Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (17 page)

They just stared. Finally, Melissa recovered her composure and explained what happened. She said I had behaved like I was possessed, screaming at the top of my lungs—nothing in particular—just screaming. And throwing things. Rocks, curlers, everything. They had to dive for cover to keep from being hit. By the time I had gone back into the bedroom, they were all on the floor hiding under the furniture.

One of the girls had said, “Oh my God. What are we going to do? She
is
Nellie Oleson!”

Melissa told me they didn’t wake me for breakfast because they thought I might kill them. I assured them I wouldn’t but explained that it’s very, very dangerous to put foreign objects into the bed of someone with major PMS.

Fortunately, I was able to benefit from my PMS. I don’t know if the producers kept a calendar and charted my cycle, but miraculously, almost every one of the episodes where Nellie is at her most vicious, cruel, and obnoxious were shot while I was having my period. “Little Women,” the episode where I demand that god-awful black wig with curls? Yup. “The Music Box,” where I make the little stuttering girl cry? You betcha. “The Cheaters,” where I make my classmate Andy Garvey (played by Patrick Labyorteaux) steal the answer to the final exam from his own mother, who is subbing for Miss Beadle? Ouch. The one where Laura and I get into a fight over Almanzo and duke it out in the mud? That was a bad one. She’s lucky she lived.

That was one of our best fights, and Melissa and I loved it. It was the episode called “Back to School Part II,” in which Laura and Nellie fight over Almanzo. Laura, looking for a way to get out of her parents’ house, sets out to take the teacher’s exam and stupidly asks Nellie for advice on what to study. Nellie, not surprisingly, lies to her and almost totally ruins her chance at a teaching career. (Will Laura never learn?) Right before we started filming, the director told us, “There’s no sound, so don’t worry about saying anything.” They were telling this to the wrong girls. When we realized that nobody in the viewing audience would be able to hear us, we instantly knew what we had to do. Melissa grabbed me, threw me down in the mud, and screamed, “Take
that,
you BITCH!” I came up yowling and thumped into her full force, shouting, “Oh yeah?
FUCK YOU!
” We screamed and swore and called each other every filthy name in the book and beat the crap out of each other. We were laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe. And Melissa was strong! She was smaller than me, but a wiry little thing, and she tossed me around like I was a rag doll. At one point, she got me facedown in the mud in a headlock. Her other arm came around as I was screaming away, and as her hand came at my face, I saw too late that it was full of mud. She had grabbed a huge clot of filth and hit me with it square in the mouth.

People have actually asked me if that was “real mud.” I am perplexed by this; I did not know there was such a thing as fake mud. If they have fake mud, we did not use it on
Little House on the Prairie.
We only used live, genuine, organic dirt on our show. In Simi, along the road into town, there was a large sunken area. In the summer, it was a popular grazing area for cattle, a cow pasture, and in the winter rainy season, it quickly became a duck pond. Occasionally, when Nellie required a dunking, a hose was used to turn the hole into a large muddy soup. That was what we were fighting in that day, and if you watch the episode closely, you can see it happen. And at the end, when I’m screaming at Almanzo, “Look at me! I’m covered in DIRT!” you can see that I have said dirt between my teeth.

The set doctor was very concerned. He asked us if we had gotten any in our eyes. “My eyes?” I replied. “No, but I just swallowed a quart of it!” He said that wasn’t good. I did not get sick. I am apparently impervious to mud, duck shit, and cow shit. Melissa and I never worried about hurting each other during fights. We just had some kind of psychic choreography that allowed us to yell, “Go!” and start flailing away, without ever making real contact. Well, except once. It was this weird dream sequence in “The Fighter,” where Laura dreams about boxing with Nellie. We were outfitted in 1800s boxing gear, including gloves. Thinking they were making it safer for us, the prop men padded the gloves so that our hands weren’t really in them all the way. Instead, they were balled up at the base. Anyone who knows anything about fighting knows this is a terrible idea. We couldn’t tell where the ends of the gloves were by feel. So, sure enough, Melissa swung, meaning to miss me, and punched me right in the nose.

I could feel my nose bend. I really thought it was broken for a second. But it was okay, and we opted to put our hands the rest of the way into the gloves to prevent further injury. We knew we would have been safer if they had just let us fight bare-knuckled.

Someone I never did get to take a swing at (and would have liked to) was Melissa Sue Anderson. We technically had a match scheduled, but it was canceled at the last minute. It was one of the few times Mary loses it. Nellie suggests that Ma is having an affair with the handyman. In the script, Mary was supposed to actually hit me with her metal lunch pail, which would have hurt. Thinking ahead, the prop guys brought in a rubber one for this occasion.

Missy and I were in makeup getting ready for the scene, and we started “trash talking,” like a couple of TV wrestlers threatening their opponents. Melissa Sue turned to me and said, “I’m really going to hit you, you know.” She wasn’t smiling, and it appeared she might actually be threatening me. So I responded in kind: “That’s okay, because when I pull your hair,
I’m going to rip it out by the roots.
” And then I looked right at her and grinned.

When we got all the way down the hill, I got the impression that perhaps someone had called down on the walkie-talkie and warned them of our little “chat.” The director had dispensed with the entire lunch pail idea. Missy was now just to give me a simple slap, and I would take off. There would be no fight scene. Missy looked pissy that she missed the opportunity.

But
Little House
wasn’t the only war zone in my life. There was also school. At this point, I was a student at Hollywood High. Because of the demands of my job, I only attended classes sporadically, and eventually I managed to get into the “alternative school” program, which meant I didn’t really have to show up at all. I was quite good in some subjects. I loved home economics. It was all about cooking, and if I could get it as my first-period class, it meant free breakfast. Weirdly, one of my worst classes was French. It shouldn’t have been. I loved French and everything about France. But at Hollywood High, I had what may have been the worst French teacher on earth. He was an American, not a native French speaker, and it was a little unclear if he had ever actually been to France. Unlike my junior high teacher, who conducted the whole class in French, at least trying for a sense of immersion, Mr. Haig spoke English. And he didn’t always talk about French either. He spoke a lot about his personal problems. Sometimes he discussed other subjects, like history and literature.

Mr. Haig seemed to have issues with my being on TV. I know that sounds like a line: “Oh, boo-hoo-hoo, my teacher hates me because I’m a child star,” but this guy was a real character. I told him I would be out of school for a few days to film. I asked him for my assignments in advance, as was the rule, and about getting a make-up test for the exam that had been scheduled while I was working. He became very angry.

“Filming a TV show is not an excused absence,” he sniffed.

I told him that it was and handed him the form from the State of California explaining the whole process, thinking maybe he wasn’t familiar with it. That’s when he went bananas.

“I
know
it’s an excused absence in the State of California!” he shouted. “It is
not
an excused absence in
my
class. It is not an excused absence if you are
getting paid.
”

I was slack jawed. What was he talking about?

“I am most certainly not going to give a make-up exam to someone who is out of school
making more money than I do.
”

And then he went into a bizarre tirade about teachers in France. “Do you know how much teachers are paid in France? Do you? Teachers are respected in France, you know!”

I didn’t know what to do except back slowly out of the room. I went to the girls’ dean, with whom I had been told to talk if I had “any problems.” I didn’t know what on earth she would do with this, but I thought I’d take a shot. She was very understanding. She assured me, “Don’t worry about this. You just go on to your other class. I’ll deal with him.”

Then I ran into Radames Pera, who was not only a student at Hollywood High but was on
Little House on the Prairie
as well. He played John Jr., Mary’s gorgeous boyfriend. Michael had decided to postpone the whole plotline about her blindness indefinitely and let her become a romantic lead. Radames was supposed to marry her. Unfortunately, Melissa Sue hated his guts, refused to kiss him, and eventually he left the show. So, of course, that meant Michael had to go back to the old plotline and make her blind. The logical consequences of one’s actions or spiritual karma? You decide.

I, on the other hand, was crazy about Radames and could not believe Missy didn’t like kissing him. I seriously thought about asking her if I could stunt double for her. I would have been quite happy to lighten that part of her workload. Radames had no romantic interest in me, of course. But he was still very helpful when it came to Mr. Haig.

“Oh, he did exactly the same thing to me when I was in his class,” he said calmly.

“What?” I was amazed.

“He does that to all the actors. Did he give you the speech about ‘teachers being respected in France’?”

It turned out Mr. Haig indeed had done this over and over to many students with acting careers. The girls’ dean called him into her office, and the outcome was that he gave me my assignments and make-up tests. But no matter what I did in that class, good or bad, I never got a grade anywhere above a C–.

My other favorite class was “office service,” a totally useless class where we learned to operate all manner of completely out-of-date office machinery that hardly anyone used in the late ’70s—like a mimeograph machine and a switchboard. Only the biggest geeks took office service. That’s how I met my friend Gertrude. She had the little pointy glasses, got straight A’s, and was the only person I knew under sixty-five who wore sweater guards.

Gertrude was shy but very sweet. She didn’t like to talk about her family. One day we were talking about religion, and one girl said she was Catholic. I said we didn’t really have a religion at my house, and another girl explained the Jewish holidays. When we asked Gertrude what religion, if any, her family practiced, she seemed embarrassed and said, “Oh, we’re kind of different.” Everyone backed off and left her alone and went on to discuss another religion. The poor girl; we assumed they must be Jehovah’s Witnesses or something.

She had a geeky mom, a geeky dad, a geeky brother whom I already knew from school, and a geeky kid sister. They all wore trench coats and big, thick glasses, her dad’s and brother’s Buddy Holly–style black frames with masking tape on them.

While still in high school I had begun my foray into stand-up comedy. One night Gertrude came to see me and brought her entire oddball family with her. Afterward while chatting in the parking lot, my mother asked Gertrude’s dad what he did for a living. “Oh, I work at NASA,” he said excitedly. “Oh, how nice,” said my mother, trying to make conversation.

He went on about all the rocket ships and things he worked on, in very geeky detail. Then he added, “And I’m also high priest of my local Church of Satan.”

Come again? I thought I hadn’t heard him right, and my parents looked confused by this, too. He couldn’t have really just said that, could he? But he had, and he kept going. “Yes, my whole family are Satanists.”

And that’s when he got out the pictures. So help me God, he had wallet-sized photos of them all posing and smiling in black robes. “In fact, my daughter is the youngest child ever to be inducted into the Church of Satan. Here she is at her first black mass.”

My parents just kept glazed smiles through his spiel, not saying a word.

He finally wrapped up his happy tour of the underworld, and they all said good night and went home. There was the world’s longest silence.

Finally, my mother slowly turned to me and said, “And you thought
your
parents were weird!”

LITTLE HOUSE SHOUT-OUTS

I remember the first time I realized that
Little House
had become part of the fabric of our culture. I was fifteen years old and had gone to see the movie
Network
with some “regular” (non–show biz) friends from school.

For about an hour, I felt like a regular teenager, enjoying the anonymity of the darkened movie theater. And then one of the characters on the screen began ranting and raving at Faye Dunaway about the scheduling of her show. She was furious about being opposite hit shows with which she couldn’t compete in the ratings: “…and NBC’s got
Little House on the Prairie
!” she spits in rage.

My friends all turned and stared at me. I was so embarrassed I wanted to pull up the floorboards of the theater and jump in. I slumped down in my seat and cringed.

But I eventually realized there was no escape. I now know that when I watch TV, go to the movies, listen to music, there’s a pretty good chance someone will make a joke about
Little House on the Prairie
or Nellie Oleson. Once I finally gave in and accepted this phenomenon, I was able to beam with pride at the references—for example, while watching the episode of
Mystery Science Theater 3000
in which the show’s cohosts send up Michael Landon’s
I Was a Teenage Werewolf,
Servo says, “I think Nellie Oleson’s behind the whole thing!”