This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Rory O'Malley: You're listening to episode number 39 of Living the Dream with Rory O'Malley.

[0:05] Rory O'Malley: If you like the podcast, remember, subscribe, rate, and review, but only if you like it.

[0:11] Rory O'Malley: Audition, side job, swimming upstream.

[0:14] Rory O'Malley: Believe it or not, you're living the dream.

[0:17] Rory O'Malley: Welcome to the podcast, Dreamers.

[0:19] Rory O'Malley: Rory O'Malley here, your host for Living the Dream.

[0:22] Rory O'Malley: Thank you so much for listening.

[0:25] Rory O'Malley: I have a wonderful guest this week.

[0:28] Rory O'Malley: I really, really like this person.

[0:31] Rory O'Malley: Marilu Henner.

[0:33] Rory O'Malley: Marilu Henner is a legend.

[0:37] Rory O'Malley: She has done so many amazing things in our business, from TV to Broadway to film.

[0:44] Rory O'Malley: She has done it all, and she has maintained such a positive, wonderful outlook on life, on the business, and she's a joy to be around.

[0:54] Rory O'Malley: I got to meet her on stage at Hamilton, where I've gotten to meet a lot of wonderful people after shows at Hamilton.

[1:01] Rory O'Malley: And she was on Dancing with the Stars.

[1:05] Rory O'Malley: She brought her partner Derek that she was about to start the Dancing with the Stars contest with.

[1:11] Rory O'Malley: And she could not have been more happy and joyous.

[1:16] Rory O'Malley: And I connected with her immediately.

[1:18] Rory O'Malley: We kept in touch over email and Twitter.

[1:22] Rory O'Malley: And so when I got to Los Angeles, I said, can I please sit down with you and have a conversation about your one wonderful career and all the things that you've done from being in the original Grease before it even got to Broadway to Taxi to Evening Shade to tons of movies.

[1:41] Rory O'Malley: She was in the revival of Chicago.

[1:43] Rory O'Malley: She took over for Anne Reinking and has done a lot of other Broadway shows.

[1:48] Rory O'Malley: She is a veteran of the stage, film, and TV.

[1:51] Rory O'Malley: And she's also gone on to do tons of books on health, fitness, well-being.

[1:58] Rory O'Malley: She's a mogul.

[2:00] Rory O'Malley: She's a mogul, people.

[2:02] Rory O'Malley: She was gracious enough to invite me into her home, her beautiful, beautiful home that has an amazing view.

[2:10] Rory O'Malley: I got to meet her son, who's in college, and it was a real honor to get to speak with her.

[2:17] Rory O'Malley: She also has a very unique memory, which you will hear about.

[2:25] Rory O'Malley: She can remember everything that's ever happened to her and what day it happened, what she was wearing.

[2:31] Rory O'Malley: She has a really incredible gift.

[2:34] Rory O'Malley: And I first heard about it when I watched a 60 Minutes segment that she was on, and it was so popular that they did a follow-up with her, and you'll hear that we talk about it a lot on this podcast.

[2:46] Rory O'Malley: She's an incredible person.

[2:47] Rory O'Malley: This was a real treat for me to get to sit down and speak with her and ask her so many questions from, you know, how she's been able to raise a family to what was it like to work with Andy Kaufman and get all the Andy Kaufman stories I could.

[3:03] Rory O'Malley: So here, enjoy my wonderful conversation with Marilu Henner.

[3:10] Marilu Henner: Thank you so much for having me in your home.

[3:11] Marilu Henner: Oh my gosh, I first of all I love entertaining.

[3:13] Marilu Henner: I already offered you the entire cast of Hamilton can come here and do a party.

[3:17] Marilu Henner: And believe me, you're gonna regret it.

[3:20] Marilu Henner: I did so many parties.

[3:21] Marilu Henner: You know what we do?

[3:22] Marilu Henner: If it's cold, we'll put tables around the fountain out there or we do it downstairs.

[3:27] Marilu Henner: I mean, I've done 350 people in this house.

[3:30] Rory O'Malley: That's, uh, no, I mean this house is absolutely stunning.

[3:34] Rory O'Malley: The view, uh, all of Los Angeles, Runyon Canyon.

[3:38] Marilu Henner: Yeah.

[3:38] Rory O'Malley: How long have you lived here?

[3:40] Marilu Henner: Okay, so I moved, you now.

[3:42] Marilu Henner: I'm gonna give you dates.

[3:43] Marilu Henner: Oh, yeah, yeah.

[3:43] Marilu Henner: I moved in March the 23rd of 1989.

[3:46] Rory O'Malley: Wow.

[3:47] Marilu Henner: So yeah, so 28 years ago.

[3:49] Rory O'Malley: Wow.

[3:49] Marilu Henner: That was like two husbands ago.

[3:51] Marilu Henner: I mean, my, the father of my, my son Joey, who we just met, um, my second husband, even before we got married, we bought this house.

[3:59] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[3:59] Marilu Henner: And so then when we got a divorce after being together X amount of time in 2001 when we separated and decided to get a divorce, I said, I'm gonna buy the house from you.

[4:08] Marilu Henner: Because my kids were here, obviously.

[4:12] Marilu Henner: And I just wanted to live here and I just thought that's the same.

[4:14] Rory O'Malley: Oh, I mean, this is the kind of house that you just want to stay in forever.

[4:18] Marilu Henner: It has, thank you.

[4:19] Marilu Henner: It has the, it's a beautiful view, it's, uh, I mean a beautiful size, but it feels like a family living here.

[4:27] Marilu Henner: Oh yeah, which is so important.

[4:28] Marilu Henner: But I'm from Cleveland, you're from Chicago.

[4:30] Marilu Henner: Like a Midwest feeling of like people actually living in a home is something that's sometimes kind of hard to find in California.

[4:36] Rory O'Malley: I know, I know, you know.

[4:37] Marilu Henner: Well, the way I grew up was so unusual, so that, yeah, I, you know, and everybody now, all my siblings call this Henner West.

[4:43] Marilu Henner: You know, it's like we're all going to Henner West.

[4:45] Rory O'Malley: Yeah.

[4:45] Marilu Henner: So I wanted that kind of like craziness that I grew up with to sort of carry into my adult life.

[4:51] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[4:52] Marilu Henner: So I don't know.

[4:53] Marilu Henner: So you like, you like to have a constant stimulation of people surrounding you?

[4:57] Marilu Henner: Oh, I can, I, I, I have people, everybody stays here.

[5:02] Marilu Henner: This is during the holidays, this is always Camp Auntie Lou, you know, it's like so I have, you know, sometimes like 12 little kids, and you know, I mean, we do Christmas, and depending on how many people it is, it's never fewer than 28, and sometimes it's 42, and we just put extensions on this table and the table in the dining room, and I do all the cooking, and my sisters, you know, my two nieces, and I do all the...

[5:02] Rory O'Malley: You aren't someone who sits around.

[5:29] Rory O'Malley: You, I mean, you've used, you've done so much in your life.

[5:37] Rory O'Malley: And that is kind of one of the reasons that I'm most excited to talk with you.

[5:42] Rory O'Malley: This is called Living the Dream.

[5:42] Rory O'Malley: You've, you clearly have more than just one dream.

[5:46] Rory O'Malley: Sometimes people, when they're like, I want to be an actor, I don't know, I don't have any other interests, I don't really know what else to do.

[5:51] Rory O'Malley: But clearly, you've taken your success as an actress and channeled that into so many other different avenues of life, in writing books, in health, in family, and in so much of the work that you do with charity, or like in the fact that you are constantly creating, constantly stimulating yourself and your mind and putting yourself out there.

[6:17] Rory O'Malley: How do you keep that going?

[6:24] Marilu Henner: Well, a couple things.

[6:25] Marilu Henner: One, I've always had a lot of energy.

[6:27] Marilu Henner: In fact, my nickname as a little girl was Perpetual Motion.

[6:30] Marilu Henner: And my mom would say, Oh, Mary, burn off some of that energy.

[6:34] Marilu Henner: Yeah.

[6:35] Marilu Henner: Run around the block a couple of times, you know.

[6:37] Marilu Henner: And in fact, that's the name of my corporation, is Perpetual Motion Inc.

[6:41] Marilu Henner: And so I, and I grew up in such an unusual way.

[6:44] Marilu Henner: I don't know if you know this story, but I...

[6:49] Marilu Henner: Sure.

[6:49] Marilu Henner: I grew up in the heart of Chicago, right in like a nice, really cozy lower middle class neighborhood with a lot of Polish people and Greek people and German people, and not so many Greeks, mostly Polish, German, and Irish.

[7:02] Marilu Henner: Right in the heart of the city on Logan Boulevard, um, if you know what that is, and right next door to a Catholic school.

[7:11] Marilu Henner: And my mother was extremely entrepreneurial.

[7:13] Marilu Henner: She was Greek, my dad was Polish, they were first generation.

[7:17] Marilu Henner: And my mother always wanted to be a dancer, so she had a dancing school.

[7:21] Marilu Henner: And there was a fake garage that we built into a dance studio.

[7:26] Marilu Henner: And we had 200 students between the ages of two and eighty, including the nuns from the Catholic school next door, who would come over for stretch classes.

[7:36] Marilu Henner: And as soon as you were 14 in my house, you got a class.

[7:40] Marilu Henner: So you started teaching little girls or you started teaching little boys or whatever.

[7:44] Marilu Henner: My mother taught basically things like, you know, cha cha and jitterbug and social dancing.

[7:51] Marilu Henner: Right.

[7:51] Marilu Henner: And the rest of us, my sister Joanne, my sister Melody and I, and my brother Lauren, who's like the Bob Fosse of the neighborhood.

[7:57] Marilu Henner: Right.

[7:57] Marilu Henner: We taught little kids tap ballet and jazz.

[8:00] Marilu Henner: You taught.

[8:00] Marilu Henner: I, oh, I taught my whole life.

[8:02] Marilu Henner: I taught from the time I was 14 until I left to become a professional actress.

[8:06] Marilu Henner: Wow.

[8:07] Marilu Henner: And even kind of after that.

[8:08] Marilu Henner: Um, I always taught dancing, but I taught to like little kids and teenagers.

[8:12] Marilu Henner: Um, but that wasn't enough for my mother.

[8:14] Marilu Henner: My mom also was a major, major hairdresser, and ran a beauty shop, a salon out of our kitchen with about 25 women from the neighborhood who would come over and get their hair done.

[8:26] Marilu Henner: So the kitchen was set up like a salon, like Steel Magnolias or something, and instead of a refrigerator in the kitchen that was in the basement, yeah, there was a blue hair drying chair instead, where the refrigerator was supposed to be.

[8:39] Marilu Henner: And the house smelled like perm solution, and it always like somebody was getting their hair cut, and then she also went over and cut the nuns' hair in the at the Catholic church next door.

[8:48] Marilu Henner: She would do house calls for, yeah, for the convent and for the priests.

[8:52] Marilu Henner: She also took them bra shopping at Vassaret, you know.

[8:55] Marilu Henner: I mean, it was like we had backstage passes to Catholicism.

[8:58] Rory O'Malley: Wow.

[8:59] Marilu Henner: So we grew up with the city.

[9:00] Rory O'Malley: Did you grow up Catholic?

[9:01] Marilu Henner: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[9:02] Marilu Henner: Catholic high school, Catholic grade school, all girls Catholic high school.

[9:05] Marilu Henner: The best education, you know.

[9:06] Rory O'Malley: Yeah.

[9:07] Marilu Henner: But that still was not enough.

[9:08] Marilu Henner: Upstairs from us, because it was like a typical Chicago two-flat, you know, which is like they have a lot of houses like that in Queens and Brooklyn and things.

[9:16] Marilu Henner: My uncle, my mother's younger brother, lived upstairs with 10 cats, two dogs, two birds, a skunk, 150 fish, and his boyfriend Charles.

[9:25] Marilu Henner: And he lived upstairs, and he taught art at the Catholic grammar school next door.

[9:29] Marilu Henner: He was Mr. Collis, the art teacher.

[9:31] Marilu Henner: But everybody really called him uncle, even though he wasn't everybody's uncle.

[9:35] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[9:35] Marilu Henner: And he taught art classes after school.

[9:37] Marilu Henner: So after school, we had the dancing school in the backyard, the beauty shop in the kitchen, the art classes going on upstairs, and my uncle was also the neighborhood astrologist, so people would come over for art, uh, for astrology readings, and he ran a cat hospital on our roof.

[9:51] Marilu Henner: So that's how I grew up.

[9:52] Rory O'Malley: That's so, that so this is completely calm.

[9:55] Marilu Henner: Oh, this is a good thing.

[9:55] Rory O'Malley: Compared to where you grew up.

[9:59] Marilu Henner: I mean, talk about perpetual motion.

[10:01] Marilu Henner: Yeah.

[10:01] Rory O'Malley: Like, how could I, I can't imagine how active you were if you stood out in that?

[10:06] Marilu Henner: Yeah, it's true.

[10:07] Marilu Henner: I know there was always so much activity at my house, and it just gave me that, it gave all of us that really entrepreneurial spirit.

[10:14] Marilu Henner: So just, I don't want to say just being an actress.

[10:17] Marilu Henner: So being an actress, only being an actress was never gonna, it was never gonna satisfy my writing interests and my, you know, my teaching people things, my memory certainly was unusual.

[10:30] Marilu Henner: And so I was able to always record things and stuff.

[10:32] Marilu Henner: So, you know, this, I always wanted to do more than just because when you are an actor, no matter what level you're at, you're always waiting for someone to come to you with a job.

[10:32] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[10:32] Marilu Henner: You're always waiting.

[10:43] Marilu Henner: So if you aren't active, if you weren't creating something on your own, you're out of luck until something comes along.

[10:50] Rory O'Malley: So that just is not what the person, way too passive for the kind of life that you came from in Chicago and the family that you came from.

[11:00] Marilu Henner: But we have to immediately talk about the memory stuff because I think it is one, just so fascinating to me.

[11:08] Marilu Henner: And two, I think it's, it must have shaped so much of who you are.

[11:13] Marilu Henner: It's funny.

[11:14] Marilu Henner: Yes, no question about it.

[11:16] Marilu Henner: But it, until the whole 60 Minutes thing came about, I had no idea, two things, how unusual it was.

[11:23] Marilu Henner: I knew I was the only person in my family, and then my circle of friends, and then in the people that I knew, but I had no idea how rare it is in the world and how, you know, how we've now changed medical books and science books and stuff and research, especially research for like Alzheimer's and dementia and things like that.

[11:43] Marilu Henner: Um, and I'm just so happy it was discovered during my life to give time because I love contributing to the testing and, you know, research and everything.

[11:50] Rory O'Malley: Well, well, let's go back and look at what it is.

[11:53] Marilu Henner: It's called, I, I don't have it because I can't remember what it's called.

[11:56] Marilu Henner: So maybe the name is, is now called highly superior autobiographical memory, HSAM.

[12:02] Marilu Henner: First they were calling it hyperthymesia, and then they realized that's not a good name.

[12:06] Marilu Henner: Okay, so it's highly superior autobiographical memory, and basically what it means.

[12:10] Marilu Henner: Well, first of all, they, they've done research on people and they find out that most people remember eight to eleven events within any given year of their lives.

[12:19] Marilu Henner: If I started talking to you about 2002 or 1997 or whatever, you could probably sit here and come up with eight to eleven events within any given year.

[12:30] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[12:30] Marilu Henner: That's so sad to me.

[12:32] Marilu Henner: Right.

[12:33] Marilu Henner: Because I remember virtually every single day of my life.

[12:36] Marilu Henner: So the criteria for HSAM is 200 plus.

[12:39] Marilu Henner: Right.

[12:39] Marilu Henner: But there's like a group of us in the 99 percentile that remember 365 or 366 if it's a leap year, and we've been tested.

[12:47] Marilu Henner: They've basically taken cheek samples, hair samples, blood samples, muscle testing, saliva samples, of course.

[12:53] Marilu Henner: Um, they've wired me, put me through an MRI, fired up questions, um, you know, five asked me questions to see how my brain fires up.

[13:03] Marilu Henner: And they took 300 measurements of my brain and found nine areas ten times larger than the normal brain.

[13:10] Rory O'Malley: Wow.

[13:11] Marilu Henner: Yeah.

[13:11] Marilu Henner: But I know, I know from, for me that it's, it's definitely been a combination of nature and nurture.

[13:19] Marilu Henner: I think I was definitely born with something very unusual.

[13:21] Rory O'Malley: Sure.

[13:21] Marilu Henner: But as a little girl, I knew I had an unusual memory, and I loved it.

[13:25] Marilu Henner: Because it differentiated me from my six brothers and sisters.

[13:29] Marilu Henner: And all the dogs and animals and all the, yeah, I can imagine that you would be like, it, it, there must have been a point where it went from being a party trick, though, to being, and to be something that would impress people to being like, oh my.

[13:43] Marilu Henner: Well, I didn't think of it as a party trick.

[13:44] Marilu Henner: I would just be like, what?

[13:45] Marilu Henner: You don't remember this?

[13:47] Marilu Henner: Come on.

[13:47] Marilu Henner: Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[13:49] Marilu Henner: Because people would say when I was little, they'd say to my mom, what's with that kid in her memory?

[13:53] Marilu Henner: She remembers the little day I was here, what I was wearing, what we talked about.

[13:56] Marilu Henner: You know, and so I was called like Miss Memory and the Memory Kid and Univac, and which is an old computer.

[14:01] Marilu Henner: And people, you know, they knew in I became this the family historian.

[14:06] Rory O'Malley: Yeah.

[14:06] Marilu Henner: So it wasn't so much, nobody ever thought of it as a trick as much as they thought of it as like something's unusual.

[14:12] Marilu Henner: It was beyond a trick.

[14:13] Marilu Henner: Yeah.

[14:13] Marilu Henner: Because it, I mean it was too of course.

[14:15] Marilu Henner: It's too pronounced and, and, and it's just there.

[14:15] Rory O'Malley: Yeah.

[14:15] Marilu Henner: It's just there.

[14:21] Rory O'Malley: I think of myself as being fairly good with dates, but it's like I can remember what year something happened.

[14:27] Marilu Henner: Yeah.

[14:28] Rory O'Malley: When's your birthday?

[14:28] Marilu Henner: Because I don't even know.

[14:29] Marilu Henner: December 23rd, 1980.

[14:31] Rory O'Malley: Okay, so December 23rd, 1980.

[14:33] Marilu Henner: That was a Tuesday, right?

[14:35] Rory O'Malley: I yeah.

[14:36] Marilu Henner: Okay, but I know, yeah.

[14:37] Marilu Henner: December 23rd, 1980. I know exactly what I was doing on that day.

[14:41] Rory O'Malley: Why would you show you?

[14:42] Marilu Henner: And I was in Chicago. I mean, I remember shopping exactly what I was doing December 23rd, 1980.

[14:43] Rory O'Malley: December 23rd.

[14:48] Rory O'Malley: All right, so you were born 1980.

[14:50] Marilu Henner: Yeah.

[14:50] Rory O'Malley: So your 21st birthday would have been 2001.

[14:53] Marilu Henner: Yeah.

[14:54] Rory O'Malley: Right?

[14:55] Marilu Henner: Okay, so 2001. So do you remember how you celebrated your 25th?

[14:58] Marilu Henner: This was one of the questions on 60 minutes.

[15:00] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[15:01] Rory O'Malley: So do you remember what you did?

[15:02] Marilu Henner: Do I remember my 21st birthday? Half of it.

[15:05] Marilu Henner: Half of it, yeah.

[15:06] Rory O'Malley: Do you remember what day of the week it was? Or do you remember anything about it? Because this is a 60 minutes question.

[15:11] Marilu Henner: I remember like that. I had a chicken hat that my friend Jennifer Dunn made me wear a chicken hat.

[15:18] Marilu Henner: Like I I don't know if that's what I'm saying. You remember what day of the week it was?

[15:20] Rory O'Malley: Oh no.

[15:21] Marilu Henner: Around what time? Do you remember?

[15:23] Marilu Henner: I don't remember what day of the week it was. No, absolutely no clue.

[15:28] Marilu Henner: Um, I assume it was a weekend, but it's hard because my birthday is right before Christmas, so everyone's always talking.

[15:34] Rory O'Malley: It was a Sunday.

[15:35] Marilu Henner: It was a Sunday. I mean, I could tell you, you know, I could tell you like 1997, your birthday was a Tuesday.

[15:44] Marilu Henner: And uh, you know, in in yeah, it's like in nineteen eighty-eight. Your your birthday was on a Friday. One of the one of the just there, it's there, and I see what I was doing on that day. It's like boom, boom.

[15:55] Marilu Henner: And and you're like, are you pulling the files? Like, you know, when I have to like think about a memory, I have to kind of try to search. Do you know what I mean?

[16:02] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[16:02] Marilu Henner: Like if I go to a memory and I'm like just like when you asked me about my 21st birthday, I had to be like, okay, now let me think about this.

[16:08] Marilu Henner: Where was I? What where is that file?

[16:11] Marilu Henner: So for you, is it just kind of right there?

[16:14] Marilu Henner: It's kind of right there. It's almost like it's almost it's it's um I this is the closest that I can describe it to people. Because I, you know, I I've been describing it since I was a little girl, so I'd say, well, it's like a card catalog.

[16:27] Marilu Henner: It's like people wouldn't understand filing.

[16:29] Rory O'Malley: Yeah.

[16:29] Marilu Henner: It's kind of like a timeline, yeah, a sequential timeline, but it's it's almost like uh scene selection on a DVD lined up in a file, like in a timeline with all the videos right next to each other and they're all going simultaneously, and I can go and just swoop in.

[16:47] Rory O'Malley: So you that 60 minutes uh life changing seeing all of you together and when they would go through different dates and you would be oh yes, and this is this day of the week and that and seeing you bond right over something that you hadn't had that bond with anyone else before was kind of profound and beautiful.

[17:10] Marilu Henner: Yeah.

[17:10] Marilu Henner: I love gonna see that and the second time with the child.

[17:14] Rory O'Malley: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. To see you guys all kind of see you taking him. I wonder how he's doing by the way.

[17:19] Marilu Henner: I hope he's okay.

[17:20] Marilu Henner: Yeah, I'm sure he's fine because his parents were very they embraced it. I mean a lot it's funny though, because a lot of times people write to me or they see me, and now everybody that's all people want to talk about.

[17:31] Rory O'Malley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[17:32] Marilu Henner: But people stop me and they'll say, Oh, you know, my daughter has this, or my child, my cousin has this, or something. I say, you know what, you're worried about it? Get him into acting. Because nothing will be more valuable to someone who's studying to be an actor than learning how to embrace your memories, your past, your ability to recall things.

[17:52] Marilu Henner: And writing.

[17:53] Marilu Henner: And writing, yeah. I'd go, I'd go to uh an acting class and do a sense memory exercise, and they'd say, like, you know, bring in a piece of music or a fabric or or a smell or something like that, or photograph, and it'd be like instant. They go, How are you there so fast? And it's like, how are you not?

[18:09] Rory O'Malley: No.

[18:09] Marilu Henner: Yeah. I mean, we just we uh before we started when I met your son, you described the day he was born.

[18:16] Rory O'Malley: Yeah.

[18:17] Marilu Henner: In like detail and in of course, that's a day that many.

[18:21] Marilu Henner: Of course, and memories tied to adrenaline. So that's why people remember highs and lows. What I'm trying to do through my books and my research and my teaching classes, and I'm gonna do a memory show for lifetime. I'm trying to bring back all those middle of the, you know, what I call the our town moments, those little moments that people tend to forget because they aren't tied to adrenaline.

[18:39] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[18:39] Marilu Henner: They they almost you to you turn those those moments in your life to feelings more, you know, like when you walk in somewhere and you're gonna be able to do it.

[18:46] Rory O'Malley: Well, some people do, not everybody does that.

[18:48] Marilu Henner: Do you mean like sometimes people hold on to things and some people don't?

[18:52] Marilu Henner: Oh my gosh, totally. Or and everything you've ever been through is on your emotional hard drive, and it makes you behave in certain ways. You just not might not be able to access it. The people of HSTM, we just happen to have extraordinary retrieval systems.

[19:04] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[19:04] Marilu Henner: But you could be in the middle of a massage and someone touches you, and it's like, oh my god, why did that memory come back? Or you smell something, yeah, or you hear something, or you taste something, and it's like, oh my god, I'm back in my grandmother's, or yeah, or whatever. Yeah, that that's in there. But I but it's hard to recall the exact origin of them, and you you just have that right at your fingertips.

[19:25] Rory O'Malley: So you got into how did you start becoming an actress?

[19:31] Marilu Henner: Very young. Well, my family had this dancing school. So people would call and they'd say, Oh, we need 12 kids for the king and I. It's like, oh, pick me, pick me. We need two kids for South Pacific. You know, pick me, pick me. So I would just start doing plays. And my oldest sister, who's like 10 grades ahead of me, she's nine and a half years, but she um she did uh was always like this lead in school plays and her college plays. So I'd be like the little girl following her around with her her script and run lines with her. And she was also starting to choreograph uh for different high schools around the city. So I'd go and help her do that as well. So I was just always around theater people, and I had was like a very good student, so you know, I was able to get my homework done and kind of do so. I always knew I wanted to be an actress. I mean, in sixth grade, you know, the other girls stayed on Tuesdays for none club, but I went home with the boys, you know.

[20:23] Rory O'Malley: Right I wasn't gonna do none unless it was sounding right, right, right, right.

[20:28] Marilu Henner: Unless they were singing, yeah, unless they were singing. So so you you were into it from the beginning, but did you know that you were going to do it professionally right away?

[20:37] Marilu Henner: Oh you I mean, I had ideas that I knew. I knew I was gonna be out of my neighborhood, I knew I was gonna go to Broadway. I mean, I had stars in my eyes, and that was gonna be it.

[20:46] Rory O'Malley: Production that you were a part of was Greece.

[20:49] Marilu Henner: It's pretty crazy. Well, what happened was I started doing, you know, Chicago's got an incredible community theater system, right? So I started doing plays at Hull House and stuff, and there was a production I did, I was 15 years old, and it was like all these people who were like a lot older than I was, but I, you know, would do my homework on the bus because I thought, oh, I, you know, I want to do both. So it was a production of the boyfriend, and it was great. I played Dulcie, and it was a had that number and everything else, and um. And um, like a year, you know, two years later, one of the guys who who was in the show with me, who was actually over 10 years older than I was, but he worked um in the advertising business.

He called me and he said, Henner, I uh I've written a show, it may never get off the ground. I want you to be part of it. Uh, we're gonna perform it in a converted trolley barn at the uh Kingston Mines Theater. I wrote it about the kids I went to high school with, and it's called Greece. So we walked in for the first rehearsal, and there were two stacks of paper, and I'm indicating about 15 inches high, you know, at least a foot high. Right. Two stacks. One of them was songs, so the songs were passed out, and we tried different songs, and the other one was scenes. So there was like the polio shot scene, the book report scene, the lunchroom scene, the rumble scene, the pajama party scene, you know, the buying a new car scene, you know, all those things.

And slowly but surely that became Greece. And now I was a real goody two shoes. I mean, I was, you know, outstanding teenager of Illinois, four scholarships, go to university, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now I'm playing a greaser, which was so different than my own kind of makeup. But I loved it because I got to tease my hair, and we put we were such a tough Chicago gang of girls that we teased our hair and put razor blades in it, and all the girls were a lot older than I was, but I loved being part of this gang. And I I thought it was like so much fun. We assaulted the audience, we came up through the aisle and like practically stepped on people's fingers, and it was so different than anything that I was doing in my life in real life.

But it was such a cool experience because it was so, and here's the crazy thing. Okay, so Greece is really about 1959, 1960, because that's when Jim uh graduated. This was 1971. So only 11 years had passed, and people were already the 60s though were so intense that people were feeling nostalgic for the late 50s. Like, oh, we haven't seen it. I mean, if you this would doing Greece Now would be like doing a show about 2009, right? You know, like when I think quite. Yeah, but it's just it's it is crazy to me. So and so much of the 60s and the 50s because my mom was a baby boomer. Like I feel like I was born in 1980, yet I feel like I lived every year of the 60s because they weighed so heavy on our culture. Of course, I know every year, like talk about you know, knowing what happened in certain years. I know a lot about those 60s before you were born.

[23:43] Marilu Henner: I was there. But I I'm sure that like having some nostalgia after coming out of that decade for you know, easier times. Simpler times, or you know, those high school years for for that generation is really important. And and the show was 75% book, 25% music, and now it it became 75% music, 25% book. So someone like Tom Moore was brilliant enough to know how to fashion it. Right. But what happened? Uh wait, can I just ask you? Are we we have a lot of time?

[24:12] Rory O'Malley: We have as much time as you want.

[24:14] Marilu Henner: Okay, so if we I mean my show's at I have to be there at 7 30.

[24:17] Rory O'Malley: No, no, no.

[24:19] Marilu Henner: Are we okay for me to like really expand on something? Because you you could turn this into more than one podcast, right?

[24:23] Rory O'Malley: Oh, yeah.

[24:24] Marilu Henner: I'm gonna do it. It's a 10 part series with Mary Leonard. And she's only done one year so far.

[24:31] Rory O'Malley: No, but I mean, so it was so intense, and people loved it so much. So we became this huge Chicago hit. And then people from New York saw the show and they loved it, and they asked some of us to come and audition. Right. But I thought it's such a Chicago show. I have these four scholarships at University of Chicago. Plus, my father had just had died, you know, like within that last year. And I thought, I can't, I shouldn't take the risk and lose the school time, right?

[25:01] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[25:02] Marilu Henner: Of course, I was kicking myself in the ass when I realized how incredible the show was because I went to see it on a spring break. And then on Broadway, and I just could not believe how unbelievable it was. And then I got a call. It was November the 27th of 1972. And I was this just starting my junior year. I was only gonna have to do three years of college because I placed out of a lot. Okay. But I got a call from Jim Jacobs. He said, like, henna, the national company starts tomorrow. If you come to New York this afternoon, I saved the part of Marty for you, you'll get the part, but you have to be here. And I said, Jim, I have two papers due on I have two papers due this weekend. This was a Monday morning.

I said, I have two papers due by Friday. I'm on my way to the library right now. I love you so much. Thank you for thinking of me, but I just I can't do it. I'm in a show, I'm in a relationship. No, I can't, you know, my roommates will I see it. Thank you so much. Anyway, so I hung up from him and I started walking toward the library. And my car was parked in front of the library, which never happens. So I looked at my car, looked at the library, looked at my car, looked at the library, my car, the library, threw my books in the car, went to the airport, flew student standby, went to to the audition and got it. And they said, be here for the first rehearsal tomorrow. My heart was pounding. I thought, oh my God, I just got cast in the first national company of Greece.

And I called my mother and I said, Mom, I'm not at school. I'm, you know, I'm gonna do this. Jim called me, blah, blah, blah. And she's like, oh Mary, I'm so happy because you could have been a doctor. You could have been, I really wanted you always in show business. So he was so happy. So that was it. So I slept on Jim's couch, and the next day I went to the first rehearsal and walked into this room. Now imagine in this room, Jeff Conway was playing Danny Zuko. Right. Uh, Jerry Zachs was playing Kanicki, Michael Lembeck, who of course, you know, did the directed the pilot of Everybody Loves Raymond and Bazillion Friends episodes. He was Sunny. John Travolta was playing Duty. Judy Kay, big Broadway actress, was playing Rizzo.

Uh and rehearsing with us for the London company to play Danny was Richard Gere. Okay. Johnny and I were the two youngest, and we bonded instantly. We were both from big families, and he wanted to know everything about duty and what I knew about Greece and stuff. And that was it. They gave me 15 hours to go home, pack up my life, throw a note under the bursar's uh, you know, door, and yeah, and I did it.

[27:38] Rory O'Malley: That must have been one of the scariest things you've ever done in your career in retrospect.

[27:45] Marilu Henner: Yeah, because because uh, you know, taking a chance like that early on, those those big chances that you take, and obviously, because you had you had a life, you had something that you were giving up. You had something that you had to kind of sacrifice just to step away from. But my God, to be in a room with all of those people, clearly, like that that room and that those people who were there formed what the next few years after that were.

[28:11] Marilu Henner: Well, and especially and Greece really did it. You know, I mean, it's crazy how many people came through Greece that then became very successful. So it was almost like the best training ground. It's interesting because my son Nick, you met Joey. Yeah. But Nick is now, he wants to be a director. He's like an extraordinary talent, very handsome, and he's gonna be an incredible director. I wish he would be an actor director, but anyway, because he did a lot of people. But get a deck. His best friend is Ben Platt. Oh, right. And they went to school together. And uh his girlfriend is Molly Gordon, who's the young female lead on um Animal Kingdom, and she's in the new Melissa McCarthy movie that'll be out next summer.

And her mother's Jesse Nelson, who wrote uh waitress, and her father is Brian Gordon, and so you know, and he they know all these kids, Noah Galvin. I mean, like these kids, all and Beanie Feldstein, what am I talking about? Beanie's been Joe uh Nikki's best friend since they're before they're born, because my is her mom and I are best friends, right?

[29:08] Marilu Henner: And so they grew up together, yeah, and ended up gradually. So they're all surrounded by so yeah, but I mean they didn't have the sort of like, you know, Ellis Island of Greece, you know, yeah. It's amazing that these kids have all found one another and have become this the movers and shakers of this next generation. It's funny you say that about Greece being Ellis Island, or you know, and I think I know what you're saying by that, by like bringing so many people together in a room and starting their careers off. Yeah, I really think that's what Hamilton is doing, and I'm not saying that for myself, but you know, I really feel like there's this whole new crop of actors, especially in our tour, they're like right out of college.

If that they're gonna be able to do that. And they're being given a chance. And they're being given a chance. Which is it would not have been in the Greece Days, you know. Right, yes, absolutely. Because I mean, that's why it's so great, because the diversity, and it also, you know, plays with your mind to say, yeah, that's what the winding files are fathers. We're like scrappy and immigrants and right, right. You know, and it's also like it's inspiring a whole new generation of people coming to the theater, people of color, seeing other people like playing these parts, and not just considering like, oh, I can be on stage, but saying, like, oh, the story of George Washington is my story too.

Yeah. Anyway. And I gave it a late. See how I got to Hamilton. That's great. No, Hamilton is. Yeah, let me tell you something. Last year the Schuberts called me and they said, Would you do us a favor? We want you to do a thing for us in um in uh New Orleans. And I said, Great. And you know, I'm a speaker, I go all over the country doing speaking things, and I do all kinds of stuff. But I would have done it for the Schuberts anyway. And they said, Well, what can uh you know, what can we give you? What you're gonna do? No, I want tickets to Hamilton. Just get me tickets to Hamilton. So I did, and I saw one of the last performances of everybody. I saw it uh on July the 6th, right before everybody left.

That's right. Yeah. Yeah, like one of the last years. That's right. Was that when you came with Derek? The first time. No. The first time Derek, I came on September the 7th. Okay. Wednesday. Great. Both of them were Wednesdays. Um, yeah, no, I I was of last year. I was here at listening to 2006. You know the city. Because you know, people got like me. Yeah. No, um, I I remember you coming at least the second time with Derek. I didn't know. Well, I mean, yeah, the second time I came with Derek. Yes. First time I did. It was a whole lot of new people the second time that we saw it. Yeah. I saw the whole new, a whole new crop of actors. Um, okay, so you're in Greece, you're on a national tour, which is uh for me, what I've realized in getting to do the show in San Francisco and Los Angeles, I've only done shows, you know, put big productions of shows on Broadway.

How thrilling it is to take a show to a city. I bet Greece couldn't have been more. Well, I don't know how they felt about Wednesday afternoon. With all the blue-haired ladies that walked out and they all looked like they had those 3D glasses on. Yeah. And you thought, oh my God. And with the first, can I swear or not? Yes, you can. With the first fuck you, we lost like a third of our audience, you know, that kind of thing. So it was really, I mean, it was a very interesting experience. And the first Grease, well, the first first Grease, the original Grease was ridiculously, you know. My my one character said fuck you seven times. Really? Yeah. But but it was so filthy. And then the Broadway version, the first Broadway version was still like they sanitized it, but not that much.

Right. And the subsequent ones have been so much less, you know. Yeah, yeah. They clean it up. They clean it up as they go along. Especially now it's done in like every high school. Oh, excuse me. Joey, when he was eight, he played Sonny. Nice. And Nick and Nikki played because he was nine and a half, he played uh Danny. So yeah. So I know they didn't. Yeah, they weren't swearing. So you uh you're doing a national tour. I'm doing a national tour. I make it back to Chicago. Make it back to Chicago. Oh my gosh, I'm finally like in my home town. And I'm back at school apartment and everything else, like, oh, I'm girl in my hometown. And we were started at the Blackstone and we were moving to the Schubert.

So we uh actually ended up with an extra day off because we went from a Saturday night to a Sunday schedule. Anyway, we had they had to move the change the set and move to a different theater because it was such a big hit there. Yeah. So uh a friend of mine said, Oh, come to New York. This is so cool. Come to New York. I said, okay, because she was doing Frenchie on Broadway at the time. So she said, I've got a singing lesson. Just meet me at the theater. And I went, okay. Yeah, you know, I'd stayed with her, and then it was like we ran errands and stuff. So I walk in, and there's rear they're auditioning for a show. There's a new show going on over here with the Andrew sisters. And I said, Oh man, I haven't. I said, I know I'm not right for any of their parts.

I said, but uh, let me go out and say the hi and everything. So I went out and walked backward. And my hair was short and I just lost some weight because I was always up and down my weight before I figured out health. And so I walked in, they were like, Oh my gosh, it's great to see you. And they said, Are you here to audition? And I said, No. And they said, You might be right for one of the parts. And I sang and thought nothing of it. And a week later they called me and they said, You have to come back. I flew in the morning, came back in the afternoon, did a show that night. And the next day, during the intermission of a Wednesday matinee at the Schubert Theater, I get they say to me, You got the part.

So now I'm upended again, and I moved to New York to do the Broadway show. Over here, and what part of Johnny? I was Donna, the waitress. The waitress. And I played opposite Treat Williams. Oh. And Annie Ranking was my dressing roommate. Oh my Phyllis Somerville was in the show. And Janie Sell and the Andrew sisters. And well, here's here. I'm very excited to get to tell you this. I was Billy, my freshman year of high school in over here. I can't remember. I that wasn't with Donna or whatever your character went to be a good one. No, no, no. You were the young getting married who wanted to get married just to get laid. Yes. Yes, that's right. No, you really mind until the end of time to kiss your lips wine.

Oh baby. Yeah. I love that song. That's my favorite show. Yeah. No, it was it was a good. I did it at the all-girls school, Magnificat High School in Cleveland, Ohio. Great female roles. Yeah. And I was Billy. And you're Bill. I think it was Billy. Bill. Yes. No, then I was Billy in the next show. I was had this like running gag that I only played Bill's or Billy's. I was Billy in anything goes. Uh-huh. That's what I was doing. Oh yeah. Bill. Yeah. The memory on this one. I know. Oh. Yeah. So you get a Broadway, you're in your broadcast. I'm doing a Broadway show. I the first preview happens and I get calls from six agents the next day. I couldn't believe it. And I was 21 years old. And it was like, oh my gosh.

Okay. So you had you didn't have an agent at that time. No, I didn't have an agent. No, I just, you know, it's like, we'll give you this. I was like, okay. All right. You know, I thought I was going back to Chicago today. I mean, I knew I was gonna do this. I didn't know if I was gonna do it then or go back to school for a while or whatever. But then that was it. I just started doing that, and then I started doing a ton of commercials. I did 72 commercials in two years. In New York City. In New York City. Wow. I did you wouldn't believe the commercials I did. It's funny because I I'm doing my club act here in LA. Yeah. But you'll be doing the show, unfortunately, but maybe you can come to a rehearsal.

But I tell some of these stories in the club act because here's the thing. I not only sang in commercials like I love saving in the springtime, Samsonite. I was the Samsonite luggage girl. Amazing. I did it's uh family night at Ponderosa, everything you say night at Ponderosa, right? Yeah, and then I did four Play Tech Sproad commercials. Um, it's got Sash here and sing with support, two play text panties commercials, super look, sheer, super look, sheer. Wait, were you singing and singing and you saw in that one you saw my butt walking my dog, walking around Lincoln Center, getting on a bus, bowling. The the audition for it was just shooting your crotch in your butt. You saw all the Polaroids lined up.

Oh but I was also I I did so many commercials. I did everything from Gleam Toothpaste to Pina Reese's peanut butter cups to to I was Annie Sullivan in an Exxon bicentennial minute because I told my my um agent that I knew that it the uh you know the alphabet. Yeah I knew you know yeah yeah they called it the Deaf and Dumb alphabet. I don't think they say that anymore. But anyway, so I told him I knew that. So I did this whole thing that was based on the merit co-worker, and I got a Clio nomination for that as well. And I did so many commercials. It took me 40 to get my first one because I was always 40 auditions, yeah, yeah. This is what people don't realize as actors, because I'm sure you hear have a lot of actors listening to it, yeah.

You have first of all, you have to fall in love with auditioning because that is what we do, and it's it's let's face it, if you go into it with the right attitude and think this is the only 10 minutes I have this job, so I might as well, you know, make it my job. Yeah, and I for 40 auditions was just always trying to overthink, like what do they want? What do they want? And I was trying to fit myself, deny myself. I'd leave my personality outside and then just go in and do like what I thought they wanted. Yeah, and then a friend of mine called me in for an audition that I was wrong for, but he wanted to see me, so he had me go in. But I thought, oh, if Michael's calling me in, Michael Gibson, he's an arranger.

I'm gonna, you know, do I'm just gonna do that. Was for Mr. Coffee. My new Mr. Coffee has me in a world, you know, anyway. It's crazy how things come back. Yeah, okay. So I went in and he called me that night and he said, uh, he said you you did we almost changed the concept for you, but um you were so much fun in that audition. I can see why you're not getting uh commercials because you you're not being you, you've got to go in there and be you. Today you were you, we almost changed it, but next time you're you, trust me, you're gonna get the job. Yeah, and I did. I just started booking one right after the next. Wow, and made a big difference. I think that's I think you're absolutely right.

That's it's commercials are anything that if you go in and you stop trying to be whatever version you think they want of you, or whatever version it is you think that it would be better if it was, go in there with what it says in your heart, either the character or if it's a commercial, you yourself be genuine and authentic, and people will be able to do that. Well, read that much more, yeah. Yeah, otherwise, you look you're you know, as my acting teacher used to say, you're in the land where elephants die, and you know, as somebody who's got a lot of energy, I just look constipated, you know. It's because I like extract my personality, I'm not gonna have this energy, you know and you know I just started.

I mean, I did everything, Ponderosa Steakhouse, as I sang for you before. I did like everything, every kind of commercial barnett banks. I mean, I did so many different commercials. So that was your start into the TV world, right? So is taxi like it lay around that time? Well, what happened was I auditioned for a movie and got it and found out um Wednesday, April 6, 1977, that I was going to go be flown to Los Angeles for a screen test. It's actually my birthday, so I would remember that away. But it was like very exciting, and I was going to screen test, and I screen tested opposite my buddy Richard Gere, because everything is connected to everything. Yeah, I got the part, and that's what moved me, moved me to Los Angeles.

And then Joel Therm, uh casting director, who just liked me, he called me in for everything. So he said, I've got a project that you're too young for because they wanted, I was 25, and they wanted a 35-year-old Italian New Yorker, and it was right around the time of Unmarried Woman and Um uh uh Goodbye Girl. So they wanted her to have like a semi-teenage, you know, kind of middle school or teenage daughter. Sure. And it was the audition for taxi, and nothing was written. It was a 12 on the air commitment. There was only a monologue of me on the phone calling my daughter, saying I'm picking her up after she's visiting my ex-husband, you know, her dad, and I'm picking her up at the airport, and I'm not gonna be bringing a car, I'm gonna be bringing a taxi.

So that was a monologue that I had read, and they kept bringing me back and saying, 'Gosh, she's so young, she's so this. Can she go toe-to-toe with somebody like a Judd Hirsch? We were anyway. They oh man, this is such a long story, but I'll give you the the highlights. Okay. I had a contract with CBS because they just really liked me at CBS in New York and Jean, I met Jean Guest and everything. So they I had a contract for CBS. They called me to honor the contract and do the show Paper Chase. But I had just arrived in Rio at the time. I was dating John Travolta, and we were in Rio. I think we're gonna need the whole story. No, and there was no FedEx in those days and no fax machines. So I said, I said, I'll only come back if I can do it as a guest star because I really didn't want to get on a plane.

I just literally just landed. And they said, okay, you can do it as a guest star. So I did the paper chase as a guest star and then honored the contract by doing a pilot called Leonard opposite Leonard Fry. And then they that died, but they tested Paper Chase at the same time they were trying to figure out what they're gonna do about taxi, and I tested higher than anybody, but they didn't have me under contract, so they threw a ton of money at me, and I said, So now the taxi people were like, Oh, we don't want to lose her. So I ended up getting taxi. So I really had the choice, my choice between the two. Wow, and I'm so happy I did taxi. Yeah, yeah, it was great, it was life-changing. So, what was your decision though?

At that at such a young age to be able to make that decision? How did you go about that? Well, my mother was dying in Chicago. And the only time I left her bedside, her hospital room was uh to go and audition for taxi. And she had a good feeling about it, and I had a good feeling about it. And I've always, yeah, I think when you have a good memory, you sort of understand patterns and you see things. And I saw the word taxi in print when I was in Chicago, and I hadn't even had my first audition for it. And I said, I'm gonna get that job. Like for some reason, like it just jumped off the page to me. I didn't even know anything about it, but I just said, I'm gonna get that part. Yeah, I can imagine.

Yeah, patterns and seeing things and knowing what stands out. You can notice it right away. But they liked they liked that. I sort of looked like somebody who could be interested in art. They made instead of giving me a daughter, they gave me two little kids that were still too young for me to have. But yeah, and you know, my mom died, and a couple weeks later I got taxi, so I always felt like she arranged it. Was a part of that, yeah. Wow, that's really that's really beautiful. And you had and once again, you're in a cast in a room with these crazy. Well, you know what it's like, you do a classic thing, and and it's like the rest of my life, I'll be known for taxi, and you'll be known for Hamilton. And it's like, thank you, God, yeah, thank you, God. How nice to be part of a classic piece of absolutely of you know, art. Yes, absolutely.

[43:38] Marilu Henner: I mean, you I feel like Taxi changed television in so many different ways, and it was really because you had a cast, an ensemble of actors that had characters that were all so rich and genuine and true, and not just archetypes of something from the past. That was a new kind of story being told that people hadn't seen before, right? And was cutting edge, especially in the case. It was gritty, it wasn't on audio tape, I mean it wasn't on video tape. You know, it was like, I mean, when you think about the Thursday night lineup when the show first went on, the first one was, you know, Happy Days. So it's not day Tuesday, Happy Days, you know, and then you had Shlomiel Shalom, you had Laverne and Shirley, and then you had Three's Company, you know, come on, Naka, and then you had doo doo doo doo doo doo, and it was so oddball, yeah.

It was so dark compared to those candy colors of everybody else. So, you know, it was a gritty show, and they were, I don't want to say that we were losers, but we were people with a dream who weren't having their dreams realized every week. Right. But this cast adored one another.

[44:50] Marilu Henner: Oh, the producers had just come off of the run of, you know, Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda and Phyllis, so they wanted to write for guys, but they knew they had to put a woman in there, so it was like six guys and me. It was the perfect job. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, I mean, just I loved every single moment of it.

[45:06] Rory O'Malley: That's great. And you had the Andy Kaufman.

[45:09] Marilu Henner: Oh, yeah, I mean, like, I mean, larger than life type person, or like, was he? And I mean, you also did the movie about his life with Jim Carrey, which was like so, I mean, what was, I want to know like what it was like to work with him, but also doing the movie about working with him. Right. Was that that whole experience so weird?

[45:29] Marilu Henner: It was weird, and with all due respect to Jim Carrey, because I adore him. Yeah, I think he captured some of the crazy of, but you only saw the crazy. I mean, the thing that was really Andy's genius is that he could be the most normal, sweet, adorable person sitting next to you having a totally like Andy kind of, you know, boy next door conversation, and then go do something so crazy that you just, you could get whiplash from the segment, right? You know, and he was so, he only came in and also they made him sound, they made him sound much more negative than my experience with him.

[46:03] Rory O'Malley: Sure.

[46:04] Marilu Henner: It was darker, yeah, darker and more like angry than, you know, because he and I really got close, especially toward the end. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was. I had seen him like a month before he died and everything. Nice, I, it was the most choked up I've ever been because obviously I'm a talker. But I, at his funeral, I could barely talk, yeah, you know. So no, he was, he was very sweet, and you would never know that from the movie, right? But he definitely had his crazy. I mean, there's like so many stories. The one that they did show you about where he was, um, Tony Clifton, yeah, you know, that was pretty crazy because we had worked together. We started our very first read-through.

[46:45] Marilu Henner: Well, let me tell you a little backstory on my experience with Andy. I had seen him at the improv in Shaca in, uh, in um, uh New York. Okay, I'd seen him in 1976, actually, before I left New York in 77. And we, you know, we all went there after the show because, you know, we were Greece was like going on unemployment. You went in between jobs, right? Oh, yeah, I'll go back to Greece for a couple months. And so we went there a bunch of us after the show, and all of a sudden, this guy, like a little foreign guy, gets up and starts reading from The Great Gatsby, right? And you think, like, oh, that's funny, you know. And then he, by the time he gets to chapter two, people are throwing dinner rolls at him and straws and wadded up wet napkins.

Right. And he breaks down and cries, doesn't break character, and then breaks down and cries and sits, you know, like just weeps till the entire audience was like, and I remember hitting my boyfriend at the time, like, you jerk, look what you did, you know, and you just like stunned. And then he sort of looks like he's gonna walk away and he turns up stage, and then he pulls from the side of his pants two pieces of tape, reveals studs on the side of his pants, and turns around and does this Elvis thing, you know, like with his hair, and turns around to us and goes into the greatest Elvis imitation you've ever seen in your life. The audio people were screaming, standing on their tables, their chairs.

You've never seen anything like it. Because he pushed, pushed an audience. Like, is he really doing that? Is he not doing that? Is he doing, is this guy? This guy's really doing it. Oh my god, I hate this guy, you know. And he pushed, pushed, pushed, and then he'd do such an about face for something. It's unreal.

[48:22] Marilu Henner: Like, I feel like I'm so interested in him because of his ability to do that and what he did, and also the fact that you all were able to utilize your unique talents in Taxi because you all really did have very different strengths from Danny DeVito to Judd Hirsch to you to Andy Kaufman, like it was all, it all worked, but you're all so different, you know.

[48:46] Marilu Henner: We're all so different. I mean, Judd, you know, the show was Judd Hirsch in Taxi. Right. He had come off of Del Vecchio. Yeah, he had been on Broadway with Chapter Two, right? You know, and he was such a consummate actor and really knew drama. And he hadn't done a lot of comedy except for, you know, Chapter Two, of course. But he hadn't done a lot of sitcom comedy. Yeah. Um, and so when he got in, it was his generosity of spirit that really turned it into an ensemble show. And he was like the everyman, the person that the audience, you know, Judd and I were kind of like the parents of the group, and then there were the crazy relatives and the bratty teenagers and Bobby and Tony and stuff like that.

And then, you know, but Danny DeVito, a great story of, and I'll get back to Andy in a second. But Danny DeVito, a great story about Danny. Uh, he had done Cuckoo's Nest, he had done some off-Broadway type stuff. He was like really, really like not doing well. He was on his like last round of unemployment, and that was it. He always, he tells this story great that he had gotten down to like one shirt, one decent kind of clean shirt. He read his agents sent him the script for Louis De Palma, which is not described as Danny at all. He's just this like ruthless dispatcher, yeah. So Danny walks in and he says this so funny. He says that he was, his heart was pounding, he had the last ten dollars in his pocket, unemployment was out, and he knew that this was like do or die.

And he walks in with his script, and he's, and it was like Jim Brooks and all these guys, and he walked in because they went to like every audition. They, well, he walked in, he was like, uh, before we begin, let me ask you something. Who wrote this shit? And he threw it right, and in that moment, he got the part of Louie. That was it. So at that audition down to his last ten dollars with his last clean shirt. Wow. He was so Louis that it was that total commitment and taking that chance, and he got the part.

[50:39] Marilu Henner: Yeah, that could go either way.

[50:43] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[50:46] Marilu Henner: But they loved it. That's crazy. And by third year, he had, you know, by after the first two seasons, he had points. Yeah, you know, and he wasn't even supposed to be in every single episode. He was hired as seven out of 13. Wow. I know. But when he, in that first episode, because it wasn't a pilot, it was just the first episode. Yeah. And that first episode, because you see him in the cage. Yeah. And then when he comes out of the cage and he's like, Riga, Riga, Riga, Riga, like that. And he goes down the stairs and you realize how short he is compared to Judd, the audience when Bruzier. So you, so, uh, you had a live studio audience for that. And did you feel like your transition from theater into that world?

[51:24] Marilu Henner: Perfect. It was easy. I loved it. I love working on a sitcom because of that. Yeah. Because you shape it all week, you sit around the table, you give ideas. And you're with a bunch of theater actors. And yeah. And I mean, you went, you, um, this is a big gap. Or do you wanted to see something about Elsa Body Coffee?

[51:40] Rory O'Malley: Oh, well, I'll take anything about it.

[51:43] Marilu Henner: Well, there's that famous story that you saw in, um, in, uh, uh Man on the Moon that, uh, about the Tony Clifton, yeah. Okay, so just I'll tell you briefly. Um, our producers, they must have had bad seats because they went one night to see Tony to see Andy, and opening for Andy was Tony Clifton, and they didn't realize that they were the same person for whatever reason. But to Andy said that he would sign the contract for Taxi if Tony could have a couple episodes, and they said, Well, you can, he, we, we'll give him one. Then they realized what was going on. So imagine this. We start July 5th, this is our first table read. July the 14th is our first, um, you know, we're on the first, no, the first in front of the audience, the, yeah, and so imagine that this is now the last week of September.

This is now September the 29th, Friday, September 29th, yeah. And they say to us, okay, this the in the show next week. The guest star, uh, it's a guy named Tony Clifton. Now it's Andy, but it isn't Andy, but just, you know, I, they couldn't even get the words. I was like, wait, wait, what? What? Because we've been working together almost three months. It was like, wait, wait, what? They said, Well, it's Andy, but it's not. Well, just play along, I'm sure it'll be fine. Okay, so now we come in on Monday, and here's this guy, pretty much painted orange, yeah, with a fake nose, fake mustache, fake hair, glasses, chain smoking, barrel chested, which Andy, you know, had it like padded in a powder blue tuxedo with a ruffled shirt.

Yeah, and he's like, Okay, where's the director? You know, it's like, oh hey, pretty lady, you know, and he's this total asshole. Yeah, but we're like, okay, yeah, you know, but this. Okay, so now the episode that week was all about Danny DeVito, Louis De Palma's brother, coming, and they're gonna have like a card game about who's gonna get stuck with their mother for the holidays. Okay, so I just remember this line so well because this is how Tony Clifton acted, you know, you know, ma. Sometimes she's sad, sometimes she's glad, you know. It was like by Tuesday, the Tuesday run through, we were like, Oh my god, he's taking us down. Yeah, you know, this is not Taxi, we're now on the air a couple weeks, we're getting lauded, lauded.

This is, you know, what's going on? You know, what's going on? So they called him Tuesday night, and they called Andy Tuesday night, and they said, We're gonna have to fire Tony. And he said, You can do it if you, oh I understand. Okay, well, okay, you can fire Tony, but you have to do it in person, okay, at one o'clock tomorrow. So we get in Wednesday morning, and they said, Okay, there's another actor here, he's gonna be playing the part, blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, so we're rehearsing, and it's like, okay, finally, we have an actor, we can hear the lines, you know, correct. And all of a sudden, from the back with two hookers, you know, attached to him, it's like, where's the director?

Let's go to rehearsal, blah, blah, blah. You know, and pretty soon he comes in and at Weinberger goes up to me and says, you know, um, Tony, we're gonna have to, you know, it's not we're gonna says, I'm not leaving, I'm not, you know, I've got a contract here, you know. All this, and Judd turns to me and he says, The guy wants a psycho drama, he wants a psychodrama. And pretty soon Judd gets in his face, and two, you know, the guards are like pulling the two of them apart, right? Tony's pulling, uh, Judd off of him, and Andy slash Tony. Yeah, yeah, made Tony Danza is pulling Judd. Okay, but Tony Clifton slash Andy is being dragged by Paramount Security Guards, like, I'm gonna be bigger than any of you.

I'm gonna be, you know, and they said, and the following week he came back. He came back, he just showed up. Yeah, but so when Judd said that, like he wants a psycho drama, he was, he like, Andy needs this to play out this way, so we're gonna have to do this. Yeah, but it was also like I'm tired of this. I'm tired of this. Everybody had had it up to here, and you know, I don't think Judd's one to pass up a psycho.

[55:46] Rory O'Malley: Sure, sure.

[55:47] Marilu Henner: Tony for a good psycho drama. Sure, sure. Yeah, um, but I just, I think it's amazing because it feels like in one way, like the sitcom is so separate from what he was doing as a, you know, it's so foreign and different from what he was trying to do. So he was creating this other. He created a country I wanted to visit. I mean, it's crazy. He had this language. When Carol King got passed as Simca for the first time, he said, We have to go out to dinner, but you cannot speak in any other language. Wow. You know, he was such a provocateur, but he did it in such a charming way that challenged you that you thought, like, all right, I'll guess I have to go along with this. Yeah. Uh, you know, cookies and milk for like 11 buses taking his, you know, Carnegie Holly audience, you know, to, you know, it's like he'd do these things, and you'd think, like, God, no one ever thought of this stuff, this kind of performance art, whatever you want to call it. I'm gonna see what this is about. And then you found yourself following him. Yeah, you know.

[56:46] Marilu Henner: No, it's remarkable. And it's remarkable that so many of you were put together. And that, I mean, it's such a great show, and I feel like it really broke boundaries for so much of television into, you know, what I grew up on, and I just, you know, it's a, well, it's interesting when we went to the Jimmy Burroughs tribute, yeah, and the casts of, you know, of, uh, will and grace and cheers and friends and stuff. When they got up, they all said Jimmy, you know, always said it's Taxi, and you're all different versions of Taxi, so find your, you know, it's like, uh, it was so, I mean, and we were like, Oh, really? Yeah, we were just going there to have a good time because we, the cast is ridiculously close. We come to each other's screen, and we're, we're so close. I just talked to Tony like two days ago.

[57:33] Rory O'Malley: That's amazing.

[57:33] Marilu Henner: We're close, so close. And Jim Brooks and I have lunch, and I was just at his daughter's wedding, and you know, he, everybody gets invited to all my weddings. I'm on my third and final, I hit my third and final when happily married.

[57:45] Rory O'Malley: That's incredible.

[57:47] Marilu Henner: It's, I, it doesn't always happen like that. Like successful things are not always like you are all friendly and, and but how wonderful. Like, I have Book of Mormon where I'm so close with all those people still and will for the rest of my life. And that was something that changed us. And like you said, that any people always kind of be like, That's what you did. And no matter what else I do, it'll always be about being in the original cast of Book of Mormon.

[58:11] Marilu Henner: How grateful I am that I was texting with Nikki James, who won the Tony for it just this morning, you know, that we're part of each other's lives almost seven years later. Um, so you kept doing theater though, and you kept after Taxi.

[58:25] Marilu Henner: Oh, I started. I mean, the day after I before I even like left Taxi, I was already booked on a bunch of movies and stuff. So I did a, you know, I did The Man Who Loved Women with Bert Reynolds and directed by Blake Edwards, and then, you know, I did Johnny Dangerously with Michael Keaton, right? And I did, uh, worked with, uh, Bert again on Cannibal Run, yeah, and Perfect with John Travolta, and so you Brussels Rap study. So I did a whole bunch of movies.

[58:48] Marilu Henner: You did a bunch of movies, and then they weren't all hits, but that's, yeah, but you also, so you worked with Bert Reynolds on those movies before you did even shake.

[58:55] Marilu Henner: I did five things with Bert. I worked on it at first. I met him on The Man Who Loved Women, and we had like instant chemistry. We just instantly adored one another because we both have that improv kind of thing, and I knew that we, and Blake Edwards, who was so great, he just let us kind of go with it. So I, um, I worked with him there, then he called me that night. He said, I want you to come down to, uh, Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater, and I did their playing our song. He said, and then I've got this other script that I want you to do it, and it's, you know, Canterball Run 2, and so I did that, and then I did, you know, a few years later, I did a, um, uh, he was directing an episode of the new Alfred Hitchcock presents, which was taking some of the old ones and doing that.

[59:37] Marilu Henner: Right. And it's so funny as I'm like saying, you know, all these things, it's, uh, yeah, I started that on September the 23rd, 1980s, you know, it's like, and then I get this call a few years later and he said I want you to play my wife on Evening Shade. So I went in to meet Linda Bloodworth and then I got the job. And I always tell everybody and then we worked together for four years. I just talked to him recently too, it's like I think that Bert and I because we never had an affair and we were able to constantly work with each other because it wasn't like threatening to any of our relationships.

[1:00:07] Rory O'Malley: Sure.

[1:00:07] Marilu Henner: You know, so I mean I love him. Yeah, he's amazing. I loved that show. I loved Evening Shade.

[1:00:16] Marilu Henner: Yeah, talk about a master class. Yeah, I mean Ozzy Davis, Hal Holbrook, uh, you know, Charlie Derning, Elizabeth Ashley, Ann Wedgeworth, Michael Jeter, you know, all these people. Oh no, I mean crazy that that ensemble, another all those theater actors, you know, like you and a range of type of, I mean talk about people who had all different styles, you know, uh, Elizabeth Ashley, she never knew her lines. I mean, Michael Jeter knew his lines like from day one. Charlie Derning wrote them around the cell, you know, Elizabeth Ashley never had anything down to like the night elephant. Yeah, everybody had different ways of working, but I'd have to say, I mean that everybody's great. Yeah, Hal Holbrook, you're in a scene with him, you know, you don't catch him acting.

I mean, he's just amazing. He played my father in that and I loved him so much. Yeah, all of them, I mean he's still alive, so yeah, loved, I love him. Yeah, yeah, but getting to actually work with, it's funny because you can work with your peers, um, but when you work with somebody who you know, you're like, this is excellent. This is, this is the re, this is everything.

[1:01:18] Rory O'Malley: It's a different experience.

[1:01:21] Marilu Henner: Yeah, totally. Oh, I was so grateful for the job. And especially because the thing I was bringing is sitcom training.

[1:01:27] Rory O'Malley: Sure.

[1:01:28] Marilu Henner: So that was like nice for me to have kind of that in my, you know, uh, the, you know, my arsenal. But, uh, everybody was so, I just literally sat there like, oh my god, I just, you know, what's Charlie gonna do with this line? What's this gonna happen?

[1:01:40] Rory O'Malley: Yeah, and you're somebody who is constantly taking in information and analyzing and remembering and like you're constantly.

[1:01:48] Marilu Henner: You are a student.

[1:01:49] Marilu Henner: I'm always a student. A teacher and a student. I'm always a student. I think if you have a good attitude about teachers and homework, your entire life, it's gonna serve you well. As a little kid, I loved school, my boys loved school, you know.

[1:02:01] Marilu Henner: And Joey, uh, the baby, was, um, it was, uh, he was 15 months old. I get a call from my agent saying, Anne Ranking is leaving Chicago and they're interested in seeing you. It was actually, he was actually, it was, uh, March 14th of 97. So, um, Friday.

[1:02:20] Marilu Henner: It's just there. Yeah, it's just there. It's just there.

[1:02:22] Marilu Henner: So they called me and I, they said, um, have you danced? I went, oh my god. What kind of dancing shape are you in? I went, oh my god, I haven't had my legs up over my head except for childbirth or a good weekend in five years. So I go to, so I said, called my brother who's the dancer, he's the young, he's five years younger. And I said, Lauren, come on, we're, you know, you're coming to class with me, let's go check it out. So we go to class on Saturday, the, the, the, the, uh, the 15th, and it was literally like oil can, oil can. Yeah, we were laughing because we're doing potter shots across the floor, and I'm like, oh my god. But I thought I've got to do something. So I started hiring somebody who's gonna help me just to get into enough shape to go to the audition, which is like in a week and a half.

[1:03:07] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[1:03:08] Marilu Henner: So, um, I go to the audition. First of all, I hadn't seen the show. So I saw the show and I went, I have to play this part, right? So I go to the audition, and Walter Bobby, whom I knew through the Grease family, he said, um, really good, you know, you can sing it, you can act it. He said, Uh, we gotta get, I mean it's Fosse, it's Fosse, it's hard. And I said, Okay, okay. He said, I want to see you in a couple weeks because we're seeing a lot of people. And I went, Okay.

[1:03:36] Marilu Henner: So the next day I called the producers, I called the Weissler's office, and you know, the person I talked to, I said, Do you have anything? I mean, do you know anybody who teaches Fosse out here in Los Angeles? And they said, No, we don't really have anybody. And this is, you know, '97, the show had just opened. And I said, um, okay, okay, that's all right. So I watched Cabaret and I watched, uh, uh, All That Jazz, and I realized that Catherine Dobie, who's married to Wolfgang Gladys, who had just worked with my husband at the time. Okay. Um, and I called her, and she was the original Honyak. And I said to her, I said, Could you work with me? And she said, I'm leaving for Hungary to see my family.

She said, Um, get a copy of the tape and meet me in a studio. So I met her the next day in a studio, and she said, What did you wear? And I said, you know, I wore like little biker shorts and a little jash, and she says, No, no, we must wear like share this and black and cut up to here and false silence and put your hair up and push up bra and blah blah blah. And she taught me in a day, like Fosse within an inch of my life. I mean, I was in pain, you know, it was all about isolation and everything.

[1:04:41] Marilu Henner: So two weeks later, I went to the audition and it was at Actor's Equity, and everybody was there, like all the, I don't want to say their names because they're all famous actors. Sure, sure. A bunch of them had been chorus line and everything else, but I had worked on Fosse, Fosse, Fosse, Fosse, and I, they just kept getting rid of people, riddled people. By the end of the day, I had done every single thing. Um, I, when I called them, I said, Listen, I know you're gonna want somebody like me who can get her ass on Letterman and the Tonight Show and everything else. Anyway, so that whole day they worked me all the way through. I sang every song, I did every scene, and then I found out the next day I got the job.

[1:05:17] Rory O'Malley: Wow, which was really cool.

[1:05:18] Marilu Henner: And so then, you know, I packed up and brought the kids and the, you know, my soon-to-be ex-husband was traveling back and forth. Yeah, but I went there for like a year. I mean, I did the part 400 eight times.

[1:05:32] Rory O'Malley: Wow.

[1:05:33] Marilu Henner: So there's a lot because then they had me go to Vegas, and it was, you know, I said, Oh, 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 and he said, 'Uh, they made you an offer you can't repeat.' You're going to Vegas. And then they had to like drag me kicking and screaming away from Vegas, but my kids were in like preschool, so I had to start them in September. But I had a blast. The boys learned how to swim that summer, and they got their little yellow belts in karate. And, uh, we go into the, the, um, Mandalay Bay Theater, which was beautiful, and we did the show, although it's weird to start, you know, doing me and my baby at 12:10 at night twice a week.

Um, and they were like, 'Hey, we like you here. We like you here.' And I said, 'Oh, thanks. You like the show.' And they said, 'We don't know about the show, but you saw a hell of a lot of Belvedere. Perfect.' That's all they're doing. People always say, What's the difference between doing a show in Vegas and on Broadway? And I say, cup holders.

[1:06:26] Rory O'Malley: Yeah.

[1:06:27] Marilu Henner: Well, we did the full-on show. It wasn't like a bridge or anything.

[1:06:31] Marilu Henner: Yeah. You know, I would love to talk about you writing books because you've written so many, and you have, you've put out so much knowledge, and you're taking in stuff that you're studying and you're curious about, about health and memory. How did you get into doing that?

[1:06:46] Marilu Henner: Because that's, that's not it. You, you maybe you get a book deal, but that doesn't mean you listen like I'm gonna write a book. It's a lot of work.

[1:06:52] Marilu Henner: It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, it's a lot of time. How did you start getting into specifically health? And as some, as, as an actress, as actors, I talk about it a lot like body image, health.

[1:07:06] Rory O'Malley: Right.

[1:07:06] Marilu Henner: Right. Something that's so important and that is not talked about enough is how to stay healthy the right way.

[1:07:12] Marilu Henner: Yeah. Well, trial and error for sure. Right. Um, okay, so I got into health because both my parents died very young. My father died my senior year of high school, he died of a massive heart attack. I was 17 at the time, he was 52. It was at a Christmas, it's a sad horrible story. But anyway, he died of a heart attack, and I found myself eating my feelings, going away to college. I was, I gained a lot of weight the summer between high school and college. And I started college not feeling my best and not feeling like, you know, I could really make a presentation in the world. So I knew at some point I was gonna try to take it off, but I had terrible health habits. And then when my, you know, and I would swing my weight up and down and up and down for years and was able to fake it.

Um, and then when my mother took ill with arthritis, with rheumatoid arthritis, she was literally teaching dancing in December still because the school was open, teaching dancing in December, went to bed with the flu in January. It was a brutal Chicago winter, so she went into the hospital in February. She had her leg amputated in April, and she died in May.

[1:08:13] Marilu Henner: Wow.

[1:08:14] Marilu Henner: And after I saw my mother in the hospital, and no matter what machine they hooked up to her, her body was trying to make sense of it. And it was such an epiphany for me. I thought, gosh, can you imagine if you do the right things for your body? So I said, if she gets out of here alive, I'm gonna learn everything I can about the human body, save her life. And if she dies, I'm gonna learn everything I can about the human body and help myself and help my siblings. So when she passed away, I said, that's it. And I became this obsessed student of health. Now at this time, I was just getting onto Taxi as well. And I really decided it's, it's not about my weight, it's not about my vanity, it's about my health.

So if I start seeing everything in my life through the prism or the filter of health, I'm gonna start making better choices. So I read everything I could get my hands on, which was over 200 books. I went to medical libraries, I went to nutritionists, I went to the Bowdy Tree, which is a famous place here in LA. I started taking human anatomy classes at UCLA. I mean, I had to figure this out. So I experimented on myself, and it took me about eight years to put the information together, and I never looked back. I never struggled with my weight at all after that.

[1:09:21] Marilu Henner: Because it was having a good memory, once you're on to the real thing, you say, I'm not gonna be stupid and go back to the way. You can see those patterns, like you're gonna be able to do it. And so, uh, I, people would call me and they'd, I'd work with people and I'd help them with their health. Anyway, in the meantime, I was at William Morris, and the head of William Morris and I went out to lunch with him and his wife, dinner with him and his wife, and he said, You should write a book. He said, You have such an unusual background, the dancing school and the whole thing. And this is, I was on Evening Shade at the time. And he said, I won't, I think you should meet Judith Regan. So Judith and I met, she had her own impression, she didn't ever, she was working for Simon and Schuster at the time, and she said, You have to write a book. So I wrote a book called, uh, By All Means Keep on Moving. And it's about my father and my mother and the just so many different things.

[1:10:10] Marilu Henner: But she left in the middle of it. She had a falling out with Simon and Schuster, and she started her own imprint, but I couldn't leave with her. So a couple years later, she said, You have to write the definitive health book because I'm going to now for years about health. You're, you saved my son from this, my daughter from this, me from this. You have to write this health book. So I was doing Chicago at the time. I started, people would say, Why do you look better than you did on Taxi or during this movie or whatever? And I'd say, you know what? Let's all stay in between shows and I'll start giving lectures. So I started making these tapes with the ensemble with the other people in the show, and I started making them.

And I was literally putting on eyelashes at night, going like the evils of dairy products, you know. My boys were three and one and a half when I started Chicago. And so I, uh, that I could give them their bath, you know, put them to bed, go to the theater. But I was so revved up from all the Fosse that I would take these tapes and we'd download them and it started fashioning a book. So I wrote the book. Um, I, the, the, I went into the show June the 24th. I was leaving March the 22nd. I started the book in January, turned it in. I mean, I started the book actually in December, but like did most of the writing in January, turned it in February 4th.

[1:11:23] Rory O'Malley: Wow.

[1:11:24] Marilu Henner: And finished my run in Chicago, and May 6th, the book came out, and it went on the New York Times bestseller list. They ran out of books and then went on the New York Times bestseller list, and it just gave me another whole career. And it was basically what the 10 steps were that I did to change my life and how I felt about things, and taught people about face reading and a digestion chapter called What's the Poop and The 10 Steps I Take and 10 Steps to Your Best Body. And it was talking about dairy products. And it just, I knew the third day of publicity when I walked, I came down from the hotel, and I saw, well, I wasn't even at the hotel, I was at the place where I'd stayed for, um, Chicago. Came down and there was a limo. I went, This is my life is about to change. I knew there was a difference. And I ended up writing 10 books. I've written 10 books now.

[1:12:12] Marilu Henner: So there's Total Health Makeover, 30-Day Total Health Makeover, Healthy Holidays, Healthy Kids, Healthy Life Kitchen, you know, just, uh, by, uh, uh, something about not raising a brat.

[1:12:22] Rory O'Malley: Yeah, I refuse to raise a brat.

[1:12:24] Marilu Henner: He's very nice. Yes, you did not, you did not. And, um, yeah, Wear Your Life Well, Total Memory Makeover, um, and, uh, the book with my husband, because that's another whole story.

[1:12:35] Rory O'Malley: Sure.

[1:12:36] Marilu Henner: I mean, uh, I'm so impressed by that because I think that as actors, we aren't like I, as I started out, we aren't asked to think outside the box in our creativity, you know, especially when you have success come to you, especially when you have it given to you in the way that that, not that it was given to you, but you know that it's when it's in your reach with Taxi and Evening Shade and all of these things that, you know, all of us actors are like, Oh, that's all I want.

[1:13:05] Marilu Henner: I don't want anything else. I want that. Well, when you have that, and you are a student of the world and you have that curiosity, that's not gonna be enough. You have to keep it. I have to share. It's the middle child in me. Yeah, you know, it's like my brother, my father, my father would say something in my younger brother, who's a year younger than I am, and he'd say, Dad, don't tell it to me, tell it to Mary Lou, she'll break it down to kid language. So I love reading esoteric, bizarre material, sort of finding a memory hook for people. And I love sharing the information that has helped me. Yeah, you know, I love doing any, and I knew I had to save my siblings' lives, and I knew that maybe I could put some of the information that helped me, help could have helped my parents.

Sure. And so I felt like this moral responsibility to get that information out there. It's amazing that when that is what your motivation is, when it's about helping people, when it's about a moral responsibility, it's way more successful than I hope this earns a buck, or I hope this, you know, hits somewhere. Like when it's just going into the commercial audition and being genuine, being authentic and connected. Yeah, because you can do like a fake job, but you can really, I mean, once it's like you know what you want to express and you feel the confidence to be able to express it so that you know, I'm always saying to my kids, you know, hey, the you know, it's not don't be from the oh, keep quiet and they'll let me live school.

Because there's so many people unrecognized genius or unrealized, people are so afraid to take some kind of gamble or like a Danny DeVito kind of step. It's like so they say, I'll just stay at zero on the number line, because then I don't go to negative on the number line. They're so afraid of the negative that they don't like take a chance that maybe that energy will take them to the positive side. Yeah, you know. I mean it's a fearlessness. I want to give my kids resilience and fearlessness because that's what it takes. That's really what it takes.

[1:15:02] Rory O'Malley: I think that when you embrace that with the kind of positivity and energy that you have, like just seeing you interact with your son just now, you guys are laughing, you're having a good time. There's a lot of joy in this house, and you have a lot of joy that just comes from you effortlessly. And I think that it's a lot easier to take those big chances when you have that joy surrounding it.

[1:15:25] Marilu Henner: It's funny you're saying that because I think because I've always had this very strong family unit. Yeah. So no matter how I tethered out, I knew I could always, not that you go home, but you'd at least have people, you know, who would understand, like, oh my God, I made a complete fool of myself today, but it was worth the shot, even though it didn't work out. You know, and the people in my family growing up, the six of us, we were in tight quarters. It was four tiny little, tiny, tiny, tiny little bedrooms, one bathroom for eight people, you know, everything that was going on in our household. And, you know, it's like no one could throw a tantrum because it was like, you want to throw a tantrum, do it in your bedroom because there's a party in the kitchen.

You know, nobody got away with stuff, you know. So it's like you just there was always that checks and balances. I worry about people not having a big family these days because it really teaches you how to share and how to negotiate and how to navigate.

[1:16:14] Rory O'Malley: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I think that it's just like because we're also so isolated from the whole world that if you don't have people in your home who are, you know, checking you and keeping you grounded, absolutely in reality, what do you have? If you don't have somebody to say you're a jerk, you know, once in a while, yeah. Or that hurt my feelings, and why are you trying to get away with that? Yeah, you know, whatever.

[1:16:35] Marilu Henner: But thank you so much. I mean, I feel like, you know, it's just yeah, and I do have a great relationship. I have a great relationship with both of my boys, they're both so different, so different, but they're so, you know, equally great, but very different. You know, Joey's not the talker that Nick is. Nick, if I see Nick on the phone, it's like, oh my God, I'm gonna hunker down for a while. And Joey's like, you know, yes, yeah, it's just funny. This is for a serious relationship with some people. I adore her, so that's good.

[1:17:04] Rory O'Malley: Well, they're wonderful. Thank you. You are wonderful. I cannot tell you enough that when I started this podcast, I wanted to talk to actors who are living, who are doing it right, who are living the dream in a way that I feel like, oh, that's something I want to have. And you are, but you're like that too.

[1:17:24] Marilu Henner: Come on. You are, you know, I always say that there are four different types at every dinner party, and as a hostess, because I'm always hosting something. Sure, there's the four, there's the anchor, the sun, the person that you might build your table around, the person that everybody's driving to the party going, oh, is that person gonna talk to me? And then there's like the second, not second meaning not as important, but there's the other type is like the swizzle stick, you know, the swizzle stick that stirs the drink. Sure. People go, oh Rory, you're not, no, talk to Mary Lou, blah blah blah blah blah. Then there's the chameleon, the person who blossoms or withers and dies, depending on what person you seat them next to.

Right, you know, and then your fourth type is your wild card slash black hole, because you know, the wild card is like, oh, the person I don't know, or like, oh yeah, I know that person, black hole. The number one rule of any party is you never seat a black hole slash wild card next to a chameleon because you might have a sinkhole right there at the table. You need enough swizzles.

[1:18:19] Rory O'Malley: This is amazing.

[1:18:20] Marilu Henner: You need enough swizzles, you're a swizzle stick. I'm a swizzle stick, okay. Yeah, we're swizzle sticks, and so swizzle sticks tend to know how to find like that glass half full. And it's like, oh, well, this is, you know, this is kind of an adventure. Well, let me try this, and this may or may not work out, but you know, I mean, I've made a fool of myself so many times that I can't get offended. You know, I can't get offended by people because I, and also I think having a good memory helps because I go, yeah, okay, I'll be the only one to remember this and then go on. I'll remember something.

[1:18:55] Rory O'Malley: That's great.

[1:18:55] Marilu Henner: You're right. But that's the thing is that you know how bad everyone else's memory is. Oh, we don't really think about it because you're like, geez, they really don't remember it. Oh my gosh. I, you know what truthfully? I had no idea. I feel bad. I feel bad. That's why I'm constantly doing memory sessions and memory. I'm doing a memory show, and I'm always trying to help people with their memories because people just have just gotten lazy or they're not paying attention, or their attention units are so focused on themselves rather than taking in information. But it is to your advantage. I was just saying this to somebody that some talking about creative mistakes. I was saying a wonderful piece of information is to remember that nobody remembers and nobody cares.

And that it's not in a negative way, but nobody really cares. So why are you worried about thinking go make that big mistake? And but you have such a clear understanding of that because you're witnessing people not remembering and not caring.

[1:19:54] Rory O'Malley: Yeah.

[1:19:54] Marilu Henner: Oh, I'm sure that more people in my life till they knew about my memory from 60 Minutes, they probably thought, oh my gosh, I must have meant so much more to her than she meant to me.

[1:20:05] Rory O'Malley: Yeah.

[1:20:05] Marilu Henner: Did you ever see the movie Um Having Can Wait with Julie Christie and Warren Beatty?

[1:20:12] Rory O'Malley: Yes.

[1:20:12] Marilu Henner: Okay, well, do you remember at the end when at or during the course of the movie he says to her when if you know there might be somebody like even a quarterback who comes to you and says something, right? Right. And then at the end when his memory's wiped clean and she he says something to her, and she says, You're the quarterback, you know, because she remembers that part. That's how I feel every single day of my life. Like people don't remember that they had this moment with that person or with me or with somebody else and stuff. Right. You know, but that's okay.

[1:20:41] Rory O'Malley: And but that how wonderful that you are a person who loves to share what you've learned because thank God you can articulate what your memory is, this talent, this thing that what you have to other people through writing and telling people because we need you to give that perspective.

[1:21:01] Marilu Henner: Yeah. You know, if you weren't, if you didn't have the personality that you have, a lot of people who have this memory are depressed or they're like closed in.

[1:21:09] Rory O'Malley: Yeah, I can imagine.

[1:21:10] Marilu Henner: I can imagine that it's a lot to deal with. You see it as a burden, and I don't. Oh my God, it's, I, people always say, Is it ever a burden? Is it ever negative? And go, only for my husband, which is why I'm on my third and final. But Michael always says, what man ever wins an argument against his wife anyway? At least I have an excuse.

[1:21:30] Rory O'Malley: There you go.

[1:21:31] Marilu Henner: Yeah, so it sounds like he's got the right mindset. I know sometimes he'll take me on. It's like, Michael, don't embarrass yourself. You don't remember we were standing in the kitchen, you had the blue and white striped shirt on. I was in the black dress with the little thing. I mean, it's funny.

[1:21:44] Rory O'Malley: It's remarkable.

[1:21:45] Marilu Henner: I think that you are remarkable. And I am so appreciative that you would take the time.

[1:21:50] Rory O'Malley: Oh, please, I know you're beautiful, amazing home to have me over here and your enthusiasm and your joy for life for Hamilton.

[1:21:59] Marilu Henner: Oh my God, no, it's like crazy. I've, you know how many of those books I've bought, those damn books.

[1:22:03] Rory O'Malley: Oh, yeah.

[1:22:04] Marilu Henner: 15.

[1:22:04] Rory O'Malley: Really?

[1:22:05] Marilu Henner: Yeah, and I've given them out to people. Yeah, I've, believe me, I've seen a lot of Christmas gifts that have been to Hamilton.

[1:22:10] Rory O'Malley: That's so great.

[1:22:11] Marilu Henner: But aren't you happy that you had this and you had Book of Mormon to have something like these two shows in your life? There's nothing like it.

[1:22:18] Rory O'Malley: No, it, I mean, it's really insane. I mean, that's why, like, you know, I mean, this is different. This talking on a podcast, but I feel like I have a responsibility to talk to other actors and people who are pursuing this because I'm trying to articulate what it's been to be a part of these shows and what the struggle in between has been, even after they've happened, that you still have to constantly...

[1:22:23] Marilu Henner: Oh, you're always auditioning.

[1:22:44] Rory O'Malley: That's what I mean. That's why you've got to fall in love with auditioning. Exactly. And say this is the 10 minutes that I have this job. I mean, I had an audition not too long ago that was so bad that it was like funny. I walked out of there going like, okay, that's like early career bad. Right, you know, yeah, but it didn't even, it's like you just have to like let these things go and you think like, okay, why did I pull this in? You know, what did I learn from this? You know, my boys are so funny because they know I'm very big on life lessons. Yeah, so they'll like go launch into a storyline distance on the phone or something. Nick did the other day, and he's like, I know there's a life lesson. I got the life lesson. Just hear me out first, you know.

[1:23:20] Marilu Henner: Right, yeah, yeah.

[1:23:20] Rory O'Malley: Because I've always, I mean, my probably my number one theory in life is the key to your life is how well you deal with plan B.

[1:23:27] Marilu Henner: Yeah.

[1:23:27] Rory O'Malley: Because you aim for plan A, but then plan B is what actually happens to you. So it's like if you could be, if you're dragged kicking and screaming to plan B, you might miss the wonderful opportunity that it is. Right, you have to kind of just go with where the universe is taking you and make the most of it.

[1:23:42] Marilu Henner: Yeah, so I was thinking, okay, what question could he ask me? You know, like, is there anything that I've never said in an interview? And somebody once asked me that.

[1:23:49] Rory O'Malley: What?

[1:23:50] Marilu Henner: No. Somebody once asked me that. Um, and I said to them, um, I never talked about the fact that as a child, I had two imaginary characters, and so, and but all the kids in my family did. I think because we were so close growing up that it's like once in a while you wanted other friends to show you. Sure, yeah. You made them up. So my oldest sister made up two, my next sister, I made up two. My brother that was next, he made up one, and then my our sister who's like super shy, she had like a whole like 12 of them or something, you know, and then the youngest brother didn't have any. So that was like something, and it's funny because my two characters were Milky Way and Icky Winnie, and I'm totally lactose intolerant.

Once I gave up dairy, I lost, you know, 54 pounds. But anyway, so I was thinking what somebody doesn't know, especially with all these young talented kids. I ended up doing all the hair and makeup for my kids' school plays because my boys went to a school, and I said, you know, the no one's talking to these kids about hair and makeup, and I want to honor the period and everything else. So I did, I did 21 productions, and I can't show the pictures unless I have the permission. Sure, but Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein, you know, and like so many of the kids that are like superstars and the future talents of today, I mean the future stars of today, and they're stars. What is a Tony Award win? Yeah, you wouldn't believe some of the great looks that these kids and they just threw themselves into it, and I thought that that was like because you know why?

Because I loved being a mom more than anything of life, and I got involved with my kids' school, like turned on jobs or whatever, like far location jobs. I mean, I worked all through their lives, but I loved being like the mom, and it's that beauty shop in the, you know, in the kitchen in the dancing school.

[1:25:28] Rory O'Malley: Exactly.

[1:25:29] Marilu Henner: And I love that like these were kids who clearly hadn't seen Taxi yet.

[1:25:42] Rory O'Malley: Yeah, and so like they that you were doing.

[1:25:45] Marilu Henner: I, it's so funny because I actually did a benefit show with Ben Platt years ago. Well, probably like two or three years ago, and he did a story about playing the Tin Man. I don't know if it's if you did the makeup for this, but he, but you know, like he, his he told a story about playing the Tin Man and all of his like experiences in children's theater.

[1:26:06] Rory O'Malley: Yeah, how much so funny, yeah.

[1:26:08] Marilu Henner: And he and Molly, my son's girlfriend, Molly Gordon. But it's funny because, you know, like Nikki, my son and Nick, my son and Ben, they were Stein and Stone. Like City of Angels. So I have like all these and Catherine Gallagher, Peter Gallagher's daughter.

[1:26:23] Rory O'Malley: I know Catherine.

[1:26:25] Marilu Henner: She is so gorgeous, and what a talent she is. She played Melora and Beanie was in the show. So I have like all these into the woods that I do.

[1:26:32] Rory O'Malley: Do you have this on DVD?

[1:26:34] Marilu Henner: Uh, maybe there's recordings on.

[1:26:36] Rory O'Malley: Yeah.

[1:26:36] Marilu Henner: This will be like worth a lot of money.

[1:26:38] Rory O'Malley: I know, I know.

[1:26:40] Marilu Henner: I know. I'm sure Ben has copies of everything.

[1:26:43] Rory O'Malley: Yeah.

[1:26:43] Marilu Henner: Well, thank you so much.

[1:26:45] Rory O'Malley: Thank you. This was so much fun.

[1:26:46] Marilu Henner: This was fantastic, and I really appreciate your time.

[1:26:49] Rory O'Malley: Oh.

[1:26:50] Marilu Henner: And I'll be seeing you at the Hamilton Cast party we're having here at your house.

[1:26:54] Rory O'Malley: Seriously, we have to talk about it.

[1:26:55] Marilu Henner: We'll talk.

[1:26:56] Rory O'Malley: We're gonna talk right now.

[1:26:57] Marilu Henner: It's so close.

[1:26:58] Rory O'Malley: It's so close.

[1:26:58] Marilu Henner: You guys can come like a Thursday night.

[1:27:00] Rory O'Malley: I'll be here in an hour.

[1:27:01] Marilu Henner: Okay.

[1:27:05] Rory O'Malley: Audition, side job, swimming upstream. Believe it or not, you'll live in the dream.