Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Special Collector's Edition (13 page)

"So Maureen made like a minister, and we held a ceremony.
She asked Michael if he wanted to take me as his `awfully wedded
wife' and did like six other bad wedding jokes, but when it was
over, me and Mikey were married. We were filming that camping
episode at the time, and that became our honeymoon. So we're
on location, walking along hand in hand like a coupla geeks, and I
remember Michael gushing to Ann B., `We're maaaaarried now,'
and Annie of course just said something like `Oh, that's nice, I'm
very happy for you.'

"But it didn't end there. For most of that first season, we used
to sneak off into Tiger's doghouse and make out. This will probably really embarrass Michael, but a couple of years later, he
became maniacally horny. He'd see a woman with big boobshe seemed to have a kinda `boob thing' and he'd be fascinated.
This is like at age ten or eleven. And right about that time
Maureen had 'em, and Eve was acquiring a pretty respectable set.
I of course had none, so he decided it was time to get rid of me
and chase after Eve for a while.

So we got a divorce. And the way that our twisted little brains worked we decided that to really be divorced, we'd have to do the
entire wedding ceremony over again, only this time we'd have to
do it backwards. I remember instead of kissing, we kinda spit on
each other, and we walked backwards down the aisle, and that
did it. We were officially divorced."

If only real life were that simple!

I think America looks at "The Brady Bunch, " sees Bob,
and thinks, "Wow, what a great guy!"I don't think that
they have a clue about how impossible he really is.

-Lloyd Schwartz

Sherwood and his cohorts-Lloyd, and whoever else
he had writing-had no sense of reality whatsoever. I
mean, they'd write this beyond-farce "Gilligan's
Island"-level shit, look at it, and say, "Yeah, that's
great. That's wonderful. We've done it. " And try as
you might, you couldn't talk them out of it.

-Robert Reed

Robert and the Schwartzes had their horns firmly locked. Their
feud rattled throughout the lifetime of "The Brady Bunch" and
beyond. Their battles were always heated, usually bitter, and so
ongoing that page space alone prevents me from hacking through
them all. What I can do, however, is delve into some of the really
good stuff.

I'm also going to spend the next several pages absolutely refusing to take sides. Sherwood Schwartz, Lloyd Schwartz, and Robert
Reed are three men whom I truly respect, so throughout this book
their fight will remain just that-their fight.

With that disclaimer out of the way, we'll pick up the story
where we left off. Bob had appeared in the pilot episode for "The
Brady Bunch," hated the results, and was (to put it mildly) less
than enthusiastic about being a part of the series. With that in
mind, I asked Bob the obvious question: "If you were so unhappy
with the show, why not quit?" He answered like this:

"First of all, I couldn't get out of my contract. If I tried, what
would I say? `I'm unhappy with the show'? With a signed, sealed
contract, I'd simply have been sued. And the other thing was, once
we got at it, the problems seemed easy to fix. We had a good cast,
and frankly I thought you kids were wonderful, certainly the best
thing in it. So in watching John Rich direct you"-he directed the
first seven episodes-"I couldn't help but think, `Get a good director in here and we might really have something good.'

"Once having taken the first bite out of the show, I wanted to
stay around and watch it become something that we might not be
ashamed of. And another reason was that my business manager
said that my tail would be in crap if I didn't!"

So Robert Reed became Mike Brady, and Sherwood Schwartz
became a severe migraine sufferer. Even before our first thirteen
weeks had gone by, they were at odds over the direction of the
show. Sherwood was trying to make "The Brady Bunch" as funny
as possible, and Bob was working against that cause, toward a
more realistic, less jokey focus. That's important, because from
here on, almost every fight between Robert and the Schwartzes
can be traced back to this basic conceptual conflict.

This is Bob's description: "My theory was-and Sherwood and I
argued about this dozens of times-that either you have a show
like 'Gilligan's Island,' where kids can just sit back and laugh at
what they see, like a cartoon, or you do a show that's grounded in
reality, wherein you deal with real kids, and present their characters as identifiable peers for your audience. That's what I'd always
hoped for `The Brady Bunch."' And the adult characters? "There
are dozens of other shows where the father figures run around
telling jokes, stepping on relationships, and acting stupid. But I
thought, `God damn it, the father's supposed to be an authority
figure here, and we'd better keep him that way.' I mean, he can
make mistakes, and do dumb things, but at all times he's got to be
a father, and Florence has to be a mother: "

And therein lies the heart of the argument that kept the Alka-
Seltzer flowing on the Brady set for years. I asked both Sherwood
and Lloyd Schwartz for their take on Bob's strict code of ethics
regarding "The Brady Bunch." Sherwood blamed Bob's aversion to
all things slapstick on the fact that "he came into the series with a
kind of a black cloud over him, and just plain didn't want to do it.
He doesn't do comedy, and has no sense of humor ... at least on a
commercial level." But Lloyd went a step further.

"Bob is not a comedian. Listen to the theme song and you'll
hear it's `the story of a man named Brady,' but in reality `The Brady
Bunch' is not the story of a man named Brady, it's instead the story
of a man named Brady's kids. And personally, I think that's because due to Bob's reluctance, or inability to step forward and
be funny, he let the show get taken away from him. Even today,
people remember the names of all six kids, but nobody remembers `Mike.'

"The show really should have been centered around Bob's
comedic reactions to his kids' goings-on around him, but we could
never depend upon Bob for that. As a result we started centering
our stories around the kids and became very successful that way.
So I think Bob did himself a real disservice. I think he let the show
get taken."

With both parties unwavering in their quest to model "The
Brady Bunch" after their own personal vision, the Battle over the
Bunch began in earnest, with both sides tolerant but leery. At face
value, it would seem that Sherwood, as creator and producer of
"The Brady Bunch," would certainly have much more authority
over its direction than Robert. However, the cagey Mr. Reed could
sometimes overcome his subordinate political position by employing the age-old piece of strategy known as the "end run."

"Sherwood and I tried talking about the problems with the
show," he told me, "but we were constantly at loggerheads. In
fact, I gave him his very first migraine. But then I found a method
of working around him. I went to the head of Paramount, Doug
Cramer, and told him about what was going on, and he said, `You
can't get what you want by arguing with Sherwood.' So we came
up with an alternate plan.

"Even before my first meeting with Doug, I'd taken my `Brady
Bunch' scripts, rewritten them, and sent them off to his office with
a note saying, `This is what the arguing is about. Here's my revised
script. Is this an improvement or not?' His reply was `Yes, it is,' and
together we devised a plan wherein I would work with another
writer, or on my own, rewrite each week's `Brady Bunch,' and turn
in the revisions to Paramount's front office. Paramount, in turn,
would send the rewrites down to Sherwood as if the changes came
from them. And because Paramount owned one-third of `The
Brady Bunch,' they had clout. There would still be discussion
about the changes, but they certainly had more bargaining power
than I did.

"That's the way we operated for as long as Doug was there. But
after some personnel changes in Paramount's front office, I started
sending my changes straight to Sherwood. And sometimes there'd
be periods wherein we'd try our best to be nice to each other and
to be polite, and considerate of each other's feelings, but the problem was that when this happened, Sherwood would take my
changes, rewrite them himself, and they'd end up very watered
down. The system always seemed to me to work better when I'd say, `You fucker! What the fuck is blah blah blah ...?' you know?

"Anyway, rather than go through all this, the studio finally
decided to bring in a script editor that I liked, and so they hired my
friend Tam Spiva. That worked better, but still, we were constantly
at odds over scripts, and I guess I wasn't very flexible either.

"I remember every once in a while I'd lose perspective and
issue critiques of the show and, geez, I'd get really vitriolic about
this. It's no wonder Sherwood took issue with me. I mean, they
were basically written from the point of view of `You stupid asshole, how could you possibly write anything this dumb?' So there
was crap on both sides of the fence, but certainly on mine."

Now, by the time we got around to actually shooting each
episode, the fighting over its script was usually finished. But there
were exceptions. Lloyd Schwartz remembers it this way:

"It was constant gamesmanship with Bob, and he's a very difficult man. For example, stage time, when you've got a full crew
working, and the lights on, is incredibly expensive. I remember
one time we were filming an episode, and all we had left to shoot
was its `tag'-that's the short little piece of schtick you see on sitcoms in between their last commercial break and the credits. "Bob
decides, on set, that he hates this tag. So I go back up to the production office and I say, `We need a new tag,' and we discuss the
situation, which goes like this.

"Bob is one of those actors who says, `I don't think this material
is very good. I'm gonna play it for what it's worth.' And so, of
course, he was doing the original tag very badly. Ann B. Davis, on
the other hand, would do the exact opposite. She'd say, `A lot of
people worked very hard on this, and maybe it isn't great, but if
that's the case, they really need me to make it work.' Opposite attitudes.

"Anyway, Bob is out there playing the original tag right into the
ground, and because of that, it's dying. And now he's saying,
`Y'see, see how bad it is?' So now I come down from the office to
give them a new tag, but when I get there I find they're already
doing a new tag that Bob wrote. And now Bob's playing the hell
out of the thing, and the crew is laughing, but to be honest, it
wasn't anywhere near as good as the original. I get to the set,
where Bob glares at me and says, `Well, what have you got?' Now I
know whatever I have, he'll play it into the ground and ruin it. So I
just said, `Uh ... we couldn't come up with anything,' because I
know I'd much rather have him do his mediocre tag with a lot of
energy and spark than do a good one badly. That's how you deal
with Bob."

Bickering was common between Robert and the Schwartzes;
but every once in a while, when things got uncommonly heated between the two camps, the infighting would escalate a notch.
Bob Reed remembers:

"Oh, God, sometimes I'd get so furious at Sherwood that I'd go
over to O'Blath's"-a bar just outside the Paramount lot-"and
have a belt or two, and I remember one time, coming back loaded
... okay, maybe a couple of times, always after big blowups with
Sherwood. And I'd come back to the set drunk, thinking, `I don't
give a fuck-shoot this.' And of course I made a complete asshole
of myself."

When I asked Bob if he could remember a specific episode
where that took place, he didn't come up with one. But Lloyd
Schwartz did:

Maureen McCormick on the Braless Bradys

Nowadays if I'm changing channels and I happen across an
episode of "The Brady Bunch," the first thing I notice is how ugly
our clothes are. I mean, that polyester stuff is just awful.