Suzanne Somers Part 1

In the 1990s, sitcom star Suzanne Somers introduced Americans to one of the bestselling pieces of exercise equipment of all time: The ThighMaster. On this episode, we explore her harrowing early years. Chat, where are we at on punching nuns? Watch Your Fat Friend on YouTube, Apple TV, Prime Video and Kinema Support us: Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and more Links! Suzanne Somers ...

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Okay, I have one, but we have to do it like Peter and Michael style.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Michael?

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Aubrey.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  What do you know about Suzanne Somers?

• 0:20Speaker 00

  All I know is that her story is one we have to tell step by step.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  And day by day.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  It's the kind of episode where Two's Company.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  No, Three's Company.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  No, I know, but I'm making a, I'm making a pun.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  Aubrey fucking.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  All right, never mind. Let's record a different day.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Who did I marry?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I'm Aubrey Gordon.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  I'm Michael Hobbs.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase or subscribe on Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Same stuff, Aubrey.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Also.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Also what?

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Finally, the incredible film director, Jeanne Finley, directed a feature documentary about me and my family. It's called Your Fat Friend, and it is now actually available to rent or buy on Apple TV and YouTube and Prime Video and all those usual spots.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Haven't seen it, not worth $12.99.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. Oh my God, Michael, your support means the world to me.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  No, it's great. I said on theater, it was wonderful. You should watch it.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  Michael.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Aubrey.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Today, we are talking about a true boomer fitness icon, Suzanne Somers.

• 1:30Speaker 00

  This is one of those people who was like famous to your parents and like you didn't really know why.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  I feel like this is someone where like if you're under 25, this is probably how like Sandra Bullock is to you.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  What do you know, just as a starting point about Suzanne Somers? How do, how did she sort of come across your radar?

• 1:47Speaker 00

  I learned the name of the sitcom that she was on from checking the Wikipedia to get a zinger for our show.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Great. So glad that you spoiled yourself for a killer intro joke.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  I literally read like the third sentence and it was like, she's in a show called Step by Step. I was like, all right, we have one. I'm done here.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Step by Step was a TGIF show, so I watched the shit out of it.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  I also know from a text message from Aubrey Gordon that she was associated with the thigh master.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  I'm so glad that you now know who the lady is who's in the header image on all of our social media.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  The thigh master I recognize, the woman I do not.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Wow. This is somehow both your gayest and least gay attempt.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  I am gay, so I have face blindness for all women, but not for exercise equipment. I'm sorry.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  So Suzanne Somers sort of rose to fame as a breakout star on Three's Company, which was the most popular show on ABC for years. But she really built her fortune on the thigh master, which has made an estimated $300 million in sales.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  I'm so excited to learn more about the thigh master. I've not thought about the thigh master since I was like 12.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  It is one of the best-selling as seen on TV products of all time.

• 3:10Speaker 00

  It's such a dumb device. It only does one thing.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  So today, we are going to talk about the early years and the popular rise of Suzanne Somers.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  And next time, we will talk about her sort of second act as a fitness and wellness influencer.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  We were just talking about how I injured my shoulder rock climbing this morning. I just need something to distract me for the next three hours. I'm so in on this.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  So Suzanne Somers was born Suzanne Mahoney in San Bruno, California in 1946. San Bruno is just south of San Francisco. Suzanne Somers describes growing up in San Bruno as like a working class and lower middle class neighborhood.

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Back when they had those in the Bay Area.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Suzanne was born to a working class family herself. Her father was a laborer and sometimes boxer or boxing coach, and her mother was a medical secretary, and she was one of four children. Her father had a profound alcohol use disorder. When he was drunk, he was angry, he was loud, he was violent, and he was extremely abusive, both physically and emotionally. She ended up writing a whole memoir about her father's alcoholism and its effect on her. It came out in the 80s, so we'll be relying on that memoir quite a bit. She's

• 4:40Speaker 01

  very loving with her dad. It's clear that she really values their relationship now, but she also kind of pulls no punches in the storytelling about what he actually said and did. It's, I cried a lot reading this book, a lot. She also said that he would go on these rages at night, so she would like miss a bunch of sleep the night before, and then she would be like not very attentive in school. And this is like the 50s and early 60s, so her teachers largely just, she says, assumed that she was not a very capable student.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. Man.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Also, she later found out she was dyslexic.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  But again, this is at a time when teachers straight up would not have known what that was.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  Right. This is the time where like, if you're like, I'm struggling. They're like, oh, so you're stupid? Okay, we got a stupid one over here.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yes. So she gets treated from a very, very, very young age, as if she is like academically behind or sort of a lost cause or whatever.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  There's all this discourse now about like, oh, disability accommodations have gone too far and like people are faking it. And I'm sure there's some level of exaggeration, but underdoing it is so much worse than overdoing it.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Yep, totally. She is also in her tween and teen years. She gets a little like interested in boys. Her dad is not only someone with a very pronounced drinking problem, he's also Catholic, and she goes to a Catholic school.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Not responding because I don't want to get emails, but we're all thinking it.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Late 50s, early 60s, this was the era when even outside of Catholic schools, girls would be asked to kneel on the ground so that they could measure the distance between your kneecaps and the hem of your skirt.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  I grew up in the era when like the Catholic schools were just like the kids that did a lot of coke, but this is like a different level of Catholicism.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I feel like similarly, the Catholic schools were like, so it's all gonna be lesbians?

• 6:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  So at age 14 in 1960, Suzanne Somers was going to a Catholic school when she wrote some love notes to a boy that she had a crush on, but she never gave them to him.

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Okay, this is ominous.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  It is, because unfortunately, the sisters at her Catholic school found them. And I am going to send you an excerpt from her memoir where she talks about the moment when they confronted her.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  "Sit down," Sister Jean said sharply. "I felt scared. What could be so bad that they called my mother to come?" I thought. Should we do a little script for this?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Do you want me to be Sister Jean or Suzanne?

• 7:16Speaker 00

  Uh, you be Sister Jean, I'll be Suzanne.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  Okay. Sit down.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Sister Jean said sharply, "Good acting, Aubrey."

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  "I felt scared. What could be so bad that they called my mother to come?" I thought.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  "I went through your locker this weekend, and guess what I found?"

• 7:29Speaker 00

  "I didn't understand."

• 7:30Speaker 01

  "What?" she demanded.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  "I don't know," I said meekly.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  "Louder."

• 7:34Speaker 00

  "I don't know," I said again.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  "Well, then, I'll just have to tell you. I found all sorts of notes. Notes are against the rules. Don't you know that?"

• 7:44Speaker 00

  "I really don't know what you mean," I stammered.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  "Dear Mike," Sister Jean read, "how much I love you and wish you were in my arms. Isn't that sweet?" Sister Jean said sarcastically. She read on and on. She had a whole pile of notes, and she read them one by one. "How I would love to make love to you all night long," Sister Jean read. "You are a cheap little girl," she said. "Aren't you ashamed of yourself? Mrs. Mahoney, aren't you ashamed of your daughter?"

• 8:17Speaker 00

  I forgot her mom is there for all of this. This is horrifying. So then she goes through and reads all of the letters to her and her fucking mom.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yep. And then she goes, "We don't have room for cheap girls here."

• 8:31Speaker 00

  She didn't even do anything, though. She just like wrote cute love letters.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  This is a 14-year-old.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, they didn't find her like giving him a handjob underneath the bleachers or whatever. It's just like a cute love note.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Honest to God.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Dude, at my high school, there was a girl who had a crush on a boy named Zachary, and she had a diary. And she wrote Zachary, Zachary, Zachary over and over again in the diary. And then she left the diary, she forgot it, in one of her classes, and someone found it and fucking photocopied it and distributed it around the school.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  That's like worse somehow, but it also, it's kids doing it, which is like you can kind of forgive. Like, of course, kids are gonna be monsters. This is like an adult being hella shitty.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Well, it's an adult being like, you little hussy.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  "Can I travel back in time and burn down the 1950s as a concept?"

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Question. Chad, where do we fall on this?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  After getting expelled from her Catholic school, as you can imagine.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Wait, so she's expelled for this?

• 9:31Speaker 01

  She is expelled for this.

• 9:33Speaker 00

  She's just writing cute notes to a boy that she has a crush on. That's insane.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  And keeping them in her locker and not showing them to anyone.

• 9:41Speaker 00

  This is insane.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  I think the important things about these stories from her early years in particular are like, she is barely into high school and she's already being treated like she's dumb and like she's hypersexual.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's crazy.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  So after she's expelled, she began attending her local public high school hilariously named Cappuccino High.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  And she started engaging much more in their theater program and she auditions for a school play and gets cast in guys and dolls.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  She talks also quite a bit about her build, which was essentially the beauty standard of the time. She was like a very thin, conventionally attractive blonde woman and she had large breasts even in high school. So she talks about like, this was the starting point at which she started to get cast in roles that were more sexualized just because of her body type. It doesn't seem to bother her. She really starts to embrace them. At the same time, she talks about like getting really into the drama program and her high school drama teacher saying shit to her like in the halls at school like, and I quote, "Great legs, Mahoney."

• 11:00Speaker 00

  And she's like 15.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  This school drama teacher was 47. Suzanne Summers was 15 or 16.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  When he asked her out to a play to quote, "introduce her to theater."

• 11:14Speaker 00

  Oh, like by himself, like outside of school?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Yes. He took her on a date.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Dude, fuck.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  She was like, "I had a crush on him and he was willing to take me out. He was investing in me. I couldn't..." And she like tells her mom and her sister and they're both like, "Don't go. What a bad idea."

• 11:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  And she was like, "You're wrecking it." And she went anyway, where you're like, "Oh no." Well, you know, teenagers.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Here's the last thing I'll tell you about this drama teacher.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  She never uses his first name in the book.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  His name is, I shit you not, Mr. Bates.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Really? We had a teacher at my high school, Mr. Bone, whose first name was Richard.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Oh no.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  You give that material to a bunch of high schoolers? Poor fucking guy.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a kid at my school growing up whose last name was Rump. And I was like, "Well, that's, I'm so sorry."

• 12:08Speaker 00

  Someone fucked you over Ellis Island on that one, probably.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  So around the same time that she's like getting involved in the theater program and so on and so forth, her father's alcohol dependence was worsening and worsening. And Suzanne's expulsion from Catholic school only fueled the fire, right? He is a Catholic dude and it led to a moment with her father that she describes as a turning point that shaped her whole life to follow. Like I said, in reading this book, there are extremely harrowing instances that she recalls about the brutality of her father's alcoholism. I wanted to really keep those to a minimum in this episode because they are distressing.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  We're gonna talk about this one because she cites it as a turning point for the whole rest of her life. It is very explicit verbal and physical abuse. If that's not a thing you want to hear, I would say skip ahead a minute or two.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  So we're gonna read this passage. She's getting ready for a school dance and she is 16 when this happens. She's going to the dance with a boy she really liked. They couldn't afford to buy a new dress, so her mom sewed one for her.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  I'll be her dad so that you don't have to say horrendous shit.

• 13:31Speaker 00

  I'll be Suzanne for consistency.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Michael Hobbes, the ingenue.

• 13:35Speaker 00

  One night dad was very drunk and I was his target again. Bang, my bedroom door slammed open.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  "You think you're something, huh? Mommy's little favorite, huh? I'll show you you're nothing."

• 13:45Speaker 00

  He walked toward my closet.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  "Mommy's been buying her little pet some new clothes, huh? Huh, piss head? New clothes for all your boyfriends? Huh, cunt?"

• 13:55Speaker 00

  At that, he pulled my favorite dress out of my closet and started to rip it. "Stop it," I screamed. I ran to him and tried to pull the dress from his hands. He grabbed my wrist and twisted it till I thought it would break. "Mommy, make him stop." He threw me to the floor. He took another skirt. "Rip." "I hate you," I screamed at the top of my lungs. I tried to pull the skirt away from him. He threw me aside. My mother screamed. "Are you crazy?" she yelled. She tried to stop him. He pushed her to the floor.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  "I'll show you two. You're nothing."

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Rip went another dress. "No, no, no," I screamed. "Stop it, please." He wouldn't stop. All my clothes were on the floor. I jumped on him. He threw me off. My mother pulled at him. "Stop it, you crazy man," she yelled hysterically. I couldn't stand it. I felt a rage I had never felt before in my life. I didn't know what to do. I felt crazy, out of control. He was hurting my mother. He was ripping my clothes. He was stronger than both of us. I grabbed my tennis racket and with all my might, I banged the wood side down on the top of his head. I felt the wood connect. I heard the sound of breaking flesh. Blood spurted out of the top of his head like a fountain. Blood was everywhere. It wouldn't stop. He groaned a deep, low, guttural sound. "Oh my God," I wailed. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," I screamed. My father fell to the floor.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  My mother ran to the phone to call the hospital. "I didn't mean to," I cried over and over. Fuck.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  The words fail me to describe without these kinds of specifics how brutal this man is.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  To her. And this is like multiple times a week, this kind of thing is happening.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  And she has like kind of an understandable reaction to it where she's like freaks out and hits him in anger and then immediately feels sorry for him.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  He is the one who basically created this situation. It's fucking insane to act like this about your daughter. And like kind of, I know, I'm like cheering on like, "Yeah, hit him with the, hit him with the racket."

• 15:43Speaker 01

  They took him to the hospital. He had a concussion and that was, you know, and needed some stitches, but he was like functionally fine. But I think her snapping in that way really got her attention. She was like, "Oh God, I've never done anything like this before." That felt really out of control to me. And that is a sign that I cannot take this shit from this guy.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Anymore.

• 16:12Speaker 00

  Good.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  And one of his favorite things to say to her in this passage, he says, "You're nothing." Many times throughout the book, he tells her she's a big zero and she's going nowhere and shit like that.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Christ.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  And she later talks about this specific instance as being the point at which she goes, "Oh, you think I'm nothing? I'll show you."

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Right? That it sort of births a kind of defiance in her.

• 16:37Speaker 00

  Good. Yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  That helps to kind of free her in some ways for this, but also locks her into some other bad behaviors that we'll see over time.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  It's also, this is such a common abuse dynamic too, that like you experience systematic abuse. Eventually it boils over and you kind of lash out and then the abuser gets to play the victim.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  She also talked about, I was like, "Oh God," in the continuing like brutal realities of this. She was like, "My dad was a nightmare when he was like plastered. He was also kind of a nightmare when he was sober. Like that is why he wanted to drink."

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  And she was like, "The time that I really liked him was when he was like one or two drinks in."

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Oh God.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I was just like, "Oh God, this is such the like nitty gritty of living with someone who is like way deep in a substance use disorder."

• 17:24Speaker 00

  I love how every time we do like, "Ooh, it's a fun frothy wellness influencer biography."

• 17:28Speaker 01

  Definitely not.

• 17:29Speaker 00

  Like bleak memoir.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  In that way, it is very Richard Simmons.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  So needless to say, when Suzanne graduated from high school, she was ready to get out of that house.

• 17:41Speaker 00

  Go girl, run.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  So she enrolled in Lone Mountain College, which was a Catholic school.

• 17:47Speaker 00

  But she goes to another Catholic school.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Honest to God, lady. I suspect that this was a, "My parents will approve and I can have a do-over and make good" kind of thing.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Or maybe they would pay or whatever. Yeah.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  She wound up withdrawing from college in her first year because she had become pregnant.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  Oh wow. Okay.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  She had a shotgun wedding with her son's dad, Bruce Summers, in 1965. She was 18 years old.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  What is his deal?

• 18:18Speaker 01

  He is a college student at the University of San Francisco. He's like a couple of years older than her. And she's like, "He seems fine and I gotta get married."

• 18:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, yeah.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Every time I heard her tell this story in different interviews and books and so on and so forth, she claimed that she got pregnant the first time they had sex.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Okay, maybe.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Maybe. That strikes me as like, that's a thing that could be true. It could also be a thing that you say when you have a real mean, real Catholic dad.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  But does it seem like Bruce was like an okay guy?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  He seemed sort of fine. It seems like she was just never super into him.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  You know, she's now 18 years old. She's dropped out of college. She's married and she's pregnant. She gives birth to her son, Bruce Jr., Brucie. And as they are, you know, settling into married life and parenting, she's like, "I hate being married. I don't think this is the guy for me." In her stories about them dating, he is like very constantly pressuring her about sex and having sex. According to her A and E biography, while she is married to her first husband, she says she has an affair.

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Get it, girl.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  And that affair is with Mr. Bates.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Oh, oh. Oh, so after she's out of high school, it continues.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  She's one year out of high school.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  And he's like 50.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  And he's like 48 at this point, 49, something like that. She wrote in one of her memoirs that the guilt of that affair finally got to her. And she told the drama teacher that like her husband was getting suspicious, which was true.

• 20:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  And she needed like a two week break. She was like, I just, we just gotta cool off for a couple of weeks. This was so unacceptable to that man that the next day she comes home from work and Mr. Bates is talking to her husband and telling him about their affair.

• 20:18Speaker 00

  No fucking way.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  And her husband takes their son and leaves her.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  What?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  Can you just do that? Could you do that back then?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  I mean, he did. I don't know.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  You just like bounce?

• 20:30Speaker 01

  So he leaves her for a while and then he's like, actually taking care of the kid is your job, but I'm still leaving you.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  He tried being a dad for like 24 hours and then he's like, I, all right.

• 20:39Speaker 01

  There's a lot of noping out of parenting from this guy as the story continues.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  Not to be all like et tu teacher who's molesting a former student, but like.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Wild as fuck behavior.

• 20:51Speaker 00

  Sleeping with your former student is insane. Also, while she is 19 and like has a new baby at home and married, which all of this you know, presumably.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  And she's like, I need two weeks off of having sex with you. And you're like, cool. I'm gonna blow up your entire fucking life.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  All right. Time to ruin your life because you told me to wait two weeks. Jesus Christ.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  So she and her husband get a divorce. Um, this is before the existence of no fault divorce.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  So they have to provide grounds for divorce. Here is a little passage of her talking about that in her memoir, Keeping Secrets.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  I had to have grounds for divorce and there was a question of custody. I had never considered that Bruce might want custody. When he tried to get it, bitterness grew up between us and escalated to name calling. All of Bruce's repressed anger toward me rose to the surface. The grounds for my divorce were adultery. I was an adulteress. I thought about wearing a big scarlet A around my neck. I asked for $1 a month alimony and $150 a month child support. I didn't get the alimony. But she did get the child support. That's good.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Like so, so many men who are court ordered to pay child support, he simply stops and faces no consequences for not paying child support.

• 22:07Speaker 00

  It's more like a guideline or like a suggestion, like, hey, if you don't really mind.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  And it's a dumb one that you don't have to follow.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  It's just your child. I mean, like pay it, pay it.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  So by 1968, she is on her own as a single mother to a toddler. As you can imagine, she starts really piecing it together. She like tries to get a job as a waitress. She works at a hospital for a bit. Finally, she finds a job that works better with her schedule and that is that she signs with a modeling agency. So she can go away and do a one day shoot and get paid a lump sum.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Great.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  And she starts booking quite a few jobs. She's like, easy to work with. She's friendly. She super needs the money. She's like on time.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Oh, good. She's gonna get out of like the rapey teacher and into the modeling industry.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  What could go wrong? By the time her modeling career starts, her ex-husband hasn't paid his child support in three years.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Men are trash. Are people talking about this?

• 23:08Speaker 01

  She, you know, is making better money on a better schedule, but it's still a far cry from what she needs to like feed, clothe and house her and her son.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  So she starts writing bad checks.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Oh no. Okay.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  She starts check kiting and she does it quite a bit. To the tune of like a few thousand dollars. I inflation calculated it. It is like $17,000 by today's standards. Like it's not a small amount.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  It's a lot. Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  So in 1970, there is a knock on her door and it is the police with a warrant for her arrest.

• 23:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. You can't get away with that for very long. Yeah.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  This is her mugshot.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Oh, there's a Suzanne Somers mugshot?

• 23:51Speaker 01

  You better believe it.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Wow. I'm sorry, but she looks amazing. I know that's not the point.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Isn't it the most beautiful mugshot you have ever seen?

• 24:02Speaker 00

  She looks like one of Charlie's Angels. Her hair is like feathered out.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  This is no question, one of the worst days of her life to date.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  And also.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Damn.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  She looks amazing. It's nuts.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  She looks like anime. She's like huge, big eyes and like an upturned little nose.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  This is a fucking Helen of Troy face.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Let's just be horny for the rest of the episode. Let's just look at photos and be like, ah.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  No, we're not doing that.

• 24:27Speaker 00

  Two queer people getting horny over a lady 60 years ago.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Change your mind later in the episode.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  God damn it. Okay.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  So she's arrested in 1970. She is trying to figure out how to like bounce back and make enough money to pay for these bad checks that she has passed and come back from this like really humiliating thing that is like, she's clearly in the wrong and she knows that she's clearly in the wrong.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Wait, what happened with the trial then? She, did she go to jail for the checks?

• 24:58Speaker 01

  No, she is a very beautiful white woman and she went to court and was like, I promise I'll pay it back.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Okay. Okay. So it was like probation or something?

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Yes, it is probation.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  I dream of a nation where everybody gets white lady treatment.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  That's the Michael Hobbs promise.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  So she's trying to figure out how to bounce back from this extremely tight financial time. And just a few months after her arrest in 1971, her son Brucey was hit by a car.

• 25:28Speaker 00

  What? Does he die?

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Her son pulls through, but after major physical and emotional trauma at age six is how old he is at this point, he needs a lot of care.

• 25:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  She like takes him to therapy. She starts going to therapy. Their son needs a lot of care and this is simply too much for her ex-husband. So he writes to her and says that he will no longer help care for their son.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Like the piece of shit Olympics at this point, just like on the podium, holding up the trophy.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  We were already pushing it. You know, I wasn't gonna pay you child support, but time with my kid?

• 26:04Speaker 00

  You're on thin ice already.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  And she is very gracious with him and was like, you know, he had a new wife and was starting a new family and da, da, da.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  Fuck. Well, then he can pay his fucking child support then.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  Because we are in the United States, her son's car wreck means astronomical medical bills for a lady who was already check kiting to get by, right? She starts looking for jobs that pay a little bit more and she gets an offer to do a shoot for Playboy.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Oh, I didn't know she did that. Okay.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  It is very lucrative. She certainly needs the money and she's definitely at this point like pretty comfortable in her own skin and comfortable with her own sexuality in spite of everything that has happened to this point.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  I'm, okay, I'm furiously Googling.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Don't, are you Googling the Playboy shoot? Don't do it because it'll spoil a later event.

• 26:54Speaker 00

  Okay, okay, okay, okay.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  So she goes, they do a test shoot. She gets paid for the test shoot, but she decides against doing the full shoot for the publication.

• 27:06Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  So she just takes the money from the test shoot, which she gets paid for.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  And she is naked for that.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  And she is naked for that. They're doing test shots to see how her body reads on camera, how she is to work with as a model before they pull in the full court press of all the lighting and photography stuff.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  So Chekhov's naked photos.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  I can't imagine why you would say that, Michael.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Around this time, she finally gets steady work.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  On a game show as a prize model.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Oh, where she's like holding up the briefcase?

• 27:39Speaker 01

  She's doing like a Vanna White. She's doing like a Deal or No Deal. The show was called The Anniversary Game and it was hosted by a guy named Alan Hamill.

• 27:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Alan Hamill was already married, but that did not stop him and Suzanne from having an affair, baby.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  All right.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  And just a few months after her arrest and just before her son's accident, she became pregnant with Alan's baby.

• 28:06Speaker 00

  Girl.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  And was like, yep, nope, totally, totally. And to her credit, in this memoir, which came out in 1988, she is very open about having an abortion.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  So for the duration of her career, she is pretty upfront about like, yep, I'm a lady who had an abortion.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Good for her. Yeah.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Genuinely.

• 28:27Speaker 00

  So she has the abortion. Are they still dating after this or the affair ends?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  They stay together.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  And eventually Alan divorces his wife.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Okay. True love?

• 28:36Speaker 01

  And by the end of 1977, Alan Hamill and Suzanne Somers got married and moved to Palm Springs together.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Okay. A happy ending, kind of.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  She stayed married to Alan Hamill until the day she died.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  That's nice. And he seems wholesome and cool?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Uh, she loves him.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  And she speaks about him in glowing terms throughout the book. She also is pretty unvarnished about like, yeah, it was, it was a hard time getting my son on board with having a stepdad. Yeah. He was a little brusque to begin with.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  But she is so clearly, for the duration of her life, completely head over heels for him and he feels the same way about her.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  That's great.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  So Alan is a game show host. He is an actor. He is all showbiz all the time. And eventually he becomes her manager. And together, they start building her acting career.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  That begins with that first game show. And then she joins his next show that he hosts as a panelist. It's like a 70s style panel show.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  His show is on the CBC in Canada, and it is called Man Trap.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Wait, what, really?

• 29:54Speaker 01

  I couldn't find clips of Man Trap, but I read as much as I could find.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Here is the description of the show from IMDb.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  During each of the episodes, one male celebrity guest has to face a panel of three female celebrities who just wait for the smallest opportunity to dump him for anything he says or does that seems insulting to their womanhood. Dude, before phones, man, you could just get anything on TV. People just needed something to watch in the evenings.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  This is a straightforward backlash to second wave feminism.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Right, yeah.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  It's a way of like platforming women and being like, look at how terrible these women are.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Also, how did they get people to go on? They're like, we want you to go to this game show where we're just gonna talk shit, basically, and find something wrong with you.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Well, it's very fun. I looked up who some of the men were on Man Trap, and it's like Dick Sargent and Paul Lind, two famously gay men.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I'm, I'm sure I'm like queeny gay men all the time. What could women do to me?

• 30:51Speaker 01

  This is the era of like, everyone's favorite singer is confirmed bachelor Freddie Mercury.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, and like Liberace and stuff, yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Rob Halford and Judas Priest, just dressed as a fucking leather daddy all day. And people being like, he'll make a great catch for a lady someday. And you're like, Billy. During this time, she also starts writing poetry.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  And she is fortunate enough to have a collection published.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  Her first book was called Touch Me: The Poems of Suzanne Somers.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Her poetry collection was the first thing I read in researching her, and absent the context, it was very funny to me.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  I assume they're bad, honestly.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, like, listen, I'm a person who wrote poems about people I dated in my twenties, and I would not like anyone ever to read or see any of those.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  So what's in it? What's it like?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Well, I thought we should hear one of her poems.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna read it, I'm not gonna make you read it. Instead, we have a clip of Kristen Wiig.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  What?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Reading Suzanne Somers' poetry.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  This next one is called Extra Love.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Let's see.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Sometimes I wonder if there's enough love to go around.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  All the people I know grasp for it, the ladies whose husbands drift away, the men whose lives have forgotten to care.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  The children standing on their heads to be noticed.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  And well, I might as well admit it, me.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  What about me?

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Sometimes I wonder if there's enough love to go around with all the pain and longing. But one thing is for sure, if anyone has any extra love, even a heartbeat or a touch or two, I wish they wouldn't waste it on dogs.

• 32:51Speaker 00

  Wait, what?

• 32:55Speaker 00

  That's pretty good.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Don't do that.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Pretty great.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  I was about to defend it, be like, okay, this is really mean spirited, and then it got to the end.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yes. I consider myself to be like a very earnest writer. Her stuff is very, very, very earnest.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  So she actually thinks that you shouldn't waste love on dogs? That she just hate dogs?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  I don't know what that's about. Around this time, she also starts getting little bit parts in movies and TV shows. She has an uncredited role in Magnum Force. She gets a guest spot on a TV show called Lots of Luck. But perhaps her most notable bit part was as the blonde in the white thunderbird in American Graffiti.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  American Graffiti is, of course, George Lucas's sort of breakout movie before Star Wars. And she is like a showstoppingly beautiful woman in a sort of nameless kind of role in the movie, and becomes like the topic of conversation. And because this is pre-internet, no one knows how to find out who she is. She's not in the credits of the movie, blah, blah, blah.

• 34:02Speaker 00

  Right, yeah.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  The good news is that the popularity and acclaim for American Graffiti, when she did go out for auditions, got her foot in the door for a bunch more callbacks, right? Like, she just started having like a better rate of callbacks when people were like, oh, wait, that's you, right?

• 34:17Speaker 00

  Dude, the, uh, the woman in the red dress from The Matrix is mauling right now.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  While she was out on auditions on a lot at one point, she struck up a conversation with someone in passing, and that someone was Johnny Carson.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Oh, okay.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  She, at this point, gave him a copy of her book of poetry. He was like, what are you doing? And she was like, well, I'm auditioning, and also I just released this book of poetry.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  She doesn't get this audition, but she does get a call from The Tonight Show, being like, Johnny wants to have you on the show.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  God, all these guys were just using this as like pimping opportunities, all their like showbiz garbage, yeah.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  So she was like, oh, my God, he must have loved my book of poetry.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  Oh, sweetie.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yep. And she's like, great, this is a great opportunity to promote my first book. So she goes on The Tonight Show. And while she's waiting to go on, he's like, everybody's been wondering who that blonde in the white thunderbird is.

• 35:12Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, of course.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Well, we got her.

• 35:14Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Would you like to see a clip?

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Of the Carson interview.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  Where's home for you?

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Sausalito, California.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you came to Hollywood just to say I want to be an actress and get into this nutty business?

• 35:30Speaker 04

  Uh, I came to Hollywood to do lots of, I've been here one week.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  She's been in LA for one week.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  That's all?

• 35:36Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  Our producers waste no time at all.

• 35:38Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Now, Mr. Reed, you see, could really give you more advice. He is involved with a motion picture. How, what's the best way for this young lady to pursue her career? Do you have any particular questions, uh?

• 35:49Speaker 05

  No, but I'll be glad to discuss it with her after this.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  I figured you would.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  You know, so many people say that.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  Well, that's, you, uh, you, that, that brings up a point. You, now, you've read about, uh, I suppose, about young girls coming to Hollywood and the, and the so-called, quote, casting couch and the, that, that myth, I guess it's a myth, I don't know.

• 36:11Speaker 00

  This is so awkward. I'm about to die.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  But do you?

• 36:15Speaker 04

  I haven't been on the casting couch yet.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  No, I didn't, no, I didn't say, uh, yet?

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yet, he said, yet?

• 36:23Speaker 04

  That was a slip, I didn't.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  Do you find it a difficult town to, uh, to navigate in at all?

• 36:27Speaker 04

  I, I really can't say because I am, I truly.

• 36:31Speaker 03

  You see that, no?

• 36:31Speaker 04

  The day that I saw you in the commissary, I said, where is Donna Carson? Because that was my first day in an NBC studio or in any studio.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  God, this was TV? This was TV?

• 36:43Speaker 01

  This is.

• 36:44Speaker 00

  I want to die.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Men be normal around Suzanne Somers challenge, impossible.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Turning, like, the concept of the casting couch into like, I just met you small talk is crazy.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  It's unfucking real, and then for her to be like, I've only been here for a week, I haven't had that happen yet, and him going, yet?

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Like, that's a big opportunity. And the one other dude on stage being like, I'll talk to you afterwards. I mean, I think this is like a really good indicator of the climate that she is stepping into.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  This is their behavior when the world is watching.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Right?

• 37:23Speaker 00

  It's funny how like not even good at flirting they are. There's like long silences in this. Oh, man. If I, if I was like part of this like conversation at a party, I would like immediately be like, I gotta get a drink, better get a new drink, and just like walk away.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  Just like, get me the fuck out of here.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Call the police, put on a fucking Kevlar vest, get out your drink testing strips.

• 37:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, seriously.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  So from that first appearance on Carson, like, she has very quickly established herself as both an actor and a writer.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  She goes on to write a total of 25 books in her life.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Wait, really? All poetry?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  No, only one poetry collection. This is the only poetry collection.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Wait, what, what else did she write about?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  I wound up reading 10 books for this.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  Aubrey, you did not.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  I did.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  10 books about Suzanne Somers?

• 38:18Speaker 01

  By Suzanne Somers, about Suzanne Somers, about the thigh master.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  You're like, six of them were about the thigh master.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  One of them was about the thigh master specifically, we'll get there.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  The thigh master is actually the kind of thing that there'd be like a berserk PhD dissertation written about. There'd be like the most interesting thing you've ever read, but also like, how did someone dedicate three years of their life to this?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  It's, I'll tell you what, the book about the thigh master is not the most interesting thing you've ever read.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Among the viewers of Suzanne's appearance on The Tonight Show were higher-ups at ABC.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  They had been working on shooting the first season of a show called Three's Company, which was an American adaptation of a British sitcom called Men About the House.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  The idea was that two single women and one single man were living together, but their landlord thought that seemed untoward, so they pretended that the man, played by John Ritter, was gay. That's the central conceit of Three's Company.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  I can't believe they milked like a years-long sitcom out of this.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It ran for, I think, five or six seasons.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Unbelievable. Okay.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  So ABC had shot the first few episodes, and one of the three leads wasn't working out. So she was fired, and they brought in people to audition, including Suzanne Somers.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  They did an Aragorn.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  And she was cast as Chrissy Snow, was the name for her character, on Three's Company. That character is often written about as being like the archetypal sort of dumb blonde slash sexpot kind of character.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  Three's Company becomes a massive hit. It is one of the most popular shows on TV, and it is the most popular show on ABC. She's like on a rocket ship to the moon.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  She's on like all of these magazine covers. This is the most popular show. She is the most popular character.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  After several seasons of the show just absolutely crushing it, it's time for contract negotiations. This is heading into their sixth season. So they've had five years of being this like immensely popular show. And in those negotiations, Suzanne Somers asks for a raise.

• 40:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  She wants to be paid the same amount as her male co-star, John Ritter.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  Okay. I see where this is going.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Suzanne Somers was making $30,000 an episode, which is really not bad money, especially in 1980. Suzanne is making $30,000 an episode. So is Joyce DeWitt, the other woman lead. John Ritter is making $150,000 per episode.

• 41:02Speaker 00

  Fuck.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  He is making five times what she is making.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  I think you were gonna say like double or something, which would be egregious, but five times.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Adjusted for inflation, John Ritter's pay in today's dollars would have been about $500,000 per episode, and Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt would have been making about $100,000 per episode.

• 41:20Speaker 00

  It's funny, if she demanded half as much as a man, that would still be like a 300% raise.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  At one point, her husband is in negotiating as her manager on her behalf, and he's like talking to the ABC higher-ups, and they're like, "Well, if we pay her $150,000, then we have to pay John Ritter $250,000." And they're like, "No!"

• 41:42Speaker 00

  That's so funny. He has to be making more, obviously.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  So Suzanne Somers counters back. They are like, "We'll give her another five grand an episode." And she's like, "No."

• 41:53Speaker 00

  Five grand is crazy.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yep. While these negotiations are going on, she is out sick for a couple of episodes. She says she was unwell. The ABC executives take this as like she's playing hardball.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  ABC starts reducing her part to one to two minutes per episode.

• 42:14Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  So the negotiations are extremely tense.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  And in 2015, Suzanne's manager and husband, Alan, recounts this story to The Hollywood Reporter.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  He says, "The night before we went in to renegotiate, I got a call from a friend who had connections high up at ABC. He said, 'They're going to hang a nun in the marketplace, and the nun is Suzanne.' The network was willing to do this because earlier that year, the women on Laverne and Shirley had gotten what they asked for, and they wanted to put a stop to it. They'd destroy the chemistry on Three's Company to make a point." It's very much a metaphor for like a lot of other like industrial negotiations, that like companies will destroy themselves rather than pay what the workers are asking.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Well, and in this case, they are very explicit. "We already started paying Laverne and Shirley more."

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  "We can't have women getting ideas that they can just renegotiate their contracts."

• 43:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  "They're getting ideas about getting paid still not as much as men, but more than they're being paid now, and we need to nip that in the bud."

• 43:21Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  And they fire Suzanne Somers during these negotiations.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  Wait, so this actually happened? I didn't know this.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:27Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  They fired the breakout star of their most popular show because she wanted to be paid what the man standing next to her was getting paid.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  That's wild.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  The show goes on for one additional season and then comes to a close.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  The response from the public and the media is predictably awful, and Suzanne is blamed for the end of the show.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  This always happens. Like, you're making a lot of money, and yet you're asking for more.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Wow. How greedy can you get?

• 43:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  And you're like, "I'm making 20% of what I'm... I am working at 80% salary remission."

• 44:04Speaker 00

  She's not the one being greedy here. The greed is on the part of people who are making so much money with these fucking sitcoms. They were getting a huge amount of money from advertisers. They easily could have afforded it.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Three's Company definitely paid the price. When she was on, her last season on the show, it was the number two show on television, and the season after she left, it dropped to ninth. We don't even have cable yet at this point. There are five channels that you can be watching at any given point.

• 44:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  So dropping to ninth?

• 44:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  When there are five choices?

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Not great. So Suzanne is now being very publicly scapegoated. She's like on the cover of TV Guide as like a fallen sitcom star.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  She's lost her main source of income. Just when she is really going through it and down on her luck, she gets kicked while she's down, and Playboy decided to publish her test photos without her permission or knowledge.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  They have like a folder somewhere where they just keep all this shit, and they're like, "In case one of them gets famous."

• 45:09Speaker 01

  A few years later, in 1984, she is still struggling to find TV work, and Playboy approaches her about posing again, which is wild, and she says yes! After they published her test shots without her permission, she says yes.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  It's already out there anyway. Like, if people can look at you naked, you might as well get paid to get photographed naked. Yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  This is like Pamela Anderson, like profiting off of the sex tape that was leaked.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 45:37Speaker 00

  It's happening. I might as well be the one to benefit from it. Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Well, and again, she feels good about the way that she looks. She's not, like, despite the best efforts of absolutely everyone around her, she is not shamed by her sexuality. So she's like, "You know what? Sure."

• 45:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  She does not write about this as being like a tortured or difficult decision. She doesn't write, she's just like, "Yeah, man. Hey, I needed work. I look pretty good."

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, whatever. Yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  So aside from Playboy, after the end of Three's Company, she is once again sort of piecing together stage roles.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  She does a residency in Vegas at the MGM Grand, and then another at the Vegas Hilton. It's definitely like steady work, but it's not what you do when you're at the top of the world as an A-lister, right?

• 46:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  And without a TV show, those bookings start to thin out because the promoters tell her it's harder to sell tickets when she's not on TV, right?

• 46:33Speaker 00

  It's crazy how just getting, even like the whispers of like, "She's difficult."

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  Is just like enough to basically tank your career.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Because this is somebody who like was basically America's sweetheart. She's on this like massively successful show. She's clearly a gifted comedic actress, and then she just like disappears.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, she has a conversation some years later with one of the executives, like a few years after Three's Company ends, and he's like, "Look, man, you were seen as like a sure bet, and now you're seen as a loose cannon." She has a couple of TV opportunities that don't go super far. She makes a pilot for a sitcom called Suzanne.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  But it really fizzles, and she's like, "It felt like they were putting roadblocks in the way of the show." In 1987, she lands a TV role on a sitcom where she is the lead. It's called She's the Sheriff.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Where Suzanne played a widow who takes on her late husband's job, which is being the sheriff of a small town.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  I love, I love the premises of 80's sitcoms.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  In her memoir, she was like, "I didn't like this show. How did she get her husband's job? He's elected. Why would this happen?" Like, she was just like, "It's dumb. I didn't like it, but it was work, and I needed work."

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Remember Small Wonder?

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Jesus, do I!

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Where they have like a robot daughter, and like everything is like the hijinks that ensue.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  So She's the Sheriff ran for a few seasons before also kind of fizzling out.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  During this time, she also writes her second book, which is called Keeping Secrets.

• 48:11Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  It is a memoir about her father's alcoholism and its far-reaching effects on her life. All that means that her book garners a lot of media attention in a way that seems genuinely productive to me.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  It's like a comeback memoir?

• 48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. As a result of it, she started getting letters from many, many readers being like, "Oh, my God, here's what happened in my life," and then like trauma dump.

• 48:36Speaker 00

  It's like your inbox.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  It is. There are some similarities.

• 48:41Speaker 00

  That stood out to you.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  So she founded the Suzanne Somers Institute for the Effects of Addiction on Families.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Which, among other things, just sort of acted as a connector to her readers so that she could go, "Call this hotline."

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  "They can give you all the resources. They can give you local referrals to wherever you are for like treatment and support." And like, provided that those are reliable sources and not quacky weird shit, like, that's a straightforwardly good thing to do.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  This is why you're founding the Aubrey Gordon "I'm Sorry Your Mom Was Mean" Foundation.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Nope. No, sure am not.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  With a hotline.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  The Aubrey Gordon Institute of Almond Moms. But fundamentally, despite the success of this memoir, you know, like, you write a book, and it is sort of by design a flash in the pan.

• 49:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  She is still fundamentally kind of down and out in Hollywood and in business. This is the late 80's, heading into the early 90's. She's had this Vegas residency. She wrote this book, which was successful, but it's not like a career relaunch, and it's certainly not acting, right? It's now been six or seven years since she was on Three's Company. She's been off TV and on in these sort of like, you know, She's the Sheriff-style projects. She wants to get back on screen. She wants to get back to like a winner of a sitcom. In 1990 and 1991, she finds her way back to the small screen

• 50:10Speaker 01

  with a landmark role in another long-running sitcom. And in those same years, she launches what will become one of the best-selling-as-seen-on-TV products of all time.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Ooh.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Making over $300 million in sales. Next time.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  Ooh. I knew we were getting there.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Suzanne Somers introduces America to the thigh master.

• 50:35Speaker 00

  It's funny that she has Mr. Bates and the thigh master, and I'm trying to make it work.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  I did think about, um, the connotations were wrong, but I was like, "Do we call this episode Suzanne Somers colon thigh mistress?" And then I was like, "Nope. No, we sure don't. She's had enough of that. I don't need to be another Sister Jean."