Maureen McCormick’s Incredible Journey From ‘The Brady Bunch’ to New HGTV Show ‘Frozen in Time’

In the Beginning

She was born Maureen Denise McCormick on August 5, 1956 in Los Angeles, daughter of Irene and William McCormick and younger sister to brothers Michael, Dennis and Kevin. Maybe it was because she was the youngest, but Maureen loved to entertain others, often breaking into song, dancing, and putting on puppet show for the neighbors.  Her career — or at least a move towards one — began at the age of 6 when she won the Baby Miss San Fernando Valley beauty pageant, followed by her debut on television in 1964 in Barbie and Chatty Cathy commercials for Mattel (in 1970 she would end up voicing a redesigned Chatty Cathy doll).

From TV Commercials to TV Guest Star

Beginning in 1964, Maureen made the transition from commercials to guest appearances on episodic television. It started with two episodes of Bewitched between 1964 and 1965, which saw her playing the young Endora (Samantha Stephens’ mother, played by Agnes Moorehead). From there followed appearances on the shows The Farmer’s Daughter, Honey West, Camp Runamuck, I Dream of Jeannie and My Three Sons.

‘The Brady Bunch’

In 1969, Maureen joined her fictional siblings for the first time as The Brady Bunch made its debut on ABC, running until 1974. In the book Brady, Brady, Brady: The Complete Story of The Brady Bunch as Told by the Father/Son Team Who Really Know, series creator Sherwood Schwartz writes, “I spent an entire summer casting those six kids, but I didn’t want typical casting: Like one overweight kid who keeps eating all the time. Or a kid who just talks about sports. Or a brainy kid who knows everything … I wanted all the kids to be real. And I wanted their series personas to be reflective of their own real personalities. The world was wide open in terms of kids’ interests, and the kids I wanted would bring their own interests to their roles … For some reason, the girls were easier to cast. Maureen looked like she would grow up really beautiful, and that certainly could become part of her character.”

Never a ratings giant, The Brady Bunch nonetheless connected with a loyal audience that stuck with it through its five years. What no one could have expected, though, was just how popular it would become in reruns. Or the fact that it would lead to a number of spinoffs: the animated The Brady Kids (1972-73), The Brady Bunch Variety Hour (1976-77), the TV movie The Brady Girls Get Married (1981) which was followed by that year’s TV series The Brady Brides, the TV movie A Very Brady Christmas (1988), the series The Bradys (1989) and, now, A Very Brady Renovation. Any way you shake it, that’s a whole lotta Brady.

A Double-Edged Sword

That identification, Maureen told WGN-TV, serves as both a blessing and a curse. “It’s a blessing,” she explained, “because I was on a show that is loved by America and that’s a great thing. It’s a curse when you’re an actress and you get so well known for one role and you want to move on and do other things. But the blessings definitely outweigh the curse. And it was just a great show to be a part of.”

She might not be able to say the same about her home life. It seems that early on in production of The Brady Bunch, she discovered that her father had been having an affair. As if this wasn’t bad enough, her mother had contracted syphilis from her mother at birth, and, following a nervous breakdown, had electroshock therapy. As Maureen relayed to People, “I convinced myself that I was also infected with syphilis. Like my mother and her mother, I was destined to go insane. Both of them ended up in mental institutions. I was filled with dread.”

A Turn to the Darkside

Doing her best to keep all of that at bay, when the original series ended its run, she returned to Taft High School in Los Angeles for what was her senior year. It may have been an attempt to attain some sort of normalcy, but all it did was bring her down a darker road. “I didn’t have any interest in academics,” she admitted in the same interview. “To help me study, friends introduced me to white crosses — pills they said would help me stay up. The pills peeled away the disquietude that resurfaced after I no longer had my life as a Brady to keep it at bay. We also popped them to lose weight. I always seemed to be five pounds away from being happy with myself.”

Following graduation, she found it really difficult to get acting roles, which led to fighting bulimia and experimenting with cocaine. “Coke quieted the voices in my head,” she said. “The concerns I had about going insane vanished. I could do more coke than anyone, it seemed. It earned me the nickname Hoover. I got into the habit of taking Quaaludes to come back down. I wasn’t able to sleep without them.”

‘Happy Days’ to ‘The Brady Bunch Variety Hour’

To be fair, she did manage to get work with small parts in movies like Moonshine County Express (1977), Take Down and Shaketown, USA (both 1979) and The Idolmaker (1980), with TV guest starring roles on Happy Days, Harry O, Joe Forrester and The Streets of San Francisco. In 1976 she reprised the role of Marcia Brady in The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, which brought together the cast to play their characters who in turn are the host of a variety show. It was truly bizarre and so of its time — and something authors Ted Nichelson, Susan Olsen (Cindy Brady herself!), and Lisa Sutton decided that the world needed to know all about, and went about writing what became the book Love to Love You Bradys: The Bizarre Story of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.

In an exclusive interview with Closer Weekly, Ted related that beyond the bizarre premise of this show, Maureen had a different problem stemming from the fact that she was, as Ted says, “at the height” of her well-documented drug addiction. He points out, “She wouldn’t show up for rehearsals, and then she would show up with bruises on her arms and legs. Well, you can’t have your pretty Brady girls with bruises, so they all had to start wearing opaque leggings. You’ll see after the pilot episode that none of the girls’ legs are showing anymore. This is something Maureen admitted to me: They had to hire extra people to keep her corralled, because she was just a nitwit. She had someone who had to make sure that she was getting dressed, and got where she needed to go.

“One time,” he elaborates, “Maureen didn’t even show up. She showed up to do her pre-record, so they had her voice there and everything, but they couldn’t find her. They panicked, because they only had a short amount of time to film this show. They found her lying out on the beach somewhere, which is pretty good considering there was no texting or anything back in those days. But they were all sitting there in costume, and there’s actually an episode where there are two musical numbers where Maureen is missing, so they had to re-stage one of them, and you can see Susan lip syncing Maureen’s little bit of singing. She told me Maureen never showed up and they forced her to sync to it.”

Life Without Marcia

In the introduction of her 2008 autobiography Here’s the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice, Maureen writes, “When [The Brady Bunch] went off the air, I missed the structure and routine by my fictional TV family, and in a way I missed Marcia, with whom I had such a love-hate relationship. She’d given me an identity. Without her, I had to figure out who I was — a next-to-impossible task for someone doing everything she could to avoid the truth about herself. I sought refuge in seemingly glamorous cocaine dens above Hollywood. I thought I would find answers there, while in reality I was simply running farther from myself.

“From there,” she adds, “I spiraled downward on a path of self-destruction that cost me my career and very nearly my life. Over the years I battled drug addiction and bulimia. I was treated in a psych ward, went in and out of rehab and looked to God for answers.”

Turning Things Around… Eventually

Maureen met actor Michael Cummings and, on March 16, 1985, they were married. Four years later they welcomed into the world their daughter, Natalie Michelle. Things should have been getting better, but as Maureen noted in that introduction, “I never felt as if the light shined on me, not even on the sunniest of days. I came out of it slowly and in stages. First, I had to acknowledge and then get help for a longtime struggle with depression. Then I had to come to terms with my mother. And finally I needed to face myself. Once I stopped telling lies and trying to pretend that life was perfect, I was able to move on.”

Country Music

Between all of that, she decided to pursue one of her dreams and recorded the country album When You Get Lonely in 1995. Unfortunately it was greeted by negative reviews, though Maureen did get some positive notices for her voice. “I kind of felt like it wasn’t done the right way,” she related to Entertainment Weekly in regards to the album’s commercial failure. “There are certain rules in Nashville, and my album didn’t really follow them. We came in from L.A. We had incredible musicians on the album, but I just would’ve liked it to have been more organic. It’s always been a dream of mine to write a song and have it played on the radio. How cool would that be?”

Interestingly, but not surprisingly considering the success of The Brady Kids in Concert, Maureen had been offered a recording contract back at the time the original series ended, but she turned it down, feeling she needed a normal life. “I’ve always regretted that,” she said. “I think it would’ve been interesting to see where it would’ve gone. Could’ve, would’ve…”

Fighting Her Demons

But the album almost didn’t matter. Finally, Maureen was ready to confront and deal with her addictions, ultimately managing to beat them and get her life back on track. While she was able to get acting roles here and there, she got the most attention for those Brady reunions, which in a sense could be seen as something of a lifeline. More than that, it was probably reality TV that saved her life. In 2007 she appeared on VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club, eventually winning the onscreen contest based on her weight loss on it. It was that experience that really turned things around for her, allowing her to very publicly discuss her past issues with drugs and the mental health problems that plagued her most of her life.

“When I turned 50,” she told WGN-TV. “I did [that] show in which I had to do it, because I was fat. I had gained a lot of weight and I had to get on a scale in front of America. And I realized that it was really wonderful to show the world me; imperfect me with all of my mistakes and all of my faults. And I started writing [my biography] and just couldn’t stop.”

In her book’s introduction she elaborated, “As trivial as it sounds, I didn’t feel like I quit pretending until I made a decision about whether or not to do Celebrity Fit Club. But that’s what happened. Michael, Natalie and I were at the kitchen table talking about the offer. All of a sudden I had a feeling in my gut. Call it being 50 and fatigued. Or being 50 and courageous. Or being 50 and not caring anymore what people thought about me. But for the first time in my life I said, ‘You know? I’m overweight. I’m really imperfect. I’ve had all this s–t happen to me. I’m not going to hide it anymore.’ ‘You’re going to do it, then?’ both of them asked. ‘Yup,’ I said. ‘Screw it.’”

More Reality In Her Life

The following year she joined the CMT reality series Gone Country, where she was in competition for a recording contract, attempting to pick up where she left off in 1995. While she didn’t win there, she did end up in the reality series Outsiders Inn, opening a bed and breakfast located in Newport, Tennessee. Fast-forward to 2015 and she began appearing on an Australian version of I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and she actually remained on the show for 42 days and was apparently one of the last people to be evicted. (That’s understandable: Who really wants to evict Marcia Brady?)

‘Dancing With the Stars’

In 2016, Maureen was announced as part of Season 23 of ABC’s Dancing With the Stars. There she was paired up with pro dancer Artem Chigvintsev, making it until week seven before they were eliminated. Their placement was fifth.

During her time on the show, there were moments she was caught on camera crying. It was something she was asked about by Entertainment Weekly, to which she replied, “I’m emotional about everything. I feel a lot and I love it. To come into this competition and feel like I was the worst dancer in the world. I had this other head above me when I danced with friends. I would have to stop. I thought I looked ugly. I look uncoordinated. I didn’t know what I’m doing. It was a huge thing for me. I’ve not been able to dance in public and enjoy it, so it was one of my biggest fears. I’m a woman. I’m insecure. I don’t mind those things. They make me human. It’s who I am.”

Life Comes Full Circle

And now life has essentially brought Maureen back to where, for all intents and purposes, it all began: with her fictional Brady Bunch siblings and being part of A Very Brady Renovation, the reality series in which HGTV has taken the house that served as the exterior of the Brady home on the TV series, and renovated the interior to look exactly as it did on the original series, which were actually sets on the Paramount Pictures lot.

“People have asked why the original show is still so loved,” she commented at TCA, “and why is it still playing in syndication, and why has it survived for so long? I truly believe it was one of those shows where everybody came together. It was an amazing experience. For me, it was fun going to work every day and being with these people. It was kind of just a magical thing that happened. And this whole experience has been one of the most magical ever since that’s where it all feels so good.”

Welcome home, Maureen.