Here's the Story LP: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice (3 page)

I loved the attention and posing for the camera in different outfits and jewelry. At five years old, I was able to give the photographer any expression he wanted. Two years later, my parents entered one of my photos in a Baby Miss San Fernando Valley Beauty Pageant. I sang “Getting to Know You” from
The King and I.
I also recited poetry from the book
Little Women.
And I won.

Little did they realize a star had been born.

Wind Her Up and…

A
fter a picture of me winning the Baby Miss San Fernando Valley beauty pageant ran in the local newspaper, talent agent Pat Domigan of the Jack Wormser Agency called our house and asked if she could represent me for radio and TV commercials. We met at her office. She seemed legit and trustworthy. She suggested I take dance and modeling lessons, but she was convinced I had that special quality that casting directors looked for in kids.

My parents liked hearing that, and while I enjoyed the occasional modeling, I was really a normal kid. I enjoyed playing make-believe. I practically lived in our tree house, and I put on puppet shows for anyone willing to watch. Thanks to my brothers, though, I was more of a tomboy than a girlie girl. I made mud pies, climbed trees, played cowboys and Indians, threw footballs, baseballs, and Frisbees, and joined in games of hide-and-seek. My knees always had scabs on them from skateboarding.

The only hint of an interest in show business was the time I spent with my parents watching all the great musicals on TV, and often after dinner my father asked me to sing favorite songs from
Carousel, Oklahoma!, The King and I,
and
West Side Story.
He could listen till I exhausted my repertoire. That was fine with me. As the baby of the family, I enjoyed the attention.

Then a short time after signing with Pat, I had my first interview. The strange thing was it didn’t come through my new agent. No matter. I thought I would burst from excitement. We were told to be at Paramount Studios early one Saturday morning. It was raining when we left home, and my father stopped at a store in Hollywood to buy an umbrella so my hair wouldn’t get wet.

But when we got to the studio, the gates were locked. We waited, thinking they would eventually open up since we had an appointment. They never did. We went to a pay phone and called Pat, who was surprised by what was going on and set us straight, explaining that no one had meetings on the weekend.

The interview turned out to be a cruel setup by an unhappy mother of one of the girls who hadn’t won the beauty and talent contest. It was the kind of hoax you hear about on the news today—the revenge-of-the-bitter-cheerleader’s-mother kind of thing. We learned a lesson. As we later said, laughing, at least we got our feet wet—literally!

On April 24, 1964, I went to my first legit interview, and I got the job. It was a commercial for Mattel’s new doll, Baby Pattaburp. They showed me how to put the doll over my shoulder, pat her, and make her really burp. She was the cutest thing I’d ever seen. Even then, back when I was almost eight years old, my dream was to get married and be a mom. So the doll was like a dream come true.

Four months later, Mattel hired me again to do an ad for their Chatty Cathy dolls. I still have my original Chatty Cathy. My voice was used for the dolls, too. My favorite days were those when I got to go to the Mattel factory in Hawthorne because I usually left with new toys and dolls. Believe it or not, those are still some of my favorite memories.

Before the year ended, I was cast in the play
Wind It Up and It Breaks
at the La Jolla Playhouse. It was directed by Cy Howard, produced by Ray Stark, and starred Mike Connors (later known for the hit series
Mannix
) and Jack Weston. For my first acting job, I could not have worked with a better group of professionals. They gave me pointers and made me feel comfortable and confident onstage.

They also taught me the meaning of the old adage “the show must go on.” Shortly after the play opened, I came down with the flu. My parents wanted to keep me in bed, but they were told there were no sick days in the theater. Instead I was given a paper bag and told to run offstage if I had to throw up, then get back out there and be ready to deliver my next line.

There was talk of the play going to Broadway. All of us were disappointed when it didn’t happen, but we had a fun wrap party all the same.

I
can’t imagine that my family would’ve let me follow the play to New York. My career was still more of a lark amid the comings and goings of our busy family. But there was genuine excitement when my next job was on
Bewitched,
one of everyone’s favorite shows. It was the episode titled “And Something Makes Three,” and I played Tabitha in a dream Samantha had before she gave birth to the actual Tabitha.

I remember being awed by Elizabeth Montgomery and thinking wow, she’s more beautiful in person. I also remember that in my scene I was supposed to wiggle my nose, like Samantha, but I can’t remember if they used
my nose
or Elizabeth’s.

Trivia, trivia, trivia.

I worked on pilots for
Camp Runamuck
and
This Is the Hopsital,
though neither was picked up, and then I was cast in episodes of
The Farmer’s Daughter
and
Honey West.
I also returned to
Bewitched,
this time playing Endora (Agnes Moorhead) as a child, and I followed that with spots on
I Dream of Jeannie
and
My Three Sons.
In fact, I received my first on-screen kiss as Ernie’s girlfriend. The funny thing was I had a crush on Fred MacMurray, the boys’ pipe-smoking father. I thought he was a cutie.

I made my movie debut in
The Arrangement,
a drama starring Faye Dunaway and Kirk Douglas. Elia Kazan directed, but I only have a vague impression of him as businesslike when it came to positioning me. My best training came on commercials for Pillsbury chocolate-chip cookies (I was the first person to appear on-screen with the Pillsbury Doughboy; I even poked him in his tummy), Barbie’s “Color’n Curl” set, Standard Oil, Chevron, Kool-Aid, Gaines Dog Food, White Cloud tissues, the new Twist Barbie, and Mr. Bubble.

My work and various dance and singing lessons I took after school provided me with an escape from growing tension and stress at home, some of which was too nuanced for me to notice but some of which I understood too well. The tension revolved around my brother Kevin, who had a difficult time as a middle child finding his way amid the attention given to me and my brother Denny, who had special needs, and my oldest brother Mike’s excellence in and out of school.

Indeed, following Mike wasn’t easy, as he got good grades, worked two paper routes, had a job at a TV repair store all through junior high and high school, and set his sights on college. Kevin also tried a paper route, but he was fired after he was caught dumping his papers into trash cans behind a store. After that, his grades dropped and he began hanging around with a bad crowd.

By junior high, Kevin was regularly in trouble. He was suspended from school for poor grades and fighting. He also started to drink and experiment with drugs. He and his friends broke into neighborhood homes for kicks. My mother was concerned, but she was busy with me at the studios or occupied by Denny. Although she pleaded with my father to get him help and separate him from his friends, he refused, arguing that Kevin was in a phase that he’d eventually grow out of.

While Denny would never grow out of his situation, he attended regular school through a program that integrated special-ed students with the regular student population. He was adorable as he hurried to the bus every morning with his books and then came home in the afternoon and did his homework, hoping to get a gold star. He was about one thing—love. All he wanted was a hug, a kiss, or a smile, and he gave as much affection as he got.

Certain friends of mine weren’t allowed to spend the night at our house because I had a handicapped brother. Their parents feared he might turn violent. I was infuriated by their ignorance. Denny was the kindest person in the whole world. Then there was the cruelty I witnessed when people made fun of him or called him a “retard.” After one such incident at the mall, Denny turned to me and asked, “What’s a retard?” Another time he asked, “Maureen, am I retarded? What does that mean?”

We were raised Catholic, and I always wondered how the all-knowing and all-loving God we heard about at church could permit other people to hurt Denny. I had even more questions when my father, after befriending a charismatic local preacher, turned into an impassioned born-again Christian. Almost every night for about six months, he came home and implored all of us to get to know Jesus better.

Then the preacher hanged himself. After hearing the news, my father was devastated and disillusioned. The rest of us were relieved. We didn’t have to sit through any more of his dinner-table preaching.

And a lot of good the preaching did. After a year of high school, Kevin dropped out. He took up painting, at which he showed promise, and guitar, but for the most part he drifted around and got into trouble. Mike, who attended junior college and managed a TV repair store, was rarely home. My father started to teach emotionally disturbed students, on top of his other jobs, including ferrying my mother and me back and forth to the studio.

We were a busy family, a close unit but in some ways as compartmentalized as a Swanson’s TV dinner. Everyone was excited when I was told that I got the title role in the TV movie
Heidi
. Blake Edwards, whose wife, Julie Andrews, was one of my heroes, was producing, and the project starred Maximilian Schell, Jean Simmons, and Michael Redgrave. Then out of the blue I was told my role was going instead to Edwards’ daughter, Jennifer.

Oh my God was I disappointed. I threw myself on my bed like a little drama queen. It felt like my life was over. My mother sat on my bed, took me in her arms, and promised something else good would come along. I looked up at her through tear-filled eyes. It was clear to me that she didn’t understand.

The Way We Became the Brady Bunch

C
an one be both blessed and cursed by the same thing?

That’s the question that comes to mind as I think back to the end of the summer of 1968, when I began interviewing for
The Brady Bunch
at Paramount Studios. As we drove to the studio, I was unaware of the show’s brief history in Hollywood. What I later learned was that executive producer Sherwood Schwartz, an Emmy-winning writer and creator of
Gilligan’s Island,
had written the pilot two years earlier after reading an
L.A. Times
story about “blended families,” two parents with children from previous marriages, but all the networks turned it down.

Then the Henry Fonda–Lucille Ball movie
Yours, Mine and Ours
was a hit in theaters, and ABC remembered Sherwood’s pet project. It looked like his perseverance had paid off. Sherwood and director John Rich saw 1,200 boys and girls, then narrowed the field down to 464, and then finally down to two sets of kids—one set with three blond girls and three brown-haired boys and one set with three brunette girls and three blond boys.

I was in the first group, where I was actually the middle daughter. But Sherwood decided to go with younger children, and I was moved into a new threesome with Eve Plumb and Susan Olsen, where I was the oldest. I wonder how my life would’ve been different if I’d played Jan. Then it was down to the hair color of the parents. Once Sherwood and the network decided on Florence Henderson as the mother, they chose us. She was blond, and so were we. (And back then it was natural!)

D
uring the audition process, I recognized Eve Plumb from other tryouts and Susan Olsen and I had met in passing at an audition for the Elvis Presley movie
The Trouble with Girls
(neither of us got the part). But my first real introduction to my Brady sisters came at the screen test we did for Sherwood and John, where we answered questions. It felt more like a personality test than an audition. In retrospect, Sherwood was gauging our chemistry together.

It was evident to us that we hit it off and I guess to him, too. Soon after that final interview, my agent called with good news. It was then that I also learned my brothers were to be played by Barry Williams, Chris Knight, and Mike Lookinland. I couldn’t wait to meet them.

Later I found out that actress Joyce Bulifant had been first in line to play Carol Brady, that is until Sherwood saw Florence’s screen test and went with her. He had also wanted a young Gene Hackman to play Mike Brady, but the executives at Paramount thought he lacked TV experience and instead went with Bob Reed, who was still under contract to the studio after having starred on the series
The Defenders.

Our first run-through was at the Lucille Ball rehearsal hall on the Paramount lot. That’s where everyone met. Sherwood made the introduction by saying, “This is your new family.” I liked the sound of that—
my new family.
Even better, I liked the looks of the three boys, all of whom were supercute.

The first day of shooting took place on Barry Williams’s fourteenth birthday. There was a party on the set. Barry was the most enthusiastic of the six kids; the most ambitious, too. He was ready for his Johnny Bravo moment. Chris was shy. Eve was quiet. Susie and Mike were young. It seemed like a friendly group. Everyone except Bob seemed glad to be there.

I don’t know what it was about Bob that I sensed. He’d come off the E. G. Marshall drama
The Defenders
to find himself the head of the Brady household with six kids, a dog, a cat, a housekeeper, and an unrealistic plot. He was a stickler for realism, so the show tortured him from the get-go. But I recently went back and watched the first episodes, and in the scene when I hug my new dad for the first time, I saw genuine affection in my eyes—and Bob’s.

I was fascinated to see that in me. It was more than acting. All of us really were making deep connections, like a family.

Then there was a six-month wait between the time we finished the pilot and the news that ABC had picked up the show—and to borrow a line from the show’s theme song, “that’s the way we all became the Brady Bunch.” We began shooting that summer, and as I later wrote in a high-school essay, “
The Brady Bunch
became a big part of my life, with Paramount Studios as my second home and the people I worked with my second family.”

When we returned to work, I and all the other kids were asked to bring a couple of personal items from home to help decorate our new bedrooms on the set. I brought a stuffed giraffe and the Miss Baby San Fernando Valley trophy I’d won years earlier. Funnily enough, my beauty pageant trophy ended up on a shelf in the boys’ bedroom. That was fine with me. I wasn’t interested in replicating the non-Brady-like chaos of my real house. I liked this new arrangement.

One day my mom and I rode to the studio with Susie Olsen and her mother. Susie started to read a book that I’d brought and got carsick. When we stopped outside the studio to give the guard our names, she threw up all over the gate. A short time later, Eve Plumb and her mother arrived. Her mother reported that a kid had vomited all over the front gate.

Susie’s mom nonchalantly asked how she knew it was a kid.

“You can see what they ate for breakfast,” Eve’s mom said.

We also laughed at Mike, the youngest, whose hair had been dyed red for the pilot but was now dyed black, and sadly for him, it ran in black-streaked drivels down his face as he perspired under the hot lights. I remember Chris teasing me. The flirtations started right away. I was titillated by the fact that the boys were dressing, and undressing, in a room right next door to us. That drove me crazy as we got older.

A
typical day began at five
A.M.
when I woke up and got ready. At five-thirty, my mother and I caught a ride to the studio either from my father or with the Knights or the Olsens. At the studio, we went into hair and makeup and then worked with our tutor until we were needed on the set. The day ended around five
P.M.
It took about an hour to get home. After dinner, I studied my lines until bedtime and often fell asleep still wearing my makeup.

In those early days on the set, we were constantly under adult supervision, usually a combination of parents, producers, and a tutor. Our girls’ dressing room resembled a crowded hair salon. I remember Susie’s mom constantly fussing with her daughter’s pigtails, and Eve’s mother carefully brushing her daughter’s long blond hair. Of course I brushed mine as much as, if not more than, anyone.

I heard the boys’ side was less animated. Barry’s parents were sweet, classy people. Chris’s mom, Willie, was a tough New Yorker. And Mike Lookinland’s parents seemed the most Brady-like, though they divorced years later. As for my mother, she got along with everyone, but she preferred to stay in the background and away from the gossip that everyone liked to swap.

I
loved the familiarity of being on the set every day. It became a second home, including the mischief. Eve and Susie teased me for pressing my ear against the wall that separated our dressing room from the boys. But I wanted to hear their conversations, especially if they were talking about us—but really me! I wondered if Barry liked me. I sure wanted him to. That would come later.

Susie and Mike had the first on-set romance. They snuck off into the doghouse and made out. Once Eve and I threw Mike into our dressing room and locked him inside with Susie. By the time we shot the eighth episode, “A-Camping We Will Go,” Susan and Mike had professed their love. I officiated at a fake marriage ceremony outside our dressing room, asking if he took her as his
awfully
wedded wife.

In August, I celebrated my thirteenth birthday on the set. Finally a teenager, I was ready for big changes. One morning on the way to the studio, Susie’s mom mentioned that her other daughter, Diane, who was my age, had gotten her period for the first time the night before. I was so jealous I couldn’t contain myself.

“I want mine!” I blurted.

I had to wait until the next season for that special moment, and when it finally happened I was blocking a scene, wearing white pants. I sprinted to the dressing room, followed by the wardrobe lady, my mother, Eve’s mother, and others, everyone whispering, “She started her period.” It felt like an exclamation point.

When I noticed Eve that first season getting boobs, I had a minor girlie fit. She was younger than me by two years. Although it was barely noticeable (and not even anything producers had to hide yet), I thought it was unfair that she should start to pop out before me. With three mothers standing by as I had my meltdown, I received plenty of advice and consolation. Mine would come, they said.

I could only hope and pray it came soon.

T
he first of our eventual 117 episodes premiered on Friday, September 26, 1969, airing at eight
P.M.
on ABC. I watched it at home. After dinner, my whole family gathered around the TV set. It was the first time I remember all of us watching anything together since Robert Kennedy’s assassination the previous year. The mood in the room was decidedly happier while watching
The Brady Bunch.
I think my brother Denny was the first person to ever turn to me and say, “You’re Marcia Brady!”

And so I was, but I can’t say I was 100 percent happy about it. To be honest, I was slightly embarrassed after the generally poor reviews came out. I wished I could have been on a hipper show. Even though
The Brady Bunch
became a Friday-night staple, the show’s ratings put it only in the top thirty. There was much more buzz about the series that aired opposite us on CBS,
Get Smart.

At that time, television was transitioning from the conservative 1960s to the more progressive 1970s.
Laugh-In
was the country’s top-rated show, followed by
Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Mayberry R.F.D.,
and
Family Affair. Room 222
and
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father
also debuted that year. My favorite was
The Mod Squad,
the detective series starring Clarence Williams III, Peggy Lipton, and Michael Cole, who I thought was the dreamiest guy on television. I also thought Peggy Lipton was the epitome of pure, natural beauty.

When I found out
The Mod Squad
shot near us on the Paramount lot, I put myself on high alert every time I walked outside our stage. One day Eve and I were walking to lunch at the commissary when I saw Michael Cole coming toward us. My heart raced. I looked into his eyes as we passed, then I stopped, breathless, and asked Eve if she had seen what had happened.

“What?” she asked.

“He looked at me!”

“Really?”

“Oh my God!”

A thousand fantasies were born right there. I remember thinking if he ever asked me out, I was going to say yes. And if my parents said I was too young, I’d sneak out of the house anyway. In reality, I don’t think Michael even slowed his step as he passed the two of us.

By this time, I also had a crush on Barry. I realized that he thought every girl had a crush on him—and to be fair, most of them did—but he liked me, too. We flirted shamelessly as we got to know each other. Nothing explicit would happen between us for a couple of seasons, but Sherwood Schwartz and his son Lloyd, also an executive producer, watched the two of us closely, wondering not
what if
but
when.

To me, it felt like something might happen when we shot the camping show. It was our first time on location, and I tried to imagine what it would be like if Barry and I actually shared a tent overnight. The closest we came was a scene when a tent collapsed on all six of us kids. For a few moments we were close together in the dark. Suddenly there was a lot of pushing, touching, and giggling. My fingertips found Barry’s arms and chest, and I felt someone’s hands touch my arms and legs.

Several weeks later we shot “Vote for Brady,” the episode in which Greg and Marcia run against each other for student-body president. It was one of my favorite episodes because Barry and I had so many scenes together. I also liked working closely with Bob Reed in the “Father of the Year” episode. I always had a thing for older men, including Bob, who had a lovely daughter, Caroline, from a previous marriage. I had no idea he was secretly gay. I used to imagine running off with him.

What was with us Brady kids? The following year Barry developed the hots for Florence, took her out on what he considered a dinner date, and gave her a good-night kiss. That was weird. Florence was married (though her husband spent most of the time in New York) and more than twice Barry’s age. I want to believe she thought his puppy love was cute and she decided to play along. If you ask me, it’s still weird.

My life couldn’t have been any better. I remember spending the weekend at Eve’s family’s beach house and lying out in the sun with her and her beautiful older sister, Flora. We were gossiping about the boys, the show, and a thousand other subjects that interested teenage girls. Before bed, we brushed our long hair like two princesses. I could hear the surf outside. As I drifted off to sleep, I thought my life was perfect. It was like a dream.

Little did I know the nightmare was about to begin.