Current Events > I'm getting drunk and thinking about Robert Reed (Mike Brady from the Brady Bunc

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Robert Reed is one of the celebrities who makes me feel the most sad, right alongside Karen Carpenter. He lived a tragic life that ended too soon.

He's remembered fondly as Mike Brady, the dad on the Brady Bunch alongside Florence Henderson as the mum. He was a classically trained actor, and he resented his role on the Brady Bunch - he thought it was beneath him, and it caused a lot of tension between him and the top brass.

Sherwood Schwartz, who produced the show, said that Reed would have altercations with him where he disagreed with the script and would demand they follow a different path. Real prima donna shit - but Schwartz said that when tensions had cooled off, Reed's suggestions ended up improving the show. Whenever he went off, he tended to be right and the staff would use his suggestions to make the show better. The last episode of the Brady Bunch, where the oldest son uses the wrong shampoo and dyes his hair orange, famously didn't feature Reed because he thought the concept was shitty.

Exacerbating this was the fact that Robert Reed was gay.

The Brady Bunch was produced in the late 60's through to the mid-70's. Reed's sexuality wouldn't have just sunk his own career, it would have ended the show as a whole because the stigma of hiring a gay man as a wholesome all-American father would be enough to sink the show. Apparently his sexuality was apparent, and his frustration with the role was exacerbated by his struggle to assimilate. But nobody commented on it - they were professionals who were there to do a job.

Despite his bitterness over the saccharine garbage that he viewed the Brady Bunch as, and his numerous clashes with the producers, one place where his unhappiness didn't spill into was his relationships with the cast. Specifically, his relationship with the children - he would take them out for barbeques and to see the great outdoors, and to this day the Brady Bunch cast remembers Robert Reed fondly.

There was a tendency back then - which is unfortunately coming back into vogue now - to portray gay men as predators and rapists and pedophiles and shit. That's compounded by the amount of sexual abuse in Hollywood, with a lot of it occuring on these saccharine family-type sitcoms. An Australian sitcom about a nuclear family was tarnished decades after it had ended because the dad of that show was raping and molesting the youngest member of the cast who played his daughter. The guy from that Christian sitcom, who played Bruce Matheson in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, admitted to molestation years after the fact. It's rampant and fucked up.

But to this day, the cast have nothing but positive things to say about Robert Reed. One of the actresses, I think the girl who played the youngest daughter Cindy, said that her parents were going through a bitter divorce and that Robert Reed became a surrogate father figure to her during those formulative years. For all of his unhappiness, he never took it out on the children.

Reed lived a private and conservative life. To this day, there's not much record of his personal life outside of his career. But it was a couple weeks before his passing that he called Florence Henderson - someone he had stayed close to, as well as the children in the show - to tell them about his fatal prognosis and sexuality.

Reed had contracted colon cancer. Years after his death, the fact that such a famous gay man had died of ass cancer was something of a punchline; I remember my dad making fun of it when I was younger. He was on his death bed when he called Henderson and asked her to tell the rest of the cast.

But he also disclosed his sexuality for the first time. And like I said, his sexuality was an open secret on the show. But it had never been public knowledge, and he asked Florence Henderson to tell the public when he died.

I'm permanently distraught about Robert Reed. Was he loved in his final days? Did he have people to take care of him, did he know love in the years before his passing?

While he was alive, was Robert Reed happy?

From what I can tell - no.

And it hurts my fucking heart. Because for all the weight he had to carry, all of the shame of being known as the clean-cut, all-American superdad Michael Brady, was a tremendous source of shame for him. He didn't have a partner watching over him during his final days - he died in pain, his only support being his television family from thirty years ago.

He deserved better. He deserved love and care and understanding. All he got was a legacy of being a gay man who died of ass cancer.

He could have been the biggest piece of shit on Earth and taken it out on the people around him. But he cared for the Brady cast like they were his own family. He was always in touch with them, up until the day he died. Nobody had a bad word to say to him, not even the head producer who clashed with Reed so often. And he died in agony, alone.

I will always remember Robert Reed and the life he endured. I wish only for care and understanding for this man, even thirty years after his passing. To be a total fucking hack and paraphrase a line from an Elton John song: if one in ten could ever be that brave, I would never hate again.

Man I wasn't even that drunk when I wrote this, lol.

But yeah, Robert Reed and Karen Carpenter are the two celebrities who always make me sad when I think about them.

I never knew that it was colon cancer that killed him. At some point many years ago I must have heard it was because of AIDS and never thought to look into it more.

Damn. Hell of a monument you made there, TC.

I didnt read the whole thing, because I mean, cmon. But I do have the slightest memory of something about this person and you might be just the person to sort it out.

Some interview, who knows how many years ago, it was one of the Brady daughters, talking about how another Brady daughter called her up and said dads (something). It was in reference to his failing health, I think. But obviously, that quote stuck with me.