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

Fifty years later, who would have known that it would be commonplace to see commercials for erectile dysfunction on television? Back then, the slightest innuendo that had anything to do with sex or any manner of bodily function related to it were harshly off-limits. On television and in films, there were all sorts of rules about such things as how long a kiss could last. If you happened to be embracing on a bed, better be fully dressed and have one shoe firmly planted on the floor. There was a long list of words, many of which are very tame by today’s standards, that could get you into big trouble if you uttered one on air.

On a practical level with a new family, the Today Show job was a perfect situation. It was in New York, and for the only time during this show’s long history, it was pretaped in the afternoon for airing the next morning. The viewers at home had no idea. The news readers, either Frank Blair or Jack Lescoulie, were the only ones live arriving at the crack of dawn, to give inserts with the latest news and weather.

The accommodation of doing the show the afternoon before was designed for the program’s first host and originator, Dave Garroway. Like everyone who has sat in his chair since, nobody enjoys waking up that early every day year in and year out. Dave was a powerful but lovable figure but one with a very big and obvious drug problem. He had this little black leather case where he kept his stash of blue and red pills. “These pep me up, and these calm me down, and I take them together,” he told me. He would wash them down with a liquid he called “The Doctor” from a flask he carried in his pocket. When I asked one of the staffers on the show what “The Doctor” was, I was told it was liquid Dexedrine, a powerful amphetamine. That world was all new to me. I had no idea what he was talking about.

The habit was a good reason why his behavior could be quirky at times. One day he came in and all the skin was off his thumb. “Dave, that looks terrible!” I said.

“I was working on my car and got glass fibers in there, so I’ve been pulling them out,” he explained.

“Dave, I don’t think those are glass fibers. Why don’t you go see the nurse?” There was nothing subtle about it. He had been pulling out the skin fibers.

Dave was the first person I had encountered in the business who was on “prescription” drugs. I knew musicians did it, but it wasn’t such an obvious thing to me working in the theater. For most of the actors I knew, alcohol was the poison of preference. For example, if the understudy for Walter Slezak in Fanny had to suddenly answer the bell, he would get blasted to self-medicate his anxiety. The other actors would routinely have to turn their backs to the audience to feed him his lines.

Dave would come in sometimes and tell me that he had been up for three days straight, one of the side effects of his habit.

“I really admire you,” he said to me one morning. “You have children and you work. My wife…” He was kind of upset and complained that she was not active enough or productive, in his opinion.

“You shouldn’t say that,” I countered. “Your wife is lovely. She’s raising your son.” We had developed a nice friendship grounded in mutual admiration. But the pressure of all those years clearly wore on him. He was a very bright and sensitive guy under it all, a very complex man.

As an on-air personality, Dave had a penchant for doing some fairly wacky things, not the least of which concerned his fascination with monkeys. J. Fred Muggs was one of the memorable simian regulars on the show, but one that I would choose to forget. One day, the chimp gently and tenderly put his hairy little hand out toward me and grabbed hold of my cheek like he was ready to rip it from the bone. Guess he didn’t know his own strength. That was the beginning and end of our friendship.

But it didn’t stop there. “More fun than a barrel of monkeys” was a very common expression of the time, and Dave decided to put it to the test on the program. So he arranged for an actual barrel stuffed with live monkeys to be on the show. When he took the lid off, all hell broke loose. “More pandemonium than a barrelful of monkeys” would be more apt. We quickly had a full-scale disaster on our hands. The chimps went completely berserk. In seconds, the set became one big monkey toilet, littered in crap. I quickly leaped up on the desk, adrenaline-boosted gymnastics given the dress I was wearing. Some holdouts were still up in the rafters when I left. Sadly, I was told later that they had to shoot them to get them down. I hoped that wasn’t true.

Being the “fart in the whirlwind,” as my mother had once called me, life circumstances put me in the center of one particular censorship issue. Not long after the ink dried on the Today Show contract, I got pregnant. And yes, the word “pregnant” was on the no-no list. They did everything possible to hide my bulge as it became more visible. A strategically placed potted palm plant worked quite well when I was singing. I never really got that big, but my dresses went up a few sizes as I progressively got larger. Some lady wrote in and referred to me as “sitting up there in my hatching jacket.” Now you can almost deliver your child on television!

Don’t ask me why my biology always seemed to pick inopportune times in conflict with major career moments. So much for the rhythm