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but dramatic change, and so did my perceptions about myself. It was all due to ignorance and the inability of any of us to discuss this seismic jolt our family had received. Following my father’s revelation, I felt embarrassed about my mother. It’s terrible to admit even now. But I didn’t like being around her in public, especially among the other mothers on the Brady set. I knew she didn’t fit in with them, and now I thought I knew the reason. It was because of her syphilis. I figured everyone could see it.
    Granted, I had yet to see signs of it—later, I would learn she did suffer long-term effects, including bad eyes, thin hair, and physical frailty—but I was sure other people noticed.
    Even worse, I took the few facts I knew and used them to convince myself that I was also infected with syphilis. I ignored my father’s claim that my mother had received treatments to prevent transmission. I told myself that it ran in the family. My mother’s mother suffered from syphilis, then she passed it to my mother, and thus it made sense that I was infected, too.
    I knew exactly what that meant. Like my mother and her mother before her, I was destined to go insane. Both of them had ended up in mental institutions. It was only a matter of time, I reasoned, before the same thing happened to me.
    I wasn’t entirely wrong. By believing that I had syphilis, I inherited all the same emotional problems that had plagued my mother, namely the debilitating psychological side effects of carrying around a secret. I was suddenly filled with dread, shame, and fear, feelings that grew worse over time. When I went back to work, we were shooting “Brace Yourself,” the episode in which Marcia gets braces. It was a story about self-image.
    How fitting! My self-image was in crisis mode. Susie remembers me as suddenly different. According to her, the change was subtle but noticeable. It was like I had my head in the clouds. My attention drifted. Chris Knight even made fun of me a few times for that reason.
    But I was different. I remember being in the dressing room, the same as always, except this time I felt as if everyone was looking at my mother and me. I felt as if they could see signs of the syphilis in both of us (it felt obvious to me), but I wasn’t going to say anything in case they couldn’t. Then the producers sent me to an orthodontist to get real braces put on my teeth. I was against that idea; why stand out even more?
    When I returned to the set, Barry, Chris, Eve, and the others said my teeth were going to be marked for life. I really felt, as Marcia said in the script, ugly, ugly, ugly.
    If only they knew what was going on with me, I thought.
    I was required to cry in several scenes, and I summoned the tears easily. It was the first time I’d cried since witnessing my parents’ fight and convincing myself that syphilis had made me a ticking time bomb. Little did anyone on the Brady set know my tears were real and it felt so good to cry.

    A t the end of January 1970, the show took a brief hiatus as producers waited to hear if the network was going to pick it up for a second season. This also gave the writers time to finish scripts for the remaining episodes. During the break, I traveled to Washington, D.C., with TV host Art Linkletter and three other child actors for a TV special called A Kid’s Eye View of Washington.
    With cameras following, the four of us toured the sites of our nation’s capital and got a bird’s-eye view of the corridors of government. Among our stops were John F. Kennedy’s gravesite at Arlington and the Smithsonian, where I tried on the 98.6-carat Bismarck sapphire. Armed guards stood around me as the necklace was placed around my neck. We also took an aerial tour of the city in the presidential helicopter.
    The highlight of this amazing trip was a face-to-face with the president of the United States, Richard Nixon. He met us in the Oval Office. The whole thing was carefully choreographed