Life Is Not a Stage (4 page)

To her credit, my mother recognized from early on that I came into this world with a gift—a musical voice. In fact, I cannot remember a time in my life when I wasn’t singing. My mother loved music and played the guitar. She taught me lots of songs from age two, fifty songs, in fact, that I knew note perfect. It was mostly what they called hillbilly music back then, like “Down on the Levee” and spirituals such as “The Old Rugged Cross.” Years later, I found out in a rather unusual way that music was in the ancestry of my mother’s family. An aunt was touring the Mammoth Caves National Park in Kentucky when she saw etched on the wall of one of the caverns some graffiti from two Civil War soldiers who were hiding down there. They wrote, “Isaac and Henry Newton, musicians and composers.” They were on the family tree on my maternal grandmother’s side.

As a young child, singing was also an antidote for my shyness. I had the belief that if I closed my eyes the people around me would also not be able to see me. My mother made me get up and sing in public wherever there was a gathering of people (sometimes in the local grocery store). I was more afraid of her than of being shy. Quite often I’d pass the hat. So I guess it can be said that I’ve always been singing for my supper. Sometimes Babby would join in, and we’d fall easily into harmony. We even won a contest. Our prize was hot fudge sundaes at Wyndall’s Market.

I never had any musical instruction until the nuns put me in the church choir when I was eight. They taught me how to sight-read Gregorian chants. They had me sing two Latin masses on Sundays. If the tenor or bass didn’t show up that particular day, I’d sing their parts too. People started to recognize that I had talent. Had my mother stuck around, I’m sure she might have become a great stage mother.

Often when I sang, some people in the gathering would cry. It is unlikely at the time that I fully comprehended on a conscious level the reason why they did this. But Rockport was not a large town. The conditions Babby and I lived under were no secret. And we convincingly looked the part of two little ragamuffins fending for ourselves, living precariously close to the edge.

Babby was three years older, and that age difference gave her a certain authority in watching out for me. She had brown hair and eyes and was very pretty. Being older, she was a big step ahead of me in knowing the ways of the world and especially about boys. When puberty erupted and the hormones kicked in, she stepped in as a form of guardian angel because there was no mother or grandmother figure around to rein me in.

“When he comes into your mind, just think about things you hate about him,” she told me. That was her form of psychology to help rid me of puppy love. She thought my feelings had become a little too hot and heavy (nothing beyond kissing!) for Gene Springer, the boy who worked at the taffy counter at the carnival. She was also concerned about another boy named Doc Bush, and for good reason. He was five years older than I was! And I was crazy about him.

Temptation was all around, and had I been a little freer in spirit and not so Catholic, I might have gotten in some serious trouble. Case in point: Babby, Oscar, and I often went dancing at the Rendezvous Dance Hall in nearby Tell City. When I was out on the dance floor, I really felt the music and wasn’t shy about expressing it—which would later prove to be a good thing when I became a Broadway performer. “Don’t shake your behind like that,” Babby warned me. Guys were always asking me to dance, and I was only thirteen.

Along with Babby’s loving influence, religion also served to hold me in check. When I was a child, I had to go to mass nearly every day. And once a week, we all lined up to go into the little box for confession. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” was how I would begin. Our parish priest was on the other side of the perforated slot. When I was little, my sins were fairly predictable: “I disobeyed my parents”; “I fought with my brothers and sisters.” As I got older and when it was something I thought was really a bad sin, I tried to disguise my voice, because the priest knew us all. My voice would go into a higher register: “I lied”; “I had impure thoughts”; “I touched myself impurely.”

Confession is a fairly serious sacrament in the Catholic Church. It’s all tied to owning up to our shortcomings, expressing genuine sorrow, receiving penance of some sort, and finally, absolution. Also, one of the other big rules is that what is said in the box stays in the box. One day, this rule provoked a particularly severe case of soul-searching for the simple reason that our priest absentmindedly forgot to close the slot on my side before he had finished with the person in front of me. As I entered, he had already begun to hear the confession of an older girl named Maria—better known as “Maria with the big boobs” among us other less endowed girls. Maria launched into her confession, and it was much better than listening to the radio. “Oh my God,” I said to myself, realizing that I would probably be compelled to add this inadvertent eavesdropping to my already prepared list of sins. But this was juicy stuff. Maria said she was truly sorry how she let her boyfriend Simon have his way with her ample breasts. I decided to leave well enough alone.

A short time later, our priest revealed that he too fudged on the rules. At the end of one of my confessions, he asked, “By the way,
Florence
, how’s
Carl
?” He was referring to my brother, who was gravely ill at the time. So much for the pretense of anonymity!

Our priest had no doubt a fair good bit of material for his own confession. It was clear that he thought that all of us blossoming young girls were pretty cute. As a group of us were graduating from the eighth grade, he called us to his rectory upstairs. He had us all line up. He was seated in a chair with his legs spread wide. When it was each girl’s turn, he would rub us against his crotch. At least he kept his clothes on. I remember thinking, “That’s Father So-and-So. Oh my God! What about confession? Is this his sin or ours?”

One of the girls must have told her parents about the incident. My mother got wind of it and asked me about it. “Yes,” I admitted to her, “but I don’t think he meant anything bad with it.” I was always trying to make everything right, which was not always a good thing. The priest had been at the parish for many years, but was transferred somewhere else soon thereafter. Many years later, he came to see me performing on Broadway in
Fanny
.

In general, when those kinds of things happened, whether it was going on in the home, at church, or anywhere, kids didn’t speak up as promptly as they should have. In high school, I was living with another family, and their friend came to visit one afternoon in quite a drunken state. “Now, you’ll be very sorry,” I said to him, trying to talk him down while circling the table in order to get close enough to escape through the door. Even though that self-preservation instinct luckily worked in our favor, we always had a blurry line of what was appropriate and what was not. Someone touching your private parts or hitting you was not called sexual abuse or domestic violence back then. You didn’t tattle on anybody. Even though Babby certainly went through the same things with our father, our attitude was to try to work things out internally, silently. Be forgiving. See the good in everyone. That’s life on the farm.

That farm life in a large family with older brothers did not give you a free pass from their sexual curiosity. My mother had one solution for it all. “If your brother tries to touch you, you tell him the devil will take him straight to hell.” That devil must have worked overtime in our house, ready to spring into action whenever anybody did anything wrong. If I didn’t get to sleep right away, my mother had that same devil standing by. Maybe that’s why I still don’t sleep so well. I’m not joking—it took me years before I had the courage to watch
Rosemary’s Baby
.

“Come on, Florency, run faster, run faster.” I can still remember how Babby cried out. We were walking home one night, and a stranger was following us all too close. Terrified, I cried back, “I can’t run any faster.” Thankfully nothing happened. It is scary how much free rein we had to come and go as we pleased. On another night out past dark, when we were too tired to make it home, we crawled into the outhouse of a family we knew in town, the Berrys. We got up early the next morning and went home. Nowadays, a child protective agency would have probably intervened.

To my knowledge, no such entity of that kind existed in Rockport in the 1940s, with one notable exception, the truant officer. Babby and I would skip school sometimes, usually because we had no proper clothes to wear. So we’d take the day off and stay in bed. We’d hear the truant officers coming to the porch of our house on Eureka Road where we lived prior to moving to the two-story home. We’d hear them talking outside, followed seconds later by a knock on the door. With no answer, they’d walk around the house and look in the windows. We pulled the blankets over us and stayed very quiet until they left.

One silver lining of that house on Eureka was that it was located next door to an African American church. Their services were quite different from what I was used to in the Catholic Church. Instead of long liturgies, a young woman would sit down and play the organ, and the music seemed to take over from there. It was contagious. From the moment I would go into that church, I could not stop dancing. I learned there at a young age a valuable lesson on how to “get down” musically and otherwise.

Behind the church was a house where a black family lived, the Rowans. Mr. Rowan and Daddy would sometimes get drunk together. It was quite a sight to see them walking on the street, stumbling home together. His daughter would sometimes sit and kiss her boyfriend on the front steps of the church. I remember thinking, “Hmm, that doesn’t look like such a bad thing.” And the memory of Mrs. Rowan is still quite vivid. One night, I was supposed to take the garbage out. For whatever reason, I was afraid to go back where the garbage cans were, so I came up with the excellent idea of dumping it conveniently over behind the Rowans’ house. Well, Mrs. Rowan came over the next day. My mother didn’t bother to count to ten after the screen door closed behind Mrs. Rowan. With no hesitation, she beat the tar out of me.

Whether I was singing and dancing at the African American church or performing in the grocery store, people must have sensed a positive life force in me in spite of my circumstances. I was, as far back as I can remember, a “glass-half-full” personality type. I was optimistic even in the worst of times when nothing around gave cause to be so. Any kind of inner strength and confidence that were communicated through my singing voice perhaps stemmed from that optimism and the protective faith I felt. Despite my listeners’ tears, they were hopeful, as I was, that somehow I would persevere.

To my great delight, some of the people from that period of my childhood have turned up sporadically. A short time ago, a letter arrived from Missy Mason, the town doctor’s granddaughter. Back in the old days, I held her in high regard, “the cat’s meow,” and the real height of sophistication in my mind. “It was just so semi!” was her favorite expression, and whatever that meant, it had to be good. She wrote in this letter some six decades later, “I’ve seen you so many times on TV and always feel so proud of all you’ve accomplished. Who would have thought it way back when we were so young. Maybe you did.” Another unforgettable encounter was with Bananas, or ’Nanas for short, a tough African American kid whom I would say hi to on the street when he wasn’t being a terrifying bully (or so he seemed to me). Sometime in the 1960s, I was performing a concert for Oldsmobile in Flint, Michigan, with a wonderful choir made up of their workers. At that event, a very handsome black man came up to me. “Florence, I’m ’Nanas from Rockport.” We hugged each other with such joy. He took a step back with one of those “just look at us” looks. He laughed. “Yeah, we both got out.”

No doubt I rode out of Rockport on my mother’s galloping horse. As I mentioned before, Elizabeth Henderson was a survivor and a fighter, and give her credit, it was advice that worked for her for her whole lifetime. I didn’t recognize until much later on just how courageous she was. She dealt with her difficulties with a lot of grit and sheer determination. I followed her example without totally being cognizant of it, and it’s been one hell of a ride! For the greater portion of my life, I barreled through problems and obstacles as if my very existence depended on it. And certainly, in the difficult years of my youth, it did. But logic dictates that there comes a time when all of that is no longer necessary, when you can relax and loosen your grip on the reins, slow the horse down, and enjoy the ride. Nice thought. Why not? But that’s easier said than done. Such behavior becomes an ingrained and stubborn pattern. It had a powerful presence lurking in all of my thoughts, actions, and choices. At the same time, it was seamless and nearly invisible, unnoticed like a painting hanging on a living room wall that fades into the background with time.

Heavy lifting would be required to deal with the emotions I held inside from early childhood, and, in my case, more than a few Kleenex boxes processing it all in therapy. As I’ve gotten older and somewhat wiser, I’ve come to better understand and deal with the past. But the scars are always there. We just deal with it the best we can. Even the very act of recounting these old stories has had a definite healing effect.

CHAPTER 3

Growing Up Fast

O
ne of the brighter spots of my early life came in the form of Oscar. She was my saving grace and my best friend from the time we were five years old until she died all too early from asthma at age fifty-three. I’m not sure exactly how my lucky break happened, but Oscar was going to attend St. Francis Academy, the Catholic high school on the other side of the Ohio River in Kentucky. She came from a well-to-do family, and I think her grandparents didn’t want her taking the Greyhound bus alone every day back and forth to school. I never found out how it was paid for, but regardless, it was all arranged. I got to go with her on the bus.

On those bus rides, we’d laugh and talk about girly things: school, making fun of teachers, boys, and movies—usually in that order. But beyond that, we usually didn’t dwell on our problems. Oscar had her share of misfortune with her home situation too, albeit markedly more benign than mine. Her mother gave birth to her at seventeen. Due to alcohol problems, her father was not in the picture, but she was raised by his parents.

Oscar would visit her mother, who rented a room in the home of a wealthy Rockport family. Sometimes I’d come too, and we’d spend the night together in that room, all three of us packed in the same bed. Often I would stay at Oscar’s house as well. During one sleepover, Oscar had an asthma attack. She couldn’t breathe and got very frightened. We were alone, and I didn’t know what to do and felt powerless to help. I tried to comfort her. It was terrifying, but it shocked me into a real state of compassion and gratitude when the calm was restored. It reduced things to basics. We supported each other the best we could. We were both trying to fit in and live as normal a life as we could imagine.

In that regard, going to St. Francis with Oscar was made to order, even down to the fact that we wore uniforms, since I didn’t have any decent clothes. Still, often I’d get off the bus in the morning with a soiled uniform or wearing something other than the clean white blouse required as part of it.

“Why aren’t you in your uniform?” Sister Mary Auxilium, the wonderful mother superior wearing the full nun’s habit, asked me when I was sent to her office.

“I spilled hot chocolate on it,” I replied, trying to mask the truth. Hot chocolate? I hadn’t even had breakfast.

“Oh, I see,” she said in a neutral tone. She offered me something to drink. Sitting there with the cup in my hand, I was completely clueless that she or any of the other teachers knew of my circumstances. How could I have been so naïve?

Thinking it might help, Sister Mary would send me to the school’s spiritual director, Father Saffer, for counseling. I don’t remember any particularly profound insights from our conversations, but there was something more powerful in the unspoken, in his gesture of caring kindness. As I sat in his presence, there was another thing about him that I couldn’t resist. Even back then, I guess I was preparing to be an actress and conducting my own character study. He had a nervous manner about him that I found fascinating. And I had the audacity to imitate him, to everyone’s delight, including his (I think!), when we had school assemblies.

“How’s everything?” was how he’d usually start the conversation.

“Great,” I’d say, but he knew I really meant, “Not so great.”

“Would you like a candy bar?”

“Oh, thanks.” So we would just sit and talk, and I’d eat the candy bar. That treat seemed extra sweet with his nurturing energy.

On a few occasions, my geometry teacher, Father O’Bryan, would make me leave the classroom because I was talkative and laughed a lot in class. He had been a Navy chaplain during the war, and he ran a tight ship in class. If you misbehaved or weren’t listening, he was prone to throw erasers at you. Chalk does not taste good even when you’re hungry—take my word for it.

I was staying temporarily with my older sister Marty during this time. She was not a happy person, and for good reason. She was married to a man who had a short fuse, to put it mildly. Being fifteen years old and his wife’s youngest sister gave me no immunity from his treatment. I once tried to pull him off my sister when he was hitting her. He was a big man. He picked me up and threw me against the wall. Then he picked me up again and literally threw me out the door. I ran over to the neighbors and told them, “He’s going to kill my sister.” Mr. Wilkie calmed me down. But I don’t remember them going over there or intervening in any way. Another time during this stay, I was babysitting for them. They came back late one night, and my brother-in-law discovered that I hadn’t done the dishes as he had asked.

“I’ve got a good mind to shoot her right now,” he told my sister. He owned a nightclub in Owensboro and always carried a gun on him.

“Stop talking like that,” I could hear Marty pleading. Although Marty’s husband didn’t drink, his anger was terrifying, and I couldn’t wait to get out of there. My grades, which were usually good, understandably went downhill. My conduct at school wasn’t the best either.

When my behavior was not to his liking, Father O’Bryan would say, “Henderson, take a walk!” The classroom had a large glass window. From the outside, I could peer in and watch what was going on during my detention. One of the students would be sent to get me after a while. Father O’Bryan loved my singing, so his message to me would always be the same. “You can come back in if you sing an Irish song.”

Many years later, I received an honorary doctorate at nearby Brescia University in Owensboro. All my old teachers from St. Francis came and some as well from my elementary school in Rockport. During the ceremony, I talked about my time at the high school, especially of the extraordinary kindness of the teachers and the enormous impact it had on me. They remembered what I had been through during that time of my life. They all were crying, but Father O’Bryan cried the most. When I left for New York, he gave me a beautiful crucifix he had made. It still hangs in my house.

One of the other duties I had as a child was to sing at funerals. If there was anything that wounded my childhood faith, it was the death experience. The poorer Catholic families usually had the viewing of their deceased family member in their living room. The rosary would be said, and I would sing the funeral mass. As part of it, they always wanted me to touch the dead body, which scared me half to death.

I’ll never forget the time when two men and a woman were killed in a gangster war in Chicago and dumped in a field near our town. Everybody lined up outside the mortuary, adults and children alike (including Oscar and me), waiting to view the bodies and see the bullet holes up close. Their deaths were turned into a festive carnival in Rockport. It gave me nightmares.

No matter how much I believed in prayer and saw its power in action, it could not defeat death. My beloved brother Carl had survived World War II only to come home and die of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix a short time thereafter. He left behind a wife who was eight months pregnant. How shocking it was to see his once handsome, curly dark hair turned suddenly straight as I viewed his corpse laid out in his home. I didn’t know him as well as some of my other siblings, given our age difference and the fact that he had been gone for a greater part of my childhood. But that didn’t diminish my grief, just as the standard line that he was going on to heaven only comforted me so far. That body didn’t look anything like him in real life. But the child finds a way to shut the thought out and keep going.

Not so long after Carl’s passing, I had a personal introduction to death myself. I was riding on the bus home from school with Oscar when I started to get a horrible stomachache. I rushed home and waited for my father to arrive. “Daddy, my stomach hurts so badly. I’m so sick.” There was little response, so I had no choice other than to try to ride it out. A short time later, Billy Richards, the cutest boy in the school, came over. I let him only into the hallway. We were both in the Catholic Youth Organization through our church, and we were planning a dance and looking into getting a bus so the kids from Owensboro could also come. Finally I said, “Billy, I’m really sick. You’re going to have to go.” As soon as he left, I passed out from the pain and collapsed. To make matters more dramatic, I hit the back of my head hard on the floor and was bleeding.

“What happened, Gal, did you slip up?”

“Daddy, I think I fainted.” Such a thing had never happened to me before, but it was a safe assumption.

My father proceeded to do the next worst thing. He went into the cabinet and brought out a bottle of patent medicine, a.k.a. “snake oil.” It was some cure-all elixir he had mail-ordered. He gave me a teaspoon of it. I promptly threw up.

“I think we need to go over to Pauline’s house,” my totally helpless and clueless father concluded, alarmed at seeing my rapidly deteriorating condition. Walking was the only option because we didn’t have a car. My sister lived at least a mile away.

“Daddy, I don’t think I can make it.” But I walked all the way hunched over. By the time we got to Pauline’s, I was in sheer agony.

Pauline decided that it was surely something that a good old-fashioned enema could fix. It was a close runner-up to my father’s earlier “next worst thing” intervention. They all went to bed after the deed was done. I remained on the sofa writhing in pain. After a few more hours, I called out to Pauline and cried how I couldn’t take it anymore. By this time, the pain had moved down to my right side. She finally called the doctor in Rockport. He came and examined me and said she needed to get me to the hospital in Owensboro immediately. Nobody had a car except for Marty’s husband, that abusive man who was never pleasant to me to begin with. He was furious that he had to drive from Owensboro to get me, and didn’t say a word in the car the whole way.

It got worse. We got to the hospital’s emergency room and the doctor took one look at me, a fourteen-year-old girl, and assumed that I was pregnant. Great! Adding insult to injury, or more accurately, embarrassment to agony, the doctor performed a pelvic exam on me. Excruciating! Finally, they decided to operate. The appendix was perforated and ready to burst. I would have ended up like my brother Carl if they hadn’t operated. It made sense that part of my father’s paralysis in helping me was related to the trauma associated with Carl’s death. He was equally troubled about how he was going to pay the hospital bill. At least he was sober at the time.

They kept me in the hospital a bit longer than usual because they probably realized there was nobody at home to take care of me. Reverend Mother Superior Auxilium as well as Ilean, Pauline, Marty, and some other friends came to visit me in the ward I shared with seven other people. So did my friend Ruth Helen. She was the first new friend I made when I started high school in Owensboro.

Ruth Helen was one of those girls who had already become a tall, full-figured woman. And there I was, still a girl, at five feet two inches and flat-chested. She lived in a mansion in Owensboro. Despite our radically different economic backgrounds, we found that we had a lot more in common once we opened up to each other about our problems. My eyes opened to the fact that my family circumstances were not just the domain of the poor. She told me that her mother, a glamorous, wealthy, and well-traveled woman, beat her. Her father was also an alcoholic. I’m getting ahead of the story, but Ruth Helen and her family would soon make a miraculous impact on my destiny.

What I also cannot forget about my stay in the hospital was one old lady in the ward, Mrs. Chancellor.

“I’ve got to get these fishhooks out of my side,” she moaned repeatedly.

I begged her, “Mrs. Chancellor, don’t do that!” She kept taking off the metallic clamps that closed the incision after her surgery. Doctors used those as an alternative when problems with the skin tissue made suturing difficult. I had to yell for the nurse more than once.

I went home to Marty’s near the hospital for the first few days after I was released. The day I got there, Marty went into the hospital herself for—guess what?—appendicitis. I often wonder if it was a coincidence or inherent symbolism that we all got appendicitis. In my situation, the case could certainly be made that my body and spirit literally couldn’t stomach what was going on any longer, and my insides threatened to explode. When I went home to Rockport, I stayed downstairs on a cot for a while to further recuperate. It was not the most pleasant of times.

The more I look at my own children and grandchildren, the more I’m convinced that infants come into the world with a certain wiring. It is probably one good reason why Babby didn’t have as easy of a time coping as I did. When we would talk about what we were going through, it was always curious to me why she was more prone to cry and become negative in her thoughts and words and get nightmares, when my first response was always to look for a solution.

The experience of my youth, as challenging as it was much of the time, proved to have many tangible and positive by-products. For example, I learned how to read people extremely well (most of the time!), something that was put to good use once I started acting. With the few who protected me not always there to shield my eyes, cover my ears, or lead me away from harm, I saw too much. I could easily pick up lies. I had to grow up fast.