Maureen Mccormick - Heres the Story LP: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice

Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice

To Michael and Natalie
And to my mother, Irene

Ye shall know the truth,
and the truth will set you free.

Tell me the honest truth. Do I look funny?

Marcia Brady,
Brace Yourself episode of The Brady Bunch

T his story begins in the fall of 2006 in Los Angeles. It was the first day of production of VH1s Celebrity Fit Club . I was fifty years old, and I was about to get my initial weigh-in. Kimberley Locke, Tiffany, Da Brat, Cletus T. Judd, Warren G, and Ross the Intern from The Tonight Show were among the other celebrities participating in season five of the competition weight-loss show. All of them, as well as the production crew, were staring at me as I stepped on the scale.

Until that moment, not even my husband of twenty-one years, Michael, knew how much I weighed. Nor did my seventeen-year-old daughter, Natalie, who had urged me to participate in this reality show. I cant say if my doctor knew my weight. Sharing my weight was tantamount to many other admissions that I was loath to make even to myself. But all that was about to change.

As the numbers were calculated, I felt an overwhelming sense of humiliation. What was I doing? Why? The world was about to know how much I weighed. From that, they could infer much more. I may as well have been naked, caught having sex, or walking down the aisle of an airplane with toilet paper stuck to my shoe. I wanted to put my head in the ground and disappear.

I tried to control my emotions and look unfazed by the results (more than 150 pounds) as cameras captured every nuance of my mortification. My blond-brown hair was pulled back and I wore thick-rimmed black glasses that had drawn surprised comments from the other competitors a few hours earlier. Wow, cool glasses. I didnt know you wore them.

Of course they didnt. Wed just met.

Some didnt say anything about the glasses, but I still noticed the expression on their faces. So many other people had given me that same look over the years that I felt like a mind reader. They were thinking the glasses didnt look very Marcia-like. Or if it wasnt the glasses, it was my age, weight, or something else they couldnt immediately reconcile with the long-held image in their head.

I understood.

I had no choice but to understand. A few years before, my husband and I had taken a car trip. We stopped for lunch at a restaurant in a small Colorado town. A large man approached our table, apologized for interrupting our meal, but said he couldnt help it. He said he had to show me something. Then he took off his jacket and rolled up the left sleeve of his flannel shirt.

What do you think? he asked.

His upper arm was covered by a tattoo of my face, albeit a younger, thinner me. Beneath it, in beautiful script, was the line I LOVE MARCIA BRADY.

Itsits nice, I said. Im flattered.

There was nothing else to say. For most of my life, I have been followed, and sometimes haunted, by Marcia Brady. I dont have a choice in the matter. Imagine always being shadowed by a younger, prettier, more popular you. Even when I met the other Celebrity Fit Club cast members, several of them inadvertently referred to me as Marcia, not Maureen, as in nice to meet you, Marcia, or Hi, Marcia, I grew up watching you, or Hey, its Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!

That kind of thing had happened to me so often since The Brady Bunch went on the air on September 26, 1969, that I shouldnt have noticed. Except that I did. Every time. I had played Marcia Brady for five years. But I wasnt her in any way, shape, or form. She was perfect. I was anything but that.

As I knew too well, it wasnt Marcia whod been asked to appear on Celebrity Fit Club. She was still a perfect-looking teenager, struggling with the ups and downs of adolescence, and she would stay that way throughout TV rerun eternity. No, the shows producers had asked me, Marcias imperfect-looking, middle-aged doppelgnger. There was one main reason they had asked me. They thought I was fat. They knew the reaction viewers would have when they saw me.

Is that Marcia Brady? Oh my God, what happened to her?

T he better question was what didnt happen to her? And did I want the world to know all that, along with my weight?

Those details had been off-limits to other people my whole life. In fact, as I contemplated a decision, my thoughts raced back to a day during the first season of The Brady Bunch. It was 1969, and I was thirteen years old. We were shooting the Brace Yourself episode, the one in which Marcia feels like her life is over after she gets braces. She feels ugly, ugly, ugly. Then her boyfriend breaks their date, making her feel even uglier, and she sobs uncontrollably.

What no one knewnot Florence Henderson, Robert Reed, Barry Williams, Eve Plumb, Chris Knight, Mike Lookinland, Susan Olsen, or Ann B. Daviswas that those tears were real. My parents had recently had a terrible fight, which shattered my sense of peace and security. In the fallout, I learned that my mother had a deep, dark secret shed spent her life hiding from us and everyone else.

Through ignorance and an inability to communicate, her secret became mine, and during the entire run of The Brady Bunch, I thought I was going to end up insane, as she did briefly and as her mother did before her. But I kept that to myself, as I waited for that fateful time. I didnt want anyone to know. I tried to be perfect and to make everything seem perfect, as if through a combination of willpower, denial, and control, I could prevent what I thought was inevitable.

So much was going on behind my fake smile. The others made fun of me for the way I frequently spaced out. Oh, theres Maureen, in her own little world again. Look at Maureen; she flaked out again.

It wasnt like my fellow Bradys didnt have their own issues. Id later learn that Bob Reed hated the show and hid his homosexuality, Eve Plumb resented me for getting too much attention, and Susie Olsen despised her pigtails and the fake lisp the producers had her employ to ratchet up her cuteness factor. But as a teenager, I had no idea that few people are everything they present to the outside world.

When the show went off the air, I missed the structure and routine provided by my fictional TV family, and in a way I missed Marcia, with whom I had such a love-hate relationship. Shed given me an identity. Without her, I had to figure out who I wasa next-to-impossible task for someone doing everything she could to avoid the truth about herself.

I sought refuge in seemingly glamorous cocaine dens above Hollywood. I thought I would find answers there, while in reality I was simply running farther from myself. From there, I spiraled downward on a path of self-destruction that cost me my career and very nearly my life. Over the years I battled drug addiction and bulimia. I was treated in a psych ward, went in and out of rehab, and looked to God for answers. I managed to marry a wonderful husband and give birth to a spectacular daughter, yet I never felt as if the light shined on me, not even on the sunniest of days.