Why ‘Marcia Brady’ traded drugs for sex

“She was America's most wholesome girl,” said Philippe Naughton in the Times Online, “so who would ever have thought that Marcia Brady would end up as a cocaine addict, partying at Sammy Davis Junior's house and trading drugs for sex?” In her new book, Here's the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice, former Brady Bunch star Maureen McCormick says that’s exactly what happened.

Ah, the joys of being a child star, said Stuart Heritage in Heckler Spray. You get to develop the “sort of low self-esteem Pavlovian conditioning” that equates “attention with love,” then “spiral off into the dark realms of joyless sex and drug addiction” by your early teens. Then when you career dries up, you get to write a book about it.

In a way, said TheImproper.com, “it’s good to hear” that McCormick “also suffered from the ‘unreal perfection’ of Marcia Brady. She inflicted that same sense of unreality on a generation of her peers, who were trying to cope with massive changes in a society that was also wrenched, at the time, by the Vietnam War.”

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At least this story has a happy ending, said David K. Li in the New York Post online. “After several stints in rehab and interventions by loved ones, McCormick is now not-so-ironically living an idyllic suburban life in Westlake Village, Calif., that bears an uncanny resemblance to her pretend ‘Brady’ life.”