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

about it in my mind at that time. Yes, I thought it was a good idea to do a show about a blended family. It really hadn’t been done before. The kids were adorable. Bob was great, and the fact that he and I were to be seen sleeping in the same bed together might finally break that antiquated taboo on network television. I felt I could bring something special to the character of Carol Brady given the fact that I was a mother of four in real life. Beyond that, I had absolutely no expectation or attachment to the outcome. I just viewed it as a job, and it was done.

Did I think the pilot would sell? I really wasn’t sure, and consequently I moved on to other projects, most notably the filming in Europe. To be totally honest, I promptly forgot about The Brady Bunch until I got the phone call several months later with the news that it was a go.

It may sound strange, but I really wasn’t so aware during the first years while I was doing The Brady Bunch that it was growing into anything that might be considered a cultural phenomenon. It is probably one of my major personality quirks that I get hyper-focused when I’m in the middle of a project, especially one as all-consuming as a weekly television series proved to be. It was quite easy to get cut off from the world in the whirlwind of doing a weekly series. We went to work in the dark. We went home in the dark. The long hours and demanding schedule, plus trying to be a real-life mother, afforded little luxury of time for any distractions. When I did have time off from filming, I was usually off doing club dates or musicals to maintain my musical chops.

My MO has always been to keep my attention on the current job to make it the best it can be. Dwelling on the past has never been a priority. It is the same reason why my scrapbooks remained virtually unopened, a whole cabinet full of videos were never watched, and audio recordings were never played. Part of it, I know, is avoidance, because I am my own harshest critic, echoing my mother’s judgmental ways. And luckily, I’ve kept busy throughout the years, so there is always a new project that demands my full attention. It’s also important to realize that once it’s done and in the can, you can’t change anything. Whether you had a great success or a flop, it is your past. You have to learn to acknowledge it, and love it, but move beyond it. In my later years, I am thankfully and usually even pleasantly surprised on the rare occasions when I do happen to see a tape of something from the past or find an episode of the Bradys while channel surfing. “Hmm, that wasn’t so bad.” The show makes me smile.

One of the big reasons I think the show has endured for so many decades is due to the fact that we really tried to make each episode seem real and believable to the viewer. There was a commitment to be truthful in the way we interacted and reacted to each other. Every word in the script had to pass that credibility test. I am sure the background laughter would have been coming from that place of truth if we had filmed before a live audience instead of using a laugh track.

I had done enough television by the time the series began that the learning curve about doing a sitcom progressed very swiftly. There were some adjustments I had to make in learning about the cameras and the lighting. Having cut my teeth in the days of live television, I was already accustomed to how everything moved at a fast clip. Scripts were constantly going through changes, and we all had to learn new lines every day, sometimes a lot.

Doing the show was not the cushier life of sitcom stars of later years where you did a table read with the cast on Tuesday, rehearsed and blocked the cameras on the set on Wednesday and Thursday, and then shot two shows in front of a live audience and four cameras on Friday. Ours was filmed in the traditional way, more like a movie. There were no days of rehearsal. We memorized the script the night before. Usually, there would be last-minute changes to our lines, and sometimes quite a few. We would rehearse before the camera, then go off to the side and talk it through while they arranged the lighting with the stand-ins on the set. This was helpful if someone didn’t have the scene down. We’d also try to come up with some added nuances to make it more special. Then we’d shoot the master shot (i.e., the broader view of everyone in the scene), most of the time in one take, sometimes two. If you asked for a retake because you felt something wasn’t right in your performance, they’d do it again. Then the scene would be repeated to get all the close-ups, which could take considerable time if all nine of us were featured in the shot.

We didn’t get coddled or babied. After John Rich left the show, we had another director named Oscar Rudolph, the father of filmmaker Alan Rudolph. He was a short, bald man, and his direction was always the same, which the kids loved parodying. “Okay, everybody, up, up, up, up!” It was an additional pressure that the child actors could only work so many hours by law. Often they’d run out of time, so Sherwood Schwartz would quickly write another scene for Carol and the housekeeper, played by Ann B. Davis, to fill in the gap. During part of one year, they tried to do two shows in one week. That was insanity. But in the end, I give great credit to the cast that the show has sustained. We