Florence 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.
Actually 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.
When 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.