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

Good reviews aside, things not privy to public view went from bad to worse in Philadelphia. With still so much work left to get the show ready for Broadway, director Joe Layton came down with acute hepatitis. Then came the news that sent me over the edge, spiraling into the worst depression of my life.

I was on an elevator in the hotel when some guy got on and started talking. “It’s just awful that he’s been shot.”

“Who’s been shot?” I asked.

“The president.”

“Oh my God, you must be kidding.” A few seconds later, when we got downstairs to the lobby, we heard that John F. Kennedy had died.

I started to panic. The first thought out of my head was, “I have to go to church.” I walked down the street to the nearest one. Others had the same idea, and people were pouring in. I just sat there in prayer.

Herman Levin made us go forward with the show that night because the house was sold out. It was gut-wrenching to perform, especially acute in one scene where my character has a little too much to drink and starts reciting the Bill of Rights. One consolation was that the opening number was cut. “Long Live the King (If He Can)” was just about as inappropriate a message for the moment as you could get. Mercifully, sanity prevailed, and the show was canceled over the next few nights. Everybody was numbed. For once, and rightfully so, the show did not have to go on.

During the immediate aftermath, I refused to watch the nonstop television coverage or read anything about it in the newspapers. Instead, I wrote a long letter to Jacqueline Kennedy, an acquaintance through an exercise class we took together. My son Joseph and her John-John also were in a class together. She was always so nice. When we met, we were both pregnant, she with Patrick, the baby she lost, and I with Robert. My child lived and hers didn’t. So with this horrible, violent tragedy, I took it personally. All that promise that the Kennedys symbolized was wiped out so quickly. It was as if I had lost my brothers all over again.

For the first time in my life, I was terrified that I couldn’t remember my lines, exasperated by the fact that the production was constantly doing rewrites and changing things. During the out-of-town weeks, I felt guilty being away from the baby. I wasn’t sleeping well or eating well. I didn’t have anybody with me. Ira stuck with his work in New York. It felt at times like I was in free fall without a parachute. When I really hit bottom, I probably had a nervous breakdown.

When the show was about to open on Broadway, postpartum depression came back with a vengeance. Here I was, doing this role that was so demanding, and failure was not an option. Forget about going on sick leave to give myself time to get over it. There were none of the modern and sophisticated antidepressants available (or if there were any, I didn’t know about them), no magic little pill to bring you out of it real fast or, more accurately, at minimum put a temporary Band-Aid on it. Like before, I never told anybody how sick I was, although it had to be noticeable how the weight was dropping from my already slender frame.

Fear carried me through. Commitment, responsibility, and fulfilling expectations put me into some supernatural state of overdrive. It must have been the Holy Spirit working through me. Even though I felt awful, I guess taking pride in what I was doing overrode the fact that I was so utterly terrified.

The Girl Who Came to Supper was something that could have been great, but it missed, lasting only 112 performances. After the opening performance on December 8, 1963, the whole audience, or so it seemed, came backstage and up the flight of stairs to our dressing rooms to congratulate us. I didn’t feel deserving that all these people would come to see me and tell me how wonderful I was. Some remarked after shaking my hand how cold I was to the touch. “Yes, I didn’t feel all that great tonight,” I told them. I took a pass on the usual post-premiere festivities.

To show you how strange our attitudes and perceptions can be, I carried inside of me for decades the thought that the show’s short run may have been my fault. The audiences began to dwindle as the weeks went by, so the last curtain came as no surprise. It was easy for my mind to take on that blame because I had felt so awful. There were many times when I was onstage when I thought I was going to completely lose it, forget my lines, and go completely berserk. Somehow or another and miraculously, I did not make any horrible blunders.

Noël Coward sensed what was going on and was wonderful to me. On opening night, he gave me a beautiful amethyst pin that looked like a medal pinned to a ribbon. The note read, “You’re first class.” With his ever-present cigarette in hand, he was compassionate, understanding, and very aware. And privately, he displayed his wisdom, laced sometimes with a wickedly delightful sense of humor.

We sat together on the plane ride from Toronto to Philadelphia. Only weeks earlier there had been a very serious fire in his apartment, and quite obviously, he had not died. I asked him, “Were you afraid? Afraid of dying?”

Knowing my downcast state, he chirped back, “Oh, no, no, no! I have so many friends waiting for me over there!” He began rattling off the names of all the great people he knew who had passed that he looked forward to seeing again, such as Vivien Leigh and Gertrude Lawrence.

A few years later, Noël came to see me in South Pacific at Lincoln Center. If you wanted to go backstage after the show, there was a strict rule that you