Life Is Not a Stage (14 page)

Given this mentality and the fact that I was not able to dig myself out of this funk, there was little other choice than to just shut down and seal myself off from the world. What made this bout of depression especially sinister was how it threatened my faith. I prayed a lot, but seemingly missing in action was that being who was supposed to be protecting me. The only saving grace was that I was able to hold myself together just enough to keep working. That special energy field of love I experienced being on the stage helped out immensely. In contrast to the bout after Barbara’s birth, I was also much more serious about finding out the answers to this dilemma for myself and consumed as many books as I could find on the subject.

Ira and Nanny tried very hard to help, but with little effect. As tears rolled down my cheeks, they took turns trying to comfort me.

“Buck up,” Nanny said with that stiff-upper-lip attitude.

Ira tried his best too. “You have everything. You’ve got three beautiful children. You have nothing to feel bad about.” Neither had walked in my shoes with any firsthand experience of what I was going through. Well-meaning and compassionate as they may have intended to be, they only made me feel worse. Just like before, more guilt was piled on for not being happy or feeling the gratitude. It was like adding gasoline to my already blazing inferno.

Slowly but surely, this nightmare of a depression also lifted some months later after the show closed, and I began to feel in balance again. Still in “tough it out” mode, it was a chipping-away process of learning more about what you are feeling and experiencing. You try to keep coping with things, and eventually the coping gets easier, I found. Even if the show had been a hit, I think I still would have found a way out of the postpartum depression. In contrast with the first bout, I was reading a number of self-help books to try to understand the situation better. Also, it helped that close friends like Frank and Jane Egan knew what was going on, and I could talk to them about it. They could make me laugh.

CHAPTER 12

The Pill

T
he spirit of rebellion, upheaval, and liberation was in full flower in the mid- to late 1960s. With the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement stirring the pot, the middle part of the decade was a molten-hot cauldron that frequently boiled over to challenge all our assumptions as a society and as individuals. In Florence Henderson–land, that was quite the understatement.

As this period began, I was the poster child for mid-twentieth-century, good old-fashioned American values, with the major exception that I had rebelled in marrying outside of my faith. I was Little Miss Perfect in my own mind and in the public’s perception. My handsome and utterly charming husband and I seemed the perfect couple, with perfect children. Much of this came from the motivation that I so desperately wanted a life with the harmony, stability, and affection that I didn’t have as a child. In fact, this mechanism to compensate for past deficits took on lots of curious forms. For example, I became utterly nonconfrontational when Ira and I got into any kind of disagreement (which was rare). The thought of raising my voice reawakened the trauma of hearing my parents yelling and fighting. So I put a cork in that anger, a quick fix that seeded trouble later down the line.

In the first part of the 1960s, my marriage was unshakable in my pride of righteousness. Constantly surrounded by colleagues who were not faithful to their spouses, I remember believing with all my heart that I would rather die than commit that kind of sin or divorce. My life was devoted to children, marriage, and career, in that order. The heavy load of responsibility and high expectations I set for myself as a working mother gave me the single-minded drive to keep bulldozing through all the rough spots.

My religious upbringing insured that I had plenty of fear and an endless supply of guilt in the offing to keep me in check in case major temptation came my way. That indoctrination began early. Imagine being six or seven years old, and a dour priest comes into the classroom. His lecture for the day is entitled “Introduction to Mortal Sin and Eternal Hell.” If you had taken a photograph of all of us at our little desks, I’m sure you’d see nothing but terrified faces, bulging eyes, and mouths wide open.

“When you go to hell, you’re in hell for all eternity,” he told us as we quaked in our little shoes. “It’s like the clock ticking—ever-never, ever-never, ever-never, ever-never.” He stretched out the vowel sounds torturously long to make the ticking sound that much more ominous. “That’s how long you’re in hell.” To this day, I don’t like to hear a clock ticking!

At home, my mother’s frequent use of “the devil is going to get you” kept the fear of that eternal punishment going. It took a long time to outgrow my conviction that it was only a matter of time before the devil was going to show up and snatch me. It had that kind of inevitability that leadfooted drivers face all the time. One of these days, you’re going to see those flashing blue-and-red lights in your rearview mirror.

Being Miss Perfect was not necessarily in the spirit of those times and came with a price. “Wholesomeness Is Bad—Singer Suffered from Good Image.” So read the headline from one newspaper article about me from 1967. I told the reporter how that image was not to Hollywood’s liking. One studio I met with wanted to change my name to Felicity Ford. “I said ‘no.’ They said, ‘How about Jill Jones?’ [I snapped back,] ‘What’s the matter with Florence Henderson?’ Do you know what they said? They said that Florence Henderson is too stolid. Too staid. And too long! So I told them that I’d rather be stolid than a flash in the pan. And that was that.”

The columnist Earl Wilson added to this chorus. “Florence perpetuates her image as a happy wife and mother of four in her new café act which she’s taking around the country after [her debut at the Waldorf].” When I opened for comedian Alan King at the Sands Hotel, he would call me his Catholic yenta. He’d get a good laugh from the audience with the line, “I came to Las Vegas to do some gambling and drinking, and they put me onstage with a Girl Scout den mother.”

The 1960s had other surprises in store, most notably in the aftermath of the birth of my fourth and last child, Elizabeth, who arrived blissfully and uneventfully on January 26, 1966. She was conceived during the time I was doing
The King and I
with Ricardo Montalban in Los Angeles, the first performance to open the city’s newly christened Music Center in the downtown area. It was a good time for me, and the production was a great success. Critic Cecil Smith of the
Los Angeles Times
had only one negative comment, that I was perhaps too young for the role. “But who can argue with youth and beauty on the stage?” he added.

I had the great delight to call him on it after I read it. “You should have done your homework. The actual Anna was exactly my age.” Older actresses had played this coveted role, beginning with Gertrude Lawrence, so that’s where he had no doubt gotten the idea. My being a younger Anna gave the romance with the King a little more sizzle. A big part of my joy of being in the play was that Ricardo was truly an unbelievable actor to play against (whistling problem aside). Up to that point in his career, he was often given short shrift because of his name and accent, reduced to Latin lover and ethnic types and always making lemonade out of lemon roles. When finally given other good roles like the King or as Khan in the
Star Trek
movie
The Wrath of Khan
, his remarkable talent really shone in its magnitude.

Despite the pregnancy, I got through the engagement without any unnecessary drama, with the exception of coming down with bronchial pneumonia. I didn’t miss a show, but after many a scene I had to rush offstage to cough. When the doctor prescribed an antibiotic, I told him that I didn’t want to risk taking it due to the pregnancy. His reply was blunt. “You know, you can die from this, and you won’t have a baby.” Reluctantly, I took it, and luckily there were no repercussions.

As the due date neared, I was in pretty good shape physically and emotionally and was confident. There was no anxiety or any hint of negative thinking that I would be automatically doomed after the delivery to another horrible round of the blues. Preparation on the front end was sound prevention—I had time to devote to working out regularly at the gym to build fitness and strength. And I followed through with my promise to myself and learned Lamaze natural childbirth breathing from a record. By the time the ninth month came, when I was back in New York City, a little impatience began to set in. I just wanted to have the baby already. The Fifth Avenue bus had a lot of potholes on its route, so I took it a few times hoping the ride might help induce labor.

I don’t think the bus helped, but before long the moment arrived. Awake and aware during the childbirth, I heard Dr. Steinberg ask just before the last push, “What’s it supposed to be?”

“It’s got to be a girl with dark eyes and dark hair,” I said wishfully.

A few seconds later, he said, “Here she is.” When she got a little older, Elizabeth saw a picture taken that day of herself as a newborn in a row of similar photos of her older brothers and sister. She was upset. She felt that all the other babies were pretty except for her, pointing specifically to the puckering expression on her face. She chilled out when I explained, “No, no, no, you came out, and you were kissing me.” That was her character, a totally sweet and funny baby.

Of course, just when things are going so smoothly, life pushes forward a new challenge. Lizzie’s birth brought to a head a problem that had been slowly creeping up on me but suddenly could no longer be denied. Right after labor, I told Dr. Steinberg that I was struggling to hear what he and other people were saying. He arranged for me to immediately see a hearing specialist in New York.

The diagnosis was otosclerosis, a hereditary disorder caused by an abnormal growth of spongy bone in the middle ear that interferes with the transmission of sound. My sisters Babby and Ilean and brother Tom have also had to deal with it, and it can sometimes skip a generation. It is more common in women than men, and, as in my case, is often made worse by childbirth. It is also a misnomer that the problem is due to the bones getting harder. Rather, they get softer and sludgy, so sound cannot get through them to the nerve. If not addressed, it leads to tinnitus and you can eventually go stone deaf.

It probably started manifesting when I was a teenager, but it was so subtle and insidious that it remained under the radar for the most part. But after Barbara’s birth, I started to turn up the TV when other people seemed to have no apparent difficulty hearing at a lower volume. Later, when my children progressively began to speak, I had some trouble making out what they were saying and pressed them to enunciate more clearly. It was not their problem but mine, but one positive result is that they all developed such wonderful diction.

As it worsens, you find you’re in conversation with people and get increasingly frustrated by not hearing what they’re saying when everyone else is. You’re always thinking, “What did they say, what did they say?” Around this time, I had an exasperating meeting with the legendary lyricist Alan Jay Lerner, who cowrote musicals such as
My Fair Lady
and
Camelot
with Frederick Loewe, at his home in New York City to talk about his upcoming musical
On a Clear Day You Can See Forever
. I felt so horrible because I missed so much of what he was asking me. I realized that if I wasn’t looking directly at people, I’d lose what they had to say. I also would have to get up close, literally into someone’s face, which some people may have felt was sexy and others uncomfortable.

If you make your living as a singer, the problem begins to snowball into a nightmare. Certain instruments in the orchestra, especially the strings, begin to gradually fade away out of your hearing range. Are you certain that you’re going to hear that special note that is your cue to begin? Staying on pitch had never been a problem before, but all bets were suddenly off.

There was one blessing in disguise. Since the problem was significantly worse on one side, I could roll my head on the pillow over onto the good ear at night if Ira was snoring. Magically, all would be quiet and peaceful.

When Lizzie was a baby, I had successful surgery in New York to correct the problem. The doctor said that I might not feel the need to do anything for the other ear, but a few years later I was having trouble. When performing, I was turning up the volume on the monitors so loudly that everybody else was dying. A fellow performer and good friend, Nanette Fabray, had the same issue and had been in worse shape. She told me about the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles. Dr. Howard House did the second surgery for me, with great results. He put in an implant made of stainless steel and Teflon. You can imagine all the jokes about having a tin ear and being able to cook inside of it without any sticking. I described the difference to one journalist: “After the operation, cars sounded like jets and water from the spigot sounded like a waterfall.”

Since that time, I’ve done charity fundraising work for Dr. House and the House Ear Institute, as well as other institutions that deal with the hearing impaired. I will never forget doing a show with the children at the Lexington School for the Deaf in New York. We performed “Do Re Mi” together, and the children sang along and kept rhythm by feeling the vibrations in the floor. One beautiful girl sang “The Sound of Music” and it was inspiring and uplifting to see how she tried so hard to stay on pitch and quite often succeeded.

Once the problem was identified and healed, I realized that some of the issues that I was beginning to experience with stage fright might have had their origin with my gradually deteriorating ability to hear. It was yet another challenge that life served up to me that fortunately had a lasting solution.

But that was hardly the end of the story. Solving the hearing problem set some gears into motion that would take me far into uncharted terrain and ultimately shatter my carefully ordered world. So much for best-laid plans!

Back in the old days, women of childbearing age with otosclerosis were routinely sterilized to prevent them from further deterioration and becoming completely deaf. Luckily for me there was another option. Father Charles Whelan, a Jesuit priest and a cousin of mine, was worried about my situation. “Look, you’ve already had four children. Your health and your livelihood are at risk.” He granted me special church dispensation to take birth control pills, which had cleared the FDA and become available to the general public only a few years earlier. Needless to say, Father Whelan was on the progressive wing. Around this time, he wrote a highly controversial article for
America
, a Catholic publication he coedited, entitled “Why Does Every Act of Love Have to Be an Act of Life?” You can imagine how that got the fur flying.

For about ten years starting in 1958, the Catholic Church gave permission to use the pill strictly for the treatment of disorders linked to the reproductive system, such as mine. However, Pope Paul VI yanked it away in 1968 with his
Humanae Vitae
encyclical. But if my example was in any way typical, the church had every right to fear the societal change in its wake. They wanted to stuff those pills and the genie back in the bottle pronto!