A long, long time ago, when TikTok was just the sound your watch made and Taylor Swift hadn’t even been born, two talented teenagers met and fell madly in love. One of them, Melissa Gilbert, was already very famous, as the cherished child star of Little House On The Prairie. The other, Rob Lowe, was an up-and-coming actor with no idea that his career was soon to go stratospheric.
On paper, they were a cute, era-defining Brat Pack couple with so much potential, but in reality, things got messy fast. Come and trawl through the archives with Us…
How it Began
Back in 1978, Gilbert and Lowe, both now 60, were just 14 when they first met, albeit briefly, on the CBS lot where Gilbert was appearing on a talk show. Lowe “made a point of standing in the hallway so he could meet me,” Gilbert recalled in her 2009 memoir, A Prairie Tale. “After a quick chat, I left with the impression that he was cute (actually, he was almost pretty), sweet and funny — just the kind of guy I could go for if he called me.”
The call never came — but they ran into each other a few years later, in 1981 when they were both 17, and promptly got into an intense relationship. “I fell instantly, hopelessly and stupidly in love,” Gilbert wrote. “We went from first date to instant couple. I felt like I was starving for Rob.”
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Not everyone approved. According to Lowe in his own autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Gilbert’s mom thought that he was only with her daughter for fame. By 1983, though, Lowe was even more famous than Gilbert, following the huge success of his breakout movie role in The Outsiders.
How Long it Lasted
This is where things get complicated. In total, these two were together for more than six years, finally splitting for good in 1987 — but it was very on and off; it’s just that Gilbert wasn’t always looped in to the “off” parts.
Lowe has admitted to cheating on Gilbert repeatedly, including with some high-profile costars like Demi Moore, with whom he appeared in St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) and About Last Night (1986). Gilbert actually auditioned for About Last Night as well, but director Ed Zwick felt that Lowe and Moore looked better together — ouch!
“We [Demi and I] briefly had a thing,” Lowe revealed to Kelly Ripa on her podcast Let’s Talk Off Camera in 2024. “Look, anytime you put young, 20-something men and women together, hookups are inevitable. And I don’t think that has changed.”
Lowe’s most dramatic cheating incident was with model-actress Nastassja Kinski, who he met on the set of 1984’s The Hotel New Hampshire, which was shot in Montreal. Gilbert quickly knew something was up. “I began to sense something missing between us,” she recalled in Prairie Tale. “All signs pointed to one reason, and I started to freak out about Nastassja. In person, she was gorgeous. I could only imagine her effect on Rob.”
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Things came to a head when, back in Los Angeles, Gilbert was trying to get hold of Lowe by calling his hotel in Montreal — and an operator decided to do the decent thing and intervene. “Frustrated, I asked her to ring his room again,” Gilbert recalled. “Instead of saying ‘of course’, she paused. She must have thought long and hard about what to do because a moment later she sighed and said, ‘Miss Gilbert, shall I ring Miss Kinski’s room?’.”
Gilbert booked the next flight to Montreal to surprise him — and said she watched “the blood drain from his face” when she caught him red-handed with Kinski, before he asked “The hotel operator sold me out? Why the hell would she do that?”
Gilbert had the best response, yelling “You don’t f— with America’s sweetheart!” before flying back to Los Angeles. However, they soon reconciled.
Not long after, Joan Rivers confronted Lowe about his indiscretions live on a June 1984 episode of The Tonight Show, with a sheepish Lowe blaming the long-distance nature of their relationship as a factor but adding that Gilbert was “no saint” either.
He didn’t elaborate — but, decades later in her memoir, Gilbert revealed that she got revenge by having an affair with fellow Brat Packer John Cusack, who happened to be one of Lowe’s best friends. “We ended up having a little fling, which I kept from Rob,” she wrote. “It was my own private ‘screw you.’ Only John and I ever knew about it. He was very sweet and funny. Funny was a problem for me. Rob’s sense of humor kept me going back to him as much as our physical attraction did.”
Over the years, Gilbert was linked with other big stars including Tom Cruise (“we made out but honestly there was no sex,” she told Andy Cohen in 2017) and rocker Billy Idol. Basically, if you name a hot star from the 80s, there’s a strong chance either Lowe or Gilbert was rumored to date them. What a time to be alive!
How it Ended
The couple broke up briefly in 1986 when Lowe began dating Princess Stephanie of Monaco (daughter of classic movie star Grace Kelly), but reunited soon after.
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Shocking as it might sound, it wasn’t actually all that cheating that ultimately ended this messy relationship, but an unplanned pregnancy in 1987, the year both stars turned 23. By now they were engaged, but when Gilbert told Lowe she was pregnant, he said he was not ready to be a father and they split. Shortly after, she miscarried, which the actress described as “devastating” in her book. “I had lost my baby and my relationship with Rob,” she wrote. “It hurt like hell.”
What They Said About Each Other
Whenever Lowe was asked about Gilbert in interviews, he emphasized that their relationship was “long-distance” due to them both frequently being away filming. It might have sounded like he was playing down the seriousness of their love, but the challenges of being miles apart were something he stood by years later in his memoir.
“Sometimes you chase girls, sometimes they chase you, sometimes it’s just to flirt, and sometimes it’s more than that,” he wrote, looking back on how he felt at the time. “My situation is complicated somewhat by my long-distance relationship with my girlfriend and there are times when I feel bad about that. Nothing quiets the inner voice you want to ignore better than a couple of beers.”
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In fact, alcohol and drugs were an issue for both of them, with Gilbert revealing that she first tried cocaine in 1983 while the couple were in Malibu, and said she would also drink beer and shots of tequila to help her relax.
What They Say Now
All these decades later, both parties know why things didn’t work out: they were both just too young, and swept up in the excitement and drama of life in Hollywood. “It ran its course,” Gilbert told Today in 2009. “I think we were just too young.”
Gilbert also said that having two grown-up sons of her own (Dakota and Michael, now in their thirties) helped her understand why Lowe had been so freaked out by the prospect of fatherhood. “It was very, very painful,” she said. “It was a very dark and difficult time for me. Now that I have children that are his age… I understand it. But at the time it was devastating.”
Lowe opted not to go into such detail in his own memoir — something he was confronted about in a 2011 interview with The Independent, where he seemed to hint that he wasn’t delighted that Gilbert had spilled so much tea.
“I didn’t write the book to set the record straight or to settle scores,” he said. “That’s such bulls—. There have been a few people in my life who have written books over the years. I know people get really upset about it, but I don’t because I believe everyone is entitled to their own perspective on their life. OK, I might go, ‘I wish they hadn’t said that’ or ‘I wouldn’t have done that,’ but that’s a factor of taste and style. My book has a decorum, and that meant a lot of stuff didn’t get in the book, but that’s OK.”
Gilbert said she felt Lowe had deliberately avoided talking about her. Speaking with Andy Cohen on Radio Andy in 2022, she said, “I was kind of surprised… I could decipher stories about me,” she said. “There was no new information. I was mostly just kind of dismissed. Which is fine… you know, whatever.”
She added that, when her own book was published, she had sent Lowe a copy “to make sure he was OK with it”, and received a response saying “Do you have to refer to me as pretty?” She added: “He has a real problem with being called pretty. He’s a handsome dude!”
Key Relationship Takeaways
It’s a miracle that these two lasted as long as they did, when both of them clearly still had a lot to get out of their systems before settling down. Perhaps they should have split sooner, when it first became evident that neither of them wanted to be faithful — or perhaps they provided crucial support to each other during the craziness of Hollywood in the 1980s.
Of course, the craziness didn’t end with their split for either of them. Gilbert rebounded quickly, marrying Bo Brinkman in 1988, but it was another relationship destroyed by alcohol and infidelity. They split in 1994 and she quickly remarried again, this time to Bruce Boxleitner, who she divorced in 2011.
It seems that the third time’s a charm, though, as she’s now been married to thirtysomething actor Timothy Busfield since 2013, and the couple enjoy a quiet — and, crucially, sober — life together outside New York in what they call “Little House in the Catskills.” Gilbert told Andy Cohen in 2022 that Busfield is “crazy about me and I adore him”. The couple love being grandparents too. Thanks to their big, blended family, Gilbert is a grandma to eight kids! “All these babies,” she recently told People. “All these grandchildren. I mean, they’re so delicious and fun and funny.”
Lowe, too, leads a much quieter life now, following some well-documented wild times in his younger years. He’s held down his marriage, to Sheryl Berkoff, since 1991. Just like Gilbert, he has two grown-up sons: John and Matthew.
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All these years later, their long-lost relationship is still a source of fascination for the generations who grew up adoring Gilbert on Little House on the Prairie and swooning over Lowe and his fellow Brat Pack stars. The pictures of them together, rocking some seriously sharp 80s fashions, are iconic, and their relationship is so compelling because, if they were 40 years younger and had dated during these days of social media, there’s no way they would have gotten away with quite so much bad behaviour. And where’s the fun in that?!
