Here's the Story LP: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice (21 page)

Cameos by Dolly Parton (the director was smitten with her, as was I) and Kenny Rogers added authenticity, as did the presence of Barbara’s daughter playing the youngest Mandrell sister. Michael and I watched the movie after it was finished. A harsh critic of my work, I cringed during moments where I thought I pushed it too far, where I tried too hard. But there was one scene in which Barbara was running a business meeting and took control of people in a way I couldn’t imagine myself doing. While shooting it, I felt like I stepped outside myself and into her skin, and I was thrilled to see it played that way on the screen, too.

The lessons I’d learned then were still resonating in me when the movie aired at the end of September 1997. Helped by good reviews, it was CBS’s highest-rated TV movie that year. More important, I felt good about myself for stretching as far as I ever had in my career, and succeeding. It had nothing to do with Marcia Brady either. In fact, somehow, through a long, bumpy, circuitous route via Barbara Mandrell, I rediscovered Maureen McCormick, actress.

And I didn’t stop there.

Mo’ Better

A
fter finishing
Get to the Heart,
I looked forward to spending time at home with Natalie, her friends, and their mothers. Some of Barbara’s message about reprioritizing had rubbed off on me. One morning I walked outside with my coffee cup and had a conversation with one of my friends in the neighborhood who was walking her dog. We waved at Michael as he drove to work. I told her about the difficulties he was having at his job because of undependable suppliers.

Once I was back inside, I realized how much I liked where we lived; the house and the neighborhood felt right, like we were supposed to be living there. I appreciated being able to walk outside and talk to a friend. I liked being part of this world of moms, this cozy community that bonded through shared experiences. All of us had raised our children together. We went out to dinner once a month, and sometimes we let our husbands come with us, though we preferred the girls-only nights.

Over time, without realizing it, I revealed many of the things I’d always kept private. Sometimes I realized what I was saying; other times the stories came out of my mouth before I knew it. I would gasp and say to myself, did I really say that? But I needed to get those things off my chest. I trusted those women. And the truth was, after so many years, they knew me better than I knew myself.

And they knew what I needed. One afternoon I was sitting on the porch with my friend, Janie. She was the mother of three children, and a doctor. She lived around the corner and down a few doors. As we talked, I started to cry. I didn’t know why. It was a feeling, I said, like a sadness that came over me. I said I thought there was something wrong with me.

“Do you feel like that often?” she said.

I shook my head yes.

“Gray and blah,” I said.

“For any reason?”

“Sometimes, yes. But most of the time, no.”

I explained that the sadness was always with me. I said I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I had a beautiful home, child, and husband. I had great friends, too. I had everything a person could want. Yet…

“It’s like there’s an insanity brewing inside me.”

She reacted to my choice of the word
insanity.
I had to explain that what I meant was complicated, difficult to share, and even harder for me to articulate. I tried to explain the sad, scared, tenuous feeling I’d had for as long as I could remember, since I was a teenager. Even on good days I felt like it was always just beneath the surface. And on bad days, it consumed me. It filled my life with dark skies and rough water. The feeling came and went on its own accord, affecting my moods, which in turn affected my marriage.

“It scares me to know that I’m not in control, that I could go insane if I let it consume me,” I said.

I cried.

“I don’t even know why I’m telling you,” I said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m glad you are.”

“I feel like I’m at war with myself. There’s all this stuff that I’ve kept in me and it wants to come out. I feel like I’m going to go crazy if I don’t tell someone.”

I explained that I was at a point where I couldn’t go on, where I wanted to find out what was wrong with me. She handed me some tissues. I apologized for breaking down and burdening her. I also thanked her for being there and listening to me talk. Just talking seemed to relieve some pressure.

“Maureen,” she said, “I think you could be depressed. You could possibly be bipolar. I think it might do you a world of good if you were to go see a doctor, get diagnosed, and maybe get on some medication.”

“I know,” I said.

“Have you done that?” she asked.

“No. Michael has begged me to go for help.”

“And?”

“I’m scared.”

“What about, medication?”

I shook my head no and explained that my past problems with drugs, which had provided escape and relief until they almost killed me, scared me off anything stronger than an Advil. She asked if I’d heard of Prozac and said it sounded like it might make a positive difference in my life. She surprised me by describing some firsthand experience she’d had in her family dealing with depression.

I related to many of the things she said. At various times, she could’ve been describing me. It gave me the courage to reveal my deepest, darkest family secrets, from my mother and her mother to my brother Denny. I told her everything. I tried to make connections for her: how I was passive like my mother, subject to swings like my father, and…

“I fear that I might be insane like—”

“You don’t have to go there,” she said, and stopped me. “You aren’t insane. You’re a wonderful, special person carrying around a lot of pain.”

I kept going.

Photographic Insert II

Billy Henshy of Dino, Desi & Billy and me.

Bill Levy, director of
Skatetown U.S.A.

Eve and me, 1989.

Our friends Dup and Bob Pierce. Bob helped introduce me and Michael, and he played my husband in
Shout for Joy
in Hawaii.

Harmonizing with Fred Waleki, 1980.

Thanksgiving, 1984. Just after Michael and I were engaged.

During
Shout for Joy,
our prenuptial honeymoon, 1983.

Our wedding, 1985.

I finally have an excuse for not having a flat tummy. Eight months pregnant in 1989.

One precious little girl and two tired parents, 1989.

Natalie is seven month old! Spending Christmas in Minnesota

The family, 1991.
Top:
Dad and Mike.
Bottom:
Denny, me, mom, and Kevin

Mother and daughter, 1991.

Natalie likes chocolate.

Natalie and Kona.

Lloyd Schwartz and me during
The Brady Brides
, 1981.

Cybil and me, 1995.

Easter with Bill and Hillary at the White House, 1995.

Mike and Natalie visit me on Broadway during
Grease,
1994.

As Rizzo in
Grease.

Natalie watching Mom signing autographs after a performance of
Grease.

Natalie and me in Central Park in New York during
Grease.

The family.
Top:
Michael, Kevin, and Denny.
Bottom:
Dad, Natalie, mom, and me, 2000.

Shooting
Get to the Heart: The Barbara Mandrell Story
, 1997.

Director Jerry London, Barbara Mandrell, me, writer Linda Bergman, and producer Tom Patricia, 1997.

With Christopher Atkins, costar on
Title to Murder
, 2001.

A promotional shot for my album taken by my friend Carin, 1995.

With Wayland Patton, dueting on “When You Get a Little Lonely,” 1995.

Florence Henderson and me, 2003

Me on the set of
Scrubs,
2003.

Touring with
When You Get a Little Lonely
, 1995.

On the red carpet. The Rascal Flats are so amazing and down to earth, 2008.

My favorite pic. Our little trio, 2007.

Mary and me in Africa, 2008.

The more I said, the better it felt. It was a true purge.

I cried and cried and cried.

What I discovered at that moment, though, was how badly, how desperately I wanted help. I had all this fear inside me. And anger. And hatred. Hatred for what I’d done. For what I’d put my parents through. Hatred for the way I’d treated Michael. For being selfish and self-destructive. For being Marcia. For expecting things to be perfect. For not having my career go the way I’d imagined it.

I hated everything.

And I was tired of it!

I was tired of hating!

I just wanted to be me, Maureen, and appreciate that. I wanted to appreciate the things I had, not what I thought I wanted.

A
t Janie’s suggestion, I went to my doctor and asked for a prescription for Prozac. My internist was a wonderful man whose daughter sometimes babysat for Natalie. It was very hard for me to sit in his office and admit that I was depressed and then have to provide him with my family’s and my own medical history, which I did without crying too much.

He was wonderfully understanding, though. He even made me smile after I apologized for crying and said I was embarrassed to admit I had a problem.

“Maureen, I’m a doctor,” he said. “People don’t usually see me unless they have a problem.”

He wrote me a prescription, but a couple weeks went by before I filled it. Given my history of drug abuse, I was wary of taking anything. I was also scared of medication that was going to alter the way I felt in my head. Hey, I was embarrassed of just going into a bookstore and asking the girl at the information desk to point me toward the self-help section. I also worried what people might think if they saw me reading a book on depression. It was silly.

Michael and I sat in bed at night, poring through the literature. He also did research on the Internet. Soon I told some of my other close girlfriends what was going on. After years of not talking about anything, I was suddenly telling everyone. I realized my friends would still love me, warts and all, and they did. They were incredibly supportive.

After deciding to start on the Prozac, it was almost anticlimactic. I didn’t feel any effects from it. Granted, I didn’t know what to expect. But I thought I’d experience something. It actually took about two weeks before I felt the drug starting to take affect in my system, and it wasn’t pleasant. I felt hyper and amped up. My mind wouldn’t stop racing. I was unable to concentrate.

I complained to Janie, who explained the unpleasant side effects were part of the process. She encouraged me to stick with it.

I stayed with it only because I trusted Janie. But about six weeks into the course of treatment I felt the beneficial effects. It happened so gradually that one day I noticed I didn’t feel jittery and unfocused. I’d grown so accustomed to the nagging side effects that I had to stop and think when they were no longer there. In their place, I felt different. Actually, I realized that I felt good.

And once that happened, it was like a wonderful awakening, as if I’d been rewired in such a way that I no longer felt the pain and fear that had given a foreboding texture to my life since I was a teenager. I was aware of it, but I felt released from it. The same was true of the anger that had made me a tinderbox of emotion through most of my adulthood, especially in my marriage. A weight lifted off of me. I was like a plane breaking through the clouds into blue sky.

I remember telling Michael it seemed like I could finally let go. I didn’t know how else to explain it. I kept waiting for it to disappear and the old feelings to return. They didn’t. One morning I found Michael and told him the chattering in my head responsible for much of my confusion and conflict was gone.

“It’s quiet!” I said, beaming.

The feeling was that dramatic, and so were the changes in my behavior. Around that time, Michael left his job out of frustration with unreliable suppliers. In the past, such a change would’ve caused me to panic. I would’ve taken my fear out on him. We would’ve fought for days. Now, not only was I supportive of his decision to leave and efforts to find a new job quickly, but I found myself at a party talking to friends about his situation, asking if they knew of any openings, and speaking highly and in fact boasting of his special ability to deal with people.

Michael said he appreciated having the person with whom he fell in love present most if not all of the time. I wasn’t perfect by any means, but my better attributes were present and accessible every day, no longer like tantalizing phantoms he had to hope and pray would return and stay. After my husband had given so much to me, I tried to give back. I apologized endlessly for all the irrational craziness I seemed unable to control for so many years of our marriage. I marveled—both of us did—at how I was no longer fighting myself or Michael.

Like my marriage, my mothering improved, too. Now that I was more in control, I didn’t lose my temper if Natalie spilled something. I didn’t go to the extreme where I saw my world fall apart just because she broke a glass or messed up a room. I always loved my child, but I enjoyed being a mother more than ever.

As I’d told Michael, I was able to let go. I no longer felt the need to control everything for fear it would fall apart if I let my guard down.

Even with the change in me evident my mother remained skeptical. She needed to see over time that Prozac wasn’t another drug that was going to cause me problems. I gave her that opportunity. We went to garage sales two or three weekends a month. I picked her up early in the morning when the best stuff was still available, and we stayed out until the late afternoon. We talked the entire day. I always made sure she knew how good I felt.

Sometimes she asked tentatively if the pills were still making a difference, and other times I told her without waiting for her query. I could tell she was more curious and accepting. One time, while we were searching for a garage sale, I told her about the pain I’d been in for so many years, as well as how I thought the cocaine I did was a way to escape all that hurt and fear. I had tried to run away from my problems, nearly destroyed myself, and been a poor daughter.

I apologized for not dealing with it better. I’d been sick. I should’ve gotten help sooner.

“But I feel so much better now,” I said, suddenly trying to inject a more upbeat note to the conversation.

My mother took my hand and squeezed it.

A little while later, as we walked through the yard sale, she gave me a hug. She had a tear in her eye.

“It’s a miracle,” she said.

My father remained dubious. He was influenced by Kevin, who seemed to resent me for feeling better. He accused me of being on mind-altering drugs. I felt bad for Kevin. He was a bitter man. He still lived in the same apartment my parents had gotten for him years earlier. He didn’t work. Even though my parents provided him with money each month, he blamed my mother’s syphilis for all of his hard luck.

I found it nearly impossible to sympathize with him the way I did when we were younger. I had no patience for his criticism and lack of ambition.

A
s this was going on, I worked on
Teen Angel,
a sitcom about a teenager who dies from choking on a hamburger and is sent back to earth as his best friend’s guardian angel. I had fun. I was in the best shape of my life and feeling good about myself, and my work. The regular hours of a sitcom were also convenient for planning around Natalie’s schedule. But the show struggled in the ratings, and after eleven episodes I was let go.

I’d never been fired before. The producers called me into their office and tried to soften the blow by explaining that it wasn’t me. They blamed it on the network, explaining that sometimes when a show doesn’t work, executives tear it apart, try to fix it, and bring in other actors, which was what happened. I was cast off and they brought in Jerry Van Dyke as my replacement.

I held myself together until I got to my car and then I broke down. No matter the explanation, it was still me being rejected. But I handled it. I cried within the normal range and then talked it through with Michael. It was the first major test of my emotional stability since I’d started Prozac. If I hadn’t been on the antidepressant medication, I probably would’ve killed myself.

Work was still sporadic. What I realized is that after thirty years in the business, I needed to work my way up from the bottom again. It was a sobering challenge, but one I met by gritting my teeth and taking the necessary baby steps. In 1999, I was in
Baby Huey’s Great Easter Adventure,
a children’s movie directed by my friend Stephen Furst, a wonderful, funny guy who’d lost more than a hundred pounds in the twenty years since he appeared in
Animal House.

Next I appeared on Nickelodeon’s
Amanda Show,
a clever and fun series amalgam of sitcom and variety starring Amanda Bynes. Mine was a tiny role, something I had to remind myself was part of the process of taking baby steps. But Amanda was a breath of fresh air, a genuinely lovely kid, and a big fan of
The Brady Bunch.
She asked all sorts of questions about what it was like to do that show; everyone on the set did. The people I met more than compensated for the size of the part, and I realized I could have fun just working.

I also guested on the WB’s
Moesha,
the hit sitcom starring Brandy, who was twenty at the time and in love. It was sweet to observe. Her mother was on the set, as was her brother, Ray J. Being around Brandy and Amanda, I couldn’t help but reflect on the years I’d spent growing up on the set. After the taping, Michael and I went to a restaurant, where I talked about the emotions and memories that were flooding my head. I cried as I remembered all the pain I’d grown up with, the way I’d covered it up with a smile, then with cocaine, and through it all the impossible effort I’d put forth to try to keep any cracks from showing.

All those years I had wanted simply to be me, but I’d either been too scared to do that or too lost to figure out who I was. Now, as I told Michael, who was thriving in a new job and was on his way to becoming the company’s top national salesman, it was different. Our lives for the first time were stable and real. As a result, I wanted to know and understand more about me, which led in a predictable direction.

W
hether directly or indirectly, my mother had always been the biggest influence in my life. Over the years, there had been several reunions on her side of the family in Iowa. She’d asked me to go, and I turned her down. I was either too messed up, too scared, too angry, or all of the above. But now I was done treating life like a multiple-choice exam. I knew that I’d missed opportunities.

First I told Michael and then my mom that I wanted to go to Iowa and walk on the ground that my mother had walked on, go into the house where she had grown up, and feel the place that nurtured the woman who gave life to me. My mother didn’t feel up to going back—despite previous reunions—but Michael suggested a family trip, and I thought it was a fine idea.

“Maureen, you don’t want to go back there,” my mom said.

“I do.”

“There’s nothing back there.”

“Not true,” I said. “Your childhood is back there. Your family is back there. I want to find out about those things.”

My mother rolled her eyes. I laughed.

Michael, Natalie, and I flew to his folks’ place in Minnesota. After a few days, we drove to Burlington, Iowa. The decision to travel by car rather than plane wasn’t intentional, but the time it took to get there (and that didn’t count the years I needed before I was ready) heightened the anticipation. I realized that time can be a good thing. God gives you nine months to get used to the idea of having a baby. You get twelve years to prepare for having a teenager in the house. Hopefully you get a long life to learn from your mistakes. In my case, it was forty-four years.