In my young eyes, Marcia was beautiful, sexy, smart — even if her character possessed a fragile ego.
I must admit that I also felt something of an attraction for other women on TV in the early 1970s as well — like Laurie Partridge (Susan Dey) of the "Partridge Family," Hot Lips Houlihan (Loretta Swit) of "M*A*S*H" and Gloria Stivic (Sally Struthers) of "All in the Family" — but they were all much older than I was — or at least they seemed to be.Marcia Brady seemed attainable because she reminded me in many ways of the young girls I knew in my world — the ones who plastered pictures of the male pop idols of the day (like Donny Osmond and Bobby Sherman) onto their school notebooks and drew small circles as the dots on their "I's."
Then as now, girls in that age group were also the first ones to embrace a new fashion.
My father was a college professor, and I often spent time on the campus where he worked, but my first exposure to emerging female fashion trends tended to be not on that college campus but in my middle school and my junior high school.
It was there that I saw the young girls of my generation wearing mini-skirts and hip-hugging jeans, forever defining "sexy" in my mind. Those were the kinds of clothes Marcia and her girlfriends wore.
That was about as far as things went for me in those days.
But, in real life, Marcia apparently did a lot more than play "Spin the Bottle."
Recently, McCormick published her tell-all behind-the-scenes account of things with the "Brady Bunch."
In the book, "Here's the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice," McCormick confesses an addiction to cocaine that led her to trade sex for drugs. She also admits to having had two abortions and battling depression through most of her adult life.
Now 52, McCormick is no longer the enticing adolescent girl I remember — although one can certainly see remnants of her in current pictures of McCormick — the eyes are the same, the smile is the same.
Even so, I find it astonishing that, more than 30 years after the "Brady Bunch" went off the air, revelations about the cast members are still capable of drawing the kind of attention that McCormick's book did.
Really, how many other middle-aged former American TV stars would merit foreign media attention for books about their exploits in their younger days?
