This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. People have different definitions of what makes a star. Is it raw talent, beauty or is it simply an X factor, a certain ineffable quality. Whatever it is, Mary Lou Henner has.
It, and she has it in spades.
Singer, dancer, actor, and wellness expert, Henner is a multi talented performer who is also simply a joy to be around. She's like a Christmas tree and lights up every room she's in. She's starred in over a dozen films, seven Broadway shows, and two smash hit sitcoms. She played Ava Evans Newton on Evening Shade alongside Burt Reynolds, and perhaps most notably, Elaine Nardo on Taxi, a role that earned
her five Golden Globe nominations. Mary Lou Henner has also a New York Times bestselling author and recently staged a one woman autobiographical show. It covered everything from growing up in a large family in Chicago to her preternatural mnemonic skills. Henna is one of about sixty people in the world who can recall nearly every detail of her life down to the exact day and date.
It's so funny because you know, I worked with Trump twice on Celebrity Apprentice, but he used to start every boardroom like Mary Lou, if I took you to Vegas? Could you cheat for me? Could you count the cards? Could you let's go to Vegas.
I'm sure people assume that this skill you have it's not a sill.
But it's yeah, it's just there. It's weird.
What do you call it?
I call it a gift. People sometimes call it a condition. It's not, and that's why they changed the name. They used to call it hyper tynysia, but then they thought that that was like too weird a name, which it really is. But it's not that they don't call it that anymore. It's h SAM highly superior autobiographical memory, h SAM. And it's funny you should mention that on my show because I do a song about it in my show
that my brother wrote the lyrics to. So I'm going to is a song called wait, don't tell me no, No, you know what it's called. It's you know the Peggy Lee song. Because I'm a woman, you know that song? Okay, So I thought, hmmm, because I have h Sam, So this is what we decided. I'll just do the first one bucks count.
Yeah.
I was like, I Sam, because I excuse me, mister. It was a very successful number and a very successful run, a lot of fun. They said it was the best show they've done there in seven years.
Well, let me ask you this. You wrote a biography back in ninety four. You've written ten books, I believe, including that book. But when you do a one woman show, where do you start?
Well, you need an opening number that sort of grabs people and sort of sets up the tone. And so I wanted everything to sort of connect to something in my life. And I was watching television and do you know the Cold Porter movie, not Night and Day, the other one that he did anyway, So all of a sudden, I'm flicking through channels and there it is, and it's Elvis Costello singing Let's Misbehave, And I thought, oh, that's
the closing credits to Johnny Dangerously. I'm going to sing that song as my opener and then tell a story about Johnny Dangerously, but then say everything is connected, and then I go into the song about my memory because I wanted to set that up right away because I throw dates around a lot, and then I talk about my childhood, which was so unusual, so you know, and I do a little whole tribute to growing up in a dancing school.
Well, yeah, what's funny. When I think of you, I think of many things. You know, when you do the show Taxi. You're someone who is part of that elite group of people that I know who were on a hit TV show back when tens of millions of people were watching TV, but such a remarkable group of people. All of them went on to have the really heavy duty careers and everything and movies and TV in theater and so forth.
And how did you get that job?
Okay, this is a good story. I believe that the key to your life is how well you deal with Plan B, because so many Plan B things you plan for Plan A, and you think this is how it's going to work out, and then all of a sudden forget it. I'd been flown out to Los Angeles to do a screen test for a movie called Blood Brothers. I auditioned for Robert Mulligan, the guy I was testing opposite.
He didn't get the job, but they kept me around because they had to find the guy and then they found him and it was Richard Gear, whom I knew through the Grease family because when I my first day in show business professionally, I was in the First National Company of Greece and I walked into that first rehearsal and it was Jeff Conaway playing Danny Zuko, Jerry Zach's playing Kinicki, Michael Lembeck playing Sonny, Judy k playing Rizzo,
Johnny Travolta playing Duty, and Richard Gear rehearsing for the London Company to play Danny Zuko. Anyway, so Richard and I crosspaths again because we ended up getting care and blood brothers. So I came out to Los Angeles and then I ended up staying because I had a contract with CBS at the time, and they offered me money every month to stay away from the other networks while they found something for me holding money holding deal. I
had a holding deal for a few years. Now, all of a sudden, they're starting to audition for Taxi and Joel Thurn, he really liked me. They wanted a thirty five year old Italian New Yorker because they wanted her to have like a sixteen seventeen eighteen year old daughter and because unmarried woman and Goodbye girl, those were all out then, so they liked the mother daughter dynamic. But Joel said, I'm telling you, this is the girl. I
was twenty five. He said, this is the girl because she can hold her own with somebody like a Judd Hirsh. She is one of the guys, but you'd believe her having art aspirations. And I'm telling you, this is the girl. So he kept bringing me back with all these older actresses. But in the meantime, my mom was dying in the hospital in Chicago, so I would literally fly back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. So
what happened was they really liked me. And at that point, paper Chase was picked up for a season because Taxi didn't have to do a pilot, so paper Chase was picked up for a season and they said, okay, she tested higher than even John Housman, we have to give her a contract. And my agent said, well, there's this other show, Taxi that you know, so we have to see. So my agents were able to play one against the other.
And I really wanted to do Taxi because the idea of doing a sitcom was more appealing to me because it's like a stage play, you know. So Taxi said, well, she's too young. We see this teenage girl with a daughter, blah blah blah blah blah. And they said, look, you're gonna lose her a paper chase if you don't do it. And so they said, okay, we'll do it. She's Elaine. We'll give her two little kids. So that's what they did.
So how it was Housman pay per Chase and what was his name, Timothy.
Something, Timothy Bottoms. No, he didn't do the TV show.
Tim Bottoms did the movie.
Yeah, yeah, that was a good movie with Lindsay Wagner and everything. John Houseman was a real character. At the rap party for the pilot, he tried to French kiss me. I mean he was like one of those guys.
Wow, well you can be canceled now, I know.
Oh my god, I've got that. Yeah. I mean I never had.
Like who probably deserved to be canceled at some point in your life.
Actually, I was very protective of myself. I've been the kind of girl that I think most whatever I don't want to say, well, you know, I had brothers, so I knew men or pigs, so I was like always on the defense. I knew I was paying attention. Some of them are some of them?
You know. It's funny you say that because in that casting holding deal I went out to l A. I've told the story before, I think, but I'm there and Chris Guest's mother, Jean Guests, who I worshiped. Geen Guests, was in charge of casting. Incredible, loveliest woman and show She was one of the loveliest women in show business. And if she really believed in you, she like hung
in there with you. She brings me into a meeting and they put me on a holding deal because I did a pilot for them that fizzled, and they said, we're going to sign to this holding deal because we really believe in you. We're going to keep throwing it against the wall until something sticks. And then he says, we want you to be the.
Next Bill Bixby. I was like, wow, that sounds great.
Did you ever honor the deal? Did you ever have to or did you go get something else in.
The I went to do a pilot and then I did a TV movie for them. I did a couple of things for them. This is obviously a billion years ago. In the eighties and the early eighties.
The one with Stephanie Zimbleist. You were so good in that.
That was NBC. Remember that, My god?
Yeah, I did tell you the day we met and how we met.
What was it?
It was May May the twenty second of nineteen eighty five. It was a Wednesday, and this is how we met. I knew Tuck, your roommate. So Tuck and I went till dinner one time, and in Venice and right where you guys used to live. So I went over to your house. And now we are both. I'm in New York doing the junket for Perfect and I'm on a bunch of shows and I'm on Live at five with Sue Simmons, remember yeah, and you're and so you and I were both in the room, but I didn't see
you because I didn't really know you. And all of a sudden I could feel you over this person over my left shoulder, and then all of a sudden, Susman says, I'm coming up next Alec Baldwin and later Mary Lou Hannah, and it was like we looked at each other and I went, oh, my gosh, it was like, oh my gosh. And you and I actually had lunch the day of the big Perfect opening and you were one hundred days sober that day and you showed me your coin.
Yeah, I have thirty six years now and Febrielle have thirty seven years.
Then, unbelievable.
It's incredible.
And even last night I wanted to DEVI a drake. Last night, I thought, let me just have a gigantic glass, what would you doe, slurpy glass of red wine? Help me good because I have horrible insomnia. I've always had hard me too.
Me out with these kids. It's horrible. You know.
I wrote a book called I Refused to Raise a Brat, and I wrote it with a brilliant psyche flanalyist because I had these two kids, and I listened. Every time I listened to her, it didn't the kids. It was all good. And then when I didn't, it was like, Okay, it's going to bite me on the ass at some point. But it's so funny because having so many. I grew
up with six. You grew up with six. We had the opposite of you, guys, because it was two boys and four girl, which is different, and you were third third. I was third. We came up with this concept, the concept of hamper, you know, because our houses were like a big hamper. So now to this day, you could have a beautiful silk blouse, but it's got a stain, so you put a pin over it. That's hamper. You know, your glasses are broken, so you put a pin in it.
That's hamper. You know, you do you put a paper clip, a paper clip, your uniform had staples in it or tape or something.
You know.
It's like I remember growing up, our phone court was always like so you had to like hold it.
If you read If you read my memoir, it opens up with how my mother's bedroom was filled with plastic pails filled with laundry. It was laundry bedroom. Her bedroom was a hamper. She had an ironing board at the foot of her bed and an iron and she had like these plastic hampers, right, these collapsible plastic things that were just and they were like falling off of each other. I said, if you if you came to my house and you didn't know better, you thought this was in an illegal laundry.
Someone was running out of their house.
My mother used to do her laun tree on Tuesdays. There was seven teen loads, you know, and she always had like seventeen loads from all of us, because when you think about it, a house full of kids like that. The beginning of the pandemic, I was home, My boys were here, my brother has two children, my husband, we were here. I never did more cooking and cleaning and laundry and scrubbing grout in my life because I'm very you know, I like to be very organized. But we had a rule that everybody.
My wife hates it. She's really angry with me.
That you're so meticulous that I'm so crushed by an OCD at that level with my kids, like I'm always cleaning in my household, and long with my wife.
Was like, this is going to kill you.
Well, with kids, you got to let it go. I mean, because I was always and I was tested for OCD because that was part of the whole memory thing. They take blood, they do all kinds of tests for you. I don't have OCD. I call my OCO obsessive compulsive order because one kid in the family had to have it with six kids, and my bedroom was off the kitchen and had no door so people could be on the phone or at the kitchen table and look in
at a little girl sleeping, and I didn't care. I was my oldest sister shared it with me, then my younger sister than my brother. I mean, but always my room had no door. So I think that's how I ended up in show business.
I think the same.
I'll tell my wife, I go, don't you want to let's go to the opposite here. Don't you want to commend me for how neat I am? But would you rather have a husband who didn't want to clean? Now you have two biological.
Children, two biological children, and they're how old?
Now?
They're twenty one is twenty seven, the other one's twenty five and a half.
And you have them doing what phase of your career? What were you working on at the time you decided to put the brakes on and have kids?
Oh?
Well, I had finished okay, so I finished evening Shade. I do tell this in my club act because I always say I couldn't talk about the eighties and nineties without talking about Burt Reynolds, because I did five projects with him and we never had a thing, which is probably why we were able to work together so often. But I always adored him, and he one morning, you know, Rob,
my second husband, and I were frisky. And then I go to work and Bert is directing this episode where he has me do a stunt where I am running, running, running, leaping over like a fence in a football stadium stand and I land and then you run up to the team and he says, do it again, do it again, do it again, do it again. So that night I was sitting in a restaurant, and this is after three and a half years. I was sitting in a restaurant and I looked at Rob and I went, the eagle
has landed. I just got pregnant. He said, what I said, I'm telling you. Contact was made, and sure enough I was pregnant. So I always tell people Burt Renolds got me pregnant. Even though he's not the father of my kids.
He's the spiritual father, a spiritual father. Yeah. And when you worked with him, you did Cannibal too.
With him, Well, I first did the man who loved women, and we had such a great chemistry the very first day. But he called me the night that we met, the very night and he said, I want you to come down to the dinner theater in Jupiter, Florida. I want you to do their playing our song, he said, And I want you to do Cannonball Run too, but I want a rewrite of the script. Do you know anybody, any of the guys from Taxi that might be willing to take a crack at it. I was like, okay.
So originally the Countball I've never told this story before. The Countball Run two script was about the Dom and Bert sort of rescue this girl who's hiding out in a sanitarium and she's an heiress, and then they rescue her, and then she and Bert end up in a thing. And so then I get Harvey Miller, who's a taxi writer the job, and he turns it into two women.
And then Shirley McLean wanted to do it. So then of course they put Shirley with Burt and I was with Dom, which was fine, but it's kind of funny. But I had like one of the best experience. That movie was so stupid. But there were a couple days where we had like twenty three wagon trains in the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona, because it was one hundred
and seventeen degrees. So we started hair and makeup was at two o'clock in the morning so we could be on the road before four, and we pulled the plug at one. But then everybody hung out at the pool at the Arizona Inn. So it was Sammy Davis Junior, and Dean Martin, all these guys and even Frank for a day. And to be with Shirley, who I I had always loved and always idle to play her friend and then to have her hanging out with the rat pack.
It was like, you know, I was this little girl from Chicago who's watching these people at drive ins and stuff. So it was like a lot of fun.
Yeah, I met him.
For those people who don't know this, and I wasn't on a big devotee of this, but I went a few times. It's that Norby Walters, the famous record executive. Norby Walters had his.
Card game, his legendary card game.
In his apartment Wednesday nights and West Wednesday nights in West Hollywood, and you go up to the department of his near Holloway.
Yeah Halloway, Losi Anago, Yeah Losi.
On your way to Barney's Beanery and on your way to the sunset Marquis and you go to his house and I went there.
I went a handful of times.
You know, velvida cheese and he's in a bowl, my god, and no alcohol.
That was a no alcohol.
And you bought one hundred dollars worth of chips and when you were finished, you were done. It was no serious gambling, right, And you went there. And I remember sitting there one time, and there was Harvey Korman.
And Tim Oh, Tim Conway, Yeah Conway.
The two of them were there one time. Kathy Lee Crosby would go.
Every now and then Rod Steiger was there a couple of.
Times when you were there. Bert was there when I went one.
Time, Oh he was.
He seemed like he was in the throes of his kind of medicated agony. But he But then to the right of me one time was Don Adams. And Don Adams is in a China white jumpsuit and everyone's waiting for the moment to arrive when someone's going to just do this and do the Don Adams thing. So somebody will puts down two pairs, you know. He puts down two pairs, and I put down.
I say, I have three kings.
I do and everybody left and he doesn't laugh, and then finally he smiles and nods to me, like, Okay, good for you. You saw the opportunity and you took it. But he was very serious and very really super antiseptic and very He was there to play cards. He didn't want to talk about his career or chit chatty. Was there to play cards with a bunch of schmucks. We were card players, were eating.
Velveda and Hershey's kisses and drinking on pop punch.
Yeah, it's funny you're bringing up Norby Walter because you probably don't remember this, but we were both supposed to be there on it was it was June the seventh of two thousand and one. Okay, it was a Wednesday, June the sixth of two thousand and one, seriously, and you called up and said you weren't going to make it. He put me on the phone with you, and I said, you said, how are you doing? Blah blah blah, And I said something about I just I'm filing for divorce.
And you said, oh, can I talk to you about divorce? I said, you said, let's meet tomorrow. So you and I went to Sushi Roku on third Avenue and you were telling me there was all the pitfalls. This was two thousand and one. It was what happened was we got together because I was avoiding the process servers because everybody said, oh, you have to let the woman serve first, otherwise it looks like she cheated. Blah blah blah blah blah.
And we were having a friendly divorce, you know, we went away that weekend and read about it ourselves in the paper. Rob and I we're still friends. You know, I do things weird, but we're still like really good friends. But anyway, we sat at Sushi Roku for like two and a half hours, and you told me everything that was going on and what I should watch out for.
I know you remind me.
Your energy and my feelings for you remind me of when I was around streisand once and I said to her, you know, you and I would be the greatest divorced couple. You know, we would be married, we'd be in love, maybe we'd have a kid. Of course, we get divorced. It just has to be that way. It shows us. But I come over every Sunday. We'd have Chinese food screenings exactly, and I feel the same way about you.
You and I would have made great ex pers Yeah, very similarly, And that we have that big family kind of thing.
This is a trite word, and this is a trite idea, but not so trite now in the age of the pandemic and beyond. And that is positivity and you have always been this, like staggeringly positive healthy.
What's the secret?
Well, A couple of things come to mind. I had a really great family and we're still super close. My parents both died tragically, both of them very young, and I think it bonded the family. I did a lot of therapy. I got my whole family involved in therapy. My therapist would put six speaker boxes up in her office at Princeton, New Jersey, and every other Sunday for ten years, the siblings would do a group therapy. So we've worked out a lot of our stuff. That's number one.
But I had an extraordinary childhood, which was totally unusual, with the dancing school in the backyard, beauty shop in the kitchen, an uncle who taught art at the Catholic grammar school and lived upstairs with his boyfriend Charles, and a menagerie of animals, and I just had such an unusual way of growing up, and I always had this mission to make something of myself and to share. I think it's a middle child and me always wanted to like, if I have a good idea, I want to share
it with everybody. I've never been very proprietary over anything. I just always want to share with people. I think it comes from being the middle maybe, but I also think having my memory is helped because the memory makes you get over things very quickly, because you start to see the waves. And also being an actress, you know, every bad experience was like, Okay, I'm going to take note of this. What can I do better next time?
How can I figure this out? You know I say to people all the time, they go, how do you do it? And it's like this, I go, think of flaps up and it's like you just close your ears to it, flaps up. Like say that to my kids all the time, you know, smile not and move on.
So you were married three times, you were married twice, and you're married again.
Now very final.
There's final, and so each of these meant the extent you're willing to say, what did they represent for you? You seem to be such a thoughtful, deliberate aware. You seem like somebody that all the lights are on your brain, your mind, your soul is like a house you pull up to. It's like some kind of a Richard Neutra, all glass structure and all the lights are on.
You're always on, you know what I mean? And alert and aware.
So when you married one, and you're married two, and you married three, what were you marrying them for?
Well?
First, Freddie and I met at a screen test and I didn't know that they had added a kiss. And I was the sixth girl screen testing opposite him for a film called Hammet, and we just did.
Some people who don't know, this is Forrest.
Yeah, sorry, Frederick Forrest the Academy Award now called Freddie. And so he was so different from anybody I knew. He was a lot older than I was, but he was so different from anybody I ever knew. And I was so fascinated by him because his brain was so different and he was just I've just never seen anything like a totally instinctive, brilliant actor. Brilliant actor and would transform himself every part that he's played. He looks completely different.
And he wanted to marry me a few months after we started dating and I said, no, let's live together. He said, no marriage or nothing. I said, okay, well then nothing. And then I went to my tenth year high school reunion in Chicago and he went to a wedding and he called me and we were both feeling very sentimental, and we said, okay, let's get married. I said okay, and then we ended up getting married three
weeks later in New Orleans and that was it. And then coming home from the honeymoon because the actors were on strike, I was going back to taxing. I thought, what have I just done? I married a total stranger to me. You know, it was like crazy, but he was so fascinating and so loving and so full of demons that if you're not somebody who is exposed to demons a lot, you think like, I'll fix it. I'm going to take care of it. Twenty eight twenty.
Eight, you're very young. Yeah, everything you do in your twenties is a book. Yeah. No.
I have three theories of marriage. The first one is marriages like making waffles. You throw the first one out, okay. The second one is marriage is finding that special, certain someone you just know you'd love to aggravate the rest of your life, because marriage is like, you know, all these little like diggy kind of things. And I said,
but no, the real theory. Saint a Zuberrie wrote something, and I added something to it, and that is, you'll have a happy marriage when you realize marriage isn't two people gazing longingly into each other's eyes, but rather looking out over the mountain in the same direction, with their hands on each other's genitals. That's the part I added. That's the part I added, because you got to have heat.
Oh that wasn't Saintan zuber reed, No, no, ok, sorry.
So you got to have vision in heat. So my first marriage was all heat, my second marriage was all vision, and finally I have vision and heat in my third marriage.
Wow, Actress Mary Lou Henner. If you like hearing about the lives of groundbreaking women in comedy, check out my interview with Carol Burnett. Her hit variety show ran for more than a decade in the late sixties and seventies, and at the height of her success, she had to tread carefully.
In that era, the only one who really would speak up was Lucy. She was very strong, but It's not in my nature to take.
Over confront or anything.
You know, if a sketch wasn't working or something, instead of like Gleason or Sid would say, look, guys, this stinks.
Now, come on, you got to fix it.
But but you know they would do that.
I would say, I'd call the writers down into the rehearsal hall and I'd say, you know, guys, I'm not doing this too well. Do you think maybe you could help me out with a different line here or there, because you know, otherwise I would have been a bitch.
Hear more of my conversation with Carol Burnett in our archives that Here's Thething dot org. After the Break, Mary Lou Henner talks about how a change she made and her approach to auditioning completely opened up her career. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here is the Thing. Mary Lou Henner is passionate about encouraging people to take
charge of their happiness and well being. She's written several best selling books on living a healthy lifestyle, often sharing lessons that changed her own life.
What happened was I went with Jerry Katzman, who's the head of William Morse at the time, he said, you have to write a book. I'm hooking you up with Judith Reagan. So Judith and I met at lunch and we hung out together all day and everything. I had a book deal, so I started working on my autobiography. She is a character, and when she started her own imprint, she said to me, you have to write a health book because you're in such good shape of this. You
changed so much since blah blah blah. Every time I have anything wrong with me my kids, I call you, and you always seem to know the answer. So I was doing the show Chicago on Broadway and one of the guys said, oh, why don't you give us some lectures.
I was like okay. So in between shows, I would do these seminars and I'd have a little, you know, like recorder and I'd be, you know, talking to them, and then I'd be putting on my eyelashes like the evils of dairy products, you know, as I'm putting on
my eyelashes to go do roxy. And so then I worked with somebody who was like a real crafts person in terms of like books, and I was so revved up from all the fossy, and my boys were very little, so I could like give them a bath, go to the theater, be revved up, go to an office and work on the book. And a few weeks after the show ended, the book came out and it went on the New York Times bestseller list, and I've sold over
a million copies of that first health book. But then got a contract to keep going and going and going, so then I've done ton.
What's your biggest health concern? You know, growing up in my lifetime, everybody was always saying, you know, don't smoke, and then when I went through my drug phase, people said you got to get sober and stop taking all these drugs and drinking, which I've had a very relatively brief but white hot period of that for a couple of years in the eighties when I was very young,
and then as I've gotten older. You know, the thing that shocks me that is the utter poison in my life is sugar, because I was pre diabetic and now I'm full diabetic, and which has been so for me and demoralizing for me. Yeah, what's your health concerns?
Now? Like, what do you say to yourself? I never eat.
I sometimes eat every now and then I cheat, and I allow myself to eat. When you want to treat yourself to something that you know isn't the best possible thing for you, Is it something sweet?
Is something I'm a savory person. No, I would say probably sushy is like my own, my last not so guilty pleasure. Yeah. But I haven't had dairy since August fifteenth, nineteen seventy nine. It was a Wednesday I gave up dairy and have never had dairy since. And it changed my life. So I'm always trying to get people off of dealer.
What was the impact other than sinuses and congestion?
You here, but well that's a lot, but you know, sore throats and stomach aches all the time. When I lived in New York, I'd live near zay Bars, and I would go pick up cheese, and you know at zay Bars where they'd cut the cheese a certain way and the little rind and stuff. And I'd buy these little cheese bags, cheese ends bags on my way to unemployment and wondered, why am I not working when I'm fat, constanpated and half impulse, you know, I mean, my whole stomach changed after I gave up dairy.
I used to be an ice cream addict. I was like Brando, And they say that brand would sit with like a half a gallon of ice cream and watch TV and you have like a big jug of ice cream and lay in his bed and just with a spoon and eat like a half a gallon of ice cream.
That wasn't that bad.
Yeah, But Darry is always the first thing I talk to people about. Always, that's been on my that's my soapbox speech. Immediately with people especially, I can read people's faces and tell that they're like allergic to it or something like that, or they've had trouble. But the big killer right now, I think for everybody is the whole stress management people. Really, you know, I say three things. Learn to love the food that loves you. And we know what doesn't love us. Learn to love the food
that loves you. It's very obviously what does Dairy did not love me, Meat did not love me. Sugar does not love meat, nor does it love you obviously, So I say, learn to love the food that loves you. I say, motion is the lotion, because we've got to move. You know, your cat stretches, your dogs you walk your dogs. Your hamster's got a wheel with this beautiful human animal. You've got to walk, You got to do, you got
to move, move move. Motion is the lotion. And then I also say, you better fall in love with your stress or it's going to kill you. Because if I give I go all over the country open.
Through stress, you better I can't fall in love with my stress.
Got well, yeah, I mean it's but no, you have to, I always say, because I give speeches all over the country, I'm always like asked to give you know, could go to different things, seminars and stuff. And I always say, if every one of you in this audience wrote down your problems on a piece of paper and I collected them and I started reading them out, and you had to pick some problems that are on a list, you'd all take back your own because you know the beast.
You know how to handle it. You just might not be doing it well.
I always tell people whenever i'm especially when i'm speaking to people in this profession. Number one, find out how much you love acting itself, because you're going to get to do so little of it. Oh, the life of the actor is all this other bullshit. You know, the rest of the year and you're in front of a camera at what forty five minutes a day, an hour a day. The rest is sitting in your room. You do the show, it's two hours at night. If you're inclined to do theater, and I said, you don't need
to find that how much you love it. And number two, if you're in get into it. Don't do what I did, which is to be like fuck la and fuck you and I think you're all full of shit, and you know this whole thing is just this business is full of shit.
Be a part of it.
Join the academy, go to the screening, be a part of the business, and don't be cynical about it.
And if not, then get out.
Get out. I always say, if something, do it or don't do it. If someone can talk you out of it, let it, because otherwise you have to really really want to do it. And also I always say to people, look fall in love with auditioning because it might be the only ten minutes you have that job. So if you do it, you know what I mean, then it's like your job for ten minutes. And maybe you remember.
All these people from the TV star shelf that we always talk about Gregory Harrison, who did an interne Wants to Change My Life Gregory Harris.
I mean we did the Jack Nicholson and Margaret parts in Carnal Knowledge at the Pasadena Playhouse. We played those parts, so we saw each other naked in a shower.
Yeah, oh my god, I'm sure you both look pretty good.
We do. We still do.
He did an interview once years ago, was a million years ago, like TV guide or some stupid thing, and he did an interview where he said, basically I'm paraphrasing, he was like, you know, his whole energy changed, his whole career changed when he walked into auditions and his attitude was like.
How can I help you? Like you called me here, right. I didn't put a gun to your head and make you, but it come to audition me for this part. I have something you want? Yes, you're looking for something and whether and once he stopped giving the energy of like oh and being fawning and obsequious with them, everything changed.
It's so funny you're saying this because I tell a story in my show again about how I auditioned for forty commercials before I got one, and the reason I find got Then I booked seventy two in two and a half years. It was quite crazy. I was doing commercials constantly, but it took me forty auditions to get my first one because on the thirty ninth a friend of mine called me and it was for mister Coffee. I still remember the jingle and I had to sing it.
I was so wrong for the part, but he called me in and he called me that night and he said he knew I was having trouble with auditions, and he said, are you this way the way you were today with me in your auditions? And I went, oh, my gosh, no, are you kidding. I was just so myself because you were there. He said, we almost changed the whole concept of the commercial because you were so original. He said, that's what you have to do every time you go into an audition. Stop giving people what you
think they want. Just go in there and it's going to hit. It's going to hit. And he was right. And then I booked one right after the other and I became this body parts model and it was just like crazy that I did a lot of different parts of the body.
I was which parts of the body did you do there?
Which party this is in my show? I said, I did four playtext broad commercials. It's got sash here and seamless, two play text panties.
You were wearing a bra, you were a bra model.
I was a bra model, but sometimes I had like a shirt on, you know, and you could see certain things. But it was just like I'm exactly. And then I did two play text panties commercials or all you saw was my butts.
And these were separate commercials, separate. The bra and the panties were two.
There were separate shoots because if I was the producer, that's what I would have said, and we need to shoot these separately, and we need to shoot them over five.
Days or and I did do yes. And then I said, but all you see is my button, my crotch, walking my dog, walking around Lincoln Center, getting on a bus. Both the polaroids when you walk into the audition for a panties commercial, it's amazing because you see all these polarids of just people's crotches and butts and side views and everything else. And then I was even the Fruit of the Loom panty host girl inside of a giant apple with my legs sticking out, and so I did
like different carts. But then I also did like I did an exce on Bicentennial Minute where I played Annie Sullivan. I got a Cleon nomination for that. And I did everything from Reese's peanut butter to gleam toothpaste, so many different times. I was the Ponderosa Steakhouse girl, the samson I luggage girl. So I just kept doing it and doing it and doing it because every time and I learned this the heart. I mean, I learned the hard way. You walk in and you'd bring something to it, like
Gregory says, how can I help you? Let me show you something like I would do with it.
But what did you study at you Chicago? You studied theater.
No, they had a theater department, but they had no theater degree. So even though did you take so, I No, I was a political science major and so in the first two years is mostly the core curriculum.
So where did you learn to sing and dance?
Well? I grew up in the dancing studio and I always sang because my two older sisters were in choir and stuff like that. So I'd go to their practices and stuff, and it was just something I always wanted, you know. I was on stage at two and a half at a father Gym, was the.
Lead in Chicago, like a pinnacle for you? Was that a big dream country?
That was a big gena. They called me on March the four, nineteen ninety seven, Walter, whom I knew from the Greece family, and they called me and they said Annie Ranking is leaving Chicago and she thinks she'd be a good replacement. What kind of dance shape are you in? And I said, ooh, I haven't had my legs up over my head except for childbirth or a good weekend for about five years, so I better get my ass
back into class. So I went to class for ten days and then I went to audition and then he said go home, work on the fosse, and I did. And I went back and there were like twenty seven potential actors in the room and they kept eliminating, eliminating until they told me I had the job. So I did four hundred and eight performance, four hundred and eight performance on Broadway Broadway, but I also did Vegas because they asked me to come to Vegas and I was like, no,
I don't want to go to Vegas. And then my agent said, well, let's have some fun with your quote. And then he called me back. He said, they made you an offer you can't refuse. You're going to Vegas. It was like, okay, So I went to Vegas. But my favorite Vegas story because people always said, what's the difference between Broadway and Vegas? Although it's not this anymore, I'd say, oh, yeah, cup holders, because back then you could this was ninety nine. In two thousand you couldn't.
You could drink in Vegas, but you couldn't do it on Broadway. So I'd been there two weeks and they said we love you here. I said, really, you've seen the show and I was like all excited and he said, no, I haven't seen the show yet, but your crowd drinks a lot more Belvedere than most people. Okay, we love Belvedere.
Yeah, I'll never forget.
Someone was connected to like one of these big phizzy musicals and they were doing like some kind of a cast replacement, and they wanted all this stunt casting with somebody famous, and this actress walks into audition for the lead role.
She's this famous.
Actress and she comes in and she does her audition and she leaves and everyone's just kind of standing there slack Jode after she leaves, and the director turns over and goes, she can't sing, she can't dance, she can't act. She's a star, you know, like we're going to hire her, even though she gets a D.
Or an F in all three categories based on what they saw there in that room that day.
It's so funny because there's all these stories that you know that sort of shape your life, like that one. You know, and you just write, you hear it and you understand it and you know it right away. When I was first on taxi, somebody at ABC cany he goes, I've got a movie for you, Mary Lou. I said, really, what is it? And he said sizzle? I said, what's it about? He said, who cares sizzle? So Johnny and I always used to say we would like joking like
people were like, you know, who cares sizzle? You know, it's just that thing that you do.
New York Times best selling author Mary Lou Henner. If you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever.
You get your podcasts.
When we return, Mary Lou Henner talks about finding lasting love the third time around. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the thing. Mary Lou Henner recently developed and performed a one woman autobiographical show. It's filled with songs and stories from her remarkable life.
I sing a song about my sons and show a video of like pictures of them and little videos. Oh it kills me every time if I watch it, I'll cry just thinking about it. I cry. And it's a mash up between nick of Time because you know it's funny Nicky took me three and a half years to get pregnant Joe, like immediately I didn't even get my period. It was like bam, I'm pregnant again. So and so I do nick of Time and happiness is just a thing called Joe and that's it. And also I sing
a song about Freddie, my first husband. I do Desperado because that's kind of who he was in my life. And that song always gets to me too. So it's like telling some of those type stories and talking about Bird was very emotional to a couple of times. So it depends, you know, it depends on the crowd.
When you come and you're gonna camp, bet he is your husband going to come with you?
Yeah, he's great. That's he's another whole story.
You know.
We wrote a book. We got together. He was my roommate's boyfriend. I didn't dare twinkle in his direction. But then when he called me out of nowhere, six months after my divorce from Rob was final, we got together. Within a week. We're saying I love you, We're going to spend the rest of our lives together. And two months later he's diagnosed with two cancers, bladder cancer and lung cancer. And we ended up doing a whole protocol
for him that didn't involve chemo or radiation. They wanted to remove his bladder, his prostate, run a hose up his penis, and we could pump it up six times if we wanted to have sex. They were pushing all of this. I was like, no, and we always say.
He's done with the penis pump by the way, he finished, do.
It for fun. No, he doesn't need the pump at all. No, my husband, thanks, No, no, not at all. He saved all of his organs. He saved his organs and he's been in remission. It'll be eighteen years November the twenty fourth. It's pretty remarkable. And he didn't he did immuno therapy, but he went completely vegan, and he went got rid of I mean he did every He shot himself with iscador,
which is extract of missiletoe. He got rid of all of the mercury fillings in his Mouthculation therapy, high colonic lymphatic massages, infrared saunas, and he stays on this protocol and he has been in remission almost eighteen years. It's pretty remarkable, you know, pretty cool.
When I went to the doctor and he was going to do the anterior hip replacement process, and he says to me, now, I want to just review with you that you know that that when you do the anterior procedure, when we go in the front as opposed to the side, it's the quickest to heal. But there are some complications. Is like point zero two percent that we're going to nick some nerves in there. There's some material to it,
which I said, what nerve? He took his finger and he went like this, no, And I turned to her mind and said, oh you can just tear that out, just with that.
Nerve right down. I'm done. You can just yank there, get a pair of pliers and.
Come on you. And we have an expression in my family PF. Okay, we have this expression. My brothers and I made it up and it's like measures the sexual cuotient of things like, oh man, there was so much PF at that party, or man I saw that movie. No PF between the two of them. And PF stands for pussy factor or penis factor, right, because things have PF, you know. And I don't like BD for big dick energy because that is sexist and sizest, do you know
what I mean? But you and Hilaria obviously have tons of PF. Obviously six kids, but you still want to have You're still gonna have PF.
Even I don't want you.
I don't want to retire from that, but yeah, please, but six kids, it's really been. It's been like a student six and eight years is six kids in seven years.
Seven years and seven years old. Oh that's right, seven years.
You know.
I don't know if you remember this day, but we were all all the kids because Ireland is close to my Joey's age. He's born November twelfth, nineteen ninety five. So she's like the So we were all at a meet because Joey was like the real athlete in the family. But Joey was at this meet and Caitlyn Jenner was there and her kids and you know, Ireland and my
Joey and they were all doing their sports thing. And you walked up to my son Nick, who is about thirteen at the time, fourteen at the time, and you said, and what are you going to be besides the Ralph Lauran model? Because he's very cute.
What does he doing now?
He's a director. He's a director. He went to Columbia and he directs all these videos. And he directed this short that has now been bought by Will Ferrell's company and he's turned it into a two hour movie and he might be directing it, we'll see. But it looks good. Can I just say what my son Joey's doing too? Because he's yes, okay, because I said about Nick. So Joey lives in Brooklyn. He does his improv troupe that
they do whatever. But he's an international bridge player. He's one of the top bridge players in the world under twenty five, and he became a life master at twenty four. And he has all these women that he plays bridge with and they pay a lot of money to play with him because he's so cute. And he's writing a script called Bridge Jigglow because I'm a comedy writer and I have a director. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I'm sure.
Telling telling me should read Jonathan Ames's book The Extra Man that was made into a film with Kevin Klein and Paul Dano, and that's your son, the Paul Danel. He is a character because because it's about a boy that meets like a guy who's like a who's like a walker.
He's like a male prostitute, and he doesn't necessarily sleep with the women.
But he's like he like takes old of these old biddies to like Palm Beach, Cotillions and all the ship.
I'm thinking that my son is talking about them as old biddies because you know, someone.
Who know not his not his bridge part.
Yeah.
Anyway, my love to you, and I look forward to seeing you in New York.
Okay, and you're killed one. Sometimes it's called Mary Lou. I know, so I forgot that.
I know we literally they my wife calls are Mary Lou. I know she does Maria Luthia, but my wife calls her Mary.
Lou, daughter Mary.
It's on the back of her little.
I know.
See I pay attention.
Well.
My name is Mary, Lucy, Denise, ce Celia, Hannah Forrest, Lieberman Brown, good Luck vision and heat.
Good on that share I love to use, Sweetie.
We'll talk to you down the road, okay. Actress and author Mary Lou Henner. This episode was produced by Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donahue, Maureen Hoben, and Zach McNeese. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.