Growing Up Brady: I Was a Teenage Greg, Special Collector's Edition (29 page)

Meeting day. We piled into Sherwood's office, he greeted us
with one of his big, genuine "glad to see ya" smiles, and we quickly
managed to wipe it right off his face. One after another we railed at
the guy with our criticisms of him and his show. We voiced our
predetermined demands and made absolutely sure that he understood our implied threat of "Cave in to our demands, or collectively we can make contract negotiations for season six very, very difficult."

Basically, we stabbed him in the back ... six times.

I'll never forget the look of disappointment on Sherwood's face
as the "perfect family" he'd created, loaded down with demands
from parents, managers, and selves, tried its best to bite the hand
that fed it. Here we were, six kids with the audacity to march into
the office of a man who'd been highly successful in the television
industry for decades, who'd created, produced, and written the very show that launched our careers in the first place, and tell him
in short order that his show stunk and that we were demanding
changes.

So what did Sherwood do? Amazingly, even after we'd laid our
huge, steaming pile on his desk and proceeded to try and rub his
nose in it, he was cordial, he was polite, and he told us that he'd be
more than happy to consider everything we'd discussed. He was
smiling, but it wasn't one of his usual big grins; this smile was
being worn as a mask. The six of us had hurt Mr. Schwartz, and I've
got to say that the image of his crooked, counterfeit, crestfallen
smile still haunts me sometimes.

Nevertheless, we kids left the meeting feeling good about ourselves. We'd had our showdown with Sherwood and came away
convinced that (with the six of us united managerially, and with
contract negotiations for season six just around the corner) there
was nothing that could keep us from getting everything we'd
demanded.

We had a lot to learn.

Filmation Associates-who had produced the "Brady Kids" cartoon show-called, trying to put together a simple deal that would
allow them to use our voices in producing five more episodes of
the cartoon show. This would bring their total number of shows to
twenty-two and would make the cartoon much easier to syndicate
since affiliates generally bought programming in twenty-twoepisode cycles.

It had been about a year since we'd last dealt with Filmation,
and in that time the six of us had changed. We'd grown cocky,
grown egos, and grown a manager to boot. Thus, when we were
asked to simply extend our original cartoon show contracts by five
more episodes with the same deal as before we were "highly
insulted"-at least that's what Harvey Shotz told us.

He yelled about how Filmation was taking advantage of us, how
unfair it was that they'd reap all the cartoons' syndication profits,
and about how we were now "too big" to be treated so poorly. So
now, us kids, our parents, and our manager, with a seemingly united front, told Filmation that we couldn't possibly work with them
again unless our contracts were retroactively renegotiated all the
way back to episode number 1. This, we told them, was to reflect
our newfound, large-scale celebrity status.

Filmation was furious, but with our manager leading the way,
the six of us held fast in our demands ... at least for a while.

Immediately, Filmation told us to shove our demands and
threatened to produce the shows without us, our voices, or our
approval. At this point a couple of parents began to sweat, but we
were still pretty much united, and we countered Filmation's threat with a doozy of our own. "Drop the six kids from the show,"
Harvey Shotz expostulated, "and we'll slap a lawsuit on you so fast
it'll make your head spin. And," he continued, "since the cartoon's
characters bear my clients' likenesses, we can hit you with an
injunction that'll keep you from making another dime off the show
until this whole legal mess gets cleaned up-and you know how
long that could take."

He was playing hardball all right, but we were the ones who
ended up getting hardballed. It came time for another volley from
the folks at Filmation, and they did a strange thing ... nothing.
Several days went by, a week, ten days, and still we heard nothing.
Now all the parents were sweating, and when faced with the possible loss of income, the possibility of their kid being tagged "difficult," and the queasiness of impending litigation, one by one they
began to crack.

First to cave were Eve's folks, then Maureen's, Susan's, and
Michael's. This left just Chris Knight, his parents, and I to battle it
out alone. Harvey Shotz's grand scheme of tough and united
group representation hadn't even survived its first battle.

Chris and I continued our holdout, but the rest of the bunch
went ahead and made the cartoons without us (years later, our
ensuing lawsuit was stopped short of the courtroom when the two
of us received modest cash settlements from Filmation), but a
great deal of damage had been done. Once the Bunch had been
divided, we were never the same.

We kids still pretty much got along, but our parents (now in
divided camps) could barely conceal their hostilities toward one
another, and somehow the six of us were no longer the idealistic,
optimistic bunch of the past. I think that really hurt the remainder
of the "Brady Bunch" episodes. All along, we had basically been a
bunch of fairly ordinary kids who liked each other, and who interacted naturally together on camera. Now, with burnt business
deals, lawsuits, angry parents, and a jaded mistrust of those in
charge thrown into the mix, our chemistry went from spontaneous
to stilted, and our united ensemble mentality burst into six-sided
selfishness. Worst of all, our spirits were dampened, and that
resulted in some noticeably low-energy episodes (check out our
last dozen shows sometime). We'd listened to the hype, believed
it, and screwed up big-time.

Still, when season five of "The Brady Bunch" was finished, none
of us had any reason to believe that there wouldn't be a year six.
"Sanford and Son" was our strongest competition, but we still had
a very strong, very loyal audience, For those reasons, it came as a
major shock when two months later, my phone rang and I found
myself talking to an ABC programming executive.

"Barry," he slurred, "I'm sittin' here at my deshk with a bottla
bourbon." The drunken executive belched out the fact that he'd
been given the unenviable and unpleasant task of notifying all the
Bradys that the show had been canceled.

Silence.

"That's it," I thought. "It's over." Without the show there
wouldn't be a live act, the cartoon show was all but dead, and
before long, five of us kids would be returning to public school,
and I'd become an unemployed adult.

Funny thing, that news didn't make me sad ... at all. "The Brady
Bunch" was great fun while it lasted, but now, even as my livelihood was being unceremoniously yanked out from under me, I
wasn't upset. Instead, I simply came to the conclusion that maybe
it was time to put all this behind me and just let it die. I'd never
have to deal with Greg Brady again.

Yeah right.

'd finally given up on chasing Maureen, but that didn't mean
all of the Bradys had finished working toward fictional incest.
Chris Knight and Eve Plumb had wrestled with an awkward
on-again/off-again romance throughout the run of "The Brady
Bunch," and just after the show was canceled, they took a stab at
making their relationship a bit more intimate.

Disaster followed.

To begin, we'll have to take a step backward in time and flash
back across the Atlantic, where we kids are once-again working our
way through Bob Reed's supervised tour of London: Here's how
Chris remembered it:

"All through the time we were on the QE 2, Eve had been hinting and working on trying to knock into my skull the fact that the
two of us should be something more than friends. And finally, as
she nibbled on my ear, something clicked, and I realized that she
was probably right. I mean, up until this point I'd just plain been
sort of oblivious toward the opposite sex, but after she'd nibbled
on my ear for the first time, this wave of feeling came over me, and
I thought to myself, `Oh, my God-now I understand what all the
fuss is about!' I was fourteen.

"Anyway, it was terrific, Eve was incredible, and the two of us
were very comfortable together, y'know? I mean, most of the time
when a guy's just beginning to experiment with the opposite sex,
he's stuffed into a backseat somewhere with somebody he doesn't
even know all that well. But here I was, relaxed, and genuinely
attracted to someone that I literally knew as well as a sister. That, I
have to say, was extremely eye-opening, and extremely arousing,
and it yanked me out of my opposite-sex ignorance and put me
into this sort of frenzy for more. And I mean, here's how innocent
I was. We were rolling around on that bed for I don't know how long, and I wasn't even thinking about sex yet. Just the experience
of having my neck kissed and my ears kissed was simply ...
enough. Making out had suddenly started making sense.

"So then we get back from the trip, go back to work, and I
behave like a normal teenage guy in that I start acting like a complete turd toward the one person in the world who'd shown any
romantic interest in me at all. I don't know why that was; it just
sorta was.

"So anyway, a year comes and goes, we get canceled, I go back
to public school, and all of a sudden it hits me ... I don't know
anybody. I mean, I'm new in school, and the only people I'm really
comfortable with are Bradys.

"Now here's where this whole thing gets truly embarrassing. At
about the same time that I'm feeling lonely, puberty has kicked in
to make my ability to be content with just kissing a girl a thing of
the past. I mean, like all normal, healthy teenaged boys, I was simply in heat all the time.

"Now at this point my hormones take over, and when they realize how long it's gonna take for me to meet someone, befriend
them, win their trust, build and consummate a relationship, they
opt for what they belive might be a quicker route toward satisfaction. They make me pull out my address book and force me to call
Eve.

"So I call Eve. I say, `Let's go to a movie.' She says okay, and I
proceed to pick her up, and take her ... nowhere near a movie
theater. All I did was to drive her up into the hills, hoping that we
might finally get to finish what we'd started in Hyde Park.

"Eve knew exactly what I was up to. I mean, my clumsy
attempts at romance couldn't have fooled anybody. But we talked
for a while, and actually did manage to rekindle what we'd felt
toward one another, and this time we quickly moved beyond the
sensory pleasures of just making out.

"Now it's just starting to get physical, so we move into the back
of my truck, and things start getting really great. And at about this
same time, I open my eyes, look up, and find that the back of my
truck is now lit up like a night game at Dodger Stadium. And
there's two cops parading up to the back of the truck with their
flashlights. I had no curtains on the thing, and we're scrambling
around trying to stay out of the light as the cops yell at us to put
our clothes on and get out of the car.