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

of gambling, many an entertainer was as big a player as the people they entertained. In this regard, Alan King was no slouch. One night, he went out and dropped $100,000 at the tables. The management wanted to hold him to it. “Hey, I have a bad elbow,” he said. “I’m on cortisone and it made me crazy.” They relented and let him off the hook. He was a real character. When I first started working with him at the Sands (when he called me his “Catholic yenta and Girl Scout mother”), he took me aside and told me that he was a little uncomfortable and embarrassed having to bring this up, but…The issue was the marquee outside the hotel. We had equal billing, and our names were required by the contract to be the same font size. The only problem was that his name had eight letters and mine had seventeen.

“I feel so bad to ask you this, but would you mind having a smaller name?” he asked me.

“Nobody sees my name,” I told him. “You can make it any size you want—I don’t care.”

We became great friends despite my continual rejection of his sexual advances. I used to say, “Oh, Alan, give me a break!”

One of the other unpleasant aspects of club life that performers had to deal with back then was that everybody smoked in the clubs. There were no laws against it or even a designated section set aside. The term “secondhand smoke” did not yet exist in the dictionary. Your hair reeked, along with your gowns that cost a fortune, not to mention what it was probably doing to your insides, especially the toll on a singer’s throat. It could get nasty. Lainie Kazan had been performing at the Plaza Hotel in New York City a week before I was to open. A man sitting right in front by the stage was smoking a big cigar. Lainie asked him very politely to put it out since the smoke was bothering her. He refused. So she went over to him, took the cigar, and put it in a glass of water. It must have been a very good cigar, because the man got up and hit her in the chest. It was a good-sized target, because Lainie was back then and still is quite zaftig. The incident made the newspapers.

Cut to a week later. I was standing there on the same stage and, lo and behold, there was a different man with a big cigar blowing smoke at me. I reminded the audience that just a week before Lainie Kazan had asked a gentleman to put out his cigar and had her ample cleavage accosted. In a premeditated gesture for comic effect, I looked down at my own much lesser-endowed bust and said, “I guess I don’t have to worry.” A big laugh followed. And the man put out his cigar.

Regardless of drunks or smokers or Alan King trying to hit on me, I wouldn’t have traded those times for anything. The same time as I was out there having a blast singing for my supper, there was a bigger story happening inside that was both exhilarating and petrifying. The club scene truly hastened the inevitable. Telling me back then to “be careful what you wish for” would not have stopped caution from blowing away in the wind.

CHAPTER 14Detours and Other Digressions

No one ever promised that the path was going to be straight and narrow. Sharp curves, detours, and U-turns made things quite adventuresome out on the road during this time of self-awakening. Call it a case of arrested development, immaturity, or a delayed onslaught of teenage rebellion, because in many ways that isn’t a stretch.

Deferred for all those years were all the things that young people normally should be experiencing as a rite of passage upon leaving the nest. Branching out and trying different things…Going to college…Having a relationship or two that didn’t work out…Experimenting…With the exception of studying that single year at the American Academy, I had leapfrogged headlong from adolescence to adulthood.

As described, there was one side of me that was having the time of my life doing the nightclub tour. But the other side was engrossed in dealing with a real Pandora’s box. I was trying to solve all of the things that were going on inside of me that were suddenly freed from the repressed depths. There wasn’t the luxury of cherry-picking the issue of the week to focus on. Everything seemed to come up at once, demanding urgent attention like a chorus of crying babies.

There was no depression to smother these feelings as in the past, and the devil and all his threats could go bother someone else for all I cared. Instead, when matters got too intense during this period, I called on that old family friend, alcohol, to help quiet things down. After all, that was how I was raised. If you had trouble, how did you cope? Open the bottle. I can’t say that I was happy about my consumption, and Ira was none too thrilled about it either. Thank God that particular crutch to help keep me on the horse was cast aside.

The liquor flowed freely, and often in the culture of the nightclub circuit was the steadfast companion of many a performer. It wasn’t a good thing for any of them either, with one possible exception—George Burns. Based on the results, those untold thousands of cocktails and fine cigars probably did a lot more good than harm if you live for a century and have a brilliant career in the process. For years, George had a set routine that the first thing waiting for him when he got off the stage was a double gin martini, one of at least four he imbibed each day. I’m sure it also put him in a good mood. Over the years, whenever I appeared with him on TV or onstage, he never failed to be