Life Is Not a Stage (21 page)

Laughter and having fun while working was also important to setting the tone. For that purpose I was always doing something crazy. In one of the shows, the famous NFL quarterback Joe Namath guest starred as himself. The plotline was that Bobby lied to his friends, telling them that the football star was coming over for dinner at his house when playing an exhibition game in town. The touching climax of the show is the scene when Joe actually comes to our house. The family goes out to say goodbye to him as he walks down our fake driveway to his car. I whispered to the director, “Keep the camera rolling.” When Joe said his farewells and got to me last, I jumped up on him, wrapping my legs around his waist. “Take me away from this family!” I cried. The crew fell down, and it became a favorite on the blooper reel.

If there happened to be a new director working, this fun atmosphere was a little harder for that person to take, since most were probably a little nervous and on edge working on the show for the first time. Jackie Coogan was a guest on one show in which our characters had a car accident and he blamed me. Doing that scene, some gaffe happened and Jackie and I broke up. We got hysterical and could not stop laughing. The director got really annoyed at us. I took him aside. “Excuse me, but when you work this hard, every once in a while it’s good to laugh. So please don’t talk like that, especially in front of our guest star.” But that wasn’t the end of the problem. In a courtroom scene in the same episode, Robert Emhardt was playing the judge. He was a great actor. We did the master shot, and then had to do close-ups on everybody, including Jackie, the kids, and me. By the time they got to Robert’s close-up, he had done it so many times he couldn’t remember the line. The director started yelling at Robert, and the more he yelled the more stressed Robert became. I ran to the phone and called Sherwood. “You have to come down here because it’s not right what this director is doing.” Much later, I ran into this same director, and he apologized for his behavior, which was big of him. He said it happened during a stressful period of his life. But you can’t bring that to work. Be kind, because everybody is struggling with something.

If there was a source of recurring tension on the set, it usually concerned Bob. As mentioned, he wanted
The Brady Bunch
to be Shakespeare. It was the catalyst for terrible fights with Sherwood. We had one show in which there was a role reversal. Mike tells Carol that he thinks she has an easier time of it. She responds, “Well, you take over my job, and I’ll take over yours.” So the script called for me to teach the boys baseball, and Bob would be in the kitchen baking something. The idea was that he loads up stuff from the refrigerator and manages to drop the eggs. Then he slips and takes a pratfall.

“This is so stupid,” Bob complained. “Nobody would ever do that.”

“Why don’t you try it?” I coaxed him. “I think it’s funny. I wish I were doing it.” I loved doing physical comedy.

He backed down and tried it, loading his arms up, dropping the eggs, and seeing everything go flying.

“I was wrong,” he said, laughing, as he got up.

Another time, Ann B. and I were supposed to be making jam. We had all these pots on the stove, but all we were really stirring was water.

“That’s ridiculous,” Bob protested. “It’s so obvious.”

I replied, “It’s our scene, and we don’t have trouble imagining this is strawberry jam.”

A lot of the time, I understood Bob’s frustration, but blurting out, “This is crap” didn’t win him a lot of sympathy.

As complex and sometimes difficult as Bob could be, it was balanced by his genuine love for the kids. It was fairly obvious to me that he treated the kids as though they were his real family. During a hiatus, he even took them all on a trip to Europe. He did have a real daughter, Karen, from a short-lived marriage, whom he rarely saw. We got to meet her once when she did a small guest role in one of the episodes. It’s hard to imagine what it must have been like in that era to be an actor in fear of losing his career if his sexual orientation were to become public. Being in that closet had to be a very stressful place.

I know that he found real solace being around his fictional family. It was something he carried close to his heart to the very end of his life. In 1991, I got a call from Bob. He was teaching Shakespeare at UCLA. He was supposed to give a speech in Little Rock.

“Florence, I’m not feeling well. Could you go for me and give my speech for me?” It was ironically for a cancer research hospital. I told him I’d be happy to go.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I have colon cancer, but I’m going to be okay.”

When I got back from Arkansas, I called him and asked if we could have lunch together. I told him I’d come out to Pasadena where he had a lovely mansion.

“That would be great,” he said enthusiastically. But it didn’t happen that time and a few attempts after. We would set something up, and then he’d call and cancel. I waited a few weeks and then called him again to see how he was doing. Everything seemed fine, but he called me one day out of the blue.

“Florence, you know what, I’m not doing well. It’s not going to be very long. Can you call the kids for me? Would you tell them?”

I get cold chills and cry every time I think of this conversation. “Oh my God. Of course, Bob. I’ll do it.” When I did so, each of them was devastated to hear the news. Telling each of the kids was one of the toughest things I’ve had to do.

I wanted to visit him, but I respected his wish that he didn’t want me to see him in his condition because he had lost a tremendous amount of weight. He died very shortly after this last phone call. Along with his real daughter, Karen, the kids and I were just about the only ones there at his private funeral. He was able to keep the veil of privacy and dignity up to that point, but all hell broke loose once one of the tabloid newspapers printed his death certificate on the front page!

AIDS was a new thing in the American public consciousness, a deadly, scary disease that carried a fearmongering stigma. “The father of America has died of AIDS” was picked up and projected like a scandal by the gossip traders. All the newspapers wanted to interview the kids and me. Soon thereafter, Bob’s image and likeness started to disappear little by little from Brady Bunch promotional materials and merchandising.

But even from the start, it was evident that Carol and the children were focused on as more the essence of the show. Playing her for me was hardly a stretch. As an actor, you have to draw upon your own feelings and emotions to somehow find a way to relate to the character you are portraying. I think it must have come through in my performance that I understood that character. I drew on my real life as a mother of four children. But there was something else charging the character, as if Carol Brady were some magical antidote to Florence Henderson’s childhood. It was as though the trauma and turmoil, the lack of real parental affection or attention, and the material deprivation that happened to me ultimately had a positive purpose once it was channeled into Carol Brady.

It is quite unfathomable to me how this character of Carol Brady could have had the kind of impact she did. To think that a sitcom mother could give comfort and support to children who were parentless, abused, ignored, or unloved. It was almost otherworldly how the latchkey child living in the housing project in some lower-income community or another who writes in a language I don’t understand from a place with a name that I cannot pronounce feels a kinship. I’ve always felt tremendous compassion for children who are lonely and suffering.

It may all be based in illusion, but hopefully one with an overwhelmingly positive impact. Truthfully, I would have played the character a lot stricter and harsher than the TV codes would allow at that time. Situations sometimes dictated a sharp reprimand that wasn’t permitted as part of Carol’s arsenal. Maybe instead of shrugging my shoulders and being so understanding, I would have given her a little slap on the fanny. I also wanted Carol to be a little more realistic, like have an actual job, for God’s sake. But Sherwood wanted her to be always available, and I became akin to those
Father Knows Best
and
Leave It to Beaver
parents who didn’t have to work for a living yet somehow kept a nice middle-class life afloat in grand style.

Bob was not alone in having some dissatisfaction with the scripts. After the first season, I went on the record to point out that I thought there were times when I felt that we sometimes came off like a bunch of cardboard characters. “Does the scriptwriter have kids?” I remember questioning. But when the scripts were done right, I thought I came across as a believable mother. After that first year, I decided that I had to be a little more proactive in giving my input. In contrast to Bob, I took a less confrontational approach. “I have an idea how we can make this better” usually worked.

In one scene, one of the kids brought home two friends after school. I had to put my foot down when I learned that these two young actors were not given a line of dialogue in the script. They were just standing there in silence as they were introduced to me. “No kids visiting my house would do that,” I told the director. “They would say, ‘Hi, Mrs. Brady.’” Then I realized what the problem was. It was going to cost extra if the two kids spoke. I called up to Sherwood and told him that I would pay the additional cost, but he had to give them something to say. He agreed, but I never got the bill.

I know that when I go in public and people stop and want to have a photograph taken with me, it is because of a heartfelt relationship they have with Carol Brady. I make the time for that, as well for answering each and every e-mail and letter that I have received over these four decades, for one big reason: I have the deepest gratitude that I was given this opportunity.

Late into what proved to be our last season of shooting
The Brady Bunch
, Bob started to get into one of his usual arguments with Sherwood, but it soon heated up. “I won’t do this,” he complained about something that was obviously highly objectionable to him in the script. The discussion was futile, and Bob was asked to leave the set. Sherwood asked Ann B. and me if we would stay and do a couple of extra scenes to effectively write Bob out of that episode. We said sure, and we stayed late to get it done. They asked Bob to go home, but he refused and got very testy. He stayed in the back, observing. It was such a bizarre situation.

As we left the studio late that night, none of us knew that we had just finished the 117th and final episode of
The Brady Bunch
. The show was canceled. But it was hardly the end of the story.

CHAPTER 17

Good Help Is Hard to Find…

O
n the home front, things were in a holding pattern during much of the Brady years and the immediate aftermath. There was more than a legitimate excuse to maintain the status quo: an active parent dealing with the demanding schedule of a weekly series, plus performance engagements sandwiched in the downtime. I was running a tight ship, and it was not the time to rock the boat. Unfortunately, the climate had not really changed for the positive in terms of my overall happiness in the marriage over those years. Don’t get me wrong, there were some good times mixed in, so it was hardly all doom and gloom.

The first order of business once we knew that
The Brady Bunch
was not going to be a flash in the pan was to make the move to Los Angeles. I can’t say that I was thrilled with the prospect of leaving New York at the time. I was a New Yorker as far as I was concerned—it had been my home from the time I was barely seventeen. Admittedly, I shared the somewhat snobbish attitude that L.A. just didn’t measure up to what New York had to offer, the cultural life and the quality of the education for the children included.

Woody Allen once said something to the effect that the major cultural advantage to living in L.A. was that you could make a right-hand turn against a red light. Well, maybe he should have included some other advantages about the car-driving lifestyle. Gone were the jostling over cabs and swimming upstream against the sidewalk crowds on Fifth Avenue. Gone was the constant vigilance over who might be walking too closely behind you or breathing down your neck in elevators. Mercifully gone were those layers of winter clothes, the constant taking on and off. The change for the better in the weather was a good cure for homesickness.

My sister Pauline, who was living with us and helping out with child care, took charge of the move. The kids were a little upset because she gave away a number of things they wished she hadn’t. She was very organized, and I, on the other hand, probably would have brought out far too much stuff.

When we arrived at the new house, we were waiting for the moving van that was running late. It was cold both inside and out, as the heater wasn’t working. Leaving a world where the building superintendent took care of everything, I was a duck out of water. I didn’t know the first thing about the pilot light on the furnace and how it could have been blown out by the wind. But as the hours, days, and weeks went by, the house on top of the hills of Beverly Hills slowly began to feel like home. Ira purchased any furniture we needed in his usual careful and deliberate manner. Some of the crew from
The Brady Bunch
offered to come and wallpaper a few rooms, which was a wonderful perk.

The Trousdale Estates area where we lived was carved out of the hills of Beverly Hills and offered a panoramic view from downtown Los Angeles to Catalina Island on the occasional smog-free days. It was quite the neighborhood to go trick-or-treating on Halloween, with more show business folk per square mile than anyplace else in the world. But otherwise, without an adult willing to drive them somewhere, a kid growing up atop the steep hills felt imprisoned until that magic day of emancipation—getting a driver’s license on the sixteenth birthday.

Many a long day and night, I would feel guilty that I wasn’t spending as much time with my children as I would have preferred. On the other hand, I also knew there were a lot of full-time mothers at the high school who didn’t work and whose children did not turn out that great despite the quantity of “quality time.” I think what made a difference to my children was that I never made a big deal about what I did. It was really just about the work and to make a better life for all of us. They could also see that I loved my job, and I think they always knew how much I loved them.

Whenever possible, I would take the children out on the road with me and incorporate them into what I was doing. From time to time, they would appear in the shows. For example, Joe and Barbara played little Polynesian children in
South Pacific
,
and later Lizzie and Barbara worked in another production. They also had roles in
The Sound of Music
. Robert and Lizzie did
Annie Get Your Gun
with me, playing my little brother and sister. I was so proud of them. As adults, they look back on those times as some of their fondest memories from childhood. They each have retained a love and knowledge of music, theater, and television.

If I had to go out on the road while they were at school, I tried to stay on top of what they were doing and what their appointments might be to the degree that they used to always think I had eyes in the back of my head. We would leave notes to each other that we would hide in special places. When I came back, they would always make a big sign to greet me at the door saying “welcome home.” I’m sure that they missed me and experienced loneliness and loss just as I did being away from them. I prayed that they were understanding and forgiving about my drive to express myself through my work and why it was so important to me. In the final analysis, your children know it when you genuinely love them. If you don’t, they know that too, and it doesn’t matter how much you do for them, you won’t make up for that.

I am sure there were many parts of the package of being my son or daughter that they would have gladly done without. What a pain it must have been if a classmate wanted to become friends with them so they could get to know me. Even worse, teachers could on occasion be harder on the kids because of my celebrity status. “You think you’re so special, blah, blah, blah,” one nasty teacher snapped at Lizzie. When she told me about it after school one day, I immediately called for an appointment to meet with this teacher. I called her out on it.

“Look, this is my job. I work, and I don’t appreciate that you take it out on my child. So I would really appreciate it if you didn’t do that.” The teacher was trying to look younger than her years in her pink dress with bleached blonde hair adorned with a big bow. What was also noticeable was a very big chip on her shoulder. She apologized.

To a fault, I was maybe a little too protective of my kids. Sometimes you need to back off a little and let them try to take care of their issues the best they can for their own development’s sake. Chalk it up to the fact that I had to take care of so many things on my own as a kid without the intervention of a loving adult. I didn’t want them to always have to deal with that sort of thing. Again, it’s not always the recommended action. In the final tally, I trust that the good outweighed the bad for my children, and that they came to terms with whatever they felt they might have lacked at times. This feeling came forward for me in a song my son Joseph wrote called “Red River.” It’s about all the red taillights you see on the highway, and the hope that it is transporting people home to a loving situation.

Ira was commuting back and forth, arriving in L.A. on Friday and leaving to go back to his job in New York on Sunday night. That’s the way it was, and on some deeper level I probably preferred it that way and consequently went to a lot of places and events by myself. Otherwise, I might have put my foot down. “Get a job out here, for God’s sake. You’re well respected in the theater business. It shouldn’t be a problem.” I never demanded that. Rather late in the game, he did just that, but by then it hardly mattered. They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder. It doesn’t. A steady diet of separation for long periods is not constructive on any level.

One Sunday as Ira was preparing to return to New York, all the drains in the sinks, toilets, showers, and bathtubs backed up, and a stinky tide of raw sewage began to flow. Ira had to catch his plane. I gritted my teeth and said to him sarcastically, “Fine. You go. I’ll take care of it.” Talk about symbolism! Reality is sometimes stranger than fiction.

Pauline was a godsend on many levels during this period because I was worry-free with her in charge as a second mother to the children (and no doubt to me, as well as being my older sister). She was very smart, and as a divorcee, had a chance to reinvent her life. She eventually got a job at Cedars-Sinai hospital and moved into her own apartment. After a while, she felt that she should move back to Kentucky to be closer to her kids, and I encouraged that. She had given a lot of years to me, and it had been good for both of us.

With Pauline’s departure began a new adventure, one that probably deserves a whole separate book by itself. That tome would be entitled
Florence Henderson’s Housekeepers
, by Stephen King.

It is an understatement that I was fairly spoiled by the years we had my sister, Nanny, and a few others who set the bar very high for their successors. When you have someone living full-time in your home, slowly but surely the truth begins to emerge. And the stakes are very high as you entrust the most precious things in your life to their care.

We all have quirks, eccentricities, and peculiarities. We all carry some unpleasant baggage. We all have our fair share of drama that comes with the human territory. But most who came to work for us were blessed with a greater abundance of all. It wasn’t like they were working for Cinderella’s stepmother. They got a nice room with a private bath, salary on the generous side, car, and more. The conditions were fairly laid-back, and beyond the daily tasks and responsibilities of their jobs, they were included in the family and its activities to the degree that they wanted to participate.

“Toot, toot, toot, toot, toot…” That was the constant high-pitched drone from one of our first employees as she went about her tasks. She was highly recommended from a doctor in Beverly Hills. On one of her days off, she left the door to her room open. On her bed I saw a book and opened it up. It was full of spells and incantations. We had a devil-worshipping witch living in our midst. The “toot, toot, toot” she shared with me was an occult chant to conjure money and wealth. She told me that she would put a protective ring of salt around a chair to ward off something. The last straw happened when she wasn’t getting along with Barbara. She gave my daughter an envelope. Inside was a swatch taken from a piece of Barbara’s clothing. It had been burned. Where’s the Exorcist when you need him? Goodbye.

The next was a very heavyset woman. She came very highly recommended. All she wanted to do was make soup. There would be pots going all over the kitchen. She did little more than cook and eat. Joe said she did make good soup. Adieu.

Then we hired a very tall African American woman, about six feet tall and very strong. Very highly recommended, but we soon found out that she was emotionally unstable. We were all scared of her. I said to Ira, “We have to let her go.” He was afraid to tell her because she was so big and tough. So guess who got that job?

The very sweet woman from Central America was, of course, highly recommended. She dutifully sent her earnings down to her husband and children. One day, she went into an office to pay one of the utility bills for her apartment where she stayed during her time off. There was a long wait, and the clerk called out names to announce when it was their turn. As she waited, she heard a name she recognized and looked up to see that it was her husband, the one who was supposed to be with the children in her home country. When she went up to the clerk, she told her story and pleaded to get the address on her husband’s account. “I can’t give you that information, it’s confidential,” the clerk replied. After she told her about sending all the money, the clerk relented. My housekeeper showed up at the address to discover that her husband was living with another woman. A friend was intercepting the money and sending it back to him in Los Angeles. She moved back to her home country, which soon thereafter had a devastating earthquake. I never heard from her again.

Next was a young couple. Highly recommended. They were great at cooking and cleaning. They were devotees of the Maharaj Ji, the round-faced young guru who had a big estate in Malibu with all the Rolls-Royces. They would borrow the car to go to meetings or do various errands at his bidding. We would get into some spirited discussions. “How come you’re giving all your money to him, and he’s driving all those Rolls and Mercedes, and you can’t afford to buy your own car?” There was always a bit of secrecy about where they were going, and they started, for whatever reason, to fabricate stories. Once they told me one thing, but went off instead to Miami and came back sick with parasites. They even showed me the big ugly worms in a jar. That was hardly a comforting thought since they were preparing our family’s food. “Okay, I think maybe this is not going to work,” I thought to myself. The young couple was history. Sad, because I really liked them.

Soon after, I found a very sweet Lebanese woman, who was a horrible driver. It didn’t help that she had a heart condition that she forgot to disclose. From time to time she would nearly pass out. After that was a woman who was a hard worker but a secret drinker—not the person you want driving your kids to school. Then there was the uptight and rigid British girl who believed that children should be seen but not heard—no, thank you. How about the barefooted one in cutoff shorts who would come and sit on my bed and say, “What are we going to do today, Flo, honey?” Another was working out great, but she called me late one night and said she needed to borrow a lot of money from me. Her husband had just been arrested for running a big illegal alien smuggling operation. The money was for bail. Hey, I’m only skimming the highlights.