Here's the Story LP: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice (25 page)

It came down to Natalie. This was my chance to break the pattern, to put three generations of secrets, shame, and personal shit on the table so she would be aware of it, make better decisions, and ultimately be spared having to go down the same self-destructive avenue. So I went for it. I told her about my fear of syphilis, the drug abuse, my two abortions, and more. It was as if I opened a box of keepsakes, but instead of trinkets, glass beads, ribbons, it was filled with pain, misery, anger, embarrassment, shame, and grief.

Telling my daughter those things was one of the most painful experiences of my life, and also one of the best and most profound. When I finished, I felt like my soul was exposed and vulnerable in a way it had never been in front of my child. All the pain, fear, and self-hate I’d ever tried to escape was flapping in the breeze, like laundry on the line. I’d claimed every bit of it. Then I looked into Natalie’s eyes for a response. They were as wet and red as mine. Unprompted, she got out of her chair, walked over to me, and gave me the hug of a lifetime.

“Mom, I know you shared all those stories so I wouldn’t have to go through the same things,” she said. “I understand.”

“You do?”

She nodded.

“I just want to say thank you so much. And I love you even more.”

That left just one person whose love I needed, and I was working on her.

Fifty

N
atalie came home from her summer job as a waitress at a popular local deli. She walked into the kitchen and burst into tears the second she saw me. She shook her head and pulled away from me when I tried to console her. It was clear that she was angry with me. When I demanded to know why, she said Kevin and my father had gone into the deli for lunch and told her that I was a vile person and a terrible mother who had beaten her when she was a small child.

She tried to defend me, she said, but they insisted they had proof. They even said they’d seen me hit her.

Now she stared at me, wanting to know the truth.

I told her that I’d done many bad things, but I’d never beaten her as they’d claimed. Nor could I imagine doing such a thing.

Such was summer 2006. In June, my father’s brother flew into Los Angeles from his home in Florida to see the family. Uncle John was dying of cancer. He didn’t know how much time he had left, but it wasn’t long. A year earlier, he’d written the court a letter, warning of Kevin’s influence over my father. It was ignored. Now he wanted to say his goodbyes to everyone, especially his brother.

I arranged for the family to get together. I made sure invitations got to my father and Kevin. Neither of them showed up. Disappointed my uncle returned home and died a few weeks later.

That was a blow to the little hope I had left. I didn’t know what else I could do to try and bring the family together. I missed my mother’s stabilizing presence more than ever. For the past year, I’d compensated by canvassing antique shops and buying things that reminded me of her. If something had the word Mom or Mother on it, I bought it. Small boxes, poems, cups, picture frames.

I tried but never found things with her name, Irene, but I did find all kinds of objects engraved with the word “Iowa,” her home state, and I bought those instead. Because my mother had once given me two quilts, I bought dozens of those, too. I knew that with each purchase I was trying to bring her back into my life, and I knew that the effort was painfully futile. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t stop myself.

I spent a lot of money and time looking for her. I compiled a list of Salvation Army locations from the Valley to Santa Barbara. I had pages with the addresses of antique stores. As soon as Michael left for work and Natalie got off to school, I got in my car and hit the stores. My mom liked teapots, so I had to have a hundred. She liked chairs. I bought ten different kinds.

I couldn’t stop. After I filled the house, Michael had to cram even more chairs into the ceiling of the garage. He watched in amazement as the patio and then the backyard itself filled up with enough tables and chairs to host a wedding for more than a hundred guests. Except no one was getting married.

Every so often Michael asked if we really needed another chair, another table, or another half-dozen teacups that said
MOM
. Finally, toward the end of that summer, he reached his breaking point. It wasn’t, he later told me, any one thing I’d bought. It was everything. I couldn’t argue that point.

We had piles of things in every room as well as in the hallways. My mother had been a hoarder, saving everything from furniture to newspapers to string, and I seemed to have inherited that lovely trait (or is it a tic?). Michael hired a professional organizer to clean out our house. An understanding woman, she arrived with a crew. Working room by room, they removed everything, put it in the driveway, and returned only the essentials.

I was so embarrassed that the neighbors could see all the crap in the driveway. Of course, over the years, most of them had seen much worse.

I remember surveying all the stuff with Michael. We laughed, cried, and shook our heads in amazement and bewilderment. Most of the stuff went back to the Salvation Army. I suffered a minor panic attack as I watched the truck take away so many things that had, however fleetingly, let me have one more moment with my mother. Michael didn’t care. He was thrilled to be getting his house back.

T
he housecleaning was symbolic of so much more. In August 2006, I turned fifty years old, a milestone I celebrated at one of my favorite restaurants with family and friends, who toasted the way I embraced the half-century mark with good cheer and satisfaction. My response: Why not celebrate it?

Though aging is feared by most in Hollywood, I actually liked it. While a part of me would always be sixteen years old and getting hit in the nose with a football, I arrived at this milestone in real life sans any Botox or plastic surgery. When I looked in the mirror in the morning, I saw the real me staring back. I proudly wore my wrinkles and sags like medals earned in battle.

And a battle it had been to this point. I wasn’t perfect by any means, but I had many more pluses than minuses. My marriage was more than twenty years old, strong, and more loving than ever. My daughter was beautiful inside and out. And I felt wiser, better, happier, and healthier than at any time in my life.

What wasn’t to celebrate?

Other than the occasional
Brady
-related appearance, I no longer thought about show business. I didn’t have an agent. My priorities had changed. I thought more about Denny, Natalie, Michael, Kevin, and my father, and even antiquing than I did about getting a job. Then one day a call came in from Barry Greenberg, an executive at the TV Land cable network. He’d received an inquiry from a producer who wanted to meet me for the MTV show
Celebrity Fit Club.

I’d never heard of the show. When Barry explained it to me, my jaw dropped.

“Oh my God!” I said. “They want me to be on this show because they think I’m fat.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The ugly truth was, I
had
put on weight. Once my mom got sick, I began to pack on the pounds. My days were spent taking care of her and everyone else, trying to make sure things were okay. Then late at night, after Michael and Natalie were asleep, I crept into the kitchen and wolfed down ice cream, pasta, cake, casseroles, and cookies—whatever I found in the fridge.

It was a high-calorie pity party reminiscent of the binges I’d gone on a decade or so earlier. Except instead of throwing up afterward, I kept it in—and kept eating more. I didn’t want to give it up. I needed the comfort that food gave me. I was trying to fill a hole that kept getting bigger. With the weight, I literally carried around my burdens, adding a pound or two with each new upset.

Back when my mother was getting chemo, she hinted that I should lose a little weight. My husband remarked on it a couple times, too. By the time I was offered
Celebrity Fit Club,
my weight had climbed from 115 to 154 pounds, and my dress size had increased from a four to a ten. I remember waiting all day for Michael to get home from work. As soon as he came through the door, I greeted him with a question.

“Am I fat?”

Michael set down the backpack that held his laptop and looked at me. Unlike me, he was good at thinking before he answered a tough or tricky question, and this question defined tough and tricky.

“Well,” he said cautiously. “Why do you ask?”

I told him, and then Natalie came home and I went over it with her, too. I was aghast at the effrontery of the offer and said outright that never ever would I go on such a show. I pounded my fist on the table to emphasize the point. Then, agitated, I opened up the fridge and looked for something to eat. Natalie was the one who brought me to my senses, first telling me to look what I was doing—“Mom, close the fridge and come back to the table”—and then suggesting that doing the show might be cool.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a great show,” she said.

I arranged to meet with the producer, Richard Hall, the son of veteran game-show host Monty Hall. I picked the Good Earth restaurant to give him the impression that I was healthier than he thought. I ordered fruit, too. During the meeting, he and another producer who also joined us never once mentioned the word
fat
or directly said I was heavy. Instead they spoke in vague terms about getting into better shape, feeling healthier, and losing weight if that’s what I wanted to do.

Later on, we laughed at the way they’d tiptoed around the real issue. Nonetheless, they got the point across. I went home, took a long, honest look at myself, and decided this was actually an excellent and timely opportunity for me to get in shape, and to get paid for doing it. My husband was wary of what was required, namely going on national TV and admitting I was not in the kind of shape that most people associated with me. But Natalie was overjoyed that her mom was going to be on MTV.

“I wonder what other fat celebrities will be on with you?” she asked, laughing.

P
roduction began after Thanksgiving, which made my favorite holiday torture. I love to eat and cook. It was the first Thanksgiving I could recall when I only had a bite of pie. Normally I ate to the point where I pushed back from the table, unbuttoned the top button on my pants, and sprawled on the sofa in front of the TV. What I realized instead is that I’m very competitive. I wanted to get in shape for the show, so I immediately cut out alcohol and chocolate.

As hard as that was, my most difficult task came at the start of production, when we had to get on the scale. I don’t know what it is about revealing your weight to other people, but stepping up on the pedestal for my first weigh-in was one of the most awful, and scariest, moments of my life—and I’d had my share of those.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see the result. I didn’t want anyone else to see. I felt naked. I might as well have been naked. Viewers were going to know at a glance that I didn’t have any self-control when it came to Baskin-Robbins chocolate mint ice cream, Famous Amos cookies, and garlic bread. It was similar to the time when I’d panicked on the
Touched by an Angel
set at the thought that everyone knew I’d had a drug problem—except for some reason, this was even worse.

I couldn’t have said why other than that this was a public declaration that I wasn’t perfect, that I had problems and faults, and that I carried them around my hips and thighs. It was like divorcing myself from Marcia Brady in front of Judge Judy. People were going to see the truth, they were going to see me, the real me, Maureen McCormick, at fifty—heavy, out of shape, and trying to win.

Was that bad?

No, in fact, that was the point!

I reminded myself of that by glancing at my fellow competitors: Tiffany, Cledus T. Judd, Kimberley Locke, Da Brat, Ross the Intern, Warren G, and Dustin Diamond. All of them looked roly-poly and maybe a little soft, but not fat. What I saw were people like me, people who probably ate and overate for many of the same reasons I did, and people who were also risking embarrassment if not humiliation by stepping outside their public image to show they were…not fat, but human.

I was okay with being human. It’s not like people have much choice—something that only took me thirty-some years to accept. Realizing that, I was able to step on the scale, albeit with my eyes closed and my heart pounding. I fought the urge to rip off my clothes so I’d weigh less than 154. Ah, well.

From there, it was a matter of grit and willpower over the show’s hundred-day time span. Dustin was the only clinker among the cast. His jokes and behavior were offensive. I suspected he might have been acting that way in an effort to wrangle his own reality show. Everyone else was wonderful. I spoke regularly to Kimberley, Tiffany, and Da Brat. Warren G referred to me as his sister, and Ross became one of the sweethearts of my life. We walked into every show holding hands.

On the first day of physical tasks, we had to run the stairs in the football stadium at Long Beach City College. I was the worst of anyone. I collapsed after going up and down three times. I was pathetically out of shape. Between shooting days, though, I worked out with a personal trainer and kept careful tabs on my diet. Soon I found myself talking about endurance and upper-body strength. Michael encouraged me to exercise, and Natalie left me notes in the morning saying, “Mom, you look beautiful. Keep it up.” They became Team Maureen.

My brother Denny was the most inspirational member of the team. Before one of the weigh-ins, the producers showed a videotape of Denny saying, “Maureen, good luck. I hope you win!” I saw it and burst into tears. I think Ross and some of the others cried, too. As it turned out, I won the competition. I ended up at 117 pounds. I set a record, losing the highest percentage of weight in the five-season history of
Celebrity Fit Club.
I was deliriously happy.

There was a party afterward. Everyone attended, except Dustin. By this time, all of us were close, including the show’s host, Ant, boot-camp drill sergeant Harvey Walden IV, and psychotherapist Stacy Kaiser. As we celebrated, people described their favorite
Brady Bunch
episode. As always, I was amazed at the way the show had touched the lives of so many people of every age and background. However, this time I didn’t feel at war with my doppelgänger, Marcia. I simply felt blessed.

Why was I no longer at war with her?

Almost a decade of work on myself had paid off. And though it sounds silly, I’d just had one of the greatest experiences of my life on the show. I didn’t have to play a character or memorize lines. All I had to do was be myself.
All I had to do.
How long had it taken me to get to that point? But how worthwhile were the results! On the show, I had talked about my bulimia. At the party, I heard someone mention an issue with drugs, and I piped up about my past drug problem. Despite all my fears, I had let it all hang out. After spending my life worrying about what people thought of me, what they might think of me, and trying to present a certain image, I gave up. I was just me. And the darnedest thing happened.

I won.

And I’m not talking about the show.

I won much more than
Celebrity Fit Club,
though losing more than thirty pounds wasn’t anything to complain about!