Here's the Story LP: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice (2 page)

Part
One

The One Day When This Lady Met This Fellow

I
wish my mother had been alive for my fiftieth birthday. I think my attitude would have surprised her. Rather than dreading the half-century milestone, I celebrated it. I embraced the idea of getting older. My family was around me all day. At night, they brought out a big cake and I blew out candles. We toasted…me!

I said silly things like “fifty is nifty.” Several reporters called, wanting to know how Marcia Brady felt about turning fifty. Politely, I reminded them that Marcia Brady was still a teenager, but I, Maureen, created not in Sherwood Schwartz’s imagination but in the womb of Irene McCormick, felt okay about it.

And no, I responded to another frequently asked question, I hadn’t had any plastic surgery and didn’t plan to. I borrowed Flip Wilson’s line: What you see is what you get. It wasn’t that bad. Despite the punishment I’d heaped on my body over the years, gravity had been kind to me. I didn’t have many wrinkles, at least none that were undeserved. I had few complaints.

But those questions got me thinking. Why would I get surgically pulled, stretched, and Botoxed? When I looked in the mirror, I wanted to see me.
The real me—warts, wrinkles, and everything else.
I’d gone through hell and back to get to a place where I could, and indeed wanted to, look at myself—and like what I saw.

My mother had spent nearly her entire life doing the opposite, hiding from her past and trying to avoid the truth. It clouded much that she should’ve liked. A stay-at-home mother, she was a hard worker, with a good sense of people, good morals, and a good business sense.

Before the end, she came around and was much better and happier for it. By then, of course, much had happened.

My mother was born in 1921 in Burlington, Iowa, a small town along the Mississippi settled by German immigrants. Her father contracted syphilis while serving overseas during World War I, and he passed it on to her mother. She entered a mental institution with extreme paresis and died there without being able to recognize my mother or her younger sister.

A week after she entered the institution, my mom’s father locked himself in the garage and breathed the exhaust fumes from his car. He died leaving his two girls inside the house. My mother was ten years old when she lost both of her parents.

She and her sister moved in with an aunt and uncle. They were dedicated, devoted, and loving people. They provided my mother and her sister with a loving, nurturing home, though small-town life being what it was, my mother and her younger sister were still subjected to scorn. A year later, she was diagnosed with syphilis, an event that scarred her more psychologically than physically for the rest of her life.

It turned out she’d inherited the disease at birth from her mother. Following the diagnosis, she was warned not to tell anyone,
ever,
lest she be branded diseased and dirty. She didn’t have to be told. From that first moment on, she
felt
dirty and diseased. It was the most shameful thing in the world to her. She was also frightened that she’d end up in an institution like her mother.

She was treated with stovarsol and mercury capsules, though both treatments caused a bad rash and later a more extreme skin condition. She ate her meals off a separate set of dishes. It was like wearing a scarlet
A,
only worse. At thirteen, she began special treatments at the State University of Iowa in Iowa City to ensure she would never pass the syphilis on to any children she might have. Those treatments lasted for three years and required long and lonely bus rides.

“At the time of her last visit here, on December 28, 1938, she seemed to be in good health, had been taking mercury and chalk fairly regularly, and had been going to her local physician for weekly Bismuth shots,” her doctor wrote in a report. “Physical examination at the time of her last visit revealed a well-developed, well-nourished female. She was quite cooperative but acted rather self-consciously.”

D
espite everything, she did well in school, worked numerous odd jobs, and put herself through business college. She blossomed into a beautiful, intelligent, ambitious young woman. On the one hand, I picture her sitting on those long bus rides to the hospital: alone, scared, praying no one found out about her condition. On the other hand, I marvel at the strength she must have had; though she didn’t show it, she was the strongest woman I’ve ever met.

At twenty, she fell in love and married a soldier who was immediately shipped off to Europe. A week later, he was killed in World War II when a German U-boat sank the transport ship he was on.

Devastated, she moved to the West Coast with her best girlfriend, Mary Crawley. They wanted to live in Hollywood, among the movie stars and fancy theaters. They dreamed of adventure, maybe even stardom. But they ended up fifteen miles away in Westwood, near UCLA. My mom didn’t care. She was happy to be out of Burlington and away from the stares and stigma of her past.

M
y father, Richard, was the youngest of three children born to Joseph McCormick, a bartender in Riverside, New Jersey. His father was a heavy drinker who abused his wife. He lost everything in the Depression and died in his mid-thirties from illnesses related to alcoholism.

My father’s mother did the best she could to raise her family, but they were very poor and at one point they had to burn furniture to keep warm in the winter. My dad spent most of his youth in a wheelchair, the result of osteomyelitis. By his late teens, though, his illness was gone. Near the end of World War II, he lied about his age and joined the Coast Guard. One day he was on deck, cooking for his shipmates, and his gas stove exploded, severely burning his leg.

Discharged because of his injury, he moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at UCLA. It was 1945, and he lived in a fraternity house. To earn money, he and a friend started a window-washing business. One day he was washing windows outside a doctor’s office, and he began making eyes at the pretty receptionist on the other side. That was my mother. She had gotten a job as a receptionist/office manager for a foot doctor in Westwood.

She smiled back at the nice-looking window washer. A moment later, he walked into the office. He heard music playing on the office radio. Inspired and playful, he asked her to dance. She said okay, got up from her desk, and, in a manner of speaking, they never stopped dancing.

They married six weeks later in a Catholic church in Westwood. My dad’s window-washing partner and his girlfriend were the only witnesses. A framed photo of my mother from that day stands in my living room. My mom wore a smart, dark suit and looked as striking as any movie star I’ve seen. But I’m sure her outfit was old. She never would’ve spent money on a new dress, not even on her wedding day. She didn’t think she was worth it.

She was like that my whole life. She bought clothes on sale at Kmart, wore cheap wigs to cover her very thin hair, and wore the least expensive makeup and shoes. She never felt deserving of anything. Yet she was very beautiful and feminine. Tragically, I don’t think she ever saw or felt it.

N
ot long after they married, my mom grew homesick and she and my dad moved back to Iowa. They lived in a duplex with my mom’s sister and her husband. Dad and a buddy opened a gas station. My dad was always industrious. In 1948, they had their first child, Mike. Eleven months later, my mom gave birth to a second son, Kevin. During both pregnancies, as would be the case with subsequent pregnancies, she received extremely painful shots of penicillin directly into her hip on ten successive days to prevent her congenital syphilis from being passed to her children.

After Kevin arrived, they moved to Davenport, where Dad spent a year at Drake University. In 1952, my mother was pregnant again. With a growing family, both she and my father realized there were more economic opportunities in California, so they loaded up their station wagon and drove to San Diego, where my father got his teaching credential at San Diego State College.

They were living in a military-style Quonset hut when my brother Dennis arrived. My mother was overjoyed, but three boys was a lot for a woman who worried about her stamina. In 1953, my dad graduated and found a teaching job in Malibu. They moved to a rustic, one-room cabin on twenty acres of land near Malibu Lake. On their first night there, the entire family slept in a queen-size bed. That was togetherness!

A couple years later, they moved to a more spacious, three-bedroom tract home in Reseda. Mike started kindergarten. Kevin and Dennis were still home with my mother. Mike remembers Dad coming home one night from his after-school job at Builders Emporium with cuts and bruises. He said angry union mobsters had beat him up after he refused to join the union.

Mike also remembers one day when he and Kevin, then about five and four, were playing cowboys with the girl next door. At Kevin’s suggestion, they captured her, tied her to a stake, and painted her with mud. That didn’t go over well with her father, who knocked on our door that night and demanded an apology.

The boys apologized, but then they had to face my father. For some reason, Kevin was let off the hook. Mike wasn’t as lucky. My father whipped him with a belt until he was black-and-blue.

Around this time, my mother entered the hospital. My father gathered the boys together and said she needed to go away for special care. My aunt came out and filled in for my mother. The episode was a mystery for years, until my father revealed that my mother had had a nervous breakdown and received shock treatment. He said that her behavior turned disturbing, and includes an episode where she had complained of seeing snakes coming out of the couch.

I’ve asked Mike if he remembered such behavior. He didn’t. A longtime friend of my mother’s told me that my father may have pushed her into that state. My mother’s friend Harriet, who died at age ninety-three as I was finishing this book, said they fought often and at times my father hit her.

My mother refused to discuss anything like that, as well as her hospitalization. She pushed it out of her thoughts. For her, it was just one more thing to be ashamed of, one more thing to hide.

I
n 1954, at the end of the school year, my father built a home for the family in Woodland Hills. He enlisted some of his students to help with the construction. He loved do-it-yourself projects, but that meant cutting corners to cut costs. As such, the home was full of leaks from bad pipe fittings in the cement slab, all of which had to be redone by experts. And for a month after moving in, they lived amid the earsplitting sound of jackhammers as plumbers broke up the floor and replaced the pipes.

Apparently that was a source of laughter in those days, but these were also very difficult times for my mother—indeed, for both of my parents. According to Harriet, their fighting was intense. Harriet was often and I think the only person my mother turned to after such fights. For whatever reason, she was able to show her bruises and bare her soul to her friend.

In fact, when Harriet recalled these moments to me, I remembered seeing my mother full of bruises. As I thought back, I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t see her bruised somewhere on her body.

“I asked her why she didn’t do something, why she didn’t yell for help,” Harriet told me. “Your mother said she couldn’t. She didn’t want the neighbors to hear.”

However, according to Harriet, they did go to a Catholic priest for help with their problems. He told them to have another baby. At the end of 1955, my mother got pregnant again. That Christmas everyone talked about how they wanted a girl. They got their wish when I arrived ten months later on August 5, 1956. My mother was ecstatic when she heard the doctor say, “It’s a girl.”

She named me Maureen. My parents’ second choice was Christine. But my mother said I looked more like a Maureen. She also said that I was the most beautiful baby she’d ever seen.

The years following my birth were happy times. We spent many weekends with our cousins from Long Beach. Either they drove up or we visited them. One Sunday, while both families were at our house, Dennis got into my dad’s car and released the emergency brake. It began rolling backward down the long, steep driveway. Someone saw it move and screamed. My dad, who was seated about twenty feet away, dropped his beer and sprinted alongside the moving car until he was able to jump inside and slam on the brakes.

We stayed in that home for about two years. Finally my mother had enough of the dirt roads, the mud slides, and other difficulties of rural life in the hills. In 1958, we moved to a neighborhood near Topanga Canyon and Mulholland Drive. We spent the next five years there. It was a great neighborhood, with lots of children, trees to climb, and large backyards where we played.

Soon we added a pet duck and a homemade pigeon coop. My mom used to make a delicious angel-food cake when the duck laid its eggs. Around this time, my parents learned that Denny was intellectually handicapped. He’d had a problematic birth and suffered minor brain damage from a lack of oxygen. My parents had known about this, but had hoped and prayed for the best. But their worst fears were confirmed.

My dad saw this as a challenge, and he took night-school classes on how to teach children with special needs. Kevin’s behavior worried my mother, too. Ever since the incident when he tied the little neighbor girl up, others looked at him with a wary eye. My mother wanted to get him help, but my father wouldn’t let her. He felt Kevin was fine. Everything was fine.

Yet my dad always wanted a better job, something more, and as a result he moved from school to school, district to district, which infuriated my mother because it meant he constantly lost the tenure and retirement he’d built up. Because it was difficult to support a family of six on a teacher’s salary, he moonlighted, selling portrait photography and family paintings for artist Jim Gaines. One day, he suggested they use me as a baby model, and soon clients remarked on what a beautiful child I was.