Melissa Gilbert - Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered

A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered

Back to the Prairie

Melissa Gilbert

Foreword by Tim Busfield

Gallery Books

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Copyright 2022 by Half Pint Enterprises

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First Gallery Books hardcover edition May 2022

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Interior design by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

Jacket design by John Vairo Jr.

Front cover photograph by Brian Bowen Smith

Back cover photograph by NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021952266

ISBN 978-1-9821-7718-8

ISBN 978-1-9821-7720-1 (ebook)

For my sweet, perfect grandchildren who have filled this second half of my life with immeasurable joy. I love you each to the moon and back.

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.

THE LITTLE PRINCE

T here are many people who could write a foreword to this book: those who read the book and then weigh in; those who know the author and then weigh in on what they have read; and those who read the book, know the author, and were there to validate its truth. I am the only one who fits the latter. I was there for all of it.

I dont like to read books. I often joke that the last book I read was the Yogi Berra story in ninth grade, but thats not really true. I read for a living. I read scripts. I am always reading a script for a project I am preparing to either act in or direct, or scripts that others have sent to me asking for feedback. I also read the news. What I cant seem to do is commit to a book, because something will inevitably pull me off it and I may not return. Ive started every novel Michael Crichton ever wrote but finished only three of them. But I wanted to read this book all the way through for a personal reason: I didnt trust my wife to get the facts right. However, I have now read this book, and I can tell you that I have no quibbles. The story is one hundred percent correct.

Melissa Gilbert is my wife. She is exactly the way her fans imagine her to be: kind, sweet, determined, funny, and a champion in the charity of forgiveness. They think of her as a grown-up Laura Ingalls Wilder, the character she played throughout her childhood on the classic TV show Little House on the Prairie, and if youre talking about her heart and soul, wisdom and humanity, and eagerness to learn, they arent wrong. But she was not raised a country girlshe doesnt have an iota of prairie in her. Shes a Jewish girl from Encino, California, and as a child, the closest she came to picking vegetables from a garden was when she went to Gelsons market to get a tomato for her bagel.

When Melissa and I met, I was directing a television pilot in Los Angeles but lived full-time on a lake in Michigan. Melissa lived in a house in Studio City. She drove a convertible, her hair was fiery red, and her movie-star sunglasses were perfect. There was absolutely no anonymity to her life. When we were out, Id hear the brakes on passing cars screech as people rubbernecked to see the beautiful icon I was sitting next to. Shed recently come off Dancing with the Stars and was fit, a perfect ten, and yet she was utterly confused about how to stay on the hamster wheel of Hollywood. She frequented her Botox specialist as if the doctors office were a Starbucks drive-through. She was injected, augmented, and veneered, and doing everything right for an actress closing in on fifty trying to maintain a career as an ingnue.

When actresses hit middle age, they are no longer ingnues, period. They survive Hollywoods merciless insatiable appetite for youth because they embrace the character that time and experience adds to their face. They become character actresses. They evolve to stay in the game, and they stay in the game because they look evolved. Its the prize of age. I came into Melissas life when she was at that midlife crossroads, deciding whether to hang on to the past or evolve to the next phase of her life and career, building on who she had been and who she wanted to be.

Melissas whole life has been about adaptation, growth, and evolution. Born into a creative, blue-collar desert family in Nevada, she was put up for adoption the very day she arrived in this world. A glamorous, multigenerationally renowned Hollywood family claimed her as their own, raised her as a showbiz Valley girl, and loved her to pieces, as did millions of others who knew her as Laura Ingalls Wilder. In that role, she acted as though she loved animals and we believed her (because she really does). She made us think she rose early to milk cows (maybe not so much). She made us believe her values were rooted in family and the virtue of hard work, even if it meant breaking a fingernail (bingo!).

After Melissa and I found each other, we discovered that we were both craving a life away from the lights and pressures of Hollywood. I had moved to Michigan in early 2012, and after we married a year later, she packed up her bags and joined me in the slow lane of the Midwest. From the moment she left Detroit Metro Airport and found herself in the Michigan countryside, she melted into her natural self. After a few years of Great Lakes, snowstorms, and spring flowers, we moved to New York City for work. On the way, we stayed overnight in the Catskills. She was infatuated.

In 2019, we found property there and, in upstate New York, Melissa began her nextand currentchapter. She traded her Rodeo Drive wardrobe for overalls. Her bright red hair returned to its roots, literally. Her face moved again: Her forehead was freed from captivity, and I could tell when she questioned something. I watched her shed the years of playing the Hollywood game of vanity and self-promotion as Melissa Gilbert the star and become Melissa Gilbert the womanthe natural woman. This life wasnt just a more relaxed fit. It was a natural fit.

Fireflies! shed shriek joyously. Baby deer! shed call out. She became a DIY guru. She raised chickens. She tended our garden. She was at homeand she was home. I was the yuppie guy from thirtysomething and Poindexter from the Nerds movies. I was unable to put a table saw together. But Melissa could, and did. I dont know if this could have happened had we not experienced the COVID-19 pandemic and found ourselves in a time and place where normal no longer applied. I want to believe it would have. If youre open, if you ask the right questions, you find yourself. If youre lucky, you find someone who makes you find your best self. I am lucky.