Life Is Not a Stage (15 page)

The pill held the promise to finally give every woman control over her body and give couples like Ira and me the possibility of worry-free sex. In my particular case, yes to the first part, but no to the second. It was a given fact that the rhythm method was a colossal failure for us. Fact number two was that I was obviously very fertile, not such a surprise given my parents’ ability to produce babies like a factory production line. But fact number three was that changing longstanding patterns in our relationship instantly by swallowing a little magic potion was sadly not in the cards.

On the surface, the rhythm method’s greatest effectiveness is killing any sense of spontaneity in a relationship. Never mind that it also flies in the face of our natural instincts by commanding a woman not to have sex at the time of the month when she’s ovulating and hardwired to desire it the most.

We had been married for over a decade before the pill came into my life. Up to that point, the patterns of how we related to each other were all deeply ingrained if not totally locked in. There were no other options. I had married young and so totally inexperienced, unlike young people in later generations who had the opportunity to experiment or try other lifestyle options before settling down. With marriage and immediate pregnancy, I was thrown right away into a whirlwind of responsibility and expectation. Hook, line, and sinker, I bought in to the concept of domestic perfection, i.e., this is about as good as it is going to be, so suck it up. Being the eternal optimist, I always looked at the bright side. I embraced the good and tolerated the bad.

The
Catholic News
painted a rosy picture of our life in an article about ten months after Lizzie’s birth. It sounds like one of those picture-perfect family sitcoms of the early 1960s. “With a common sense, matter-of-fact approach to life, the blue-eyed, diminutive singer manages successfully to raise a large family and have an expanding career and has done so for ten years.…‘You have to pray a lot and take vitamin pills,’ she quipped.…Miss Henderson’s busy schedule provides so much variety that no two days are alike, except where her family is concerned. Her household roars from 6:45 a.m. to nine at night—except for the school hours and when she sees them off to school, makes sure the homework is done and eats dinner with the children, as well as puts them to bed. After that, the Bernsteins relax and have a couple hours together, calling it a day around 1 a.m. Even though the pace is fantastic and requires her constant attention, Florence Henderson sparkles and looks like a woman who enjoys the challenge of giving both jobs [as an entertainer and a mother/wife] the best she’s got to give.”

I loved Ira for all the right reasons. He was a great companion and father, a warm and caring lover, and a supportive partner on so many levels. But he was very worried (and for good cause) that I was going to have a baby every nine months. Not surprisingly, I think this created a deep underlying tension. I felt rejected, and it opened my old wounds around this issue from childhood.

I kept always mindful that Ira’s emotional life as a kid was no picnic either. When he was fourteen years old, his older brother was killed in World War II, shot down over the English Channel. Ira answered the door and received the telegram with the news. From that moment, his relatively happy childhood abruptly came crashing down too. Seeing the emotional devastation on his mother, there was a part of him that shut down that spilled over into our relationship just as my reactive programming from my early years did.

Ira and I shared an unspoken compassion for each other because of what we had separately gone through. On the other side of the coin, it bred dysfunction because neither of us wanted to risk going into the scary unknown frontiers beyond our upbringing and conditioning. We were both heavily invested in a carefully constructed façade, one that proved to be more fragile than I could have imagined.

So the pill may not have changed Ira’s attitude. But it did mine. I was thirty-four years old. With this single development, I realized how trapped and subservient I had been to a set of hypocritical rules that I could no longer accept. How hard I had struggled for so many years to try to make everything okay.

You come to a point when the talking stops, when you realize that still nothing changes. You realize that the status quo is abhorrent. It exacts a price on your spirit that will attack you at your weakest link—addiction, depression, or mental breakdown, or gradually wearing out your physical body with debilitating and deadly disease.

With the pill, my life went haywire for a while. Little Miss Perfect checked out.

CHAPTER 13

The “No Door Act”

A
s a sense of liberation began to take hold in my personal life, some boundaries with my work also began to crumble. Some doors that were locked or that I had dared not even attempt to enter, such as working more in Hollywood or doing my own nightclub act, were suddenly flung open. What lay on the other side was certainly beyond my imagination at the time. Before the 1960s would come to an end, both my career and my head would be in a much different place.

Once you’ve cracked whatever you have been repressing, you suddenly begin to understand the stranglehold guilt, fear, sadness, and anger can exercise over every minute aspect of your existence. It wasn’t as easy as simply opening the gate and putting my galloping horse out to permanent pasture. There were still many miles to go before that horse and I would more peacefully coexist. But that incessant drive and control over my life began to slowly loosen, as I gently let go of the reins.

Once the process started, it was almost impossible to stop its forward progress. For the first time, I was much more relaxed, more prone to go with the flow. Other shifts began to take place in that state. Even during my worst periods, I had always loved performing onstage before an audience, but now the enjoyment stepped up to a new level, becoming more aligned with the internal shifts that were starting to happen.

Another message came forward that it was time to stand more powerfully on my own two feet. With that realization, the field began to open up. Opportunities to do variety television shows abounded, while theater work became more sporadic. Someone recently sent me a copy of one of the old
Bell Telephone Hour
summer shows I did regularly during this time period as a singer and host. Talk about a trial by fire. It reminded me just how demanding those programs were. In the course of an hour, you might be doing four or five songs and changing costumes each time. You didn’t get much rehearsal time, so you had to step your artistry up a notch if you wanted to be better than just good. Nowhere else but these variety programs did you have the chance to work with and interact with so many varied artists who were at the absolute top of their craft.

One of my lasting memories from
The Bell Telephone Hour
was seeing the incredibly lovely Lena Horne resting backstage with her shoes off and her feet up on a chair.

“Oh, Miss Horne, do your feet hurt?” I asked her.

She looked up at me and smiled. “Oh, you’ll find out later.” She was about twenty years older, and she was right. Doing two shows a night in high heels catches up with you in the long run.

At their highest form,
The Bell Telephone Hour
and
The U.S. Steel Hour
might feature symphony orchestras, great opera divas, and ballet companies, extravaganzas that I trust few television entities would attempt to mount as an ongoing regular series today. In fact, I feel sorry for the younger performers nowadays who missed out on the opportunity to be exposed to this genre in its heyday and grow from the experience. In recent years, the only things that come remotely close are shows like
Dancing with the Stars
,
American Idol
, and
Glee
.

Perhaps my very finest acting job was on one of those shows. I had to do a duet with John Raitt, a period piece for which I was dressed in a period costume. At one point in the song, I had to sit down on a chair. Immediately a long and sharp straight pin pierced through my dress and found its way into the flesh of my derriere. Somehow and some way, I didn’t flinch or use any profanity when it happened. It sure helped with the high notes.

You could also get an education just being present and watching the best of the best perform up close, such as the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev in his prime. I recall how very upset he was about having to perform on the studio’s concrete floor, and rightfully so. That’s one major contributor to why so many dancers from that era developed chronic knee and hip problems.

One summer, I hosted the
Bell
programs out of Studio 8H at Rockefeller Plaza in New York, the future home of
Saturday Night Live
. It was the first time that an American television show was shot in the round with an audience completely surrounding the stage. They had to get very creative in designing how to keep the crossfire of cameras hidden from the viewers at home.

The Dean Martin Show
was a popular viewing destination on Thursday nights at 10 p.m. Kate Smith, Lena Horne, and I were three of Dean’s favorites, so we were frequently on the show in the mid- to late 1960s. He was one of the sweetest and kindest persons you could have wished for, and I was thrilled to be part of his enterprise. He was very smart and knew what was funny. He also had a great voice.

Many comedic entertainers of that era adopted a signature character, and Dean’s was a debonair, tuxedo-clad drunk with a cigarette in one hand and faux scotch (apple juice) in the other. With a twinkle in his eye, he enjoyed pushing the boundaries of sexual innuendo right up to the censors’ limit. The audiences loved it when he frequently lost it laughing in the middle of a sketch. He loved working with people who could be spontaneous and comfortable venturing off script with him.

One day when I was taping Dean’s show, Kate Smith called me into her dressing room. She was a major star on radio in the 1940s and in early television, and her iconic version of “God Bless America” took a then obscure song and transformed it into the unofficial national anthem. Yet a generation or so later, ask most young adults who Kate Smith is, and all you’ll probably get is a blank stare. (I haven’t had that issue myself yet because of a certain television series in perpetual reruns.) She was known almost as much for her beautiful voice as her wide girth, which also made her the sad object of a lot of fat jokes. She made no apologies about her size and it was as much her trademark as Dean’s cigarette and drink glass. In her autobiography, she wrote, “I’m big, and I sing, and boy, when I sing, I sing all over!”

In Kate’s dressing room that day, she said proudly, “Take a look at my dress,” and handed her lavish beaded gown to me. I almost fell over—it was so heavy I could hardly hold it or myself up. Telling Dean something like that was like handing a lamb chop to a wolf.

He said to me, “Did you read the label in that dress?”

I said, “No, what did it say?”

“Everlast,” he replied (referring to the brand of shorts and equipment popularized by professional boxers). But he didn’t stop there. “Have you ever noticed that Kate ain’t got no cleavage?”

“No, Dean, I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yeah, she’s only got one, and it’s the biggggest one!” This was, of course, off camera, but no less terrible and funny all the same. But in many ways Kate set herself up for a lot of it with her divalike ego—and I don’t think she minded being the butt of such jokes or had at least gotten used to them decades before.

For a beginner, I was given a generous fifteen-minute performance spot my first time on the show. Among the songs was a ballad, “Hi-Lili Hi-Lo,” and for it the stage was decorated with chandeliers. Those details did not escape Kate, and I soon learned that she was oversized not only with her dresses but her persona too. She called the show’s director/producer Greg Garrison aside. She had given him his break some years before on her afternoon television program,
The Kate Smith Show
. So Greg was very partial to her.

“Greg, how long have you known Florence Henderson?” she asked him.

“I just met her on the show,” he replied.

“Then how come she has all those chandeliers in that number?”

Some years after Kate and I first met on the show, we happened to cross paths at the Philadelphia airport in a VIP waiting room, both having done concerts in the area. She was extra famous in that area because the local NHL hockey team, the Flyers, had a superstition about playing her recording of “God Bless America” before every home game (the team later erected a statue of her outside the arena). In the waiting room, Kate threw down her newspaper and said, “Have you read my reviews?”

“No, Kate, I haven’t. I haven’t seen a paper.”

She said, “Here, read these. They speak it.” That was Kate. Talk about confidence! During the summer of 1966, I officially became the stuff of trivia questions as the first woman to guest host
The Tonight Show
, subbing for Johnny Carson for a whole week. (I would later go on to do it several more times.) They made a pretty big deal about it at the time. The experience interviewing people on
The Today Show
way back when helped out. By hosting talk shows, I learned to never ask a question that could be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” You have to instead prompt the guest to elicit a story. And once you ask the question, shut up and listen. Really listen. The other cardinal rule is to “know your material.” It wasn’t enough for me to read off the blue index card that the writers would prepare. I did my own reading and research on the people I was interviewing. Lastly, you also have to be a bit of a ringmaster to keep the conversation from veering off track away from key points. The same skill is helpful if you’re a guest and the interviewer doesn’t want to talk about the book I’m there to promote but goes off on some tangent about
The Brady Bunch.

When it came to monologues and other parts of the show, it certainly didn’t hurt that Johnny had also assembled a great team of writers. It was so easy and comfortable to slip into such a well-oiled machine. On one of the programs that week, I opened the show singing a long medley a cappella accompanied by four male singers for ten minutes instead of the traditional monologue. Risky? Perhaps. There was a musicians’ strike at the time, so necessity was the mother of invention. It was a shining example of that sense of unpredictability that has walked along with me like a shadow. Even to this day, I seem to always pop up where I’m least expected. It has kept things interesting to say the least.

The most bizarre Carson appearance I ever made was on December 17, 1969. Over forty million Americans tuned in to the show that night to witness the nuptials of Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki. For those of you not around during that time period, I’ll tell you about him. For those who were, no description is necessary because he was unforgettable. He rose to fame playing his ukulele and singing in his signature falsetto/vibrato “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” I have no doubt that if he had come around thirty years later, he would have fit in and found an audience on a show like
American Idol
, because he was such a quirky performance artist. He was a sweet man to meet him in person, but he had some strange ideas. One day, I was talking on the phone to Babby, who at the time was working for an advertising agency in New York. “You’re not going to believe this,” she interrupted suddenly. “There’s a man here in the lobby with long brown hair and a white face [makeup] going around kissing all the pictures on the wall.” That was Tiny Tim. Legend has it that he was so enamored of the fact that he could get free room service when he played Las Vegas that he hoarded the food under his bed. For his wedding to Miss Vicki, I was asked to sing an appropriate song for the occasion. I came out bedecked in a beautiful gown and sang “My Love,” Petula Clark’s hit song from a few years before. Afterwards, I sat on the panel for the rest of the show. From time to time, Johnny turned his head to make eye contact with me, flashing an expression of disbelief.

Of all the television appearances I did during this time, the one that stands out the most was an appearance on
Ed Sullivan
on September 24, 1967, and for a tragic reason. The day before the show, I was rehearsing with the orchestra a medley from
The Sound of Music
with a conductor I adored and used frequently for live performances named Irving Actman. Irving was a frequent collaborator with lyricist Frank Loesser and had conducted
Guys and Dolls
for him. He was a smoker, and I knew he had a heart condition, so I was on his case about that whenever I saw him light up.

We rehearsed the medley a couple of times and took a break.

“I’m going to run across the street and get some coffee,” he said. “Do you want some?”

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll go get my own.” As I crossed the street, he was coming back the opposite way, cigarette dangling from his mouth and in a hurry to get back. I yelled at him, “Irving, throw away that cigarette!”

“Okay, okay, okay,” he said.

We started rehearsing again. Irving went up on his podium, and I took my usual position right beside him. He raised his hand as he did normally to start conducting, but the hand suddenly reached up to grab his head. A second later, he collapsed at my feet. One of the musicians rushed over and gave him mouth-to-mouth. Minutes later, the paramedics came and tried everything to bring him back, beating on his chest and almost kicking him to try to get him going. But he was gone. He had grown to become almost like a father figure to me, and just like that he was gone.

I was devastated, and I told my manager at the time, Ken Greengrass, that there was no way I could possibly do the show the next day. He kept talking to me and talking to me. “This would be the best thing for Irving if you would go on,” he told me. It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. The audience knew nothing about what had happened the day before, but they must have felt the outpouring of intensity from both the orchestra and me and were enthusiastic. It was a showstopper. Irving once confided to me when we were out on the road, “I hope I don’t die alone in a hotel room.” I promised him he wouldn’t. I know it is a cliché, but there is something to be said for dying doing exactly what you love doing the most. As shocking as the experience was, I’m so glad I was with him and he wasn’t alone in a hotel room.