Confessions of a Prairie Bitch (4 page)

I also learned how to do drugs and get high. I understand that some people get through childhoods like this without using any substances at all. They must be a lot tougher than I am. I grabbed a break anywhere I could get it. Of course, the drugs weren’t for my benefit. Stefan was taking every substance known to man and didn’t want to “drink alone,” as it were. I learned to roll joints. I learned to smoke pot, but I would cough too much to hold it in. So he taught me to drink it in tea. That worked.

By this time, I was eight, and my brother was home all day. He was no longer working. After his show,
Land of the Giants,
was canceled in 1970, his voice changed, and he grew to over six feet tall. All fourteen-and fifteen-year-olds want to look older, but for a kid actor, that’s death. This freed up his time for other activities. School wasn’t one of them.

He’d long ago managed to convince everyone that he didn’t need to go to school like “regular people.” The whole business of dealing with teachers and other children, let alone doing homework, seemed impossible for him. It was a great relief to everyone when he got a series where he could be tutored on the set. The trouble arose when they weren’t filming, and he was expected to enroll in a school—somewhere, anywhere.

For a while my parents tried putting him in what was then the premier school for rich hippie parents in Los Angeles, Summerhill. The only decent thing he got out of that school was a cat. Really. The school cat was named Malcolm X because no one figured out, until it was too late, that Malcolm was really a female (basic biology being one of the many subjects outside of its core curriculum). Malcolm gave birth to seven kittens in our garage. I promptly picked out the cutest one and named it Bonnie after the movie
Bonnie and Clyde.
It died before its eyes even opened, and we buried it in the front yard as my brother played taps on his kazoo. So I got to pick another kitten, which I called Maude, and she lived for fourteen years.

Summerhill was a great school for Stefan, as they didn’t ask him to do anything, and he didn’t have to go if he didn’t feel like it. I found this fascinating and begged my parents repeatedly to take me out of public school and send me to this magical place.

All they said was, “Finish your breakfast, or you’ll miss the bus.”

So from the time I came home from school, until the time my parents came home, which some days might not be until the early evening, or all day during summer vacation, I was alone in this huge, rambling house on a hill with Stefan. And his friends. He had the room on the side of the house with its own entrance, so he and his friends simply came and went at all hours of the day and night as they pleased. They liked to have parties.

One day, when I was about eight, I walked into the kitchen and saw that someone had baked a cake. Now, this was unusual, as I was the only one who did any baking in that house. My mother certainly didn’t, my father only did stuff like that at the holidays, and besides, they weren’t home. My father taught me how to make scrambled eggs when I was five, and cooking became my great passion. By the time I was nine or ten, I could make anything: cakes, pies, Cornish game hens in orange sauce, whatever. And here was a great big chocolate cake and an enormous bowl of purple frosting. What with the lurid purple color, I quickly deduced this to mean my brother and his friends must be having another party. I decided to inspect their handiwork. The frosting tasted pretty good, sweet with a slight hint of peppermint extract. Just as I was having my second or third spoonful, my brother and one of his buddies walked into the kitchen.

I heard a gasp. I looked up, spoon still in my mouth, to see them both staring at me wide-eyed. The boy next to my brother was getting very pale and looked as if he might start crying. My brother remained calm. “Put down the spoon and step away from the frosting,” he ordered.

“What?” I said, my mouth full of frosting.

“Don’t…eat…any…more…
frosting
!”

I put down the spoon.

“Okay, how much frosting have you eaten?” he asked.

“I dunno, a couple of spoonfuls. I licked the beaters.”

At this point, his friend began to hyperventilate. He started whispering hysterically, “Oh, shit! Oh, shit! We’re going to go to jail, man! We’re going to go to jail!”

My brother turned to him. “Shut up” was all he said. The friend complied.

Then Stefan explained the situation to me: “We’re having a party. We made a cake and put LSD in the frosting. Since we calculated the correct dose to be about one slice per person, and you’ve just eaten several large spoonfuls—and licked the beaters, where most of the acid we poured may still be concentrated—you’ve just taken enough LSD to pretty much fuck up all of West Hollywood.”

His friend made a painful, gurgling noise and almost fainted.

“So what exactly does this
mean
?” I asked.

He smiled in a way I never liked to see. “It means you’re coming to the party.” I shrugged and followed him downstairs.

As they like to say in the drug books, “LSD’s psychological effects vary greatly from person to person.” Now, there’s an understatement. I was nowhere near as stoned as the other guests, who each had way more than one piece of cake, along with champagne, pot, and anything else they could get their hands on. At one point I asked for a glass of champagne, and someone protested that I was too young. My brother laughed and said, “She’s dropped more acid than all of you put together; what possible difference could it make now? Give her whatever the hell she wants!”

So I sat back, sipped my champagne, and watched the other guests. Some seemed to be enjoying themselves, chatting and laughing. Others were acting like people on acid in an antidrug film—sitting in the corner all freaked out, staring at their fingers. Someone even kindly gave me a balloon. I soon figured out that all of these people had been instructed that I was to be kept amused and happy at all costs, because if the kid freaked out, everybody was going to jail.

As soon as I realized the power I had, I began to mess with their heads as much as possible. “Let’s play Monopoly!” I shouted. If they didn’t look interested, I put on a face that indicated I might be about to lose it. “I really,
really
want to play Monopoly!” Then I sat back, smiling behind my champagne glass, while I watched a bunch of hapless stoners panic and scramble to find a Monopoly board. Why, there was fun to be had here after all!

The best was when I lost my balloon. It went over the side of the balcony. One big-eyed look from me, and three terrified, hallucinating young men were dispatched on a quest to find a balloon in the dark, in our huge, unlit, overgrown backyard. Mean? Sure. But these crazy bastards were giving drugs to small children. I figured they had it coming.

And where were my parents during this particular bout of insanity? Upstairs in another part of the house, paying absolutely no attention whatsoever. At one point, their dinner guest, a friend of my dad’s, actually came downstairs to see “what the young people were up to.” He didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. So my brother, grinning, gave him a piece of cake. And he ate it. He went back upstairs to watch TV with my father.

I heard later that he began to hallucinate, and he turned to my father and said, “Holy shit! There was LSD in the cake!” My father blithely denied the whole thing. “Oh, don’t be silly. They wouldn’t really be doing acid! You probably just ate a pot brownie.” Well, if he didn’t believe another grown-up, his own buddy, why ever should I think he would have believed me?

And people actually still ask me why I didn’t tell anybody anything.
Sheesh.

CHAPTER FOUR

SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE

LAURA:
Hard-working folks only smell bad to people who have nothing better to do than stick their noses in the air! Well, whenever you stick your nose in the air with me, Nellie Oleson, it’s going to get punched!

I
t was 1971. Somehow, I’d managed to survive the ’60s. I was nine years old and still being abused by Stefan; his sexual demands had only increased over the past three years. But now I was old enough to actually understand what it was he was asking me to do, and what it meant. If I didn’t like the situation before, I liked it even less now. I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do about it, though. There were no public service announcements on the TV advising “what to do if someone hurts you.” There were no brochures. There was no
Something About Amelia.
Nothing. I was on my own dealing with this.

As far as the general public was concerned, the entire concept of incest and child molestation simply did not exist. You couldn’t learn about it on an
ABC Afterschool Special,
because no one was talking about it. Hell, the
ABC Afterschool Special
series itself wouldn’t be invented for another year. When I was a little girl, teachers were told they were forbidden to call the police about child abuse. “Mandated reporting” didn’t exist until after 1974, when Congress passed something called CAPTA—the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. Until then, it was just understood by nice people everywhere that “these sorts of things” only happened very rarely, in poor, backward, rural, or slum families. And if, God forbid, you did manage to accidentally hear about it, your job was to “not interfere.”

And what if someone did get caught back then? Did he go to jail? Not terribly likely. Jail for child molesters is actually a new concept. Until 1950, the penalty for child rape in California—not “fondling,” not “molestation,” but flat out, unquestioned, forcible rape of a child by an adult—was (drum roll, please) thirty days in the county jail. After all, child rape was only a misdemeanor. The victim was only a child; it wasn’t like raping a real person. But then, in November 1949, Linda Joyce Glucoft, a six-year-old girl in Los Angeles, was raped and murdered by a man named Fred Stroble. The story was front-page news in the
L.A. Times
for a week as police and the FBI searched for Stroble. Turns out he had just finished his thirty days for raping another child. The public went berserk, and the law was changed, so that the rape of a child could at least be considered a felony.

I found out that I might have some recourse entirely by accident. I was at day camp and heard some older campers joking about someone having “gotten raped.” I asked my father what rape was, and he gave me an explanation about someone making someone else have sex “when they didn’t want to,” and that this was actually illegal. I was floored—not by the illegal part, but by the “didn’t want to” part. My brother had gotten so good at making everyone cater to his slightest whim, that the very idea of my “wanting” or “not wanting” anything had become an alien concept. I didn’t know that sex was something people did because they wanted to. I thought it was something you had to do when you were told. And I could hardly imagine anyone wanting to do
that
on a voluntary basis.

So I refused Stefan’s next “request.” When he started the usual ranting and raving and threats, I took a deep breath and informed him that I had just found out that making me do this was against the law, and that if he didn’t get out of my room, I would call the police. Bluffing? You bet. Even then I figured the cops probably weren’t going to do much about a “familial” molestation case. I would have been right. Stefan laughed and taunted me, but then decided not to take the risk, and walked out of my room, zipping up his pants on the way out. How long would this reprieve last? I didn’t know, but I knew I had to do something to make sure he never touched me again.

What I really needed was to get out of town. As luck would have it, I got a movie part in a real honest-to-God feature film. I was the lead. Well, the lead kid anyway. It was called
Throw Out the Anchor,
and the stars were Richard Egan and Dina Merrill. It was a poor imitation of a typical Disney flick: handsome, widowed dad and his two adorable kids—the precocious, blond tomboy (yours truly) and her teen idol–type brother—go to Florida to “get away from it all” and rent a houseboat. Dad meets gorgeous heiress type, and romance and adorable high jinks ensue.

Oh wait, this sounds familiar. That would be because somebody already made this movie, in 1958. It was called
Houseboat
and starred Cary Grant and Sophia Loren. But I was too young to know that (and thankfully too young to compare Richard Egan to Cary Grant—yikes!), so I thought it was great. The best part was the whole movie was going to be filmed in Florida for three months. Hooray!

My mother and I moved to Orlando for the summer of 1972. We stayed in a nice hotel called the Park Plaza. I was thrilled because the room had a kitchen, so I could stock the fridge with Dr Pepper and pickles and all the other ghastly things I liked that nobody else could stand. On the set, I had not just my own dressing room, but an entire Winnebago. The set was in the middle of nowhere on the St. Johns River; not quite the Everglades, but close enough. The whole area was crawling with thousands of frogs, fish, armadillos, raccoons, possums, snakes, and, yes, alligators—real-live alligators that could actually maim and kill. And unlike California, whose only poisonous breed of snake is the rattler, Florida is home to every kind of poisonous snake you can name: rattlesnakes, water moccasins, coral snakes, and copperheads. As a huge fan of nature’s villains—not to mention all things weird and scaly—I was in heaven.

My character, Stevie Porterfield, also liked wild animals, even snakes, and one of the movie’s subplots was her quest to save their habitat from being destroyed by developers. Like me, Stevie was a tomboy, who preferred jeans and sneakers to dresses and romping through the underbrush to playing with dolls. For the next three months, I got to play a character who could be my real-life best friend, and I didn’t have to see, hear, speak to, or so much as smell my brother.

This was probably the healthiest I’d been in years, because I was sleeping eight hours a night and, during the day, getting more exercise and fresh air than I ever had. And I was certainly eating. The impossibly thin Dina Merrill and I drove everyone crazy by making a show of how many hot dogs, hamburgers, and Twinkies we could eat without gaining weight. (We both apparently had the metabolism of hamsters.) We just burned them off as fast as we could scarf them down.

I gained a little weight, which was a good thing. Until then, I was always in trouble at school whenever the school nurse decided to check everyone’s height and weight. I was always at least twenty pounds under whatever the number was supposed to be. Notes were sometimes sent home. I ate constantly, but I suppose it was stress. During
Throw Out the Anchor,
I had a growth spurt, and I proudly went all the way up to fifty-eight pounds.

To top everything off, I even got a pet, just the kind of inappropriate pet every kid wants: a possum. On the way to the set, Dina Merrill found a dead mother possum and her babies. Some were still alive, so she rescued one and presented me with an adorable baby possum in a laundry basket full of Spanish moss. It sat there hissing, spitting, and snarling as all baby wild animals do. I was thrilled; my mother wasn’t. She admonished me not to get too attached, as this probably was
not
going to be a big hit at the hotel. Several older cast members said that possums were very dangerous—they bit, had rabies. They encouraged me to return this creature to the wild immediately.

Before a decision could be made, a boat pulled up on the river. Sometimes visitors arrived on the set this way, as it was actually easier to get in by boat than by car, and this stretch of the river was a vacation spot for rich tourists with houseboats. An older couple disembarked. The lady had white hair and tons of jewelry and even carried a small poodle. The man wore a neck scarf and captain’s hat. They looked like Mr. and Mrs. Howell from
Gilligan’s Island.
They wanted to drop by and see “the movie stars,” they said.

The woman suddenly looked down at my basket. “And what do you have there?”

“A possum,” I replied.

“Oh,
how adorable
!” she squealed.

My mother interrupted. “Yes, well, it may be cute, but I think they’re not going to feel the same way at the hotel!”

The lady brightened. “Oh? What hotel are you staying at?”

“The Park Plaza,” replied my mother.

“Ahhh!” The rich lady said and laughed. “What a coincidence! We own it.”

They thought the possum was darling and absolutely insisted that we bring it back to the hotel as an honored guest. My mother looked at me and asked, “How do you always manage to do these things?”

So what did I name my new pet? I named him after a bizarre subplot in the film. In
Throw Out the Anchor,
there’s a scene in which an old man tells me a convoluted story about “second chances in life” and how this all has something to do with an egg cream soda. Since my furry little friend had been facing certain death when I got him, I figured this would be a good name for him. So he became Eggbert Crème II, or Eggy for short. When we finished filming, I knew I couldn’t bring Eggy back to Los Angeles, so I left my pet with the director’s daughter, who was about my age and also an avid animal lover. She had a rat named Sweetheart that she had taught to run up her sleeve. She happily took Eggy into her menagerie. Later she wrote to me that, when Eggy got too big to keep in the house, they took him out to the location where they first found him and let him go. Somewhere in the forests along the St. Johns River in Florida, there is a possum sitting on a stump trying to tell the other possums and squirrels and raccoons, “No! I am
not
making it up!! I really
did
live at the Park Plaza Hotel!”

By the time my mom and I returned to L.A. from the movie, it was, of course, time to move again. My brother was also sort of out of the house. I say sort of, because he couldn’t seem to make it stick. He would find an apartment, move out of my parents’ house, usually trading up for an apartment with a girl, a couple of guys, and a big pile of drugs. He’d pay the first and last month’s rent and then stop. This became a joke around our house: “With Stefan, the first and last month’s rent really are the first and last month’s rent.” He and his friends would stay until the landlord threw them out or until someone got arrested for drugs. It was a toss-up as to which happened more often. But it was decreed that Stefan “lived on his own now,” even though my parents wound up paying for everything, and he spent more time moving back home than he did out. His time at home with us was considered “just visiting.”

My family moved to an apartment, a fabulous place in West Hollywood called Hayworth Towers. It was built in the early 1930s, and each apartment had high ceilings, white art deco moldings, a fake fireplace, and floor-to-ceiling mirrors. My room even came with its own bathroom. I particularly loved that it was in the heart of West Hollywood, where there were 7-Elevens, Thrifty Drug Stores, and Baskin-Robbins as far as the eye could see. There was so much sidewalk, I even got a skateboard.

Sadly, though, I was unemployed. I continued to go to auditions. After the movie, I was considered a marketable commodity, and my parents and I thought my career would be off and running. No dice. Auditions, even callbacks, came and went with no bookings. Was I doing something wrong? Was the market glutted with blond eleven-year-old girls? Hmmm…and there was always that damn Jodie Foster. My God, she got everything! She was fantastic, an unstoppable force. I loved her movies, but every little child actress in Hollywood knew that if they saw her at an audition, it was time to go home.

My father, having now started his own management business, Arngrim and Associates, soon to become Arngrim and Petersen, sat me down for a managerial talk. “It’s not going well,” he began. “It happens. Sometimes people do a movie and work like crazy afterwards, and sometimes they never work again. You may need to accept the idea that you might not work until after you’re eighteen.”

He was right, of course. Show biz is inherently an unpredictable business, but for child actors, it’s downright impossible. You grow, you age. You might have a “look” that sells, then wake up one morning looking like someone else entirely. Children are often hired as “accessories” to the grown-up members of the cast. A child might get a role because he or she bears a physical resemblance to the star playing one of the parents in the film or TV show. If that star stops working for some reason…well, so much for the kid. Was this me? Was I “done”? It was possible: I could be washed up, over the hill, past my prime. At eleven.

It was less than a week after my dad’s speech that I auditioned for the part of Nellie Oleson on
Little House on the Prairie.
Now, it was not my first trip down to this particular office. I had been called in when the concept of the show was first being discussed. I remember wearing my frilly, girly yellow dress, the one I deemed nauseating and only to be worn for special occasions or at gunpoint. I was not asked to read any lines. It was a bizarre meeting where producer Ed Friendly showed me a set of
Little House
books and asked ominously, “Do you know what these are?”

“Um, books?”

I figured I didn’t get the job, as I had not read the
Little House
books and had actually never heard of Laura Ingalls Wilder until that day. But this, apparently, didn’t destroy my chances. Weeks later, I returned to read for the part of Laura. Obviously, no sale there. I was called back yet again, a week later, to read for the part of Mary. The only thing I found surprising about any of this was that I kept getting called back. As I said to my father at the time, “What could they possibly be thinking? I am
so
not the farm girl type.” So when I got the call that my presence was requested yet again, I thought,
How the hell many people are in this thing? It must have a cast of thousands!