‘Tiny Area on the Prairie’ actor defends age-gap kiss with teen Melissa Gilbert: ‘Mom was involved’

Dean Butler was battling anxiety when he learned he might be giving his co-star, 15-year-old Melissa Gilbert, her first kiss — both on-screen and on a real date.

The actor, who played Almanzo Wilder on “Little House on the Prairie,” has penned an unreleased memoir, “Prairie Man,” that sheds light on his rise to stardom and the age-gap scene Which raises eyebrows lately. ,

“You couldn’t do that today,” the 68-year-old told Fox Information Virtual. “There will be a lot of shock. It’s remarkable that we didn’t get more shock than we did… but I think it was handled so well that people… forgot about the age difference.”

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“I think the audience had been watching Melissa for years and loved her incredibly much,” Butler shared. “They wanted to see her express her love for this young man so honestly and innocently. She fell in love with him the first time she laid eyes on him. The audience was ready to go along with it ”

Butler was 23 when he was cast in the sweeping TV show, which aired from 1974 to 1983. Gilbert, who starred as Laura Ingalls, was “15 years younger”.

“She was really a little girl,” Butler recalled. “She was very sophisticated in the ways of the industry. As an actress, she was very skilled. But as a young woman, she was very inexperienced. And I think that was more difficult for her than it was for me.” It was difficult for…”. (And) I am not aware of any such casting. There was a difference of 15 to 23 in our casting.”

According to Butler, the characters in the new store form were intended to be much more at the pace of 10 years. He noted that Gilbert had “complete confidence” in his TV father, who supervised the scene discreetly.

Butler noted, “That was a very powerful relationship in Melissa’s life, which she had with Michael Landon.” “When Michael said, ‘This is the guy for you,’ she was ready to suspend all her worries and just step into it. And Michael never steered clear of anyone in the series. He really nailed it.” He knew what he was doing. He had great confidence in his creative instincts that it would work.”

“I’m really grateful that I was the person he felt he could trust with this,” Butler said.

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However, both Butler and Gilbert had to overcome their fears in an effort to bring the scene to life.

Butler said, “I think a lot of young actresses may have held back because of the pressure.” “Melissa had no experience. She had never been on a date. She had never kissed anyone. She had never done anything like that. All of that was still ahead of her. So what asked her to step into that Even though she had no real life experience, she just put aside all her worries and went ahead to become Laura. What will he have to do for this?

“My job was to really be that gentleman and make it as easy as possible for him,” Butler said. “There has been no casting couple since that could do what they did with us. That casting could never happen today. Certainly not on a mainstream television show.”

The pair smooch in the episode titled “Sweet Sixteen”. Butler wrote that about 100 people surrounded them, but there was one who started crying – Gilbert’s mother, Barbara Abels.

“I had a feeling that Barbara was not fully supportive of my presence on the show,” Butler wrote. “Her unhappiness probably culminated in her not being able to bear to see me kiss her daughter. It was a protective resentment; Barbara knew her daughter. I didn’t, and in some ways, I’m glad.”

While the scene was “beautifully set up”, Abeles would not be the only person who had reservations regarding the story. Butler explained that shortly after he was cast, an “ominous prediction” was made in an August 1979 story in the Knight-Ridder newspaper series.

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“Dean Butler may have the most intriguing role of the 1979-80 TV season. He’ll have to convince the audience of that G-rated hit, ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ that a young girl’s love for a grown man It’s okay to fall, girl.”

“I think it will be handled very carefully,” Butler told a reporter, trying to make the air cloudless. Nonetheless, he was aware that the community was “risking moving into dangerous territory.”

The audience understood. Butler described how, when the episode aired, a frustrated mother wrote to a Midwest newspaper, demanding that casting director Susan Suchman be “burned at the stake” for hooking up Gilbert with “an older man”. . The horrified matriarch asked how she could still convince her daughter to wait for the right generation when such “dating depravity” was becoming the playground in “Little House.”

“There were some letters and comments about this age difference,” Butler told Fox Information Virtual. “The mother was concerned… Obviously it was challenging for some people to see young Melissa Gilbert in this romantic relationship with someone much older than her. But, I think… people got the feeling of the show. They understood where it was and people who knew the material well, who read the books, knew that when Laura Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder got married they were 10 years apart.

In his memoir, Gilbert wrote that after meeting Butler, he once experienced “a perfect storm of despair, fear, anger, and even nausea.” She informed Butler over the telephone call, “How was I going to do this? You were a man, a grown man with a car and an apartment. I was actually a young teenager. I was allowed to wear heels. I was still wearing Mary Janes, I couldn’t get my ears pierced, I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs, and I had never even been on a date.”

“My biggest problem during all of that was the physical space thing,” Gilbert quoted Butler as saying in his store. “I wasn’t ready to have that kind of physical contact with anyone. I was basically being raised by a Puritan when it came to sex and physicality and all that…. He was very willing to talk to me.” I was completely puritanical about sex and intimacy. I would try to have these conversations with her, and it wouldn’t necessarily be ‘good girls.’

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Despite the discomfort the kiss caused the pair, Butler said there were no bad feelings recently.

“I think we’re very respectful allies of each other now,” he said. “We know we’re part of something. We’re bound together by this experience, by doing this… She knows I respect this special moment in her life and career… We’ll always be Connected to that experience.”

“Melissa is a very accomplished woman,” Butler said. “I’ve always had a very high level of respect for her and what she’s accomplished…she gets that respect from all of us who were a part of ‘Little House.’ The relationship I have with Melissa today So important in our lives because of the work we’ve done and how much it means to so many people, she’s good, I’m good, we’re good.”

Lately, Butler in particular has been getting comments – from fans who are actually acknowledging that he was their first omnibus.

“It’s incredibly humbling,” he said. “It’s also humbling. I take it very seriously, the boy they fell in love with… I’m still the same person. I’ll always be the same person. And I’m happy about that.”