Several Potential Mrs. Bradys Tried to Seduce ‘Brady Bunch’ Producer During Auditions

The showbiz cliché is that Hollywood producers solicit starlets for sexual favors in exchange for juicy parts in movies and television shows. But if we’re to believe Sherwood Schwartz, producer of the family sitcom The Brady Bunch, sometimes the sleazy process works the other way around.  

Schwartz was running behind when it came time to cast Carol Brady, the All-American matriarch of the Brady clan. He’d spent the summer looking for the right six kids, auditioning more than 1,200 boys and girls, according to Barry Williams’ book, Growing Up Brady. To complicate matters, Schwartz called back and personally interviewed 454 kids in his search for the perfect six. No wonder it took him so long to get to the parents.

Because he got such a late start, many of Schwartz’s obvious choices for Carol had already committed to holding deals with other shows. Other well-known actresses turned down the auditions. “I guess they didn’t want to spend screen time with six kids,” Schwartz concluded in his book, Brady Brady Brady: The Complete Story of the Brady Bunch.

But others said yes, many bringing along photos of themselves “in a swimsuit to show off their figure.” Others had dramatic chops, but little talent for comedy.

Then there were the actresses who decided the best way to win Schwartz’s heart was to appeal to his potentially dirty mind. “One attractive lady opened her portfolio and showed me full-page color photos of herself completely nude,” Schwartz said. “Maybe she thought those photos, and all the possibilities they implied, would help her get the part. It didn’t.”

Schwartz was also unimpressed with an actress who said she was no good at reading scripts cold. Perhaps, she offered, they could go to Schwartz’s place and go over the lines… together. “She didn’t get the part either.”

But the most forward applicant was an attractive young woman who had a special way of saying hello. “When I came over to greet her, she reached out her hand and I reached out my hand to shake hers,” remembered Schwartz. “But she reached a little lower than I did, and shook something else, and with a smile said, ‘Very pleased to meet you.’”

Again, she didn’t get the part.

Funny actors who tried to land the part the old-fashioned way — reading the lines and being funny — got further in the audition process. Schwartz decided to go with an actress named Joyce Bulifant, who went on to play Murray’s wife on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Brady Bunch staff even took her shopping for clothes that she might wear on the show.

But that decision flip-flopped when Florence Henderson suddenly became available. Her screen test with Robert Reed was damn good — so good that Schwartz and Paramount changed their minds and went with Henderson instead. 

While Schwartz tells no tales of Henderson engaging in hanky-panky during the audition process, he did compliment her on her “wonderful, bawdy sense of humor.” He wrote that when Henderson was in a new stage play, she loved to get flowers from men with a card that read, “Kisses on your opening.”