Life Is Not a Stage by Florence Henderson (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

take a hard look and come to terms with why I had let my ego get the best of me in The Sound of Music, I embrace the challenge of understanding what could have caused it. I have also taken solace and gathered strength in times of personal struggle by taking to heart a very simple concept: It is easy to deal with the happy times. It’s the adversity that offers up the real test. Could my behavior on the tour have been more of a delayed-onset and milder form of postpartum depression? Were some more of those stored-up and unresolved emotions from childhood coming out of hiding? Certainly some of the same fears came up: commitment, responsibility, expectation, guilt, doubt, and so on.

Regardless of the causes and conditions, they all lead back to the core question: Why are we really here? The only answer that makes any sense for me is to strive to use the gift that has been given me in order to do something in some way to help others.

CHAPTER 11The Girl Who Came to Supper Loses Her Appetite

By this time, it may not come as any surprise that I landed a great part in a Broadway musical, and like clockwork promptly became pregnant. In the summer of 1963, I was cast in the lead as “the girl” in The Girl Who Came to Supper, music and lyrics by Noël Coward and directed and choreographed by Joe Layton. The musical was set in London in 1911 at the time of King George V’s coronation. It was based on a play by Terence Rattigan called The Sleeping Prince and was later made into a movie, The Prince and the Showgirl, starring Marilyn Monroe and Sir Laurence Olivier. My character was Mary, an American-born chorus girl who becomes involved with a Balkan prince played by the distinguished actor José Ferrer (who is best remembered for the title role in both film and play renditions of Cyrano de Bergerac).

The producers surprisingly agreed to hold the show for me until after the baby was born. That moment came just as I was on the set of the game show Password. The host, Allen Ludden, was a lovable man, but he was a nervous wreck when I started going into labor in the middle of taping his program. He probably wasn’t thinking about the publicity and the incredible ratings potential of an actual childbirth in the middle of “the Lightning Round.” However, it was my third pregnancy. As a seasoned veteran, I had my timing down. Only when the contractions moved down into the lower back was it time to get serious. I had such a ball doing game shows that no contraction was going to stop me. Back in the early 1960s, game shows were hugely popular, even in prime time. I loved the competition, having to think fast on my feet and use my imagination. Going to the hospital could wait.

Ten days or so after Robert entered the world, rehearsals for The Girl Who Came to Supper started in New York and continued for five weeks total. I felt great in the beginning, but not being with the baby began to wear. As it would be for most mothers, the feeling of separation from my newborn was not healthy. My “tough my way through it” mode kicked in as usual. With rehearsals completed, the show went out of town for tryouts in Boston, Toronto, and Philadelphia. The schedule during this tour was horrendous, rehearsing all day and then performing in the evening. Therefore, the decision was made that the baby and the children would be better off staying in New York under Nanny’s care.

Fatigue set in, and so did the loneliness and guilt because of the separation. During my longest absence, Robert had suddenly transformed from an infant to a chubby-cheeked little baby. Oh, how terrible I felt. On top of that, Barbara’s first communion was about to happen and missing that would be unforgivable. I rushed to get myself to New York in time for the ceremony and hurried back for the evening performance, producing the kind of stress that adds insult to injury.

Things started out well despite some clear problems with the show. The expectations had been sky-high. We were the second coming of My Fair Lady, said the rave reviews. Consequently, Herman Levin, the producer, was overconfident. The show was a smash in Boston but not as warmly received in Toronto. By the time we got to Philadelphia, it was hard to deny that things were not quite right despite the local critics’ approval. The problems with the show made me first feel very insecure, then snowballed downhill into outright fright. We got great reviews in Philadelphia again, but I felt intuitively that the show was not ready for New York. When everything is right, there is a pervasive quality of effortlessness. When they’re not, things feel forced and unnatural, and consequently miss the mark or wander off track. The audience can feel it too.

One major obstacle was that José Ferrer was definitely miscast in the role. He was a great Shakespearean actor and worthy of the highest respect, but it was clear that singing in a musical comedy was outside his comfort zone. Add two and two together, and it was perhaps no mystery why the audience had difficulty hearing his normally strong voice, which necessitated his use of a newfangled cordless body microphone. We had a good laugh when I asked him where he hid the device.

“It’s in my jockstrap,” he told me.

I leaned over in front of him and said, “Testing one, two, three.”

Walter Kerr, the powerful critic for the New York Herald Tribune, tried to put his finger on the problem with the show, writing, “What [Ferrer] can’t do is strike a spark between Miss Henderson and himself…and the lack is serious, behind all the gold braid.” Noël Coward admitted to me that he should have played the Prince