She likes jobs … so she juggled three of them

After 35 years on the job, some people might get a gold watch, a dinner or maybe a fishing pole. Heather Tom got extra work.
That’s fine with her, she said. “I don’t like not working.”
Brad Bell, the producer of “The Bold and the Beautiful,” was aware of that. “This is a celebration of my 35 years of work,” Tom said. “So Brad said, ‘Let’s give you three jobs.’”
She wrote, directed (shown here) and acted in an episode — possibly the first woman to do that in one daytime episode. It airs at 1:30 p.m. Thursday (March 27) on most CBS stations.
This was planned for Women’s History Month, Tom said, focusing on mother-daughter relations including Brooke Logan and her daughters Hope and Katie (which is Tom’s role). “We’re a female force on the show. And Katie is kind of the moral center of the Logan women,”
A cynic might ask if Katie offers a good women’s-history image. She fills a TV stereotype – a good wife, married to a scoundrel. Her husband, Bill Spencer Jr., has lied and cheated, causing her agony and two heart attacks.
Still, she’s making progress. “She started out in the shadow of her sister,” Tom said. She was “not very sure of herself, of her ambitions; she was not confident in her own intelligence, even.”
That has changed. “She has really transformed herself …. And she does hold Bill’s feet to the flames.”
All of this has become natural for Tom. Still in her 40s (until Nov. 4), she’s been an actress for 48 years.
She did commercials and modeling in the Chicago area at 2, added theater roles and moved to Seattle with her family at 11. The next year, her mom took all three kids – Heather and younger twins David and Nicholle — to Los Angeles for auditions. All three have had busy careers.
“We had a very hands-on mother,” Tom said. “She wasn’t going to let us mess around or let us be messed around with.”
Tom did become legally emancipated at 15, but that was just for logistic reasons, she said. On “The Young and the Restless” — produced by Bill Bell, Brad’s father – she was taking over the role of Victoria Newman.
“Victoria will always be close to my heart because we grew up together,” Tom said. “We went through everything together – not entirely; I didn’t get married at 16.”
Victoria did. As the Y&R companion book (General Publishing Group, 1996) tells it, she lusted for Ryan McNeil, who lusted for her father’s money and for Nina Chancellor. “The triangle flattened out when Ryan, who was engaged to Nina, married Victoria, only to later divorce Victoria and marry Nina.”
Then she turned to Cole Howard, a ranch hand. They jetted to Las Vegas for a quick wedding. “When they returned, (her father) confronted them with the truth – they were brother and sister.” They annulled the marriage, learned they weren’t siblings after all, married again and later divorced.
This is the soap world Tom grew up in. “It’s a genre where the stakes are very, very high,” she said.
She played Victoria for 13 hectic years, then switched to the competing “One Live to Live,” to play Kelly Cramer. “I loved playing Kelly. She was just the opposite of Victoria – just crazy and funny and girly and fun.”
That was filmed in New York, during Tom’s busiest stretch. “I was always doing a play. I would work during the day and then do a play at night.”
In Los Angeles, she had co-founded one theater group and starred in “Glass Menagerie” for another. In New York, she worked on Broadway and off.
Tom returned to California in 2006 and, the next year, to the Bell world. She’s won four Daytime Emmys as Katie, joining her two from “Y&R.”
Tom has remained busy at work (adding directing and, last year, writing) and beyond. She and her husband, musician James Achor, had a design business and an HGTV show; their son Zane is 12.
It’s been a fast-paced time – especially on the day her triple episode was shot. “My biggest concern was that the show was really well-rehearsed …. There are some very emotional scenes.”
Being busy is Tom’s natural state, but what about when she slows down?
“Hot yoga is my church and my therapy,” she said. “And I love to hike …. That’s where my happy place is – taking my son on a 12-mile walk.”
It is, one assumes, a briskly paced walk.