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Some women buy a new wardrobe when pregnant. Others redecorate their nests. Jaclyn Smith tackled a big one. The eleven-room French-colonial-style house in Bel Air that the actress is renovating is an architectural celebration of her swelling condition. The edifice is filled with French-provincial antiques. Soon it will be enhanced by a crib that replicates in loving detail Smith's own antique bed, complete with details like hand-painted flowers and gold leaf. The master builder is sedately curled up on a plush flower-print couch in an upstairs parlor. Now seven months pregnant, she radiates a warmth well beyond her Charlie's Angel image. Her skin is flawless, her eyes full of the clear California light and her manner exasperatingly placid. She and third husband Cinematographer Tony Richmond (The Greek Tycoon), 39, married last August. "I'm very old-fashioned," says the Houston dentist's daughter. "I've wanted babies ever since I was a little girl." A heady rise from shampoo commercials to Angel to film actress kept the yearning on the back burner until her pregnant Jackie Kennedy role. That message was too strong to ignore.
Like most career women, Smith will return to work after a few months at home. Although she has not yet chosen a project, she is adamant about breast feeding on the set. "I'll convert my trailer into a nursery," she says. It may complicate her life, but Smith believes the enrichment outweighs the disadvantages. Says she: "I've wanted this baby for so long it wouldn't make sense to start complaining now."
A host of pregnancies these days are no less visible than Smith's. When Natalie Jacobson, 38, Boston's most popular news anchorwoman on top-rated WCVB-TV, had her first child last May, some impassioned viewers tried to crash the obstetrics ward to catch a glimpse of her husband and coanchor, Chet Curtis, 42, and her baby, Lindsay Dawn. Thousands of letters and cards poured into the station office. Not only was her pregnancy the occasional subject of the on-camera chitchat that passes between members of television news teams, but a local newspaper gave Page One treatment to Jacobson's call to her husband with the good news of her pregnancy. Viewers participated in a gestation countdown.
Jacobson's case was not unique. Two more WCVB reporters, Mary Richardson, 36, and Martha Bradlee, 28, became pregnant. Bradlee is the daughter-in-law of Washington Post Editor Ben Bradlee. The Emmy-winning reporter insisted on working up to her delivery date and reported two stories only hours before going into labor. In fact, the station's news director, James Thistle, had decided out of avuncular concern that Bradlee should avoid trips in the station's helicopter. Bradlee was furious and used the whirlybird until two weeks before her due date last January. After six weeks, she was back at work, balancing career and motherhood, and sharing child-care duties with a baby sitter and Husband Ben Bradlee Jr., a Boston Globe reporter. Later this year, Ben Sr., 60, married to Washington Post Reporter Sally Quinn, 40, will also become a new father.