Dean Butler was plagued with anxiety when he found out he would be giving his first kiss, both on screen and in real life, to his co-star, 15-year-old Melissa Gilbert.
The actor, who played Almanzo Wilder on “Little House on the Prairie,” has written a new memoir. “Prairie Man” The film details his rise to stardom and the age gap that still raises eyebrows today.
“I couldn’t do that now,” the 68-year-old told Fox News Digital. “There would have been so much backlash. I’m surprised we didn’t get more backlash. But it was handled so tastefully, I think people forgot about the age difference.”
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Dean Butler was 23 when he was cast as Melissa Gilbert’s love interest; she was 15. (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
“I think audiences have watched Melissa for years and really loved her,” Butler said. “They wanted to see her honestly and innocently confess her love for this young man. She fell in love with him from the first time she saw him. And audiences were ready to tune in to that.”
Butler was 23 when she starred in the hit TV show, which aired from 1974 to 1983. Gilbert, who played Laura Ingalls, was “only 15.”
Dean Butler gave Melissa Gilbert his first real on-screen kiss. (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
“She was a really little girl,” Butler recalls. “She was very familiar with the ways of the industry. She was very accomplished as an actress. But she was very inexperienced as a young woman. And I think it was a lot harder for her than it was for me… [And] I’ve never heard of casting like this before… Our casting ranged in age from 15 to 23 years.”
Dean Butler wrote a memoir titled “Prairie Man: My Little House Life and Beyond.” (Citadel)
Butler said the characters in the original book were meant to have a 10-year age difference, and Gilbert had “total trust” in her TV father, who carefully supervised the scene.
“Melissa’s relationship with Michael Landon was a very strong one in her life,” Butler said. “When Michael said, ‘This is the person for you,’ she was ready to forget all her fears and just go for it. And Michael never misled anyone on the series. He really was a master of it. He knew what he was doing. He trusted his own creative instincts very strongly. He believed it would work.”
“I’m really grateful that he felt that I was someone he could trust with,” Butler added.
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Dean Butler (center) told Fox News Digital that Michael Landon (left) closely oversaw the set. (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
Still, Butler and Gilbert had to overcome their fears as they tried to bring the scene to life.
“I think a lot of young actresses crumble under pressure,” Butler says. “Melissa had no experience. She’d never dated, never kissed anybody, nothing like that. It was a tall order for her. To ask her to step into that role without any real-life experience? It speaks to Melissa’s guts and courage. She just did it. She put all her fears aside and just stepped in. She knew what she had to do to become the Lola she was meant to be.”
Dean Butler said he decided to be a gentleman and put Melissa Gilbert at ease. (NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images)
“My job was to make it as easy as possible for her by being the gentleman I was raised to be,” Butler continued. “They’ve never cast us like that since. Nowadays, that would never happen. It would never happen on mainstream TV.”
Melissa Gilbert and Dean Butler had some jitters on set before their kiss. (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
The two shared a kiss in the episode titled “Sweet Sixteen,” and Butler writes that nearly 100 people surrounded the couple on set, but only one person burst into tears: Gilbert’s mother, Barbara Abeles.
“I got the impression that Barbara wasn’t all that approving of me being on the show,” Butler wrote. “Her displeasure probably reached the point where she couldn’t bear to see me kiss her daughter. It was a protective discomfort. Barbara knew about her daughter, which I didn’t, and in a way, I guess that was a good thing.”
Though the scene was “beautifully set up,” Abeles wasn’t the only one to have doubts about the storyline: Butler explained that the Knight Ridder newspaper had written an “ominous prophecy” in August 1979, shortly after she was cast.
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Several “concerned” mothers wrote letters expressing their outrage over the age-gap casting. (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
“Dean Butler may have the toughest role of the 1979-1980 TV season. He must convince viewers of the G-rated hit Little House on the Prairie that it’s OK for a grown man to be in love with an adolescent girl.”
Butler tried to clear up the confusion, telling a reporter, “I think it’s going to be handled very sensitively,” but he acknowledged the department was “treading in dangerous territory.”
Viewers took notice. Butler explained that after the episode aired, an outraged mother wrote to a Midwestern newspaper, demanding that Susan Sackman, the casting director who paired Gilbert with a “grown man,” be “burned at the stake.” The horrified mother asked how she could convince her daughter to wait for the right time when such “dating depravity” was happening on “Little House.”
In his memoir, Dean Butler wrote that Melissa Gilbert’s mother made her feelings about the couple on set very clear. (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
“We received some letters and comments about the age difference,” Butler told Fox News Digital. “Mothers were concerned. It was hard for some people to see the obviously young Melissa Gilbert in a romantic relationship with a man much older than her. But I think people got the spirit of the show. They understood what it was about. And people who were familiar with the material and had read the books knew that there was a 10-year age difference between Laura Ingalls and Almanzo Wilder when they married. Wilder was 28 and she was 18.”
In her memoir, Gilbert wrote that after meeting Butler, she was “overwhelmed with feelings of disappointment, fear, anger, even nausea.” Later, she told Butler over the phone, “How could I do this? You were a man, a grown man with a car and an apartment. I was just a teenager. I wasn’t allowed to wear high heels. I wore Mary Janes. I couldn’t get my ears pierced. I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs. I’d never even dated.”
Dean Butler’s character proposes marriage to Laura Ingalls (Gilbert), but Laura declines the proposal, citing her father’s wish that she wait until she is 18 years old. (NBC Television/Getty Images)
“The biggest problem I had throughout all of this was the issue of physical space,” Gilbert is quoted in Butler’s book. “I just wasn’t ready for that kind of physical contact with anyone. I was basically raised a Puritan when it came to sex and intimacy and all that. … She was a total Puritan when it came to talking to me about sex and intimacy. I tried to have those conversations with her, but we always ended up agreeing that, ‘good girls don’t do that.'”
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Despite the discomfort the kiss caused for both of them, Butler stressed that there are no hard feelings now.
Melissa Gilbert wrote the foreword to Dean Butler’s book. (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
“I think we’re colleagues now who have a lot of respect for each other,” he explained. “We know we’re part of something. We’re bonded by this experience, by having accomplished this. She knows I respect this special moment in her life and career. We’ll always be bonded by this experience.”
Almanzo Wilder (Dean Butler) and Laura Ingalls (Melissa Gilbert) get married and have children. (NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images)
“Melissa is such an incredible woman,” Butler said. “I’ve always had a lot of respect for her and what she’s done. She’s respected by all of us who worked on Little House. The relationship that Melissa and I have today is an important one in my life because of the work that we’ve done and how much it’s meant to so many people. She’s a good person, I’m a good person, we’re good people.”
Now Butler is getting a different kind of feedback: fans confessing that he was their first love.
Dean Butler today. (Bobby Banks/Getty Images)
“It’s an incredible honor,” he said, “but also a humbling feeling. I take it very seriously to be the guy that they fall in love with. I am still that person. I always will be that person. And I’m happy about that.”
