Here's the Story LP: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice (19 page)

The Story of a Lovely Lady

M
ichael and I woke up one day and knew we had to get out of the Pink Palace. Space was the primary issue, but so was our sanity. I had piles of stuff everywhere; the clutter was beginning to resemble the interior of my parents’ home. If we didn’t move, we were going to lose our minds.

My mother urged me to look in a nice part of the western San Fernando Valley, close to home, as she said. She felt like I had fallen in with the wrong crowd on the West Side. Even though Michael and I looked in all parts of the city, she was the one who found the two-story, Cape Cod–style home we bought. It was in a development in the foothills of a stretch of mountains known as the Santa Monica Preserve.

Michael and I fell in love with it right away. The down payment was a stretch, but Michael borrowed money from his parents and I pitched in the rest. The neighborhood was full of other young couples starting out. Some had babies, and I noticed a few women were pregnant. One night I joked that there was something in the water. Michael didn’t stop me from drinking it.

In August, I woke up several mornings feeling sluggish, like I couldn’t get started, and considering I’d always been a morning person, I thought it was strange. About a week later, I discovered it wasn’t at all strange. It was a new life growing inside me. I was pregnant. Given the miscarriage, I regarded it as a miracle.

I couldn’t wait to tell Michael. This time, I told him in private, and we enjoyed a lovely celebration in our new home. We kept the news to ourselves until the end of the first trimester, about the time I signed on for another turn as Marcia in the CBS TV movie
A Very Brady Christmas.
Everyone returned except Susie (she was newly married and honeymooning in Jamaica). All of them celebrated my good news.

I was the first among the
Brady
kids to get pregnant, and I appreciated the love I got on the set as I told people, like Sherwood and Lloyd and Ann B. Davis, all of whom commented in ways that left no doubt they were proud of me for getting past my drug problems and marrying such a steady guy. Then there was my TV husband, Jerry Houser. Without him, I wouldn’t have met my real-life husband and father of the child growing inside me. As I said, it was family time.

That also meant there were the usual complaints from Bob Reed about the script, though there were much fewer since he’d gone over it scene by scene before shooting began with Sherwood and Lloyd in order to avoid fighting during production. Still, he cringed at the end when the family’s rendition of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” helped rescue Mike from a construction-site accident. What did anyone expect? Though it was a movie, it was still the Brady bunch!

The ratings were enormous, nearly a forty share, and so naturally talks began again about another
Brady
series. By then, I was past the grueling morning sickness that hit me during the first three months, and though I felt wonderful physically throughout the second trimester, I worried about whether the baby would be born healthy. With all the drugs I’d done, the way I’d mistreated my body, and my family history, I convinced myself the chances were abnormally high that I would have a handicapped kid. I had amnios and sonograms as often as possible.

Each time they came back fine. My doctor told me to relax and stop worrying about family curses and other such nonsense. Only my mother understood my fears, and not only did she listen to me, she opened up about her own life in ways I’d never heard. She shared vulnerabilities that neither of us knew existed, and as a result we grew truly close—closer than we’d ever been. It was wonderful.

One time she called me up on a Saturday morning and said she was stranded. Since she didn’t drive, I asked where she was, thinking I had to go get her someplace. She laughed and then asked if I wanted to take her to garage sales. She ordinarily did this with my father, but for some reason he was busy. Well, that began a routine the two of us wouldn’t stop for years. My mother and I went out every Saturday and Sunday morning, looking for treasures or, as we joked, things we didn’t need but couldn’t live without.

It turned out she was a tiger. I saw where I got my addictive tendencies. She went through the papers, marked out a route, and then we hit every frickin’ antiques store and yard sale in Southern California. I’m not exaggerating. We drove hundreds of miles every weekend, talking nonstop. I was amazed at how much we had to say to each other; then again, I wasn’t. It was on these drives that I finally learned about her childhood, details about her syphilis, and stories that cleared up things I’d always feared.

I had spent so many years embarrassed about her, yet I realized how similar we were in ways. Shoppingwise, tastewise, we shared a mutual love of old things. That was because both of us enjoyed things that were real, solid, and full of character. We appreciated the test of time, things that survived and aged. We looked at, and bought, the cutest chairs and tables, rugs and knickknacks. At one point, Michael had to hang tables and chairs from the vaulted ceiling in our garage. I could’ve opened a furniture store, that’s how much stuff I had.

Yet my mother and I continued to hunt for the perfect Windsor chair. Then we got into clocks. Oh my God, we loved clocks. Then we switched to quilts. Each item we got into prompted a new recollection from my mother, and that was great. One day she gave me two quilts that she’d had in storage; they’d been made by my great-great-grandmother and her friends and relatives in the 1800s. They had quilting parties, then passed the quilts down to subsequent generations. My mother put her hand on my rounded tummy and said one day I’d give them to my child.

I
gave up when it came to food and indulged in cravings for milk shakes and french fries. The result was sixty extra pounds. I shrugged them off, telling myself that this was my time to get fat and not feel guilty about it. Maybe that’s why pregnancy is called a miracle; it’s the only time you can eat whatever you want. Michael and I turned a room into a nursery. Lloyd Schwartz and his wife hosted a baby shower for me at their house, and everyone laughed as we told old
Brady
stories.

But as I got deeper into my third trimester, and especially toward the end of it, I began turning into a different person. The lightness of being that had defined the past three months disappeared. My fears returned—would my baby be healthy, would we be good parents, what if there was an accident—and it was like a fist clenching inside me as I tried to keep the demons in check. The transformation in me was slow and excruciating. There were times when I didn’t feel like me, and yet if I’d been asked what “me” felt like, I wouldn’t have known how to answer.

No, that’s not true. I felt fat.

And big.

And I got bigger.

At one point, my doctor said, “Maureen, you’d better start watching how much you eat.” It wasn’t only food, though. I suffered from edema, a condition where I retained water. I was so swollen and uncomfortable I didn’t want to move. In fact, I didn’t move; I sloshed. And it was painful. My feet ballooned, and I had to cut the backs of my shoes out.

I stared at my due date on the calendar, waiting with hope, excitement, trepidation, and utter fear. I don’t know about other women about to give birth, but I reached the point where I couldn’t wait to get that baby out of me while at the same time I was scared to death about what I was going to do when that happened. My mother said other women felt the same. She told me about giving birth to each one of her four children, and how each one had been a different experience.

I prayed for a good delivery. But then as my due date came and went, I just prayed that I’d
have
an experience. I went seven days past my due date. Then nine days. It didn’t seem like I would ever have the baby.

I’d seen my doctor every couple days, but when I went for an exam on the tenth day past my due date he informed that there was no more amniotic fluid. He said that my water must have broken without me knowing it. He sent me to the hospital. Michael spent the next three days with me, sleeping in a chair, the two of us waiting for something to happen.

Finally, on the morning of May 19, I was wheeled into the operating room, and underwent a C-section. The next thing I remember is hearing a baby’s cry, and then I saw my doctor, cradling a newborn in his arms, by my side. He said “Maureen, I want to introduce you to your daughter.”

Suddenly my whole life changed. I was a mother. I was deeply relived when the doctor announced that she was beautiful, perfect, and healthy. I still counted her fingers and toes. Then I kissed and caressed her, and did all those little things that mothers do when they first see the child that’s spent the previous nine months inside them. I was so pleased when she nursed without any problem. I was like, “It works! It works!”

Everyone laughed. I had tears in my eyes. I was really and finally a mom. It was the role I’d always dreamed of and I looked up and said, “Thank you, God.”

S
everal members of my
Brady
family came by the hospital, including Susie. Florence was among those who sent flowers celebrating our newest addition, to whom we gave the name Christine, which is what my mother had almost named me. My whole life I had preferred the name Christine over Maureen and vowed I’d use it if I had a daughter. But a funny thing happened once we got her home. One day Michael and I looked at her and I said, “She doesn’t look like a Christine, does she?”

Michael agreed. He’d never felt like the name Christine was quite right, but his goal during my difficult third trimester had been to avoid fights at all costs, so he kept his opinion to himself. But he was delighted to help pick a new name, one that fit. After staring at our beautiful sleeping infant, we decided on Natalie.

My mother was amused when we told her about the change. But she agreed that Natalie suited the baby perfectly. I’d never seen my mother as happy as she was when helping me with Natalie. She admitted that she’d hoped I’d have a girl. She shared my joy when I gushed about the feeling I got breast-feeding Natalie.

Unfortunately, such highs were countered by equally extreme emotional lows that were beyond my ability to control. Some days I was unable to get out of bed. Other days I was a shrew. I felt powerless against my body chemistry. As Michael recalls, my moods were unpredictable and inconsistent. It was a constant struggle and something we dealt with, praying the better days would outnumber the bad ones.

I can’t say that they did. Despite being offered a ton of money, I turned down the offer to reprise Marcia Brady yet again in the new series
The Bradys.
Sherwood and Lloyd Schwartz tried to change my mind. My TV husband Jerry Houser also chimed in. My agent called every other day with a new and bigger offer.

But the script was absolutely awful, and I didn’t want to do it. I had a deal with Blake Edwards’s production company to develop my own sitcom. Though nothing would come of it, I had high hopes. It was also too soon after Natalie’s birth for me to go back to work. I didn’t know how I would feel from one day to the next. Unless something fantastic came along, I wanted to stay home.

Good thing, too. I heard Bob Reed nearly got in a fistfight with Sherwood during production. He also made sure all the Paramount and CBS executives knew he thought the show was garbage. Bob even traded words with Florence and Ann B. That was sacrilegious. They were among the nicest pros in the business.

I’ve learned there’s usually a reason when people behave out of character, and this time was no exception. Although he kept it to himself, Bob was HIV positive and battling for his life. His anger was the outward manifestation.

In the meantime, Michael and I worked hard to start our own production company. Neither of us had any experience running one, but we had passion. Our first project came from a story we saw on
60 Minutes
about Donna and Ricardo Thorton, a white woman and black man, both of them intellectually handicapped, who met in an institution, fell in love, got married, and had a normal child.

It was actually a follow-up to a story that had been broadcast four years earlier, in 1986. Michael and I were moved to tears. Our first thought was that it would make a great movie; suddenly we wanted to make it. We acquired the rights and then shopped the project around Hollywood. We pictured Forest Whitaker as Ricardo. But our inexperience prevented us from pulling it together.

Eventually Kirstie Alley’s production company took over the rights. The movie, titled
Profoundly Normal,
aired on CBS in 1983 and starred Kirstie and Delroy Lindo. Although I wondered how different our version might have looked, the film was as good as we’d imagined: touching, sad, funny, provocative, and ultimately an example of how the human spirit is able to triumph over incredible odds.

Michael and I wanted to believe that would happen in our own lives. There was still so much fighting, darkness, and pain in our marriage. Sadly, I refused to deal with the fact that I was sick—and all of us paid the price.

Insanity

F
lorence called and told me that Bob Reed was extremely sick. I gasped when she said he had AIDS.

I’d heard he didn’t look good during production of
The Bradys,
and I wasn’t surprised to read years later in Barry’s book
Growing Up Brady
that Bob had been undergoing treatment for AIDS-related illnesses at that time. He started telling close friends about his condition in 1991. From what I heard, he thought he would be able to beat it. His spirits were upbeat when I spoke to him.

About a year before he died, Barry asked him to write the introduction to his book. They met at Bob’s house, and Bob gave him all of the vitriolic memos he had written to Sherwood complaining about the
Brady Bunch
scripts.

I loved that. It was like a passing of the torch to his oldest son.
Here, take my thoughts. Remember my passion. Keep the flame burning.

We knew Bob was a great actor. He wanted us to remember that he’d cared about the quality of the work, too.

Toward the end of his life, he was taken care of by his good friend Anne Haney. He was in the hospital the last time we spoke. I called him essentially to say good-bye, though I never uttered those words. We talked about other things. It was extremely emotional. I tried not to cry. Then I reached a point where I just didn’t care, where it wasn’t worth trying to hold back. I told him what really mattered, what I really wanted him to know—that I loved him.

In a weak voice, Bob said the same to me: I love you, too.

He passed away less than a week after we spoke, on May 12, 1992, in Pasadena. He was fifty-nine years old. Barry called from Chicago with the news. The entire
Brady
cast gathered for a service at All Saints Episcopal Church. I hadn’t seen most of them since Natalie’s birth nearly three years earlier. I cried through the memorial Barry arranged at the Pasadena Playhouse. It was terribly sad.

Afterward, the press hounded us. Reporters approached us outside the church and playhouse, and our phone was ringing when Michael and I got home. It continued to ring for days with reporters asking me to comment on Bob’s homosexuality and confirm that he’d died of AIDS. It was ghoulish. I hung up each time without saying a word.

However, it eventually came out that Bob had lived a tortured life as a gay man; he’d hated his homosexuality. His death was sad enough, but knowing he was so unhappy in his life made it even sadder.

I
battled myself just as ferociously, although for different reasons. I took my anger out on Michael. I never knew what would set me off. It could be a look, a comment, the rattle of a dish, a blanket out of place—anything that upset the norm or threw off my fragile sense of balance and control, which often seemed like almost everything. Consider the following.

Michael’s parents visited shortly before Natalie’s first birthday. It was their first trip to see us since our wedding. I was on pins and needles before they arrived. One day Natalie was crying furiously in her room. As I tried to calm her, Michael’s mother stood in the doorway of the nursery, watching me. She made a comment, which she intended as a joke. But I didn’t get the humor and went ballistic. Michael extinguished that fire but I continued to rage out of control in numerous other situations.

Michael took a job as a dialect coach for a theater in the Valley that was staging an Ibsen play. Since he was trying to establish himself in a different aspect of the business, he didn’t charge them. I blew up at him. How could he not get paid?

Then he signed on to do a reading of a new play, and the same thing happened. He did the work for free. We argued the whole time he should’ve been preparing; he wasn’t ready for the performance. I’d never seen him as angry at himself.

On the day after the reading, we were still fighting as we drove around doing errands. Suddenly Michael lost his temper, one of the rare times, and in blunt language he stated that he wasn’t the one who had put a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of coke up their nose. The rage in me was such that I smacked him in the face. I didn’t even think. It was that automatic.

Between the blow and the shock from it, he momentarily lost control of the car and swerved out of our lane. Fortunately, he regained control before we caused an accident or injured anyone.

Another time, Natalie, two years old, spilled some water and a couple of red grapes on the carpet in her bedroom. It left a tiny, faintly red stain about the size of a quarter. But that was exactly the kind of blemish on my orderly little world that set me off. I saw it and began yelling. When Michael tried to calm me down, I focused my rage on him. What’s interesting when I think back on it now is that deep inside I wasn’t angry. I was scared—scared of my world falling apart.

Michael was stunned by the attack, and justifiably so. My upset about that one little stain turned into a list of grievances about him, about me, about us. Everything boiled down to money, or the lack of it, and truth be told, my fear that we were going to lose everything.

He looked more shocked than he had when I hit him in the car.

“What the—” He caught himself about to swear. “What does all that have to do with Natalie’s dropping a grape on the carpet?”

“You don’t fucking get it!” I hissed.

“Why do you have to swear?” he protested.

“Fuck you!” I screamed.

I grabbed Michael. I wanted him to fight back. He tried to restrain me, but I jerked free and hit him. He froze.

Natalie was right there, too. At that moment I didn’t care.

“You don’t fucking get it, do you?” I yelled.

A
ctually Michael did get it. Knowing I’d be a basket case as long as the carpet wasn’t perfect, he spent every night for the next few days on his hands and knees, scrubbing the carpet until the stain was gone. At one point, he used a toothbrush to clean individual fibers.

That scene was repeated a few months later when Natalie broke a cup in the bathroom. I didn’t know what it was; I just couldn’t handle it; when something like that happened, the string that held me together broke.

W
hen Natalie was almost five years old, Michael left me. It wasn’t the first time. Sometimes he spent the night in his car; other times he slept on a buddy’s sofa. But this time we’d fought in front of Natalie, and it was bad. I later found out that Michael snuck back into the house, found our daughter, and said, “Daddy will never, ever, ever leave you.”

At her school the next day, he found her on the playground and reassured her that he was still present and would never leave. He was probably reassuring himself, too. I didn’t make it easy for him. He later told me that he always returned because our fights followed a pattern. After a cooling-off period, I was contrite and sorry. For the next few days, I was normal and enjoyable. Then the pressure built until both of us were on edge, waiting for the next explosion.

I knew I was at fault. That part was clear to me as the smoke and dust rose over the battlefield. When Michael returned, I confessed my problems and swore that I would get help. But that never happened. We never broke from the status quo. Not even when I was embarrassed publicly, as happened once when we fought in front of Natalie’s preschool, which was at our local Presbyterian church. When I picked Natalie up the next day, one of the teachers started a conversation with me.

“It’s amazing what we as teachers hear from the kids,” she said.

I felt my face flush. Natalie or another kid must have heard me in front of the school the day before.

“Really?” I said.

“They’re little sponges,” she said.

At that point, I knew she was referring to me. I thought it was best to apologize for my mistakes, the same as we taught the kids.

“I know,” I said. “And I’m very sorry. I had a bad fight with my husband yesterday in front of the school, and I screamed ‘fuck you.’”

She looked at me, puzzled, then shocked.

“What?”

“Yeah, I told him to fuck off.”

“But I wasn’t talking about you,” she said.

Oh my God, I wanted to die. I needed help. Michael was constantly pleading with me to find a therapist. He suggested couples therapy. He was willing to share the responsibility; anything to improve life, to make it less of a battle. I refused. Sometimes I was calm about it. Other times I screamed and kicked. I was afraid of the diagnosis. I didn’t want to be told that I was insane. I didn’t want to end up like my mother, or worse, my grandmother.

The irony was that I was worse than my mother ever was, and while not as bad as my grandmother, I probably could’ve used quiet time in an institution. One time I asked Michael why he hadn’t left me for good. He said something like he wasn’t going to leave until God changed the locks. Marriage, he explained, was about more than attraction and emotional ups and downs. It was about commitment.

He’d made a commitment to me, he said—to us, and to our child—and he wasn’t going to abandon it. I put that resolve to its most severe test when his parents came out for Natalie’s fifth birthday in May 1994. As always, I was against it. I spent a week letting my anger build, and after they left, I exploded. In the heat of battle with Michael, I lost control and again slapped him across the face. It’s one of those moments that still makes me sick whenever I flash back on it.

Michael left the house, slept in his car half the night, and then crept back in after I was asleep and made himself a bed on the downstairs sofa. At wit’s end, he needed an outlet, someone to talk to about our situation, and he confided in a friend who offered to come out to the house and talk to us.

Michael thought he was doing the right thing, a good thing. But when I heard he’d let the secret out of the house, I felt betrayed. I said that I wanted a divorce.

“You’re serious?” Michael asked.

“I want you to move out,” I said firmly.

I stormed off to the bedroom. Michael stood by himself, shaking his head. He was resigned to throwing in the towel. He realized we were locked in a pattern that was not going to change and that was most likely insane—that is, if your definition of insanity is doing the same crazy thing over and over again, and expecting different results. And me, I think deep down I knew that something had to give or he would give up and I would…

Well, I didn’t want to think about what would happen to me.