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

had to physically exit the theater onto the street and reenter through the stage door. In other words, going through a side door near the stage was forbidden.

Noël came into my dressing room after the show in quite a state of agitation.

“Quick, quick, quick, quick, hide me! I think she’s coming after me!”

“What are you talking about?” I shot back.

“Well, I came down the aisle and through this door to see you. This usherette said, ‘You can’t go there, you have to go outside and through the stage door.’”

“‘I beg your pardon,’” Noël said, reenacting the encounter. He drew himself up in an imposing posture (and he was already tall to begin with). “I told her, ‘Step aside, dear girl. The day that Noël Coward can’t go through any door in the theater, the theater is finished!’” With that he had barged through and came scurrying into my dressing room to find shelter like a puppy with its tail between its legs. Despite all of his accomplishments, he was in many ways a very modest man.

Given my emotional state when the play opened, I didn’t even read the reviews. Someone had told me that Walter Kerr wrote some nice things, but that was about all that I registered. An assistant collected a number of the newspaper clippings and pasted them in a scrapbook that was put away on a shelf. Strange as it may sound, it would be almost fifty years before I actually read these articles (in preparation for writing this book), and I was astonished at what I discovered. The reviews were shockingly perhaps the finest I had ever received over my entire career: “Totally captivating.” “A joy.” “A perfect sweetheart.” “A singing-dancing wonder of radiant charm in the title role.” “Miss Henderson strengthens her position as one of the loveliest, most spirited and musically gifted young women on the stage today.” “Not only a singer of unusual talent and intelligence but a first-rate actress and comedienne.” “Miss Henderson’s eager Cinderella embraces life with arms wide open.” “Miss Henderson has everything a musical comedy star needs—beauty, humor, an exceptionally good singing voice and a spring steel constitution.” So read the sepia-tinged fading newsprint in the scrapbook. It is impossible to say whether reading those reviews when they were first published would have eased the emotional burden I was carrying.

I recently got to see some additional graphic evidence of this huge gap between perceptions and appearances during that same time period. Someone sent me a video clip from a Garry Moore variety television show I did to promote the play. Looking at it objectively almost a half century later, none of the fear or deep depression seemed to come across on the screen.

The only possible explanation for my getting through both The Girl Who Came to Supper and this TV show had to be that same coping mechanism that insured my survival as a small child. There was a real stigma about depression back then—it was considered an inherent weakness and vulnerability to keep hidden. I just had to close my eyes and the audience would once again disappear. My mother’s instructions echoed: “Think nothing of it.” In that world, you dealt silently with whatever life threw at you or you got the dickens beat out of you. Depression and any kind of emotional turmoil were not for discussion when I was growing up, and that continued to be the norm through the 1950s and early 1960s.

Given this mentality and the fact that I was not able to dig myself out of this funk, there was little other choice than to just shut down and seal myself off from the world. What made this bout of depression especially sinister was how it threatened my faith. I prayed a lot, but seemingly missing in action was that being who was supposed to be protecting me. The only saving grace was that I was able to hold myself together just enough to keep working. That special energy field of love I experienced being on the stage helped out immensely. In contrast to the bout after Barbara’s birth, I was also much more serious about finding out the answers to this dilemma for myself and consumed as many books as I could find on the subject.

Ira and Nanny tried very hard to help, but with little effect. As tears rolled down my cheeks, they took turns trying to comfort me.

“Buck up,” Nanny said with that stiff-upper-lip attitude.

Ira tried his best too. “You have everything. You’ve got three beautiful children. You have nothing to feel bad about.” Neither had walked in my shoes with any firsthand experience of what I was going through. Well-meaning and compassionate as they may have intended to be, they only made me feel worse. Just like before, more guilt was piled on for not being happy or feeling the gratitude. It was like adding gasoline to my already blazing inferno.

Slowly but surely, this nightmare of a depression also lifted some months later after the show closed, and I began to feel in balance again. Still in “tough it out” mode, it was a chipping-away process of learning more about what you are feeling and experiencing. You try to keep coping with things, and eventually the coping gets easier, I found. Even if the show had been a hit, I think I still would have found a way out of the postpartum depression. In contrast with the first bout, I was reading a number of self-help books to try to understand the situation better. Also, it helped that close friends like Frank and Jane Egan knew what was going on, and I could talk to them about it. They could make me laugh.

CHAPTER 12The Pill

The spirit of rebellion, upheaval, and liberation was in full flower in the mid- to late 1960s. With the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement stirring the pot, the middle part of the decade was a molten-hot cauldron