Bad Seed: A Conversation with Alison Arngrim

Pop Culture's baddest "bad seed," Little House on the Prairie's Nellie Oleson

Because everyone has their own personal Nellie Oleson, the Little House on the Prairie character has become one of the most endearing villains in pop culture history.  Rival to series heroine Laura Ingalls, Nellie Oleson was a frontier Leona Helmsley in blonde curls and puffy sleeves.  Nastier than Darth Vadar, bitchier than Nurse Ratchet and more vicious than Hannibal Lecter, Nellie Oleson pushed the buttons of TV audiences world wide, becoming one of the most iconic characters from the beloved series.

However, behind the blonde wig and crooked smile was Alison Arngrim, the actress who brought Nellie Oleson to life and who once described her evil alter ego as being “the living embodiment of PMS.”  Born into a show business family, since the age of eleven the ghost of Nellie Oleson has walked with Alison, forcing her to live her entire life with a confused public. Who couldn’t remove Alison from Nellie,  hating her.  So how did Alison deal with the public’s animosity?  Well, she just had to laugh it off, and get the rest of the world to laugh with her.

Acress Alison Arngrim today

Working as a stand-up comedian for years, Alison has used her Nellie Oleson legacy as the subject for a one-woman stage show called Confessions of a Prairie Bitch in which she tells all the nasty and dirty truths of living as Nellie Oleson.  She also has an upcoming spin-off book hitting bookstores this summer, and does her own Nasty Nellie Hollywood Tour via Los Angeles’ Dearly Departed Tours.  Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg for Alison.  If that doesn’t keep her busy enough, she also is an activist, working for different groups and networks supporting AIDS and HIV victims, and sits on the board of Protect, an organization that helps abused children. She also makes occasional appearances at autograph shows and Little House reunions on top of being a favourite participant on retro-television events.  As a result, Alison has become the most popular of her former Little House castmates.

I was delighted to be able to have a chance to talk to Alison about her life as Nellie Oleson.  As a closet Little House on the Prairie fan, Nellie Oleson is one of my favourite television characters.  Alison Arngrim is a bright and vibrant woman whose sense of humour kept me laughing through our interview.  A big part of her survival as a former child star in Hollywood has been by having a strong sense of humour about all the strange things that have happened to her.  Our talk covered an array of strange subjects ranging from the trials that child stars face, to growing up with Liberace, to the Manson murders, the eccentricity of Michael Landon, growing up on Little House on the Prairie and, of course, her most famous character, Nellie Oleson.

CONFESSIONS OF A POP CULTURE ADDICT PRESENTS

BAD SEED:

A CONVERSATION WITH ALISON ARNGRIM

The many faces of Nellie

I spoke to Alison Arngrim via telephone in November 2009

Sam:  I’m really excited to be talking to you, because Nellie Oleson is one of my very favourite screen villains.

Alison:  I have that effect on a lot of people.

Sam:  Well that’s true, because I let this interview leak at our web-site and the immediate response was amazing.

Alison:  It’s crazy how popular Nellie Oleson is now; everyday I am slack-jawed at my evil alter-ego’s popularity.

Sam:  What do you think it is about Nellie Oleson that creates such a emotional impact on the audience?

Alison on Nellie: "She is cute. She’s pretty. She has the blonde fluffy curls and the big puffy sleeves and all the lace and really good villains have that, too. She’s much like Captain Hook."

Alison:  Well we all know one.  Everybody has had one in their life.  Someone who you go “How can she be such a bitch?  When does she ever stop?”  Somebody who drives you completely mad.  I think I struck a nerve and I portrayed that particularly irritating quality that those people who are impossible and totally bitchy and horrible to.  You go “Is she going to ever have a good day already?” and, “No, she’s still horrible.”  I think I captured that and people understood right away.  But then she also has a quality that great screen villains always have, which is an attractive quality.  She is cute.  She’s pretty.  She has the blonde fluffy curls and the big puffy sleeves and all the lace and really good villains have that, too.  She’s much like Captain Hook.  In the old Mary Martin version of Peter Pan, Captain Hook is always perfectly dressed in the hair and the wig and the hat.  He looks good, but he is completely evil and stupid and foolish and you want to hit him in the head.

Sam:  Now you’ve turned the Nellie Oleson phenomenon into a stage show?

Alison:  Indeed.  I have been doing stand up comedy for years and I talked a little about Little House and being an ex-child star but I hadn’t really tapped into the cultural zeitgeist.  Ex-child stars are sort of the poster child for the decade.  We are the canary in the coal mine:  all roads lead to crazy ex-child stardom.  If you look at the horror of reality TV, the most popular ones are fronting their kids.  From Octomom to Jon and Kate, it’s because they are going to screw up these kids’ lives.  Even our celebrities that make the tabloids – Britney, Lindsey – well, what are they?  People who were put to work when they were little tiny girls, and look!  They’re crazy now!

Sam:  Did you find out that you ended up being crazy?  You seem normal enough.

Alison:  Not so sever.  We’ve joked about it:  the cast of Little House have no arrests and no convictions and we are very proud.  We did have a higher level of self- esteem and self-respect on Little House on the Prairie which I think contributed to us being a lot less cranky than some of the other ex-child stars.   So, I realized that was out there because that’s what people were talking about.  It’s a real thing.  So in 2002 I thought to myself “What the heck am I doing?”  So I changed my whole act to something called Confessions of a Prairie Bitch.

Sam:  Which is such a great title!

Alison Arngrim as Nellie Oleson with Alison Balsam who played adopted sister Nancy Oleson

Alison:  Isn’t it the best title ever?  I couldn’t go wrong with that.  I confessed everything.  People ask “Why are you a bitch?”  Well do you have any idea what I had to put up with?  I talk about what it is like to have people hate me:  to have people throw things at me in the Hollywood Christmas parade.

Sam:  Really?  Somebody did that?

Alison:  Yes, somebody threw an orange soda at my head.  There was also a lovely event where me and Katherine McGregor went to sign autographs for charity at a school and two girls ran up and kicked me in the ass and knocked me to the pavement.  Just a couple of years ago I was at the LA County Fair signing autographs and a woman came up to my table and said “I forgive you” and walked away.  She was really mad.

Sam:  Well that’s what I’m talking about.  That’s the strong emotions that you brought to your audience.  It’s basically Hannibal Lecter,  Nurse Ratchet and you.

Alison:  So now I address this bizarre phenomena of what it’s like to grow up, from the age of eleven, having total strangers calling you a bitch to your face everyday.  What does this mean?  How do you survive this?  Now my stand up is about that and then I talk about all my heinous appearances on Love Boat and Fantasy Island.  I have photos and clips of things to illustrate my point and I talk about people on the show, as well as Little House and the wig.  I also do a question and answer segment because one of the running themes my entire life are people asking me questions.  In the street, my friends…asking “What was it like?  Was that a wig?  How did that work with that thing on your head?”  People want to know so I thought we’d make it part of the show.  Hand out index cards and people could ask whatever the heck they want and I’ll answer it.

Sam:  Have you ever been asked anything truly bizarre?

Alison:  Every night.  Oh my God.  The questions people ask!  People’s minds are truly in the gutters.  One of the popular questions I get is “Did you have sex with Michael Landon?”  That seems to be a running theme.

Sam:  Really?

Alison:  Yeah.  Well he was hot.  I mean did you notice?  When did Charles Ingalls ever put his shirt on?  The man was half-naked all day.  It’s because Michael Landon knew so well that that’s why women were tuning in.

Sam:  What was it like working for Michael Landon?

Little House on the Prarie's director, writer and star Michael Landon: "He was extremely eccentric and driven and terribly funny. He was exactly like Charles Ingalls, except when he wasn’t."

Alison:  It was fantastic.  One of the funniest people I have ever worked with.  Absolutely hilarious.  Very crazy.  Brilliant, but he’s the mad scientist of episodic television.  Remember that he didn’t just star in Little House but he was directing the show, writing the show, producing the show.  It was all him.  He was extremely eccentric and driven and terribly funny.  He was exactly like Charles Ingalls, except when he wasn’t.  On the one hand he was much like Charles Ingalls by being obsessed with the values of hard work. We didn’t have certain star perks:  nobody had a fancy trailer.  A lot was expected of us and those values, oddly enough, were in fact, all being imparted.  But at the same time Michael Landon’s idea of a good time was to go to the Playboy jazz festival and the race track.  He drove a green Lamborghini.  He liked fast cars and blonde women.  He was married three times, let’s not forget.  But he had a whole [bunch] of kids and he adored them, and I think he liked working with the kid actors better than the grown-ups because he never got past thirteen or fourteen, I think.  Michael Landon was Little Joe.  He was the eternal teenager.  No matter how old he got there was an eternal junior high prankster and he always wanted to start a fire in the trash can and trash the principal’s office.  He was always rebelling against authority and he drove NBC crazy.  He picked all the actors.  I never went for network approval.  Half the cast never went for network approval.  Michael Landon said “I want these people!  It’s my show and I can have them!”  He did a lot of wacky eccentric things that were really really cool, which contributed to why Little House was so brilliant because he didn’t let the suits interfere.  He was constantly telling the suits to take a hike and doing the show his way and eventually we got this fabulous thing that we have.

Sam:  Was there really a real Nellie Olsen?

Nellie Owens - the real Nellie Oleson

Alison: Oh.  Absolutely, and I’ve been to her grave!  It’s just outside Portland, Oregon.  Nellie was the only name that Laura Ingalls changed in the book.  It was Nellie Owens of the Owens family that had the store.  Laura changed Nellie’s name because she was still afraid of her and thought she would kick her ass.  Also, later, in  Little Town on the Prairie, Nellie is a mix of three different horrible bitchy girls that bothered Laura.  But Nellie and Willie and Nels Owens moved to Oregon at one point and were apparently very big in cheese.  Nellie got married.  She had kids and she got divorced.  Scandalous at that time.  She and Willie and Nels are all buried in Forest View Cemetery in Forest Grove, Oregon.

Sam:  She didn’t marry a Percival, did she?

Alison:  She did not.  She married a guy named Kirby who was a steamboat captain.  Apparently she divorced him because they were living in the city and she didn’t feel that it was a proper and moral upbringing for the children.

Sam:  Nellie Oleson was worried about a proper upbringing?

Alison:  The funny thing is that she was quite tough.  I did meet a guy from Houston, Texas who was the great-grandson of Nellie.  I asked him if we know if Nellie was that bad.  It’s kind of like Richard III.  There is a great debate over if Nellie was a real bitch or not.  But this guy was related and he was obviously too young to know her, but they were watching Little House with an elderly Aunt who was old enough to know Nellie in her lifetime and they [said to her] “Well?” and she said “Very accurate.”  So apparently Nellie was a handful.

Sam:  It’s just so bizarre to think that these characters were all historical figures.  That they truly breathed and lived although we are so used to them being just characters on TV.

Alison:  Oh yes!  There are Ingalls relatives running around.  There were a bunch of relatives of Carrie Ingalls at this event in South Dakota I was at recently.  We were in a parade with Carrie Ingalls’ relatives.

Sam:  Isn’t that trippy for you?

Melissa Gilbert and Alison Arngrim as Laura Ingalls and Nellie Oleson: "Melissa Gilbert and I would sit around going “Are we the reincarnations of Laura and Nellie? Are we psychically connected to them in some way? What does this all mean?”

Alison:  It’s very bizarre.  When we were doing it Melissa Gilbert and I would sit around going “Are we the reincarnations of Laura and Nellie?  Are we psychically connected to them in some way?  What does this all mean?”  Every now and then the relatives of the Ingalls family would visit the set and it was really bizarre.

Sam:  I have read quotes by both you and Melissa Gilbert that you were close during the show and you remain close.  Was your closeness the factor that created the dynamic quality of Nellie and Laura’s rivalry on the program?

Alison:  We really liked each other and we knew that nobody was going to get hurt.  Had we not been so close there would have been no telling what would have happened because that would have encouraged two teenage girls to beat the crap out of each other.  Since we were such good friends we knew that nobody was going to injure anybody.

Sam:  You auditioned for the roles of both Laura and Mary.  Why do you think you got Nellie?

Alison:  I don’t know.  Do you think that says something about me?  It’s a multitude of things.  I am a city girl.  I’m not a country girl.  I was raised in Queens and West Hollywood.  I’m a New York/LA girl.  But there is something about her:  Nellie doesn’t know how to hold back.  One of the reasons that child actors go mad is because if you look at the characters that they play, they are eternally sweet.  They’re impossibly nice.  They don’t have a full range of emotion.  There tends to be lots of “Oh yes, Mother.  Oh gosh, Dad.”  Who does that?  When you are a kid you go “Well no Mom, I don’t want to clean my room actually.”  Whereas Nellie was all “Why are you people bothering me?”  We all feel like that sometimes.

Sam:  You just described Buffy from Family Affair, and look how that ended.

"If I had to be Mary or Laura I’d be on a tri-state killing spree now."

Alison:  My God!  Family Affair!  Those poor kids!  Jody is still knocking around.  I know him but he’s been through hell because he had to be icky sicky perfect on that show.  If I had to be Mary or Laura I’d be on a tri-state killing spree now.  I’m so glad I was Nellie because I was able to at least vent all my hostilities and frustrations.

Sam:  How were you able to get in the mindset to play a vicious character like Nellie?

Alison:  We all have days.  I don’t know.  Maybe they scheduled my episodes around my schedule of PMS.  I’m not sure.  It was a lot of work.  I had to get up really early in the morning and it was really hot and the wig was uncomfortable and I was a teenager.  I was twelve when it started and the worst, most evil episodes was when I was thirteen and fourteen and fifteen.  We all have all these frustrations and hostilities when we are teenagers and I was a teenager in Hollywood and its 110 degrees but I was able to vent all that.  You know those days when you really have a headache and everybody is really stupid and its just grating?  Just imagine that you’re having one of those days and somebody has come up to you and asked you the fifteenth dumb assed question you’ve heard that day.  Don’t you just want to turn around and snap “WHAT?”

Sam:  I think I’ve done that a few times.

Alison:  Right.  You put yourself in that place and then it’s easy to go “YES LAURA!  WHAT IS IT?”  It’s that place of ultimate irritation and disgust.

Sam:  Well it’s been nearly thirty years since you put Nellie to rest.  Are you ever tired of the character following you around?

Alison:  Not really.  When the show first ended I thought “Oh jeez.  Is this going to stop soon?” But then it got apparent that “No, no it’s not.”  Then there was a lull, and then with the DVDs coming out and the fact that it started running in all these countries in the 90s and 2000s and it’s being run in 140 countries.  I’m in France all the time.  They’re obsessed with Little House over there.  So it was either get plastic surgery, change my name and try to find a country to live where they’re not airing it, or embrace this and run with it.  That’s what I’m doing.  I’m bitching all the way to the bank.  I’ve embraced it in the one woman show, I play a bitchy mother in the film Make The Yuletide Gay, which I’m so proud of, and I have a book coming out next summer from the wonderful people at Harper Collins, called Confessions of a Prairie Bitch:  How I Survived Being Nellie Olsen and Learnt How to Love Being Hated.  Its all true stories.  I blurt it out for several hundred pages and it’s quite fun.

Sam:  How did you get into acting in the first place?

Alison's mother, Norma MacMillan, provided the voice for both Davy and Gumby

Alison:  My whole wacko family are actors.  They were Canadian actors.  My father, Thor Marven Arngrimsson was raised in Mozart, Saskatchewan and left the farm to become an actor in Vancouver, where he met my mother, Norma MacMillan and they got married and ran the Totem Theatre in Vancouver in the late 40s and early 50s.  They were the only theatre in Canada that had the rights to do the Tennessee Williams plays.  Then they move to Toronto and were in early TV and radio and then they moved to New York.  My Mom became Casper the Friendly Ghost, and she became Gumby, Sweet Holy Purebread – Underdog’s girlfriend, and Davy of Davy and Goliath.

Sam:  Hold on a second:  your mother was Davy?

Alison:  My mother was Davy.  By default Davy’s Mom, sister and half of Davy friends were also my Mom.  The guy does the dog and a couple of people and my Mom does the rest.  So my Mom would have conversations with herself.

Sam:  Did that not dement you a little bit as a child?

Alison:  You want to know why I’m bonkers?  Yes!  My mother’s frickin’ Davy and Gumby and Casper.  My brother’s big on sci-fi:  he was on Land of the Giants in the 60s and played a lot of vampires and dead people, so everybody was working.  We tried to get the dogs and cats to work but they wouldn’t co-operate.  My father was a manager:  he worked for Seymour Howard Associates.  He worked for Liberace, Debbie Reynolds, Susan Anton.  So I was going to Liberace shows when I was a kid.  It was really odd.

Alison's father, Thor Arngrim, managed Liberace: "Even as a kid I thought 'You think this is a straight guy? Are you not quite right in the head?'”

Sam:  What was Liberace like?

Alison:  He was a riot.  He was very sweet.  I was in stitches being eight years old and going to Liberace shows.  He was very bonkers.  He really did have the piano watch and the candelabra ring.  He lived up the street from us.  We went trick-o-treating at his house on Halloween – “Let’s go see if Liberace has candy!”  But it was a crack-up because I was a kid and it was still the sixties and I was told by my parents “Don’t say anything because nobody knows that Liberace is gay.”  I was like “Dude, I’m eight.  I know he’s gay.”  He sued someone you know, and he won.

Sam:  What blows my mind is that people were shocked that he was gay when it came out after his death.  I mean, the man would wear sparkly hot pants in his act!

Alison:  Even as a kid I thought “You think this is a straight guy?  Are you not quite right in the head?”  It was that weird unspoken thing.  He had all these little old lady fans.  The women in the fur coats that would come to see him and they freakin’ loved him, but if you talked to them they’d say things like “Oh, he’s so sweet” and “He’s that way you know.  You’d be safe with him.  Hee hee hee.”  They knew he was gay but if you said to them “Is Mr. Liberace gay?”  They’d say “No, no, don’t be ridiculous.”  But if you said “Are you going to marry Liberace and does he like girls” they’d say “Ha ha ha….no.”  They knew and they didn’t know and they knew but they wouldn’t say.  None of those women seriously thought that he was going anywhere with them and they didn’t care and they bought the t-shirts and the albums and the picture set.

Sam:  So let’s talk about your new movie Make the Yuletide Gay.  That came out this summer, didn’t it?

Alison:  Yes.  A couple of months ago we had a screening at the San Diego gay film festival.  Then it was at the LA Outfest.  We had to do two screenings because we couldn’t fit everyone in.  It was sold out.  They were climbing the walls.  It’s been doing every gay film festival in the world.  We won an award in the gay and lesbian film festival in Seoul, South Korea.  Did you know that there was a gay and lesbian film festival in Korea?  They have a freakin’ film festival and we won!   It’s won awards all over the place.  It just did a big festival in Chicago and then we launched the DVD just the other day.  It’s on Netflicks and do you know there is a waiting list?  When I went to get the movie it said “Very long wait.”

Sam:  It’d be easier to buy it.

Alison:  We had a signing of the DVD at the Borders Bookstore in Hollywood and the whole cast was there and we sold out of the DVD in stock in five minutes.  The producers had a box stashed in the back that they were going to get signed for friends.  They brought those out and sold those.

Sam:  Tell us a bit about the film.

Alison as Heather Mancuso in film festival favorite "Make the Yultide Gay"

Alison:   It’s a gay coming out story, but it’s a gay “Christmas” coming out story and it’s actually very wholesome and G rated.  It’s like a gay Hallmark special.  It’s so cute.  It’s about this very nice young man in college and he goes home and it turns out that even though he is on every kind of gay political committee at school, he hasn’t told his parents that he’s gay.  Anyone who is from Wisconsin or Minnesota will love this movie because his mother is from Wisconsin and his father is from Minnesota and they have that “Oh yeah, dontcha know.”  His parents are good old-fashioned prairie folk that talk like that and they adore him but they are completely oblivious to the fact that he’s gay.  Then his boyfriend gets ditched by his wealthy parents on the holidays so he decides to pay a surprise visit and chaos ensues.  It gets sillier and sillier from there and every kind of sight gag imaginable happens.  The parents keep trying to fix up the son with his ex-girlfriend.  I’m the ex-girlfriend’s totally impossible pushy annoying cougar Mom.  I am the dreaded Heather Mancuso who throws the big Christmas party and I’m sleeping with, apparently, the gardener, the handyman, the Fed-Ex guy and the mailman and I am raising my daughter to be a bit trampy and to follow in my footsteps.  I wear a lot of leopard print, which I’m very proud of.  I’ve decided to wear leopard print in every film I do now.  The characters are like “Oh God, here she comes!”  What is really nice is that it is a positive uplifting message and a happy ending.  That’s what’s really mind blowing.  At the film festivals a lot of people commented on it by saying “You know, when you’re talking about low budget independent gay film its often a depressing story, but this is the happiest independent gay film we’ve ever seen!  Who are you people?”  It’s not Brokeback Mountain.  This movie is so cute, if you’re thinking of coming out to your parents you could take it home for Christmas, show it to your Mom and when she’s in a really good mood say “Guess what?”  They’ll never throw you out.  There is no sex or violence.  I don’t think there is any profanity.  I think one person says “shit” and their referring to fertilizer.  That’s it.

Sam:  So you can show it to the kids!

Alison:  Right.  Its gay, but its exceedingly goody-two shoes.

Sam:  Now another thing you are involved with is Dearly Departed Tours in Los Angeles.

Alison:  I am a closet tour guide.  I have friends that are tour guides and we go walking and they point things out and I say “Yes, but did you know in 1947…” and I point things out.  My friend Rich is a tour guide, although he is so Disney and Mickey Mouse sweet and chipper that he can’t do the Manson tour.  He can’t do anything dark or depressing.  He does the “happy death tour.”  Anyway, half the things on The Dearly Departed Tour [features places] where I lived or know something about or have some sort of connection to, so Rich said “We’ve got to do a tour” and we came up with the “Nasty Nellie Tour.”  You get in a van with me and Rich and we go to all these fabulous locations that I have personal connections to and I have the dirt on and I have scandalous details on.  We go to the Hollywood sign and we do bring the Nellie wig and you can try on the Nellie wig and take pictures by the Hollywood sign and that’s really fun and you get an autograph picture and get to ask questions.  We go to Hollywood High, Paris Hilton’s house, Bernie’s Beanery, Paramount Studios.  We go all over.  We do go by Jay Sebring’s home who was horribly murdered by Manson and, oddly, my father used to get his hair cut by Jay Sebring.  That’s why there is a Manson tour in a way because, weirdly, the Manson murders managed to affect everybody in Hollywood in some horrible bizarre twisted fashion.  Even my father used to say “The son of a bitch killed my barber.  Haven’t had a decent haircut since.”

Sam:  You also do a lot of work with AIDS related charity, isn’t that right?

Alison:  Oh.  Yes.  I help with organizations for people that have AIDS and HIV, and .  I’m on the board of Protect.  Tell people to check out www.protect.org where we are fighting to protect the rights of children and protect kids from horrible and nasty abusive people.  We’ve changed the laws nationwide to protect children.  Once again, it’s raising the Nellie thing and using it for charity to help people out.

Sam:  It’s like you’re channeling the evil past to make a better future.

Alison:  It’s like using your super powers for the goodness of humanity:  I use my powers for good now!

Sam:  Is there any schedule on-line for your appearances and Prairie Bitch Shows?

Alison:  I can be found on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter and my own web-site and all of those will tell you where I am.

Alison Arngrim is one of the most delightful and vivacious women I have had the pleasure to speak with during my pop culture adventures.  However, as a crusader who obviously cares about people, she shouldn’t be confused with Nellie Oleson.  Certainly a bit of Nellie must lay somewhere deep in her soul if she was able to channel the character to such an extreme, but the reality is that a bit of Nellie sits inside all of us.  We all have a bad day every now and then.  We all can get bitchy.  We all hate someone and, in return, someone hates us.  It’s all a part of being human.  Just somehow Nellie Oleson personifies those qualities in all of us to an extreme.  But wouldn’t we all, just for one day, love to be Nellie Oleson?  To be able to just say what we want with little to no consequences?  To allow our power and prestige to shield us from our evil ways?  Sure we would.  God knows I would!  Perhaps that’s why we all love to hate Nellie Oleson.