage and saw the chairs set up for the various actors. There was one with Michael Landon’s name, one for Melissa Gilbert, Karen Grassle, etc. And finally I saw one that one that had the word “Teacher” on it. I made myself comfortable in that chair until an assistant director came by and said in a low voice, “I’m sorry you can’t sit there. That’s for the teacher.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “I’m the teacher.”
“No, it’s for the real teacher.”
Ah.
With so many kids on the series there was in fact a real teacher who was running a real classroom each day on set after the kids had shot their requisite four hours.
I eventually found a chair, though not one with my name emblazoned upon it.
“Nellie Oleson was very pretty. Her yellow hair hung in long curls, with two big blue ribbon bows on top. Her dress was thin white lawn, with little blue flowers scattered over it, and she wore shoes.
“She looked at Laura and she looked at Mary, and she wrinkled up her nose.
“ ‘Hm!’ she said. “Country girls!’ ”
On the Banks of Plum Creek, Laura Ingalls Wilder
My first episode on Little House on the Prairie was called “Country Girls,” which would first air on September 18, 1974. In this case “country girls,” as you can infer from the quote, was an insult hurled sneeringly by, of course, Nellie Oleson at Laura and Mary on their very first day at the schoolhouse in Walnut Grove.
This was Nellie’s way of establishing the pecking order, letting the new girls know that she was a sophisticate who not only owned more than one dress but that all her clothes were store-bought and not — gasp — sewn by her mother. (Nellie Oleson was basically Walnut Grove’s Kim Kardashian.) It didn’t end there. Not only did Nellie have a closet full of fancy, flouncy dresses, she was smart and knew how to read. Laura by contrast could only barely get through a single sentence, a fact that she was at great pains to hide. Oh, and Nellie would be making Mary and Laura’s lives hell if they didn’t kowtow to her. And so the die is cast between the girls from the first moment.
If a show’s success is fueled by its antagonist, Little House was off to a good start, I thought.
What’s interesting is that this dynamic between Laura and Nellie is there in one of the books — On the Banks of Plum Creek — buried on page 148 (in my copy) in a chapter simply titled “School.” It’s a credit to the genius of Mike Landon to recognize that story element, practically tug it out of the book with tweezers, and make it the engine of a show that lasted nine seasons.
The trio of kids that most people remember is of course that of Melissa Gilbert (Laura), Alison Arngrim (Nellie), and Melissa Sue Anderson (Mary). They had great chemistry on screen, which is all that really matters to fans. Like most children the world over, however, they did not always get along. Missy tended to do her own thing and keep to herself, while Alison and Half-Pint got along pretty famously. They were all terrific at playing their roles, bringing a lot of honesty and emotion to the screen. I doubt any group of kids would ever all get along without a hitch — if the trio of Barbara Jean, Lewis, and Charlotte Stewart back in Yuba City was any sort of guide.
While shooting that first episode, I realized what a find Melissa Gilbert was. She was a great scene partner. There’s one moment in particular where it’s just Laura and Miss Beadle in the classroom. Laura is reading haltingly out of a book. Miss Beadle is encouraging her, gently trying to build her confidence, while kindly and evenly pushing her to do better. At one point Half Pint stops reading and fixes me with those big, brown, nine-year-old eyes and shy smile and the camera, the lights, and the crew all just vanished. You can feel the adoration pouring out of her. In that moment we weren’t at Paramount Studios on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. We were a teacher and student in Minnesota in the age of kerosene and wagon wheels. If America loved Miss Beadle, it’s because Laura Ingalls loved her first. Even watching those scenes today, I am struck by Melissa’s focus and authenticity. How do you do that when you’re nine?
Maybe too it has something to do with the fact that Miss Beadle’s empathy was real. When filming those scenes I remembered how I had struggled in school back in Yuba City, how I’d felt stupid, felt like I was letting my parents down, and was fighting to hang on to a shred of dignity in the face of schoolwork that had seemed like a breeze for my brother and sister and other kids. I knew Laura’s embarrassment, I was rooting for her, and I wanted Miss Beadle to be the teacher I wished I could have had.
“Country Girls” set a pattern for how Mike would construct nearly all of the shows. While Laura and Nellie were having their battle about who would call the shots in the schoolyard, their mothers, Caroline Ingalls and Harriet Oleson, were being snippy and passive-aggressive over their own pecking order. Caroline brings a dozen eggs to sell to Harriet at the mercantile and their bicker over the price is a not-so-thinly veiled power struggle. Later as Caroline fingers a pricey bolt of cloth on display in the store, Harriet says with a domineering smile and triumphant tone that that fabric is surely something the Ingalls family can’t afford. They both know it’s true but Caroline sets her jaw and buys it.
Time and again you see mirrored storylines in which what’s happening with the kids is also happening with the adults, one storyline taking the more emotional and dramatic path, while the mirrored storyline usually serves as the comic relief.
Another good example of this is “Bully Boys,” a show in the third season. When a boy and his two much older adult brothers move to Walnut Grove, the youth establishes himself as a bully at school, at one point punching Mary in the face and giving her a black eye. Meanwhile the two brothers are swindling everyone in town and when Pa physically goes after them (for making Ma spill her fresh eggs on the Walnut Grove bridge), they send him off in a wagon badly beaten up too.
In the end the kids in the schoolyard finally have enough of their bullying and gang up and beat the living crap out of him — literally something like a dozen kids press in around in a scrum hitting and kicking him. (Miss Beadle is inside presumably cleaning chalkboards and spritzing herself with lemon verbena somehow not hearing the sounds of violence just outside her window.)
In the adult world, the townspeople finally have a showdown with the two older brothers and march them out of town all singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
After my first couple of days shooting interiors at Paramount, I had on June 27 my other big “first” with the show and that started at about 5 a.m. Getting up and driving an hour out to Simi Valley to Big Sky Movie Ranch.
The Ranch is huge and hilly, more than 6,000 acres in size, and it looks like you’re a thousand miles from any city. By 6 a.m. I parked in a gravel lot with the other actors and crew. A van picked me up and drove me over a hill to a collection of white trailers for costume, hair, and make-up.
There Larry Germain got my hair and wig just so, Whitey Schneider did my make-up, and Richalene Kelsey got me into that day’s costume. Once I was all packaged up as Miss Beadle in my wool skirt, petticoats and golden hair, I walked to the top of the next hill where the sky was sprawling and blue, the air was clean, and the only sounds were the crunch of dry grass and dry soil under my lace-up boots. There wasn’t a power pole, TV antenna, or a paved road in sight. I crested the hill and there spread below in a pretty little valley was Walnut Grove. My breath caught in my throat. The store, the mill, the church that doubled as the schoolhouse, all painted in early morning sunlight. I still get goose bumps thinking about it. I walked down and crossed the bridge spanning the busy stream and it was as though I’d passed through a magic doorway into another time. It seemed so real.
I struggle to put into words why this had such an effect on me. In the late 1800s my grandmother, Nana, had come to California from Iowa in a covered wagon and I felt a powerful connection to her. The sight of that beautiful little frontier town, me in these 19th century clothes, the connection to my family, to the past, maybe even in some way it called up some of my deepest memories growing up in Yuba City with its farmland and broad valleys dappled with the same grasses and scrubby plants, the same bird sounds and scents of nature. I felt as though I’d been there before.
Over the next four years, every time I would crest the hill and see the town, I would have the sensation that somehow I had been lucky enough to travel back in time to this very ordinary and yet very special place. Even now, some 40 years later, I’m nostalgic about that moment. I loved being out there.
Eventually, of course, the moment would pass and I was indeed at work. There was the big camera on a dolly, reflectors, barrel-shaped HMI lights, make-up people, crewmembers hauling equipment, the usual hustle of a film set.
As I explored the Walnut Grove set that first morning it reminded me of filming Gunsmoke or Bonanza in that the buildings were more or less false fronts. When you see cast members climbing the stairs into the church (or school), once the doors open there’s a dark wall in the center with entrances to the left and right. The positioning of that wall allowed actors in and out of the building but kept the TV audience from seeing that inside the building there was simply a hollow, open space. There were no church pews or chalkboards though there were modern folding tables and chairs set up as this is where the younger members of the cast had their actual on-set school on days we shot at the movie ranch.
When we’d go up the steps into Oleson’s Mercantile, you can see a sprinkling of items for sale in the front window but it was a very shallow space inside. Any time you see the inside of the Ingalls’s cabin, the store, the school, etc., all those scenes were shot back at Paramount Studios.
One thing I still love about Walnut Grove is the water wheel on the mill. I realize that may sound pretty random but I know that Mike had to fight for it. One of the producers or perhaps the studio had said no to his original request to the mill’s waterwheel — not sure who — on the grounds it would be a large, needless expense, saying that you could easily build Walnut Grove without spending god-knows-how-much on such a thing. Instead of giving up, which was not in his nature, Mike cooked up a scheme. Without telling anyone, he used his own money to purchase the mill equipment, created a fake rental company, and rented the water wheel, the mill works, and all things necessary to create the stream that appears to power it (all fake as Simi Valley is bone dry). I believe that by hiding the cost as a rental instead of a purchase, he got it past the bean counters. Once it was part of the series, it was too late to go back. I always admired Mike for fighting — if not outright pranking the studio — for that waterwheel because he was right. It’s a detail that helps brings the town to life.
As beautiful as the movie ranch was, there were challenges shooting out there. Depending on the time of year the place is naturally brown and dry so any greenery — such as the grass and plants around the pond or along the streams — had to be brought in. For that matter all the ponds and streams had to be created too.
In the show’s opening title sequence when you see little Carrie bobbling down the hillside through the grass and flowers and she takes her famous header, all those flowers are fake and their stems are wires. Apparently as they were filming her running down the hill, Sidney Greenbush’s right shoe got caught on one of the wires and perhaps the most famous tumble in TV history was born.
We all learned pretty quickly you had to take some precautions on a shoot day in Simi Valley, where it got very hot. For example, in “Country Girls” you can see that Missy has a sunburn — no, that’s not bad ‘70s TV make-up. In the previous episode she’d be allowed to hang around in the sun too long and she turned lobster red. After that the producers made sure all the actors had plenty of shade in between takes.
Later in the series we shot an episode called “In the Big Inning,” and at about midday we were all in baseball stands watching a game. Of course there I was in 100-degree heat in my long skirt, petticoats, and all the other layers. When the director called for a break everyone got up but me. I sat there unmoving. Someone realized I had heatstroke and — being our second summer at the movie ranch — the crew was prepared. They put wet washcloths on the back of my neck, soaked in a blend of water and witch hazel, which brought me back around.
Much has been made of the fact (mostly by Alison) that Mike Landon didn’t wear underwear while he worked. Well guess what? Neither did I — at least not in Simi Valley, where temperatures were regularly out of control. Unlike Mike, who wore his woolen pants like a glove, and often left little doubt regarding his gender, my commando status was as discrete as could be. Though once I nearly gave the cast and crew quite a show when my skirt was invaded by a wasp. It happened in front of the schoolhouse while a lot of people were milling around between takes. My first terrified impulse was to throw the skirts up over my head and get the thing out. Fortunately Richalene Kelsay, the wardrobe person, grabbed my arm and dragged me around the back of the church, where we could flush the beast out and I could avoid advertising my wares.
One of my other wardrobe contributions, which you can kind of see in that episode of “Country Girls,” among others, is that I wore a bra that I really liked, as it was comfortable and fit well — something that’s important for long shooting days. Plus as someone who was a hippie at heart I often went without a bra in my daily life. The downside to this thing of comfort was that the thinness of the material tended to show my nipples. And depending on the blouse I was in, well, there they were. Should that be a big deal? We all have them. It’s not like Miss Beadle was some kind of outlier born without all the usual parts.
I figured given the nature of the show Mike or one of the producers would eventually ask me to re-think this choice. But no one said a word, though fairly often, under the right lighting conditions when they were shooting me “from the jugs up,” I would see Mike and the cinematographer take turns peering at me through the camera’s eyepiece discussing something just above a whisper. The only thing I’d hear is Mike murmuring to the cameraman, “It’s fine, let’s shoot it.”
For anyone who was a kid watching Little House on the Prairie, it was probably easy to imagine that the lives of the actors who played Mary, Laura, Nellie, or any of the others were really fun and exciting. The truth is it was mixed. I should mention right off that Mike Landon was in many ways a kid at heart and was a great mentor to some of the child actors, being especially close with Melissa Gilbert. He would break the tension of a long day with a joke or a prank and make the kids laugh.
For the most part though life on the Little House set was hardly a play land. The show was run as a tight ship in all ways including expectations for the children. They were either shooting scenes, in their on-set school, or on a union mandated break. There was very little goof-around time except scripted moments in front of the camera. It was always fun to see the genuine joy in the eyes of someone like Jonathan Gilbert, Melissa’s real-life brother, in his role as Willie Oleson when he got to terrorize the girls at school with a big frog.
I didn’t get the idea that any of them were particularly unhappy. They all seemed up for the daily challenge. But I often wondered how they were doing since their lives stood in such contrast to my own childhood back in Yuba City, a time when life was so easy and free.
On top of that I’m not sure that being on the show necessarily translated into any added status in their personal lives. When you live in Hollywood, you’re surrounded by lots of people who work in entertainment — your mom and dad, your parents’ friends, aunts and uncles — and it takes the shine off. It’d be like growing up in Napa Valley where half the people you know work in the wine industry, in Detroit around automobile manufacturing, or Washington DC in the fishbowl of government. Hollywood is a factory town. And Alison talks about how if anything, beyond the typical trials of teenage life, being on television actually added to the social challenges she dealt with rather than giving her a sparkly carpet ride of coolness. She’d be in school on set for two weeks straight and then back in regular school for a couple of days when not shooting. Or she’d be in real school for three weeks and then back at her Little House school for four days. The lack of continuity in either direction played havoc with her friendships and social well-being.
Growing up on the set came with other unusual challenges as well. At one point both Alison and Melissa Gilbert had braces, which of course didn’t exist in the 1870s. The make-up people solved that by applying white candle wax to their braces, requiring the poor girls to spend the end of their day getting that gunk out of their teeth in addition to shedding the pounds of pancake make-up we all wore. If you keep an eye out, you can sometimes see the braces. There’s a scene in “Bully Boys” in which Melissa Gilbert sits up in bed at night with an idea she wants to tell Mary about. The light hits her teeth just right and you can see the glint of metal.
Even with these and other things to deal with, the young actors all rose to the challenge. They knew their lines and worked hard to respond to a director’s instructions; no one messed around. When I was playing Miss Beadle, whether in the classroom or outside while the kids were “playing,” I was always the adult, feeling that if I gave into my own impulses to goof around with them, it would ultimately work against the chemistry we had on camera.
I only remember one child actor in my four years on the show, who was cast in a guest role, who showed up not knowing his lines and thinking that this was a place to have some fun. He was replaced after one day.
It’s fun today to watch those episodes with scenes in which the townspeople gather in the church and recognize so many faces. Ruthie Foster, who was my stand-in when they would set up lights, is often in one of the pews and was so good on camera that Mike eventually gave her a role as Mrs. Foster, one of the townspeople you might see at the Mercantile buying eggs from Mrs. Oleson. A lot of the kids you see were the children of the crew including those of the directors who would come in to direct an episode or two. Once when directing episodes that aired in December 1975 (“The Voice of Tinker Jones” and “Money Crop”), Leo Penn brought along his oldest son Sean Penn, who has an uncredited role, as one of the kids in the schoolhouse.
It was a real gift to get to work with all of them and I love to see them at the reunions and fan events that we get to do. Alison and I clicked early on. Unlike her character she doesn’t have a mean bone in her body but ate up her juicy role as the meanest girl on earth. She could bunch her face up like a fist and scare the bejesus out of all the other kids.
Both Alison and Half-Pint have written books about growing up on Little House and about their private experiences growing up in their real-life families. They each lived through heartbreak and terrible challenges. Alison experienced sexual abuse on a level that is hard to imagine — and yet she has emerged with her humanity and chutzpah intact and works as a fighter for causes benefiting children and AIDS-related charities.
One of the funny things I noticed about Alison when we first started is that when we’d do scenes together she would never look at me directly in the eyes. Partway through a scene I’d realize that she was looking at my nose or a little off to one side. She was a funny kid. She could be very outgoing and sort of enter a room with a real sense of tah-dah and yet she also had some shyness to her, something that was held back a bit.
Melissa Sue Anderson, as discussed in both Alison and Melissa’s books, was never a girl who seemed to fit in with the rest of the kids, nor particularly seemed to want to. She was always ready to work, nailed her part, and was prepared, so I didn’t have any difficulty working with her and in fact I liked her a lot. She seemed like a very normal, healthy, non-Hollywood kid. She wasn’t there to hog the spotlight or to razzle-dazzle anyone. Some of this may’ve been due to her family. Unlike the other kids, many of whom had a paid caretaker with them on the set, Melissa’s mom was there almost all the time. She was my favorite of the actor-kids’ moms on Little House — some of whom were either big, over-the-top personalities or were just basket cases. In fact she and I and Melissa Sue went out to dinner a few times and had nice evenings together.
I wasn’t there to become anyone’s surrogate mother but I did see Missy’s aloofness (or perceived aloofness) between takes and, over time, her isolation from some of the other kids. In many ways she carried herself like a young adult from early on. To this day I have no idea of the causes of any of these dynamics and can only speculate. Melissa Sue Anderson has also written a book about her Little House experiences but, like her presence on set, it doesn’t allow the reader to look too deeply into her life.
Because most of my scenes were filmed with the children in and around the schoolhouse, it took me some time to get to know the adult members of the cast.
When I started working with Karen Grassle, I felt like a complete bumpkin around her. She had earned not one but two degrees at U.C. Berkeley (my sister Barbara’s alma mater) in English and Dramatic Arts — which made my internal inadequacy alarm bells ring. She had also done a broad range of theater from Shakespeare both in the U.S. and in England to a stint on Broadway. The only thing we had in common really was that she’d taken part in the summer program in 1961 at Pasadena Playhouse.
Where my little heart had always been with film and television, Karen was a theater person — so much so that she has talked publicly about the fact that she was almost totally unfamiliar with U.S. television. In early 1974 she’d just come back from doing Shakespeare in England and her agent called, saying that Michael Landon from Bonanza was putting together a show based on Little House on the Prairie and Karen had to ask who Michael was — being unclear which character he had played on the show.
She took her work seriously, was always prepared, and managed to look lovely and even elegant in the plain palate of costumes and make-up the producers gave her character. You can actually see much of her personality on screen as there wasn’t a huge distance between Karen and her character in terms of stamina, smarts, and focus. In other ways she’s very different — more outspoken, a better advocate for herself, and more adventuresome.
She was terrific as Caroline Ingalls and she and Michael always had excellent chemistry on screen. Unfortunately in real life, Karen and Mike didn’t always get along. He would tease her without mercy for being serious-minded and I think she got tired of not only his joking around but of the easy-breezy approach he took to acting in general. Mike was an actor who did not seem to sweat at all in terms of his craft. Time and time again I saw him joshing and joking around with the crew, drinking vodka out of a coffee mug in the middle of the morning, and moments later he’d be in front of the camera as Pa with tears streaming down his cheeks in a scene about a dying colt or some disappointment suffered at Christmastime.
I had heard that when Mike and the producers were casting key roles for the show, the role of Caroline Ingalls very nearly went to Hersha Parady, who would have made the part her own, perhaps a bit earthier, finding little comedic touches, a bit like Mike really. Hersha landed a part later in the show’s run as Alice Garvey, married to Merlin Olsen’s character, Jonathan Garvey.
I have to say that one of the things that worked well with Mike and Karen were in fact their differences. There’s nothing more boring than watching two characters who are too much alike. Sparks often happen in that space between two actors where there’s friction.
One of the other differences between the two was that Karen — and she’s talked about this publicly as well — thought the show was a bit too lightweight in its exploration of themes such as family, marriage relationships, the harshness of prairie life, and so on. She wanted the show to be grittier, as she said once in an interview, adding that at one point she felt like the show was “Let’s Pretend on the Prairie.” She says she’s come to see it differently with time but it’s a legitimate point and gets to a tension that exists any time you produce a show intended for a very broad audience.
“Country Girls” is a good example. On one hand it took a look at what it’s like to be illiterate with Laura’s embarrassment about her inability to read. It also revolves around issues of social class, a theme the show would return to again and again both dramatically and with a sense of humor thanks to Nellie and Harriet Oleson lording their supposed aristocracy over the Ingalls family and other townspeople.
At the same time a fairly rich vein of fantasy runs through the episode with its portrait of idealized family life. Laura is shown as adoring Miss Beadle and of course her mom. At one point she’s at the dinner table and she says to Pa, “Miss Beadle is the most beautiful woman in the world.”
Then Mike shoots his eyes in the direction of Karen and Half Pint takes the hint and adds, “Next to Ma, of course.”
In the meantime Caroline Ingalls is looking over that costly length of blue fabric she purchased at the mercantile to make herself a nice dress — and let’s be honest, doesn’t Ma deserve to have at least one nice thing? Ultimately though, in a generous change-of-heart — because she’s the perfect parent — she uses the fabric to make dresses for her two girls instead.
The real fantasy bit though comes later in the episode when Laura enters an essay writing contest at the school to prove she’s up to the task of reading and writing. In a big moment in front of the whole town Laura reads her essay in which she lavishes rich praise on her mother for her self-sacrifice, hard work, constant attention, and loving kindness.
It is a moment that brings tears to the eyes of Ma and Pa Ingalls. And no doubt to many parents watching because who wouldn’t — at least secretly — love to have that moment when your child entirely on their own, unforced, and un-coached steps forward to declare in amazing and eloquent detail how fantastic you are in front of everyone you know.
In the real world, it’s pretty unlikely that a nine-year-old would take that kind of notice of what mom or dad does for them, much less trumpet for all the world to hear, unless heavily prompted. And probably bribed with cookies and chocolate milk. Not because they’re bad kids but because in reality children take their parents for granted because they’re mom and dad — and they just naturally do mom and dad things. Just like the sun rises and grass grows and water is wet.
So there’s the show — reality and fantasy spun together in a way that millions of people have found very appealing.
Ultimately Karen — and everyone else — knew that it was Mike’s show and he would produce it the way he wanted to. I think everyone in the cast agrees today that he worked some magic in terms of touching a lot of hearts. Something we did not always see at the time and really wouldn’t know until years, and in some cases, decades later.
When you’re in the middle of a show like that — which is happening within the swirl of your actual life — you don’t always think about the larger life of the show. What it’s saying. How it’s affecting others. You’re doing your job, playing your part, trying to sit in the right chair, get into the moment while hundreds of lights are dangling over your head and the all-seeing eye of the camera is staring you down.
While I initially found Karen intimidating, she turned out to be wonderful to work with and always ready with an act of generosity. Because of her starring role on the show, NBC sent a car to her house to pick her up in the morning on days when we were shooting in Simi Valley. Since she was the only one in the vehicle, she was kind enough to offer me an open invitation to jump in alongside her. I’d get to her house at 5 a.m., and we’d ride out to the set together. It was a great way to arrive at work much more relaxed and ready to go. The only issue was then the night before I could tell myself that since I didn’t have to drive to the movie ranch I could have four or five extra drinks. Those morning drives were often accompanied by a brutal hangover.
Karen was one of the few cast members from Little House that I hung out with outside of work, having dinner occasionally with her and her boyfriend at the time, who I knew as Tuie, but discovered later went by William Kinsolving on the covers of his novels.
Another one of my favorite people on the Little House set, and one I also spent some memorable time with, was Katherine MacGregor, who was brilliant at playing the preening, self-centered, peacock Harriet Oleson, the proprietress of the Walnut Grove dry goods store.
Katherine’s background, like Karen’s, was largely in theater and she brought an almost academic seriousness to her work. She’d gotten her start in New York as a dance instructor in the 1940s and went on to work steadily in regional theater and on Broadway. By the start of Little House her film and television resume included a small, uncredited role in the Elia Kazan film On the Waterfront, and then a smattering of guest roles on TV shows including Mannix, All in the Family, and Ironside.
At some point in the series I was having a respiratory problem and decided to do what you did in the ‘70s, which was to go to a health farm; Katherine and I thought it’d be fun to go together. She was a great aficionado of health spas with a special preference for The Golden Door in Escondido. The place we went on this trip was down near San Diego called Hidden Valley Health Spa (or something like that). We drove down and spent five days at this place sharing a room, which is when I discovered Katherine was a devout Hindu. She didn’t make a big deal about it but it was an important part of her life. In our shared room she set up a little shrine with a candle where she’d meditate each day.
Meditation was also part of our daily regime at the health farm as was eating almost entirely tasteless vegetarian food. After a day or two we got such a strong craving for flavor she and I hiked up to a garlic farm that we found nearby and did a little surreptitious harvesting. We took back these huge garlic bulbs that had a delicious, delicate flavor and soon everyone at our table was clamoring for a slice or two.
Every day the health farm staff had us walk barefoot through green grass, then through a trough of cold water, then a trough of sand, and finally back across on the grass. All of this was to stimulate our feet.
So Katherine and I got our feet stimulated, foraged for garlic, and laughed a lot on that trip. The whole thing was so ridiculous, but because I was with her it was a hoot.
You really couldn’t find someone more different than the character she played. I found her to be such a serene soul, very warm, funny, and unpretentious.
I learned too that she was also so kind to her fans. Even though she was in one of the top shows on television, there she was listed in the Hollywood phone book. Fans would call her up at home and she’d chat with them for hours.
She loved playing Mrs. Oleson and threw everything she had at the part, physically and emotionally. Once the show was over she says she just felt wrung out. She didn’t do any more television or film, instead she got involved with a children’s theater company in Hollywood and moved into a little apartment on Vine St. across from her beloved Vedanta Society, a Hindu temple and worship center.
I have a feeling that Mike secured so many of his actors from the theater world — Karen, Katherine, and Richard Bull, who played Mr. Oleson — because they were so solid and so right-on-the-money. At the same time a television audience wouldn’t associate them with any other previous TV roles or shows.
Even those of us with long backgrounds in TV and film were not, in the minds of a general audience, associated with any other characters or shows. Although someone like Dabbs Greer, who played the Reverend, and whose TV and film credits went back to the late 1940s, or Kevin Hagen, playing Doc Baker, who’d gotten his start in the 1950s, were at most only vaguely familiar faces.
Ultimately this approach to casting accomplished a few things. First, Mike got us pretty inexpensively by Hollywood standards. (Mind you, these were the biggest and most consistent paychecks of my career.) But even Kevin Hagen said publicly once that they “got us cheap.” The second thing is that since none of us brought any identification with other shows or films, it was easy for the audience to see us more purely as characters in the world of Walnut Grove. For example, you didn’t look at Mr. Oleson and say to yourself, “He’s good here but he was great in My Favorite Martian” or anything like that. Finally, and I’m not trying to be snarky by saying this, it ensured that Mike was the star of the show — though it was a billing he would eventually share, quite comfortably, with Melissa Gilbert.
The show, it should be said, was Mike’s from start to finish — every piece of it. On that first day at the costume department, I realized that all the costumes were new, nothing had been borrowed from any previous film or TV production as is a common practice especially with period pieces.
Later I realized that Mike allowed none of the Little House costumes to be sold or rented to any other productions. He didn’t even want anyone to use the outdoor sets. In the last episode of the show, he actually blew up Walnut Grove. (I’ve never watched that episode and never will — there’s no way I want to see a place that precious to me destroyed.)
The crew was even his, in a sense. They were completely devoted to Mike. Nearly all of them had come with him from Bonanza and would eventually follow him to Highway to Heaven. They were all Western guys, good with horses, expert builders, comfortable and effective working at a fast pace, and they liked to drink and cuss and play pranks and do, well, guy stuff. I got along really well with them because they reminded me of my dad’s drinking buddies, like the man who owned the local chicken hatchery or ran a Yuba City plumbing company.
Mike was very much the leader of this troop of cowboys and most of the time Victor French, who played the mountain man Mr. Edwards and who directed a lot of episodes, was right there in the mix. And yet in the middle of this testosterone funhouse Mike also managed to, in my opinion, create a new kind of masculinity on television.
Charles Ingalls was tough and hard-working, he was quick to defend his family and his town. Remember when he got the crap beaten out of him in “Bully Boys?” He was a fighter who wasn’t afraid of taking a hit.
Being a good dad was important to him. He had fun with his kids. He would listen to them and tried to answer their questions. He was patient. He cared about not just their physical well-being but their feelings. He was fair and optimistic.
Pa wasn’t a drinker, didn’t swear, didn’t gamble, didn’t even flirt with other women, much less alley-cat around with them. He adored his wife, his kids, his house, land, horses, his town, his profession, going to church, his fiddle, and Christmas.
He didn’t hesitate to say, “I love you,” or to hug, hold hands, or cry. Lord, Pa cried all the time. And yet Mike had come from the same world I had — raised by those tough-as-nails parents who’d grown up in the Depression and had kicked ass in World War II. Boys didn’t cry. Boys didn’t hug or express “girly” emotions. That was unmanly and weak.
Mike totally broke that mold.
Mike said you could be loving, funny, sentimental, silly sometimes, emotional — and yes you could cry. And still be a man.
Had television ever seen a guy like this before?
Fred MacMurray on My Three Sons and Ward Clever of Leave It to Beaver were both cardigan-wearing, pipe-smoking, problem-solvers, who loved their families but were both a bit aloof and untouchable. Andy Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show was a good listener, a great dad, and was insightful in the ways of the human heart but even he didn’t have the emotional openness and availability of Charles Ingalls. Perhaps closest was my friend Ralph Waite, as John Walton, Sr., on The Waltons. Even so, no one came close to the shiny eyes or outright tears down the cheeks of Mike Landon as Pa.
He was like the embodiment of the Robert Frost poem “A Door with No Lock” — there were no barriers between Charles Ingalls and his emotions.
The thing that amazes me is that Mike seemed to know how to maintain a balance between being a bona fide TV hunk and the greatest dad ever. He managed to be sexy and yet an upright citizen. Those tears always seemed earned and were a reflection of the viewer’s own emotions.
People ask me all the time, what was it like to work with Michael Landon. The truth is it was a lot of things.
I admired him for so many attributes — his ability to create, shape, and execute a story that millions of people could relate to. His gift for creating moments on screen that — even if they crossed the line into pure fantasy — rang true and made emotional sense.
He was always looking for ideas, always had a legal pad with him jotting down notes. In fact, I gave Michael an idea for an episode in season two based on my godmother, Pauline, who had been the only teacher in the 1930s in Ft. Bragg, California, a lumber town. A lot of the older boys in the area would work part of the year with their fathers in the lumber business and part of the year they would attend school. It was a difficult transition for everyone. These boys, who were used to sawing, hauling, and milling logs, weren’t always happy about being made to sit at desks and learn the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
One night some of the older boys decided to have fun terrorizing her by hurling rocks at the door of the schoolhouse while she was inside feeling trapped, unsure what would happen to her if she tried to leave. Life as a pioneer teacher was tough and the everyday challenges weren’t always pretty.
I could tell Mike liked the story idea because after I told it to him, I watched him go to work on that yellow legal pad, writing very quickly, outlining the basis for an episode that would be called “Troublemaker.”
As a writer Mike always worked at terrific speed. It seemed like the words he wrote in longhand couldn’t ever come out of the pen fast enough to keep up with his thoughts. The dialogue he wrote always had great rhythm and music to it and even though we were playing characters from 100 years in the past, the lines always fell so easily out of me. I don’t ever remember having a moment thinking, “Wait, this doesn’t make sense” or “This doesn’t work” or worse, “Miss Beadle would never say this.” The dialogue matched the character and the situation. Mike never overplayed the script, never tried to show off as a writer. It was all clear, clean, and direct. And because he was running the show, if dialogue could ever be cut and the scene played better for its emotion without it, that’s where he would always go.
The episode Mike created from my godmother’s experience remains one of my favorites because we got to see so many sides of Miss Beadle. The way Mike structured the final televised version the townspeople — mainly Mrs. Oleson — decide that Miss Beadle isn’t up to the task of managing a classroom with older boys in the backbenches. The trouble that’s brewing is that with the end of harvest even more older boys from outlying farms will return to the schoolhouse and God knows what will happen then.
The school board decides that a man would be better suited to handle the classroom management situation and they vote to fire Miss Beadle. As she is not present at the meeting, it’s up to Pa to deliver the news.
We see Miss Beadle waiting for the verdict in what appears to be a small, pretty boarding room seated on her fancy brass bed reading a book.
When Pa knocks, she opens the door and there he is, his face filled with regret and she already knows the news. He lets her know that the vote was not unanimous. There are tears gleaming in his eyes.
Victor French, who was not only a tremendous actor but one of my favorite directors on the series, took me aside after a take or two filming this scene and gave me a great note. He said quietly, “Don’t let him see you cry.” It turned out to be a moving way for the audience to see both Eva Beadle’s strength and her vulnerability at the same time.
So the unthinkable happens — Miss Beadle leaves the school, much to Laura’s regret, and is replaced by the imposing Hannibal Applewood, played by Richard Basehart, who had such a great, powerful voice and presence. Richard had been in movies going back to the 1940s such as Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, La Strada, and Moby Dick. He’d even played Hitler. Well, he certainly brought a touch of the Third Reich to Walnut Grove, focusing his sadism and ill-will on Laura Ingalls, punishing her by making her fill the chalk boards with spelling words, slapping her hand with a ruler (twice!), and even expelling her from school — all for crimes she had not committed. Well, you don’t treat Half-Pint like a juvenile delinquent and not expect Pa to eventually open a can of whoop-ass. Which he does demonstrating the truth of the words “Beware the anger of a patient man.”
Miss Beadle is looking pretty good about now to the townspeople as well as the kids in the school — even the boys in the back who like to cause trouble.
The school board meets again and there is a showdown with Applewood in which he reveals himself, under questioning, to be a complete crackpot. They don’t get the chance to fire him because he quits. They bring back Miss Beadle and all is well in Walnut Grove once again.
Beyond his ability to put together the building blocks for a captivating story, something else I admired about Mike is how he valued efficiency. He’d never shoot anything he didn’t have to. Most directors will work their way through a scene getting a master shot and then shoot close-ups, a medium shot, a three shot, whatever, so the editors will have lots of footage to work with; it’s a kind of safety net should something be missing or if, say, a reaction doesn’t work well. Not Mike. He’d shoot a quick establishing shot and then move in for close-ups and other shots as needed. No extra footage, no safety net. He edited in his head all day as he went and I doubt he gave his editors much to do. Not a moment was wasted. He consistently came in under budget and every day — unlike any other show I’d worked on — we wrapped at 6 pm. He valued time with his family and friends — he wanted to have a life. He valued our time as well, which we all adored him for.
Years later I heard a classic Mike Landon story. He was guest starring on a show in the 1990s, I believe it was Touched by an Angel. And he grew restless and irritated by how slow the director was working. Without asking anyone’s permission, he grabbed some crew and went off and shot a bunch of second-unit material for the show. The director was, apparently, furious but was of course checkmated. NBC appreciated all of Mike’s extra, cost-saving work and it all ended up onscreen.
Having said all of these things, Mike was not a saint nor do I think he aspired to sainthood and would, I believe, balk at the level of glow-y virtuousness that is becoming his legend.
He could be a bit vain. The hairdressers were always at their wit’s end with what to do with Mike because he dyed his own hair at home — covering up the onset of gray with color out of a box. They hated the result. I suppose, though, if you’re Mike while you may be okay weeping in front of the crew you may not be as cool with them seeing you get your hair treated. That’s just my guess.
He did wear those wool pants pretty tight and if you’ll notice — as Alison pointed out in her book — whenever Pa gets injured, it’s never in the shins, it’s always his ribs. This necessitates the shirt coming off, bandaging, and sexy winces, while Doc Baker, tells him he’ll be fine in a couple of weeks.
I remember at one point maybe in the second or third season, the show was becoming popular in Europe, especially in France and Spain, and Mike was dragging his feet at going over to do publicity. While he was a big star here in the U.S., he wasn’t famous over there. Over there he was no more well-known than anyone else in the cast.
Beyond all those very normal traits Mike did, just once, let me know that he was up for a roll in the hay, if I was interested. It was the end of the day and I was gathering myself up to leave the set. I could tell he’d been drinking. And this was a time in his life between marriages so he wasn’t breaking any rules; maybe he was just seeing what a quickie here and there would be like. I don’t remember the exact words he used but it was specific enough to let me know what he had in mind and yet vague enough to let me wriggle out if I wished. I was shocked — there had been no lead-up, no hint in our past to suggest this was coming, no flirting. And it took what felt like a long time for my mind to process what exactly was happening.
I liked Mike and I know Mike liked me. He always called me “Beadle” on the set, which I enjoyed. But we didn’t hang out. We didn’t socialize on weekends. Ever. One time in the week before Christmas I happened to run into him in Beverly Hills where we were both doing holiday shopping. It was really fun to see him away from work — it was a totally different feeling from how we interacted on the set. He was very sweet asking what I was buying, whom I was buying it for, and all that. We walked together for a little way and that was that.
To Mike I was a chess piece that he moved around the Little House game board. I was an underling. An employee. Sleeping with the boss wasn’t my idea of a good time and I’ve never regretted that choice and I don’t believe he held it against me.
I don’t mean to be unkind by saying this. I mean to make the point that Mike — like all of us — was human. He worked in an industry in which sleeping around, at least in the ‘70s, was as remarkable as going out for ice cream. There was plenty of alcohol on the set and lots of guy-talk. The fact that this only happened once is probably more noteworthy than the fact that it happened at all. Context being everything.
Honestly I would think that, rather than being remembered as a saint, Mike would rather be known for his incredible work, his work ethic, his friendships, his jokes, and his devotion to his crew, his friends, and his family rather than being remembered for something false — that he lived some kind of idealized life that came with a halo.
In my personal life I was also grateful to Mike for casting me in the show, as it gave me house-buying income. While I’d loved my rented home in Topanga Canyon, the drive was killing me. With my Little House paycheck I was able to purchase a home in Beachwood Canyon located just below and to the left of the H in the famous Hollywood sign. It not only gave me homeownership but it positioned me minutes away from Paramount and the other studios.
To get there you had to drive way up the hill past lots of houses stacked practically on top of each other. I had a big backyard with a Jacuzzi and a sauna with a sun deck on top. In fact on the first night that the place was mine, before I’d even moved in, I took my Corgi, Elmer, and a sleeping bag up to the deck over the sauna planning to spend the night up there just soaking it all in — a girl and her dog. Elmer had less dreamy plans as it turns out. In the middle of the night he tore off barking like crazy at something, which set my heart racing. In the darkness I heard snarls, growls, hisses and all kinds of noise and then came the acrid, overwhelming, sickening stink of skunk.
It was something like two in the morning. I didn’t have a single towel, blanket, scrub brush or anything in the house. I had to pack Elmer up, take him back to Topanga and give him a bath in tomato juice.
Still. It was pretty cool to finally own a home and I owed it all to Miss Beadle and Mike Landon.
Toward the end of my run with Little House, Mike came up to me one day with two photographs — headshots of two different male actors. He asked, “Which one would Miss Beadle marry?”
This was in preparation for an episode I still get lots of wonderful fan reaction for called “Here Come the Brides,” which aired December 5, 1977. In it Miss Beadle is swept off her feet by a sweet, handsome pig farmer named Adam Simms. At the same time Nellie Oleson, now in her late teens, falls in love with his son Luke, a strapping country boy who goes about in overalls and bare feet. Mrs. Oleson’s full powers of outrage and disgust are given full vent (Katherine was never better).
I looked at the two photos of the actors in Mike’s hands and saw that one of them was Josh Bryant, my long-time friend from Pasadena Playhouse. Of course I picked him.
After all the years of knowing Josh, it was the first chance we’d had to actually work together.
Josh and I rehearsed our scenes away from the cast and crew and were able to fall into those moments so easily. It was a lot of fun and I think that real friendship shows up on the screen.
As with most episodes the two storylines mirror each other. The relationship between Adam Simms and Eva Beadle (yes, Adam and Eva) is reflected in that growing between Nellie and Luke. Of course Nellie and Luke’s was comedic and fraught with peril, thanks to Mrs. Oleson.
Nellie invites Luke to the grand Oleson house for dinner. Thinking that Luke is going to be on their social level, Mrs. Oleson puts on a fancy spread and ensures that the entire family is dressed in their best. When Luke shows up in their doorway with his shaggy hair, overalls, and big, old bare feet — the very archetype of the sort of hayseed she despises — Mrs. Oleson cannot mask her revulsion and alarm.
Nellie — her Nellie — falling for a hick?!?!
The sky is falling.
Meanwhile I got to shoot a fun scene with Josh out at the Simms pig farm. It’s one of the few scenes in which I got to pull up in my own little carriage pulled by my beloved Jack — he was my horse for the four years I was on the show. As I tug on the reins, slowing Jack, and pull into the farm, the horse goes out of frame, the carriage halts neatly, and I hop out.
The reason it halts is because Hal Burton, our horse wrangler, is standing off camera catching Jack and holding him in place. It makes me look like an expert.
A quick question though — where does Miss Beadle keep her horse and carriage? At her boarding house? And where is that boarding house exactly? Is it the one over Doc Baker’s office? Hmmm. Miss Beadle has secrets.
Adam greets me warmly in his understated way and we chat about Luke and Nellie a bit. Miss Beadle has trouble masking her attraction for this kind, thoughtful farmer. As she’s gathering up her skirts to go, Adam presents her with a gift: a smoked ham.
Well, ladies, I ask you — whose heart wouldn’t melt?!?
Later the two couples enjoy a picnic together near one of the movie ranch’s manmade ponds. Adam and Eva go on a little walk and Adam can’t hold back his feelings any longer. In spite of her advanced years (Miss Beadle is in her 30s after all), he asks her to be his wife. For a schoolteacher who was pretty sure the joys of marriage had passed her by, it’s a big moment.
Meanwhile Luke has proposed to Nellie but in an uncharacteristic moment of self-doubt, she says she needs to think about it.
She finds Miss Beadle on a swing — God, if this was a musical imagine the big number they’d be belting out just then. She asks the schoolteacher questions about love and comes around to the idea of not being quite the right age. Nellie naturally means being too young but Miss Beadle’s mind is on the other end of things — the idea of being too old. With conviction, Miss Beadle tells her that age should play no part in love.
Taking that bit of advice to heart, Nellie and Luke do the unthinkable — they elope.
When Nels and Harriet Oleson realize Nellie has run off with Luke, they grab a shotgun, hop on a horse, and ride like thunder for the Simms pig farm.
As the horse approaches the farm at a gallop you see Katherine slide off, pulling Richard Bull down with her. It’s a funny moment on screen however it was unrehearsed, not performed by stunt people, and not in the script. In fact Katherine got hurt pretty badly and they had to run her to a hospital. Richard, thankfully, was fine.
As the scene continues you’ll notice that Mr. and Mrs. Oleson approach the front door of the farmhouse filmed from behind. While it is indeed Richard Bull as Mr. Oleson, the woman you think is Mrs. Oleson is actually Ruthie Foster in Katherine’s dress and bonnet. The trick works because Katherine later recorded her dialogue and they dubbed it in. Ruthie did a great impression of Harriet Oleson’s physical mannerisms and it all works pretty seamlessly.
A few days later, when Katherine was up and around again, they filmed the remainder of her scenes.
I would guess that the physicality of the role, along with injuries like this eventually took their toll, leading her to retire from film and television when Little House was over.
While all that’s happening we see that Nellie and Luke have awoken a Justice of the Peace in the next town over in the middle of the night to marry them. He does so in his nightcap and then off they go to a hotel room where they awkwardly prepare for bed and presumably a pretty un-steamy night of amore.
Before that can happen though, the Olesons, with Miss Beadle and Adam Simms in tow, have tracked them down. Mrs. Oleson bursts through the door of the hotel room with Nels holding the shotgun.
Mrs. Oleson points at Luke and shrieks, “Nels, make her a widow!”
When Nels characteristically shrinks from her, simpering that he can’t shoot Luke, she grabs the gun and blasts a hole in the ceiling. Luke makes an escape in his long underwear.
Everyone ends up back at the Justice of the Peace where Mrs. Oleson demands that man who married the kids unmarry them. Which he does simply by tearing up the marriage certificate.
At this point Adam Simms turns to Eva Beadle and says while they’re there at the Justice of the Peace’s office, they might as well get hitched.
And they do and Josh and I share a lovely on-screen kiss.
For reasons I can’t remember, Bill Claxton, the director, wanted to get one more take of that scene, which is when Josh and I cooked up an idea.
We told the cinematographer that after Bill said ‘Cut,’ to keep the camera rolling. When he did, Josh and I kept kissing. And kissing and kissing and kissing. Until the whole crew was busting up. Every now and then we’d do stuff like this for “the party reel” — a collection of bloopers and pranks we’d show at a cast party. Usually it was moments when the set would fall over or someone would flub lines.
Josh stayed on for several episodes in Season Four as my husband and, as you know, things move quickly in Walnut Grove. Two months later Miss Simms (as everyone now called Eva Beadle) was pregnant and Caroline Ingalls learned she was pregnant too in the episode “A Most Precious Gift,” which first aired on my birthday, February 27, 1978.
There must’ve been something in the water.
Miss Simms starts to feel her contractions in the schoolhouse and hands over the classroom to Mary (who is old enough now to be acting as an assistant teacher) and promptly and without drama gives birth to a boy — Matthew Adam Simms. Fortunately he was a much healthier child than Spike, the quasi-human baby-creature I had with Jack Nance in Eraserhead.
After his stretch with Little House Josh invited me over for a party at his house, where I met his buddy Richard Dreyfuss. Richard and I had some chemistry and the next day he sent a limo over to pick me up so I could come over and play. What a fun guy to hang out with. Besides the fact that he’s devilishly smart, charming, and good-looking, we found we had a lot of mutual interests, such as sex, alcohol, and cocaine. Oh, and backgammon.
We both liked going to a restaurant/bar called Ports, which was located across from Goldwyn Studios, where we’d do cocaine (in the bathroom) and play backgammon all night long. It was a surprisingly popular combination at the time. One night I played backgammon forever with the composer Paul Williams and I cleaned him out — we played for money. When he’d run out of cash he finally gave me a ring off his finger. (A couple of months later his girlfriend called and asked if he could have it back — not sure why Paul didn’t make the call himself. Of course I returned it.)
I made a lot of friends at Ports, such as Nicholas Meyers, who wrote The Seven-Percent Solution and Coleman Andrews, who would go on to become the editor of Saveur magazine. Coleman wrote a great chapter on Ports in his book My Usual Table: A Life in Restaurants. In it he recreates the feel of the place in which he says the patrons you’d run into there were people “you’d last seen in Tangier.” You would see Francis Ford Coppola at one table, Andrews writes, and Rip Torn, Kinky Friedman or young Oliver Stone at another. If Nickodell, where I’d enjoyed memorable lunches with Bill Frawley, was Old Hollywood, Ports was New.
Richard Dreyfuss, you may recall, was having an amazing career stretch having filmed Jaws, The Goodbye Girl, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind one after the other.
Even while we were partying together, Richard had some interest in getting sober. It’s hard to keep all the plates spinning on a successful film career and fully dedicate yourself to the twin cause of drugs and alcohol. There simply aren’t enough hours in a day. One time he checked himself into a well-known spa that had strict rules about vegetarian diet. He called me because he wanted me to try to sneak him a hamburger. So I bought a burger and drove over to this place; it was in a huge Victorian mansion in Venice Beach. I met him as he was coming down a grand stairway and as we were talking I heard a fruity, imperious voice boom down from the top of the stairway. It was Gloria Swanson, looking very much as she had in Sunset Boulevard, enunciating like a vampire, “R-r-r-r-r-richa-aaaaaard, who have you got there?”
Richard and I eventually drifted out of each other’s lives though I did see him once more a few years later when he invited me to an event to hear people talk about getting sober — something that had transformed his life.
At the time, I was happy to go, assuming that Richard simply wanted to spend time with me. My friend Jeanne Field pointed out to me in her blunt fashion, “It wasn’t a date, Charlotte, it was an alcohol recovery meeting.”
It never occurred to me that he had perhaps invited me along because he thought sobriety was something I could benefit from. I just thought he had a thing for me.
Jeanne was still busy, as always. She’d given up running Everybody’s Mothers in Topanga and had moved on to various other projects including a short-lived television show called TVTV, a sort of experimental guerilla comedy program that was way ahead of its time, using techniques like fake news and documentary style that would go on to be staples of comedy later on.
She worked with a bunch of great young comedic actors on the show, including a guy named Bill, whom I only vaguely remember from TVTV. Unfortunately the show only lasted a short time, less than a full season, and everyone went their separate ways. Bill ended up going back to New York for a part on a TV show that he’d gotten.
A few months later though he was back in town and Jeanne and Bill and I ended up going out for the night — went to Ports and then decided to head to a dance club in Hollywood. When we arrived I let out a groan. It was a really hot club and the line to get in was long. I thought we should go somewhere else — it would take forever to get in. But Bill was feeling confident and took us up to the front of the line where the bouncer recognized him. We got right it. Well, that was pretty cool. I made a mental note to check out the show he was on, as I’d not yet seen it.
The three of us had a great time and at the end of the night Bill decided to go home with me. Rather than Jeanne. I could tell she was annoyed and hurt by this; I didn’t think it was a big deal.
I liked Bill. He wasn’t conventionally handsome but he was a lot of fun, very smart, and sexy in a way all his own.
The next day was Sunday and I wanted to go to Tim’s weekly soccer game. Bill said he’d see me there and took off in his car. I put on my soccer clothes and drove out to the field at UCLA expecting that all the fun of the night before would carry on into this morning. Once I got to the game though, it was like I didn’t exist. Bill and Jeanne hung out at the sidelines together and talking and laughing, having a lovely old time. I could tell Jeanne was still mad at me and she wouldn’t look in my direction or speak to me. And Bill didn’t give me the time of day. It was like he’d never seen me before in his life. I was crushed.
And now I was mad at Jeanne.
For the first time since we’d met — after rooming together on and off in Topanga Canyon, working together at Everybody’s Mother and The Liquid Butterfly, after all the men we’d slept with practically at the same time — now this. Now this one guy comes along and suddenly we’re not speaking to each other anymore.
The angry silence between us lasted about three weeks. Which was just dumb. Finally I saw Jeanne at a party and thought, “This has to end.”
I walked up and gave her a hug.
“I miss you,” I said.
She said she missed me too and we both cried a little bit.
“No guy is worth this,” I said.
Not even if Bill was a guy the rest of the world knew as Bill Murray from a show I finally got around to watching called Saturday Night Live.
Back on the Little House set, another of my favorite co-stars was Victor French, who played Mr. Edwards. A lot of fans never got to see past the bearded, backcountry, yee-haw charm of the character he played to know what a passionate and fine actor he was.
In 1959 French had worked with Leonard Nimoy, Richard Chamberlain, Vic Morrow, and others to found a nonprofit theater company in L.A. called Company of Angels, which offered Off-Broadway style productions in the intimate setting of a 99-seat theater. (It’s still open today and is the oldest repertory theater in Los Angeles.) He was also a private acting teacher with a great reputation. More than anything though, he was a big, sweet, funny, loveable teddy bear of a guy.
Victor was very much inside the Mike Landon and crew frat group, and he wrote and directed quite a number of episodes. The two had a big falling out later in the run of the show when, without Mike’s blessing, Victor left to star in his own sitcom called Carter Country. You can’t blame Victor for taking a shot at some more income and giving his star a bit of a boost.
But Mike was pissed off and felt betrayed and he wrote Mr. Edwards and his family entirely out of the show.
Unfortunately for Victor, Carter Country did not do well in the ratings and after two seasons, it was history.
He and Michael patched things up and Mr. Edwards and his family miraculously reappeared in Walnut Grove. Well, all but one — Radames Pera had played Mr. Edwards’s adopted son John Sanderson. When Radames heard the news of Victor and the Edwards family coming back to the show he naturally saw it as a return for his character as well. He drove over to Paramount to reestablish contact with the production and as he was walking onto the lot he ran into another actor, who greeted him with the words, “Hey how you doing? We just buried you!”
His character was dead and Radames was collateral damage of the Michael-Victor falling out.
Unfortunately for Victor, it wasn’t the only relationship shake-up he would face while shooting Little House. At home he was dealing with the end of his marriage with his wife Julie and was absolutely devastated by the divorce.
I knew it was hard on him but I had no idea until out of the blue he called me one night at home. Poor guy, it was clear how torn up he was. I told him to come over to my house in Beachwood Canyon. We sat up for a long time drinking, talking about marriage, divorce, and life. And he ended up spending the night. Which was the start of an occasional thing between us. Usually Victor would call and say he was having dinner with one of the producers, Kent McCray and his wife, and would I like to come along? We’d go out, have a good time and he’d stay over. It was never a romance — I was never after him — I simply adored him. We had a lot of fun together — how could you not with Victor? Sometimes we’d lie in bed and joke about what fans would say if they found out that Miss Beadle was hooking up with Mr. Edwards.
Though I never drank during a day of filming, I showed up hung over more than once. I would ask my make-up guy, Whitey, if he could put make-up on my private life too. The drinking ritual I had on Little House was as soon as they were finished with me for the day, whether we were in Simi Valley or at Paramount, I would head to the prop truck where the bar was always open. I finished each day with a belt of vodka and would then head home for more.
Alcohol did get me in trouble a few times during this era, though. In mid-1977 I landed a role in a TV movie called Murder in Peyton Place, which was shooting during the same week I was scheduled on Little House. My part was small in that particular episode — I was only supposed to appear in a Walnut Grove church scene to satisfy my contract — so I asked Mike if I could get out of that week’s shoot and he had no problem with it, so off I went.
The night before I was supposed to appear before the Peyton Place cameras I was at home drinking rum-and-cokes and snorting cocaine (as one does), when I was overcome with the need to move my television from one side of the room to the other.
This was a big TV set I’d gotten out of the blue the Christmas before. Mike Landon often cooked up a surprise for the cast each year of one kind or another. One year we all got special Little House on the Prairie belt buckles, all specially made for us. I wish I knew where mine was today! The following year the show must’ve been doing well because just as shooting ended on Christmas Eve, a truck pulled up stacked with television sets for adult members of the cast.
Not bothering to take off my high heel wedges, I hefted the bulky thing, which must have weighed somewhere around 50 lbs., and I tottered around the room. A heel went sideways and I fell backward. As the TV came down with me, a corner drove into my forehead just between my eyes. I think I must have passed out for a little bit and when I came to I was drunk and bleeding everywhere and flying high from all the cocaine and knew that somehow I needed to get myself to an emergency room.
I called my financial manager, Syd Crocker, and he and his boyfriend came over and drove me to General Hospital, where I got five black, Frankenstein stitches in the middle of my face.
I dreaded showing up at 6 am the next day for my call time at the studio. As fate would have it, the train tracks in my forehead actually played second banana to a bigger disaster — our director had died at home the night before.
The whole production was put off for a few days in order to find a new director who could pull the project back into shape. This lull in production allowed me to go to a plastic surgeon who took out my original ER stitches — ouch — and do a much more skillful and subtle job of sewing me back together. Nevertheless, I ended up with a Harry Potter-like scar that I carry to this day.
Fortunately the first scene of me on the movie was a long shot and they covered my stitches with flesh-colored tape. Throughout the remainder of the shoot the hairdresser employed strategic use of my blonde bangs to cover the damage.
Murder in Peyton Place aired on October 3, 1977 in the time slot just after Little House on the Prairie. Another Charlotte Stewart double-header.
My last day shooting Little House was August 22, 1977. The final scene was at Paramount on the Oleson’s store set for the episode “I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away (Part 2),” which would air on March 13, 1978.
Mike made sure I had a good moment to end on.
Mary Ingalls, who had lost her sight in the first of this two-part episode, has been away at a school for the blind and has come home one more time before leaving Walnut Grove for good to go teach at a new school for vision-impaired children.
Eva and Adam Simms are also leaving Walnut Grove to find their fortunes elsewhere.
Mrs. Simms (the schoolmarm formerly known as Miss Beadle) comes into Oleson’s mercantile to say goodbye to Mr. Oleson, Pa, and Mary. She presses a cameo brooch into Mary’s hand, saying that it was one that her teacher had given her long ago.
She looks at Mary with tears in her eyes and says simply, “I watched you grow up. And I’m going to miss you.”
She turns to Charles Ingalls and Mr. Oleson. “I’m going to miss all of you.”
I give Mary a hug and then pull back to look around one last time.
The tears in my eyes were real. Those lines from the script were words from my heart. I had enjoyed being part of this ensemble so much, had treasured my time working at the movie ranch in Simi Valley and on the sound stages at Paramount — had loved the make-believe world of 1870s Walnut Grove.
And I had indeed watched Missy, Half-Pint, and Alison grow up. Their storylines had gone from fights in the schoolyard to first loves and marriage.
And then reality crashed the party.
When I walked out the door of the store the director, Bill Claxton, called, “That’s a wrap for Charlotte.” And there began the usual flurry through the teardown and set-up for the next scene.
And that was that. Four years with Little House had, for me, come to a close. Everything and everyone around me plunged forward at the usual, formidable pace. Costume and make-up people busy doing their thing. The crew hustling. Actors moving off to their trailers or to prep for what came next.
The Little House set wasn’t a place where there were a lot of parties so I had no expectations of Champagne and confetti. But a hug — a real hug, not a scripted one — would have been very welcome at that moment. Some well-wishes for the future. But I knew I couldn’t really expect that either. Everyone had a job to do — there were only so many hours in a day and there were always more script pages to get through and a million details to attend to. Putting together a show of that size and scope requires everyone’s complete focus at all times.
And it’s the nature of the business. People come and go. And sometimes you’re the one who goes.
I had been inside Mike Landon’s Little House typhoon since 1974 and in an instant I was now on the outside, it seemed.
A feeling of numbness came over me. As I walked toward the prop truck I realized that all the relentless forward movement of filming here would continue without me. A new actress was coming in to play the schoolteacher. The cast would continue to grow and change. I suppose in some way that’s hard to explain it was like the death of a dear friend.
I reached the prop truck, had my last vodka, and then left my pretty prairie dress and golden wig behind for a final time.
A person has to console themselves after a loss like this and I helped myself through this difficult time by flying to New York a couple of days later where I had a fling with a pilot I knew who flew with the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds. Like all the other pilots in the squadron he was in amazing shape and all the guys wore beautiful uniforms designed by Yves St. Laurent. Needless to say he was hot and it helped massage my feelings of loss.
New York was a place I liked to escape to although I generally got myself into various kinds of trouble. My friend Erica Spellman was and still is a literary agent there who would drag me around to various parties where, inevitably, I’d drink too much and engage in bad behavior and as a result our friendship, sadly, drifted apart. One party in particular comes to mind because I got the chance to meet writer-director Paul Schrader, an AFI alum, on whom I hoped to make an impression and didn’t. In the other room was director Martin Scorsese, who was having an asthma attack and was simply trying to breathe. Poor guy. I’d met Scorsese years prior when he was doing sound with Jeanne and Larry on the Woodstock documentary. I don’t believe I managed to make an impression on either occasion.
Once a friend had asked me to show the writer Anthony Haden Guest around Los Angeles — he’s the brother of Christopher Guest, who’s created so many great films such as Waiting for Guffman and Best in Show. Well, Anthony Haden Guest was a bit of a snob as far as I was concerned, although I was probably just intimidated by his writer-cred and his connections with British and American aristocracy and with his literary circles, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I was in New York once in the late ‘70s and Anthony had invited me to meet him for dinner. Feeling nervous, I had a drink or three before I went to the address he gave me, a brownstone which I assumed was his house, where I knocked on the front door. I was in for a surprise when it wasn’t Anthony who answered the door but his friend, the writer Tom Wolfe, wearing his signature white linen suit.
Tom, his wife, and Anthony Haden Guest and I sat around Wolfe’s place making conversation while I drank wine. We went to dinner at Elaine’s where I snozzled down a few cocktails and got to that very special place of intoxication that puts one on the dividing line between loss of inhibition and loss of consciousness. I knew that if I tried to excuse myself to the ladies room, I would trip over someone, probably Elaine herself, and make a complete ass of myself. Thus without lead-up or explanation I stood in the middle of dinner, walked out of the restaurant in an alcohol-induced zombie state, hailed a cab, and returned to my hotel. Anthony Haden Guest never called to inquire about my whereabouts or well-being nor did I call to check in with him. That was that.
Except that it wasn’t exactly. A few years later I was lying in bed in Los Angeles reading Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities and came across a scene in a restaurant that was pretty clearly Elaine’s (though given another name) in which a priggish writer with three names is at dinner with a friend when the three-named writer’s date who is drunk gets up and leaves without explanation. She is described as “a humorless little American dimwit…” and the writer is humiliated in front of his friends.
My contribution to great literature. You’re welcome.
Remember Eraserhead?
Throughout my sojourn in 1870s Walnut Grove, Henry, Mary X, and Spike lived on.
My involvement with the film had ended at some point in the first half 1974 — in fact on a few occasions I would rush over from Paramount to AFI, where I would scrub off my Miss Beadle make-up and get prepped to inhabit the skin of Mary X. In terms of film sets and characters this represented two worlds that were about as far apart as you can get.
When David Lynch had shot everything with me that he needed, shooting and then editing continued on and off through late 1976. I may have my dates a little wrong since I wasn’t there but I continued to hear about the progress of the film through Doreen and Jeanne, who were both involved much longer than I.
After about the first year of production, David’s AFI grant ran out and he had less and less money to work with. Apparently he got some funds from his Dad and he built sheds around town to make money (Hollywood needs sheds — who knew?). Both he and Jack got a paper route, delivering copies of the Wall St. Journal in the small hours of the morning. If David was excruciatingly slow to set up a shot, he apparently exhibited lightning speed when it came to his paper route. It was supposed to take about four hours and he whipped through it in two. Jack only lasted a few weeks as a paperboy.
David secured financial help from actress Sissy Spacek, who was art director Jack Fisk’s wife (they had met while working on the Terrence Malick film Badlands). Sissy covered the cost of film stock, without which the movie would not exist. Jack Fisk helped pay for things out of his own pocket too.
At one point David moved in with Jack Nance and Catherine Coulson and at another he was actually living on the Eraserhead set, making the bed the Henry and I shared his own.
Eventually, even though Catherine and Jack divorced, they stayed friends and her relationship with David remained strong.
When funding ran short, Catherine pitched in financially with wages from her waitressing job at a restaurant in Beverly Hills called Barbeque Heaven. She also went around and raised money from friends, family, and even her dentist.
Sometimes David would come to the restaurant where Catherine worked and she says he’d do odd jobs, like repair the roof, in exchange for a sandwich and fries.
It was clear, to me and I think to all of us from early on, that not finishing the film was not an option for David. And not simply finishing it but completing it in a way that remained true to his vision. After the AFI money was gone I’ve heard him say that he actually considered building miniature sets and creating a small Henry figurine and filling in unfilmed portions using stop-motion animation. He’d successfully mixed live action and animation with some of his early experimental films and I could see him making something like this work.
It was a long, challenging haul for David and I have nothing but admiration for that kind of unbreakable will, that I believe marks a lot of true artists.
The thing, I think, that has made the film an enduring success is that you can’t pin it to any particular era. Given the style of filmmaking it could have been made any time between the 1940s and today. It doesn’t look “’70s.” Unlike a lot of my friends — the guys from Crosby, Stills and Nash for example — David wasn’t a hippie. He wasn’t especially political either in life or in his work.
The thing you do see in his films is the return, over and over again, to certain ideas, images, and sounds. The industrial hiss and clang so much in the background of Eraserhead is heard in The Elephant Man. The chevron carpet that you see in the “red room” in Twin Peaks makes its first appearance in the lobby of Henry’s building (albeit in black and white).
A great example, that a lot of people don’t know about, is the connection I see between David’s 30-minute film The Grandmother and Eraserhead.
David showed me The Grandmother before we started filming Eraserhead and it’s tremendously odd and idiosyncratic but I really liked it. I was already a fan of a lot of the avant garde film coming out of Europe and what I saw in The Grandmother helped me see where David might be headed.
What I didn’t realize until much later was the amount of connective tissue between the two films. Like Eraserhead, The Grandmother starts with lots of birth imagery, much of it animated — two adults emerge from the leaf-covered earth and then a boy of about 11, all of whom are pale white with Kabuki style makeup. The parents, if that’s who they are, are primitive. They grunt, growl and bark. The mother has seizures. The boy, by contrast, always wears a black suit, white shirt, black bowtie and we see him over and over in isolation in a small, dark bedroom with only a bed with gray-white sheets, a dresser and a few stick-dry plants. Sound familiar? It’s like Henry Spencer’s boyhood.
In his parents’ bedroom the boy finds a bag labeled “Seeds.” He finds a large one he likes, piles dirt on his parent’s bed, puts the seed in and waters it. Something like a large potato grows and grows until it gives birth — very wetly — to another person, also dressed in black, also with Kabuki makeup — a woman looking to be in her late 60s. At last there’s someone in the boy’s life like him. She’s loving and sweet to him in total contrast to his parents who are like wild dogs.
There are shots in which the grandmother’s white face with its bright eyes and large round cheeks I swear she looks like the woman in the radiator without the skin disease.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into this but The Grandmother feels a lot like a prequel to Eraserhead and anyone who loves David’s films should check it out. It’s one of the many great extras on the Criterion edition of Eraserhead that came out a couple of years ago.
A few months before Eraserhead had its premiere in Hollywood in 1977, David showed a few of us an early cut. At that point the film was still about three hours long. David asked me what I thought and I said, “David, it’s like a toothache.”
“Swell!” he said, beaming, considering this an immeasurably high compliment.
Even so, he kept refining it and eventually cut quite a bit until the final version was just 89 minutes. Gone was a scene of Catherine Coulson tied to a bed being tortured connected to battery cables. Gone was a scene when Mary X’s parents force her to return to Henry and the baby. Also excised were things like Henry stroking a dead cat.
Good riddance. It was all extraneous. The final version holds together like a sonnet.
No one had ever seen anything like Eraserhead before; it was a film of enormous intelligence combined with visceral brutality, like an opera glove filled with organ meat.
Like all great art it can be viewed and understood in lots of different ways. It comes as close as I’ve ever seen to diving down into the dreamy subconscious with a camera and capturing it on film.
While I still can’t claim to understand the film, you can see David’s take on a lot of themes and influences. At the start when you see the diseased god-like “Man in the Planet” pulling the train-yard switching levers, for me that has the feel of Shakespeare. Like Macbeth, Henry finds himself caught in the machinations of fate — something outside himself, something supernatural, like Macbeth’s entire life being spun into a whole different direction by the Weird Sister’s prophecy (the word weird in Shakespeare’s time meant fate). Henry’s passive reaction to everything around him for nearly all of the film feels like Hamlet. And like Hamlet, that apparent inability to do anything turns suddenly into an act of gruesome violence at the very end.
There’s also an element of virgin birth. In the first minutes of the film a sperm-like creature (one of Catherine’s umbilical cords) seems to emanate from Henry’s head and then drops to the planet. Soon afterward it’s revealed that Mary X has given birth. When Mary’s mother corners Henry and demands to know if he and Mary had sex, both seem very confused by the question and neither of them actually admits to it.
There are elements of Frankenstein. Near the end, with lights blinking on and off and electricity sparking — like a mad scientist’s laboratory — Henry examines “the creature,” the thing that he created.
Henry finally reaches for a pair of scissors, cuts open the swaddling clothes that bind the baby (another infant Christ visual) and he finds that it has no skin and inside the wrapping is a salad of organs and mush. When he stabs the baby, its death becomes a transformation and seems to return to The Man in the Planet.
These are just a handful of images and ideas that the film brings to my mind but of course the beauty of it is that Eraserhead isn’t just a collection of literary symbolism and cannot be reduced to any one interpretation. It challenges you with its combination of familiar and alien, it images of disease, isolation, and desire. Yes, it’s influenced by Kafka and other writers and artists, but ultimately, Eraserhead is its own macabre, horrifying, wonderful thing.
For those who are reading this as fans of Little House on the Prairie, I completely understand why Eraserhead may not be your idea of a good time. It’s disturbing and dark. But I would like to suggest that Eraserhead is not just about bleak isolation, an exploration of the subconscious, and gross-out weirdness but in an important way, it’s about love.
I think Henry finds something — God knows what — to love in Mary X. In spite of her spasms, her agonizing awkwardness, and emotional brokenness, he wants to be with her. He loves her. And when Mary leaves him and Spike, he gingerly and tenderly tries to care for the baby — the ugliest and least loveable infant in all of movie history. He exhibits love and care for this creature that shows no ability to love in return.
To love the unlovely, to love the thing that cannot return love — in all major religions and philosophies, this is the highest form of love.
To me it’s no surprise that while David has long refused to discuss the meaning of the film, he has remained steadfast that this is his most spiritual work.
On release, Eraserhead caused a sensation. It got a big reaction at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It was polarizing. And audiences had a gut reaction that was either love or hate.
It joined Rocky Horror Picture Show as one of the top grossing midnight movies of that era. It showed every Saturday night for at least four years in L.A., New York, and other cities around the country. People would shout goofy instructions and encouragement to Henry and Mary up on the screen and audience members would dress like us and act out scenes from the movie while it was playing.
As you might expect, though, it was not met with universal praise. Variety called it “sickening” and “gory” adding: “Eraserhead consists mostly of a man sitting in a room trying to figure out what to do with his horribly mutated child.”
The New York Times called Eraserhead “…a murkily pretentious shocker” and added, “It runs for two hours but because of its excruciatingly slow pace and the under-lighting of all its scenes, it seems to be twice that long.”
Well, harrumph, harrumph.
One of the people who loved the film, however, was Mel Brooks, who was gearing up to produce The Elephant Man. Yes, Mel Brooks of Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. Mel hired David to direct The Elephant Man, which like Eraserhead was shot in black and white, featured a main character in a kind of terrible isolation, and contained some of David’s signature ominous background noises of machines hammering away somewhere two floors below.
My early prediction about his having no future as a director were, I am happy to say, completely off the mark. And you may quote me.