Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Special Collector's Edition (22 page)

By week's end, we'd nearly closed 'em down.

The first disaster would have to go under the heading of "acco-
modations." King's island was an ambitious, blossoming amusement park in a tiny town, with only one motel, and that meant
there wasn't much choice about where we would stay. Instead, the
entire Bunch was assigned living quarters in the considerably lessthan-swanky Island Resort Motel ... which, due to it's lack of privacy, and vaguely fishy smell, we redubbed "the aquarium."

The motif was early Motel 6. The plumbing worked, and the bed
had sheets, but there weren't many extras. No little mints on the
pillows, no shampoo, no soap, ... you get the picture. Still, I had no
real aversion to roughing it-until the swarm began arriving.

While I did notice a couple of six-legged roommates in my bathtub, the swarm I'm referring to was of the two-legged variety. You
see, the Island Resort Motel was within a stone's throw of the
King's Island amusement park, and it didn't exactly take a genius
to put two and two together, and figure out where we Bradys were
staying and at the end of each shooting day.

Now, take that fact and add to it the fact that park management
went all out to advertise our filming in the local papers, and you'll
understand how each night, like clockwork, our motel became
infested with dozens of Instamatic-toting park patrons intent on
creating a Kodak moment with a real live Brady. There were kids, a
lot of teens, adults, and sometimes whole families wandering
through the un-air-conditioned hallways, knocking on doors, and
peeking through our windows. Eventually, the hotel called in
some Barney Fife-ish security guards, but mostly they just created
a minor obstacle for the more determined gawkers. All of this was
incredibly flattering but terribly uncomfortable.

The girls had it even worse than the guys. Maureen and Eve
often couldn't even use their bathrooms for fear of finding human
faces pressed up against their windows. There was no place to run,
no place to hide.

Then there was the filming. Trying to make up for the motel horror story, our King's Island hosts devised a plan to let us Bradys
spend every free moment in the park riding the very best rides, all without the nuisance of waiting in line. They were gonna let us cut
any line, any time, anywhere in the park. Our fantasy had come true.

Shooting in the park.
((D Paramount Pictures)

It sounded brilliant to us kids, and soon, with our own personal
gun-toting park escort running interference for us, we were happily pushing and shoving our way to the front of all the longest lines
in the park. A two-hour wait? Not for us Bradys. We were special.
We were stars; we had been on TV for four years. Millions of people love us ... right?

Not the people we'd pushed past. In fact, understandably
enraged, they quickly learned to hate us. Our line-cutting scheme
soon became so frighteningly ugly that by the end of our second
day as VIP guests, our special ride treatment came to an abrupt
and unceremonious halt.

So now, with the uncomfortable lodgings and angry mobs calling for our heads, the Bradys' trip to Ohio had become an absolute
nightmare. Little did we know it was just beginning.

One of the most important scenes in this episode called for all
of the Bradys to ride the park's biggest, fastest, meanest roller
coaster. Finally, we were gonna pig out on adrenaline. Our first
shot called for the camera to be mounted onto the front of the
coaster and pointed backwards toward the family. After lengthy
discussions among the crew about how to safely attach camera to
coaster, the crew rigged together a sort of platform device,
strapped on the camera, and we were set to go. The camera was
loaded, and all of us Bradys got ready to take our places ... all of
us, that is, except Robert Reed, who flatly refused.

The ill-fated
camera rig.
)© Paramount
Pictures)

His refusal may have saved eight lives.

As Robert recalls: "I wouldn't ride on that thing, because they
make me sick, and that made me the butt of a lot of jokes. But
everyone else was going on, and the crew guys were mounting the
camera on the front, facing back. So now I'm thinking to myself,
When that thing gets going at sixty miles an hour, I'm not sure that
whole rig's gonna clear all the overhead stuff on the tracks. So now
I take a walk down the coaster tracks, checking things out, and I
can plainly see several places where it would never get through. I
couldn't believe no one had noticed this. So then I said, `For chrissake, look at this!' So they grumbled at me, and measured the
heights and clearances, and sure enough they had to lower it. If
they hadn't, that camera would've come down and hit the kids
straight in the face!"

And then Lloyd Schwartz got his chance to save eight lives.
Y'see, once Robert had pointed out the near disaster of the roller
coaster shoot, the entire crew seemed to get really spooked. They
lowered the camera rig, secured it to the coaster as best they knew
how, and got ready for the Bradys to ride. Time and light were getting tight, and we were already behind schedule, but Lloyd insisted that we send the rigged coaster through without Bradys, just to
double-check the camera's security.

The crew guys thought it was just a waste of time, but when
Lloyd pulled rank, they gave in, pulled the lever, and started the
ride. They ran the coaster through one complete cycle, and then
gasped in horror as it came back-without the camera!

Once again, fate had stepped in and (literally) saved our necks.
No one ever figured out what exactly caused the camera to fall, but
speculation has it that the coaster's vibrations had loosened its
moorings.

Another camera was brought in, rigged, and run through a cycle
by our now extraordinarily cautious director, Leslie Martinson. This
time it came back unharmed, and the Bradys were called upon to
climb aboard.

Obviously, we didn't get killed, and came through the harrowing experience without a scratch. All I can say is that I think eight
guardian angels worked overtime that day.

Next time you happen across this episode, watch for the illfated coaster shot. You'll notice that all eight of us Bradys look
genuinely horrified, and that's because ... we were!!!

A coaster full
of terrified
Bradys.
(© Paramount
Pictures)

don't know what it is about kid actors on sitcoms, but I keep
seeing the same strange phenomenon over and over and over
again: the irrational preoccupation with hair that runs rampant throughout the city of Hollywood. Take a look at the priority lists of most kid actors and you'll find that hair ranks just
above eating, and slightly ahead of breathing.

I told you about how Marlo Thomas had absolutely no compunction about holding up her shooting schedule while her bangs
were pinched, picked, sprayed, and resprayed. What I didn't
explain is that the Brady set was often a lot like that ... only times
nine!

Actually, it was only times eight: Ann B. Davis always just pulled
it back, glued it down, and went to work. For the rest of us, however, life was not nearly so easy.

Let's begin with Susan Olsen. To this day she regrets ever having asked her mother to make her hair "look like Buffy's," and
that's because once Sherwood Schwartz got a look at those cute
little dangly pigtails, he insisted that Cindy wear her hair like that
forever. In fact, Sherwood was so crazy about Susan's tails, he even
gave them special mention in our theme song ("the youngest one
in curls").

But Susan wasn't the only Brady with hair problems-not by a
long shot. Michael Lookinland, for example, has naturally reddish
blond hair-yep, that stringy black stuff that sits on Bobby Brady's
little round head throughout the first couple of seasons of "The
Brady Bunch" came out of a bottle. For a while the hair-and-makeup folks experimented with a temporary and washable black rinse,
but the problems with that were double-edged. First, whenever
Michael got under the intense illumination of our large studio
lights, you could see right through the rinse and down into his nat ural reddish-blond hair (this is very evident in the pilot episode).
And second, if we were working on a scene for any extended period of time, the heat of those same lights would cause Michael's
scalp to perspire, and before you knew it, little Bobby Brady had
big black streams rolling down his face and neck.