December 21, 2021 • 44 mins
(Recorded September 2021) Actress Marilu Henner is known for a lot of things, from her groundbreaking role as Elaine Nardo on Taxi to her New York Times bestselling books on health and wellness to her amazing, nearly one-of-a-kind memory. But what shines through in every story, joke, and answer she gives Alec is her positivity and joy. Henner is someone who, at every turn, has chosen her happiness, and she’s eager to share her secrets for creating an optimistic outlook with everyone.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. People have different definitions of
what makes a star. Is it raw talent, beauty or
is it simply an ex factor, a certain ineffable quality.
Whatever it is, Mary Lou Henner has it, and she
(00:23):
has it in spades. Singer, dancer, actor, and wellness expert,
Hanner is a multitalented 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 hits sitcoms.
(00:46):
She played Ava Evans Newton on Evening Shade alongside Bert Reynolds,
and perhaps most notably, Elaine Nardo on Taxi, a role
that earned her five Golden Globe nominations. Mary Lou Hanna
has also a New York Times bestselling author and recently
staged a one woman autobiographical show. It covered everything from
(01:09):
growing up in a large family in Chicago to her
preternaturalnemonic 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 the reboard room
(01:33):
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. People. I'm sure people assume
that this skill you have, 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
(01:54):
call it hyper tynesia, 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 and my show because
I do a song about it in my show that
my brother wrote the lyrics too. So I'm going to wait,
(02:16):
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, because I
have h SAM, so this is what we decided. I'll
just do the first one packing them in and bucks count.
It was yeah. I was like, because excuse me, mr.
(02:39):
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
(03:02):
I wanted everything to start of connect to something in
my life. And I was watching television and do you
know the Cold Border movie? Not Night and Day, the
other one that they 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
(03:22):
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 talked
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
(03:44):
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 ahead TV show back when tens of
millions of people were watching TV. But such a remarkable
group of people, all of whom went on to have this,
you know, really heavy duty careers and everything in movies
and TV and theater and so forth. And how did
(04:07):
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've been flown out
to Los Angeles to do a screen test for a
movie called Blood Brothers. I auditioned for Robert Mulligan. The
guy was testing opposite. He didn't get the job, but
(04:28):
they kept me around because they had to find the guy.
And then they found him and it was Richard Gere,
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 Zachs playing Knicki, Michael Lembeck playing Sonny, Judy Kay
(04:49):
playing Rizzo, Johnny Travolta playing Duty, and Richard gear rehearsing
for the London Company to play Danny Zuko. Anyway, so
Richard Knight crossed paths again because we ended up getting
Austin Blood Brothers. So I came up 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
(05:09):
while they found something for me holding 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 Thirm 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
(05:31):
out then, so they like the mother daughter dynamic. But
Joel said, I'm telling you this is the girl. I was.
He said, this is the girl because she can hold
her own with somebody like a Judd Hirsch. She was
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
(05:52):
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 Houseman, we have to give
her a contract. And my agent said, well, there's this
(06:15):
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 her
daughter boa blah blah blah blah. And they said, look,
you're gonna lose her the paper Chase if you don't
do it. And so they said, okay, we'll do it.
(06:38):
She's a Laine. We'll give her two little kids. So
that's what they did. So how it was Houseman Paper
Chase And what was his name, Timothy something, Timothy Bottons. No,
he didn't do the TV show. Tim Bottoms did the movie. Yeah,
that was a good movie with Lindsey Wagner and everything.
John Houseman was a real character. At the rap party
for the pilot, he tried to French kissed me. I mean,
he was like one of those guys. Well you can
(07:01):
be canceled now I know. Oh my god, I've got
I mean I never had like I'm sure you have
a few stories 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 well whatever, I don't want to say. You know,
I had brothers, so I knew men are pigs, so
I was like, on the defense, I was paying attention
(07:23):
some of them. Are you know it's funny you say,
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, Jane Guest, who I worshiped,
Gene Guest, was in charge of casting Loveliest Woman in
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. And she brings me into a
(07:44):
meeting and they put me on a holding deal because
I did a pilot for them that fizzled, and they said,
we're gonna sign this holding deal because we really believe
in you. We're gonna just 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 honored the deal? Did
(08:05):
you ever have to or did you get something else?
And 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 Zimbolist. You were so good in that that was NBC.
Remember that, My god. Yeah, I could tell you the
day we met and how we met. What it was
(08:26):
May May the twenty two of it was a Wednesday,
and this is how we met. I knew Tuck, your roommate.
So Tuck and I went to 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
(08:47):
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, you, I could feel you
over my show, this person over my left shoulder, and
then all of a sudden, Susiman says, and coming up
next Alec Baldwin and later Mary lou Hanna, and it
was like we looked at each other and I went,
(09:07):
oh my gosh. I was like, oh my gosh. And
you and I actually had lunch the day of the
big Perfect opening, and you were a hundred days Ober
that day and you showed me your coin. Yeah, I
have thirty six years now and fabrary, I'll have thirty
seven years and then unbelievable. It's incredible. And even last night,
I want to have a drake. Last night I thought,
(09:29):
let me just have a gigantic glass slurpea glass of
red wine. Tell me good, because I have horrible insomnia.
I've always had hard me 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
planalist because I had these two kids, and I listened.
Every time I listened to her, didn't the kids, it
was all good, and then when I didn't, it was like, okay,
(09:50):
it's gonna bite me on the us 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 the 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
(10:11):
have a beautiful silk blouse. But it's got a stain,
so you put a pin over it. That 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, 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
(10:32):
If you read my memoir, it opens up with how
my mother's bedroom was filled with plastic pails filled with laundry.
It was laund her bedroom. Her bedroom was a hamper.
But she had an ironing board at the foot of
her bed and an iron and she had like these
plastic hampers, 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
(10:52):
didn't know better, you thought this was in an illegal
laundry thing that was running out of their house. My
mother used to do her lime tree on Tuesdays. It
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, his two children, my husband, we
were here. I never did more cooking and cleaning and
(11:13):
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 o c D at that level
with my kids, like I'm always cleaning my household, and
long with my wife was like, this is going to
kill you. Well, with kids, you gotta let it go.
(11:34):
I mean because I was always and I was tested
for o c D because that was part of the
whole memory thing. They take blood, they do all kinds
of tests for you. I don't have o c D.
I call mine o c O 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 I was
(11:57):
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 would you
rather have a husband who didn't want to clean? No? No,
you that you have two biological children, to biological children,
(12:18):
and they're how old now? They're twenty one is twenty seven,
the other one is 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
I had finished um 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
(12:39):
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 Burt is directing this episode where
he has me do a stunt where I am running, running, running,
leaping over like a fence on a in a like
(13:01):
football stadium stand and I land and then you know,
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, 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
(13:22):
was pregnant. So I always tell people Burt Reyll's got
me pregnant, even though he's not the father of my kids.
He's the spiritual frother Spa. And when you worked with him,
he 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 we met, the very night,
and he said, I want you to come down to
(13:43):
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
(14:03):
Run to script was about the Dom and Burt 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 Burt end up in a thing. And
so then I get Harvey Miller, who was a taxi
writer the job, and he turns it into two women,
and then Shirley McLean wanted to do it, so then
(14:25):
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 of
days where we had like twenty three wagon trains in
the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona, because it was a
hundred and seventeen degrees. So we started hair and makeup
(14:45):
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 Jr.
And Dean Martin, all these guys and even Frank for
a day. And to be with Shirley, who My had
always loved and always idle, to play her friend and
then to have her hanging out with the rat pack.
(15:05):
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. Is that Norby Walter's famous record executive,
Norby Walters had his card game and the legendary card
game at his apartment Wednesday nights and West Wednesday nights
(15:27):
in West Hollywood. You go up to the apartment of
his near Holloway, Yeah, Halloway in last Annaga, Lasiannaga, 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,
velvita cheese and no alcohol. That was no alcohol, and
(15:48):
you bought a hundred dollars where the chips and when
you were finished, you were done. There was no serious gambling.
And you went there. And I remember sitting there one time,
and there was Harvey Korman and Tim Tim Conway Conway,
the two of them were there one time. Kathy Lee
Crosby would go every now and then Rod Steiger was
there with a couple of times. He was when you
were there, was there when I went. One time he
seemed like he was in the throes of his kind
(16:11):
of medicated agony. But 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. So he puts
down two pairs, and I put down and I say
(16:32):
I have three kings. I do, and everybody laughs, and
he doesn't laugh. And then finally he smiles and nods
to be like, Okay, good for you. 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
(16:54):
with a bunch of schmocks. We weren't hard players, were
eating Velvida and Hersy's kisses and drinking on punch. It's
funny you're bringing up Norby Walters 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 one. Okay, it was a Wednesday at June the
(17:15):
six of two thousand one, seriously, and you called up
and said you weren't gonna 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
(17:38):
was all the pitfalls. This was two thousand 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, because 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 were still friends. You know, I do
things weird, but he were still like really good friends.
(18:00):
But anyway, we sat at the sushi roku for like
two and a half hours and you told me everything
that was going on in what I should watch out for.
I know you remind me your energy and my feelings
if 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
(18:21):
a kid. Of course, we get divorced. It just has
to be that way to show business. But I come
over every Sunday. We'd have Chinese food screen on exactly.
And I feel the same way about you. You and
I would have made great x. We think very similarly,
and that we have that big family kind of thing.
This is a trite word and This is a trite idea,
(18:43):
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. 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.
(19:05):
I got my whole family involved in therapy. My my
therapist would put six speaker boxes up in her office
in 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,
(19:28):
an uncle who taught art at the Catholic grammar school
and lived upstairs with his boyfriend Charles, and 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
(19:51):
to share with people. I think it comes from being
the middle maybe, But I also think having my memory
has 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?
(20:12):
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. I 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 final, final, And
so each of these men things that you're willing to say,
(20:33):
what do they represent for you? You seem to be
such a thoughtful, deliberate aware. You seem like somebody that
all the lights are on your 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
(20:54):
when you're married one, and you're married too, and you're
married three, what were you marrying them four? Well? First all,
Freddie and I met at a screen test and I
didn't know that they had added a kiss. And I
was the six girl screen testing opposite him for a
film called Hammett and we just different. People who don't
know this is Forest. Yeah, sorry, Frederick Forrest the Academy
(21:15):
Award nominate. 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
(21:37):
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
(21:57):
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, and
I thought, what have I just done. I'm married a
total stranger to me. You know, it was like crazy.
But he was so fascinating and so loving and so
(22:18):
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 that. Yeah, everything you
do in your twenties. No. I have three theories of marriage.
The first one is marriage is like making waffles. You
(22:39):
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 sting XUBERI wrote something and I added something to it,
and that is you'll have a happy marriage when you
(22:59):
real 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've
got to no, that wasn't sayting zuberin now sorry that
(23:23):
So you got to have vision and meat. So my
first marriage was all heat, my second marriage was all vision,
and finally I have vision and heat in my third marriage.
Actress Mary Lou Henner. If you like hearing about the
lives of groundbreaking women in comedy, check out my interview
(23:43):
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 there the only one who really would
speak up was Lucy. It was very strong. But it's
not in my nature to take over confront or anything.
(24:07):
You know, like if if a sketch wasn't working or something.
Instead of like Glee coner Sid would say, let's look, guys,
the stinks. Now, come on, you gotta 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, um, I'm not doing this
too well. Do you think maybe you could help me
(24:28):
out with a different line here or there, because you know,
otherwise I would have been a bit here more of
my conversation with Carol Burnett in our archives that Here's
the Thing dot org. After the Break, Mary lou Henner
talks about how a change she made in her approach
to auditioning completely opened up her career. I mean, I
(25:01):
like Baldwin and you were listening to Here's 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 Morris
(25:23):
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 like 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. You this, you changed so much since
blah blah blah. You. Every time I have anything wrong
(25:44):
with me and 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 like 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,
(26:06):
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 rebbed up from all the fosse and
my boys were very little, so I could like give
him 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,
(26:29):
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've
got to get sober and stop taking all these drugs
(26:50):
and drinking, which I 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 I'm which has been so for me and for me. Yeah,
(27:14):
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 a savory person, No, I would say
probably sushi, is like my own, my last not so
guilty pleasure. Yeah, but I haven't had dairy since Augustine.
(27:38):
It was a Wednesday. I gave up dairy and never
never had dairy since. And it changed my life. So
I'm always trying to get people off of what was
the impact sinuses and congestion you here about that's a lot,
but you know, sore throats and stomach aches all the time.
When I lived in New York, I'd lived near Z
Bars and I would go pick up cheese ends. You know,
it's a bars where they cut the cheese a certain
(27:59):
way and then up a little a 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, constipated 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 brand Oh they say the Brandon would sit with
like a half a gallon of ice cream and watch
TV and you have like a big jug of ice
(28:20):
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. But dairy is always the
first thing I talked to people about always. That's 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
(28:41):
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. Learned to love
the food that loves you. It's very obviously what does
Dairy did not love me, Meat did not love me.
Sugar that does not love me, nor does it love you. Obviously,
So I say, learned to love the food that loves you.
I say motion is the lotion, because we've got to move.
(29:03):
You know, your cat stretches, your dogs, you walk your dogs,
your hamster's got a wheel with this beautiful human animal.
You've gotta walk, you gotta do, you gotta 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 when I give I
go all over the country. You better I can't fall
in love with my stress. Well yeah, I mean it's
(29:25):
but no, you have to, I always say, because I
give 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, 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
(29:48):
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, you find out
how much you love acting. It's itself because you're gonna
get to do so little of it. 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,
what forty five minutes a day, an hour or a day.
The rest is sitting in the room you do the show.
(30:09):
It's two hours at night. If you're inclined to do theater,
And I said, you need to find out how much
you love it. At number two, if you're in, get
into it. Don't do what I did, which is to
be like fuck l A and fuck you and I
think you're all full of ship, and you know this
whole thing is just this business is full of ship.
Be a part of it. Joined the academy, go to
the screening, be a part of the business, and don't
(30:31):
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 to 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 then it's like your job for ten minutes. And
(30:53):
maybe you remember all these people from the TV Star
Shelf that we always talk about, Gregory Harrison, who didn't
inter you wants to Change My Life, Gregory Harris And
we did Jack Nicholson h and Margaret parts in in
Kernal Knowledge at the Pasadena Playhouse. We played those parts,
so we saw each other naked in a shower. Yeah, Oh,
(31:14):
my god, I'm sure you both look pretty good. We did,
We still do, he did. He did an interview once
years ago, it was a million years ago, like TV
Guide or something 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
(31:34):
I help you? Like you called me here, I didn't
put a gun to your head and make you audition
me for this part. I have something you want. 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
(31:55):
how I auditioned for forty commercials before I got one
and the reason I find he got and then I
booked seventy two and two and a half years. I
was quite crazy. I was doing commercials constantly, but it
took me forty auditions to get my first one because
on the thirty nine a friend of mine called me
and it was for Mr. 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
(32:16):
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.
(32:39):
Just go in there and it's gonna hit. It's gonna 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 which part? This is in
my show? I said. I did four plate text Brock commercials.
You know, it's got sash here and seeing was to
(33:00):
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
looking exactly, And then I did to play text panties
commercials or all you saw was my button. These were
separate commercials, separate. The bra and the panties were separate shoots, separate,
(33:22):
because if I was the producer, that's what I want
to said. I said, and we need to shoot these separately,
and we need to shoot them over five days. 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. But the
polaroids when you walk into the audition for a panties commercial,
it's amazing because you see all these polaroids of just
(33:43):
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 cuts.
But then I also did like I did an ex
on by Centennial minute where I played Annie Sullivan. I
got a Cleon domination for that, and I did everything
from Reese's peanut butter to gleam toothpaste. So many different
(34:05):
times I was the ponderosa Steakhouse Girl, the samson I
Luggage Girl on. 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 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 Chicago? You studied theater. No, they
had a theater department, but they had no theater degree.
(34:28):
So even though it was so, I know, I was
a political science major and so and the first two
years is mostly the core curriculum. So where did you
learn to sing a 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 like
(34:49):
a pinnacle for you, was at a big Dream Country Was.
They called me on March the fourth scene Walter, whom
I knew from the Greece family, and they called me
and they said, uh, 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, oh, I
haven't had my legs up over my head except for
(35:11):
childbirtha 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
(35:34):
eight performances Broadway, but 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.
I 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,
(35:55):
I'd say, oh yeah, cup holders, because back then you could.
This was in two thousand. You couldn't. You could drink
in Vegas, but you couldn't do it on Broadway. So, um,
I've 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. He said, no, I haven't
seen the show yet, but your crowd drinks a lot
(36:15):
more belvedere than most people. Okay, yeah, I'll never forget.
Someone wasn't connected to like one of these big fizzy 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.
(36:36):
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 joe. After she leaves, and the
director turns every and goes, she can't sing, she can't dance,
she can't act. She's a star, you know, like we're
gonna hire her even though she has She gets a
D or inn F in all three categories based on
what they saw there in that room that day. It's
(36:58):
so funny because there's all these stories that you know
that sort of shape your life, like that one you
know you and you just right you hear it and
you understand and you you know it right away. When
I was first on taxi, somebody at ABC came and
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?
(37:20):
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 bestselling author Mary Lou Henner. If you're enjoying
this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Here's the Thing
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(37:42):
you get your podcasts. When we returned, Mary Lou Henner
talks about finding lasting love the third time around. I'm
(38:02):
Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Mary Lou
Hanna 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 son's and show a
video of like pictures of them and little videos. Oh
it kills me every time if I watch it. I'm
(38:23):
crying just thinking about it. I cried. And it's a
mash up between Nick of Time because you know, it's
funny NICKI took me three and a half years to
get pregnant Joey like immediately I didn't even get my period.
It was like, Bam, I'm pregnant again. So and he
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
(38:43):
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 an, it's your
husband gonna come with you? He comes. Yeah, he's great.
Oh that's he's another whole story. You know, we wrote
(39:03):
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
(39:24):
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 they were pushing all of this.
I was like, no, and we always say that the pump,
by the way, don't do it for fun. No, he
doesn't need the pump at all. No, my husband, No, No,
not at all. He saved all of his organs. He
(39:48):
saved his organs and he's been in remission. It will
be eighteen years November twenty four. It's pretty remarkable. And
he didn't he did immunotherapy, but he went completely vegan,
and he went got rid of I mean he did
every thing. He shot himself with iscadoor, which is extract
of mistletoe. He got rid of all of the mercury
fillings in his mouth, kulation therapy, high colonics, lymphatic massages,
(40:08):
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 supposed to the side is the quickest to heal.
(40:29):
But there are some complications. Is like point zero two
percent that we're gonna nick some nerves in there. There's
some maarterial to heverage. I said, what nerve? He took
his finger and he went like this, and I turned
my mind and said, oh, you can just tear that out,
just that nerve. Right, I'm done. You can just yank
get apparel of pliers and zax come on you. And
we have an expression in my family PF. Okay, we
(40:52):
have this expression. My brothers and I made it up
and it's like measures the sexual quotient of things like
oh man, there was so much PF at that party,
or man I saw that move 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 b D for big dick energy because
that is sexist and sizest, do you know what I mean?
But you and Hillaria obviously have tons of PF. Obviously
(41:15):
six kids, but but you 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 but six kids,
it's really been. Its been like a six and eight
years is six kids in seven years and seven years
and seven years? 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
(41:37):
my Joey's age. He's born November twelve, so she's like
the So we were all at a meat 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
(41:58):
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 a Ralph Lauren model?
Because he's very cute. What is he doing now? He's
a director. He's a director. He's 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
(42:20):
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 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
(42:41):
they pay a lot money to play with him because
he's so cute. And he's writing a script called Bridge Giggalow.
Because I have a comedy writer and I'm a director. Yeah, yeah,
I'm telling me he should bead. Jonathan Ames book The
Extra Man that was made into a film with Kevin
(43:02):
Klein and Paul Dano and that's your son, Paul. He
is a character because 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 takes
all of these old biddies to like Palm Beach, Cotillions
and all the shops. I don't think I'm thinking that
my son is talking about them as old biddies, because
(43:23):
you know, someone who know not not his not his
bridge park. Anyway, My love to you, and I look
forward to seeing him in New York. Okay, love to
after and you're one. Sometimes it's called Mary lou I know,
so we actually said that. I forgot that. I know
we literally they My wife calls her Mary lou. I
know she doesn't Maria Luthia, but my wife calls her
(43:45):
Mary Louke. My wife calls my daughter Mary. It's on
the back of her little high chair chair chair. I know,
see I pay attention. My name is Mary, Lucy, Denise, Cecilia, Hannah, Forrest,
Lieberman Brown, good luck, vision and heat because up on
that chair. I love to you, sweet. We'll talk to
you down the road. Okay actress and author Mary Lou Henner.
(44:10):
This episode was produced by Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donohue, Maureen Hoban,
and Zack McNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. I'm Alec Baldwin.
Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. People have different definitions of
what makes a star. Is it raw talent, beauty or
is it simply an ex factor, a certain ineffable quality.
Whatever it is, Mary Lou Henner has it, and she
(00:23):
has it in spades. Singer, dancer, actor, and wellness expert,
Hanner is a multitalented 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 hits sitcoms.
(00:46):
She played Ava Evans Newton on Evening Shade alongside Bert Reynolds,
and perhaps most notably, Elaine Nardo on Taxi, a role
that earned her five Golden Globe nominations. Mary Lou Hanna
has also a New York Times bestselling author and recently
staged a one woman autobiographical show. It covered everything from
(01:09):
growing up in a large family in Chicago to her
preternaturalnemonic 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 the reboard room
(01:33):
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. People. I'm sure people assume
that this skill you have, 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
(01:54):
call it hyper tynesia, 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 and my show because
I do a song about it in my show that
my brother wrote the lyrics too. So I'm going to wait,
(02:16):
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, because I
have h SAM, so this is what we decided. I'll
just do the first one packing them in and bucks count.
It was yeah. I was like, because excuse me, mr.
(02:39):
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
(03:02):
I wanted everything to start of connect to something in
my life. And I was watching television and do you
know the Cold Border movie? Not Night and Day, the
other one that they 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
(03:22):
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 talked
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
(03:44):
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 ahead TV show back when tens of
millions of people were watching TV. But such a remarkable
group of people, all of whom went on to have this,
you know, really heavy duty careers and everything in movies
and TV and theater and so forth. And how did
(04:07):
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've been flown out
to Los Angeles to do a screen test for a
movie called Blood Brothers. I auditioned for Robert Mulligan. The
guy was testing opposite. He didn't get the job, but
(04:28):
they kept me around because they had to find the guy.
And then they found him and it was Richard Gere,
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 Zachs playing Knicki, Michael Lembeck playing Sonny, Judy Kay
(04:49):
playing Rizzo, Johnny Travolta playing Duty, and Richard gear rehearsing
for the London Company to play Danny Zuko. Anyway, so
Richard Knight crossed paths again because we ended up getting
Austin Blood Brothers. So I came up 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
(05:09):
while they found something for me holding 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 Thirm 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
(05:31):
out then, so they like the mother daughter dynamic. But
Joel said, I'm telling you this is the girl. I was.
He said, this is the girl because she can hold
her own with somebody like a Judd Hirsch. She was
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
(05:52):
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 Houseman, we have to give
her a contract. And my agent said, well, there's this
(06:15):
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 her
daughter boa blah blah blah blah. And they said, look,
you're gonna lose her the paper Chase if you don't
do it. And so they said, okay, we'll do it.
(06:38):
She's a Laine. We'll give her two little kids. So
that's what they did. So how it was Houseman Paper
Chase And what was his name, Timothy something, Timothy Bottons. No,
he didn't do the TV show. Tim Bottoms did the movie. Yeah,
that was a good movie with Lindsey Wagner and everything.
John Houseman was a real character. At the rap party
for the pilot, he tried to French kissed me. I mean,
he was like one of those guys. Well you can
(07:01):
be canceled now I know. Oh my god, I've got
I mean I never had like I'm sure you have
a few stories 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 well whatever, I don't want to say. You know,
I had brothers, so I knew men are pigs, so
I was like, on the defense, I was paying attention
(07:23):
some of them. Are you know it's funny you say,
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, Jane Guest, who I worshiped,
Gene Guest, was in charge of casting Loveliest Woman in
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. And she brings me into a
(07:44):
meeting and they put me on a holding deal because
I did a pilot for them that fizzled, and they said,
we're gonna sign this holding deal because we really believe
in you. We're gonna just 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 honored the deal? Did
(08:05):
you ever have to or did you get something else?
And 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 Zimbolist. You were so good in that that was NBC.
Remember that, My god. Yeah, I could tell you the
day we met and how we met. What it was
(08:26):
May May the twenty two of it was a Wednesday,
and this is how we met. I knew Tuck, your roommate.
So Tuck and I went to 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
(08:47):
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, you, I could feel you
over my show, this person over my left shoulder, and
then all of a sudden, Susiman says, and coming up
next Alec Baldwin and later Mary lou Hanna, and it
was like we looked at each other and I went,
(09:07):
oh my gosh. I was like, oh my gosh. And
you and I actually had lunch the day of the
big Perfect opening, and you were a hundred days Ober
that day and you showed me your coin. Yeah, I
have thirty six years now and fabrary, I'll have thirty
seven years and then unbelievable. It's incredible. And even last night,
I want to have a drake. Last night I thought,
(09:29):
let me just have a gigantic glass slurpea glass of
red wine. Tell me good, because I have horrible insomnia.
I've always had hard me 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
planalist because I had these two kids, and I listened.
Every time I listened to her, didn't the kids, it
was all good, and then when I didn't, it was like, okay,
(09:50):
it's gonna bite me on the us 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 the 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
(10:11):
have a beautiful silk blouse. But it's got a stain,
so you put a pin over it. That 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, 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
(10:32):
If you read my memoir, it opens up with how
my mother's bedroom was filled with plastic pails filled with laundry.
It was laund her bedroom. Her bedroom was a hamper.
But she had an ironing board at the foot of
her bed and an iron and she had like these
plastic hampers, 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
(10:52):
didn't know better, you thought this was in an illegal
laundry thing that was running out of their house. My
mother used to do her lime tree on Tuesdays. It
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, his two children, my husband, we
were here. I never did more cooking and cleaning and
(11:13):
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 o c D at that level
with my kids, like I'm always cleaning my household, and
long with my wife was like, this is going to
kill you. Well, with kids, you gotta let it go.
(11:34):
I mean because I was always and I was tested
for o c D because that was part of the
whole memory thing. They take blood, they do all kinds
of tests for you. I don't have o c D.
I call mine o c O 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 I was
(11:57):
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 would you
rather have a husband who didn't want to clean? No? No,
you that you have two biological children, to biological children,
(12:18):
and they're how old now? They're twenty one is twenty seven,
the other one is 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
I had finished um 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
(12:39):
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 Burt is directing this episode where
he has me do a stunt where I am running, running, running,
leaping over like a fence on a in a like
(13:01):
football stadium stand and I land and then you know,
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, 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
(13:22):
was pregnant. So I always tell people Burt Reyll's got
me pregnant, even though he's not the father of my kids.
He's the spiritual frother Spa. And when you worked with him,
he 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 we met, the very night,
and he said, I want you to come down to
(13:43):
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
(14:03):
Run to script was about the Dom and Burt 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 Burt end up in a thing. And
so then I get Harvey Miller, who was a taxi
writer the job, and he turns it into two women,
and then Shirley McLean wanted to do it, so then
(14:25):
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 of
days where we had like twenty three wagon trains in
the desert outside of Tucson, Arizona, because it was a
hundred and seventeen degrees. So we started hair and makeup
(14:45):
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 Jr.
And Dean Martin, all these guys and even Frank for
a day. And to be with Shirley, who My had
always loved and always idle, to play her friend and
then to have her hanging out with the rat pack.
(15:05):
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. Is that Norby Walter's famous record executive,
Norby Walters had his card game and the legendary card
game at his apartment Wednesday nights and West Wednesday nights
(15:27):
in West Hollywood. You go up to the apartment of
his near Holloway, Yeah, Halloway in last Annaga, Lasiannaga, 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,
velvita cheese and no alcohol. That was no alcohol, and
(15:48):
you bought a hundred dollars where the chips and when
you were finished, you were done. There was no serious gambling.
And you went there. And I remember sitting there one time,
and there was Harvey Korman and Tim Tim Conway Conway,
the two of them were there one time. Kathy Lee
Crosby would go every now and then Rod Steiger was
there with a couple of times. He was when you
were there, was there when I went. One time he
seemed like he was in the throes of his kind
(16:11):
of medicated agony. But 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. So he puts
down two pairs, and I put down and I say
(16:32):
I have three kings. I do, and everybody laughs, and
he doesn't laugh. And then finally he smiles and nods
to be like, Okay, good for you. 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
(16:54):
with a bunch of schmocks. We weren't hard players, were
eating Velvida and Hersy's kisses and drinking on punch. It's
funny you're bringing up Norby Walters 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 one. Okay, it was a Wednesday at June the
(17:15):
six of two thousand one, seriously, and you called up
and said you weren't gonna 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
(17:38):
was all the pitfalls. This was two thousand 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, because 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 were still friends. You know, I do
things weird, but he were still like really good friends.
(18:00):
But anyway, we sat at the sushi roku for like
two and a half hours and you told me everything
that was going on in what I should watch out for.
I know you remind me your energy and my feelings
if 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
(18:21):
a kid. Of course, we get divorced. It just has
to be that way to show business. But I come
over every Sunday. We'd have Chinese food screen on exactly.
And I feel the same way about you. You and
I would have made great x. We think very similarly,
and that we have that big family kind of thing.
This is a trite word and This is a trite idea,
(18:43):
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. 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.
(19:05):
I got my whole family involved in therapy. My my
therapist would put six speaker boxes up in her office
in 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,
(19:28):
an uncle who taught art at the Catholic grammar school
and lived upstairs with his boyfriend Charles, and 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
(19:51):
to share with people. I think it comes from being
the middle maybe, But I also think having my memory
has 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?
(20:12):
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. I 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 final, final, And
so each of these men things that you're willing to say,
(20:33):
what do they represent for you? You seem to be
such a thoughtful, deliberate aware. You seem like somebody that
all the lights are on your 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
(20:54):
when you're married one, and you're married too, and you're
married three, what were you marrying them four? Well? First all,
Freddie and I met at a screen test and I
didn't know that they had added a kiss. And I
was the six girl screen testing opposite him for a
film called Hammett and we just different. People who don't
know this is Forest. Yeah, sorry, Frederick Forrest the Academy
(21:15):
Award nominate. 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
(21:37):
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
(21:57):
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, and
I thought, what have I just done. I'm married a
total stranger to me. You know, it was like crazy.
But he was so fascinating and so loving and so
(22:18):
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 that. Yeah, everything you
do in your twenties. No. I have three theories of marriage.
The first one is marriage is like making waffles. You
(22:39):
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 sting XUBERI wrote something and I added something to it,
and that is you'll have a happy marriage when you
(22:59):
real 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've
got to no, that wasn't sayting zuberin now sorry that
(23:23):
So you got to have vision and meat. So my
first marriage was all heat, my second marriage was all vision,
and finally I have vision and heat in my third marriage.
Actress Mary Lou Henner. If you like hearing about the
lives of groundbreaking women in comedy, check out my interview
(23:43):
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 there the only one who really would
speak up was Lucy. It was very strong. But it's
not in my nature to take over confront or anything.
(24:07):
You know, like if if a sketch wasn't working or something.
Instead of like Glee coner Sid would say, let's look, guys,
the stinks. Now, come on, you gotta 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, um, I'm not doing this
too well. Do you think maybe you could help me
(24:28):
out with a different line here or there, because you know,
otherwise I would have been a bit here more of
my conversation with Carol Burnett in our archives that Here's
the Thing dot org. After the Break, Mary lou Henner
talks about how a change she made in her approach
to auditioning completely opened up her career. I mean, I
(25:01):
like Baldwin and you were listening to Here's 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 Morris
(25:23):
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 like 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. You this, you changed so much since
blah blah blah. You. Every time I have anything wrong
(25:44):
with me and 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 like 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,
(26:06):
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 rebbed up from all the fosse and
my boys were very little, so I could like give
him 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,
(26:29):
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've
got to get sober and stop taking all these drugs
(26:50):
and drinking, which I 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 I'm which has been so for me and for me. Yeah,
(27:14):
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 a savory person, No, I would say
probably sushi, is like my own, my last not so
guilty pleasure. Yeah, but I haven't had dairy since Augustine.
(27:38):
It was a Wednesday. I gave up dairy and never
never had dairy since. And it changed my life. So
I'm always trying to get people off of what was
the impact sinuses and congestion you here about that's a lot,
but you know, sore throats and stomach aches all the time.
When I lived in New York, I'd lived near Z
Bars and I would go pick up cheese ends. You know,
it's a bars where they cut the cheese a certain
(27:59):
way and then up a little a 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, constipated 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 brand Oh they say the Brandon would sit with
like a half a gallon of ice cream and watch
TV and you have like a big jug of ice
(28:20):
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. But dairy is always the
first thing I talked to people about always. That's 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
(28:41):
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. Learned to love
the food that loves you. It's very obviously what does
Dairy did not love me, Meat did not love me.
Sugar that does not love me, nor does it love you. Obviously,
So I say, learned to love the food that loves you.
I say motion is the lotion, because we've got to move.
(29:03):
You know, your cat stretches, your dogs, you walk your dogs,
your hamster's got a wheel with this beautiful human animal.
You've gotta walk, you gotta do, you gotta 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 when I give I
go all over the country. You better I can't fall
in love with my stress. Well yeah, I mean it's
(29:25):
but no, you have to, I always say, because I
give 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, 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
(29:48):
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, you find out
how much you love acting. It's itself because you're gonna
get to do so little of it. 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,
what forty five minutes a day, an hour or a day.
The rest is sitting in the room you do the show.
(30:09):
It's two hours at night. If you're inclined to do theater,
And I said, you need to find out how much
you love it. At number two, if you're in, get
into it. Don't do what I did, which is to
be like fuck l A and fuck you and I
think you're all full of ship, and you know this
whole thing is just this business is full of ship.
Be a part of it. Joined the academy, go to
the screening, be a part of the business, and don't
(30:31):
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 to 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 then it's like your job for ten minutes. And
(30:53):
maybe you remember all these people from the TV Star
Shelf that we always talk about, Gregory Harrison, who didn't
inter you wants to Change My Life, Gregory Harris And
we did Jack Nicholson h and Margaret parts in in
Kernal Knowledge at the Pasadena Playhouse. We played those parts,
so we saw each other naked in a shower. Yeah, Oh,
(31:14):
my god, I'm sure you both look pretty good. We did,
We still do, he did. He did an interview once
years ago, it was a million years ago, like TV
Guide or something 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
(31:34):
I help you? Like you called me here, I didn't
put a gun to your head and make you audition
me for this part. I have something you want. 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
(31:55):
how I auditioned for forty commercials before I got one
and the reason I find he got and then I
booked seventy two and two and a half years. I
was quite crazy. I was doing commercials constantly, but it
took me forty auditions to get my first one because
on the thirty nine a friend of mine called me
and it was for Mr. 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
(32:16):
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.
(32:39):
Just go in there and it's gonna hit. It's gonna 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 which part? This is in
my show? I said. I did four plate text Brock commercials.
You know, it's got sash here and seeing was to
(33:00):
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
looking exactly, And then I did to play text panties
commercials or all you saw was my button. These were
separate commercials, separate. The bra and the panties were separate shoots, separate,
(33:22):
because if I was the producer, that's what I want
to said. I said, and we need to shoot these separately,
and we need to shoot them over five days. 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. But the
polaroids when you walk into the audition for a panties commercial,
it's amazing because you see all these polaroids of just
(33:43):
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 cuts.
But then I also did like I did an ex
on by Centennial minute where I played Annie Sullivan. I
got a Cleon domination for that, and I did everything
from Reese's peanut butter to gleam toothpaste. So many different
(34:05):
times I was the ponderosa Steakhouse Girl, the samson I
Luggage Girl on. 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 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 Chicago? You studied theater. No, they
had a theater department, but they had no theater degree.
(34:28):
So even though it was so, I know, I was
a political science major and so and the first two
years is mostly the core curriculum. So where did you
learn to sing a 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 like
(34:49):
a pinnacle for you, was at a big Dream Country Was.
They called me on March the fourth scene Walter, whom
I knew from the Greece family, and they called me
and they said, uh, 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, oh, I
haven't had my legs up over my head except for
(35:11):
childbirtha 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
(35:34):
eight performances Broadway, but 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.
I 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,
(35:55):
I'd say, oh yeah, cup holders, because back then you could.
This was in two thousand. You couldn't. You could drink
in Vegas, but you couldn't do it on Broadway. So, um,
I've 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. He said, no, I haven't
seen the show yet, but your crowd drinks a lot
(36:15):
more belvedere than most people. Okay, yeah, I'll never forget.
Someone wasn't connected to like one of these big fizzy 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.
(36:36):
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 joe. After she leaves, and the
director turns every and goes, she can't sing, she can't dance,
she can't act. She's a star, you know, like we're
gonna hire her even though she has She gets a
D or inn F in all three categories based on
what they saw there in that room that day. It's
(36:58):
so funny because there's all these stories that you know
that sort of shape your life, like that one you
know you and you just right you hear it and
you understand and you you know it right away. When
I was first on taxi, somebody at ABC came and
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?
(37:20):
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 bestselling author Mary Lou Henner. If you're enjoying
this conversation, be sure to subscribe to Here's the Thing
on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(37:42):
you get your podcasts. When we returned, Mary Lou Henner
talks about finding lasting love the third time around. I'm
(38:02):
Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Mary Lou
Hanna 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 son's and show a
video of like pictures of them and little videos. Oh
it kills me every time if I watch it. I'm
(38:23):
crying just thinking about it. I cried. And it's a
mash up between Nick of Time because you know, it's
funny NICKI took me three and a half years to
get pregnant Joey like immediately I didn't even get my period.
It was like, Bam, I'm pregnant again. So and he
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
(38:43):
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 an, it's your
husband gonna come with you? He comes. Yeah, he's great.
Oh that's he's another whole story. You know, we wrote
(39:03):
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
(39:24):
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 they were pushing all of this.
I was like, no, and we always say that the pump,
by the way, don't do it for fun. No, he
doesn't need the pump at all. No, my husband, No, No,
not at all. He saved all of his organs. He
(39:48):
saved his organs and he's been in remission. It will
be eighteen years November twenty four. It's pretty remarkable. And
he didn't he did immunotherapy, but he went completely vegan,
and he went got rid of I mean he did
every thing. He shot himself with iscadoor, which is extract
of mistletoe. He got rid of all of the mercury
fillings in his mouth, kulation therapy, high colonics, lymphatic massages,
(40:08):
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 supposed to the side is the quickest to heal.
(40:29):
But there are some complications. Is like point zero two
percent that we're gonna nick some nerves in there. There's
some maarterial to heverage. I said, what nerve? He took
his finger and he went like this, and I turned
my mind and said, oh, you can just tear that out,
just that nerve. Right, I'm done. You can just yank
get apparel of pliers and zax come on you. And
we have an expression in my family PF. Okay, we
(40:52):
have this expression. My brothers and I made it up
and it's like measures the sexual quotient of things like
oh man, there was so much PF at that party,
or man I saw that move 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 b D for big dick energy because
that is sexist and sizest, do you know what I mean?
But you and Hillaria obviously have tons of PF. Obviously
(41:15):
six kids, but but you 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 but six kids,
it's really been. Its been like a six and eight
years is six kids in seven years and seven years
and seven years? 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
(41:37):
my Joey's age. He's born November twelve, so she's like
the So we were all at a meat 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
(41:58):
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 a Ralph Lauren model?
Because he's very cute. What is he doing now? He's
a director. He's a director. He's 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
(42:20):
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 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
(42:41):
they pay a lot money to play with him because
he's so cute. And he's writing a script called Bridge Giggalow.
Because I have a comedy writer and I'm a director. Yeah, yeah,
I'm telling me he should bead. Jonathan Ames book The
Extra Man that was made into a film with Kevin
(43:02):
Klein and Paul Dano and that's your son, Paul. He
is a character because 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 takes
all of these old biddies to like Palm Beach, Cotillions
and all the shops. I don't think I'm thinking that
my son is talking about them as old biddies, because
(43:23):
you know, someone who know not not his not his
bridge park. Anyway, My love to you, and I look
forward to seeing him in New York. Okay, love to
after and you're one. Sometimes it's called Mary lou I know,
so we actually said that. I forgot that. I know
we literally they My wife calls her Mary lou. I
know she doesn't Maria Luthia, but my wife calls her
(43:45):
Mary Louke. My wife calls my daughter Mary. It's on
the back of her little high chair chair chair. I know,
see I pay attention. My name is Mary, Lucy, Denise, Cecilia, Hannah, Forrest,
Lieberman Brown, good luck, vision and heat because up on
that chair. I love to you, sweet. We'll talk to
you down the road. Okay actress and author Mary Lou Henner.
(44:10):
This episode was produced by Kathleen Russo, Carrie Donohue, Maureen Hoban,
and Zack McNeice. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. I'm Alec Baldwin.
Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio
Host
Alec Baldwin
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