On the face of it, actress Marilu Henner fits neatly among the amiably kooky inhabitants of ”Evening Shade,” CBS-TV`s thriving prime-time Arkansas town.
One example: Her wristwatch is set 20 minutes ahead of her time zone (”I grew up in a family that kept 10 minutes ahead, and I had to take it to the next generation”).
Another example: The furnishings and wallcoverings in her home, she says, were designed to match the yellow cast to her skin color. She readily admits to being compulsive to a fault, and she generally prefers puttering around the house in the middle of the night to sleeping (”after five hours I have to get up and organize something”).
Her nimble memory-self-trained over many childhood nights when she had trouble falling asleep-has split-second retrieval, able to call up the day of the week, as well as the date, of any event in her past.
Behind this facade of eccentricity, however, is a woman in her late 30s whose passionate advocacy of good health, diet and exercise has personal roots.
She shares them in her new workout video, ”Marilu Henner`s Dancerobics.” After 50 minutes of dance-oriented exercises, she explains the serious side of her dedication to fitness.
Her father, Joseph, died of a heart attack at 52, and her mother, Loretta, an arthritic who had been paralyzed when her upper vertebrae disintegrated and shifted out of position, succumbed to her illness at 58, she explains on the video.
”I made a commitment that this was never going to happen to my brothers and sisters and me the same way,” Henner says. ”I knew I wanted to live a long time-and to have not just the quantity of time, but also the quality of time. I decided to educate myself.”
As she sips iced tea in a Los Angeles restaurant on a recent afternoon, Henner says, ”Every single day of our lives we breathe, we drink water, we eliminate and we eat. The one (function) we have the most control over is eating. People think that disease is something that God `poofs` on you in your 40s and 50s. They don`t realize it`s an accumulation of all the bad habits you`ve had over the years. We`re killing ourselves with chemicals.”
The death of Henner`s father, who managed an automobile dealership in Chicago, soon after she graduated from Madonna High School, was devastating. And when her mother died, two weeks before Henner was cast as Elaine Nardo in the 1978 TV hit ”Taxi,” it redirected Henner`s life.
Loretta Henner was the life of the seemingly endless party that went on for years in the family`s two-story home on Chicago`s Logan Boulevard.
The household included eight Henners (including Mari Lucy Denise, later shortened to Marilu) her three sisters and two brothers), who lived on the main floor, and an uncle, who was into astrology and art, who lived upstairs
(”with his 10 cats, two dogs, two birds, a skunk and 150 fish”).
For Loretta, it wasn`t enough just to command this army. She ran a dancing school-with classes in her back yard when weather permitted. Neighborhood kids would begin taking basic classes at age 3. By the 7th grade, they were ready for Friday night boy-girl social dancing sessions. And Loretta Henner would always be on hand to prep the 8th graders for the class night dance.
The Henner kids were drafted as instructors.
”As soon as you were 14, you got your own class,” Marilu says, adding that she left the ”big hangout” occasionally to perform in plays at Hull House and other local facilities, and to work summers as a waitress at the Nippersink Manor Resort near Lake Geneva, Wis. (After graduating third in her high-school class, she attended the University of Chicago briefly, leaving to join the road company of ”Grease”-her entry into the national theater scene and to television and Hollywood.)
That life experience with dance, fused with her determination to live a healthy life, has resulted in the video.
”I read 400 books on the subject of food and health,” she says, revising the number, when pressed, only slightly.
She began her quest during her mother`s bout with arthritis.
”Years before,” Henner says of her mother, ”she had gone on a diet for about two months; she`d found it in a women`s magazine. For a while it helped, but she didn`t know enough to keep it up. So she stopped. That`s where I decided to start.”
Henner first eliminated such foods as tomatoes and potatoes, dairy items citrus fruits from her own diet. And over the years, she eliminated meat and sugar, and then shellfish and chicken, because the consistency made her nauseated.
What does she eat today?
”A lot of pasta, grains, vegetables, fruit. Fish a couple of times a week. A lot of beans, a lot of rice, a lot of soy products.”
Her husband, film and television director Rob Lieberman, has kept pace with her, digressing only by eating chicken and turkey. Henner likes to describe how her stepson, Lorne, 17, had severe allergies when he came to live with them. He was taking pills and shots, but eating pizza every day.
”I told his allergist I thought Lorne was allergic to dairy
(products),” Henner says, ”but he said, `No, no, no-there`s no connection.` On a dare, Lorne gave up dairy. He hasn`t had any for four years, and he`s completely changed his body (chemistry)-no skin problems, not one sniffle!”
Lorne is enrolled at New York`s Parsons School of Design; Henner`s stepdaughter, Erin, 19, is a business major at the University of Arizona.
Paralleling Henner`s investigation into the relationship between diet and health was her search for the right exercise. Once she settled on that, it wasn`t long until she came up with the idea of a video workout.
Although she spent part of her career expending energy in various stage and screen roles, she was ”always fighting a few pounds,” she says. ”So I had to find something I could do every day that was fun. I ended up dancing-fun dancing-jumping around my house, putting on music for 20 minutes or a half-hour and breaking a sweat. That`s what this video`s like. I keep telling everybody that it`s perfect for anyone who`s sick of aerobics classes but is the last person off the dance floor at a wedding.”
The `90s are particularly good times for Henner.
”I feel like I`m just getting started in so many ways,” she says. ”The `80s were all homework,” she says of the years after ”Taxi,” when a number of her choices of movie products ”didn`t click.”
But now, she says, brightening, ”since the `90s began I got married, I got the new show, I`ve done two movies (”L.A. Story” and ”Noises Off”) and the workout tape.” She`s also 100 pages into an as-yet untitled lifestyle book to be published by Simon & Schuster.
She met Lieberman 13 months before she finally agreed to go out on a date with him-not for his lack of trying, though. She had been married once before briefly in the early `80s, to actor Frederic Forrest (”It was much too soon”). Before and afterwards, she had a long ebbing-and-flowing relationship with John Travolta. They`re still in touch, she says; he was among the wedding guests when she married Lieberman on June 27, 1990.
That fall, ”Evening Shade” joined the CBS Monday night lineup. For Henner it`s been an embracing experience. ”Taxi,” she recalled, ”was about a lot of unrelated people who were looking at life, with hopes and dreams, but were kind of stuck in this garage. That was their bond.” By comparison, she says, ”Evening Shade,” in which the character she plays is married to Burt Reynolds, is a ”homey,” family experience.
In no small measure Henner attributes her sunny disposition to her years of therapy with a psychoanalyst in New Jersey, whom she still consults by phone. The one recent shadow across her sky-which she won`t discuss in detail, because of legal considerations-is that for a time she was the object of stalking by a man who is in prison awaiting trial.
How did she cope with the situation as it unfolded?
”You protect yourself as best you can,” she says, skirting the subject carefully. ”You solicit the help of the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), which I did. And you just pay attention to the people around you, and try to avoid situations that are going to get you in trouble.”
Today, amid the excitement of projects brought to fruition, she still considers herself ”always a work in progress,” involved with a coping process. Which calls up her Plan B theory of life.
”You have a Plan A, some kind of structure,” she explains. ”Plan B is what happens when Plan A doesn`t work out. It`s your adjustment to what actually happens that really makes your life come together.”
She relates a story about a train journey she took a few years ago from Naples to Rome-a scheduled two-hour ride that got caught up in a major civil disorder. In the course of a five-hour delay, she struck up a conversation in halting Italian with a train porter who barely understood English. Yet over the years, he has become a close acquaintance. He arranged the details of Henner`s wedding and even named one of his children after her.
Speaking of children-do Henner and Lieberman hope to have children together?
”Oh, yeah,” she exclaims. ”Definitely. I mean, it`s mandatory.” She pauses, then adds, ”It`s Plan A.”
