Maureen McCormick has been sober for over 40 years – and she would not have it any other way.
The former child star, who famously played Marcia Brady in the 1970s sitcom “The Brady Bunch,” said she feels “incredibly lucky” to have found sobriety after falling into drug addiction after the series ended.
“It’s not easy in the beginning at all, but it gets better every day,” the 68-year-old recently told Us Weekly.
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“I’m so happy to be sober and to be really clear and comfortable in my skin,” the actress noted.
McCormick stressed that sobriety has “been everything to me.” She shared that her husband, Michael Cummings, helped her get clean. The pair married in 1985 and share a daughter, 35-year-old Natalie.
“My husband was a big part of that for me, and my mom, dad, family, and some really close friends,” McCormick told the outlet. “It’s an amazing journey.”
“I feel very blessed to have him in my life,” she said about Cummings.
The road to sobriety was not a smooth one for McCormick. For five years, she struggled with a cocaine addiction. She opened up about her struggles in the 2008 memoir, “Here’s the Story.”
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“I had played Marcia Brady for five years. But I wasn’t her in any way, shape or form. She was perfect. I was anything but that,” McCormick wrote, as quoted by The Telegraph.
“I sought refuge in seemingly glamorous cocaine dens above Hollywood,” she admitted. “I thought I would find answers there, while in reality, I was simply running farther from myself. From there, I spiraled downward on a path of self-destruction that cost me my career and very nearly my life.”
“Over the years I battled drug addiction and bulimia,” she wrote. “I was treated in a psych ward, went in and out of rehab, and looked to God for answers… If there was coke, I had to stay up and do every last flake, even if it meant going without sleep for days. Nothing else mattered.”
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In 2018, McCormick told Us Weekly that her parents “almost turned me in to the cops.”
“They had been trying for years and knew something was going on. I was pretty sneaky, and I could hide very, very well. But then I started messing up on jobs and so many things, so I’m sure everyone in the industry at the time knew that I was flaking out.”
It was Cummings, she told the outlet, who gave her an ultimatum after her last relapse.
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“He came to me and said, ‘If you ever do this drug again, I’m gone, I’m leaving,” McCormick recalled. “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.”
Reflecting on her experience, McCormick gave some no-nonsense advice to those faced with addiction.
“I recommend to anyone who’s struggling to throw that phone book out and… do not hang out with anyone who’s using,” she warned. “I had to literally say goodbye to so many people that I was hanging out with.”
