Confessions of a Prairie Bitch Read online

  Just about everything.

  My parents went out quite a lot, so I was often left home with a baby-sitter. That should have been fine, except that my parents had some strange ideas about who was considered a reasonable choice as a baby-sitter. I encountered a long parade of actors, friends, acquaintances, and friends of friends. Some of them were amusingly eccentric, some had severe drug and alcohol issues, and some were actually certifiably insane. (I once took a count and realized that three out of four people who baby-sat me later wound up committed to a mental hospital. I think the ones who weren’t simply went undiagnosed.)

  But all of them were preferable to my parents’ favorite (translation: cheapest and most available) baby-sitter, my brother. Why would any parent think that a teenage boy, who no longer attended regular school, had already been to a psychiatrist, and had been caught smoking, drinking, and trying drugs, would be a suitable baby-sitter for a six-year-old girl? I think they thought it would teach him responsibility.

  The best explanation I can give for what happened next is this: he was really angry, and I was home. A lot of it’s a blur. I wish a whole lot more of it was. I know a lot of kids beat up their younger siblings (and, no, that’s not good for anybody either), but most of the time, they don’t break out the kitchen carving knives and demonstrate how they’re going to cut your throat if you tell anyone what they’re doing.

  It wasn’t like I didn’t try to tell my parents my brother was abusing me. It was just hard to explain how low things had really sunk, and they didn’t want to believe anything like that was even possible. Stefan was famous, after all, and could therefore do no wrong in my parents’ eyes. I’d beg them not to leave me alone with him, and they’d say, “Don’t roughhouse with your sister!” and split. And the next thing I’d hear was: “Now you’re really going to get it…”

  I soon learned to shut up. Besides, Stefan clearly had some kind of magical powers; grown-ups seemed to believe absolutely anything he told them, no matter how ludicrous, and everyone talked about how he was a genius. So when he spoke, I listened. Sometimes he didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Sometimes I’d question him; this was not a good idea. If I asked a question that he didn’t know the answer to, or was perhaps a bit too logical for his taste, he’d beat me up. I was amazed at how the adults didn’t seem to want to question him either. Did he beat them all up, too? In this environment, what happened next wasn’t really much of a surprise.

  I was six years old, and I didn’t know what sex was or where babies came from. And frankly, I hadn’t asked. But the guy who insisted he knew everything wasn’t going to let that stop him. I had seen our two dogs, Rex and my brother’s ill-treated mutt, Pork Chop, romping in the yard and as dogs will do, occasionally attempting to mate. I had asked what they were doing, and why everyone was giggling so much about it. My brother took it upon himself to enlighten me…in the garage, with the door closed.

  I was innocent, but not a moron. I demanded to know why his explanation would require me to disrobe and lie down. But his answer was the same he gave to most questions: “JUST DO IT!” Having no clue as to what would come next, I did. As weak as some of the “sexual abuse prevention” literature may be, if I had been told even as little as “Don’t let anyone touch you there,” things could have gone quite differently. But no one had ever said anything about my body belonging to me. And my brother always made it quite clear who he thought it belonged to.

  I don’t remember pain. Or fear. I remember utter confusion. And a coldness, both physical and emotional. I was naked and flat on my back on a cold, filthy steamer trunk, in a dark, cold, dirty garage. Stefan explained what he was doing, but not why. And then, it was as if I wasn’t there. There was no pretense of affection, no emotion, no talking. I was an object he’d found to serve this odd purpose. He was on top of me, and it was as if he was all alone in the world.

  Afterward, I tried as usual to question him as to exactly what the point of this activity had been. His explanation was vague, to say the least. I wasn’t sure if this now meant I was going to have a baby, give birth to a litter of puppies, or grow a second head. The only part I understood clearly was the very last thing he said: “Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone. Or else.”

  The abuse became a regular occurrence; it was happening at least three times a week, sometimes every day. After several months of this, not surprisingly, I wanted to get out of the house. I asked my parents if I could move out and get my own place. They explained that six-year-olds did not have their own apartments. Besides, these things cost money. “How much?” was all I asked.

  It was oddly my brother who explained that I needed a job and that the only job for kids that paid well enough to get an apartment was acting. Perfect! I already had a press clipping file and an audition tape from the supermarket. Well, sort of. The Arrow Market in West Hollywood was the first market to put in video security cameras. It was such an innovation, they didn’t try to hide it. You could watch the video monitor at the checkout line. So every time we went shopping, I marched into the cheese aisle and practiced my tap routine. I wasn’t very good, but the people at the checkout counter were very entertained nonetheless. I had turned theft prevention into art.

  I soon joined the Arngrim family ritual—the audition process. Everyone in my family—in fact, everyone I knew—went on these things they called “auditions.” I liked them at first, because I enjoyed dressing up and making sure my hair was absolutely perfect—no small feat in my case, with my nearly waist-length, super-fine, fly-away Barbie doll hair. (I think they invented the No More Tears and No More Tangle hair products just for me.) But I didn’t care for the long car rides. I was then and still am prone to motion sickness and became famous for starting off auditions by brightly chirping, “I frew up in the car!”

  At that age, auditions didn’t demand any acting, seldom even dialogue. I was just asked to smile, then turn, and smile. It was sort of like posing for a cheerful mug shot. I finally landed a national television commercial, a major gig in anyone’s book. It was for Hunt’s ketchup. It was a series of commercials featuring a whole bunch of kids. The premise was children trying to figure out “how they get those tomatoes into the bottle.” We were all given a sealed bottle of ketchup and a large tomato and told to do our worst. Some pushed, some tried to jam the tomato down the neck of the bottle. It was pretty funny.

  So there I was on my first set, in an adorable white tennis outfit. No, I did not play tennis, but it was the ’60s, and those cute little tennis skirt and top sets were very popular. And against my pale skin and white-blond hair, it made for a striking look. I fiddled with that bottle and tomato in every way possible, squinting and biting my lip, finally pressing down on the tomato with the bottle. Small problem: my tomato was apparently just a little bit riper than the others. Finally, during one take—squish!—the tomato exploded. Juice, seeds, and tomato flesh flew everywhere, splattering all over my fabulous, brand-new white tennis outfit, all over my face, landing in my hair, in my eyes, everywhere. I froze with my juice-covered arms extended away from my body.

  The director and all the adults stood frozen, too, stifling hysterical laughter. Finally, the director, a very nice woman, came up to me and said, “Can I get you anything, honey?” (By which I suppose she meant, did I want a towel?) To which I replied, in a very deep, un-six-year-old girl voice: “Yes. GET…THIS…GODDAMN TOMATO JUICE OFF OF ME!”

  At that point, any attempt on anyone’s part to stifle laughter went right out the window. I think some of those crew members are still laughing. I wasn’t really mad. I was just appalled. Not to mention cold and wet. Later, I did thank the nice lady for wiping me off. But my reputation in Hollywood was off to a hell of a start.

  For the next several years I led a double life. I did my best to behave normally at school and in public, while at home nothing was normal. My brother had decided that his experiment in the garage was a success and now insisted on repeating this activity as often as possible.
New activities were introduced, usually with the aid of whatever pornographic magazine he was reading that week, and insurrection was punished swiftly and mercilessly. I still have some of those awful visual memories, like the time I almost made it to the front door, my hand slipping off the doorknob as I fell to the floor, and watching my fingernails scrape the hardwood floor, as I was dragged back by my feet.

  I understand how people in these situations can develop multiple personalities. I sometimes wish I had. I learned a whole bunch of stuff nobody, particularly not a child, should learn. I learned how to pretend that hours, days, entire weeks had simply never taken place. I learned how not to cry, how not to show pain, and what to do to guarantee myself a few hours of peace and quiet. I learned how to pretend to be happy when I wasn’t. I learned to play dead. I learned how to lie. I’ve always been fascinated by what people are willing to do to survive, physically and mentally; how the human mind will warp, bend, twist, and adapt itself to even the most unbelievable situations if it thinks there’s a chance of survival. When I was a bit older, my friends used to ask me why I had so many weird books about people in horrible situations—stuff about wars, plagues, the Holocaust. It was because I was fascinated by how these people lived through such horrors and survived, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally. I was looking for help in that department.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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!

  It 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.”