—From “Michael Landon: Big Man in a Little House” by Lisa Mitchell, from the September 1980 issue of The Saturday Evening Post
NBC publicist Bill Kiley affectionately says of Michael Landon that “he can run a studio, but he can’t run himself.” So there is always someone to put gas in his car because he doesn’t “remember” to do it. “He’d run out on the way home and wouldn’t even have a dime in his pocket to make a phone call.” Seems he never carries money because he’d “lose it.” Same thing with keys.
“I’ve never had a key to my house,” Landon says. “Even though it says ‘no solicitors,’ I just keep ringing the bell. If no one can hear me I have to climb over those damned fence spikes, and if you don’t think that’s scary some nights…”
Landon said that his enthusiasm for a series based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie was heightened by coming home and finding his then-12-year-old daughter Leslie Ann engrossed in the Wilder books. “Then I discovered that my wife, Lynn, had devoured them when she was a girl and was reading them again. I thought, ‘How wonderful if parents and children can watch this series together — and maybe it would start the kids reading the books after seeing the episodes on television. Imagine a TV show that would make kids read.’”
Sophisticated critics have called Little House sugar-coated, just as Hollywood director Cecil B. DeMille’s movies were considered pure corn. Nobody loves them but the public, Mr. DeMille used to say of his consistently popular pictures, as can be said of Little House — perhaps because, regardless of the shameless sentimentality, the truth of basic human emotions always, always comes through.
The producer, director, writer, and star of Little House on the Prairie goes out of his way to see that those around him can move up, can become all they can be. Michael Landon gives an assistant director the life-changing opportunity to direct, sees that a stand-in who wants to get into the makeup union gets in, and when a costumer comes to him with a story idea for a Little House segment, he helps her write it, buys it from her, and gives her a writer’s screen-credit.
When Landon speaks of his show as being family-oriented, he is not speaking only of its audience appeal. He programs the work day, for example, to break early enough “so the guys get to eat with their families. It’s a lot of monster work if you’re not going to see your family. The guys that do detective shows, their marriages fall apart, everything goes to pot, because they work all night. The amount of time taken for car chases doesn’t leave much time for the actors, so they have to work late. The cars get to go home early, though.”
This article is featured in the May/June 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.
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