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

since the new agency almost always cleans house. If it really works, the brand will look for other ways to support you—Wesson sponsored the Country Kitchen show I did on the Nashville Network for nine years.

On the other hand, I felt it was important that you had to be honest about what you did. A few years back, the Wall Street Journal published some public opinion research that showed that Bill Cosby and I were ranked the two most believable commercial spokespersons. If you don’t believe in what you’re saying, don’t do it. I imagined one of my sisters in the Midwest. Would she want to buy this product? I also had to use it, which proved to be a problem some years later when I had an offer to do Polident.

“I can’t do this—I don’t have false teeth,” I told them.

“We don’t care,” they countered.

“I can never say that I use it,” I warned them.

“That’s okay.” We ended up having some fun with those commercials. We did one when I was in the shower. Another was a song-and-dance number on the moon. People seemed to like them, and the spots ran for about ten years.

When I first started doing commercials for Wesson Oil and Tang in the mid-1970s, it was quite different than doing the Oldsmobile spots in the 1950s. Commercials are not easy. First of all, I wasn’t used to all these corporate executives and advertising agency people flying in and hovering in the studio, watching the monitor and dissecting every word. Huge money was involved in these campaigns, and the agencies spent lavishly on the smallest details. To do it well, it’s more than just delivering your lines. You have to do all the other things they want, and precisely. Hold the label just right. Don’t tilt it so the light reflects poorly. It’s not easy to be that precise, but luckily I was good at it.

One particular ad lady was not pleased with my performance during a shoot.

“What is it that you want?” I asked her politely. She tried to explain it to me, but no luck. We did about forty takes (good enough that they printed them all), and it was still not to her satisfaction. The crew was starting to get antsy.

“I want so much to give you what you want, but can you demonstrate it for me?” I asked her, trying to find a constructive solution. She got up and did her version. Both she and everyone else in the studio understood instantaneously that she should keep her day job.

“You know what, I think we have a lot of good takes,” she retorted, brushed off her performance like it never had happened, and moved on.

Once I did a demonstration on the Mike Douglas talk show to show how complicated shooting a commercial can be. I gave Mike a plate of fried chicken and showed him exactly what he had to do: carry the plate of chicken, walk and talk and take a bite out of it in a highly choreographed way and timed at not an eyelash under or over sixty seconds. He didn’t get too far. He fumbled the plate, and the chicken went flying.

Every detail was sweated and every nuance was gone over with a fine-toothed comb. Ad-lib an “um” or an “oh” and you’d hear “cut” because you just put the whole spot a half second over. One spot for Wesson required that I would sing, take a bite out of the chicken so it would audibly crunch, then finish singing the lyric. This chicken’s got a certain…CRUNCH…Wesson-ality. BING! After the shoot, the great legal minds reviewed the footage and thought the crunch sounded bogus. They were nervous. “We don’t want the Federal Trade Commission coming down on us.” So I had to go into a recording booth with a bucket of chicken. Take after take, they would play the song and I took my bite on cue. I don’t know how many chicken legs I dented that night, but it got to the point where Kayla, Bill Sammeth (who worked with Sandy Gallin), and I got tears we were laughing so hard. The lawyers in the room were not amused. I had to sign an affidavit stating something like, “I, Florence Henderson, do hereby attest that the sound heard is actually yours truly biting with own and intact natural incisors into the said poultry leg.” See. Not easy!

Trying to balance the work with family, I took every opportunity to include my kids in commercials just as I did with the shows, which they loved to no end. Lizzie and Robert were in one of the spots I did for Tang. In it, I make the case to a neighbor that one glass of the orange-flavored instant breakfast drink gives children their daily dose of vitamin C.

“You really do drink Tang,” the neighbor (ironically holding a basket of vitamin-C-rich tomatoes fresh from her garden to share) is both surprised and happy to see. The pigtailed Lizzie takes a gulp and says convincingly, “It tastes good,” smiling at me and then at the neighbor. I poke the tip of Lizzie’s nose approvingly with my finger. I remember it like it was yesterday, although YouTube refreshes.

What probably gets more hits on YouTube than the old commercials are some of the selections from The Brady Bunch Variety Hour. On the merit of all of the colorful costumes and lavish production numbers, the show has a bit of a cult following. I had mentioned earlier that the cancellation of the original series was hardly the finale for the Bradys. Within about eighteen months of doing that last episode, we were all back together again—well, almost all of us. (Eve Plumb was the lone cast member to opt out, resulting in the “Fake Jan” phenomenon.) Talk about going from the penthouse to the basement—from one of the most beloved television series of all time to what some TV historians regard as one of the all-time