The Death of Michael Landon | Last Days

I don't want to keep you here, Will. I just came out to say goodbye to you, that's all. This pony and your clothes, all the clothes you got back in your room, they're yours to keep. Make sure you come back and get them. Come back and visit us real soon, too, now you hear? In the spring of 1991, Michael Landon was seemingly as healthy and energetic as he had been throughout his extraordinary career. For more than three decades, Landon had been one of the most recognizable faces on American television. First as the handsome and hot-headed Little Joe Cartwright on Bonanza, then as the devoted father Charles Engels on Little House on the Prairie, and finally as the literal angel Jonathan Smith on Highway to Heaven. And though Highway had recently ended, Landon had no intention of slowing down. He had just left NBC after an almost uninterrupted 30-year relationship with the network and moved to CBS, where he had written, directed, and starred in a two-hour pilot called Us, which the network hoped would become his next series. Now in his mid-50s, Landon was attempting something few television stars had ever managed, launching a fourth series after already anchoring three long-running shows. And he remained unusually involved in virtually every aspect of his work. By this point, Landon wasn't simply an actor whose name was attached to a project. He was a writer, director, and producer who had spent years exercising enormous control over his programs, and Us was intended to continue that model. There was little indication that his career was winding down. But in early April, while on a ski vacation in Utah, Landon developed a severe headache that he couldn't shake. He returned to Los Angeles, where doctors began running tests. For days, Landon was forced to wait for news of his condition until, on April 5th, he was given a devastating diagnosis. He had advanced stage pancreatic cancer that had spread into the surrounding tissues and blood vessels. The cancer was inoperable, and doctors told him it was terminal. Three days later, Landon went public with the diagnosis. There would be no attempt to hide what was happening. Landon told reporters he intended to fight the disease with everything he had, and over the next several weeks, he pursued conventional and experimental treatments while trying to remain optimistic. The prognosis, however, was grim. On May 9th, just after a month after learning he had cancer, Landon appeared on The Tonight Show with his good friend Johnny Carson and received a long-standing ovation. Landon looked remarkably healthy and spent much of the interview doing what he had always done best, telling stories, cracking jokes, and making the people around him laugh. He criticized the tabloids for sensationalizing his illness, vowed to fight cancer, and asked the millions watching at home to pray for him. A visibly emotional Carson struggled at times to maintain his composure, but Landon refused to indulge in self-pity, instead confronting his grim prognosis with humor and optimism. The appearance was also remarkable simply because of how public Landon was willing to be. Cancer diagnoses, particularly terminal ones, were still frequently handled far more privately by celebrities. Landon instead discussed his illness before a national television audience, including the treatments he was trying and the uncertainty surrounding whether any of them would actually work. He made no attempt to suggest that his doctors had given him good odds. His message was simply that he intended to use whatever time and options remained available to him. And indeed, Landon was desperately sick. Twelve days after the Carson appearance, doctors operated on him for a life-threatening blood clot in his left leg. In June, he granted Life magazine an extensive interview about his illness, his family, and the possibility that he was going to die. Landon, a father of nine, spoke openly about his fate and the things that I believe in God. I believe in family. I believe in truth between people. I believe in the power of love. By then, however, his physical decline was becoming increasingly apparent. The entire course of his illness was unfolding with extraordinary speed. Diagnosis in April, the Carson interview in May, the Life interview in June. There was never a prolonged period in which the disease stabilized enough for Landon to return to anything resembling his previous life. And then, on July 1st, 1991, just 84 days after his initial diagnosis, Michael Landon passed away at home with his wife by his side. Michael Landon was just 54 years old. I'm Jason Beckerman. I'm Derek Kaufman. This is Last Days Michael Landon. As we previously talked about in our episodes on Steve Jobs, Patrick Swayze, and Alan Rickman, pancreatic cancer is among the deadliest forms of the disease, in large part because it's so difficult to detect before it has already spread. The pancreas sits deep in the abdomen, and tumors can grow for a long time without producing obvious symptoms. There's also no standard screening test for pancreatic cancer, so by the time patients begin experiencing significant pain, jaundice, weight loss, or other symptoms, the disease is often already advanced. And that was the case with Landon. When doctors discovered his cancer in April 1991, it was already affecting the tissue and blood vessels surrounding his pancreas, and surgery was no longer an option. We've talked about this often. This is not a medical show, but just pancreatic cancer, it is terrifying because you are totally asymptomatic. All of a sudden, you begin to have some sort of illness. The headache, the weight loss. And we've seen it over and over again. We mentioned Steve Jobs, Patrick Swayze, Alan Rickman, all of them. They discovered it, and within a very short period of time, they were gone. Yeah, it advances very quickly, very aggressively. Typically, you hear these stories, and you watch a person waste away in a matter of months. I mean, the diagnosis for Michael Landon was my first experience with hearing about pancreatic cancer. I was young, I was 11 years old, but he was a massive, massive star. We'll talk about it. You know, Little House on the Prairie was an institution, and he was on the cover of People magazine. I remember his flowing hair. He just had the classic good looks of a television star at the time. And, you know, we saw then Steve Jobs waste away from this disease. It sort of just took him from us. Now, the interesting thing with Michael Landon, when he was on Carson, he looked pale. He looked very like the guy you saw on TV all the time. A little bit skinnier in hindsight, but the big hair was still there. The handsome face was still there. He didn't look like a man on the precipice of death. The one thing, for what it's worth, again, not a medical show, but as I was putting this together, I happened to go to the New York Times to see what the headlines were, and the headline at the New York Times was that there is a new treatment, FDA-approved treatment for an oral medication to treat pancreatic cancer. It is a remarkable advancement. Again, I just thought it was remarkable. As I was putting this together, I'm reading this article about this idea that within a few years, hopefully, people will live for decades. Yeah, because it was a death sentence. He has a 90% fatality rate. This is a very untreatable form because it spreads so quickly. You don't have the symptoms, and then by the time you get to it, it's stage four, and you're just... But hope is now on the way. Good. But that was certainly not the case in 1991, and Landon knew exactly how serious the diagnosis was. But rather than retreat from public view, he talked openly about his cancer, joked about some of the treatments he was undergoing, and most memorably, made the legendary Tonight Show appearance in which he declared his intent to fight. I thought about this as I was listening to you talk about Michael Landon. This is a stark contrast from someone like Norm MacDonald, who battled this all very privately. No one knew he passed. He didn't want to publicly talk about cancer and have people look at him a different way or not be able to laugh at his jokes and so forth. Michael Landon, as soon as he learned, and three days later, he was out there in front of this talking to Johnny Carson and so forth. And there was something almost eerily appropriate about the way Michael Landon faced death, because for most of his career, the characters he created and played had been confronting hardship with precisely that combination of optimism, humor, and determination. By 1991, Landon had been doing it on American television for more than 30 years. As we mentioned, it started with Bonanza. Landon spent 14 seasons playing little Joe Cartwright, but during that run, he also began writing and directing episodes, gradually learning virtually every aspect of television production. So when Bonanza finally ended in 1973, Landon was uniquely positioned to create the next phase of his career. That came almost immediately with Little House on the Prairie, in which Landon starred as Charles Ingalls, the father of his frontier family. In addition to starring in the show, he was also an executive producer, writer, and frequent director, exerting enormous creative influence over a show built around family and the idea that a good father could hold a family together through almost anything. Little House ran for nearly a decade and is one of the most iconic shows in the history of American television. It also made Landon into a bona fide star, and in many ways, the embodiment of the ideal American father. I wanted to pause here really quickly. Bonanza, he's little Joe Cartwright. My mom loved Bonanza growing up, so I watched old episodes of Bonanza, and he's a kid. He's little Joe Cartwright. By Little House, he's the patriarch of the family, and his transition from one to the other was the smoothest I've ever seen. He was immediately believable. He was very handsome. He was very in control. He's out there in that prairie. You believe that he lived that life. And I just always found that incredible because it's hard to transition from the world seeing you in one way on Bonanza and then going into Little House. But just as Little House was wrapping, Landon found himself immersed in a scandal that threatened to detonate his career and which undermined his carefully crafted public image as America's father and moral compass. There was an obvious contradiction at the center of Michael Landon's public image. News broke that while making Little House on the Prairie, Landon had begun an affair with one of the show's makeup artists, who was 20 years younger than him. Weeks later, his marriage to Lynn ended in a bitter and very public divorce. And there were stories in the tabloid press that Landon's infidelity was not a one-time thing and that he sometimes engaged in onset conduct not befitting a man with such a pristine reputation. It appeared that the man who had become America's symbol of fidelity, fatherhood, and family stability had lived a far more morally complicated life than anyone had Even today, this would be a problem. In Ronald Reagan's America of the early 1980s, it could have been catastrophic. And indeed, he paid a price. His children were devastated, especially including Michael Landon Jr., who was 15 when the relationship became known, and who later described essentially watching his hero fall from the pedestal on which he had placed him. He remained estranged from a number of his children until he died. The scandal also cost him financially when he was dropped by Kodak in 1982 as their commercial spokesperson. But Landon was committed to stem the erosion of his career. He acknowledged the infidelity and publicly apologized to Lynn, and the next year he married the woman with whom he was involved, Sidney Cicero, effectively putting an end to the scandal. And soon thereafter, he was back on television once again with Highway to Heaven, starring somewhat ironically as an angel sent by God to help people in need. The show was even more explicitly moral than Little House about the power of compassion, forgiveness, and redemption. It's interesting. This show is a little, you know, seventh heaven kind of vibes because he had just endured this scandal and he comes out playing an absolute angel, halo on his head, and obviously the seventh heaven dad had his own issues. These moralizing shows sometimes have very complicated histories. Highway to Heaven ran for five seasons, effectively putting the scandal behind him for good and cementing Landon's status as one of the most durable stars in television. It earned Landon the remarkable distinction of starring in three successful television series across three consecutive decades. And the numbers helped put that achievement in perspective. Bonanza wasn't simply a long running Western. At its peak, it was the number one show on American television for three consecutive seasons, and Landon remained with it for all 14 years. He then moved almost immediately into Little House on the Prairie, which kept him on television for most of another decade, followed only a year later by Highway to Heaven. From the premiere of Bonanza in 1959 until the end of Highway to Heaven in 1989, there were only brief periods when Michael Landon wasn't appearing every week on network television. His popularity was extraordinary. Landon appeared on the cover of TV Guide 22 times, reportedly second only to Lucille Ball, and spent nearly three decades acting in hour-long television programs. More importantly, he demonstrated an ability that very few television stars have ever had. Viewers followed him from one completely different character and series to the next. He went from Little Joe Cartwright to Charles Ingalls to Jonathan Smith, a Western heartthrob, a frontier father, and finally an angel, without ever really surrendering his audience. Let me make the case to you that he may be one of the biggest stars in television history. You don't think of him in your first thought, but he has two truly iconic shows, right? Bonanza and Little House are still things that people recognize. Everybody knows that. Sure, they're iconic. Even if the kids we work with don't know who Michael Landon is, they know the shows. They've heard of the show. And everyone knows Bonanza. Everyone knows. Exactly. And then, of course, he has Highway to Heaven, which is less sort of, you know, integral to the American experience, but nevertheless, pretty big show, right? You're talking, look, you know, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, she's got Seinfeld and she's got Veep and then she's got New Adventures of Old Christine. Veep is an HBO show. It's very, very small. It's hard to compete with her, I think. You've got Ted Danson, right? Cheers and Becker and Good Place. And you're up there in the upper echelon. You've got David Hasselhoff, who did Knight Rider in the 80s and then Baywatch in the 90s. Bear with me for a second. If you talk about people who had three shows, three network television shows, which were all big and lasted for years and years, those are like the few that come to mind. I mean, you've got like some others, Bryan Cranston, William Shatner, James Spader, Katie Seagal. They had multiple shows, but never, I don't think, reached the peaks of Little House and Bonanza. I like the argument because you do have three and a lot of people have two. You know, Ed O'Neill had Married with Children and then he had Modern Family. And David Hasselhoff. David Hasselhoff had the two. He had Knight Rider and Baywatch. But it's hard to get that third off the ground. And I don't think Julia Louis-Dreyfus really gets you there. I don't think Bryan Cranston gets to those heights. And I also want to talk about how important network television was when he was at the center of it. Network television was it. There were three channels when Bonanza was on and he was all over your television screen for 14 straight years. You then had Little House on the Prairie. There are still very few networks. The numbers were mind-boggling. Every show. 28 million. Big shows. They were all like American Idol numbers at that time. So you'd be hard-pressed to find someone bigger than Michael Landon. That actually might cut the other way just because once you had a foot, you know, there were television actors and there were movie actors. Never the two shall meet, right? And so Julia Louis-Dreyfus is now a huge movie star as well. And there are a lot of people from movies. Bryan Cranston went to movies. That's right. And people go back and forth. Jennifer Aniston was a television star. Then you were a television star. And once you got a foothold in, that's why these old actors, there were like multiple shows they were in. But he's like the one. He came up with three huge. I like the argument. He was dashingly handsome and he died at 54 and still crammed in all of that. Had a fourth coming up too. It was remarkable how he had a fourth go. In truth, frankly, but for his illness, Landon may have become bigger than them all. After Highway to Heaven ended, Landon left NBC, the network that had essentially been his professional home for 30 years. CBS signed him to develop a new hour-long drama for the 91-92 television season. The project became Us, a two hour pilot written and directed by Landon, in which he also starred as Jeff Hayes, a man recently released from prison who tries to rebuild his relationship with his former wife and children. The premise was recognizably Landon, a damaged family, a man trying to make amends and the But the circumstances surrounding the show were very different. For the first time since Bonanza premiered in 1959, Landon was trying to establish himself on a network other than NBC, and there was no guarantee that the formula that had worked for three decades would work again in a television landscape that was changing rapidly around him. Still, Landon was deeply involved in the project. He wasn't simply lending his name to another series. As he had on Little House and Highway to Heaven, he intended to write, direct, produce and star. He was working on Us in early 1991, just weeks before learning that he had pancreatic cancer. That detail makes the speed of his illness particularly striking. This wasn't a performer whose career had gradually wound down before he became sick. Landon was preparing what he hoped would be his fourth television series. CBS had already committed to the project, the pilot had been made, and Landon was talking about what he wanted the new show to become. Then on April 5, 1991, doctors told him he had advanced pancreatic cancer. Us ultimately aired as a television movie in September 1991, a little more than two months after Landon's death. The series Landon envisioned was never made. When Landon announced he was dying, the response was enormous. Letters poured in from viewers who had spent decades watching him. These weren't simply fans mourning an actor. Many described what his shows had meant to their families and how the lessons embedded in Little House and Highway to Heaven had affected their lives. Michael Jr., who ultimately forgave his father for the infidelity, later remembered being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of letters thanking his father for what he had given them. Landon actually went on the Tonight Show in that episode we talked about earlier of the Tonight Show and said that he had gotten tens of thousands of letters. He's like Santa Claus. The only one who rivals him is Santa Claus. It might be the second most letter receiving. You imagine like a big sack. Second most letters of all time. That's right. Tens of thousands of letters. Granted, it's a day. We didn't have emails. We didn't have emails and stuff, but tens of thousands of letters, pretty big. You need a big sack to empty them in a courtroom like Miracle on 34th Street. Landon's final months only reinforced that connection. He didn't hide from his diagnosis or pretend it wasn't happening. He confronted it publicly with humor and optimism. The Los Angeles Times, writing after his death, noted the striking symmetry between the characters he played and his determination in confronting his disease. Quote, in his final months, Landon seemed to embody in real life the same qualities his programs had championed. Straight talk, humor, and hope. More than decades after his death, Little House on the Prairie remains in circulation around the world. Generations born long after Landon died know Charles Ingalls. His children and grandchildren continue to work in entertainment, and his family has remained involved in raising awareness about the disease that killed him. Melissa Gilbert, who played Laura Ingalls, Michael Landon's daughter on Little House, spoke after his death about the person he was and what he meant to her. She said, Michael Landon was one of the greatest influences on my life. His death left an enormous hole in the lives of those of us who knew him personally, as well as those who simply admired his work. Today, I am missing my mentor, my acting partner, my favorite director, father figure, friend, and boss. Today, I am missing my pa. Today, I am missing Michael Landon.