Memories of Mike

Many of you have asked for some more memories from my days as publicist on “Little House on the Prairie,” so here are a few that have drifted to the surface of my old memory pool.

When my family sat down to watch television on “Little House” night my daughters would often ask, “Does Pa cry tonight?” They loved the shows where Mike, as Charles Ingalls, showed a lot of emotion. He was great with tears. They’d show love, anger, pity and a dozen other emotions.

One day on the set I watched him telling his usual great jokes, and then step in front of the camera for a scene, and instantly break into tears. “How the hell can you do that?” I finally asked. “What makes those tears flow so easily?”

“I just think about my father,” he said. “So many sad, sad things happened to that wonderful little guy that I can cry anytime I think about them.”

Mike’s father was a publicity man for several stars of Broadway plays. But when they drifted off to Hollywood to make movies, he decided to follow along. Mike was already living in L. A., trying to get his start in show business. He had arrived out west on an athletic scholarship as a champion javelin thrower at the University of Southern Califorina. But even in those early days Mike let his hair grow longer than most guys, and the other jocks at USC held him down and cut his hair off. “I was convinced that my hair was the source of my strength,” Mike told me. “So when they cut it off I overcompensated and threw my shoulder out — and that’s when USC threw me out.”

Mike recalled the day his father, the new Californiano, asked Mike to drive him to Paramount studios so he could visit a few of his old clients. “I think he wanted to show off a bit, about how he was pals with all those stars. Well, they turned their backs on him, and wouldn’t even authorize him to pass through the gates of the studio. That really hurt him.”

Mike had a long, sad history with his family when growing up in New Jersey. His mother, an Irish Catholic, constantly derided her husband, a short Jewish man from New York. They fought and argued so much that Mike carried memories on into his scripts in  Hollywood.  Charles Ingalls was such a fabulous father and husband because Mike never got to see any of that in his real life. His mother was the type who would turn on the gas and stick her head in the oven just in time to be rescued by Mike as he came home from  school,

“I remember the night she started making fun of my father’s prematurely grey hair. He finally got up, went to the drug store, came back and went  into the bathroom to dye his hair.  But he didn ‘t know what the hell he was doing, and when he came out his hair–and his skin–was bright orange down to his eye brows. Her laughter drove him back to the bathroom,  where he tried to remove the color. But it didn ‘t work, and she kept laughing. So, back to the store. He bought a pumice stone and came home to rub the dye off his skin — but all it did was remove a layer of his skin. He had to wear a hat down to his ears for a month after that.

Mike too often caught the anger of his mother. He was a bed-wetter, and his mother was convinced that the problem was caused by laziness, and she would raise holy hell every morning when she saw his soiled sheets. Thinking she could shame him into breaking the habit, she would hang the sheets out his bedroom window, where the bright stains were visable to all his passing schoolmates. Mike turned into a helluva runner because he raced home each day to pull that sheet in before more pals saw it. Mike fought bed-wetting for years. “I was nineteen the last time it happened,” he told me. “I fell asleep on the plane flying to New York, and I wet my pants in  flight.”

There were no tears when he spoke of his memories of his mother, but he always teared up remembering his father.

“He finally wound up as the manager of a run-down local movie theater,” Mike recalled with a smille. “I’ll never forget the marqee outside the theatre when he was showing a new movie starring Cornel Wilde. I had a tiny part in the movie–one scene with about twelve words– but the marquee on my dad’s theatre said the movie starred ‘Michael Landon and Cornel Wilde.’ He gave me top billing.”

Mike once told me that he hoped to die the same way his father did. “He had a favorite little restaurant down the street from  the theatre. Every day he’d say, ‘What’s the soup today?’ and they’d name it. ‘I’ll have a bowl of that,’ he’d say. On that last day they put the soup down in  front of him, he took a sip, smiled — and dropped dead right into the soup. That’s the way I want to go too.”

But Mike didn’t get that wish. Cancer came after him, and left him with long, painful months before he died.

One his final day, at his home, he was in bed surrounded by many of his close pals, including his long-time friend and producer, Kent McCray.

After a few laughs and memories he turned to Kent and said, “Thank everyone for coming — but I’d like a few minutes alone with Cindy now.”

His friends and family went downstairs in sadness. Fifteen minutes later Mike’s wife Cindy came down and whispered, “He’ gone now.”

We all lost a sweet man that day.

Fight Forth!