She was America’s mom - the mother that millions of fans wished were their own. But Florence Henderson’s own mother was cold and unloving - as different from the character on The Brady Bunch as one could imagine.
The actress, who played Carol Brady on the iconic show, died on Thanksgiving surrounded by friends and her loving family.
Florence Henderson passed away surrounded by friends and family on Thanksgiving Day. Her own family growing up was a far cry from The Brady Bunch
Henderson endured years of ‘abuse and abandonment’ while growing up in poverty in rural Indiana, she wrote in her unflinching memoir. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother walked out on the family when Florence was 12 years old.
She would beg Joseph, her father: ‘Come on Daddy, you can’t keep doing this’ but he had a violent temper and would trash their house during his rages.
Chillingly Henderson claimed that Joseph used to grope her legs when she rubbed his back to calm him down - and destroyed the trust she had in him.
The legacy for Henderson was that for rest of her life she was wracked by guilt about not having done more to help her parents.
It turned her into a ‘relentless caregiver’ in her own relationships and informed her most famous role, Carol Brady.
Florence at age 20 found solace in her singing, here reading and studying for her role in Fanny, while flying from New York to Kentucky. Her mother walked out on the family when Florence was 12 years old
Henderson once told CNN that to play the part she ‘created the kind of mother that I wished I’d had’.
In her autobiography: ‘Life Is Not a Stage; From Broadway Baby to a Lovely Lady and Beyond’, which was published in 2011, she said that she had been unable to speak about her upbringing until then.
She said: ‘At the heart of my silence is the sense of guilt that I surely felt as a little girl living under such circumstances.
‘That guilt keeps the victim not just quiet but makes them seek out the approval and the affection of the abuser'.
Henderson died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles aged 82 surrounded by friends and family.
Her manager said that the cause of death was heart failure.
By the time of her death Henderson had lived a life she admits was beyond her wildest dreams - two marriages, four children and a career on the stage and screen that brought her adoration and wealth.
Her beginnings were far more humble; she was born on February 14 1934 in poverty in rural Rockport, Indiana, the youngest of 10 children.
By the time Henderson was born her father was close to 70 years old and her mother was 25 years younger - both were from large Catholic families.
Joseph’s day job was farming tobacco which barely earned enough to provide for the household.
Young Florence singing with her childhood music teacher Christine Johnson while Florence's older sister Marty listens (left) in Owensboro, Kentucky
Florence singing with her sister Emily to a family audience of cousins, nieces, and aunts, Owensboro, Kentucky in 1954
They did not have electricity or running water and the walls in their homes often had holes into which they stuffed clothes to keep the cold out.
Henderson recalled how in their home in Rockport one of the two upstairs rooms was filled with junk. In the winter the thin windows gave scant protection from the bitter wind.
Henderson’s recalled going out to ‘worm the tobacco’ in the tobacco fields - her term for pulling it up - where it would get stuck to her arms like Velcro.
The family moved around a lot - possibly to avoid landlords from unpaid rent - and ended up in tiny Rockport, which had a population of 2,400.
By then all her brothers and sister had moved out apart from Babby, the second youngest who was three years her senior.
In her book Henderson was frank about the man her father could have been.
She wrote: ‘I could see good in my father, but his alcoholism had a devastating impact on himself and his family.
‘When he wasn’t drunk he could be the sweetest, kindest man. He could stay sober for weeks and months and, remarkably, sometimes for a whole year.
‘During those tranquil periods he would get us up to go to mass every Sunday morning. He loved to read, especially books about Wyatt Earp and the Wild West and Abraham Lincoln’.
Henderson praises her sober father as a man of ‘considerable wisdom and advice’ and would tell them to watch their reputation and their character.
Henderson died surrounded by family and friends at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles
Florence Henderson as Carol Brady and Robert Reed as Mike Brady in the Brady Brunch episode, 'Getting Davy Jones.'
That all went out the window after a few drinks when ‘all hell would break loose’, Henderson wrote.
She first realized things were ‘terribly wrong’ aged five when, one night, she heard her mother shouting at her father and went to their door to look through the crack.
Henderson saw her mother standing jabbing her finger at her father who was sitting in a chair in just his underwear looking ‘so sick and so sad’.
Then he began to cry.
The sight was ‘devastating’ and ‘just about killed me’, Henderson wrote.
When Joseph was on a binge, Henderson and her sister would find bottles strewn throughout the house and piled up in the garage.
Once he started drinking hard liquor it was ‘all over’ and Henderson and Babby had to take turns looking after him.
Joseph would beg each of them to go uptown and get him a beer so, despite being underage, they would find a bar and ask the bartender for a drink which they took home.
When he asked for more drink they resorted to giving him whiskey with milk and a raw egg in the hope it would sober him up.
Henderson wrote that they told Joseph: ‘Come on Daddy, you can’t keep doing this’ and begged him to straighten himself out.
But he would lie sprawled out on the sofa for days on end.
Sometimes he would be violent and in one episode Joseph grabbed Henderson and her sister Pauline had to wrestle her free.
Beneath the smile was a childhood of poverty and painful memories of her alcoholic father
Another time he ripped a screen door off its hinges and threw a table onto the floor, smashing the glass jars that were on it onto the floor.
In the most disturbing passage of her memoir, Henderson wrote that when her father would ask her to rub his back he would start touching her calves with his hands.
She wrote: ‘Looking back I know they could have been so much worse than they were.
‘No matter how young or innocent I was at the time, I always had an inbuilt sense of my surroundings and knew when something might be dangerous or harmful.
‘While things never degenerated to a more severe degree of sexual assault, the sacred bond of comfort, protection and safety that a child wants to have with her father was damaged forever’.
At the age of six or seven, Henderson wrote in her diary: ‘Dear God, give me the gift of understanding’.
Her mother was little better, although she did teach Henderson to sing at the age of two and soon singing became the antidote for her shyness.
In grade school Henderson joined the Catholic Church choir and she would busk for groceries for her family, her talent obvious for the whole town of Rockport which pitied her wretched life.
Henderson wrote that as far she could remember she had experienced no maternal love from her mother.
Kind words or gestures of affection were ‘virtually nonexistent’ and, as the last of 10 children, her mother had already ‘reached the end of her rope’ by the time she arrived.
Henderson once asked her mother she and her father had a good love life together.
The response was: ‘Yes. When he was sober’.
Elizabeth Henderson was not an alcoholic but drank with Joseph to ‘try and cope with him’.
She also did it to self medicate as she lacked the skills to channel her frustration in any other way, Henderson wrote.
During the Depression in the 1930s Henderson had to wear dresses that were made out of feed sacks as her family could not afford to buy cloth or ready-made dresses.
If the material wasn’t bad enough here was a gaping hole in the front.
Henderson cried and told her mother: ‘I can’t wear this to school, mother. Please don’t make me wear it! Everyone at school will make fun of me!’
Elizabeth responded: ‘Of course you’re going to wear it. It will never be noticed on a galloping horse’.
When Henderson was 12 her mother had enough and left and moved away to Cleveland.
Her saucy side: Florence was most known for portraying the wholesome Mrs. Brady on long-running TV series The Brady Bunch (pictured with co-star Robert Reed in 1969)
With a disturbing nonchalance, Henderson said that she and her sister Babby found it was ‘par for the course’.
She wrote: ‘Like other traumas we experienced, we had learned there was little option than to accept it and try to cope the best we could’.
Henderson tried to deal with it by telling herself: ‘If she comes back, she comes back’, but she never did, not for her high school graduation or when she was in hospital for appendicitis.
It would be decades before Henderson was able to deal with her anger at her mother and see her decision as courageous rather than cowardice.
At 17 Henderson boarded a small DC-6 plane bound for New York City and began her journey to becoming a star.
The last time Henderson saw her father was when she was a teenager and returned home from the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan to see him.
He had a large swelling on his face and as she rubbed his back she told him: ‘Daddy, I hate it when I see you like this. I’d rather see you dead’.
Joseph died slowly of cancer that started in his nose and spread out to the rest of his body.
Henderson spent decades in the iconic role as Carol Brady. Pictured with her TV family: top row: Christopher Knight (Peter), Barry Williams (Greg), Ann B. Davis (Alice); middle row: Eve Plumb (Jan), Florence Henderson (Carol), Robert Reed (Mike), Maureen McCormick (Marcia); bottom row: Susan Olsen (Cindy), Mike Lookinland (Bobby)
Henderson’s sister Pauline and Babby took care of him; Pauline later told Henderson that their dad repeatedly apologised for taking so long to die.
In the book Henderson admits that she did not rush to be by his bedside in his final hours.
She had been cast in the lead role in Oklahoma! - it was a production in New Haven, Connecticut and was to be her big break at the age of 18.
In a frank admission she says she felt ‘relieved’ that she did not have to go.
From there on she turned her back on the poverty and misery that had marked out her early years.
The Brady Bunch first aired in 1969 and continued in one form or another right up to the 1990s.
Prior to that Henderson had been the first women to guest host The Tonight Show in 1962 and an established Broadway star who played Maria in a production of ‘The Sound of Music’.
In her later life Henderson wrote that she reevaluated her parents and came to accept they were ‘coping the best they could with the hand they were dealt with’.
Henderson said she saw them as victims and wrote that ‘who knows how far back the cycle of dysfunction had gone unchecked through generations of their ancestors’.
Her own life was a ‘dream come true in many ways’ but she felt she was always a ‘work in progress with wounds still to heal and lingering pain in old scars’.
She wrote that ‘I have learned it takes courage to be happy’ and that she was ‘very fortunate’ to have survived her childhood.
Summing up her childhood she said she ‘endured abuse and abandonment because of alcoholism’ and wanted to write her memoir to reach out to others who had suffered a similar fate.
She wrote: ‘We suffer guilt syndrome in one form or another because we were so powerless to help at the time. If we’re not paralyzed by fear, anger and hatred or numbed out by our own addictions, we have to overcome deep-seated reactive patterns.
‘In addition to being workaholics some of us also grow up to be control freaks to keep real and imagined chaos at bay. Others become gregarious caregivers trying to please everybody, except ourselves. And may including yours truly end up doing most of the above!’
Over time she even learned to understand her parents more.
Henderson wrote: ‘The sadness and disappointment I had in my early years gradually diminished with time. It has made it easier to regard them not just with forgiveness and compassion but also with a degree of awe and admiration’.
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