Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Special Collector's Edition (24 page)

Actually, Robert's worries. about us four elder Bradys weren't so
much unwarranted as misplaced. We were far less interested in
making trouble than we were making out with each other. Ever
since Hawaii, Maureen and I had been awkwardly toying with an
on-again off-again kind of infatuation. It ran hot and cold and was
hindered by innumerable interruptions, pressures, and conflicts.
But out at sea, aboard this beautiful ship, I took the liberty of
attempting to heat up an old flame. "I think Bob arranged the whole trip just so you and I could finally consummate our relationship," said Mo.

So we're out in the middle of the Atlantic, traveling in style on
one of the biggest, most luxurious passenger ships in the world,
and heading toward the cultural and educational treasure trove of
London. Naturally, my thoughts were focused solely on getting laid.

I was positive, absolutely positive, that the warm sea breezes
and lack of parents would combine to finally allow my relationship
with Maureen to ... uh ... expand to its fullest potential. Yeah,
that's it.

The only problem was that Maureen wasn't buying any of it. As
we were preparing for our cruise to London, Mo and I happened
to be suffering through one of our cold spells. She'd play hard to
get, I'd play hard to get, and we'd ignore each other until one of us
gave up and gave in. She saw no reason that a long romantic cruise
should change any of that.

I, on the other hand, was sure that romance would be flying
through the air, and that by the time we left the dock, Maureen
would be all over me like ketchup on scrambled eggs.

Was I wrong. Most of our overseas trip came and went without
even so much as a friendly handshake passing between the two of
us. But then, on our third night of cruising-my eighteenth birthday-as we chugged toward the U.K., I came up with the perfect
plan. This time my dad couldn't come between us, Frances
Whitfield couldn't come knocking; and if my plan worked, there
was no way in hell that we'd be thrown off course on our journey
toward ... uh ... our destiny.

My roommate on the ship was Chris Knight. Maureen's roommate
was Eve Plumb. That may sound immaterial, but it was in actuality the
cornerstone upon which my grand, high, exalted plan for finally bedding Maureen was based. Ysee, at about the same time Maureen had
only a cold shoulder for me, Eve was overheating over Chris.

A light bulb flashed on in my head. "It's simple," I thought. "I'll
wait till tonight and, using Chris as bait, I'll lure Eve out of her
stateroom and into ours. At the same time I'll pay an unexpected
visit to the now solitary Maureen, our eyes will meet, and she'll go
gaga over me.

So with the plan set, it was time for action. First up, I had to find
Chris Knight and ask him to keep Eve busy while I made moves on
Maureen.

"Uh ... I dont really wanna do that" Chris said through a grimace.

"C'mon, man ... Yagotta!" I replied, giving the situation a sense
of life-or-death importance.

Chris finally gave in, and I got ready to pay an unannounced social call on the girls. Showered, shaved, and awash in Vitalis and
Hai Karate, I worked the mirror hard, convinced (as only an eighteen-year-old can be) that my good grooming habits might just
make me irresistible to Mo.

Now, with the moon dancing high above the waves, it was time
to make my move, and with one last backward glance toward my
mirror image, I was on my way, heading determinedly across the
ship and over to the girls' stateroom. A bunch of butterflies were
slam-dancing in my gut, but once I got to the door, I swallowed
hard and knocked. Eve answered.

"Who is it?"

"It's ... uh ... me ... uh ... Barry."

"Awwww, what do you want?" Eve replied, less than cordially.

"I need to talk to you-right away," I spit out, trying to manufacture some measure of believability in my voice.

"Maureen's asleep," replied the remarkably perceptive Eve.
She'd heard my sugar-coated bull and sliced right through it.

"C'mon," I replied, rather desperately. "Open the door."

"Nope."

"All right, then, just listen. I only came over here to deliver a
message to you from Chris."

"Chris?!!!" Eve beamed back at me through the door.

"Yeah," I continued. "He wants to see you. He's waiting over in
our room."

That did it. Eve threw on a robe, threw open the door, and
practically sprinted through the hallway toward the port side of the
ship, and Chris. I was left standing in the girls' open doorway. In
the distance, sprawled upon one of the bunks, was Maureen. She
may have been half asleep, but my heart started racing anyway.

"Hi," I said rather loudly as I entered the stateroom. "Nice place
you have here."

"Hunhhhh ...?" said Maureen, still trying to jar her brain out of
REM sleep.

Not exactly the chock-full-o'-romance greeting I'd hoped for,
but still, with my sense of resolve unshakable, and my sense of
ethics the opposite, I kept plugging away, yammering toward the
semicomatose Maureen, because you never know, she might just
wake up, take one look at me ... and melt. It could happen.

Finally, as Maureen became unable to even fake consciousness,
an evil, twisted, uniquely teenaged plan came rushing up from my
groin to attack my brain. Somehow I came to the conclusion that if
I were to snuggle up next to Maureen in bed, she might wake up,
notice the intimacy of our situation, and be convinced that she
should try and have her way with me.

There are truly some things that make sense only to a teenager.

Anyway, I climbed into bed next to Maureen, I smelled her hair
for a while, then gingerly laid my head upon her pillow, and my
hand upon her waist ... which moved. Maureen was awake!

"Barry?" she asked.

"Yeeeesss?" I replied, trying my best to ooze studliness, and
quite sure that bliss was just around the corner.

"What ... the ... hell ... are you doing?"

"I ... uh ... oh ... nothing."

"Look, I don't know what you've got in mind," Maureen hissed,
"but get outta here."

And that was it. I'd lost the battle, and this time I'd lost the war
too. My desperate groping killed something between us that night;
and in the weeks, months, and years to come, while Mo and I
stayed friendly, we never managed to rekindle the fire between us.

Many years later I was able to sit down with Maureen and finally,
once and for all, ask her about how come we always seemed to be
crazy about each other but always choked whenever we had a
chance to actually do anything about it. "I wanted to really try and
have something serious with you," she told me, "but I think I was
just scared about what it meant. I wasn't an adult at the time, and it
got weird with all the parents, and the teachers, and the producers, who were like another father figure. And y'know, our relationship was just sooo close, in so many ways, that it got scary.

"But you know, maybe it was good that way. I mean, who
knows what would've happened if all those people hadn't been
there for us? I mean, here we were, teenagers, cocky, growing up
on a television show, and feeling like adults. Who knows how far
we could've gone, in many ways, during that time period?"

But back to the QE 2. I'd now sulked out of Mo's room and
made the long walk back toward my side of the ship with tail dragging. Halfway back, it hit me: "I can't go back to the room-Chris
is still in there with Eve." (Who by the way, insist that they spent
the evening talking, with some mild "ear nibbling" marking the
night's raciest moment.) So, locked out and miserable, I spent the
rest of my eighteenth birthday watching the ship's waiters set up
the dining hall for breakfast.

I think I deserved it.

f all the multitudinous Reed/Schwartz battles, the
biggest and most serious was the Orange Hair War. We
were getting ready to begin production on the one hundred sixteenth (and, it turned out, the last) episode of
"The Brady Bunch." It was entitled "The Hair-Brained Scheme"
and revolved around Greg Brady buying some cheesy mail-order
hair tonic from Bobby, only to have it turn his curly locks a bright,
nearly Day-Glo shade of orange. Robert Reed read the script, hated
it, came to the conclusion that it was "the single dumbest thing I'd
ever read," and decided to take a stand.

Flash forward, and now it's early on the morning of the
episode's first shoot day. Sherwood Schwartz is shaving, and his
phone rings:

"I got a call from Bob's agent, saying that Bob had decided the
script was stupid, and that he's refusing to appear in the episode.
He's had the script for two weeks, and this gets me furious-not
because he's got a problem with the script, but because he hasn't
bothered to say anything until now, the day of the shoot. Now
he's demanding story changes, and script changes, and line
changes, and you just can't do that, especially with such short
notice. And in the past I'd changed a lot of things to keep him
happy. I didn't usually agree with the changes, but I'd make them
nonetheless. Changing an entire story on a shoot day, however, is
something that I couldn't do even if I wanted to.

"So I hang up with Bob's agent, call the studio, and say,
`Change the schedule, and start shooting all of the scenes Bob's
not in. By the time I get in, I'll have this thing figured out.' And I
did. Y'know, in my mind I changed things around, and by the
time I got to the studio was able to dictate a new script.
Basically, I just gave some of Bob's lines to the kids, and worked the story into shape minus Bob. It wasn't really that difficult."

End of story, right? Wrong. Because come high noon,
Sherwood got another call from Bob's agent. "'What are you going
to do about my client's demands?' he asked me. So I told him the
truth: `Nothing.' And the agent says to me, `Well, then, Bob refuses
to appear in the episode.' And I said, `Okay,' and the agent got all
hot and bothered and said, `What do you mean, "Oka?"'

"And I said, `I mean, if he doesn't want to be in the episode,
fine. We can do it without him.' And the agent says to me, `Well,
he's supposed to be in all the shows.' And I said, `He's also supposed to do what he's asked as a performer, so if he wants our,
he's out.'

"Then the agent asks me, `What does that mean financially?' and
I said, `What do you think it means? A guy asks me to let him out
of an episode, and you expect me to pay him for it? And set him up
with residuals for an episode that he nearly ruined?'"

So the battle lines were drawn, the horns were locked, and neither side was about to back down. Instead, they just dug in a little
deeper, pushed each other a little harder; and by the time
Sherwood got to the set, things were ready to blow up:

"So I get down to the stage. There's Bob-standing on the set!
So I said, `Uh, Bob, you don't have to be here. I spoke to your
agent, and you're not going to be in this episode.' And he said,
`Well, whether or not I'm in the episode, I'm interested in how it
turns out.'