Reminiscing about an idealized TV mom
Carol Brady embodied blandness, conformity and Teflon cheeriness that felt like a warm embrace
“Carol Brady is dead? Surely this is some kind of sad, sick joke.”
“Nope, she’s dead,” my friend Steve says. “From a heart attack.”
“A heart attack? The woman was only 82 years old, for crying out loud.”
Granted, I would have said the same thing if she was 92. Or 102.
Florence Henderson, for people of a certain age, is like the rock face carvings on Mount Rushmore, a perennial TV presence who — no matter how old — remains frozen in time as the perky, flippy-haired mother of six on The Brady Bunch, a show that never did well in ratings but insinuated its way into the hearts of a generation.
“You shouldn’t put down a loser, Cindy,” she told her youngest TV daughter in one memorable episode. “Because you might be one yourself someday. Just remember that.” (As it turns out Susan Olsen, who played Cindy, was fired from a Los Angeles radio show last week after an alleged homophobic rant.)
I loved Carol’s casual wisdom, her sunny enthusiasm, the way she remained politely unflustered no matter how much Greg, Marcia, Peter, Jan, Bobby and Cindy provoked her.
“I had four children,” Henderson told NPR in 2014. “And my youngest when we started was 2 or a little less.
“And sometimes my kids would say to me, you know, ‘How come you don’t scream at those kids on television like you do at us?’ ”
Because she wasn’t real. That was the whole point. The show was an idealized fantasy about the perfect American family — if it were remade now, its glossy family matriarch would be cast as an animatronic robot.
Yet somehow, despite this, she became a cultural icon for kids in the ’70s.
It shocks me how I casually thumbed my nose at the recent passings of David Bowie and Prince, whose followers wailed for months on social media, proclaimed them modern-day Mozarts and publicly shamed anyone who didn’t equate “When Doves Cry” with Beethoven’s “5th.”
But when it came to this unthreateningly generic TV mom who embodied blandness, conformity and a Teflon cheeriness that felt like a warm embrace, I found myself bawling like a baby.
The sad truth is that unless you grew up in the age of shag carpets and hockey hair, Florence Henderson is just another vaguely familiar name from the past whose life warranted a few terse paragraphs inside the newspaper.
Determined to change this trajectory and honour Henderson’s memory, I dig out The Brady Bunch Season 1 DVD from a dusty bookshelf and gather Max, 8, and Sam, 6, in the living room.
At first I figure they’ll be bored. The series ran from 1969-’74, after all.
Even my wife, a decade younger and still nursing a crush on Scott Baio from Charles in Charge, regards the Brady Bunch’s wholesome beacons of familial bliss like a hieroglyphic on a cave wall.
Which is why I’m shocked when they all congregate in front of the TV just as I did with my own siblings four decades ago, mesmerized by Cindy’s snitching, Marcia’s nose and fractious debates over trading stamps, Bobby’s kazoo and genderspecific clubhouses.
“They seem just like a real family,” notes Max, who recently adopted Peter’s habit of saying “pork chops and applesauce” in a Humphrey Bogart accent. “Except the parents don’t yell.”
“Our mom is better,” confides Sam discreetly. “But their mom is very nice and always in a good mood.” He scrunches his eyebrows. “What happened to her?”
I hesitate for a moment, swallow hard and shrug my shoulders.
Some illusions are best left unbroken. Joel Rubinoff writes for the Waterloo Region Record. Email him at jrubinoff@therecord.com.