Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Special Collector's Edition (9 page)

I didn't know much about the fetal stages of "The Brady Bunch"
until I started researching this book and got the inside scoop from
a man named Sherwood Schwartz.

Abundantly talented, and equally likable, Mr. Schwartz is a charter member of Hollywood's old school, and he's got a mile-long
rap sheet to prove it. A few of the highlights include writing for
Bob Hope, Ozzie and Harriet, and Red Skelton, then creating
"Gilligan's Island" and "The Brady Bunch." Sherwood is also a master storyteller. His face lights up as he speaks; he adds his own
sound effects; he sometimes rambles off onto (vaguely) related
tangents, and in short, he's vastly entertaining. When I asked him
about the birth of the Bradys, I got back more than I bargained for.
Here then, straight from the Schwartz's mouth, is the story of a
family named Brady:

"What sprung the whole idea was a tiny little item I had read in
the paper in 1966. It said that at that time, almost 30 percent of
marriages involved a spouse who had at least one child from apre-
vious marriage. Now, in 1966, this was a new phenomenon, and I
realized that there really was a whole new kind of family springing
up. Y'know, television was loaded with happily married couples,
and single widows and widowers, but there wasn't any show that
revolved around the marital amalgamation of two pre-existing families.

"A lightbulb clicked on in my head.

"But I had a problem when it came time to try and sell the `Brady' idea. I had just finished doing 'Gilligan's Island,' which was
full of broad comedy, and broad characters doing silly things. But
there's a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on `Gilligan's Island.' They're really a metaphor for the nations of the
world, and their purpose was to show how the nations of the
world have to get along together or cease to exist. I made the mistake of bringing all of that up at a network meeting, and it almost
cost me the show. I called `Gilligan's Island' a `social microcosm,'
which was a bad choice of words because Bill Paley himself, who
was president of CBS, and happened to be at the meeting, got this
flushed look on his face. Then he stood up and said, with exasperation dripping from his voice and sweat dripping from his upper
lip, `Oh, my God, I thought we were talking about a sitcom!...

"But it was a microcosm. I mean, here's a show about a group
of people who have absolutely nothing in common, forced to live
together and work together toward a common goal of survival.
That's the philosophy of the show. Of course we buried that message under a lot of pratfalls and bamboo and silly stuff, but I used
to get a lot of mail from psychiatrists and philosophers who understood it.

"Anyway, when I finished with `Gilligan,' I worked on the idea
for `The Brady Bunch,' and tried to sell it. Knowing that I'd just
done `Gilligan,' I felt uneasy about trusting the network to visualize
this completely different kind of show. Y'know, they simply
pigeonhole you by what you did last.

"I had never written a script in selling `Gilligan.' I had come up
with thirty storylines and developed all the characters, but I never
wrote a script until they said `Hey, let's do a pilot.' But I was afraid
to go in with just stories for `The Brady Bunch,' because I thought
people might perceive it as another big, broad, rollicking comedy,
without the dramatic or sentimental aspects that were so important to the show. And there's no way to go into a meeting and
explain that. I mean, I could have talked to these executives about
it until I was blue in the face, and they still would have left the
meeting believing that `The Brady Bunch' would have the same
basic feel to it as `Gilligan's Island' did.

"So, to protect myself and `The Brady Bunch,' I took a different
approach. I wrote stories, maybe the first ten or so, but I also came
in with the script for the pilot already written. That way they'd
have to see that this was a much more subtle, more sentimental
show. For example, there's a scene in the pilot where Mike Brady
tells Bobby that he doesn't have to put his mother's picture away
just because he's getting remarried, and there's no way in the
world you could imagine that kind of a scene with the image of
Gilligan falling out of a coconut tree still fresh in your head.

"Even with all that, the idea went no place for two years. I am, if
nothing else, stubborn. So I'd keep going back, and fortunately for
me, the personnel turnover rate in network television is phenomenally quick. So I'd keep going back to the same places with this
idea for `The Brady Bunch,' but I'd keep talking to different people.

"Now, all through those two years when the show was selling
like coldcakes, nobody disliked it. All three networks liked `The
Brady Bunch,' but none of 'em bought it. NBC wanted me to
change the ending of the pilot, because they felt it was absolutely
ridiculous for people on their honeymoon to double back, go
home, and get their kids. They felt like no two people alive would
do that. They said, `Put a new ending on your script, and we'll
shoot the pilot, but don't you agree that the parents' behavior is
ridiculous? And I said, `If I thought it was ridiculous, I wouldn't
have written it.' Y'know ... dumb question.

"CBS liked the show too, but they thought I should develop it
by having the first six or seven episodes revolve around the
courtship between Mike and Carol-how they met, how they fell
in love, the whole ball of wax-and we'd have the wedding take
place in the seventh or eighth show. I said, `In that case, how are
people gonna know what the show is about?' The show isn't about
a courtship, it's about two families having problems becoming one
family. That's what the show is about, and I have to have the wedding take place in the first episode.' Well, that was it; CBS passed.

"Then I went to ABC, and it so happened that this was the first
year of a new thing called the Movie of the Week. They said, `This
is a great idea, let's do the pilot as a ninety-minute movie.' I said,
`Okay, in that case I can start this whole thing with how Mike and
Carol meet, and we can get into the problems they have in deciding to get married'; and they said, `Wait-stop right there. We like
your script as is. We just want you to stretch it out to ninety minutes.' I said, `You like this half-hour-why not let me give you
another hour that you'll like in front of it, and we'll use the wedding as a culmination of the ninety minutes?' They said, `No, we
like this half-hour, just make it longer.' I said, `I can make this
half-hour longer, but I will succeed only in making it duller.
There's not enough plot here to carry ninety minutes.' They said,
`Oh, sure there is.' So now I'm slapping my forehead, trying to
explain to these guys why their idea would be awful, but they just
keep saying, `That's the only way we want to do it.' Finally I just
said, `Thank you very much.... Goodbye,' and I walked out. No
deal.

"And then a wondrous thing happened. A movie came out
called Yours, Mine and Ours starring Henry Fonda and Lucille Ball, which had essentially the same plot as my `Brady Bunch' script
except with a few more kids. Anyway, the film became a pretty
respectable-sized hit, and all of a sudden ABC, who'd wanted it as a
ninety-minute movie, called me up and said, `Hey, why don't we sit
down and talk again about that great "Brady Bunch" idea of yours?"
And I said, `Fine.' I sold it in a half-hour.

"A funny footnote about this whole thing is that when `The
Brady Bunch' finally got on the air, the producer of Yours, Mine
and Ours threatened to sue Paramount for stealing his idea. Now,
I had written the script for `The Brady Bunch' a good couple of
years before the Yours, Mine and Ours script was done. So I called
Paramount and said to them, `Why don't you just have this gentleman go down to the Writers Guild office and check out the registration date on my "Brady" script? And when he gets a hold of my
script, you should also ask him to be grateful that I didn't sue him.'
I said that because my original title on the script that would later
become `The Brady Bunch' was `Yours and Mine.'

"I never heard from him again."

And there you have it. After a long and painful pregnancy,
"The Brady Bunch" had finally been born. Plans were made to
film a pilot episode, the script was polished, and then Sherwood
proceeded to do something that would forever change the lives
of nine innocent human beings: he cast them as Bradys.

The casting process for "The Brady Bunch" followed standard
Hollywood procedure: it was a nightmare. Casting one kid on a sitcom involves months of work, and every theatrical agency in Hollywood. Interviews are conducted, then call backs, and finally screen
tests are shot. Experience, age, height, coloring, ability, and energy
are all considered, and after all that, the actors are chosen.

Imagine the horror of trying to cast six kids in the same show.
In researching this book, I found that twelve hundred kids auditioned, hoping to become a Brady. Of those twelve hundred, Sherwood Schwartz called back and personally interviewed four hundred and fifty four. All that to cast just six roles.

My heart sank as I arrived to meet Mr. Schwartz for the first
time. There were hundreds of kids in all sizes, shapes, and colors
overflowing his reception area and spilling out into the halls. It was
so crowded, I literally couldn't find his office. Finally, using my
mom as a sort of an `offensive lineman,' I made it into Sherwood's
waiting room, where I added my name to a mile-long waiting list,
sat down, and waited. After a couple of hours had passed, his secretary yelled out my name (somehow managing to mispronounce
"Williams") and I went in.

Mr. Schwartz greeted me warmly (he greets everybody warmly),
smiled (he always smiles), and invited me to sit down. We talked,
hit it off, and the meeting went well. He asked me the usual ques-
tions-"How old are you?" "What are your hobbies?" "Do you have
any experience?"-and somehow got a good feeling about me. I
asked Sherwood what he was looking for in all those kid-actor
interviews, and he once-again came through with a truckload of
information:

"It's interesting-with the little kids, I just put some toys on the
table and talked with them. I was looking for attention span,
because if you're talking to a kid and they're gradually paying less
and less attention to you, and more and more attention to the toys
laid out in front of them, you're in trouble. Attention span is about
the most important quality to look for in a kid actor. Also, you're
looking for attractive, and since these kids were supposed to be
playing brothers and sisters, you're also looking for similar facial
features and similar hair."

Actually, since two separate families were involved, and since
Sherwood cast the Brady kids before the Brady parents, he had to
find four sets of kids with similar features and hair. Sets one and
two would match up with the possibility of a dark-haired Mike
Brady and a blond Carol (that was us), while sets three and four
would be ready to go should Mike turn out to be the blond and
Carol the brunette.

It sounds confusing, and it was, because even after surviving the
interviews, the callbacks, and the screen tests, my big break still
hinged upon a fictional character's hair color.

Still, I felt good about getting this far. I was up for a pretty regular part in a network series; and I felt as though my interviews with
Sherwood had gone so well that I was a lock, probably the first one
cast.

Wrong.

Yet again Sherwood Schwartz set me straight. Turns out Greg
wasn't a lock or the first Brady cast. The shoo-in was Cindy.

"Susan Olsen was the only one I had no doubt about. In fact,
she was so absolutely perfect that once I saw her, I asked not to
see any more Cindys.

"She came in, and I asked, `Have you ever been on television
before?'

"`Yeth, Mr. Thwartz,' she said. `I wath on "Gunthmoke."'

"So I swallowed a laugh and asked her, `What did you do on
"Gunsmoke"?'

"'Well, I rode a horth,' she continued. `But y'know what, Mr.
Thwartz? The horth came near a thnake! And hortheth are thcared
of thnakes.'

The cast ... at last.
(©Paramount Pictures)

"By now I've given up trying to maintain my composure. I'm
laughing out loud, but she just keeps telling her story.

"`Tho the horth wath thenthitive, and nervouth about the
thnake, but don't worry, Mr. Thwartz, it wath okay, becauth what
he thaw wathn't a real thnake, it was jutht a fake thnake. In TV,
that'th called propth. Get it?'

"So this five-and-a-half-year-old has me on the floor, with tears
coming out of my eyes, telling me how television works. And that
was it-I had to hire her.

"But that's the only one. Everyone else had to fight for their
jobs."

And that's just what we did. Time and again, the remaining five
of us (plus a coupla hundred other hopefuls) came back to the
Paramount Studios and competed through interviews, callbacks,
and screen tests. Finally, when Sherwood had cast his brunette
Mike and his blond Carol, we each got a phone call that made us
official Bradys.