As her character Carol Seaver on television’s, “Growing Pains” dealt with the perils of adolescence, actress Tracey Gold struggled with her own problem: a debilitating eating disorder.
The studio’s actions – which included asking her to lose weight and subsequently gain some back, as well as writing jokes about her weight into the show – made it difficult for Gold to separate herself from her character. However, in the same way art influenced reality, Gold says it was her TV mother, Joanna Kerns, who would ultimately look out for her, pressuring the crew to help get her healthy.
After three seasons, Gold noticed the writing on the show “became a little edgier,” as the program angled to “be funnier” and “stay on top.”
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“Unfortunately, I think in that time it became at my expense, and it became because they started to have Mike Seaver make fat jokes about Carol Seaver,” she said of Kirk Cameron’s character, who played Gold’s older brother on the show, during an episode of the late Shannen Doherty’s podcast, “Let’s Be Clear.”
A member of the cast, but only a child, Gold said she felt she did not have much say in the direction of her character. “One thing you have to know about being a child actor. I always say this when I talk to kids who want to be child actors, I’m like, you have to be the best person on that set. You watch the adults messing up. You watch the adults, you know, laughing, forgetting their lines. They are allowed to do that. You, as a child actor, you need to get there. You need to know your lines. You shut your mouth and you do your job,” she explained.
“The ambiance on a set is that way. So when these jokes would come in, I really had no voice, so I would sort of just be like, I don’t think I’m allowed to say anything. But I had power, a little bit, because Carol Seaver was all of a sudden, she was mine and I had created her and I was known for her, so all of a sudden I also felt protective of her a little bit.”
Gold said at the time, she was not hyper-fixated on her weight, so jokes were easier to accept, although after going on hiatus one summer, things changed. “I came [back with] the freshman 15 basically, and then the jokes accelerated when I came back and became meaner,” she recalled. “It was out of my character to speak up, but it was hurting me, and I was sensitive to it. And I knew I had gained a little bit of weight, and I had never had that problem before.”
Although she had struggled in the past with disordered eating, the catalyst then had been different. “It was about staying childlike, you know, scared of hitting puberty.”
Gold found herself negotiating with the crew, many of whom were men. “Whether I like it or not. The set did have an element of misogyny to it because they’re always bringing in the beautiful actress of the week … a few years older than me and coming in and, you know, dolling them up and sexualizing that and all of those things,” she said. “It was a boys club. It really was a boys club.”
“They would say, you don’t have any brothers, so you don’t know what this is like. This is what brothers and sisters do to each other,” said Gold, who grew up with four sisters. Although the jokes continued to hurt, “It’d be like a joke like, ‘Here comes wide load.’ And you’re not talking just about Carol anymore. You’re talking about me, Tracey Gold. And now I have to be in front of an audience that’s laughing at me and my body and my weight.”
The studio eventually called Gold’s father, who was her agent, and requested she lose weight.
“That was a blow,” Gold said, who would end up on a 500 calorie diet. “So within a month I had lost 20 pounds. Easily,” she said. “I did it and I did it quietly, and I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it. I just went and did it. And all of a sudden, everybody’s coming up to me on the set, you know, everywhere, kind of going, ‘Oh my god, you look so good, you look so beautiful, you look so amazing.’”
“At that time, I think everybody … meant well, but in my view of it, it was like, was I that embarrassing before? Was I absolutely kidding myself that I could go on National TV, be Carol Seaver, and I really was that person they were saying those jokes about?”
Things then shifted – for the worse. “Something hit me, and I’m like, ‘I will not be the butt of anybody’s joke again,'” she said.
The actress would go days without eating.
“I would make negotiations with myself. But as I’m doing this, I’m getting lower and lower and lower and lower in weight. But you know, you’re in Hollywood, and everybody just kept giving me compliments. And it was making [my then-boyfriend] furious that everybody was complimenting me because he knew I was sick,” she said of her husband Roby Marshall, whom she was introduced to by Kerns. The couple married in 1994, two years after the show ended.
Her weight influenced the show. “And then all of a sudden, the jokes came about Carol’s working out. Carol becomes homecoming queen.”
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“It reinforces….that like having like 10, 15 extra pounds on you when you’re 18 and figuring it out is really just bad. And it put me into a tailspin that I just found I couldn’t get out of. You know, people asked me, did I think it was a cry for help? No, I don’t. I think it was a really internal thing. I don’t think I wanted help at that point. I wanted to keep myself safe and protected. It was a self-coping mechanism to keep myself safe,” she explained.
“I became very, very, very self-protective of myself and I kept continuing to lose weight. And I remember – and it was the irony of all ironies – they basically said to me, they called my dad once again, this is a few months later, and they say, ‘We need Tracey to gain weight. She’s getting too thin on camera. She’s looking not healthy.'”
Although she tried to get healthy, Gold said it was too late.
“I had taken to throwing up and stuff,” she admitted. “I remember [Marshall] came one day to my dressing room and he nailed the bathroom door shut. He went to the prop department … He’s like, ‘I need a nail and hammer’ … And they’re like, ‘Why?’ And he’s like, ‘I’m gonna nail Tracey’s bathroom shut.’ And they’re like, ‘Thank you. Thank you for looking after her. We’re so worried about her.'”
At one point, Gold went on vacation with Marshall to Florida, and the expectation on set was she would return healthier. “He thought he could take me out of California or Los Angeles and I could suddenly eat. But I couldn’t,” she said. Unfortunately, she contracted bronchitis and lost even more weight. A doctor ended up coming to the set and sending her home.
“I’m like, OK, that’s fine, I’m sick. I don’t feel like being there anyway,” she said of being sent home. “And they’re like, she needs to go somewhere before she comes back on the set. And I didn’t know, till years later, but it was Joanna Kerns, god bless her…she called the studio and she said, this girl’s gonna die on your watch if you don’t step in and do something. And something was done.”
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Kerns did not immediately return Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
Gold said – without any help from the show – she found an in-patient program that was all about “tough love,” although she would sign herself out against doctor’s advice days later. “I took a cab home, against anybody’s advice. The only person that would speak to me from a pay phone was my husband. Everybody else would hang up on me because they were told to hang up. I mean they thought they were doing the right thing. And I took a week to find the right doctor. And I go to doctors, I tell them what I was going through and, because it was so public, it was like living in a fishbowl. And it broke the news and everything like that,” she said of her health becoming tabloid fodder.
Eventually, she found UCLA’s Eating Disorder Institute, where she was able to receive out-patient treatment. “I started to find my voice, and that is such a powerful thing as a woman, as a child actress, as an actress.”
“I loved ‘Growing Pains’ and I have the best memories of ‘Growing Pains’ but that was, you know, a hard time for me. And you know, do I blame the writers? I always say no, because I was the one that was very susceptible to it. I think if I had been on the cheerleading team and a cheerleading coach had said the same thing to me, I think that would happen to me, I would have gone down a road of restriction. And you know, was it magnified because I was on TV? Possibly. I’ll never know.”
“Growing Pains” aired for seven seasons between 1985 and 1992.
