Just like it says in the song, Joanna walked into a crowded room, saw a handsome stranger, and knew that her life would change.
By Vernon Scott
Good Housekeeping/July 1991
The last thing on Joanna's mind last January, when she agreed to stop by a neighbor's after-theater dinner party, was romance. She had not gone to see the play, going instead to an open house at her daughter Ashley's school. And because she was due on the set of Growing Pains early the next morning, Joanna really didn't want to go to the party. "But I am fond of my neighbor and I thought it best to make an appearance," she told me. "I walked into a room - and there he was." Joanna stopped cold in the doorway, stunned by the sight of a tall, distinguished-looking man who smiled in response to her reaction. After introductions, they spent the next hour or two talking, laughing, asking questions, getting acquainted. "There was something very special between us," Joanna went on. "I definitely wanted to get to know him a lot better."
Before leaving for her own home a few doors away, Joanna did something that would shock the socks off Maggie Seaver, the conventional TV wife and mother she plays on the ABC series. She asked the handsome stranger for his buisness card. He had told her he was an architect, so she pretended her guest house needed major redoing.
Then the very next day she picked up the telephone. "At least I waited until 11:30 in the morning." She laughed. "I think he knew I didn't have any plans for the guest house."
Asked what prompted her boldness, Joanna said, "I had nothing to lose. He seemed shy. Now he says he would have called me. I'm not so sure about that. But I didn't want to wait, and I didn't want to chance that he wouldn't.
"I'd spent a year without dating. Men look at me with my career, my child, and my high visibility-it can all be intimidating to them."
Well, this man looked, liked what he saw, and wasn't the least bit intimidated. Their courtship began instantly. The result thus far is a glowing Joanna, who admits she is wildly in love with her architect, although she refuses to reveal his name, saying, "There may be some suprises before your story is printed."
This is her first "regular" guy since her divorce six years ago from her director husband Richard Kerns. After their split, Joanna poured all her love into her child and directed all her energies into Growing Pains.
Two years ago she bought a colorful old house on a fashionable street in Brentwood. Her life as a divorced, working mother stabilized.
With age 40 looming-a milestone for any actress-Joanna was too caught up in motherhood, on and off camera, and expanding her activities to script-writing and production deals to examine her feelings about single parenthood. At any rate, she hadn't fallen in love, nor given the subject much thought.
Recalling the moment she fell in love, Joanna said, "It was time. I hadn't told myself marrige is something I'd really like to try again. Love just hit me when I wasn't looking. I know darned well Maggie Seaver wouldn't, in a million years, have made that call. I don't think I'd have had the courage three years ago. But I've learned that you just don't let good opportunities go by."
Joanna and I were sitting at a table in her sunny combination kitchen-breakfast-party room. Windows on one whole side of the room look out on a central courtyard filled with flowers. Her Mediterranean-Spanish home has white walls and lots of wood tones, textures, colors, and antiques.
As a little girl, Joanna grew up in the shadow of her older sister, swimmer Donna de Varona, who won two gold medals in the 1964 Olympic Games and became a network TV sportscaster.
Joanna says there was always a touch of sibling rivalry between the two daughters of insurance salesman David De Varona and his wife Martha. "My family moved from the San Francisco area, where I was born, to Santa Clara [California] so Donna could train with top coaches," she explained. "I became a swimmer too. I hated the pain it took to be a champion, but I loved the social life that went with it. Sports meant everything in our family, which included two brothers-one older, one younger. At Santa Clara in 1962, I got interested in gymnastics, but there was no coaching or organized programs. I was fourteen and had given up swimming."
Instead, Joanna became an outstanding gymnast in a makeshift gym organized by her father. In need of professional coaching, it was agreed to allow her to move to Fresno and live in rented rooms while she attended high school and worked in gyms.
"Mother hated the fact that I moved away, but I was determined. I was up at six to go to the gym, took time out for school, and then back to the gym in the afternoons. My life was training. On weekends I'd compete. I became state champion and nationally ranked. My senior year I moved to Reno to work with the Olympic coach.
"But I was always too tall for the sport. I was the tallest gymnast in competition, but even so I got to the 1968 Olympic trials and placed 14th. Nobody wanted to spot me on the bars and beams because I looked like a big giraffe. They were afraid I'd fall on them. The other girls were less than five feet tall and weighed 70 pounds. I was five-foot-eight and 135 pounds.
"It was heartbreaking when I didn't make the Olympics. But I should have known. I kept getting injured. I had two major surgeries on my leg during my final two years of competion."
Joanna turned to coaching gymnasts in her freshman year at UCLA and enrolled in the dance department. One day in 1971, she answered a casting call and landed in the chorus of Gene Kelly's Clown Around stage show, earmarked for Broadway. She left UCLA and never looked back. Clown Around rehearsed in New York for a couple of months and closed out of town.
She says her first major break was a starring role opposite Tony Roberts in Alan Alda's ill-fated TV-comedy series The Four Seasons. It was a critical hit but found no viewers.
In 1976 Joanna married Richard Kerns, head of the commerical division of Columbia Pictures. The marrige lasted nine years, but had begun to deteriorate by the time she signed to star in Growing Pains.
"Here I was playing the perfect wife of Alan Thicke on the air and getting a divorce in real life," Joanna said. "The divorce was the worst experience I'd ever been through. I was scared to death. I didn't have enough cash to do anything. The producers sent me a check so I could pull things together. When the show was picked up on the strength of the pilot episode, I cried out of gratitude."
In the six years since her divorce, Joanna and Ashley, 12, have formed strong bonds. Joanna says Richard has been an attentive and consistent father to their daughter who was not quite six and emotionally shaken when her parents separated.
Family is as important to Joanna as it is to Maggie Seaver. Joanna's parents have moved from Northern California to within a five-minute drive of her home. Donna and her two young children live in Connecticut. When they come to Southern California, they stay with Joanna and Ashley.
"I believe in keeping an extended family around when it's possible," she said. "It's good for all of us."
During her 1990 hiatus from Growing Pains, Joanna starred in the TV film Deadly Intentions with Harry Hamlin of L.A. Law. Last year she also starred in the miniseries Blind Faith opposite Robert Urich. She then co-starred in another miniseries, The Great Los Angeles Earthquake.
During this hiatus she is producing and starring in the ABC-TV movie The Nightman. "This is a very sexy film. I play a woman who owns and runs an Eastern-seaboard hotel. Life has passed her by, and she takes what she needs and when she needs it. Right now, I'm looking for a really sexy co-star.
"This is a wonderful time in my life," she concluded. "I have several careers, a beautiful daughter, a great family, and now at long last I'm in love. What more could a woman ask?"
