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

creative in designing how to keep the crossfire of cameras hidden from the viewers at home.

The Dean Martin Show was a popular viewing destination on Thursday nights at 10 p.m. Kate Smith, Lena Horne, and I were three of Dean’s favorites, so we were frequently on the show in the mid- to late 1960s. He was one of the sweetest and kindest persons you could have wished for, and I was thrilled to be part of his enterprise. He was very smart and knew what was funny. He also had a great voice.

Many comedic entertainers of that era adopted a signature character, and Dean’s was a debonair, tuxedo-clad drunk with a cigarette in one hand and faux scotch (apple juice) in the other. With a twinkle in his eye, he enjoyed pushing the boundaries of sexual innuendo right up to the censors’ limit. The audiences loved it when he frequently lost it laughing in the middle of a sketch. He loved working with people who could be spontaneous and comfortable venturing off script with him.

One day when I was taping Dean’s show, Kate Smith called me into her dressing room. She was a major star on radio in the 1940s and in early television, and her iconic version of “God Bless America” took a then obscure song and transformed it into the unofficial national anthem. Yet a generation or so later, ask most young adults who Kate Smith is, and all you’ll probably get is a blank stare. (I haven’t had that issue myself yet because of a certain television series in perpetual reruns.) She was known almost as much for her beautiful voice as her wide girth, which also made her the sad object of a lot of fat jokes. She made no apologies about her size and it was as much her trademark as Dean’s cigarette and drink glass. In her autobiography, she wrote, “I’m big, and I sing, and boy, when I sing, I sing all over!”

In Kate’s dressing room that day, she said proudly, “Take a look at my dress,” and handed her lavish beaded gown to me. I almost fell over—it was so heavy I could hardly hold it or myself up. Telling Dean something like that was like handing a lamb chop to a wolf.

He said to me, “Did you read the label in that dress?”

I said, “No, what did it say?”

“Everlast,” he replied (referring to the brand of shorts and equipment popularized by professional boxers). But he didn’t stop there. “Have you ever noticed that Kate ain’t got no cleavage?”

“No, Dean, I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yeah, she’s only got one, and it’s the biggggest one!” This was, of course, off camera, but no less terrible and funny all the same. But in many ways Kate set herself up for a lot of it with her divalike ego—and I don’t think she minded being the butt of such jokes or had at least gotten used to them decades before.

For a beginner, I was given a generous fifteen-minute performance spot my first time on the show. Among the songs was a ballad, “Hi-Lili Hi-Lo,” and for it the stage was decorated with chandeliers. Those details did not escape Kate, and I soon learned that she was oversized not only with her dresses but her persona too. She called the show’s director/producer Greg Garrison aside. She had given him his break some years before on her afternoon television program, The Kate Smith Show. So Greg was very partial to her.

“Greg, how long have you known Florence Henderson?” she asked him.

“I just met her on the show,” he replied.

“Then how come she has all those chandeliers in that number?”

Some years after Kate and I first met on the show, we happened to cross paths at the Philadelphia airport in a VIP waiting room, both having done concerts in the area. She was extra famous in that area because the local NHL hockey team, the Flyers, had a superstition about playing her recording of “God Bless America” before every home game (the team later erected a statue of her outside the arena). In the waiting room, Kate threw down her newspaper and said, “Have you read my reviews?”

“No, Kate, I haven’t. I haven’t seen a paper.”

She said, “Here, read these. They speak it.” That was Kate. Talk about confidence! During the summer of 1966, I officially became the stuff of trivia questions as the first woman to guest host The Tonight Show, subbing for Johnny Carson for a whole week. (I would later go on to do it several more times.) They made a pretty big deal about it at the time. The experience interviewing people on The Today Show way back when helped out. By hosting talk shows, I learned to never ask a question that could be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” You have to instead prompt the guest to elicit a story. And once you ask the question, shut up and listen. Really listen. The other cardinal rule is to “know your material.” It wasn’t enough for me to read off the blue index card that the writers would prepare. I did my own reading and research on the people I was interviewing. Lastly, you also have to be a bit of a ringmaster to keep the conversation from veering off track away from key points. The same skill is helpful if you’re a guest and the interviewer doesn’t want to talk about the book I’m there to promote but goes off on some tangent about The Brady Bunch.

When it came to monologues and other parts of the show, it certainly didn’t hurt that Johnny had also assembled a great team of writers. It was so easy and comfortable to slip into such a well-oiled machine. On one of the programs that week, I opened the show singing a long medley a cappella accompanied by four male singers for ten minutes instead of the traditional monologue. Risky? Perhaps. There was a musicians’ strike