'Brady Bunch' Bully! Late Sitcom Dad Robert Reed Was Drunk & Mean On Set
Dec. 7 2019, Published 8:53 p.m. ET
The late actor Robert Reed was a drunken diva on the set of the iconic sitcom The Brady Bunch, a new book claims.
The tell-all called The Way We All Became the Brady Bunch: How the Canceled Sitcom Became the Beloved Pop Culture Icon We Are Still Talking About Today, by author Kimberly Potts, has exposed Reed's alleged reign of TV terror, as The New York Post has reported.
Author Potts has written that the 1969-74 classic show's "dad" Reed, who played Mike Brady, was often drunk when the hit television show was filmed and shocked onlookers with outbursts on set.
The book contends that the actor would spend lunch breaks drinking and would come back inebriated which meant creator Sherwood Schwartz would have to cancel filming for the day.
The stars who played the Brady kids would usually be finished with their scenes so they didn't see Reed's bad behavior, Potts claims.
Reed was also difficult on set and would often demand that his lines be rewritten if he didn't like them.
The actor saw himself doing Shakespeare and only took the role which made him a household name for money, according to Potts.
The actor kept his private life a secret when he was alive, but died HIV-positive at age 59 in 1992.
His co-star Florence Henderson, who played his wife Carol Brady, recalled in 2016 before her own death that she and the rest of the bunch strained for years to keep co-star Reed's homosexuality a secret.
When Henderson and Reed rehearsed a kiss for the Brady Bunch pilot episode, "I saw Bob get very antsy and protective of himself," she told the Miami Herald.
"All of a sudden, I realized, 'My God, Bob's gay!'"
In one episode, Potts says, Henderson's character Carol and the family's housekeeper, Alice (played by Ann B. Davis), have a competition to see who can make the tastiest strawberry jam.
In the script, Reed's character Mike was supposed to come home and say that the house smelled like "strawberry heaven."
But the actor "fact-checked" every script and discovered that strawberries don't actually emit any odor as they're being cooked.
Reed refused to recite the line, which bugged Brady Bunch producer Schwartz.
Eventually, Schwartz told the star he could change the line to it "looks like strawberry heaven in here," and Reed complied.
But that wasn't the only problem with the feisty actor.
Reed didn't like the quality of an ink that stained Alice's uniform and wrote a furious memo about it to the Brady Bunch bigwigs.
Reed allegedly wrote in the memo that the ink scene was so "unfunny that even a laugh machine would balk" at it.
The Brady Bunch marked its 50th anniversary in September and although both parents have passed away, the "kids" such as Maureen McCormick and Susan Olsen have kept its popularity going, recently appearing on an HGTV show covering the original TV house's renovation.
Olsen said of her TV dad Reed that "being gay killed him. Because it was so taboo, he could never make peace with himself. He never allowed himself to have a genuine love. He was forever taunted by his own disdain for the natural inclinations that he was BORN WITH. Bob was a family man. Had he been allowed to form a relationship with another man, he would have been the best husband ever and might still be alive."
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Despite Potts' awful new revelations about Reed, she also confirmed the child stars loved him: "He took his responsibility as the TV dad seriously. He famously took the kids on a trip to England because he wanted to expose them to culture and Shakespeare. He also famously gave them Super 8 cameras for Christmas. He wanted to help them the same as a father would."
