Life Is Not a Stage (22 page)

Finally, I found a woman who ended up being the keeper for several years (and trained Shelley, my current helper and great friend, who has been a godsend to me for many years). But this person had the most dramatic life. Not long after she started working for me, her soon-to-be-ex-husband almost killed her. After a good run, she decided to quit and cashed out her pension plan to start a restaurant. I told her I thought it was a mistake. She lost everything and came back to work for me again. Sometime later, she wanted to retire and move back home to her country. Her new husband went ahead. I gave her a big severance. She sent the money down to him and bought him a car. Same old scenario—she went down there to find him shacked up with another woman. I never heard from her again, although recently her granddaughter sent me an e-mail telling me that she was helping take care of her child.

One saving grace was that my older children were very aware and noticed when things were not right and kept me posted. They all survived! It doesn’t matter if you hire someone from a bonded employment agency. Talk to others, you’ll hear similar stories about people living on the edge or just plain crazy. I learned that “Highly Recommended” was code for “Happy to Get Rid of This Person.” It’s really the luck of the draw. With Shelley, who has been with me through thick and almost thin for two decades, I hit the jackpot.

There were two others who entered my life during this period who, like Shelley, became an indispensable part of my team and support system. In 1973, I was interviewing candidates for the job of being my personal assistant. I was getting toward the end of the process when in walked this spunky, confident young woman dressed in a little beige cowboy suit. Her name was Kayla Pressman. From the sound of the interview, there wasn’t anything that she couldn’t do.

“You know you would have to go out on the road. There’s a lot of travel.”

“Oh, I love that.”

“Do you know anything about packing?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Do you know how to sew in case I rip a costume?”

“Oh, yes. No problem.”

She had a contagious energy about her, and so she got the job. She didn’t know squat about sewing, but that little fib was more than made up by many other strong suits. Some even claim that they had never heard me utter a four-letter word until Kayla trained me in proper usage and syntax.

Being a personal assistant to someone in show business is like having to be a jack-of-all-trades. You’re constantly put into problem-solving situations where you need to think quickly on your feet. What she didn’t know, Kayla learned very fast, not the least of which was operating the lights for my stage show. When I realized just how bright she was, I told Sandy Gallin that she should be a manager. He took her and trained her and she paid her dues big time. She traveled as well with the Pointer Sisters, Patti LaBelle, and other top acts.

Being on the road as a performing artist may sound like a glamorous lifestyle to those not in it, but being away for extended periods from your family and the familiar comfort of your own bed can wear thin at times. It can also be a lonely existence if you choose to isolate yourself. When you’re on the road and in different environments all the time, having the support of a hard worker and great friend (and most important, someone you can trust) like Kayla makes a huge difference. When the traveling group grew larger with musicians, singers, and dancers, we created a teamlike, family atmosphere.

With all the changes going on in my professional and personal life, Kayla also grew to be a close confidante who didn’t shy from speaking her mind, especially if she happened to disagree with something I was doing. She had come of age in the 1960s, so she was a freer spirit who loved to push the boundaries, and in the process she got me to loosen up, sometimes perhaps a little too much.

Once when we were driving in Florida to see my friend Ruth Helen, who has a home in the Delray Beach area near Palm Beach, I suddenly grew concerned. “Kayla, how fast are you going?” The speedometer read 85 mph. “Don’t you think you should slow down a little?”

“There’s a guy on my tail,” she shot back.

Moments later, there were the bright red flashing lights of a state trooper. The officer asked Kayla the same question I had just asked her. I slumped down in my seat. I didn’t offer to help, no Florence Henderson card pulled, no nice autograph for his child, no nothing.

“You were going eighty-five,” the officer filled in the blank for Kayla.

Kayla pleaded her case. “I know I was going fast, but there was a guy on my tail. I had to keep going.”

“That guy was me,” he said as he handed her the ticket.

Another time, we were flying from Los Angeles to New York. As I will explain a little later, I had progressively become more fearful of flying. A drink or two could have a positive medicinal effect, but Kayla and I kept laughing and kept drinking. Long story short, I exceeded my limit. When we got off the plane at Kennedy, the woman known to millions around the world as Mrs. Brady was holding tightly on to Kayla’s arm and trying to disguise the obvious state of being sloshed. Thank God TMZ didn’t exist then. When we got our baggage, Kayla said she needed to go find our driver. She stood me up against a pole. “Here, hold on to this. I’ll be back.” I wasn’t so sure she’d be back, because she wasn’t too steady on her feet either.

My lone foray into the drug culture of that time also was in the company of Kayla, who was in the mainstream of her generation in the 1970s as a “recreational user.” We were on tour in Australia. One night after a show, a group of us that included Kayla, my conductor Allan Alper, and a wonderful drummer named Evan Diner decided we’d get together for a game of Scrabble. I don’t know if it was passing any judgment on the fun (or lack of it) we were having as the game began, but Evan volunteered that he had some marijuana that he would be only too glad to share.

I asked Evan how he had managed to smuggle it into Australia. “I put it in my jockstrap,” he replied. He explained that he had put it into a baggie and “made it the size of my left nut.” Sounds sanitary enough, I thought. He then took out an appliance he called a carburetor and placed the joint into a hole on it.

It was my turn at Scrabble.

“Have a puff,” Evan suggested.

I told him, “I don’t think so.”

“Oh, just try one.”

“Well,” I thought, “why not?”

“Breathe deeply,” he instructed.

Yes. I did inhale.

The others around the Scrabble board were clearly starting to get impatient. I knew the word I wanted, but for some reason, the signal from my brain down my arm to my fingers was taking its sweet time getting there. I sat there at the board immobilized for God knows how long. They were laughing at me.

Later, I said I was really hungry. I’m not a sweets eater, but I asked if they could get me some ice cream. That was my first and last puff of marijuana.

All the laughs and fun aside, it is a true testament that nearly forty years after she came to work for me, Kayla is still my manager and my best friend.

The other great friend and confidante who came into my life at the same time was Elsie Giorgi, my doctor. She was the one I called when I woke up that morning after to find out what to do with all the little creepy-crawlies on me. My doctor in New York had referred me to her when I came out to live in California. She had a thriving practice in New York but moved out to California, where she attracted a big following too. She had a super intellect, the first woman to graduate from Columbia University’s medical school and the one who diagnosed John F. Kennedy with Addison’s disease. She wrote health-care legislation for the Veterans Administration. She was way ahead of the times in recognizing the dangers of AIDS early on, and helped so many of her gay patients avoid the devastation of that epidemic in its early years.

When I first contacted Elsie, she barked back with her Bronx accent, “I’m not taking any new patients.” Click.

“Okay, jeez.” I told my doctor back in New York what happened.

“Yeah, she’s kind of tough.” But before long, she showed up at my house anyway, as if nothing were out of the ordinary, on call for the doctor I found in her place when one of my kids was sick. We clicked from the first second, and she became an immediate part of our family. She knew what I was going through.

“Dearie, you’re the glue,” she surmised after seeing the dynamics of my marriage on display.

If you came to her office for an exam, chances were that she’d give you something to eat first. It was her trick to get her patients to relax and open up more if they had a nice snack. She spoke with perfect diction, but if you got her started her Bronx side would come out.

“Dearie, oh please, he’s so full of shit.” Italian by birth but more Jewish in personality, Elsie told it like it was. That hybrid came forth with her exclamation “Oy Vey Maria.” She told wonderful stories about her life in New York. For example, she worked for a trucking company in New York to put herself through medical school.

“You must have known the Mafia?” I asked her. Did she! Her stories about big figures like Johnny Dio and others were priceless. She was pretty proud of her Mafia connections.

Everyone comes into your life for a good reason, and Elsie herself would prove to be the very glue that helped keep me together through some turbulent times to come.

CHAPTER 18

Days of Wine and Roses…and Clam Chowder and Chicken

W
hen
The Brady Bunch
ended its network run on March 8, 1974, things hardly slowed down. On the contrary, I was busier and in more demand than ever. The bounce from a popular television series meant dramatic improvement in the recognition factor and increased the fees I could now command. I was back onstage, a good percentage of the dates in Las Vegas, where I appeared with Shecky Greene for three years at the MGM Grand, plus a host of other performers like Joel Grey, Bill Cosby, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Bob Newhart, Sammy Davis Jr., and, not to forget, Milton Berle.

Being Carol Brady all those years also made Florence Henderson a more viable commodity as a commercial spokesperson. Some actors can be quite condescending about doing ads. It’s that “I’m sorry I’m doing this commercial because I’m really a great actress” attitude. I never felt that way. Instead, I approached it no differently than I did any other performance. I’m there to fulfill the fantasy of the viewer, whether it’s about selling tickets or moving products off the grocery shelf. Look around at almost anyone who has had longevity in the business, and you’ll see that they all did commercials. If the performer’s personal image and the brand come together in a natural way, it’s a win-win situation. It is as though you’re the star of your own sixty-second movie that is repeated over and over again. If you pull it off, you have a great relationship with the public. To this day, people still remember all those Wesson Oil commercials I did for twenty-two years. I ended up surviving five ad agency changes, which is probably a record, since the new agency almost always cleans house. If it really works, the brand will look for other ways to support you—Wesson sponsored the
Country Kitchen
show I did on the Nashville Network for nine years.

On the other hand, I felt it was important that you had to be honest about what you did. A few years back, the
Wall Street Journal
published some public opinion research that showed that Bill Cosby and I were ranked the two most believable commercial spokespersons. If you don’t believe in what you’re saying, don’t do it. I imagined one of my sisters in the Midwest. Would she want to buy this product? I also had to use it, which proved to be a problem some years later when I had an offer to do Polident.

“I can’t do this—I don’t have false teeth,” I told them.

“We don’t care,” they countered.

“I can never say that I use it,” I warned them.

“That’s okay.” We ended up having some fun with those commercials. We did one when I was in the shower. Another was a song-and-dance number on the moon. People seemed to like them, and the spots ran for about ten years.

When I first started doing commercials for Wesson Oil and Tang in the mid-1970s, it was quite different than doing the Oldsmobile spots in the 1950s. Commercials are not easy. First of all, I wasn’t used to all these corporate executives and advertising agency people flying in and hovering in the studio, watching the monitor and dissecting every word. Huge money was involved in these campaigns, and the agencies spent lavishly on the smallest details. To do it well, it’s more than just delivering your lines. You have to do all the other things they want, and precisely. Hold the label just right. Don’t tilt it so the light reflects poorly. It’s not easy to be that precise, but luckily I was good at it.

One particular ad lady was not pleased with my performance during a shoot.

“What is it that you want?” I asked her politely. She tried to explain it to me, but no luck. We did about forty takes (good enough that they printed them all), and it was still not to her satisfaction. The crew was starting to get antsy.

“I want so much to give you what you want, but can you demonstrate it for me?” I asked her, trying to find a constructive solution. She got up and did her version. Both she and everyone else in the studio understood instantaneously that she should keep her day job.

“You know what, I think we have a lot of good takes,” she retorted, brushed off her performance like it never had happened, and moved on.

Once I did a demonstration on the
Mike Douglas
talk show to show how complicated shooting a commercial can be. I gave Mike a plate of fried chicken and showed him exactly what he had to do: carry the plate of chicken, walk and talk and take a bite out of it in a highly choreographed way and timed at not an eyelash under or over sixty seconds. He didn’t get too far. He fumbled the plate, and the chicken went flying.

Every detail was sweated and every nuance was gone over with a fine-toothed comb. Ad-lib an “um” or an “oh” and you’d hear “cut” because you just put the whole spot a half second over. One spot for Wesson required that I would sing, take a bite out of the chicken so it would audibly crunch, then finish singing the lyric.
This chicken’s got a
certain
…CRUNCH…
Wesson-ality
. BING! After the shoot, the great legal minds reviewed the footage and thought the crunch sounded bogus. They were nervous. “We don’t want the Federal Trade Commission coming down on us.” So I had to go into a recording booth with a bucket of chicken. Take after take, they would play the song and I took my bite on cue. I don’t know how many chicken legs I dented that night, but it got to the point where Kayla, Bill Sammeth (who worked with Sandy Gallin), and I got tears we were laughing so hard. The lawyers in the room were not amused. I had to sign an affidavit stating something like, “I, Florence Henderson, do hereby attest that the sound heard is actually yours truly biting with own and intact natural incisors into the said poultry leg.” See. Not easy!

Trying to balance the work with family, I took every opportunity to include my kids in commercials just as I did with the shows, which they loved to no end. Lizzie and Robert were in one of the spots I did for Tang. In it, I make the case to a neighbor that one glass of the orange-flavored instant breakfast drink gives children their daily dose of vitamin C.

“You really do drink Tang,” the neighbor (ironically holding a basket of vitamin-C-rich tomatoes fresh from her garden to share) is both surprised and happy to see. The pigtailed Lizzie takes a gulp and says convincingly, “It tastes good,” smiling at me and then at the neighbor. I poke the tip of Lizzie’s nose approvingly with my finger. I remember it like it was yesterday, although YouTube refreshes.

What probably gets more hits on YouTube than the old commercials are some of the selections from
The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.
On the merit of all of the colorful costumes and lavish production numbers, the show has a bit of a cult following. I had mentioned earlier that the cancellation of the original series was hardly the finale for the Bradys. Within about eighteen months of doing that last episode, we were all back together again—well, almost all of us. (Eve Plumb was the lone cast member to opt out, resulting in the “Fake Jan” phenomenon.) Talk about going from the penthouse to the basement—from one of the most beloved television series of all time to what some TV historians regard as one of the all-time worst. Hey, it wasn’t all that bad…

To borrow from a famous Bill Cosby quote, the decision to do
The Brady Bunch Variety Hour
was like Napoleon’s ill-fated decision to invade Russia: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” In that window of time between the two shows, we had made a group appearance on the Emmy broadcast, and the place went wild. The real catalyst was when producers Sid and Marty Krofft invited the
Brady Bunch
ensemble to appear on their very popular
Donny and Marie
variety show. The ratings went through the roof. The programmers at ABC put two and two together and asked the Kroffts to put together a Brady variety show cloning the
Donny and Marie
formula onto the Brady factor. So, for example, the Osmonds had a real ice rink on their set as a signature piece for their show. After all, they were from Utah. For the Bradys of Southern California, the Kroffts built a swimming pool.

When I heard the idea, my mind went in two different directions. The realist reminded me that some of the kids were not musical at all and wondered how we could possibly pull that off. But the part of me that is a musical performer was excited about the challenge. And that it was. Remember, I am the pathological type to whom you should never say, “I dare you to…”

There was also some comfort level dealing with some of the obvious shortcomings because of the caliber of talent Sid and Marty had assembled. For starters, Rip Taylor as a regular comedic foil and Bruce Vilanch as the head writer were sure to keep things pretty loose and outrageous. Joe Cassini was a wonderful choreographer. Of course, Pete Menefee’s spectacular costume designs and the campy über-’70s feel of the show probably drive all those aforementioned YouTube hits. The gowns I wore were fabulous. The coordinated wardrobe of reds, oranges, and other bright rainbow colors seemed to literally scream off the screen, although I have to admit that Bob’s big red bow ties looked pretty outrageous then as they do today. When I asked my conductor Glen Roven why he thought that the cult following for the show is particularly strong among the gay community, he didn’t hesitate. “All those feather boas, of course!”

My strongest impression looking back on that time was how it was such hard work. To get anything halfway right, the only way is rehearsing over and over again. Among the kids, Barry was very musical and caught on quickly. Geri Reischl, who replaced Eve, was selected for her musicality. Mike Lookinland was pretty good as well. Chris Knight would be the first to admit that he couldn’t sing a note and couldn’t dance. Variety wasn’t Susan’s strong suit. Bob was not a natural song-and-dance man, but he cast himself enthusiastically into it and gave it his best shot.

Maureen McCormick had good musical talent, but this was during her drug phase. On any given day, we never knew when she was going to show up. Thank God, she got help and reclaimed her life. Not long after the show went off the air, I took her to lunch. “Tear up your address book,” I remember telling her. “These people use you and you use them.” She took the advice. She has been happily married for a long time and has a child. We still talk on the phone every once in a while. It is important to me to maintain the bond, and fortunately, my good relationship with all of the kids has endured through the decades.

In
Love to Love You Bradys
, the book dedicated to “the bizarre story of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour,” Chris went on record saying that “the idiocy and incompetence of all the people around [Florence] is like working with remedial talent. It’s like a school production.” Susan summed it up best: “Florence would have been into it, but we were all taking a dump in her church. She’s the one with the experience in this field and she’s got to lug our sorry asses along with her.”

Just like double-knit spandex jumpsuits will only stretch so much, the show could not overcome the obstacles despite the best intentions of most who were involved. All the beautiful Krofftettes and Water Follies girls couldn’t do it. Guest stars like Tina Turner, Vincent Price, Milton Berle, Redd Foxx, Farrah Fawcett and Lee Majors, Donny and Marie, Tony Randall, and many others didn’t help jump-start the ratings. After nine episodes, the show was put out of its misery. Viewers may have been turned off to
The Brady Bunch Variety Hour
, but it had little diminishing impact on the franchise. There would be more Brady sequels to come and rediscovery by the next generations thanks to the nonstop worldwide syndication of the original series. It’s also a DVD best seller.

Since learning how to better handle work-related disappointment when I didn’t get the part in the film version of
Oklahoma!
I didn’t dawdle long thinking about the cancellation. I thankfully had plenty of other activities to pursue. It’s good to push the pause button only so long to digest the lessons from the experience and use it to maintain that healthy sense of humility. But otherwise, you’ve got to keep fresh. Put on your Teflon armor. If you’re going to stay in the business, you have to keep putting your energy forward. Energy begets energy.

During the mid-1970s through early 1980s, I was like a jack-in-the-box. You never knew when and where I would pop up. There were still lots of outlets on variety television shows. That versatility of being able to both sing and act that proved to be such an asset from the beginning at the American Academy, combined with that galloping horse work ethic and the Carol Brady factor, kept the phones ringing with offers.

Perhaps the most fun I had during this time period was being a semiregular on
The Hollywood Squares
. What went on that people saw at home was funny enough, but it did not compare with what happened off camera with such a crazy group of personalities. They taped five shows in one day—three in the afternoon, a break for dinner, and then two more afterward. Wine would be served during the meal, copious amounts and with predictable loosening of tongues on the last two shows. Paul Lynde especially loved to get sloshed. Once, when it was my turn, Peter Marshall asked me, “Would humming help your tennis game?” I was taking tennis lessons at the time from Dick Van Patten’s son, and he was always saying, “Keep your eyes on the ball.” So I replied, “Yes, because it would take your mind off your balls.” I might as well have detonated a bomb on the set. Everybody immediately vacated their little squares in mock protest; even Cliff Arquette, who had recently had a stroke, got up and walked off. It took ten minutes for the hysteria and pandemonium I had caused to subside and to get the show back on track. Peter Marshall still features a video of that segment in his act.