Life Is Not a Stage (13 page)

Regardless of the causes and conditions, they all lead back to the core question: Why are we really here? The only answer that makes any sense for me is to strive to use the gift that has been given me in order to do something in some way to help others.

CHAPTER 11

The Girl Who Came to Supper Loses Her Appetite

B
y this time, it may not come as any surprise that I landed a great part in a Broadway musical, and like clockwork promptly became pregnant. In the summer of 1963, I was cast in the lead as “the girl” in
The Girl Who Came to Supper
, music and lyrics by Noël Coward and directed and choreographed by Joe Layton. The musical was set in London in 1911 at the time of King George V’s coronation. It was based on a play by Terence Rattigan called
The Sleeping Prince
and was later made into a movie,
The Prince and the Showgirl
, starring Marilyn Monroe and Sir Laurence Olivier. My character was Mary, an American-born chorus girl who becomes involved with a Balkan prince played by the distinguished actor José Ferrer (who is best remembered for the title role in both film and play renditions of
Cyrano de Bergerac
).

The producers surprisingly agreed to hold the show for me until after the baby was born. That moment came just as I was on the set of the game show
Password
. The host, Allen Ludden, was a lovable man, but he was a nervous wreck when I started going into labor in the middle of taping his program. He probably wasn’t thinking about the publicity and the incredible ratings potential of an actual childbirth in the middle of “the Lightning Round.” However, it was my third pregnancy. As a seasoned veteran, I had my timing down. Only when the contractions moved down into the lower back was it time to get serious. I had such a ball doing game shows that no contraction was going to stop me. Back in the early 1960s, game shows were hugely popular, even in prime time. I loved the competition, having to think fast on my feet and use my imagination. Going to the hospital could wait.

Ten days or so after Robert entered the world, rehearsals for
The Girl Who Came to Supper
started in New York and continued for five weeks total. I felt great in the beginning, but not being with the baby began to wear. As it would be for most mothers, the feeling of separation from my newborn was not healthy. My “tough my way through it” mode kicked in as usual. With rehearsals completed, the show went out of town for tryouts in Boston, Toronto, and Philadelphia. The schedule during this tour was horrendous, rehearsing all day and then performing in the evening. Therefore, the decision was made that the baby and the children would be better off staying in New York under Nanny’s care.

Fatigue set in, and so did the loneliness and guilt because of the separation. During my longest absence, Robert had suddenly transformed from an infant to a chubby-cheeked little baby. Oh, how terrible I felt. On top of that, Barbara’s first communion was about to happen and missing that would be unforgivable. I rushed to get myself to New York in time for the ceremony and hurried back for the evening performance, producing the kind of stress that adds insult to injury.

Things started out well despite some clear problems with the show. The expectations had been sky-high. We were the second coming of
My Fair Lady
, said the rave reviews. Consequently, Herman Levin, the producer, was overconfident. The show was a smash in Boston but not as warmly received in Toronto. By the time we got to Philadelphia, it was hard to deny that things were not quite right despite the local critics’ approval. The problems with the show made me first feel very insecure, then snowballed downhill into outright fright. We got great reviews in Philadelphia again, but I felt intuitively that the show was not ready for New York. When everything is right, there is a pervasive quality of effortlessness. When they’re not, things feel forced and unnatural, and consequently miss the mark or wander off track. The audience can feel it too.

One major obstacle was that José Ferrer was definitely miscast in the role. He was a great Shakespearean actor and worthy of the highest respect, but it was clear that singing in a musical comedy was outside his comfort zone. Add two and two together, and it was perhaps no mystery why the audience had difficulty hearing his normally strong voice, which necessitated his use of a newfangled cordless body microphone. We had a good laugh when I asked him where he hid the device.

“It’s in my jockstrap,” he told me.

I leaned over in front of him and said, “Testing one, two, three.”

Walter Kerr, the powerful critic for the
New York Herald Tribune
, tried to put his finger on the problem with the show, writing, “What [Ferrer] can’t do is strike a spark between Miss Henderson and himself…and the lack is serious, behind all the gold braid.” Noël Coward admitted to me that he should have played the Prince himself, not Ferrer.

Good reviews aside, things not privy to public view went from bad to worse in Philadelphia. With still so much work left to get the show ready for Broadway, director Joe Layton came down with acute hepatitis. Then came the news that sent me over the edge, spiraling into the worst depression of my life.

I was on an elevator in the hotel when some guy got on and started talking. “It’s just awful that he’s been shot.”

“Who’s been shot?” I asked.

“The president.”

“Oh my God, you must be kidding.” A few seconds later, when we got downstairs to the lobby, we heard that John F. Kennedy had died.

I started to panic. The first thought out of my head was, “I have to go to church.” I walked down the street to the nearest one. Others had the same idea, and people were pouring in. I just sat there in prayer.

Herman Levin made us go forward with the show that night because the house was sold out. It was gut-wrenching to perform, especially acute in one scene where my character has a little too much to drink and starts reciting the Bill of Rights. One consolation was that the opening number was cut. “Long Live the King (If He Can)” was just about as inappropriate a message for the moment as you could get. Mercifully, sanity prevailed, and the show was canceled over the next few nights. Everybody was numbed. For once, and rightfully so, the show did not have to go on.

During the immediate aftermath, I refused to watch the nonstop television coverage or read anything about it in the newspapers. Instead, I wrote a long letter to Jacqueline Kennedy, an acquaintance through an exercise class we took together. My son Joseph and her John-John also were in a class together. She was always so nice. When we met, we were both pregnant, she with Patrick, the baby she lost, and I with Robert. My child lived and hers didn’t. So with this horrible, violent tragedy, I took it personally. All that promise that the Kennedys symbolized was wiped out so quickly. It was as if I had lost my brothers all over again.

For the first time in my life, I was terrified that I couldn’t remember my lines, exasperated by the fact that the production was constantly doing rewrites and changing things. During the out-of-town weeks, I felt guilty being away from the baby. I wasn’t sleeping well or eating well. I didn’t have anybody with me. Ira stuck with his work in New York. It felt at times like I was in free fall without a parachute. When I really hit bottom, I probably had a nervous breakdown.

When the show was about to open on Broadway, postpartum depression came back with a vengeance. Here I was, doing this role that was so demanding, and failure was not an option. Forget about going on sick leave to give myself time to get over it. There were none of the modern and sophisticated antidepressants available (or if there were any, I didn’t know about them), no magic little pill to bring you out of it real fast or, more accurately, at minimum put a temporary Band-Aid on it. Like before, I never told anybody how sick I was, although it had to be noticeable how the weight was dropping from my already slender frame.

Fear carried me through. Commitment, responsibility, and fulfilling expectations put me into some supernatural state of overdrive. It must have been the Holy Spirit working through me. Even though I felt awful, I guess taking pride in what I was doing overrode the fact that I was so utterly terrified.

The Girl Who Came to Supper
was something that could have been great, but it missed, lasting only 112 performances. After the opening performance on December 8, 1963, the whole audience, or so it seemed, came backstage and up the flight of stairs to our dressing rooms to congratulate us. I didn’t feel deserving that all these people would come to see me and tell me how wonderful I was. Some remarked after shaking my hand how cold I was to the touch. “Yes, I didn’t feel all that great tonight,” I told them. I took a pass on the usual post-premiere festivities.

To show you how strange our attitudes and perceptions can be, I carried inside of me for decades the thought that the show’s short run may have been my fault. The audiences began to dwindle as the weeks went by, so the last curtain came as no surprise. It was easy for my mind to take on that blame because I had felt so awful. There were many times when I was onstage when I thought I was going to completely lose it, forget my lines, and go completely berserk. Somehow or another and miraculously, I did not make any horrible blunders.

Noël Coward sensed what was going on and was wonderful to me. On opening night, he gave me a beautiful amethyst pin that looked like a medal pinned to a ribbon. The note read, “You’re first class.” With his ever-present cigarette in hand, he was compassionate, understanding, and very aware. And privately, he displayed his wisdom, laced sometimes with a wickedly delightful sense of humor.

We sat together on the plane ride from Toronto to Philadelphia. Only weeks earlier there had been a very serious fire in his apartment, and quite obviously, he had not died. I asked him, “Were you afraid? Afraid of dying?”

Knowing my downcast state, he chirped back, “Oh, no, no, no! I have so many friends waiting for me over there!” He began rattling off the names of all the great people he knew who had passed that he looked forward to seeing again, such as Vivien Leigh and Gertrude Lawrence.

A few years later, Noël came to see me in
South Pacific
at Lincoln Center. If you wanted to go backstage after the show, there was a strict rule that you had to physically exit the theater onto the street and reenter through the stage door. In other words, going through a side door near the stage was forbidden.

Noël came into my dressing room after the show in quite a state of agitation.

“Quick, quick, quick, quick, hide me! I think she’s coming after me!”

“What are you talking about?” I shot back.

“Well, I came down the aisle and through this door to see you. This usherette said, ‘You can’t go there, you have to go outside and through the stage door.’”

“‘I beg your pardon,’” Noël said, reenacting the encounter. He drew himself up in an imposing posture (and he was already tall to begin with). “I told her, ‘Step aside, dear girl. The day that Noël Coward can’t go through any door in the theater, the theater is finished!’” With that he had barged through and came scurrying into my dressing room to find shelter like a puppy with its tail between its legs. Despite all of his accomplishments, he was in many ways a very modest man.

Given my emotional state when the play opened, I didn’t even read the reviews. Someone had told me that Walter Kerr wrote some nice things, but that was about all that I registered. An assistant collected a number of the newspaper clippings and pasted them in a scrapbook that was put away on a shelf. Strange as it may sound, it would be almost fifty years before I actually read these articles (in preparation for writing this book), and I was astonished at what I discovered. The reviews were shockingly perhaps the finest I had ever received over my entire career: “Totally captivating.” “A joy.” “A perfect sweetheart.” “A singing-dancing wonder of radiant charm in the title role.” “Miss Henderson strengthens her position as one of the loveliest, most spirited and musically gifted young women on the stage today.” “Not only a singer of unusual talent and intelligence but a first-rate actress and comedienne.” “Miss Henderson’s eager Cinderella embraces life with arms wide open.” “Miss Henderson has everything a musical comedy star needs—beauty, humor, an exceptionally good singing voice and a spring steel constitution.” So read the sepia-tinged fading newsprint in the scrapbook. It is impossible to say whether reading those reviews when they were first published would have eased the emotional burden I was carrying.

I recently got to see some additional graphic evidence of this huge gap between perceptions and appearances during that same time period. Someone sent me a video clip from a Garry Moore variety television show I did to promote the play. Looking at it objectively almost a half century later, none of the fear or deep depression seemed to come across on the screen.

The only possible explanation for my getting through both
The Girl Who Came to Supper
and this TV show had to be that same coping mechanism that insured my survival as a small child. There was a real stigma about depression back then—it was considered an inherent weakness and vulnerability to keep hidden. I just had to close my eyes and the audience would once again disappear. My mother’s instructions echoed: “Think nothing of it.” In that world, you dealt silently with whatever life threw at you or you got the dickens beat out of you. Depression and any kind of emotional turmoil were not for discussion when I was growing up, and that continued to be the norm through the 1950s and early 1960s.