Here's the Story LP: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice (20 page)

Get to the Heart

W
ork was always the best tonic, but not much came my way. Other than playing myself on the sitcom
Herman’s Head
and a similar cameo in the movie
Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star,
which had me uttering the line, “If one more person calls me Marcia, I’ll bust his f-ing head,” my career was at a standstill. It was hard to take. It made me even more insecure. I remember getting mad at Michael for using a big word in a conversation. I thought it was condescending.

That summer I took singing lessons from Florence Riggs, the wife of celebrated vocal coach Seth Riggs. I liked to sing, and it was a way to stay busy. Michael, though he was forging a new career in sales, continued to hone his acting skills. He encouraged me to do the same.

One day, as I waited for my lesson, the door to the studio opened and the student before me came out. It was Rosie O’Donnell. She saw me and stopped.

“Oh my God!” she squealed. “Marcia!”

I turned red. I was a huge fan of hers. Funny, I didn’t even mind that she called me Marcia. After all, she was Rosie.

“Hi.”

“I can’t believe I’m meeting you,” Rosie said. “I’m the biggest fan.
Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!
”

She pantomimed me as Marcia getting hit in the nose by a football. Ow. Then she sang snippets of one song after another from the old
Brady
albums.

“I know ’em all,” she beamed. “I could be a long-lost Brady.”

I laughed. I felt an immediate kinship to Rosie. She was so present, so right there in the room, and so friendly. In a few minutes of conversation, she revealed that she knew more about
The Brady Bunch
than I did. Her memory about the episodes and trivia went beyond encyclopedic. She was a riot.

She was preparing to star in the musical
Grease
on Broadway. What I subsequently found out about Rosie is that she’s one of those people who pours herself into a project, but once she does it that first time, it’s pretty much over and she’s ready to move on to the next thing. She’s not someone who wants to stay in a play for months and months. One day, after she’d been in the play for a while, she called me from New York and asked if I wanted to fly there and audition for the part of Rizzo.

But Rizzo was her role. I was confused. I thought she was under contract. It turned out she was, but Rosie explained that she also wanted to get out of her obligation. When she’d mentioned this to the producers, they’d asked who could replace her and she’d brought up my name.

So I flew to New York, sang the songs, did a monologue, and got the job. It was one of those coincidences that made me wonder if there are accidents in life or if it’s all about fate. Why had I been taking singing lessons? What were the chances of me meeting Rosie? Maybe Rosie’s an angel; she’s certainly a generous woman.

In any event, I hadn’t worked seriously in years, and boy, as Rosie warned, and then as I found out, starring in a musical was serious work. It was the fall, and I had barely two weeks to relocate to New York, learn the songs and dances, and get myself into the kind of condition needed to perform eight shows a week. It was a huge undertaking and an equally large upheaval in our personal lives. The production didn’t give me the support I felt I needed to learn my role. I felt on my own, insecure, and lost.

I thought I was going to have to tell the producers at the last minute that I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t getting it, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself. One night, before one of Rosie’s last performances, which I’d watched every night, I went into her dressing room and wailed.

“I can’t do this,” I said. “I’m going to leave tomorrow. It’s not working.”

“What’s the problem?” she asked.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I haven’t had a director the whole time I’ve been here.”

She stood up.

“What? Do you think I ever had a director?” she exclaimed.

“But—”

“No buts,” she said.

“But this is Broadway.”

“And that’s exactly why you aren’t quitting, why you’re going to do it, and why you’ll do great.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Do you think?”

“I know.”

Sometimes all you need is someone believing in you, and things work out. This was one of those times. I made my way tentatively through opening night. I spent more time looking at the other actors than I did at the audience. I wasn’t quite sure what came next. I just wanted to get through the first show—that was my only goal. Afterward, I felt like I got rid of a hundred pounds of anxiety. Michael and Natalie sent me flowers and called. About halfway through the week, I began to feel like I knew what I was supposed to do, and by week’s end, I performed with confidence.

The only part I didn’t like was being separated from Michael and especially Natalie. It was the first time I had been away from my daughter, and it was hard. I had moments throughout the day when I wanted to see her, pick her up, or just hear her run into the room and say, “Mommy!” Phone calls were a poor substitute. I always felt like something was missing.

My parents came to see me and that was probably the most special part of the six weeks I spent in the show. They never traveled and never spent any money on themselves. My poor mother arrived with a terrible cold and spent the first few days in bed. She was so frightened by the big city that I think she worked herself into a nervous state that wiped her out before she even arrived. But they pulled themselves together and let me take them to all the sites, including St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Rockefeller Center.

Michael and Natalie arrived the following week. Aside from having them there, the highlight for me was how cute my daughter looked in her coat and hat. I felt like I had my little dress-up doll back. We also saw
Beauty and the Beast,
walked through Central Park, shopped at FAO Schwarz, and enjoyed eye-popping chocolate concoctions at Serendipity. Natalie, though initially frightened by the crowds and commotion, fell in love with New York. She didn’t want to go home. Nor did I want her to.

A
t the end of my six-week run, I was nervous about returning home. I looked forward to being with Michael and Natalie, but I didn’t have work lined up. After nearly two months of nonstop activity on the play, I feared my empty calendar. Like many actors, downtime scared me. It was when I thought too much about myself, always negatively. What was positive about not working? It created a dangerous void.

I told Michael that I wanted to have another child. We’d had this discussion umpteen times in the past. He always said the same thing. With the number of problems in our marriage, he didn’t think we could handle another child. Nor did he think it would be fair to the child—or to Natalie. I didn’t look at the situation that way. I was only concerned with what I needed, wanted, and what I thought would make me feel whole. That was at least one more child and maybe two.

Hearing him tell me no angered me. In January 1995, I forbade his parents from visiting us. We fought off and on through February. I couldn’t get a grip. Unable or unwilling to confront my own issues, I punished him. After he came back from a business trip late that winter, I barely spoke to him. I also hid a letter from his parents, telling him it hadn’t come. He found it in my purse.

A year later, I was still unhappy, still stuck in a bleak place, and I continued to take it out on Michael. I didn’t have a good reason. In order to support our family, he set aside his acting career and got a job in corporate sales, working his way up the ladder. By the mid-nineties he was among the company’s top national salespeople and earning a good living. Nonetheless, in August 1996, I still picked at him, this time criticizing him for being too conservative.

“I like to get tipsy, swear, and have fun,” I said. “And you don’t.”

“That’s because someone has to be sober and pay the bills and make sure things get taken care of,” he said.

I
wasn’t working at this time, and it grated on me in numerous ways. As it turned out, that idle time gave me the opportunity to meet and get to know some of the other mothers in the neighborhood, women who had children Natalie’s age. One worked part-time, another was a housewife, one was a doctor, and another was a teacher. They made me feel like I had friends for the long haul. They weren’t part of the business. They were part of my life.

One of the revelations I had later on was how similar all of us were. Every once in a while, one of the women would let something slip about an issue at home. I was the same. I might say something about Michael or Natalie. Rarely if ever did I mention my own anger, frustration, or depression. That was still forbidden territory. But sometimes I wonder how much misery I could have avoided if I had been able to open up, if I had been able to ask for help.

That would come.

L
ate that fall I was cast in an episode of
Touched by an Angel,
the hit CBS series starring Roma Downey, Della Reese, and John Dye. I flew to Utah, where the show was filmed. It was an episode of clips from past shows tied together by a story line in which Monica (Roma) is in the doghouse and has to earn her angel privileges back. In the process, she encounters my character, Jodi, a troubled woman (talk about typecasting) who’s comforted by stories of the angel’s past deeds.

If only that had happened in real life. I was a bundle of nerves and anxiety on that job. It was one of the hardest of my career as a result of a discussion I’d had a few weeks earlier with my new manager, Mark Teitlebaum. The two of us had spent the day going to meetings. In the course of driving across town, we’d talked about many things as we got to know each other, and he’d sensed more about me than I was willing to admit. At one point, he made a carefully worded suggestion that I get help.

That got the pot simmering. By the time I arrived in Utah, I was convinced that everyone could tell I was screwed up. I thought my face was like a billboard that said
DRUG ABUSE, SYPHILIS, AND FAKE!
My first morning, I had a panic attack. I’d never had one before. I got to the set, went through makeup, and then sat in my dressing room, thinking I hope they don’t call me. I’m the worst actress in the world. I’m going to blow it.

The confidence I always had on a set was gone. So was the joy I’d felt since childhood about working. I felt like whatever talent had gotten me to this point in my career was gone. I phoned Michael. He heard me trying to catch my breath and asked what was wrong.

“They’re going to find out I’m no good,” I cried.

Then came the knock on the door. I don’t know how I got through those scenes. The whole time I was convinced that everyone on the set knew I was a former drug addict. Even as I performed my lines, I heard the alarmed voice in my head saying, “They can see. They know who you really are.”

If only I’d had the courage to simply say to myself, “So? So what if they know?” In reality, they probably did know—and didn’t care. I don’t know of an industry as forgiving as show business. By and large, the work is based on exploring the frailties of being human.

No, the fear I had of being found out was due entirely to me. At forty years old, a milestone I’d accepted with a shrug, I was at a place in my life where, like it or not, I began to acknowledge (I’m not going so far as to say confront) the things in my past that I’d spent my life trying to forget. It wasn’t a conscious, purposeful effort. It was a process. Issues were bubbling up. I was like a kid peeking out of the covers in the dark to see if monsters were in the room. Eventually I’d see if they were real or imaginary.

A
fter
Touched,
my manager realized I had never done a TV movie of the week. He arranged meetings at all the networks. Soon after, I met with Jerry London about a TV biopicture he was directing about country-music superstar Barbara Mandrell. I also met with the movie’s writer, Linda Bergman. Based on Mandrell’s autobiography,
Get to the Heart
, which opens up with her taking the stage again two years after her miraculous recovery from a 1984 car crash, and then flashed back to her youth as a multi-instrument-playing prodigy determined to rise up the ladder of country-music stardom, first with her sisters and then on her own.

It was the best script of my career. I identified with many aspects in Barbara’s life: the way she started out as a child performer and how she enjoyed being the center of attention. She had her share of emotional struggles, too. Then of course she had to find new levels of strength and determination in order to come back from the car accident that resulted in multiple fractures as well as memory loss and speech problems.

Michael and I went with the director, writer, and producer to meet Barbara in Las Vegas, where she was performing. We met before the show and visited backstage afterward. Later, I spent much more time with her there and on the set, observing and talking. Her talent aside, I was fascinated by the number of people in her world and the way she was always at the center of it.

On a more personal level, I was inspired by the strength she’d summoned at every phase of her life, whether she was a child pursuing a dream or a young woman doing the same, and especially by the way she rebounded from the accident. She told me about its devastating affect on her and her family, yet how, ultimately, after much prayer, reprioritizing, and hard work, it brought all of them closer together.

One time Barbara and I were talking on the phone. I’m someone who says “oh my God” more frequently than I probably should (hey, even grown up, I’m still a Valley girl), and I blurted the words out in response to a story she told. Barbara said, “Maureen, do you have to use the word
God
so much?” I cringed and then said, “Oh my God. I’m so sorry.”

Barbara didn’t like being on the set, but she made sure her concerns were known. She offered suggestions. I don’t remember specific criticism from her, but I was insecure about my acting. Although not as bad as on
Touched,
I still needed time by myself at the start of every day as I transformed myself from a scared doe into a country-music superstar.