Maureen McCormick was still a teenager, and already famous as Marcia Brady, when she started spending time at the Jackson family’s house in Encino, out in the San Fernando Valley. She went there to watch Michael and his brothers rehearse their moves.
It wasn’t only the Jackson 5 who were starstruck. “I think he loved ‘The Brady Bunch,'” she told Harry Connick Jr. on his talk show “Harry” in 2016. His family loved it too, she said.
At the time, “The Brady Bunch” was on ABC every week, and the Jackson 5 already had a string of No. 1 hits for Motown. The two first met through work. In her 2008 memoir, “Here’s the Story,” she wrote, “I’d met the Jackson 5 when they visited us in the recording studio.” The Brady kids were voicing their Saturday morning cartoon, “The Brady Kids,” at the time, according to Cheat Sheet. On “Harry,” she remembered it a little differently, as “some attorney’s place where we were all signing contracts.”
Either way, she was clear about who the fan was. “Michael was a fan, and we became friends,” she wrote.
Harry asked her whether she’d dated Michael. “Yeah,” she said. Then she gave her age. “I was like 15 and a half, 16, ’cause I could drive him.”
“I was the older woman,” she said. She wasn’t sure Michael saw it the same way, though. “I don’t know if he considered them dates,” she told Harry. “I did.” In the clip, listen for how she sums up the age gap, and for where she’d go to watch the brothers practice.
Maureen McCormick tells Harry Connick Jr. about dating young Michael
She calls herself “the older woman” at about 0:16. At about 0:54 she talks about the Jacksons’ house in Encino, where she watched them rehearse.
She’d said much the same thing years earlier. “I was just absolutely in love,” she told Access Hollywood in 2009. “I thought he was the greatest star ever.” She added, “I couldn’t even believe that here I am little Maureen McCormick from the Valley.”
She got close to the rest of the family too. In her memoir she wrote that she became even friendlier with Michael’s sister LaToya than with Michael. “She was fun and had a good sense of humor,” she wrote.
So what were those dates really like? Maureen answered that in 2015, when she joined the Australian version of “I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!” and talked about Michael with her campmates.
“We held hands and kissed on the cheeks, never on the lips,” she said.
That was the whole story. Two young TV stars, holding hands and trading kisses on the cheek. Her memory of Michael from those days is a simple one. “He was so sweet and just very shy,” she said on the show.
She also hadn’t forgotten how much the Jacksons loved her show. “It was so cute, he loved our show,” she said.
Mostly, she says, they just talked. “We would talk a lot and dream a lot and just, I think we admired each other,” she said on the show.