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Ironically, the series helped her over some of the rough spots: "This is the most predictable schedule I've had." When she was bouncing from show to show as a guest star-everything from Love Boat to Hillstreet Blues- "I never knew where I'd be. I'd get a call and bang! I'd be on a plane the next day, working fourteen hour days."
Although she denies it, you do get the feeling- listening to the five-foot, 8 1/2- inch blonde with a Mario Thomas voice and what she calls "a muppet face that bends a lot"- that she really is a lot like Maggie Seaver: bright, self-possessed, determined and very smart. On the show, Maggie has gone back to work as a journalist after 15 years of homemaking. Her husband, Jason, a psychiatrist (played by Canadian actor Alan Thicke), has moved his practice into the house to help look after their three children. Sounds ideal, but several episodes of the show have dealt with Maggie's guilt over not being a traditional stay-at-home mother. Admittedly, Joanna has encountered the same problem. She recalls that, when the pilot of Growing Pains was shot, her youngest TV kid, Ben, asked, "Why do you have to go back?" The subtext, though, was "Why do you want to leave me?" says Kerns. "It hit me that I was going through that in my own family." Complicated, too, by a TV-created sibling rivalry. Ashley once told Jeremy Miller, who plays Ben, "When my mom says she loves you, she's really thinking of me." Ashley eventually adjusted to the series-she visits the set frequently-but Kerns still has qualms. Just last spring she tried to be a supermom one more time. Ashley's private school was giving a chili cook-off to raise funds. "I volunteered to do everything," she says. "I made five gallons of chilli-I had to chop for hours. I helped set up the booths, I worked in them and I helped clean up." At the end of this flurry of supermom activities, though, "I found Ashley outside crying because I hadn't spent any time with her. It dawned on me that it's not what other people think you're doing for your children that's important. What's really important is finding special time for them, even if it's only fifteen minutes." Still, she admits that, "if I had four children, I don't know how I'd do it."
Working is a central issue in Kerns's life. She's had a tough time getting where she is today. "I get a lot of validation from the parts I play." If I do a good job, it makes me feel better about myself, and I'm happier and more fulfilled. I think it makes me a better mother." And, yes, Ashley did ask my Joanna has to work. "I told her that I'm the kind of woman who needs something in my life besides my daughter. I never had a choice. I'm a workaholic." That's because early on she learned that, as coach Vince Lombardi supposedly said, "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing." Her father, David de Varona, a life- insurance salesman, had been an All-Conference football player at the University of California at Berkeley. "My dad was not necessarily a stage father, but he was not the biggest communicator in the world. And you knew if you did well in sports he could talk to you more easily." Her older brother played highschool basketball and her younger brother is a professional golfer. But most troubling was the record established by her sister, Donna, six years older, a swimming star at 13 and winner of two Olympic gold medals by the age of 17. "Competition was set up in our family," Kerns says. "it turned us into a couple of driven women." First she tried to top or at least equal Donna- beginning with the time Joanna was 11 years old and a reporter from Look Magazine was interviewing Donna in the living room. "I made an entrance walking on my hands," says Joanna, laughing now. "I wanted some of that attention to come in my direction." She was always a "real little monkey," so gymnastics seemed a natural course. Eventually, Joanna was practicing six to seven hours a day- just as Donna had before entering the Olympics. The family, which had originally lived in Lafayette, California, had moved to Santa Clara so Donna could receive Olympic-level coaching. But there wasn't an equally good gymnastics coach in Santa Clara. "My dad couldn't pick up and move again. It would have killed his buisness. I understand," she says in a tone suggesting she does now but didn't then. So Joanna moved to Frenso for expert coaching and, after two years, to Reno for more. She was ranked 14th in the country. Then, just before the Olympic finals, she injured her knee while attempting a full twisting back somersault. "I still have two huge scars. That was before microsurgery." The disappointment hurt, but "I think I was really relieved because I knew I'd never make the Olympic team, never be a medalist. I was too tall." That left her with three months of her senior year to finish at Santa Clara High School and a big decision about the future. "I'd always liked the performance aspect of gymnastics best, and I'd been studying dance all along." So she enrolled at UCLA as a dance major. In her third quarter, she saw a notice on a bulletin board- Gene Kelly was auditioning dancers for a show called Clown Around. She passed the audition and quit school. "It made my parents nuts." Five weeks later the show closed on the road, and she was out of a job. But she did know what she wanted-to be an actress. As acting careers go, Kerns didn't have a truly terrible struggle. It was the Charlie's Angels era. "Everybody was looking for bimbos, and I don't do bimbos well," says Kerns. "I look like the girl next door." A look that's exactly right for selling detergent, toothpaste and all the other accouterments of day-to-day living. "I was the June Cleaver of commercials," she says. "Every time a kid needed to take cough syrup or have his nose blown, they called me." But deep in her consciousness, there was that need to win. Every season she'd audition for one two pilots. Even on her honeymoon she was nervously awaiting word on whether she'd gotten a part in Three's Company. She didn't-and she burst into tears. "But you're on your honeymoon!" her husband exclaimed. "You don't understand; this was a series," she answered. ("Maybe that was the beginning of the end," she says now. "It is true that as my career began to take off we grew apart.") Sports helped her over the rough spots, though-or at least the attitude that those years of gymnastics training developed. "I learned that you don't really lose if you give it your best and you really work honestly. You may not win, but you don't lose and you get better and better." She pauses. "But I spent years getting better and better." Meanwhile, Donna had moved from Olympic medalist to TV sportscaster. When they were young, the competition between the girls consisted mostly of "fighting over who got to sit in the front seat." As Joanna moved into her teens, she "became very rebellious. Anything Donna did I didn't want to do. If she didn't wear makeup, I wore a lot. She didn't smoke, so I smoked." But the competition didn't really get unpleasant until 1976, when Joanna landed a role on the Mary Tyler Moore Show playing a dumb woman sportscaster. Donna was preparing to cover the Olympics for ABC-TV, and the script sounded too close to home to her. She told Joanna, "You can't do that." "We had a very silly fight; It was very painful at the time," says Joanna. "She said she had the name De Varona first, and I said, 'You're right.'" Since Joanna got married soon after that, it was relatively easy to change her professional name to Joanna Kerns. Today the sisters are close friends. Donna, who lives in New York, is still a sports commentator for ABC-TV. "We support each other. I guess it was like being the daughter of a famous star. If you have your own identity, you feel better." Another pause. "Or maybe, if you feel better about yourself, you get your own identity. all that stuff helped us to get to the truth, which is that it's difficult in any family. I see now that if I do anything well and to the best of my ability, my dad's proud of me. But at the time it was confusing." Today, her parents still live in California, where they make videotapes of each of Joanna's and Donna's television appearances. "And they play them so often that the neighbors must be saying, 'Not the De Varona girls again!'" Just as Joanna was getting her emotional life straightened out (and, yes, she's been in analysis) her career started taking off. She was in the short-lived Alan Alda series Four Seasons two years ago. But, she says, "I didn't really make it as an actress until I could play early thirites, and I was doing that before I was thirty." "Actually, I think I'm coming into my own now. If you're smart, you can work in this buisness for a long time and get old in it. I don't want it to be over when I'm thirty-five. That's what's frustrating about sports. There's really only one winner. In acting, if you're good, there's room for you. There are not that many Meryl Streeps, but there are lots of Joanna Kernses. And you can age as an actress. You're not finished at seventeen." The success of Growing Pains was more improbable than the plots of Miami Vice. Says Kerns, "It was the last show bought and the last show produced. And it had all this negative going against it." The press, says Kerns, "couldn't forgive Alan for all the hype for his talk show, Thicke of the Night. At the time that folded, Thicke was portrayed as a washed-up whiz kid. And here he was, a star of a new sitcom. Not that new, of course. Television has trends, says Kerns, and "family shows are back." Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if every randy adolescent boy in America, every chipmunk toothed little kid and every bespectacled 12-year old girl is appearing on prime-time television. So why did Growing Pains survive? "One of the aspects of our show that's unique is that both characters have pretty high-powered careers that feed them the way family or children can't," she says. "And the situations are simple enough that children can understand them, but they're not stupid. The writers deal with good issues." And so what if, like many other television families, there doesn't seem to be anyone around to clean up? "I told them it was crazy, so we do have a housekeeper. But so far we just talk about her on the show."
Having a regular hit show has, in some ways, made Kerns's transition from married woman to single mother a little easier-even if "it was tough to play a married woman in the prime time just while we were going through the separation." But it's kept her busy while "embarking on new beginnings." "Basically, I'm a mom. I'm not seeing anyone special-there's nothing crazy and passionate. I have no time for dating, and I'm just not ready. Mostly, Ashley and I have dinner, and we drop into bed." She does work out five days a week, a habit from the old days, and she plays golf. So far, Ashley shows no interest in gymnastics but does like swimming. "She'll probably be a swimmer like Donna. I want her to take up social sports. I can do a handspring, but who wants to do it with me?" A few years ago, while she was bristling at the lack of intelligent scripts for non-bimbos, Kerns took up writing. She took a writing course at UCLA and has written two screenplays. The first, called Freestyle, is based on what else?- sibling rivalry. "It's not exactly what Donna and I went through, but the emotional content is there." The second, written with Becky Ayres, is titled American Pie. It's about the problems of a woman who tries to be a stepmother to her husband's children by his first marrige. "I married a man twenty-one years my senior, and he had four children close to my age. The play is really about the dreams you have about growing up and getting married and what the reality is in many cases-the built-in problems you never dreamed of."