Marcia Brady was not so Brady
Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!
Maureen McCormick, better known to TV audiences everywhere as Marcia Brady, is telling all about her time on and off screen. Her new memoir, “Here’s the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice,” set for release Tuesday. Excerpts were released Monday.
“As a teenager, I had no idea that few people are everything they present to the outside world,” McCormick, now 52, writes of her time on the family sitcom, which started when she was 14. “Yet there I was, hiding the reality of my life behind the unreal perfection of Marcia Brady.
“No one suspected the fear that gnawed at me even as I lent my voice to the chorus of Bradys singing ‘It’s a Sunshine Day.’ ”
In the book, McCormick reveals her trysts with Steve Martin, Michael Jackson and, in a momemt of pseudo-incest, TV brother Barry Williams. She writes that she once traded sex for drugs and binged at the Playboy Mansion and the home of Sammy Davis Jr. Come, kids, who didn’t in the 70s?
McCormick says she came to the feel-good show from a less-than-Brady abusive family, with a father who abused and cheated on her mother.
After the show ended its four-year (and yet endless) run, the actress says she turned to drugs, including cocaine and Quaaludes. Her drug habits helped prevent her from getting more acting jobs. She blew a meeting with Steven Spielberg, blaming the failed interview on being high at the time.
Throughout the 80s, McCormick battled with addiction and depression, spent time in rehab and kicked back a variety of pills and therapies in the process.
The real life story of the Bradys is more fitting with today’s TV – pseudo-incest, a gay dad, a model-marrying annoying brother and a boozying, drugging sister. Wait, let me copyright that before next season!
McCormick has no regrets about her experience on the show, though:
“I’ll always be struck by how much a part of people’s lives Marcia is and always will be,” she writes. “But now I’m not bothered by the connection. It took most of my life, countless mistakes and decades of pain and suffering to reach this point of equanimity and acceptance.”
Guess Jan isn’t looking so bad now, is she?
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