Here's the story, of a woman named Maureen, who went from being America's perfect older sister to TV's weight-loss champion, then wrote a book about all the events in-between.
"I had been asked for years to write a book," says Maureen McCormick, who parlayed a five-season stint on "The Brady Bunch" as apple-cheeked Marcia into pop-icon status, then spent big chunks of the next four decades dealing with the all-too-familiar fallout: few good follow-up roles, frustration over not being able to escape a character she played as a child, failed marriages, drugs, bleak future. Why, she asks, would anyone want to write that kind of a autobiography?
"I didn't want to do it," she says over the phone from her home in Los Angeles, "because I was afraid. I was afraid because I knew, if I was going to do it, what would be in it."
But McCormick finally did it. Today, she'll be at the Baltimore Book Festival to talk about "Here's the Story," the 2008 memoir in which she discusses the ups and downs of being the chief lust object for every adolescent boy in America. Her days on "The Brady Bunch," which ran on ABC from 1969 to 1974, come off as pretty idyllic, filled with good times, adolescent crushes (co-star Barry Williams, who played oldest brother Greg, turns out to have been one pretty lucky guy) and a surrogate second family that was never less-than supportive.
"It was absolutely fantastic," says McCormick, 53. "It was like a second family. They're still like a second family to me.
"We've all been fairly close," she says, rhapsodizing about her life the way you know Marcia Brady would. "We've all gone through life, we've had hard times when we haven't seen each other for a long time. But whenever we get together, it's as if it was yesterday."
McCormick says she stays in touch with all of her TV family. Everyone, that is, except for the actress who played her younger sister, Jan, the one who always hated living in Marcia's shadow. "I stay in touch with everyone except for Eve Plumb," she says. "No contact there. I would love it, but she doesn't want it. What can I do?"
Post-"Brady," however, the book portrays its share of horrors, with McCormick sticking fingers down her throat to lose the weight she was sure made her look fat, posing naked in a Los Angeles apartment to score some cocaine, being so drug-addled during an audition for Steven Spielberg that she could barely answer his questions. There were bouts of mental illness to overcome, marriages and relationships that dissolved, hangers-on anxious to ride her fame to a little notoriety of their own.
And all the while, there was that unfair, All-American paragon of Marcia Brady to live up to. Not surprisingly, there were years she became more sick of Marcia than Jan ever did. In 1992, when Williams published his memoir, "Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg," he wrote of his adolescent gropings with McCormick. She accused him of being delusional.
"I was still hiding a lot," says McCormick, who, 15 years later, included many of the same incidents in her own book. "I didn't want anybody else telling about my life."
Coming to terms with Marcia was a struggle. "I absolutely saw her as my worst enemy," McCormick says. "It lasted years. It wasn't until I was able to embrace myself, and who I was, that I was able to embrace Marcia, and who she was. And when I did, it was a wonderful day."
The turning point, oddly enough, came when she did one of the most un-Marcia-like things possible. In 2007, McCormick signed on as a contestant on VH1's "Celebrity Fit Club." She had ballooned from 115 to 154 pounds ("Not even my husband of twenty-one years, Michael, knew how much I weighed," she writes in her book's prologue), and the only thing tougher than admitting she had become so heavy was to try losing the weight before a national television audience.
"When you put yourself out there, and being fat and overweight, it's kind of like being naked," she says. "When you're getting on that scale, in front of America, you're naked, too."
McCormick won the contest, dropping better than 30 pounds. And, in perhaps an even-more hard-fought victory, she says, she won the strength to finally tell her own story. "I found I liked being naked," she said, "I liked being vulnerable. I liked being myself, and I just decided it was time to write my book."
If you go
Maureen McCormick will be discussing "Here's the Story" at 4 p.m. today in the Literary Salon at the Baltimore Book Festival. The festival runs noon to 7 p.m. at Mount Vernon Place, in and around the 600 block of N. Charles St.
