Joyce Bulifant, 88, still remembers the Friday afternoon her biggest television break slipped away. In 1969 she was signed and fitted to star in a new ABC family comedy called The Brady Bunch. She was going to play Carol Brady, the mother of three girls who marries a widowed architect with three boys. Days before cameras rolled, the part went to Florence Henderson.
Bulifant looked back on that day in a new October 2026 interview on the podcast Katchy Klassics with Kathy & Larry, hosted by Kathy Garver and Larry Dasilva. As People and Parade both reported, she also shared the real reason the network made the switch and the one keepsake she carried home.
How Close Did Joyce Bulifant Come To Playing Carol Brady?
Closer than most fans ever knew. Bulifant told the podcast she had signed a seven-year contract. She had also picked out her outfits for the pilot episode, “The Honeymoon.” Those clothes included Carol’s wedding dress and the suit she would wear when the newlyweds left for their trip.
The casting went deeper than wardrobe. “The little girls were all chosen to look like me,” she said, according to People. The three actresses who became Marcia, Jan and Cindy had been picked with her in mind as their TV mother.
She told a similar story to Fox News in 2018. She said she had been “signed, sealed and delivered” to play Mrs. Brady and had spent about two weeks with the wardrobe department. Then came the day she showed those clothes to the men in charge.
“I was showing the wardrobe to the producer and director, and they just had this look on their face,” she recalled on the podcast. “I said, ‘What’s wrong? Something is wrong.'”
The answer was short. “Yeah, New York wants Florence Henderson all of a sudden. She’s available,” she remembered being told. “And that was it.” That left one question for the show’s creator, Sherwood Schwartz, to answer.
What Did Sherwood Schwartz Tell Her At Her Own Home?
Schwartz did not want to let her go. According to People, he came to her house to explain that the executives in New York had the final say. He also told her how much the change would alter the show he had written.
“He said, ‘We wrote this to be like The Lucy Show, and if Florence does it, it’ll be like The Donna Reed Show,'” Bulifant said. In his first version, Carol was the zany one. The housekeeper was the straight woman who reacted to her.
With Henderson in the role, that balance flipped. Parade reported that the housekeeper was rewritten as the funny character. Ann B. Davis took that part as Alice and became one of the most beloved faces on the show. Bulifant told Fox News in 2018 that Schwartz “was devastated because the show had a whole new meaning than what he was looking for.”
She holds no grudge against the woman who replaced her. “I was very fond of Florence and she was a lovely lady,” she told Fox News. Henderson played Carol through 1974. Fans still revisit even its strangest chapters, like the ‘Brady Bunch’ Hawaii episodes that nearly turned dangerous. Bulifant, meanwhile, needed her next job.
Where Did Her Career Go After Losing The Brady Role?
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It went straight to another classic. In 1971 she began playing Marie Slaughter, the wife of newswriter Murray Slaughter, on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She stayed with the recurring role through the show’s final season in 1977. Her co-stars there included Betty White, who later sat beside her on game show panels.
Those panels made her a household face. Bulifant was a semi-regular on Match Game from 1973 to 1982. She also played on Password Plus and Chain Reaction. In 1980 she played Mrs. Davis in Airplane!, the mother of a sick little girl whose IV gets knocked loose by a singing nun. She told BOOMER Magazine she nearly turned that part down until her husband pushed her to take it.
That husband was William Asher, who directed 110 episodes of I Love Lucy and produced Bewitched. He had been married to Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery before he married Bulifant in 1976. They divorced in 1993. Her earlier husbands were Hawaii Five-O star James MacArthur, the father of her children Mary and Charles, and actor Edward Mallory.
Bulifant and Mallory had a son, John, who was later adopted by Asher. John Asher grew up to be an actor and director. He married Jenny McCarthy in 1999, and their son Evan was born in 2002. Bulifant’s happiest marriage came last. She wed actor Roger Perry in 2002 and stayed with him until his death in July 2018.
She wrote about those years in her 2017 memoir, My Four Hollywood Husbands. Drinking made several of those marriages hard. “I thought if I just loved them enough they wouldn’t need to drink,” she told BOOMER Magazine. Yet the Brady story still ends on a softer note than any of them.
What Did She Keep From The Role That Got Away?
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When the producers let her go, they let her keep something. According to People and Parade, Bulifant was given Carol Brady’s going-away suit from “The Honeymoon” as a parting gift. It was one of the outfits she had chosen herself for a wedding scene she never filmed.
Schwartz gave her a promise too. “He said, ‘Any show I do from now on, you’re going to be in it!'” she told Fox News. He kept his word in 1976, when she joined his Saturday morning series Big John, Little John as Marjorie Martin. The show lasted one season.
Today she speaks about 1969 without bitterness. “It wasn’t like a live-or-die situation as an actress,” she told Garver and Dasilva. “I felt family was the most important, and I always felt if I didn’t get something, I wasn’t supposed to get it.” She added, “I had two children, and I had a little house, and I knew something else would come along.”
She was 31 when she lost the part, with Mary and Charles at home. Two years later she was playing Murray’s wife on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The suit she chose for Carol Brady’s honeymoon was already hers to keep.
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