Tell me the honest truth. Do I look funny?
—Marcia Brady,
“Brace Yourself” episode of The Brady Bunch
This story begins in the fall of 2006 in Los Angeles. It was the first day of production of VH1’s 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 can’t 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 didn’t know you wore them.
Of course they didn’t. We’d just met.
Some didn’t 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 didn’t look very Marcia-like. Or if it wasn’t the glasses, it was my age, weight, or something else they couldn’t 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 couldn’t 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.
“It’s…it’s nice,” I said. “I’m flattered.”
There was nothing else to say. For most of my life, I have been followed, and sometimes haunted, by Marcia Brady. I don’t 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, it’s 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 shouldn’t have noticed. Except that I did. Every time. I had played Marcia Brady for five years. But I wasn’t her in any way, shape, or form. She was perfect. I was anything but that.
As I knew too well, it wasn’t Marcia who’d 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 show’s producers had asked me, Marcia’s imperfect-looking, middle-aged doppelgänger. 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?
The better question was what didn’t 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 knew—not Florence Henderson, Robert Reed, Barry Williams, Eve Plumb, Chris Knight, Mike Lookinland, Susan Olsen, or Ann B. Davis—was 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 she’d 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 didn’t 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, there’s Maureen, in her own little world again. Look at Maureen; she flaked out again.
It wasn’t like my fellow Bradys didn’t have their own issues. I’d 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. She’d given me an identity. Without her, I had to figure out who I was—a 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.
I came out of it slowly and in stages. First, I had to acknowledge, and then get help for a longtime struggle with depression. Then I had to come to terms with my mother. And finally I needed to face myself. Once I stopped telling lies and trying to pretend life was perfect, I was able to move on. As trivial as it sounds, I didn’t feel like I quit pretending until I made a decision about whether or not to do Celebrity Fit Club.
I know—it sounds crazy! It might have been.
But that’s what happened. Michael, Natalie, and I were at the kitchen table, talking about the offer. All of a sudden I had a feeling in my gut. Call it being fifty and fatigued. Or being fifty and courageous. Or being fifty and not caring anymore what people thought about me. But for the first time in my life I said, “You know what? I’m overweight. I’m really imperfect. I’ve had all this shit happen to me. I’m not going to hide it anymore.”
“You’re going to do it, then?” both of them asked.
“Yup,” I said. “Screw it.”
I started to write this book after a trip to New York during which I guested on a TV talk show and spoke about my life since childhood. It felt good to be able to open up about these issues. No more subterfuge. No more hiding behind fake smiles. No more pretending my life was like The Brady Bunch. No more pretending to be Marcia Brady.
As I sat down at the dining-room table to put pen to paper, I took a deep breath and looked through the sliding-glass doors into the backyard. Up to then, I never thought I would actually write a book about my life until I had a great ending. What did I mean by a great ending? Something neat. A pretty package tied up with a bow. A tale that would get people talking and move critics to praise it as perfect.
Then I laughed at myself. How stupid. Not a single word written yet and I’d immediately fallen into striving for perfection, wanting to write the perfect book and thinking I had to in order for anyone to pay attention. Maureen, I said, get a grip! Hadn’t I learned anything through my battles with coke, pills, self-destructive behavior, and depression? I had beaten them. Why did I have to make things so hard on myself?
After that, the book didn’t happen right away. Several months passed before I undertook the endeavor again, buoyed by a more reasonable expectation. I’m fifty-two years old. At this moment I am craving coffee and a cigarette. They’re about the only vices I have left. No, that’s not really true. Lately, I have struggled with food. Despite my success on Celebrity Fit Club, my weight has continued to fluctuate, and the satisfaction of fitting into size twos and fours is a fading memory. Right now I’m an eight. My husband, the sweetest, most patient man in the world, has lately dropped hints that I might want to lose a few of those pounds.
I have told him that I will try. But the truth is that, although I’m paranoid about my weight, I would really like to spend all day in my pajamas, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and eating all the See’s candy and Baskin-Robbins chocolate mint ice cream that I can get my hands on. Shit, how transparent am I? I just want to fill the empty hole in me. I want to fill it to the brim. I want to fill it to overflowing.
I won’t do it, of course.
Instead I am going to fill it through work, and by sharing the events and emotions that caused me so much fear, that brought me harm, that made me strong, and that over time allowed me to realize that I didn’t have to be anything more than me, and that being me, being human, being real, and being my absolutely imperfect self, was quite all right.
It’s funny. My mother never wanted me to write a memoir. She was adamant about that. It took me a while after her death to realize that this was an extension of the shame she had carried through her entire life, the insidious fear she had that people would find out about her secret. But I saw her in a different light. To me, she was an amazing woman, something I hope my daughter will one day be able to say about me—and if not amazing, I want her to at least be able to say that I tried.
For those reasons, I need to write this book. As you’ll see, it hasn’t been easy, and it still isn’t. I feel guilty about my intellectually handicapped brother living in a facility for adults with special needs, and I’m dealing with a situation of elder abuse with my father. In general, though, I have tried. For the most part, too, I think I have gotten to a really good place. Along the way, I have learned some important lessons, gained some wisdom, and discovered that, while I may not really be the grooviest girl on campus, I am a lot stronger than I ever thought. When people come to my house, they look around at what I hope seems like a comfortable, cozy family home and invariably ask if I have any memorabilia lying around. None of the magazine covers, photos, or gold albums are displayed. Except for a few dolls and stuffed animals I had as a child and a small music box that belonged to my mother, everything has been packed in boxes and in storage for years.
This book is my way of finally unpacking those boxes. My mother’s sentiments aside, I am looking forward to sharing the things that have been locked away about her and the rest of my family, about myself, and, yes, even about Marcia and the rest of the Brady bunch.
Here’s the story…