Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Special Collector's Edition (16 page)

Next, it was time for both outriggers (camera guys in one, nine
Bradys in the other) to paddle out where the waves were breaking,
turn around, catch a big one, and film the Bradys riding toward
shore, smiling broad Brady smiles and having the time of their
lives.

Yeah, sure. If you've ever gone canoeing, you know that trying
to get two novice sailors to row a boat with some degree of coordination is tough. Try and imagine getting nine novice oars in sync.
Does the word "nightmare" come to mind?

The better part of an hour passed as we Bradys flailed about
spastically at sea. We drifted, missed waves, and even with the
Hawaiian paddlers in the next boat yelling instructions at us, we
managed to always remain pointed in the wrong direction.
Basically, we Bradys were sweaty, exhausted, and proved ourselves
to be bona fide landlubbers.

Finally, somewhere above Hawaii, the spirit of King
Kamehameha must have looked down upon us and decided to
end our misery. I say that because all of a sudden, from out of
nowhere, a wave began to crest and pick up speed, and as it
swelled toward our outrigger, all nine of us got excited. We had
managed to get ourselves pointed in the right direction, with oars
at the ready, in perfect position.

We were actually going to catch a wave!

In real life, we
weren't nearly
this coordinated.
(© Paramount
Pictures)

The wave loomed over us. We paddled. We caught it. We
smiled for the camera. We were rammed by the camera guys' boat.
Our stern started sinking, and we capsized.

Susan Olsen remembered it like this.

"You'll notice when you see the episode that there are all these
smiling faces in the outrigger, except for Florence and I, who are
scowling. After we got rammed, the wave washed over us, and our
part of the boat ended up underwater. I was hanging on to the
side, and Florence was hanging on by her ankles. Then just at the
point where I thought to myself `I can't hang on anymore'
Florence grabbed me."

Florence kicked in "all I could think of was `Hang on to Susie,' and the next thing I knew I was hanging upside down
under the boat, and my eyelashes fell off.

Robert Reed on The Golf Cart Races

While we were shooting "The Brady Bunch," I was also working on "Mannix" a lot, and so I'd have to tool around the
Paramount lot in a golf cart, back and forth, from set to set, and to
the gym every once in a while, and I'd meet a lot of people doing
that. Somehow, it came to pass that I threw a weekly party in my
dressing room. So I brought in booze and stuff, and whoever wanted to drop by would drop by. Sometimes twenty, thirty, forty people would show up. It was great fun, and we always seemed to
end up boffing secretaries ... and the worst ones too.

Anyway, we'd carry on, and the guards all knew us and were
very indulgent, until one night we took the studios golf carts and
raced around the lot. And I remember we drove down under one
of the sets and into an area that was used for prop storage. I
mean, you could just drive down there and-well, I still, to this
day, have things up in my storeroom that I stole from there. In fact,
there was a memo that came out the next day about stealing on
the lot. I think they knew who did it.

So we were flooring these little golf carts, and racing around
the lot, and we hit the western street of the "Bonanza" set, and
we hit that dirt road, screaming and hollering, and singing and
laughing. There were six of us in each golf cart, and we all lost
traction and flipped the damn things over. And one of the girls got
hurt-nothing too serious, abrasions and stuff, but it was enough
to sober us up.

We were stupid and silly, but it was fun. Anyway, next day
there came another memo that said "From now on, all golf carts
will be locked up," and that edict exists to this day. That kinda put
a pall on the parties for a while.

"And then they made us do it again!"

So we did, this time smiling plastic smiles and grumbling all
the way to shore.

Robert Reed was a lot less comfortable doing the bedroom scenes than I was, so I'd slide up next to him
and use "Carol" to make him comfortable. And I
think it worked, because afterward he'd always come
up with a racy comment intimating that I'd gotten
him really horny. I liked that. I liked that a lot.

-Florence Henderson

Most everybody thinks of Florence Henderson as the
quintessential television mom, and that vaguely oedipal association seems to have successfully inhibited the American public
from ever realizing what a totally white-hot babe she really is. I
mean, just once put the apron and the six kids out of your mind
and take a good long look at her in that way. You'll see what I
mean.

On top of all that, Florence is sharp, sassy, and energetic, with a
very adult sense of humor that seems to fall somewhere between
Benny Hill and Andrew Dice Clay.

To put a woman like that in close daily proximity to a normally
sex-obsessed teenage guy is to drive that poor young man wild. At
least that's what happened to me. Almost from day one, my feelings toward Florence were more carnal than maternal. I can
remember that even as we Bradys did our very first photo shoot
together, her somewhat sweaty sense of humor took me by surprise, then held me entranced.

Under a huge shade tree in a Santa Monica park, all nine of us
were posing for hokey, overly cute group shots and being choreographed into all sorts of saccharine poses. One of the worst featured the Brady girls and some enormous prop lollipops. Florence remarked that they were so big it would take about four hours to
finish them. At which point I, neglecting to bite my tongue, and
with some energetic, mincing about, said, "Yeah, and four hours is
a long time to suck on anything."

Posing in the
park.
((D Paramount
Pictures)

My joke was met with dead silence and uncomfortable stares by
almost everyone-everyone, that is, except Florence. She simply
rolled her eyes, laughed heartily, and said, "Not for me it isn't."
From then on we just somehow seemed to click.

From that point on Florence never wavered in her friendship,
and I did what any young guy might: I got a case of the hots for my "mom." It finally got so intense that one day I just couldn't control
myself anymore and wound up asking her out.

Amazingly, she accepted.

Yeah, I know it struck me as completely weird too. I was thrilled
to have successfully hit on Florence Henderson, but absolutely terrified about having to look cool on a grown-up date.

Basically, I had no concept of what grown-ups actually did
when they went out on dates, and preparing for it presented me
with all sorts of problems. First, I was still three months shy of my
sixteenth birthday, which meant that I was also three months shy
of having a driver's license, which in Los Angeles, meant that I had
about as much freedom as a chained-up dog.

I did, however, have a learner's permit, which allowed me to
drive legally as long as a licensed driver, over the age of twenty-five
came along with me. "Oh, great," I thought, "when I pick up my
TV mom for our date, I'll just be sure and have my real mom riding shotgun in the backseat."

Then a stroke of brilliance hit me, and I bounced it off my
brother Craig. We made a deal that if he let me illegally drive his
car solo on my date, I'd wash and wax the monster twice a week
for a month. I got the idea from a Brady script. We haggled a little
and spit-shook on it. Seemed fair.

With my wheels finally figured out, it was time to decide where
to take the fair maiden Florence. I asked around on the Paramount
lot, and after collecting a lot of advice, most of it awful, settled on
L.A.'s most extra-double-swanky nightclub, the legendary Coconut
Grove. I found out that a Mediterranean Crooner named Rouvan
(the name would better suit a Japanese monster than a singer)
would be performing there soon, ran the idea past Florence, and
we had ourselves a date.

In the ensuing days, I had what seemed like an endless parade
of details to take care of. There were tickets to buy, a new sport
coat and tie to purchase (I was going all out), cash to dig up (I had
no credit cards), colognes to try out, and a hundred other odds
and ends to attend to. I wanted to leave nothing to chance. The
goal was to stay calm and never let Florence know that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

I ran through my things-to-do list one item at a time, and it
wasn't long before I was almost ready to go. I say "almost" because
I still had to learn how to drive my brother's car: a humongous,
smoke-belching, gas-guzzling, rubber-burning, modified Formula
400 Pontiac Firebird.

I learned to drive a stick shift while working on a ranch.
However on the street I had only ever driven our boxy, boring family Buick, which bore almost no resemblance to my brother's cruise missile. His was one of those mid-sixties American sports
cars on a muscle trip, the kind of car that teenage guys love and
insurance companies hate. The car came out of the factory begging for speeding tickets, but my brother had seen to it that whatever power GM had installed in his baby was doubled with some
nifty (albeit insane) engine modifications.

The car was difficult to operate for the noninitiated, and difficult
to understand for the nonpsychotic. Its huge engine had been further souped up at the hands of my grease-monkey brother; itsfac-
tory clutch had been ripped out and replaced with a custom shiftlever, that operated a two-thousand-pound racing clutch.
Needless to say, this made changing gears a major task, especially
for a kinda skinny 15-year-old kid. Just to get the thing out of
reverse, I'd have to press my back against the seat, stiffen my arms
against the steering wheel, and push down on the clutch pedal like
holy hell. Still, I was determined, and after a half-hour lesson, and a
half-hour warning that if I scratched his car, my brother would disembowel me, I was all set to go.

On the night of my date it came time for me to get cleaned up,
dressed up, look my folks squarely in the eye, and lie. My brother
and I both knew there was no way in the world my parents would
let me drive his metal beast, so we came up with a story: we told
my overly trusting parents that Craig would drive me to Florence's
apartment, Florence would drive from there, and that Craig would
pick me up later in the evening. Of course in reality, our plans
were completely different. I just dropped my brother off at a
friend's house, leaving him to find his own way home, then sped
toward Florence's place with adrenaline coursing mightily through
every single one of my veins.