Life Is Not a Stage Florence Henderson (13 ebook reader .txt) 📖

“Don’t think that you’re not going to do what I tell you, because this is my baby,” he barked. “I would kill to keep my baby alive.”

“Okay, Mr. Merrick,” I replied. “Thanks for the advice. But I’ve got a show to do. And doing it well is how I’m going to keep your baby alive, so you’d better go now.”

One other colorful aspect of David Merrick was his showmanship, thought by many to be the second coming of P. T. Barnum. If the ticket sales began to slack after the show had been running for a long time, Merrick and his wonderful PR guy Jim Moran would come up with some sort of gimmick or publicity stunt. Merrick even hired someone to bring an ostrich he named “Fanny” to the front of the theater. The stunt backfired because I think it bit someone. He wanted me to sit on the back of that big bird for a publicity photograph. Not in this lifetime!

Whether it was with Merrick or anyone else, the ability to stand up for myself was a newly acquired skill at the time. Prior to that point, I was more timid with authority figures like parents, teachers, and priests or nuns. Women of my generation before the women’s liberation movement were expected to be more subservient. It was difficult to suddenly realize that I had a voice and I could say to someone like Merrick, “No, I understand, but I know what I’m doing.”

Mary Tarcai, the wonderful acting teacher I studied with during Fanny, really helped me crack through that reticence. I might have benefited from going to a shrink, but the class worked almost as well. With my upbringing, I didn’t even know therapy was an option. Instead, whatever you had weighing on your heart and spirit you could tell it to the priest. But the norm was to keep things inside, where they would sit and stew for the eventual fireworks show later on.

Mary knew how to push me. Chain-smoking cigarettes for the entire three-hour duration of the class, she was extremely wise and homed in on exactly where I needed help both professionally and personally. I was not as forceful as I could be, she recognized. It was very difficult to go into deeper emotions, especially because of my childhood embargo against crying. But that wasn’t going to cut it in her acting class. Honesty and courage to delve into these deeper dimensions were demanded.

Thanks to what I learned from Mary, I was so much stronger in my bearing and gained greater confidence to no longer take guff so lightly. As far as I was concerned, if a producer or anybody else did not want to treat me with dignity or respect, they could gladly hire someone else. People tell me stories about how badly they were treated, and often it was because they were women. Luckily, I never felt that, maybe because I wanted to be so good at what I did that people rarely gave me a hard time. That was always my protection. You have to back it up and deliver the goods when the curtain rises or you won’t last very long.

I continued to take acting classes for three hours a day and studied voice daily as well. I never missed a show for a year and a half. Regarding my voice, the only time in my whole career that I ever got into any difficulty was during out-of-town tryouts for Fanny. Those performances were designed to test audience reactions and work out the kinks at large theaters in outlying cities (usually Boston, Philadelphia, and Toronto) before opening on Broadway. They had wanted me to sing more forcefully. Belting-from-the-chest singing was becoming popular, so they had me work with a Broadway conductor named Herb Greene. He instructed me to hold my jaw down in a certain way and do a number of things that I knew were wrong. It injured my vocal cords. My teacher had me do some exercises that smoothed things over so surgery was averted. I was very blessed to have very good teachers, and I was lucky to avoid those who were not. I saw too many horror stories. The bad ones want to make you so dependent on them that you can’t sing without them. Others can criticize to the point that it destroys your confidence. My teacher right before I got Oklahoma! had the right spirit. He said, “You can do it. Just remember what I taught you. And warm up your voice.”

Performing in a musical comedy requires that you put a lot of care into your voice. Microphones didn’t come into general use until much later in the 1960s. Shifting back and forth between singing and speaking can be a challenge, as it was for one of the other leads in the show, Ezio Pinza. He was an Italian opera singer who spent twenty-two seasons with the New York Metropolitan Opera before retiring and making a shift to Broadway. A lot of singers are just fine as long as they are only singing. They are properly trained how to use the diaphragm and upper torso. The challenge is to find that same support when it is time to use the speaking voice. They tend to go back into the throat, which gets them into difficulties finding balance and being heard. Opera singers are also not used to singing eight shows a week. You have to be extra careful to avoid straining the voice.

There are many things I learned about keeping my voice in shape. Don’t cough and clear your throat all the time. Don’t go out to dinner at a noisy place where you have to shout to be heard. Inhale steam to keep the vocal cords moist. Before going on in the evening, start humming in the afternoon to approximate the range of the chords and get the diaphragm warmed up, working up to more difficult exercises closer to going