The Real-Life, Ambiguously Sexy Feud Between Marcia and Jan Brady

Now that the ubiquity of on-demand entertainment has meant no longer being forced to watch whatever TBS was rerunning when we’re bored, the kids these days mostly know The Brady Bunch in meme form, specifically the clip from 1996’s A Very Brady Sequel in which Marcia Brady responds to her sister Jan’s obvious lies about a new boyfriend with a pithy, “Sure, Jan.” 

Thanks to that perfectly encapsulated dismissal, one of the most enduring legacies of the series is the fraught relationship between Marcia and Jan Brady, which was just as real off screen as on. It may not have taken the same form of middle child Jan’s resentment of being outshone by her older sister, but it did get a lot gayer.

We actually don’t know what it was that ignited the feud between Marcia Brady actress Maureen McCormick and Jan Brady actress Eve Plumb, but we do know it was immediate. According to Susan Olsen, who played youngest Brady girl Cindy, “From day one with these two, I have always been in the middle, and now it’s at the point where there isn’t even a desire to communicate through me. It’s all really petty, but if your feelings get hurt when you’re really young, some people carry it with them.” 

She didn’t say how it started, but it didn’t help that Eve “got tired of Maureen gaining attention for herself by regurgitating the tiresome and false insinuations that they had a lesbian affair."

If you’ve never heard of a Marcia Brady/Jan Brady lesbian affair outside of the AO3 search bar, that’s because, by all accounts, there really wasn’t one, as Olsen insists. It all started with a joke McCormick made during a 1997 radio interview, when the DJ asked if she’d been “pattycake close or Ellen DeGeneres close” with her co-star. (DeGeneres was the only lesbian people knew about in 1997.) “Yeah, we kissed,” she said, a statement just vague enough to conclude whatever you want from it, including friendly kisses on the cheek between teenage girls, which is what McCormick’s publicist later clarified that she meant.

Still, the damage was done. Reportedly, Plumb wasn’t happy, and a few years later, when McCormick’s memoir Here’s the Story was slated for release, gossip rags dredged up the incident to start rumors that the book would go into more detail about the pair’s “steamy on-set sexual relationship.” It wasn’t true — the book contains no such stories, which McCormick’s publisher immediately clarified even though it would have sold a lot more copies to play the “well, maybe” game.

It may not have been the cause, but it certainly seems to have deepened the chasm in their relationship, at least according to McCormick and Olsen, who both claimed Plumb subsequently refused to appear at events with McCormick for several years. (Plumb has always insisted “there is no feud.”) 

“I understand both sides of the story but I’m a little more inclined to be sympathetic to Eve,” Olsen told Australia’s News.com.au. “I know that’s horrible to say because Maureen is Australia’s little darling now.” 

In other words, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.