Eve Plumb sat on a sofa in a Hollywood studio bungalow in 1969, a 10-year-old child actress listening quietly as two men decided her fate.
“Well, she looks like our girl,” one said to the other, Plumb recalls in the opening pages of her new memoir.
And that was pretty much that.
The two men were Sherwood Schwartz, creator of “The Brady Bunch,” and TV director John Rich. They’d talked with her for 10 minutes. But she’d not read a single line of a script for them nor done a chemistry test with any of the five other child actors cast as the Brady kids.
But Plumb looked like Florence Henderson, who’d been cast as Carol Brady, a single mother, bringing up three girls of her own, and that was all it took.
After four years in Hollywood, making TV commercials for Mattel dolls and Glad sandwich bags, and playing guest roles in shows such as “The Virginian,” “Lassie,” and “Mannix,” Plumb had landed her first TV series, and a name, Jan Brady, that excited fans still accidentally call her to this day.
“Well, you just don’t know if this is going to be a thing or not,” Plumb says of her initial response to the news she’d been cast in “The Brady Bunch.” “It’s fun for now, but it’s all very tenuous.
“It was interesting to be working with so many child actors because I had never done that before except for ‘Family Affair,’” she continues in a recent phone call. “I was always the little girl in peril.”
Her character died on her episode of “Family Affair.” And she was literally the little girl who fell down a well on “The Big Valley.”
“So usually, I was the only kid on the set,” Plumb says. [“The Brady Bunch”] is shiny and new and fun and different, and you hope it goes.”
“Happiness Included: Jan Brady and Beyond” arrives in bookstores on Tuesday, April 28. In it, she writes about “The Brady Bunch,” but also about her life before and after the series, which ran for five seasons from 1969 to 1974 and forever after in syndicated reruns.
It is not a Hollywood tell-all filled with tawdry tales of child actors gone wild. For Plumb, the worst trouble she got into was as a teenage getaway driver for two friends who decided to go shoplifting at a mall near Plumb’s childhood home in the San Fernando Valley.
In a way, “Happiness Included” is the kind of straightforward memoir you’d expect of a veteran of the family-friendly “The Brady Bunch” series. It feels good, in a way, to know that after six decades in Hollywood, Plumb’s hardships amount to little more than a failed first marriage and the career struggles that any actor knows.
“I don’t remember if we had the pilot and then got a pickup and went back and shot,” Plumb says of the birth of “The Brady Bunch” from her home in New York City, to which she moved after many years in Laguna Beach, and before that Los Angeles. “I would think that with them having built that huge set we must have had an order for some episodes. But it’s always a crap shoot.
“It feels great to be there and working,” she continues of those early weeks on set. “And having a place to go. That was what was great about growing up as a child who worked.”
Here’s a story
Plumb, now 67, says she decided to write a memoir after growing tired of other people’s requests for her memories.
“People had been asking me for years for stories to write in their book,” she says. “And I didn’t ever want to do that. So I finally decided, Well, I’ll write my own book. Because if I was going to tell stories, it was going to be in my book.
“I didn’t want, ‘Tell us all your memories about ‘The Brady Bunch.’ I can write a book and make money, although that remains to be seen, whether or not you’re going to make money writing a book.”
She worked with coauthor Marcia Wilkie, and yes, she’s aware of the humor in the fact that her writing partner shares the same first name as Marcia Brady, her occasional nemesis of an older sister.
“Yes, I know,” she says of Wilkie’s first name. “She’s had a hard go of it as well.”
She chose to work with a co-writer because she figured she’d never written a book before and wanted to make sure the memoir was successful.
“It was a very pleasant process where she would ask me questions, and I would tell her things,” Plumb says. “It was almost a very gentle therapy without any pressure to make any sort of progress. [She laughs]
The process of remembering often led her to her earliest days in Hollywood, making commercials and TV shows starting when she was 6 years old.
“I really wanted to talk about that because it was so much fun and so precious and different,” Plumb says. “Not that I didn’t want to talk about anything else, but that was the main part for me, and probably the most vulnerable part.
“All of this I find for me is very vulnerable,” she says. “Because I don’t usually talk about myself or write about myself unless I’m giving interviews on a project.
“But this time, the project’s me and that could be difficult. You know, touchy-feely.”
White gloves, Mary Janes
Her parents, Neely and Flora Plumb, both had creative backgrounds. Her mother had been a dancer before marrying and starting a family. Her father was a big band saxophonist who segued into record production, often working on movie soundtracks, including “The Sound of Music,” “True Grit,” and “Taxi Driver.”
In her memoir and in conversation, Plumb praises her parents for how they handled her early acting work. Her father kept meticulous ledgers of every dollar she earned. Her mother shepherded her to auditions and jobs with an all-business attitude that only occasionally tipped into overprotectiveness.
“A lot of times with these memories it’s about what you were wearing,” Plumb says of the triggers that brought back stories as she worked on the book. “I can remember the flannel shirt and overalls as Pony Alice [her role in an episode of the Western TV series “Lancer”].
“It was so fun because I could just be on the Western street and sit down in the dirt if I wanted because Pony Alice didn’t care,” she says. “The rest of my life was white gloves and anklets and Mary Janes, so that was fun.”
Her mother would fret if young Eve got her clothes, costume or day-to-day, dirty. She writes that a tricycle she received as a gift as a child was only allowed to be used inside the house so as not to risk injury.
All of which sometimes made her parents’ occasional approval of some of Plumb’s more adult-oriented pursuits unexpected. In the 1970 TV movie, “The House on Greenapple Road,” Plumb played a little girl whose mother, played by Janet Leigh, disappears, leaving behind a blood-soaked kitchen for the child to discover.
They also let her audition for “The Exorcist,” which is definitely not the kind of movie you’d expect to see Jan Brady appear in. And one of her first big roles post-“Brady Bunch” was the TV movie “Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway,” in which she played a teen prostitute.
Sorta siblings and a very bawdy Brady
On the set in those first weeks of making “The Brady Bunch,” Plumb and the other children – McCormick, Susan Olsen, Barry Williams, Christopher Knight and Mike Lookinland – learned both their lines and how to read each other.
“It takes a while to check each other out and decide what your little hierarchy is going to be,” Plumb says. “And that is always shifting.
“It was all pretty much even keel, because the way that the show was written is that a lot of us worked together all the time, so it wasn’t necessarily cordoned off into groups,” she says. “We would go to school together, we would go on set together.”
As Mike and Carol Brady, Robert Reed and Florence Henderson were good role models for their fictional children, both as characters and professional actors.
“It was just very professional,” Plumb says of the faux family dynamic. “There was a great understanding that this is what we do. It was accepted that you come to the set and you know your lines, and this is how we do it.
“We just did the work and tried not to misbehave too much,” she says.
Did they misbehave?
“I mean, kids get bored and standing around and waiting for them to do the lighting,” Plumb says. “You just start poking each other and laughing and giggling and making stupid jokes. You have to be told, ‘All right, all right, straighten up now.’
“But Florence was very good at making lighthearted jokes,” she says of Henderson’s ability to gently nudge the kids back into line. “As we grew older, she was also great at telling a dirty joke. I wish I could remember them.”
Finding herself
After “The Brady Bunch” ended, Plumb continued a busy career as a young actress. A sequel to “Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runway,” a role as Beth March in a miniseries of “Little Women.”
“I’d always wanted to do period pieces,” Plumb says of “Little Women,” which, as her character died in the miniseries, brought her back as a Southern cousin when it spun off a series. “I finally got to wear hoop skirts, and let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve tried to use a modern-day bathroom stall in hoop skirts.”
As a guest star, she appeared on many of the most popular TV series of the late ’70s and early ’80s: “Wonder Woman,” “The Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” “One Day at a Time,” and “Murder, She Wrote.”
There were frequent reboots and spinoffs of the Brady universe, too: “The Brady Brides,” “A Very Brady Christmas,” “The Bradys.”
“It’s never been about picking,” Plumb says when asked how she chose projects. “I was fortunate that I kept getting job after job, but it’s never been about, ‘Oh, geez, which of these manuscripts should I peruse for my next project?’ No, you’re always scrambling and hoping for the next opportunity.”
Plumb married in 1979 at 21 and divorced two years later. She moved into an artists’ group house in Echo Park, cut her long blond Jan Brady tresses and took up painting.
Roles grew scarcer over time. Plumb started classes at the Groundlings improv theater in Hollywood, and, discovering a knack for improvisation, advanced quickly to the point that she and four other Groundling friends, including Lisa Kudrow, created an all-female sketch comedy show that made it to the pitch stage with TV mogul Aaron Spelling.
In the ’90s, she met Ken Pace, a saxophonist like her father who had a day job in tech. They married in 1995 and have been together ever since, living in Laguna Beach for many years before moving to New York City for both of their careers.
“It was very freeing to not have responsibility,” Plumb says of the years between marriages when she worked to discover who she was and wanted to be. “I had been married, and I had had a horse, and now I didn’t have responsibility to anyone but myself.
“That was great, and also a little bit boring,” she says. “That’s why I started painting. But I’m really glad I had that time. I was certainly right to have changed my life in that way.
“I’ve always been glad that I did because it really taught me resilience.”
‘Marcia, Marcia – ‘
One of the more surprising moments in “Happiness Included” comes when Plumb reveals how she feels about perhaps her single-most-recognizable line from “The Brady Bunch.”
In the third-season episode “In Her Sister’s Shadow,” Jan’s frustration with constantly being compared to Marcia boils over in the complaint “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!”
Plumb hates what it’s become, popularized by a ’90s-era “Saturday Night Live” sketch that felt like “a harsh mocking of me as a child,” she writes.
Still, ask her what fans she meets want to ask her about, and, well, you can probably guess.
“Usually they ask, ‘What are your favorite episodes?’” Plumb says. [We’d already asked her that and learned that she’s only seen each episode once, when it aired live the first time and her parents sat down with her to watch it.] ‘Do you still see each other?’
“And they usually say that phrase to me. Like they somehow couldn’t help it.”
In New York City, she has a room in her apartment that she uses as a painting studio, a pursuit she’s followed since a Laguna Beach gallery started to represent her work in the ’90s, with other galleries around the country later representing her, too.
“I’m a very tidy painter,” she says.
She and her husband Ken also oversee their home goods business, Plumb Goods, which features ’70s-inspired designs on coffee mugs, totes and duffels, and other items, and their coffee line, “Happiness Included.”
Plumb says she’d love to have another TV series and maybe a jewelry line called Jan’s Locket, a callback to an episode of “The Brady Bunch” in the first season when Jan gets a locket from a secret admirer and then thinks someone stole it from her.
And who knows? Maybe there’s another Brady project down the line.
“You know what, there always is,” she says. “There always is. It’s the thing that won’t die, and it’s endlessly surprising that it waxes and wanes.
“I don’t know,” Plumb continues. “It just keeps coming up in a new and different way. It just keeps evolving and changing and presenting new opportunities. And that’s great.
“I’m just amazed at it and glad that that’s happening. Because it continues to bring joy to people. So that’s great.”
Eve Plumb book event
When: 7 p.m.. Monday, May 11
Where: Barnes & Noble at The Grove, 189 The Grove Drive, Los Angeles
How much: $36.56 includes a copy of Plumb’s memoir, a ticket to the book signing and photo op, and ticketing fees. Go to Eventbrite.com and search for “Eve Plumb” to purchase books and tickets.
For more: For more on Eve Plumb, go to Eveplumb.tv.