Sometimes, the stars just align for romance.
In 1977, Chevy Chase was filming an NBC special on the same soundstage as the ill-fated Brady Bunch Variety Hour. (Paul Shaffer, who was musical director on Chase’s show, admitted he’d sneak over to ogle the show’s aquatic dancers as they practiced their underwater routines.) If not for that confluence of unlikely events, Chase would never have been able to whisper to Florence Henderson that Steve Martin wanted the phone number of her TV daughter, 20-year-old Maureen McCormick.
You read that right — the Jerk asked for Marcia Brady’s digits.
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“Of course I gave my permission,” gushed McCormick in her memoir, Here’s the Story. “I was flattered. Steve Martin was like a rock star, not just a wild and crazy guy but a wildly funny and, from what I understood, a wildly intelligent guy too.”
Martin, about 10 years older than the sitcom star, dazzled McCormick when he got her on the phone. He asked her out to Hollywood hot spot Musso & Frank, and McCormick accepted, though each of them brought a friend “to make it more casual.”
At some point, they dumped the friends. After dinner, the couple returned to Martin’s bachelor pad for some conversation and a good ol’ fashioned make-out session. “I remember him being a very good kisser,” McCormick said.
But that night turned out to be their only date. The problem? McCormick blames it on the cocaine problem she was battling during the production of The Brady Bunch Variety Hour. While the kissing was good, McCormick couldn’t quite hold up her end of the bargain when it came to the conversation. “I was insecure and either high or spaced out,” she admitted. “Probably both.”
While “Steve was too polite and confident of his talent to say anything,” McCormick was pretty sure her inability to speak intelligently torpedoed any potential romance. They never connected again after that night. “He was a genius and and I blew it,” McCormick told Howard Stern (after admitting she also had a long-term crush on the shock jock). “I was so coked out of my mind from days before. I was just really, really spaced out and just had nothing left in me.”
Robin Quivers wanted to know if Martin was a funny guy on the date. “This is really sad for me to say,” McCormick confessed. “I didn’t get any of his jokes, and I wasn’t laughing. I think it’s because I was so constantly preoccupied. My mind was driving me crazy because I knew I was coked and spaced, so I didn’t really hear what he was saying.”
McCormick regretted the missed opportunity. “He impressed me as an extraordinary guy,” she lamented in her memoir. “I would’ve enjoyed a second date. I used to think if the circumstances were different, we could have hit it off.”
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