Here's the Story LP: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice (4 page)

Brace Yourself

F
ighting was a part of the McCormick household whether or not anyone acknowledged it, and generally we didn’t. My parents were both loving, family-oriented people, and that’s how we kids preferred to think of them. But the truth is, they fought. Their fights often flared into roof-shaking scream fests. My mother was stubborn and opinionated, and my father had a temper. Generally, their reasons for losing their cool with each other had to do with stress from situations with Kevin, Denny, my schedule, one of my father’s various jobs, or money.

I was midway through production of that first
Brady
season when their fighting reached a whole new level, changed our family, and created emotional scars in me that I’ve dealt with for the rest of my life. It started after my mother found a receipt from a nearby hotel in my father’s coat pocket.

Something preceded her discovery; she must have had a reason for searching my father’s pockets. I was never privy to that information. In any event, she waited for him to get home from school and then all hell broke loose. Although their bedroom door was closed, I still heard the details clearly. Dad had had an affair with Kathy Pointer, a woman all of us had met. She was the mother of a student he tutored at night, and they’d been to our house for a barbecue. My father had taken her to the Canoga Park Inn, a lodge near our house.

Then my mother stormed from the bedroom, went into the kitchen, and grabbed a bottle of wine. Until then, I’d never known her to take a sip of alcohol. She planted the bottle on the counter, poured herself a glass, and gulped it down. She drank a second glass, ignoring my father as he stood next to her, accusing her of spying on him. My mother yelled at him for trying to turn the tables, then stormed off, trying to get away from him.

She stormed from room to room before pushing through the front door. From the front lawn, she turned and screamed at my father in the doorway. She didn’t care if any of the neighbors heard, something she ordinarily worried about whenever they raised their voices. Then she sat on the curb, buried her head in her hands, and cried so hard her entire body shook.

By the time I ventured out to help her, she’d stopped crying. She looked at me through dazed eyes as I helped her up and back inside. The house felt cold and lonely that night. My brother Mike, now enrolled at UCLA, was managing an apartment building in Westwood. Kevin had gone out with his friends. Denny and I tried to comfort each other. We watched TV together, and every so often he turned to me and, as if reading my mind, said, “Dad had an affair with Kathy Pointer.”

It was unfathomable. I thought for sure my parents would divorce. But a few nights later, while my mother was in her bedroom, my father called my brothers and me into the living room, acknowledged his affair, and then said there were reasons he’d gone outside the marriage, reasons that were justified by circumstances that us kids weren’t aware of but were probably old enough to understand.

He went on to explain that he and my mother didn’t have a normal husband–wife relationship. He made that admission hesitantly, as if gauging our reaction. It definitely crossed new boundaries in terms of the information about intimacy shared in our family. After a pause, he said they didn’t have
any
such relationship and that in order to satisfy what he described as basic needs, he had to go someplace else.

“You don’t know this about your mother,” he said, “but…”

That’s when I learned—when all of us learned—facts about my mother and her family that she had kept hidden her entire life. My father told us my mother’s mother—our grandmother—had contracted syphilis, passed it to her daughter, and subsequently died from it in a mental institution. He said that my mother had been treated so that none of us would get syphilis, but he added that she’d also suffered a breakdown and received electroshock treatment when the boys were little.

My father presented and spun facts to his advantage. It was all about what he had tolerated for years. We didn’t hear any of my mother’s side of the story. None of her torment and shame. I can’t imagine the devastation my mother must have felt as she listened to this from her bedroom. I know that after hearing that story, I never felt the same about my father, my mother, or myself.

I
wish I could say that after my father’s talk I ran to my mother and threw my arms around her, rejuvenating her with my unconditional love. Sadly, that didn’t happen. At some point that night I did seek her out and attempt to make her feel better, but I was really more interested in looking at her for signs of syphilis.

Suddenly she was a curiosity to me. The next time the two of us were in the backseat of Susie Olsen’s mother’s car, I realized that I was staring at her the same way, searching for a sign or a symptom. I wanted to know what the syphilis looked like. She never brought it up, never offered an explanation, never uttered a word about it. It would be many years before we ever broached the subject.

In the meantime, my relationship with her underwent a sudden, very subtle, but dramatic change, and so did my perceptions about myself. It was all due to ignorance and the inability of any of us to discuss this seismic jolt our family had received. Following my father’s revelation, I felt embarrassed about my mother. It’s terrible to admit even now. But I didn’t like being around her in public, especially among the other mothers on the
Brady
set. I knew she didn’t fit in with them, and now I thought I knew the reason. It was because of her syphilis. I figured everyone could see it.

Granted, I had yet to see signs of it—later, I would learn she did suffer long-term effects, including bad eyes, thin hair, and physical frailty—but I was sure other people noticed.

Even worse, I took the few facts I knew and used them to convince myself that I was also infected with syphilis. I ignored my father’s claim that my mother had received treatments to prevent transmission. I told myself that it ran in the family. My mother’s mother suffered from syphilis, then she passed it to my mother, and thus it made sense that I was infected, too.

I knew exactly what that meant. Like my mother and her mother before her, I was destined to go insane. Both of them had ended up in mental institutions. It was only a matter of time, I reasoned, before the same thing happened to me.

I wasn’t entirely wrong. By believing that I had syphilis, I inherited all the same emotional problems that had plagued my mother, namely the debilitating psychological side effects of carrying around a secret. I was suddenly filled with dread, shame, and fear, feelings that grew worse over time. When I went back to work, we were shooting “Brace Yourself,” the episode in which Marcia gets braces. It was a story about self-image.

How fitting! My self-image was in crisis mode. Susie remembers me as suddenly different. According to her, the change was subtle but noticeable. It was like I had my head in the clouds. My attention drifted. Chris Knight even made fun of me a few times for that reason.

But I
was
different. I remember being in the dressing room, the same as always, except this time I felt as if everyone was looking at my mother and me. I felt as if they could see signs of the syphilis in both of us (it felt obvious to me), but I wasn’t going to say anything in case they couldn’t. Then the producers sent me to an orthodontist to get real braces put on my teeth. I was against that idea; why stand out even more?

When I returned to the set, Barry, Chris, Eve, and the others said my teeth were going to be marked for life. I really felt, as Marcia said in the script, ugly, ugly, ugly.

If only they knew what was going on with me, I thought.

I was required to cry in several scenes, and I summoned the tears easily. It was the first time I’d cried since witnessing my parents’ fight and convincing myself that syphilis had made me a ticking time bomb. Little did anyone on the
Brady
set know my tears were real and it felt so good to cry.

A
t the end of January 1970, the show took a brief hiatus as producers waited to hear if the network was going to pick it up for a second season. This also gave the writers time to finish scripts for the remaining episodes. During the break, I traveled to Washington, D.C., with TV host Art Linkletter and three other child actors for a TV special called
A Kid’s Eye View of Washington.

With cameras following, the four of us toured the sites of our nation’s capital and got a bird’s-eye view of the corridors of government. Among our stops were John F. Kennedy’s gravesite at Arlington and the Smithsonian, where I tried on the 98.6-carat Bismarck sapphire. Armed guards stood around me as the necklace was placed around my neck. We also took an aerial tour of the city in the presidential helicopter.

The highlight of this amazing trip was a face-to-face with the president of the United States, Richard Nixon. He met us in the Oval Office. The whole thing was carefully choreographed for the TV special. Each of us was supposed to ask President Nixon a question. We rehearsed them before arriving at the White House and we continued to practice as we waited for the president.

Then President Nixon entered the room. I remember thinking he looked exactly as he did on TV, something people probably said about me. He wore a suit and tie and appeared to be relaxed and friendly, though he still seemed stiff. I assumed he had been briefed about our questions and had prepared answers. I said that I was concerned about the state of the world and I wondered what kind of shape he thought it would be in when I was old enough to vote. Then one of the other kids asked him to name the first president of the United States. Nixon replied, “Abraham Lincoln.”

What?

I quickly glanced at my mother and the welfare worker/teacher from the show, Frances Whitfield, who had accompanied me on the trip and were standing off to the side. Other nervous glances were exchanged.

Then President Nixon realized his error and said, “Oh my gosh, no. It was George Washington.”

All of us laughed. It proved that presidents, as Art Linkletter might’ve said if that slip had been shown on TV, also say the darnedest things.

The last show of the first season was “The Possible Dream.” In it, Marcia loses her diary, in which she has written about her dream of becoming Mrs. Desi Arnez Jr. Desi guested on the episode, and, oh my God, he was so cute. I didn’t have to act when I said I had a crush on him.

Then the first season was finished. I hated saying good-bye even though I knew we would be back for another season. My eyes were full of tears as my mother and I drove away from the Paramount lot. The following week I was supposed to return to regular school for the remaining two months of the school year. That also meant returning to my real life as Maureen, not Marcia—and I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!

I
felt out of place returning to Hughes Junior High for the last few months of eighth grade. I wasn’t interested in schoolwork, and I felt out of step socially. I had friends, but there was still the problem of feeling on display. Other girls stared, and I heard comments about my clothes. People whispered behind my back as if I didn’t have ears.
Look, she’s the one who plays Marcia Brady.

I used to go through the day wishing I was back on the set, and then, when I was at home, I wished I was someplace else. Mostly I wished I was more like my brother Mike, older and living on my own. When he had returned from Europe the previous year, my parents told me that he had to pay rent unless he went back to school. He turned into a dynamo of ambition, enrolling in UCLA, getting a job in their film and TV department, and managing an apartment building.

I envied his independence. At home, I resented my parents for ruining my comfort and the trust I’d had in them. They had a difficult time recovering from my father’s affair. He openly resented my mother, and she had major trust issues that she didn’t try to conceal. Since nobody talked about these problems, I was left to figure them out for myself. It caused me to look at my home life in a different, more critical light. Maybe I compared my family too closely with the Bradys’, but I knew things at home were kind of weird, definitely not normal, and I blamed my mother.

She didn’t cook or clean—nor did she have an Alice to do it for her like Carol Brady did. She wouldn’t spend money or throw anything out. We had stacks of newspapers and magazines throughout the house. I hated the mess. I didn’t want to bring friends home or invite anyone to sleep over. Why didn’t anyone else care?

My mother was on top of things in other ways that I wouldn’t know about or understand for years. For all her worrying, or perhaps because of it, she was an astute businesswoman, with an especially sharp eye for real estate. After stretching my father’s income, she invested any leftovers in rental properties. She also took care of the money I earned. I had no idea. Most of the time I wondered why she was content with worn furniture and items she and my father bought at garage sales. Why, I wondered, wasn’t she like other mothers who bought new clothes and got their hair done?

Was that the reason my father had an affair?

I wondered.

One night my father came home and declared himself a changed man, the result, he said, of seeing Jesus.

I saw my mother roll her eyes. I didn’t know what to think.

My father explained that he had been talking to the mother of a student he tutored at the clinic he ran after school when all of a sudden he saw her face morph into that of Jesus, who then spoke to him. Again, I didn’t know how to react, whether to think he was crazy or the coolest guy in the neighborhood. My mother looked skeptical. My father leaned forward and reiterated that Jesus had spoken directly to him. It wasn’t a vision, he said. It was real.

“He said, ‘Who are you to judge lest you be judged?’” He inhaled deeply and looked at us—my mother, Kevin, Denny, and me.
“Who are you to judge lest you be judged.”

None of us had to worry about interpreting the meaning of this experience. My father explained that he’d made certain assumptions about this woman based on her appearance and lack of money. But Jesus had warned him not to make false judgments based on superficial observations. What did he really know about her? Didn’t she work hard? Didn’t she want a good education for her son?

“So who am I to judge?” my father asked.

After that night, my father went through a phase where he regularly preached to us, as if we needed saving. At dinner, he talked about his rebirth as a Christian. Some nights he spoke in a calm voice. Other nights he was moved to tears. My mother vacillated between engagement, anger, and boredom. Denny wasn’t able to comprehend it. Though I should’ve been freaked out, and who knows, I may have been, I can’t really remember, I do recall being affected by his persuasiveness. This was particularly true when, as weeks went by, he applied this argument to his affair.

He was right, I thought. Who was I to judge?

Though some nights my father got so worked up talking about Jesus at the table that we thought he might cross over into crazy land, I eventually came around and believed him. I also excused him for straying with Kathy Pointer. I blamed my mother. In thinking back, it amazes me that I didn’t apply my father’s who-was-I-to-judge theory to her. As far as I was concerned, she was responsible. If not directly, she was at fault circumstantially. It was the disease, the syphilis.

It pains me to write it even now, but I looked at her as if she were infected, dirty, weak, and responsible for passing the disease on to me.

As all that unfolded, I gave an interview to a fan magazine. I provided a list of my “turn-ons,” including shopping for new clothes, ice-skating, dancing, Michael Cole, old-fashioned dolls, singing, jumping on a trampoline, happy people, and flowers. It shows that I was a typical teenage girl in so many ways. It wasn’t just a part I played on TV. I really was that person.

But there was more to me than those photos in
16
and
Tiger Beat
magazines let on. More than anyone knew—or would ever know. There was a deeper, darker layer, someone known only to me. I was resigned to keeping it that way, just as my mother had been, just as I was resigned to the fact I would eventually go insane.

A
fter the dismal hiatus, I was bursting with anticipation when production for the second season of
The Brady Bunch
started in the summer of 1970. As I returned to the studio, I felt like I was finally going back home, the place where I felt more comfortable and normal. There really seemed to be magic to the big iron gates that separated Paramount from the outside world. It was a figment of my imagination, but I felt like whatever problems I had were checked at the guard gate. Even the three hours of school we kids attended daily was better than a full day of regular school.

Stage 5 was filled with hugs and kisses as we reunited. All the Brady kids, as we were dubbed, looked a little older after the break. Barry seemed to have filled out some, maybe even grown taller. As much as Eve and I were friends, I didn’t want her boobs to be bigger or her tummy to be flatter than mine. Our stomachs both had a little round pooch and her boobs hadn’t grown any more noticeable, so I was happy to see mine still had time to catch up.

Our first show that season was called “Going, Going…Steady.” In it, Marcia set out to snag bespectacled bug collector Harvey Klinger. Nothing against Bill Corcoran, who got the part (and went on to have a busy directing career as an adult), but after ending the previous season by making eyes at Desi Arnez Jr., I was hoping for another pop star. My disappointment was short-lived. A week later we were on to another episode—and I’m sure I had another crush.

Older men also intrigued me: Fred MacMurray, Bob Reed, and Michael Cole. I also thought Barry Williams’s father was cool, too. Then I developed a thing for Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, the stars of
The Odd Couple.
Who didn’t adore them? Their series was shot on the Paramount lot. On more than a few occasions I chatted with them as we stood in line to get food at a cart near our sets, and I left thinking wow, that Jack Klugman is neat.

As we got into the year, I also liked our script supervisor, Alan Rudolph, who went on to assist Robert Altman and then direct and write more than twenty films, including
Welcome to L.A.
and
Made in Heaven.
In his mid-twenties, he never knew I liked him. His father, Oscar, was one of our regular directors. He was a sweet man, but before each take he turned to us kids as if we were circus animals and chirped, “Up! Up! Up!” We used to make fun of him.

My favorite show that second season was “The Slumber Caper,” a Brady classic in which a sleepover Marcia has planned is canceled after she gets in trouble at school for allegedly writing an insulting caption about her teacher on an art project. Would Marcia do something like that? Never.

After she appeals to her father, the slumber party is back on. Her brothers break out the itching powder, and then one of her friends ends up confessing to having sabotaged Marcia’s art project with the nasty caption. The best parts in the episode happened off camera with the girls who played my friends: Bob Reed’s daughter Carolyn, Sherwood’s daughter Hope, and Florence’s daughter Barbara.

Yes, nepotism was alive and well on the Brady set—and that was fine with me. We were around the same age, and all of us got along famously. We joked endlessly between takes, gossiped (I revealed that I always felt sexy when I wore my pajamas on the set), and laughed hardest upon discovering that each one of us had a crush on Barry. If only he had known. I remember getting into my sleeping bag and wishing he could join me for some cuddling.

Barbara, Hope, and I stayed friends away from the set and had several slumber parties that summer. I was awed by the home the Hendersons had rented. It was in Beverly Hills, and it had a beautiful swimming pool. It still comes to mind when I picture a mansion. One afternoon Barbara and I were lying out by the pool when Florence joined us. Florence loved to swim, and she looked terrific in a bikini. I used to stare at her figure, impressed. She was a little bit of a closeted sexpot. This time she underscored that impression by whipping off her top. I hid my surprise as she chatted with us, went for a dip, and then sat in the sun.

After a few more times at their house, I was used to her going topless. In fact, it was the rare occasion where she didn’t. She had great boobs, too. And they were real!

I
n August, I celebrated my fourteenth birthday—and the arrival of more of a womanly figure when I looked in the mirror. My excitement was short-lived, though. I was bummed out when the new fall TV lineup started in September and ABC’s Friday-night lineup, which was kicked off by
The Brady Bunch,
included two new shows that I thought were much better,
The Partridge Family
and
That Girl.

Like every girl my age that I knew, I fell in love with Marlo Thomas. I thought in a few years I could be just like her, just like
that girl:
an actress, with my own apartment, cute clothes, and a boyfriend like Donald Hollinger.

I had a harder time with
The Partridge Family.
After seeing it, I said to myself, “Where the heck did that show come from?” Not only was it another family sitcom with a brood of kids, they also sang. And they were cool! If not cool in the counterculture sense, they were definitely cooler than us. It made me jealous. Furthermore, I thought Susan Dey was the hippest-looking chick I’d seen since Peggy Lipton. If I could’ve snapped my fingers, I would’ve turned myself into her and then grown up to be Marlo Thomas later.

I don’t remember any of the other Bradys talking about those new shows. On the set, Bob Reed waged a one-man war with Sherwood and Lloyd to keep the show from losing all credibility. He was always clear. Even if people watched, the actors couldn’t be insulted with scripts that defied reality. For Bob, the litmus test was always reality. Did it look real? Was it real? It was to his credit as an actor that he gave the silly comedy as much believability as possible. But it was a daily fight, and every so often he would blow up or send off a scathing memo to Sherwood, as he did after an episode titled “The Impractical Joker,” about the “downgrade of quality,” “inconsistency in style and performance,” “loss of time due to rewriting,” and “bad performances by frustrated actors.”

Poor Bob. He wanted to make it Shakespeare. He used to go outside and smoke through his frustrations. During our last season, he would take extended trips to a tiny bar just beyond the studio gates. Florence had a different attitude. She was there for a good time—and a good living. She was a free spirit. She and Bob were very different, yet they had great chemistry.

Ann B. Davis was an island of calm amid waters that were always churning with something. She was a two-time Emmy winner for her work on
The Bob Cummings Show,
a master when it came to comedic timing. No one in the cast hit their mark as often. It was rumored she didn’t like working with kids. I never thought that was true; she couldn’t have been kinder to me. She was just quiet. Between scenes, she sat in a chair off to the side, working on a needlepoint project, happy as a lark.

Like Alice, she observed all the shenanigans that went on around her. Barry, now sixteen, rode a minibike around the lot. He also had a pack-a-day cigarette habit. He didn’t think anyone noticed when he snuck away for a smoke. Susie later told me that Eve was jealous of the attention I got and felt as if she were in my shadow. If that was true, I had no idea. Eve was my best friend. We spent hours in the dressing room discussing fashion, music, and our favorite Beatle (mine was John, and I believe she liked Paul).

I spent that Christmas in New York with Florence and her family. She and her then husband, Broadway producer Ira Bernstein, lived in a magnificent apartment across from Central Park. It was the best trip of my life, and I would’ve felt the same way even if we had done half as much shopping. At the end of the second season, Eve’s family invited me to go with them to Europe. I thought I was living the life of a jetsetter. But my parents said no; they were scared to let me travel that far.

I was envious when a postcard from Eve arrived in the mail. It was from Paris. She wrote the note in French. She said the city was
très intéressante
and that she and her family walked along the Champs-Élysées.
Quelle distance!
She said it was warm but windy there, and French was hard to understand but…
ça, c’est la vie!

I finished ninth grade at Hughes. Feeling more grown up and worldly, as well as less academically inclined, I fell in with a fast crowd. I dated a couple boys and had my first kisses on the hill behind the school. Those affected me. As we started the third season of the show, I remember giving Susie’s older sister tips on how to pick up boys on the beach. Listening, Eve laughed at me. She asked what I knew about guys. I told her about my make-out sessions behind the school. Susie asked what it was like.