Life Is Not a Stage (23 page)

If you happened to sit next to Jonathan Winters, there was a whole other show going on in his brilliant comedic mind. When we’d go to commercial break, he did not sit idly. One of his favorite things to fill the time was to perform his own one-man Civil War or “Cowboys versus Indians” reenactments, complete with sound effects of arrows whizzing by.

Redd Foxx was notorious for his blue comedy routines. If you happened to be the next square over from him, you were in for an earful. Sandy Duncan, the singer and actress, didn’t put up with it and asked to be moved. I found that the best thing to do was to just fire back a glib answer to him when he started to talk dirty. He’d respect that and back off. Here’s one typical exchange:

Redd wasn’t that much into the wine with dinner. Instead, he was quite open about his love of cocaine. He would take out his little silver spoon. I’ll never forget how Pearl Bailey lit into him. Like many distinguished African American performers of her time, she had worked hard to keep her integrity in a business that had so derogatorily marginalized and stereotyped people of color. In her mind, Redd Foxx was not holding up his part. She had zero tolerance for his behavior. “What’s the matter with you? You can’t do that! There are children here. Put that away!”

During the evening shows, they would always give the women panelists a rose. I would always twirl mine a little when they’d announce my name at the beginning of the show. Sometimes the stem would break, and I would playfully shrug my shoulders in response. I got a fan letter from a gentleman who wrote how he loved it when I did that with the rose. As I did with every letter, I wrote back and said thank you. Then I got another letter from him and more letters. “I know that you’re doing that rose for me and nobody else.” This went on and on. I wrote back that I was very happily married, but he totally ignored all of that. He sent me a box full of fake rings, asking me to pick out which one I wanted for my engagement ring and said he’d send me the real one. He showed up a couple of times where I was performing. One of the singers pretended to be my husband, but that didn’t faze him. My lawyer got involved and sent him cease-and-desist letters. He sent those back to me with notes in the margin: “They’re trying to keep us apart,” or “They’re working you too hard.” He would send me checks. He showed up at my manager’s office and made a total of eleven trips to L.A. I had never had a real stalker before, so this was scary. The police got involved, and eventually someone got a hold of the man’s son, who was in the diplomatic corps in Italy. The son wrote to me and thanked me for my kindness to his father. He explained that his father had not been well since his mother had died a few years before. After his son got involved, I never heard from the man again.

If you’re getting the idea that the path of being a performer is one crazy way to make a living, just wait, there’s more. Whether there were good things happening or not, there were few dull moments. Sometimes a voice of sanity would come into my head and question what in the hell I had gotten myself into.

Take, for example, my excursions with the Kennedys in Hyannis Port. These fall into that category of “sounded like a good idea at the time.” I was performing with Ben Vereen in Hyannis when I got a call.

“This is Ethel Kennedy. I’d love to have you come out and have a boat ride with us.” I told her that I thought it would be wonderful. She picked Ben and me up in a convertible at the hotel. She had packed a lunch, which included a supply of several bottles of wine. We got into her sailboat.

“Hmm, no life jackets,” I duly noted, not being a particularly strong swimmer.

The seas were especially rough that day in my novice opinion. For Ethel Kennedy’s kids, it was like a walk in the park, jumping into the water and swimming back and forth between boats. I was there holding on to Ben Vereen for dear life, grabbing him in places I don’t think he’d ever been grabbed before. The boat pitched and heeled to one side.

“I get ten thousand dollars if the boat topples over,” she said, I hoped jokingly.

“Grab the jib,” she yelled at me when we hit the next big one.

“I’d do it if I knew what in the hell a jib was!” When the biggest swell hit us, the box with the wine was heading overboard.

“Save the wine, save the wine,” she shouted. What about saving the passengers?

She told me about the time she took Sammy Davis Jr. out on the boat. He had the opposite problem. Things were too still. No wind. The boat had no engine, so they were just stuck there in the middle of the ocean. Sammy was nervous about sailing to begin with, so he had a couple of Bloody Marys. He went belowdeck and wouldn’t come up. They didn’t make it back to the theater in time for his concert, not a laughing matter for any performer.

My son Joe was with me and was invited out to sail with the other Kennedy kids, which he loved. Then Teddy called and wanted us to come out on his boat. By this time, my black and blue marks from the first excursion were beginning to heal. I also felt reassured that Teddy had a bigger boat. Ethel had told me, “Before you get on his boat, you should be warned that he doesn’t want a mess of any kind. He’s very serious about his boat. So just be careful and you’ll be okay.”

The day arrived, and Kayla and Ira were also coming along. Teddy asked me to sit up next to him at the helm. Regrettably, the waves were rough again. I glanced over at Ira and Kayla. They had already turned pale shades of green. I looked at Teddy and then started to pray that no one was going to barf and create a mess.

“I think everybody needs some wine and clam chowder,” Ethel suddenly suggested. She shook the thermos containing the soup, but evidently someone had accidentally forgotten to tighten the cap. The clam chowder went splashing all over the deck. Misfortune had a silver lining. As delicious as the soup probably was, it took on the exact appearance as if somebody had just thrown up. I started laughing, and Teddy wanted to know what I thought was so funny.

“Because Ethel said that you love a clean boat. Look at this mess.” It was harder to explain to him that the real joke was looking at the ever so slightly relieved expressions on Ira’s and Kayla’s green faces. At least they knew they had one less thing to worry about: If they were going to throw up, they were at least off the hook with Teddy.

Some of the places I got to go might have been beneficial for understanding the ways of the world but given a choice in retrospect I would have done without. Take for example my visit to the Mustang Ranch in Nevada, the famous “legal” brothel. The owner, Joe Comforte, came to my show when I was playing Harrah’s in Reno. It was hard not to notice him with the entourage of beautiful young girls, one of whom I was told was the daughter of a high-ranking General Motors executive. Kayla and the boys in the act were curious and wanted to go see the place. The maître d’ arranged an invitation for us to visit after our second show.

“It’s depressing. I don’t want to go,” I told the others.

“Oh, c’mon.”

So I went along. We stood behind a translucent curtain and could see the scene of a row of girls sitting. An old drunken cowboy came in, and the girls all stood up and made various gestures to say “pick me.” We took a tour and saw their rooms that consisted of little more than a bed with a sink. Some of them had stuffed animals. Yikes. It was so sad to me.

Perhaps the worst journey to American society’s underbelly happened some time in the late 1980s. I was appearing at a nightclub in Nevada, a jewel of a place where a lot of top acts played. It was a small venue but very tasteful. We arrived in Las Vegas, the closest airport, and a huge white limo came to pick us up. After our arrival at the venue, the owner of the club invited us to dinner. Hollywood could not have done a better job casting someone who looked like a gangster, right down to the rings that adorned each one of his fingers. “I’d like to pay you cash,” he said to me that evening at the dinner table.

“Oh, no, you’ll have to write a check to my corporation,” I told him. Big mistake!

My conductor received a call one afternoon a couple of days later.

“We’re going to close the place tonight,” said the FBI agent on the line. “There’s going to be a raid, so we want to give you the opportunity to come and get your music. We’re telling you this because we love Ms. Henderson. We watched her performing while we were undercover.”

No one had understood where this man got the money to build this place out in the middle of nowhere. He was no doubt dealing drugs and laundering money. The FBI arrested him that night. Some of the cash was hidden in the walls. When I told my longtime business manager what happened, he made sure I didn’t miss the lesson.

“If somebody offers you cash, take the money!” Of course, I never got paid for those performances, but I did pay my musicians. Given the situation, maybe that was all for the best. Oh, and gone too was that big white limo to take us back to the Las Vegas airport.

What continued to drive me through this era was my love of the business and for the opportunity to be there, to listen, to learn, and to contribute. After the kind of fame and success I had with
The Brady Bunch
, some performers find it hard to get back to a normal life because they had been living so large. But one of the benefits of my freeform career was that I met and worked with a lot of my peers and had the opportunity to learn from the best. There was no one in show business who knew more about longevity than Bob Hope.

I traveled to Australia to be part of
Bob Hope’s All Star Comedy Special
in 1978. We were to do a sketch together and there wasn’t much time for us to rehearse before going live in front of a huge audience. So we decided to do it in the car on the way to the venue. I learned from him how comedy was such a precise art. If I added an extra “the,” he’d stop me. He said, “You can’t do that. It has to be this, or we won’t get a laugh. It’s the rhythm of what you’re saying as well as what you’re saying.”

But the biggest insight he gave me was from literally watching him do nothing. It was summer in Australia, and it was very hot. I noticed in the backstage area that he was alone, sitting in the corridor quietly, all by himself.

“Bob, are you okay?” I asked him.

He nodded. “I just rest,” he explained. “It takes a lot of energy to do what we do. When I was in vaudeville, we’d do fourteen shows a day. The only way we had the energy to do it well was by making sure we had a few moments of rest. Don’t be burning up and wasting energy.”

That was an important lesson for me to heed. I was someone who never wanted to recognize my physical limitations. The galloping horse syndrome would always make me push myself beyond what anyone else would do, physically, emotionally, and every other way. It was timely information. I heard his voice loudly and clearly because I was obviously not taking care of myself in this regard, and there would soon be some serious consequences arising in its wake.

CHAPTER 19

Cutting Through the Layers to the Truth

A
nyone who has logged millions of miles in the air will have a catalog of phobia-inducing close calls (especially from the less technologically sophisticated days of the mid-twentieth century). During the
Sound of Music
tour, I was en route to Dallas when the plane started to vibrate excessively. It was fresh in everyone’s minds that another aircraft had recently blown apart due to the same circumstance. There were fire engines on the runway when we landed. I had Nanny and two of my children with me. Not a pleasant scenario.

Another time, I was returning to New York from an industrial show with Bill Hayes on one of the early commercial jets (probably a Boeing 707). JFK was fogged in. The pilot made two attempts to land but had to pull up each time. As the plane went around in circles, the pilot shut off the ventilation system to help conserve fuel and the cabin became stiflingly hot. Just as the fuel was almost at empty, conditions improved enough so we could land at Newark. It is statistically safer to go on a commercial plane than to drive your own car, but that fact fell on deaf ears. It is almost comical how the thought of being trapped inside an airplane that is about to crash was so energetically similar to how I perceived my stagnated personal life had become. All the responsibility with the four children, all the “what ifs,” combined with exhaustion and a feeling of being overwhelmed, created the perfect recipe. As this phobia increased in severity in the mid-1970s, I found myself more frequently turning job offers down because I didn’t want to fly.

The depletion and exhaustion during
The Sound of Music
caused me to suffer from stage fright as well, which grew progressively more difficult. Insomnia and my general lack of awareness about sound nutrition were also contributing factors that undermined my coping ability. During the
Brady Bunch
years, it was hardly a concern, because acting on film was far less taxing than being out on the road and performing constantly in front of live audiences.

Where this particular fear attached its tentacles was on the act of singing, which is the most demanding and required the most physical control of anything I did. Once I got out there and got the feel of the audience, I was usually fine, but prior to that I would be a wreck. I was a harsh critic of myself, a self-judgment that echoed the voice of my mother. Before going onstage, I concentrated hard to make sure I had command of my breath. Without it, you’re really in trouble. For example, when I did
The Tonight Show
, I never wanted to go out and do a slow ballad first. Instead, I’d do a very up-tempo song that would force me to stir up my energy and control my breath. Doing a slower number right after was never a problem.

The mind can be quite insidious in how it constructs coping mechanisms to make us feel superficially safer in the short term while deflecting or delaying dealing with the true root causes. But there comes a time when the bill has to be paid.

I had noticed the warning signs and beginning stages years before, but now the issues were inescapable. On the deepest level and despite all of my worldly success and hard work was the hardcore fact that my life was essentially tumbling out of control. The resulting fear had to go somewhere, and just to make sure that I’d pay attention, it had attached itself to the things I did the most: flying and performing.

This tremendous loss of confidence was probably rooted in my feeling of being trapped and my lack of courage to do anything about it. The questions I could ask myself were fairly obvious:
You’re not happy and haven’t been that way for years. What’s the big deal? People are getting divorced all the time. Why not be done with it? What’s standing in your way?

The truth, to put it bluntly, was that I didn’t have the balls to go through with it. I had plenty of explanations for not doing it. First, there were the restrictions of Catholicism. I had lived my life this way for so long under the same indoctrination. If I should ever choose to remarry, then I wouldn’t be allowed to receive the sacraments in the church.

Then, talk about being codependent, I was worried about who was going to take care of Ira and what was going to happen to him without me. Above all, I thought about the effect on the children. Divorce law in New York would not take kindly to my situation, and there was always the possibility that I could lose custody of the children.

Part of the trap was my desire to please everybody and receive the affection from others that had been so lacking from my mother. On the positive side, I knew what rejection felt like, and my caring came across as genuine, whether I was acting through Carol Brady or stopping a moment to take a picture with someone. I did not want to do anything to hurt someone’s feelings.

So I sublimated my deeper-seated emotional needs in work and in living for my children. I was not ready to be honest with myself yet and say, “This isn’t working for me, and I know there must be another way.” The tools and the confidence needed to get out of the trap I had built for myself were not present…until two major events happened in rapid succession that forced the issue.

When I was forty-eight years old, I had a hysterectomy. There were certainly legitimate medical reasons for it, notably pain, dysplasia, and bleeding. There was also a part of me that naively hoped that it would help our marriage, but that expectation was equally as disappointing as when I went on the pill. From that standpoint, it was a total mistake.

I had grown to be a great believer in the mind-body connection. I thought about my older sister who was so miserable. She had had this operation and that operation. Little by little, they were cutting pieces of her away. “What will be next?” I thought after the hysterectomy. It was a tap on the shoulder that I needed to face some hard facts and seek some answers, and fast.

Just as the organs of my motherhood were removed, my mother suffered a stroke and was dying. I got the phone call from my sister while I was still in the hospital recovering. She was eighty-eight years old and had dementia. My sister Marty told me that my mother had paralysis on her right side as a result of the stroke. She had still been pretty sharp up until age eighty-two. Her second husband (whom she had married when she was seventy-five years old) had recently died, and she had had gallbladder surgery. We had decided that she shouldn’t be alone. She would have been a perfect candidate for assisted living and would have thrived in that environment because she loved playing cards, bowling, and other social activities. But at that time, those places were not the norm, so she went to live a more isolated existence with my sister. However, Marty was the only one of us at the time who wasn’t tied down, so she went to Florida to live with my mother.

“I can’t stand it here anymore,” my mother said and repeated again in subsequent phone conversations. I am convinced that she would have lived longer and been healthier had she been in a retirement community, and I always felt bad about that.

I had asked her once about dying. Although she had quite a gruff manner and a rough mouth, she remained a religious woman.

“I just don’t ever want to be a burden to anybody,” she told me. I prayed that my mother would go peacefully and quickly.

I told my sister, “Just don’t let them hook her up to life support. Just let her go.”

I could hardly stand up straight with the pain as I got on the plane for Florida to go to her funeral. So much went through my mind, one moment full of emotion and the next remarkably lacking of it. I thought of the time on
The Brady Bunch
when I had to play Carol Brady’s own grandmother and how I played that character as tough-talking but funny, modeled on my mother. I thought of her appearing with me on
The Mike Douglas Show
doing exercises on the floor lifting a bowling ball with their fitness expert. She was strong, and if you asked her what she bowled, it was always 250 no matter what. She had boyfriends. She loved those times I invited her to Las Vegas, when she could sit at the blackjack table until all hours of the night. As she got older, I cherished the moments I had to take care of her, brushing her hair and doing her makeup. Her gruff ways softened somewhat around the edges with age. But she still said, “You’re not too old to be spanked,” and she meant it!

She looked beautiful in the casket. I thought of all the positive lessons from her example. Survival. Independence. Courage. But with recovery from the surgery and everything else brewing, there was little energy left for much outpouring of emotion or grief. I had seen the finality of things so many times before, but now the message was different. On a subconscious level, I knew that I had to do something or I would die. Too many people, including myself, were living lives of quiet desperation. It was time to grow. I also knew that once I truly opened up to that, it would be impossible to turn back. My mother left my father when she was forty-nine years old. My sister Pauline left her husband at forty-nine as well. The way things were appearing, chances were good I would be next in line.

Dr. Giorgi put Ira and me in touch with a wonderful psychiatrist in New York. Ira would go in person, and I would usually do my portion on the phone. Unfortunately, it really didn’t go anywhere. It was like hitting an impenetrable brick wall of anger and pride. Many times, I felt worse after the sessions. A lot would get stirred up, but there was very little if any process of where to go with it in the aftermath.

What I came to learn later on is that nothing gets accomplished until you reach a state of surrender. You have to realize that your overwhelming will and desire to fix things and all your best intentions are sometimes not enough. “But I can’t fail,” your pride has kept saying, locking yourself into a futile battle. Instead, you have to own up to the fact that you’re not perfect and that you can’t fix this. The act of getting knocked down a few pegs allows your humility to come forward. You accept the fact that you’ve failed; but in a loving way, you also understand that it is everyone’s failure, not just yours alone but a shared one as long as everybody takes responsibility.

The therapy in New York helped me in some ways but did not get me past the stage fright and fear of flying. A friend of mine suggested that I might try hypnotherapy. She told me about a clinic in Van Nuys, California, the Hypnosis Motivation Institute, founded by Dr. John Kappas, who is generally recognized as the father of modern hypnotherapy. “He’s very much in demand, so you’ll probably have to go on a waiting list,” she told me. I didn’t know the first thing about hypnosis, and I was quite frankly a little scared. I saw a newspaper article about a famous athlete who had attributed his success to the help he got from hypnotherapy. I thought, “Well, I’ve tried everything else. What do I have to lose?” I called, and three weeks later I came in for my first appointment.

From the first moment when I walked into Dr. Kappas’s office, I had no other thought than the strongest intuitive conviction that my life was going to change dramatically. The first session with John was wonderful. At the end of it, he said, “I’m sure we’ll find out much more, but the first thing we need to do is give you back your confidence. Everyone’s adoring you except the one person you want to—yourself—and that is doing a number on you.” It was the truth. I had no confidence in myself as a woman, a performer, or anybody. The fears of flying and performing were no doubt coming from that source.

After just a few weeks, I started to see major progress. In each session, John would talk in the beginning. The purpose is to determine what you want to achieve. What are the negative patterns that are causing you to be stuck? Where are the blocks? What are the unresolved conflicts that you have never really settled in your mind? Through the process, you are able to access that unconscious mind that is whirling 24/7 and controlling your thoughts and behaviors stemming from those old programs.
You don’t deserve that! You’re not that smart! You’re poor, and you’ll always be poor!
With hypnotherapy, I finally had a highly effective tool to break through all those kinds of negative programming.

Only during the last ten or fifteen minutes of the session would I actually be in a hypnotic state. You’re never completely asleep, but you feel afterward a deep state of relaxation just like you’ve had an incredible night’s sleep. Instead, it is your body that is at perfect rest, so still that you hardly breathe. The mind is extremely alert unless the therapist decides that it’s in your best interest to take you to a deeper level. The therapist is able to give different sorts of inductions to help achieve the specific depth or breakthrough. Once you understand how it works and how positive it can be (and most important, start experiencing some amazing results), there is certainly nothing to fear. You feel safe and empowered to journey into your past, into those places you once thought were too painful and terrifying to ever visit again.

Hypnotherapy also unlocked the revealing and highly powerful realm of dreams. Since childhood, my dreams have been extremely visual and colorful. What I learned from the work with John was the extent to which we work out a lot of issues in our dreams. The dreams you have right after you go to sleep are wishful-thinking dreams. The ones in the middle of the night are projections. And if you wake up in the morning and say, “Oh, I had the worst dream,” that’s good, because that time is for venting dreams that help you clear out stored thoughts and emotions. Because I’m so highly suggestible to the point of almost being a somnambulist, this was like finding a gold mine.