Maureen McCormick said she doesn’t believe she’d have survived her addiction if not for meeting her husband, Michael Cummings. The former Brady Bunch star explained how he saved her during her appearance on Dancing with the Stars in 2016.
“I was going to crazy parties, doing crazy things,” she said. “Drugs were everywhere. I lost all control. I did things that I’m not proud of at all. When my husband and I met, I had come out of a five-year heavy cocaine addiction. My husband really, really helped save me from rock-bottom.”
She began struggling as the show came to an end, she said. Her Brady Bunch castmates said it was difficult to watch her struggle.
“There must have been a tremendous amount of pressure. And having worked a lot with child actors, for many of them, they have all this success and everything’s going great, and then the bottom falls out,” Florence Henderson said.
McCormick admits she had trouble differentiating herself from her television role in public.
“For years I think, you know, in my own personal life, I felt like I had to play Marcia Brady,” she said.
She started hanging out with the “rock ‘n roll” crowd, and they “consumed” her, Christopher Knight, who played Peter Brady said.
She started dating Cummings in the early 1980s. But after she relapsed on cocaine, he gave her an ultimatum, she told Us Weekly.
“[I] met this guy [Michael Cummings] … and I had my last relapse,” she said. “He came to me and said, ‘If you ever do this drug again, I’m gone, I’m leaving.’ It woke me up. It was like the coldest shower you could ever take, there’s just no way I’m gonna lose somebody that I love.”
They married in 1985 and have a daughter.
McCormick Has Been Very Open About Addiction
The former Brady Bunch star wrote a tell-all book Here’s the Story: Surviving Marcia Brady and Finding My True Voice in 2008. In it, she describes in great detail the lengths she would go to to get cocaine and how dearly it cost her.
She admits to trading sex for the drug. She lost out on career-changing jobs because she was too high to audition. For example, she blew her chance to be in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark because she showed up to meet director Steven Spielberg after being awake for several days.
She said she’s so open with her story because she hopes she can help others get sober.
“I recommend to anyone who’s struggling is to throw that phone book out and do not, do not hang out with anyone who’s using,” she told Us Weekly. “I had to literally say goodbye to so many people that I was hanging out with.”
