In 1985, three years after her divorce, Lynn Noe sat down with People and said something nobody else in Michael Landon’s family has ever said.
“I was too busy being the kind of wife he wanted me to be. I lost myself little by little. I made Michael my god.”
There’s a story that gets repeated about her, endlessly, and it isn’t true as far as anyone can establish. This one is.
Updated September 2026
Did Michael Landon’s ex-wife refuse to attend his funeral?
There’s no reliable evidence either way — and the version you’ve read online shouldn’t be trusted.
The claim goes that Noe stayed away, and that she told her children the divorce had already been like a death to her. It traces back to a single line of user-submitted trivia on IMDb, with no citation attached to it. The one other outlet carrying the story quotes that same line. There’s no contemporaneous reporting, no book, no interview, and no statement from Noe or any of her children.
No account lists her as present, either. Press coverage of the funeral simply doesn’t mention her one way or the other.
So the absence is unconfirmed — and the motive, which is the emotional heart of every headline ever written about it, was invented by somebody on the internet.
What she did say is on the record. And it’s harder to read.
What did Lynn Noe say about the marriage?
The People interview is the source for all of it, and it’s unsparing.
On what she became: “I was too busy being the kind of wife he wanted me to be. I lost myself little by little. I made Michael my god.”
On what was left when it was over: “We speak without talking. Our conversation consists of, ‘When will you pick up the children?'”
And on the woman he left her for — with a clarity that’s almost hard to sit with: “If it hadn’t been Cindy, it would have been somebody. He had reached that point in his life.”
Why did Michael Landon and Lynn Noe divorce?
They married in 1963 and divorced in 1982, after Landon began a relationship with Cindy Clerico, a stand-in and make-up artist on Little House on the Prairie roughly twenty years his junior. He married her on 4 February 1983.
Landon’s own framing, given the same year as her interview: “You don’t dissolve a relationship to go to bed with someone 20 years younger… I would have done anything to make that relationship continue, but I could not.”
What happened next is the part nobody writes about. Noe opened a Los Angeles boutique called Trio’s, and co-founded LADIES, a support group for divorced women in Hollywood. She built something of her own out of it.
How many children did Michael Landon have?
Nine, across three marriages.
Mark and Josh, both adopted, with his first wife Dodie Levy-Fraser. Cheryl, Leslie, Michael Jr., Shawna and Christopher with Lynn Noe — Cheryl was Noe’s daughter, whom Landon adopted. Jennifer and Sean with Cindy Clerico.
How did Michael Landon die?
Of pancreatic cancer that had spread to his liver, on 1 July 1991, at his Malibu ranch. He was 54. Cindy was with him.
He’d been diagnosed in April and announced it himself at a press conference on 8 April. He died about three months later.
What did Michael Landon say before he died?
His last television appearance was on The Tonight Show on 9 May 1991, eight weeks before his death — and he used it to go after the tabloids that had run the headline “Four weeks left.”
“That’s the cancer in our society,” he said.
And on the diagnosis itself, he was exactly as you’d want him to be: “I think you have to have a sense of humor about everything. I don’t find this particularly funny, but if you’re going to try to beat something, you’re not going to do it standing in the corner.”
What was Michael Landon’s funeral like?
About 500 people came to Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City — among them Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Melissa Gilbert, Melissa Sue Anderson, Merlin Olsen and Ernest Borgnine. It was a Jewish service. He was born Eugene Maurice Orowitz.
His daughter Leslie read out a poem he’d written himself: “Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all.”
He had wanted the whole thing to be funny, and by every account of the people who were there, it was. Even the rabbi told one of his jokes — Landon’s reply on being told chemotherapy would cost him his hair: “I’m rich, I’ll buy a hat.”
He was cremated and interred in a private family mausoleum at Hillside.
Was Michael Landon Jewish?
He was born Eugene Maurice Orowitz, and his funeral was a Jewish service at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City. It is a detail almost nobody who watched him play Charles Ingalls ever knew, and it is one of the most-searched things about him.
What was Michael Landon famous for?
Three series, across thirty years. Bonanza, where he played one of the Cartwright sons. Little House on the Prairie, as Charles Ingalls. And Highway to Heaven.
What gets left out is how much of it was his. He wrote and directed on his own shows, which is why the voice across all three is so consistent — and why the family in them was so idealised compared with the one he actually had.
Who was Cindy Clerico?
A stand-in and make-up artist on Little House on the Prairie, roughly twenty years his junior. The relationship ended his marriage to Lynn Noe, and he married Clerico on 4 February 1983.
They had two children, Jennifer and Sean. She was with him when he died in 1991.
Who read at Michael Landon’s funeral?
His daughter Leslie, who read a poem he had written himself: “Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I will remember you all.”
About 500 people were there, including Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Melissa Gilbert, Melissa Sue Anderson, Merlin Olsen and Ernest Borgnine.
