Here’s What Happened to Florence Henderson Before, During and After Starring in ‘The Brady Bunch’

She was born Florence Agnes Henderson on Valentine’s Day 1934 in Dale, Indiana, the youngest of 10 children. Her father, Joseph Henderson, was a tobacco sharecropper while her mother, Elizabeth, was a homemaker. Lloyd J. Schwartz, whose father Sherwood created both Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, notes, “Her father was 61 when she was born. I met all of her relatives and they were nothing like Florence. Florence had left that kind of community and moved to New York and became a very sophisticated kind of person. Well, they were not sophisticated. I don’t want to be disparaging in terms of hick kind of people, but that’s what they were and it was fascinating. So she pulled herself up by her bootstraps and became who she became.”

Adds Kimberly Potts, author of The Way We All Became The Brady Bunch, “Her mother taught her to sing at age two. So the first part of her multi-talented entertainment career was singing and obviously it continued to be a big part of her career. The family didn’t have a lot of money with 10 kids, but a family friend sponsored her to go to New York shortly after high school. There she enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. It wasn’t long before she became a part of the touring cast of Oklahoma!.”

“She auditioned for Richard Rodgers for that tour,” points out Lloyd, “and when she got the part, she went to the school and said, ‘I’m supposed to be in school here, but I’ve been offered this part in Oklahoma!.’ And the teacher said, ‘Get the hell out of school and go take that. That’s why you’re here anyway.’ That was what launched that part of her career.”

Oklahoma!, which she toured in 1952, led to her first appearance on Broadway in that year’s production of Wish You Were Here. In 1953 she was in The Great Waltz, followed a year later (and until 1956) by the lead role in Fanny. In 1954, she made her TV debut in General Foods 25^th Anniversary: A Salute to Rodgers and Hammerstein. She made appearances on the anthology series The United States Steel Hour in 1957 and 1958 and in that same year starred as Meg March in a musical version of Little Women. Success led to success.

“Florence Henderson was the right person who came along at the right time,” suggests Geoffrey Mark. “She hit show business at a time when Broadway was still looking for the next Mary Martin and Broadway was still producing musicals in the classic genre. Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter and Irving Berlin were still writing musicals. And there was Florence, pretty but not beautiful, which is important because it allowed her to not be a threatening soprano. The word soprano is important, because historically there really had not been very many really good sopranos who could also play comedy and act. Broadway has a history of beautiful voices, but the combination of sincere pretty looks and the ability to play comedy and play pathos is very rare. And it was just what Broadway was looking for right at the time when Florence began to run into the people who helped her to get to where she was going. Had she hit the scene 10 years later, she probably wouldn’t have broken through. So timing is always what it’s about.”

“So she was able to parlay Broadway into television work very soon after becoming a name on Broadway,” he adds. “You found Florence doing variety show guest appearances and prestigious television specials. Back then they were called spectaculars and they garnered enormous ratings in the 1950s and, 1960s.”

States Kimberly, “One really important thing is that she guest-hosted The Tonight Show. She was the first woman to do so.”

Author Ed Robertson, host of the TV Confidential podcast, points out, “She’s an embodiment of that era — the first 10 or 20 years of television — where being on television was considered both good for your career and bad for your career. There was that split where, if you want to be a ‘serious’ actor, you didn’t do television or you only used television as a launching pad to movies. Ernest Borgnine was probably the first person to change that perception, because even though he had won the Oscar for Marty, he starred in McHale’s Navy. He ‘stepped down’ to do television, because he knew that he would reach more people every week and it worked out well for him.

“With regards to Florence Henderson,” he adds, “she did all the variety shows throughout the sixties while she was performing on Broadway. Being on television made her a name, because she reached a lot more people than she may have within the confines of Broadway. Now that’s an example of the benefits of a performer being on network television during that era. The flip side of that is 10 years later she does The Brady Bunch  and it killed her career in the sense that no one saw her as anything other than Carol Brady.”

She also became known as a “Today Girl” on NBC’s The Today Show from 1959 to 1960. “It was a very limited version of what Katie Couric did,” Florence explained. “You did interviews, but you weren’t quite the equal of Dave Garroway, but you were very visible. In my case, I also sang on the show and I think a fact that’s probably not very well known was that during the time I did it, it was the only time in its history to my knowledge that the show was taped the evening before. No one ever talked about it or tried to hide it, it just wasn’t discussed. Then the news would be inserted into it. But I think by that time Dave Garroway had done the show so long and was so sleep-deprived, that he wanted to have another kind of life. It was great for me, because having started out in theater and performed in so many nightclubs, morning is difficult. So this worked out.”

Elaborates Geoffrey, “She was one of several Today Girls that did not find success on The Today Show, because all its male hosts were very protective of their place on that show. All of the females, until Barbara Walters came along, didn’t fare well. That they were called the Today ‘Girl,’ is a good indication of what was wrong.”

“Florence and the others did the weather and the fluffier kind of stories,” offers Kimberly. “Nothing with substance.”

“They were treated like secretaries, like feather-brained pretty faces that brought nothing to the table except feminine allure,” Geoffrey details. “So Florence was not the only one who did this, there were several of them, but none of them succeeded because they weren’t given the chance to actually shine or report on anything meaningful or have equal time on camera. But they kept trying it with one pretty girl after another. And all the people who were on the Today show as Today Girls, went on to do much better things elsewhere. It was good for Florence, because it made her much more comfortable in front of the camera and the ability to be glib, look into a camera and say something without freezing. And it brought Florence Henderson to the public as opposed to a part she was playing or a song she was singing. It gave her a chance to sell herself, so to that extent, it was good for her career. Most people don’t understand that it is not easy to sit ina television studio and be yourself — even if it’s scripted. There’s no audience to talk to. You’re talking to that camera. You’re talking to millions of unseen people and she knew how to do that. That helped her a lot with what came afterwards.”

What came shortly thereafter was The Sound of Music. Said Florence, “It started on Broadway with Mary Martin in the lead role, and while that was going on, I was approached by Rodgers and Hammerstein to do the national touring company simultaneously. Myself and two small children trooped around the country for about 15 months. I have to say, though, that Mary Martin was my Broadway idol. One of the first things I ever saw was Peter Pan with Mary Martin, and when she flew through the window and made her entrance with this incredible voice, and totally filled the theater with her presence, I fell madly in love with her and just remain in love with her.”

Opines Geoffrey, “Mary Martin could not have been a better mentor for her and they were also close friends. Having known them both, I would say she learned an awful lot from Mary: ‘Be sweet, be pleasant, but don’t take any crap from anybody. Have a man in your life, whether he’s a husband or a manager or an agent, do the distasteful work on your behalf, but make sure that it gets done. Always do your best. Always rehearse hard, always work hard and don’t let them take any pictures from below.’ Mary was a stickler for that. Mary would do a a photo session, publicizing something, and there’d be half a dozen photographers, and she’d say, ‘Gentlemen, no nostril shots. If you do, I’ll sue, and you know I will.’ But she’d say it so charmingly that she’d get the point across without being a bitch. And that’s what Florence would do. She would get her point across without being caustic.

“If you talk with Mary, you talk with Florence, total confidence in what they were doing,” he adds. “A desire to always do better and better work, to take their talent to the next level and to be creatively fulfilled. I think they both have those things in common. I think if there’s one person in show business you can liken Florence to, it’s Mary.”

And one person her performance in The Sound of Music definitely made an impression on was Lloyd Schwartz. “I was a kid,” he says, “and she was in her 20’s. It was at the Philharmonic Auditorium in Los Angeles, and the set people brought her out on a hill. I remembering being disappointed that I could see the black wire that brought the hill out, which ruined my belief in the ‘magic,’ but I was just crazy about her as a musical comedy person.”

As the 1960s played out, Florence frequently appeared on the TV game show Password between 1962 and 1967, and in 1965 co-starred with Ricardo Montalban in a version of The King and I, which enjoyed a West Coast tour. “Ricardo Montalban was the king,” Florence explained, “and we opened the Los Angeles Music Center, which was quite a prestigious event to be a part of. I think I was 26 years old. I did a lot of research on Anna and found out that she was actually my age, so that gave me a lot of confidence. I loved it.”

Through everything, Florence was also raising a family with husband Ira Bernstein. Says Kimberly, “They had four kids and she was happy to have the chance to do all of those different things that she did. And if something new popped up that she wanted to do, she wasn’t committed to any one thing that would limit her. She could be home with her family — they were originally based in New York — and when the kids had an event hat she wanted to be at, she could. So she was very happy with not only the way her career was going, but the lifestyle as well.”

Geoffrey emphasizes, “That she was able to become so successful long before The Brady Bunch is a testament to her talent, her driving ambition and the fact that she was a very nice lady. With every celebrity, you can find a detractor. There’s always someone who resents someone for something. But Florence was a pro with a no-nonsense, ‘let’s get to work, I’m enjoying what I’m doing, why aren’t you’ kind of attitude. That bodes well for someone, especially on Broadway when one is doing eight shows a week, week after week. If one is unpleasant to work with, one doesn’t get a lot of work.

“By the 1960s,” he continues, “she was seen on television on a regular basis, was playing Las Vegas and the Catskills and Miami and the major nightclubs around the country, and all of this happened before Sherwood Schwartz clicked the first letter of his typewriter to write The Brady Bunch.”

According to Erika Woehlk, author of Bradypedia: The Complete Reference Guide to Television’s The Brady Bunch, at one point Florence had actually expressed interest in a TV series. “After being on The Today Show,” she points out, “Florence wanted to segue to being an actress on scripted shows. She said in 1967, ‘I would like to persuade Hollywood that a woman who has proven she can sing, can also be a pretty good actress. I wonder what I have to do to get a chance.’ As we know, Florence’s chance came soon thereafter with The Brady Bunch.”

Points out Kimberly, “She actually had no interest in The Brady Bunch at first, partly because she enjoyed having freedom in her career and partially because her marriage was not on solid ground at that point. She was very leery of taking on a TV show that would require so much time, but her manager really begged her to just go talk to Sherwood Schwartz and the ABC executives. The way her manager pled with her to go meet with them, it made her think that there might be something to it.”

There were, she says, an interesting experience along the way. “They asked her when she went that day to Paramount, to do a scene for them,” Kimberly says. “She agreed and they sent her off to a makeup trailer to get ready. She happened to go into a trailer that William Shatner [from Star Trek, which was in production at the time] was in and he was not happy to have this person he didn’t know walk into the makeup trailer. He was kind of unfriendly to her, but she was undeterred by that. She got ready, did the scene and they pretty quickly decided to hire her.”

“Florence decided, even though it meant kind of uprooting her family and her whole life from New York to Hollywood, it could be a big thing for her career,” she details. “TV was obviously a very different thing, bringing you into people’s homes every week, which could open up even more opportunities as an actress. I don’t think she ever regretted it, because it certainly did ensure that she was going to work for the rest of her life.”

When the pilot for The Brady Bunch was being put together, Lloyd was in college and did not get to see Florence’s screen test, though he did watch Robert Reed’s. “When they started the show itself,” he explains, “that’s when I started working on the show. And she did not do the first six episodes because she was filming Song of Norway. The first thing we did was catch her up in all her scenes from those first six episodes. My impression watching her work was that she just tapped into her motherly attitude when dealing with the kids, but I always felt she was a much better actress than that. I had to talk to each of the directors to say, ‘Don’t let her get away with just doing it easy.’  Because it was just so easy for her, but there was more to tap there and I really liked when she went to those places.”

“I remember there was an episode where they played their grandparents,” he offers, “and then the two grandparents kind of got together and I remember Florence just approached that like it was going to be easy. And Robert, who was a studied actor, came out with this mid European accent. He walked out like this old man and the whole crew treated him like an old man and they would sit them down carefully. For the first scene, I remember Florence was just going to do this kind of easy thing, but then she saw what Robert was doing and I saw the light go off in her eyes and she said, ‘Oh no, no, wait a minute.’ And it became a competition — it became obvious.”

Muses Kimberly Potts, “I think for everyone involved, even Robert Reed despite being part of a show that he hated, the fact is that they really did become a family, because they spent so much time together on the set. Her real life kids spent a lot of time with the kids in the cast; the cast would come over to her house for pool parties with her kids. So she very much found a way to integrate the show into her life off camera and I think she did enjoy it.”

If Florence came away with any negative memories regarding The Brady Bunch, it was mostly the constant complaints from Robert Reed about the scripts and the nature of the show, and his genuine dislike for producers Sherwood and Lloyd Schwartz. “Our relationship with Florence was very good,” Lloyd explains. “Which was interesting, because our relationship with Robert Reed was not always good. One time she came to dad and me and said, ‘He is saying the worst things about you guys,’ and it was difficult for her, because she liked us a lot. And we loved her. It was difficult for her to have to act with somebody who had those kinds of opinions. And my dad was very smart and understood the hard time she was having and told her, ‘Just agree with him.’ She got it, but didn’t like it.”

He continues, “When they weren’t doing the show, or any of the follow-ups, Florence and Robert didn’t communicate at all, because he was a very odd kind of fellow. Everybody always thinks Florence and Bob were close, close friends, because they were very good together on the show. I don’t know that they had any kind of a relationship except that in Bob’s kind of odd view of life, she was in some way his wife and the kids were somehow his kids.”

As noted earlier, The Brady Bunch ended its run in 1974 and has been a part of popular culture ever since. “The entire cast dealt with the fact that The Brady Bunch became so pervasive in their lives to the point of suffocating their careers,” says Kimberly. “But Florence managed to embrace that sort of … I don’t want to say typecasting, but being recognized as Carol Brady as opposed to having the freedom to move from project to project without that sort of hindrance.”

Suggests Geoffrey, “She took her talent and her prettiness and her intellect, because she was a smart lady, and really conquered every area of show business there was at the time she broke through. And then The Brady Bunch happened to her. It changed for the better and for the worse her career arc. It turned her from being a celebrity and a star into an iconic household name. Probably superstar status. But it forever identified her as one character and made casting her in other things to use her comedy and acting ability difficult. The Brady name raised her salary at nightclubs, but it kind of squashed her ability to do anything else. She was a bigger draw in nightclubs, but I’m talking about Broadway or films or dramatic television or another sitcom. It made it hard for her, like it makes it hard for lots of people who have been involved in a very large show, especially a sitcom, where they’re identified with one character. Even the great Lucille Ball found herself typecast after the success of I Love Lucy.”

“As she herself said,” points out Kimberly, “without the show Entertainment Weekly wouldn’t have later named her one of the Top 100 Icons of Entertainment. And she very smartly embraced it. We all remember her from those Wesson Oil commercials — she was the spokesperson from, I think, ’74 to ’96. So a couple of solid decades. She was a Polident spokesperson, she hosted cooking shows, she was a frequent guest star on game shows and made a lot of sitcom appearances: 30 Rock, King of Queens, Ellen. She was in a Weird Al Yankovic video for ‘Amish Paradise’ and they became really good friends on that.  She was a Dancing with the Stars contestant. There’s a series of beloved Judy Blume children’s books, Fudge, they turned into a short- lived series for a couple of seasons on ABC in the mid-90’s. She played the grandmother and Eve Plumb played Fudge’s mom. So she really did these different things and embraced the fact that she had this kind of super mom image — and she never lacked for work. She also continued to sing and do musical performances across the country in theater and nightclub appearances.”

States Lloyd, “The Brady Bunch in a sense gave her an identity. She did a whole bunch of other things, but when she passed away, all the obituaries referred to her as Mrs. Brady. Florence would be very happy to be remembered as Carol Brady, because people would always come up to her seeking motherly advice, assuming that she was like Carol Brady. She had no problem tapping into that.”

“We don’t often enough give her credit for being one of the first actresses — especially TV actresses — who we’ve seen in our homes every week who have been able to create a kind of brand,” Kimberly muses. “The Florence Henderson brand of being a spokesperson and doing all these different things.”

Driving home the point, Erika says, “Florence’s post-Brady career was prolific and ranged from the stage to the small screen. She branched out to a long-running cooking show she hosted called Country Kitchen. This was followed by another cooking show, Short Cut Cooking. She wrote a couple cookbooks over the years as well as a Bible stories book and a women’s health book. In 2011, she came out with an autobiography called Life Is Not a Stage. She remained in an energetic, active career, including competing on Dancing with the Stars at age 76.”

Florence, the mother of four children, was married twice. “Florence and her first husband were married from 1956 through 1985, so they were married a long time,” says Kimberly. “But, as she talks about in in her book, it wasn’t always a steady or happy marriage. The fact that she was always busy and traveling and then doing the show, and he remained in New York for the most part because he was a Broadway producer, they spent a lot of time apart. There was a lot of focus on their careers and raising the kids, but it seems that their relationship wasn’t very close. They divorced in 1985 and she remarried a couple of years later and it seems like she was very happy in her second marriage.”

Two years after her divorce from Ira Bernstein, Florence married John Kappas. “They lived on a boat in Los Angeles, so it was kind of an unusual situation there,” opines Kimberly. “He had actually been her hypnotherapist, because she went through a period of time in the ‘90s where she suddenly developed stage fright. He was the person she saw for that and obviously he helped her through it. But then they fell in love and were married until his death. He died a couple of years before she did.”

Florence’s death came pretty much without warning on November 24, 2016 — Thanksgiving Day — of heart failure at the age of 82. Notes Lloyd, “The thing about Florence is that she was just not a person who was equipped to die. I’m not saying I was around during the last hours of her life or anything, but you just had this picture of this woman with such vitality. It wasn’t that she had a long illness or was hit by a car or anything like that — she just died.”

Elaborates Kimberly, “She was very healthy up until a few days before she passed away. She had gone to a Dancing with the Stars taping because Maureen McCormick was a contestant. And then the day before she passed away, she went into the hospital because she wasn’t feeling well. She passed the next day. I think that should bring a little bit of relief to people who miss her, the fact that she didn’t suffer. She didn’t go through some long illness. It was very quick, but also obviously very shocking. I can only imagine what it was like for the people in her life.”

Unlike many other celebrities who die, no scandals involving Florence emerged after her death. Probably the greatest revelation to arise was the fact that she was considered “bawdy” by so many people. “There was a big difference between Florence Henderson and Mrs. Brady,” laughs Lloyd, “and I was very taken with both of them. I really liked Carol Brady. I mean, she was just a wonderful, sweet Jane Wyatt kind of mother on the show. And then Florence was as bawdy as could be. She’d come up to the crew members and say, ‘How are Big Jim and the twins?’ That’s who she was. Innocent flirtation all the time in terms of the crew guys and everybody loved her that way.”

He recalls when The Brady Bunch shot three episodes in Hawaii and they were working with a director named Jack Arnold, who shot things quickly. Since there was extra time at the end of the day, the decision was made to throw a party. Lloyd had a drink called a Zombie (“I didn’t know you were only supposed to drink one”), and found himself dancing with Florence. “Now I don’t know how I got home, but the next morning Florence came over to me and said, ‘If I every told your father what you asked me to do …’

“I have no memory of anything like this, but it became a continuing joke between us, because Florence’s doctor is my doctor. Every six months she’d be having a physical or something and I’d get a call from David and he says, ‘Guess who I have in my office?’ And I’d say, ‘Florence.’ ‘That’s right.’ And I would say, ‘Is she naked?’ David would say not yet and I’d tell him to call me back when she was. And then Florence would yell, ‘Ask him about Hawaii!’ Our relationship was very good.”

And it looked like it was going to continue with what would have been yet another Brady spin-off following The Brady Kids, The Brady Bunch Hour (which neither Lloyd or Sherwood had anything to do with), The Brady Girls Get Married, The Brady Brides, A Very Brady Christmas and The Bradys, though this one would have taken a decidedly different approach. “We had talked to CBS about it, and I think we were going to go through Adam Sandler’s company,” Lloyd explains. “I had read in the paper or on the Internet that she was dating guys who were 50 when Florence was 80. So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that be interesting?’

“In the show we were developing, Robert Reed’s Mike Brady had passed away and Carol married one of Greg’s friends. So I called her up and said, ‘I’m going to take a page out of your life here.’ She was entirely in favor of this.”

Kimberly concurs, “Florence was actually very excited about the idea of that show and it was something she was very seriously considering doing. I think she would have been great with that. She looked amazing, she was beautiful and she’s someone who could have pulled off that role. And it would have been fun. It may have been, on the one hand, shocking and a little weird for Brady fans who were used to seeing her with Mike for all those years, but, again, I think it could have been really fun. It certainly would have been something to talk about. “

“It would have been a cougar situation,” Lloyd points out, “but with the intricacies of someone marrying their son’ best friend, she would have been just dynamite. As we learned on The Brady Brides, as well as her theater work, she was just so good in front of an audience. A three-camera show would have been fantastic with her. On The Brady Brides, she just lit up and fed off the energy of the crowd. It was a really wonderful thing to see.”

And the legacy of Florence Henderson continues to live on — as it will likely do for many years to come. And it’s not just because of Carol Brady, but also the lives she touched either through her performances or in person. Ted Nichelson, co-author of Love to Love You Bradys: The Bizarre Story of the Brady Bunch Variety Hour, emphasizes, “People who knew Florence Henderson comment about her kindness and authenticity, her wicked sense of humor, and her youthful personality which shined throughout her life. She was faithful about responding to her friends and fans with thousands of handwritten cards over the years. Each correspondence included a personal comment to make her note extra special and always signed with a heart in reference to her birthday on Valentine’s Day. I received several such cards and always felt the love come right off the paper. She was so loving, and genuine.”

“On one occasion,” he adds, “I was with a group of people invited to attend Florence’s cabaret show at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. After the show she was overwhelmed by several dozen people wanting to say hello. I overheard her say that she hadn’t eaten anything, but she didn’t want to disappoint anyone. She then announced that she would change clothes and be right back. Florence returned less than 10 minutes later and for nearly an hour she personally greeted each person who waited for her, signed autographs and took pictures. I sensed she must have been tired, it was late at night, but she remained energetic, funny, and charismatic.”

Kimberly reflects, “I think that she ultimately left a legacy to be proud of. A lot of people make fun of The Brady Bunch and dismiss it as this fluffy family sitcom, but to even more people it’s a show that they love. A show that was an important part of their childhood that they still enjoy and that they might watch with their own kids now. I think that she’s someone who embraced that and, again, not only found a way to continue working, but made it a part of what the rest of her career was. That’s a good lesson for other performers. We all remember those TV people who came to resent their huge success with TV roles or didn’t want to be known for those things anymore. Florence didn’t do that. She embraced it and it led to huge success for her later in her career and for the rest of her life. That’s really something that everybody should look at and appreciate.”

As Ed Robertson sees it, one of the most endearing aspects of Florence was the fact that “unlike a lot of actors who run away from the character that put them on the map, she never did that. She participated in the reimaginings and brought a level of energy and fun to them, whether it was The Brady Brides or A Very Brady Christmas. She was up for whatever she was asked to do. That’s just part of the reason why three generations of viewers love her, because she seemed to be having fun and it comes across.”

For Geoffrey Mark, when he thinks of Florence he is struck by the memory of a 1961 television special saluting the music of George Gershwin. “It had a list of performers that included Ethel Merman, Frank Sinatra and Maurice Chevalier,” he recalls. “And Florence absolutely, positive holds her own against the biggest talents in show business. Whereas lesser lights might have been intimidated by those large talents, Florence plants her feet firmly on the floor and she’s in there swinging right with the best of them. I think that’s a good analogy for her career: an enormous talent who planted her feet firmly on the ground and swung in with the best of them.”