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

who played nuns in the show. The conversation got a little bit gossipy as the subject matter turned to a crew member who was having an affair with one of our fellow nuns. I was very fond of this man’s wife, and I was blunt in my opinion on the matter.

“I don’t know why he’s cheating with that girl. She’s not even that attractive, and his wife is so beautiful and sweet,” I said.

Nanny, who had sat quietly at the table with us the whole time, eating with her knife and fork in that precise European way and not saying a thing, decided to jump in. “Well, my husband always used to say, ‘When you’re poking in the fireplace, you don’t notice the mantelpiece.’” That was Nanny. And that was the end of that conversation.

Nanny was with our family for the important and formative time in most of my children’s lives, perhaps twelve years in all. She only took a break to go back to England to take care of a health problem. But as the years flew by, she eventually wanted to spend more time with her daughter and grandchildren. I realized afterwards and quickly by comparison what a gem she was. Nanny was truly a tough act to follow, as some of her successors would painfully demonstrate.

Despite the support from Nanny, things were not always smooth sailing on the road with The Sound of Music. To be blunt, it was the first (and hopefully the last) time when my ego got a little out of hand. It was a cumulative effect that mounted as the time I had been out on the road built up.

The show began in the fall of 1960 with a performance in New York on the set of the concurrent Broadway production at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre starring Mary Martin. Mary and her husband, Richard Halliday, came to watch. The set was identical to the one we would be using on the road, so it was a chance for everyone to get familiar with it. Then off we went for a year and a half, stopping in each city for usually no more than a week or two, with the exception of a several-month engagement in Chicago.

That time in Chicago, as I mentioned before, was eventful on several fronts. There was the food poisoning. There was the “fart in the whirlwind” visit from my mother. There was the visit from the real Maria von Trapp, sitting there right under my nose in the front row, dirndl-clad and all and very striking-looking. When I introduced her to the audience, she stood up and faced them, raising both arms to the heavens to receive their thunderous applause. The moment had the kind of intensity nothing short of the Bible. It was like we had just borne witness to Moses parting the Red Sea or Jesus walking on water. She was very warm and complimentary toward me when we met.

There was a lot of pressure carrying the show. We were always sold out, and with the exception of one week off, I didn’t miss a performance. I had the illusion that I had endless reserves and could just keep everything going indefinitely. Working hard all the time, I never learned how to regulate my physical limitations. Mix insomnia with the output of energy required for putting on a great show eight times a week month in and month out, and you have a foolproof recipe for total exhaustion. Despite Nanny’s extraordinary help, the demands and responsibilities I still put on myself as a mother and a wife drew from that same rapidly diminishing well.

Ira would fly out on weekends whenever he could, which was true many other times when I was out on the road. One of the weekends in Chicago, there was the worst blizzard in eighty-seven years, so I figured with good reason that he would be a no-show. It was my birthday, and the production threw a dinner party for me at an exclusive club on the top floor of a high-rise. I was in the middle of a conversation when a waiter dressed in a red jacket came over to ask what I wanted to drink. “I think I’ll have a little Dubonnet on the rocks.” A few moments later, I got my drink, but everyone was staring at me in the strangest way. I turned around. The waiter was Ira. He had found a way to make it in.

In addition to having a great sense of humor about our separations, Ira was very supportive because he knew how important my profession was to me. Of course, keeping myself very busy was my form of coping with all the emotional stuff still unresolved, a highly effective form of sublimation. But during the time in Chicago, some cracks in my usual easygoing and agreeable attitude were beginning to appear.

Under less arduous circumstances, I had always found a way to resolve any issues with cast or production before they became conflicts, but not now. For example, with all the children in the cast, I was very much hands-on, working with them to make sure they came off as naturally as possible. Sometimes one of the mothers would think that she was the director and tell her child to act in a certain way contrary to how they had been instructed. “You can’t do that. We’re all part of a family here,” I would have to tell both the child and the mother. It was not always pretty.

For reasons I cannot remember, I also had a little altercation with the Mother Superior. We had some fairly important and dramatic scenes together, like “My Favorite Things” and “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” Joe Layton, the show’s choreographer who had become a friend of mine, came out to take a look at the show and took me out to dinner in order to have a serious talk. He could see that I was wound up too tight. “You’ve got to back