“Just pull up on the reins. It will be okay.” When they took me down from that mule at the end of the scene, my saddle was not dry!
The grand prize for near-death Brady Bunch experiences goes to the Hawaii trip. One of the writers came up with the idea of how nice it would be for all of us to be in an outrigger canoe. So there we were on the water, all nine of us, and told to wait to catch the next big wave. The boat with the director, the cameraman, and the other necessary members of the crew was a few yards away. We caught the wave, and everything was going great for about ten seconds until I saw that the man on the rudder of the crew boat had lost control of it. The boat was coming right toward us and our rudder man swamped us. Next thing I know, I’m upside down in the water underneath our capsized canoe. I’m hardly what you would call a fish, but I knew that Susan had good reason to pass on the swimming pool when she came over to our house. So my first thought was to hold on to her for dear life. Barry Williams was a strong swimmer, so at least that was a comforting thought in the moment. They righted the boat, and we all climbed back into it. The director said, “Let’s do that again!” Poor Susan was a wreck. And if things were not scary enough, my false eyelashes had come off—how rude! We were all shivering, and probably not just due to being cold. But we did it again. The people on shore were all shook up, and understandably, the parents of the kids were a wreck. Of course, we had not been given life jackets to wear. It could have been a major disaster.
Another surprise that I wasn’t quite prepared for was how seriously people took the show. Once they let you into their living rooms via that cathode-ray tube, you become part of their extended family. Accordingly, they had opinions on everything and were only too glad to share. People wrote in about how much they loved my hair or detested it. Part of that was due to the fact that I had to wear a big wig for the first season, the “bubble-do” I called it. My hair had been bleached more blonde to make me look closer to Norwegian for The Song of Norway, and it was clearly not right for the show. They had filmed the first six episodes without me, so I rushed back to do all the scenes to be inserted with no time to restore my hair color back to normal. That the hair attracted almost a cultlike interest amuses me to no end. Some tuned in for each season premiere with great anticipation just to see the new style for the year. And no one was indifferent about that poor, much-maligned mullet in the 1973–1974 season. It is quite a dubious honor to be known in some circles as “the Mother of the Mullet.”
Paramount conducted research to gauge public attitude beyond the hair when the show first came on the air. Some people resented that Carol Brady had a maid. “No wonder she looks so well!” Others thought the house looked too clean and loved any episode in which I got dirty. A sampling of some Avon ladies at the Plaza Hotel in New York objected to the glamorous way I appeared in the series. “Our kids expect us to look like you.” Okay, I grant you that the real Florence Henderson has never worn makeup, eyelashes, or lipstick to bed. I did always insist that Carol Brady would be in a beautiful nightgown when Bob and I had scenes in bed, even though that was far from my practice in real life. But it was part of the fantasy, and important to the special warmth and sexual chemistry that Bob and I wanted to project.
A sociologist or a psychologist would have a much better explanation for why The Brady Bunch hit a collective nerve and has endured as a global phenomenon for so long. In my opinion, it began with Sherwood Schwartz’s ingenious design that worked on so many levels. You know when an idea is truly good because things seem to snowball.
At its heart was the notion of the blended family, a father with three sons and a mother with three daughters coming together to form a new family. Blended families were hardly a new concept, but it probably took on a new significance given what people had gone through in the 1960s in breaking from longstanding traditional mores. (Remember the pill?) Divorce rates were up, and so blended families naturally became an increasingly commonplace occurrence. My widowed cousin had seven children. She married a man who had ten. They became the “Happy Hanawalts”—an homage to the Brady Bunch. I receive endless stories like that.
Sherwood also had the foresight to keep the show and its subject matter simple and quite universal to the shared experience of children and parents. Entering the Brady world for a half hour each week was designed to provide a gentle refuge. There were plenty of big problems in the real world to go around. Instead, we were a loving family who always tried to find a way to work through its challenges. Mike and Carol Brady were parents who seemed to understand their children and guide them without demeaning them or talking down to them to make them feel worthless. Perhaps the most controversial topic the show took up was Greg getting caught smoking cigarettes at a time when
