Life Is Not a Stage (12 page)

Some years later, I was appearing on
The Tonight Show
and quite visibly eight months pregnant. Before going on, I was pacing in the hallway outside the green room, which I always did. I never liked to sit down before I worked. The comedian Jack E. Leonard called out to me, “Florence, come in, sit down, sit down.”

I said, “That’s okay, Jackie. I’m fine out here. I’m just walking, going over lyrics.”

“Come on,” he said, but I wasn’t budging. I kept walking. Finally, he said, “Florence, get in here, sit down. What’s the matter with you? Afraid you’ll wrinkle the kid?”

In addition to sexual content, if the show ever got into a conversation about religion or anything remotely close to the topic of birth control, Dave did not beat around the bush and told me not to chime in with my opinion. With the term “
Today Show
girl,” you get the picture that being a woman on TV in that era left you easily marginalized. Dave Garroway was a powerful force, and I could sometimes feel squelched by him. Maybe I wasn’t aware enough to be bothered by it. I was more consumed with trying to be the best I could at my job. Even in a sexist situation, I never felt less because I was a woman. I always tried to hold my own.

Starting out in the theater, I never had the nerve to complain if there was something I didn’t like. I’m still very respectful of directors unless they are simply god-awful. In the beginning, I was too busy learning and paying my dues, so it wasn’t until much later that I became more assertive. But my attitude was always to make suggestions in the spirit of “let’s see how good we can make this.” Producers and directors quickly grow tired of bad behavior or people who are difficult to work with. Eventually the word spreads and they stop hiring you. No one will argue with you if you are enjoying your job and doing the best you can, having fun and working harder than anybody. Get there early. Be the last to leave. Be prepared. Know your lines. Move forward with that spirit, and you’ll get invited back again and again. I’ve always enjoyed being a team player.

As I was getting ready to leave
The Today Show
with the baby due, Dave Garroway was also ending his tenure. Hugh Downs was taking over. He knew me from
The Tonight
Show
, where he had served as Jack Paar’s announcer. He asked me to continue as his
Today
girl. There were good reasons to turn it down. For one thing, they were going back to doing the show live early in the morning. If I had learned anything from my bout of postpartum depression, it was not to willingly invite that kind of stress into my life. It was also time to get back to the theater.

A young woman named Barbara Walters ended up becoming the next
Today Show
girl. The rest is history.

CHAPTER 10

Do Re Mi

I
t was a totally different experience the second time around with the birth of my son Joseph. The anxiety attacks and debilitating depression I had shortly after giving birth to Barbara thankfully did not recur. It certainly helped that he was a very easy baby, and that I was more confident and experienced as a mother. I was also excited and totally focused about returning to the theater to play the coveted role of Maria in the national tour of
The Sound of Music
. But the most crucial development of all was that I now had the support I needed thanks to the arrival on the scene of Emily Maude Dare, or “Nanny,” as we called her.

Nanny joined our household when Joseph was four months old and the tour was about to begin. She was from England, and I had found her through an employment agency in New York. When she first came to be interviewed, I asked her if she minded telling me how old she was. All I could gather from her appearance was that she was somewhere in amorphous middle age. In the early 1960s, age fifty had not yet become “the new thirty.” For whatever reason, people looked older and acted older in the mid-twentieth century than they did in early-twenty-first-century America. She said, “I really don’t have to tell you. I could tell you that I am as old as the teeth in my head, but that would be a lie.”

Real teeth or not, she was a wonderful woman and an incredible godsend. Going out on tour with a three-year-old daughter and a four-month-old son was a formidable task, but she took so much of the pressure off me as a working mother. Nanny was always kind and supportive, never complaining, and her patience and dedication to my family taught me a lot.

“Nanny, take the weekend off,” I told her once when we had been on the road for a while and had settled into a good routine.

“No,” she answered back, and the sharp clipped English accent meant that the matter was closed. “You don’t take a day off. Nor shall I.” When the show was in Chicago, she got up to attend to Joseph in the middle of the night and suffered a fall that hurt her back. Eventually, I insisted that she had to see a doctor. It turned out that she had fractured a vertebra. Talk about “the show must go on.” What a trouper.

One afternoon between matinee and evening performances, Nanny was making dinner, and I had invited a couple of the cast members to join us, actresses who played nuns in the show. The conversation got a little bit gossipy as the subject matter turned to a crew member who was having an affair with one of our fellow nuns. I was very fond of this man’s wife, and I was blunt in my opinion on the matter.

“I don’t know why he’s cheating with that girl. She’s not even that attractive, and his wife is so beautiful and sweet,” I said.

Nanny, who had sat quietly at the table with us the whole time, eating with her knife and fork in that precise European way and not saying a thing, decided to jump in. “Well, my husband always used to say, ‘When you’re poking in the fireplace, you don’t notice the mantelpiece.’” That was Nanny. And that was the end of that conversation.

Nanny was with our family for the important and formative time in most of my children’s lives, perhaps twelve years in all. She only took a break to go back to England to take care of a health problem. But as the years flew by, she eventually wanted to spend more time with her daughter and grandchildren. I realized afterwards and quickly by comparison what a gem she was. Nanny was truly a tough act to follow, as some of her successors would painfully demonstrate.

Despite the support from Nanny, things were not always smooth sailing on the road with
The Sound of Music
. To be blunt, it was the first (and hopefully the last) time when my ego got a little out of hand. It was a cumulative effect that mounted as the time I had been out on the road built up.

The show began in the fall of 1960 with a performance in New York on the set of the concurrent Broadway production at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre starring Mary Martin. Mary and her husband, Richard Halliday, came to watch. The set was identical to the one we would be using on the road, so it was a chance for everyone to get familiar with it. Then off we went for a year and a half, stopping in each city for usually no more than a week or two, with the exception of a several-month engagement in Chicago.

That time in Chicago, as I mentioned before, was eventful on several fronts. There was the food poisoning. There was the “fart in the whirlwind” visit from my mother. There was the visit from the real Maria von Trapp, sitting there right under my nose in the front row, dirndl-clad and all and very striking-looking. When I introduced her to the audience, she stood up and faced them, raising both arms to the heavens to receive their thunderous applause. The moment had the kind of intensity nothing short of the Bible. It was like we had just borne witness to Moses parting the Red Sea or Jesus walking on water. She was very warm and complimentary toward me when we met.

There was a lot of pressure carrying the show. We were always sold out, and with the exception of one week off, I didn’t miss a performance. I had the illusion that I had endless reserves and could just keep everything going indefinitely. Working hard all the time, I never learned how to regulate my physical limitations. Mix insomnia with the output of energy required for putting on a great show eight times a week month in and month out, and you have a foolproof recipe for total exhaustion. Despite Nanny’s extraordinary help, the demands and responsibilities I still put on myself as a mother and a wife drew from that same rapidly diminishing well.

Ira would fly out on weekends whenever he could, which was true many other times when I was out on the road. One of the weekends in Chicago, there was the worst blizzard in eighty-seven years, so I figured with good reason that he would be a no-show. It was my birthday, and the production threw a dinner party for me at an exclusive club on the top floor of a high-rise. I was in the middle of a conversation when a waiter dressed in a red jacket came over to ask what I wanted to drink. “I think I’ll have a little Dubonnet on the rocks.” A few moments later, I got my drink, but everyone was staring at me in the strangest way. I turned around. The waiter was Ira. He had found a way to make it in.

In addition to having a great sense of humor about our separations, Ira was very supportive because he knew how important my profession was to me. Of course, keeping myself very busy was my form of coping with all the emotional stuff still unresolved, a highly effective form of sublimation. But during the time in Chicago, some cracks in my usual easygoing and agreeable attitude were beginning to appear.

Under less arduous circumstances, I had always found a way to resolve any issues with cast or production before they became conflicts, but not now. For example, with all the children in the cast, I was very much hands-on, working with them to make sure they came off as naturally as possible. Sometimes one of the mothers would think that she was the director and tell her child to act in a certain way contrary to how they had been instructed. “You can’t do that. We’re all part of a family here,” I would have to tell both the child and the mother. It was not always pretty.

For reasons I cannot remember, I also had a little altercation with the Mother Superior. We had some fairly important and dramatic scenes together, like “My Favorite Things” and “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” Joe Layton, the show’s choreographer who had become a friend of mine, came out to take a look at the show and took me out to dinner in order to have a serious talk. He could see that I was wound up too tight. “You’ve got to back off,” he told me. In that state of mind, my response to him was to get upset. I quickly realized that he was right, but that was hardly the end of the story.

Salvatore Dell’Isola was Richard Rodgers’s musical director and longtime right-hand man. A fixture in the pit of many Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, he was a wonderful conductor but quite dictatorial like many in that job can be. It takes two to tango, and I am quite sure that his fuse was short as well, probably because he was not all that enthused about being on the road.

Keeping a consistent tempo to a song was never a problem for me. But when your accompaniment is not being consistent in that regard, it can be a big problem for a singer. I must not have been diplomatic enough when I tried to talk to him about it after the show. With so little in my tank, I probably said something to him in a way that he didn’t appreciate, and he picked his moment to get back at me with “Do Re Mi.”

“Do Re Mi” is one of the show’s longest numbers. I played the guitar, and I would give a nod of the head to the conductor for the orchestra to come in. Sal refused to take the cue. After a couple of seconds of dead space, I was left no other choice than to motion to the pit for the whole orchestra to start, overriding his authority. He went ballistic. He was so furious with me that he threw his baton down on the floor in disgust.

A few days later, Richard Rodgers called me and said, “I hear you’re having trouble with Sal.”

“Yes, he’s hostile,” I replied.

“You know, he’s been around for a long time, but if you’re really, really unhappy, we’ll do something about it.”

“Lord, no, don’t do that,” I countered. A conversation was apparently held with Salvatore as well, and the result was that Ira and I were invited over to the Dell’Isolas’ apartment for dinner.

The Italians, as I always say, have a magic pot. His wife’s cooking was no different, so much delicious food, so many different courses, and a seemingly endless supply of each. I was already tense and uptight, and under the best of circumstances have never been a big eater. But his wife had made all this food, and I didn’t want to further upset him and his wife by not eating everything on the plate. I bit the bullet because I felt so bad about the situation and was rewarded with well-deserved indigestion. The good news was that the end of the tour was in sight, and despite my struggles, I got through it.

The saving grace with this show (and even more evident in the show I did a year later) was that no matter how difficult things were in my personal life, it didn’t seem to show when I was up onstage. The act of performing has always been a love affair for me, and singing for an audience from the time I was a small child was the best medicine for my soul. You are sending out all this energy, and honestly, you can feel it come back in a tremendous way. When you can create that give-and-take, it is an exciting process. It is very clean and simple, and you can only wish that you could bring that same energy to all aspects of your life. But how I was raised made that more difficult to achieve. Children were not encouraged to express a lot of their feelings. You simply got on with it, stoically riding that galloping horse. If you were a sensitive child, somewhere along the line you have to come to terms with the stored-up feelings—loss, sadness, grief, and anger. So when you’re giving so much to please everyone but you’re not taking care of yourself in the process, the energy does not recycle like on the stage. Nobody applauds you for giving your all in the real world. Like the title of this book says, life is not a stage. If you are fortunate enough to find a way to get beyond to that place of peace and forgiveness about all that you have suffered in your life, that anger and acting out dissipates instead of lying in wait like a loaded cannon. That’s when you start to be more compassionate toward yourself and others.

Recently, my housekeeper Shelley and I had a surprising reminder of how important even the simplest gesture of compassion can be. We were having lunch at a little café called Nichols not far from my house. There was a very pretty young woman sitting by herself right behind us in a booth. She was talking on her phone, and when she hung up, she immediately started sobbing, got up, and ran to the restroom.

“Shelley, my God, I have to talk to her. Maybe we can help her.”

When she came back, I said, “I feel so bad that you are sad. Can we help you in any way?”

She thanked us and said, “I just got the news that my mother is dying.”

We sat and talked to her for a while, then hugged and said goodbye. I did not tell her who I was, nor do I assume that everyone is going to recognize me. It was not a big deal, just a passing moment. But several weeks later, I got an e-mail out of the blue from the young woman’s sister. She told me that her sister had told her about this incident.

“Our mother passed away, but I wanted to tell you how much that meant to us and my sister Kaylee.” Some people go through these life traumas and close down in bitterness. Would I have had any positive effect on that young woman had I not experienced losses of my own and worked to find a place of peace in my grief? I don’t know.

Just as I had to take a hard look and come to terms with why I had let my ego get the best of me in
The Sound of Music
, I embrace the challenge of understanding what could have caused it. I have also taken solace and gathered strength in times of personal struggle by taking to heart a very simple concept: It is easy to deal with the happy times. It’s the adversity that offers up the real test. Could my behavior on the tour have been more of a delayed-onset and milder form of postpartum depression? Were some more of those stored-up and unresolved emotions from childhood coming out of hiding? Certainly some of the same fears came up: commitment, responsibility, expectation, guilt, doubt, and so on.