The TV host is happier than ever despite divorce, near financial ruin and no more babies. Katherine Chatfield reports.
The warmth of that sunny smile says it all. Life has turned full circle for Johanna Griggs since her dark days as a lonely single mum who struggled to pay the bills and provide a home for her two sons.
At 36, the Better Homes and Gardens host is on top in her career, deliriously happy in her marriage to Todd Huggins, and grateful that the pain of her divorce from her first husband, actor Gary Sweet, is finally in the past.
Joh cries when she talks about the moment she knew Todd, a big teddy bear of a man, was the one she wanted to spend her life with. When she got home from a three-week assignment in Italy in 2005, she learned Todd had visited her sons, Jesse, now 14 and Joe, 13, every day she was away, helping them with their homework and kicking a ball around the backyard.
“It floored me,” Joh recently revealed in a telling interview.
“I said, ‘Why would you do that?’ And he said, ‘Joh, I already know I want to be with you but I don’t want the boys to think I only want to be with you. I want them to know I want to be with them as well.’”
Todd, a builder, is the foundation she has built her new life around: he is her rock and a second father to Jess and Joe, whom he dotes on and treats as his own sons.
“He’s just been this incredible strength and stability for all of us,” says Joh. A former Commonwealth Games swimmer, Johanna was just 20 and a fresh face on television when she fell “madly in love” with Logie-winning actor Gary.
Charismatic and nearly two decades older, he swept Joh off her feet and she became the third Mrs Sweet in 1994. But their marriage broke down just three years later.
Joh has never gone public on the reasons behind their bitter split but recently, 12 years after they parted, she told the(sydney)magazine, “I think [Gary] likes the idea of everything, he wants the normality, but the reality of that is hard for him.”
At 24, Joh was a single mum of two toddlers, broke as well as broken-hearted after being sacked from her dream job by the Seven Network during the troubled marriage.Unable to afford to live in her own home yet desperate to keep it, she moved back in with her parents.
Despite her world crumbling around her, she didn’t give up – even setting herself the task of losing the more than 20 kilos she’d carried since her last pregnancy. Then, she bravely began the climb back to a career in television – and another chance at love.
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