Cindy Landon has spent more than thirty years being one of the most quietly dignified keepers of a complicated legacy in Hollywood — the woman who was married to Michael Landon in the final chapter of his life, who was beside him when the pancreatic cancer diagnosis arrived in April 1991 and who remained beside him until his death three months later in July of that year, and who has navigated the particular challenge of being the last wife of a man whose public image was so carefully constructed and so completely beloved that the full human truth of who he actually was has always existed in the uncomfortable space between the Charles Ingalls mythology and the reality that the people closest to him lived with every day.

Michael Landon was extraordinary — genuinely, undeniably, completely extraordinary in the ways that his work demonstrated and that the millions of people who loved Little House on the Prairie and Bonanza and Highway to Heaven understood intuitively from everything he put on screen. He was also a man of considerable complexity — the marriages that preceded Cindy, the affairs that preceded the marriages, the specific and documented pattern of behavior that the women in his life experienced and that the wholesome prairie image was specifically and successfully designed to keep at a careful distance from public scrutiny. At 62, having carried the complete truth of her own marriage to Michael Landon through three decades of anniversary tributes and legacy documentaries and the relentless public appetite for the version of him that the audience preferred, Cindy Landon has finally chosen to reveal the awful truth — not to diminish the man or the work or the genuine love that existed between them, but to give the complete account of what that marriage actually contained that the official version of Michael Landon’s story has always carefully omitted.