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

method (or “calendar-based contraception”), the only family planning option morally acceptable for strict Catholics! I love my children, but I found out the hard way that there is a good reason why it is called Vatican roulette. Like most forms of gambling, the house almost always finds a way to win in the end.

Some years later, I was appearing on The Tonight Show and quite visibly eight months pregnant. Before going on, I was pacing in the hallway outside the green room, which I always did. I never liked to sit down before I worked. The comedian Jack E. Leonard called out to me, “Florence, come in, sit down, sit down.”

I said, “That’s okay, Jackie. I’m fine out here. I’m just walking, going over lyrics.”

“Come on,” he said, but I wasn’t budging. I kept walking. Finally, he said, “Florence, get in here, sit down. What’s the matter with you? Afraid you’ll wrinkle the kid?”

In addition to sexual content, if the show ever got into a conversation about religion or anything remotely close to the topic of birth control, Dave did not beat around the bush and told me not to chime in with my opinion. With the term “Today Show girl,” you get the picture that being a woman on TV in that era left you easily marginalized. Dave Garroway was a powerful force, and I could sometimes feel squelched by him. Maybe I wasn’t aware enough to be bothered by it. I was more consumed with trying to be the best I could at my job. Even in a sexist situation, I never felt less because I was a woman. I always tried to hold my own.

Starting out in the theater, I never had the nerve to complain if there was something I didn’t like. I’m still very respectful of directors unless they are simply god-awful. In the beginning, I was too busy learning and paying my dues, so it wasn’t until much later that I became more assertive. But my attitude was always to make suggestions in the spirit of “let’s see how good we can make this.” Producers and directors quickly grow tired of bad behavior or people who are difficult to work with. Eventually the word spreads and they stop hiring you. No one will argue with you if you are enjoying your job and doing the best you can, having fun and working harder than anybody. Get there early. Be the last to leave. Be prepared. Know your lines. Move forward with that spirit, and you’ll get invited back again and again. I’ve always enjoyed being a team player.

As I was getting ready to leave The Today Show with the baby due, Dave Garroway was also ending his tenure. Hugh Downs was taking over. He knew me from The Tonight Show, where he had served as Jack Paar’s announcer. He asked me to continue as his Today girl. There were good reasons to turn it down. For one thing, they were going back to doing the show live early in the morning. If I had learned anything from my bout of postpartum depression, it was not to willingly invite that kind of stress into my life. It was also time to get back to the theater.

A young woman named Barbara Walters ended up becoming the next Today Show girl. The rest is history.

CHAPTER 10Do Re Mi

It was a totally different experience the second time around with the birth of my son Joseph. The anxiety attacks and debilitating depression I had shortly after giving birth to Barbara thankfully did not recur. It certainly helped that he was a very easy baby, and that I was more confident and experienced as a mother. I was also excited and totally focused about returning to the theater to play the coveted role of Maria in the national tour of The Sound of Music. But the most crucial development of all was that I now had the support I needed thanks to the arrival on the scene of Emily Maude Dare, or “Nanny,” as we called her.

Nanny joined our household when Joseph was four months old and the tour was about to begin. She was from England, and I had found her through an employment agency in New York. When she first came to be interviewed, I asked her if she minded telling me how old she was. All I could gather from her appearance was that she was somewhere in amorphous middle age. In the early 1960s, age fifty had not yet become “the new thirty.” For whatever reason, people looked older and acted older in the mid-twentieth century than they did in early-twenty-first-century America. She said, “I really don’t have to tell you. I could tell you that I am as old as the teeth in my head, but that would be a lie.”

Real teeth or not, she was a wonderful woman and an incredible godsend. Going out on tour with a three-year-old daughter and a four-month-old son was a formidable task, but she took so much of the pressure off me as a working mother. Nanny was always kind and supportive, never complaining, and her patience and dedication to my family taught me a lot.

“Nanny, take the weekend off,” I told her once when we had been on the road for a while and had settled into a good routine.

“No,” she answered back, and the sharp clipped English accent meant that the matter was closed. “You don’t take a day off. Nor shall I.” When the show was in Chicago, she got up to attend to Joseph in the middle of the night and suffered a fall that hurt her back. Eventually, I insisted that she had to see a doctor. It turned out that she had fractured a vertebra. Talk about “the show must go on.” What a trouper.

One afternoon between matinee and evening performances, Nanny was making dinner, and I had invited a couple of the cast members to join us, actresses