Jaclyn Smith, 80, Opens Up About Her Near-Lifelong OCD Battle

Jaclyn Smith is getting candid about her near-lifelong battle with OCD.

In her new memoir, I Once Knew a Guy Named Charlie, out now, she reveals that she was 12 when she began obsessively praying for her family members to keep them safe after her uncle’s death at 54 from the effects of alcohol addiction.

In this week's People cover story, she said, “It’s really an unusual form of OCD. It all revolved around loved ones, and prayer, and sacrifice, and manifesting. It just eased my anxiety and my nerves on the people I love so much, and I didn’t want to lose them.”

While studying psychology in college, Smith read about the disorder, and it resonated.

She explained in the book, “It’s not fun being diagnosed (or self-diagnosing) with a psychiatric disorder, but at the same time I felt relieved. There was a name for it, and I wasn’t alone!”

According to Smith, her OCD can be triggered in moments of stress.

This is true especially if they involve her kids Gaston, 44, and Spencer-Margaret, 40, whom she shares with her third husband, cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond, 84.

“You just want to catch every raindrop, but I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older that you can’t control everything,” she said to People. “You just can’t.”

While she and Richmond split in 1989, Smith still looks back on their marriage with fondness.

As she said, “That period in my life was a very beautiful period. I never thought I’d have children, and he gave me these beautiful kids.”

Saying that motherhood has been “the best part of my life,” Smith shared her reaction to finding out that she was pregnant with her son Gaston in 1981.

She told People, “I couldn’t believe it. It was just so encompassing.”

Four years later, she welcomed daughter Spencer-Margaret, and she arranged her “whole life around” her kids.

“Nothing was more important — today, too,” she said. “I mean, they’re everything. They can make or break your day. If they’re not happy, it affects me. You never stop worrying about your kids.”

As Smith shared in her memoir, she once considered motherhood to be impossible.

In the months after her uncle's death, when she was 12, Smith wrote that her “stress showed itself in physical symptoms, including a missed period.”

When her mom took her to the doctor, the doctor told her after a blood test that her hormones were “all messed up” and that she “might have trouble having a child.”

“On a purely human level, it felt cruel to tell an anxious, grieving adolescent girl that she could be infertile,” she wrote. “He was the doctor, so I believed him, and my anxiety doubled instantly.”