Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Special Collector's Edition (12 page)

ost of us Brady kids didn't have to stretch too far in
bringing life to our Brady alter-egos. That's because
Sherwood Schwartz thought it would be more natural to have us more or less "be ourselves" on-screen
rather than superficial, stereotypical, or one-dimensional characters. There was, however, one glaring exception: Cindy.

Susan Olsen is almost nothing like Cindy. In fact, she is more
her opposite, the "anti-Cindy"-perhaps even an evil twin. I
asked Susan about it:

"I thought Cindy was the single biggest geek in the world!"
she said. "She was an idiot! I mean, I didn't like Cindy, but I really
hated the fact that she was so stupid. Even as a kid in the first
season, I can remember running up to my Mom and asking her,
`Why is it funny and cute to be stupid? Why is Cindy stupid? And
why is that a good thing?' If you ever stop and listen to some of
the lines that come out of Cindy's mouth, you come away with
the idea that she's retarded.

"I remember the worst one came during the first season in
that episode where we all had the measles. Carol comes into
Cindy's room and gives her a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich,
and Cindy asks, `How come you alwayth gimme peanut butter
and jelly?' And Carol says, `Because they're your faaaaaavorite.' To
which moron Cindy replies, `Oh yeah, I keep forgetting.' I can
remember even then being really distressed about it and asking
my mother, `Why? Why do I have to say this stuff?'

"And what made it worse is that I'd have to go back to school
after this, and try to live down what Cindy did ... you know, with
my body. Lets face it, kids are horrible psychotic maniacs, and
just plain cruel a lot of the time, so it could be really tough. I
remember going to school the Monday after the tattletale episode aired, and no one would talk to me. I'd be like `C'mon,
you know that wasn't me. You know I don't squeal. You know
that I can keep a secret.' But, in the world of schoolyard justice,
being a tattletale is about as low as you can possibly sink, and I
hated catching shit for what Cindy the geek did."

The Geek. (Courtesy
Sherwood Schwartz)

It's funny how a coupla pigtails, a coupla pinafores, and a few
dumb lines could so thoroughly hide the real kid underneath the
Cindy character, Even Sherwood Schwartz, who created the role
of Cindy for Susan, was blinded by her feminine exterior. "It's
funny," Susan says, "because I'm sure if you asked him, Sherwood would tell you that he tailored the role of Cindy around
me. But I don't know that Sherwood's ever really met me.

"But Lloyd knew that I was a little different. Once he came
over to my Mom and said, `Your kid is an imposter.' And my
Mom said, `What?' And he said, `She's an imposter. She looks one
way, but she's not that way. She's not Cindy.'

"Actually, if the character of Darlene on the "Roseanne" show
had existed then, I would have killed for it. It really used to bug
me that every single tomboy role on television used to go to Jodie
Foster. But I just sorta looked like this little lady and those are the
parts I always ended up getting. It's funny, because that same
incongruity used to really annoy my schoolteachers. One telling
my mother, `It's so strange, she comes in here with her hair all
perfect, and looking like a little angel, and then she goes outside, beats the crap out of the boys, comes back in, and her hair is still
perfect.'"

Speaking of hair, let me finally squash an ugly rumor by saying that as phony as Cindy's personality may have been, her hair was real. For years now the only Brady hair rumor more heinous than the one about bad perms on the guys has been the one about Cindy's hair being clipped on before each episode. Even today that rumor drives Susan Olsen nuts, and as you might have guessed by now, she's got something to say about it.

"The whole thing with my hair started long before I got the part of Cindy. I used to love watching `Family Affair,' and I'd say to my Mom, `Oh, please fix my hair like Buffy's.' So I was a knock-off really. I wasn't the first one with those spaghetti-looking appendages hanging off my head, but mine were real. Buffy's were prosthetic.*

"And I asked my mom to fix my hair up in those pigtail-curl things for my first interview with Sherwood for `The Brady Bunch.' Biggest mistake I ever made, because it stayed like that for five years!

"In the beginning, if you look closely you'll notice that they were changing my hair color literally every week. Me and Florence both. They would dye us at the same time and give us the exact same color, so there are some episodes where it's basically white, and a couple where we're even sorta reddish brunettesvery dark. By the middle of the first season, my hair just started coming out in clumps, and I had a terrible rash all down my neck from the hair dye. It finally got so bad that I started to cry and said, `Mom, if I have to keep doing this, tell Sherwood he has to get another Cindy.' And she said, `I want you to go up and tell him that, because he should know that it's coming directly from you.' So I went up to his office and told him. He looked at me, and being the wonderful man that he is, actually got a little tearyeyed, and said, `We won't color your hair ever again.' And he gave me a big hug and kiss, and that was that. I really loved him.

"But those damn pigtails were tough to live with, especially since I constantly had to have those rubber-band things strapped into my hair, and they were tight! I still cringe whenever I think of them yanking my hair back tight and wrapping those little dingle-ball things at the ends. Every now and then they'd drop an end and whack-hard little plastic ball snaps onto kid star's skull."

Susan's worst hair trauma of all came when our hairdresser showed her pigtail damage to Howard Leeds, Susan's least
favorite producer. He looked at her head, put his big, meaty
hands on her hair, and said, "Look, if it gets worse, we'll just cut
it all off and slap a wig on your head."

At that point, "the youngest one in curls" quickly became the
youngest one in tears.

know, I know, this is the stuff you've been waiting for. In fact,
there's a pretty good chance that you skimmed through the
book and decided to start here instead of at chapter 1. If
that's the case, all I can say is I'm not surprised. Over the
years, I can safely say, fans' questions about inter-Brady dating
have outnumbered all other subjects by at least a hundred-to-one
margin. Why you people are so interested in the gory little details
of six teenagers' libidos is beyond me, but since you definitely are,
I'll do my best to spill my guts.

At some point throughout the five years of filming, every Brady
paired up romantically with their opposite-sex counterpart. (The
only exceptions were Alice and Tiger. Hmm ... you don't suppose
...) The pairings varied in intensity, but no one was spared an
attack of the adolescent hormones, not even little Cindy and
Bobby.

My memories of the romance between Susan Olsen and
Michael Lookinland were hazy, so once again, wanting to get the
whole story for this book, I called up Susan, invited her over, plied
her with Jack Daniel's, and interrogated her mercilessly until she
fessed up. She hung tough for a while but finally cracked, exposing for the first time, the dirt behind the romance between the
youngest Bradys.

"It was funny," Susan said, taking a long drag on her cigarette
and a long sip of Jack, "because I was very strange as a little girl. A
couple of times boys had tried to kiss me and I reacted almost as
though I had been assaulted. But during our first season, Michael
got the notion that he had a major crush on me. And he'd put his
arm around me, and he'd kiss me, and ... uh ... I kinda liked it. I
remember he would drag me into his dressing room, and
Maureen [McCormick] and Eve [Plumb] would try to be funny by locking the door. And I'd be going, `Michael, Michael, get off
me-Hee-Hee-Hee-Hee-Hee,' and here's Michael, this eight-yearold mini-stud going, `I love you, I love you', and trying to put his
lips and his tongue on me. So I said what any reasonable nineyear-old would say in a situation like that, I said `Let'th get married.'

The Newlyweds.
(Courtesy Sherwood
Schwartz(