A former child star who was once America’s TV sweetheart has confessed that she became a cocaine addict and traded sex for drugs.

Maureen McCormick played the eldest daughter Marcia on “The Brady Bunch”, the long-running sit-com about the clean-cut, “blended” family of a “man named Brady” with three sons and a “lovely lady” with three daughters.

The TV show, which aired from 1969 to 1974, became a cultural phenomenon that spawned several sequel series as well as two feature films, three made-for-TV movies, and a touring stage show.

But in a tell-all memoir published yesterday, McCormick says her life became the polar opposite of the wholesome world of Marcia Brady. “I had played Marcia Brady for five years. But I wasn’t her in any way, shape or form. She was perfect. I was anything but that,” McCormick writes.

The book, entitled “Here’s the Story,” is the latest episode of revelations about the TV family after the disclosure that Bob Reed, the actor who played the on-screen father, was a closeted gay who later contracted AIDS.

In her book, McCormick, now 52, recounts that she got deeper and deeper into Hollywood’s drug scene - even after a powerful producer threatened to stop her working in Tinseltown ever again.

“I sought refuge in seemingly glamorous cocaine dens above Hollywood. I thought I would find answers there, while in reality I was simply running farther from myself. From there, I spiralled downward on a path of self-destruction that cost me my career and very nearly my life,” she writes.

“Over the years I battled drug addiction and bulimia. I was treated in a psych ward, went in and out of rehab, and looked to God for answers.” McCormick says she traded sex for drugs with a Hollywood cocaine dealer who later went to jail, and once allowed an older man she met at the Playboy Mansion to videotape her naked in exchange for drugs.

She began to “free-base” cocaine with a music-industry boyfriend and the two once spent a week binging in a hotel room with a “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door.

On one occasion, she took amyl nitrate pills, or “poppers”, from a bowl on the coffee table at a party at Sammy Davis Jr’s Los Angeles home.

On another, she turned up to an audition with Steven Spielberg for “Raiders of the Lost Ark” completely “messed up” after being awake for several days on drugs. He politely offered her an orange and did not give her the part.

“If there was Coke, I had to stay up and do every last flake even if it meant going without sleep for days,” she writes. “Nothing else mattered.” After several spells in drug rehab, McCormick now lives a Brady-like life in the Westlake suburb of Los Angeles with her husband and their 19-year-old daughter.

She says she has finally made peace with her past as a Brady. “It took most of my life, countless mistakes, and decades of pain and suffering to reach this point of equanimity and acceptance,” she writes.

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