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

that frequently boiled over to challenge all our assumptions as a society and as individuals. In Florence Henderson–land, that was quite the understatement.

As this period began, I was the poster child for mid-twentieth-century, good old-fashioned American values, with the major exception that I had rebelled in marrying outside of my faith. I was Little Miss Perfect in my own mind and in the public’s perception. My handsome and utterly charming husband and I seemed the perfect couple, with perfect children. Much of this came from the motivation that I so desperately wanted a life with the harmony, stability, and affection that I didn’t have as a child. In fact, this mechanism to compensate for past deficits took on lots of curious forms. For example, I became utterly nonconfrontational when Ira and I got into any kind of disagreement (which was rare). The thought of raising my voice reawakened the trauma of hearing my parents yelling and fighting. So I put a cork in that anger, a quick fix that seeded trouble later down the line.

In the first part of the 1960s, my marriage was unshakable in my pride of righteousness. Constantly surrounded by colleagues who were not faithful to their spouses, I remember believing with all my heart that I would rather die than commit that kind of sin or divorce. My life was devoted to children, marriage, and career, in that order. The heavy load of responsibility and high expectations I set for myself as a working mother gave me the single-minded drive to keep bulldozing through all the rough spots.

My religious upbringing insured that I had plenty of fear and an endless supply of guilt in the offing to keep me in check in case major temptation came my way. That indoctrination began early. Imagine being six or seven years old, and a dour priest comes into the classroom. His lecture for the day is entitled “Introduction to Mortal Sin and Eternal Hell.” If you had taken a photograph of all of us at our little desks, I’m sure you’d see nothing but terrified faces, bulging eyes, and mouths wide open.

“When you go to hell, you’re in hell for all eternity,” he told us as we quaked in our little shoes. “It’s like the clock ticking—ever-never, ever-never, ever-never, ever-never.” He stretched out the vowel sounds torturously long to make the ticking sound that much more ominous. “That’s how long you’re in hell.” To this day, I don’t like to hear a clock ticking!

At home, my mother’s frequent use of “the devil is going to get you” kept the fear of that eternal punishment going. It took a long time to outgrow my conviction that it was only a matter of time before the devil was going to show up and snatch me. It had that kind of inevitability that leadfooted drivers face all the time. One of these days, you’re going to see those flashing blue-and-red lights in your rearview mirror.

Being Miss Perfect was not necessarily in the spirit of those times and came with a price. “Wholesomeness Is Bad—Singer Suffered from Good Image.” So read the headline from one newspaper article about me from 1967. I told the reporter how that image was not to Hollywood’s liking. One studio I met with wanted to change my name to Felicity Ford. “I said ‘no.’ They said, ‘How about Jill Jones?’ [I snapped back,] ‘What’s the matter with Florence Henderson?’ Do you know what they said? They said that Florence Henderson is too stolid. Too staid. And too long! So I told them that I’d rather be stolid than a flash in the pan. And that was that.”

The columnist Earl Wilson added to this chorus. “Florence perpetuates her image as a happy wife and mother of four in her new café act which she’s taking around the country after [her debut at the Waldorf].” When I opened for comedian Alan King at the Sands Hotel, he would call me his Catholic yenta. He’d get a good laugh from the audience with the line, “I came to Las Vegas to do some gambling and drinking, and they put me onstage with a Girl Scout den mother.”

The 1960s had other surprises in store, most notably in the aftermath of the birth of my fourth and last child, Elizabeth, who arrived blissfully and uneventfully on January 26, 1966. She was conceived during the time I was doing The King and I with Ricardo Montalban in Los Angeles, the first performance to open the city’s newly christened Music Center in the downtown area. It was a good time for me, and the production was a great success. Critic Cecil Smith of the Los Angeles Times had only one negative comment, that I was perhaps too young for the role. “But who can argue with youth and beauty on the stage?” he added.

I had the great delight to call him on it after I read it. “You should have done your homework. The actual Anna was exactly my age.” Older actresses had played this coveted role, beginning with Gertrude Lawrence, so that’s where he had no doubt gotten the idea. My being a younger Anna gave the romance with the King a little more sizzle. A big part of my joy of being in the play was that Ricardo was truly an unbelievable actor to play against (whistling problem aside). Up to that point in his career, he was often given short shrift because of his name and accent, reduced to Latin lover and ethnic types and always making lemonade out of lemon roles. When finally given other good roles like the King or as Khan in the Star Trek movie The Wrath of Khan, his remarkable talent really shone in its magnitude.

Despite the pregnancy, I got through the engagement without any unnecessary drama, with the exception of coming down with bronchial pneumonia. I didn’t miss a show, but after many a scene I had to rush offstage to cough. When the doctor prescribed