What is very true is that Barry did have a serious crush on me, which I understood and helped him get past. Let us just say that if he had entertained a roll in the hay with me, I would never have done that.
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Undeniably we had a very special connection—and it goes without saying that I always felt like a surrogate mother to him and the rest of the kids. On a deeper level, I represented something to him that he admired. He loved music and knew that I could sing. He also liked my work ethic, and adopted it then as he still does today. He has remained a dear friend. I saw him together with his son Brandon not long ago. Brandon was about the same age as when I first met Barry, and the striking resemblance to the younger version of his father was almost miraculous.
The camaraderie with Barry and everyone in the production translated in no small measure to the good feeling that people at home felt watching the show. We brought the spirit of family not just to the characters we played but also to how we related to each other in real life. Working together the kind of hours we did, you can’t help it. My children would often come to the set, and they developed friendships of their own with their fictional counterparts. Barbara and Joe even acted in a couple of episodes. I got to know everything going on in the personal lives of crew members and their families and vice versa because we were so open with each other. The crew members loved it if you showed interest and respect about their crafts. Jimmy Fields, the head grip (electrician), taught me a lot about lighting. “Why are you using a 10K banger there?” I’d ask him. He made me an honorary member of the lighting guild. John Rich wanted to teach me how to direct because he thought I worked so well helping the kids. I told him that the technology was my Achilles’ heel, and I would never know enough about the camera to be good at it. “I’ll teach you,” he implored. I never took him up on it, and I sometimes feel regret about that.
Laughter and having fun while working was also important to setting the tone. For that purpose I was always doing something crazy. In one of the shows, the famous NFL quarterback Joe Namath guest starred as himself. The plotline was that Bobby lied to his friends, telling them that the football star was coming over for dinner at his house when playing an exhibition game in town. The touching climax of the show is the scene when Joe actually comes to our house. The family goes out to say goodbye to him as he walks down our fake driveway to his car. I whispered to the director, “Keep the camera rolling.” When Joe said his farewells and got to me last, I jumped up on him, wrapping my legs around his waist. “Take me away from this family!” I cried. The crew fell down, and it became a favorite on the blooper reel.
If there happened to be a new director working, this fun atmosphere was a little harder for that person to take, since most were probably a little nervous and on edge working on the show for the first time. Jackie Coogan was a guest on one show in which our characters had a car accident and he blamed me. Doing that scene, some gaffe happened and Jackie and I broke up. We got hysterical and could not stop laughing. The director got really annoyed at us. I took him aside. “Excuse me, but when you work this hard, every once in a while it’s good to laugh. So please don’t talk like that, especially in front of our guest star.” But that wasn’t the end of the problem. In a courtroom scene in the same episode, Robert Emhardt was playing the judge. He was a great actor. We did the master shot, and then had to do close-ups on everybody, including Jackie, the kids, and me. By the time they got to Robert’s close-up, he had done it so many times he couldn’t remember the line. The director started yelling at Robert, and the more he yelled the more stressed Robert became. I ran to the phone and called Sherwood. “You have to come down here because it’s not right what this director is doing.” Much later, I ran into this same director, and he apologized for his behavior, which was big of him. He said it happened during a stressful period of his life. But you can’t bring that to work. Be kind, because everybody is struggling with something.
If there was a source of recurring tension on the set, it usually concerned Bob. As mentioned, he wanted The Brady Bunch to be Shakespeare. It was the catalyst for terrible fights with Sherwood. We had one show in which there was a role reversal. Mike tells Carol that he thinks she has an easier time of it. She responds, “Well, you take over my job, and I’ll take over yours.” So the script called for me to teach the boys baseball, and Bob would be in the kitchen baking something. The idea was that he loads up stuff from the refrigerator and manages to drop the eggs. Then he slips and takes a pratfall.
“This is so stupid,” Bob complained. “Nobody would ever do that.”
“Why don’t you try it?” I coaxed him. “I think it’s funny. I wish I were doing it.” I loved doing physical comedy.
He backed down and tried it, loading his arms up, dropping the eggs, and seeing everything go flying.
“I was wrong,” he said, laughing, as he got up.
Another time, Ann B. and I were supposed to be making jam. We had all these pots on the stove, but all we were
