COMING IN 2018: WE'RE ENTERTAINING NOURISHMENT FOR THE MIND, BODY & SOUL
We will return in 2018 with a new look, mission & direction. Stay tuned as we develop our online destination that celebrates contemporary & retro pop culture as well as body, mind & spirit!
On the eve of pop culture's historic Joyce DeWitt-Suzanne Somers peace summit, er, YouTube reunion following their legendary 31-year estrangement, "Three's Company" co-star Richard Kline -- TV's lovably libidinous Larry Dallas -- breaks his silence about their reconciliation and offers his insights into Suzanne's contentiou$ 1981 exit from their hit 1977-84 sitcom. The accomplished stage and screen actor/director/acting coach also reveals how he's coped with the loss of his dear friend,"Company" star John Ritter, who tragically passed away in 2003. As the breakthrough sitcom reaches its 35th anniversary this spring, Kline reveals his previous plans for a stage version of the wacky roommate farce and describes his experience as James Franco's special guest last year during the Oscar-nominated actor's bizzare Sundance presentation "Three's Company: The Drama." Finally, find out the hysterical comment Richard made to aPerezHilton.com story quoting Suzanne as saying that "everybody's gone from that show."
Also, host and "Three's Company" tell-all author Chris Mann offers an exclusive, in-depth historical analysis of Suzanne and Joyce's separation -- including Joyce's repeated efforts to reconcile in the last 15 years -- as well as failed attempts at/missed opportunities for "Three's Company" reunions from the mid-'90s onward. You won't get this detailed backstory anywhere else, folks!
Also in this recent clip from Access Hollywood Live!, Somers talks about the transformation she underwent when becoming Chrissy, including a "change" (or not, as she corrects herself) in her "moral code." Interesting ...
Here's Richard Kline with Franco Snow ... Suzanne, is your Somershave hair removal system on the market yet?
Suzanne Somers has a number-one book. And all hell is breaking loose.
For good reason. The media-savvy, self-branding celebrity poet-turned-actress/entertainer-turned-author/entrepreneur-turned-home shopping mogul/ThighMaster millionaire-turned-alternative health guru’s latest tome, Knockout, boldly cold-cocks chemotherapy while promoting controversial treatments and doctors claiming to cure this year’s biggest celebrity killer: cancer. This dreaded, virulent scourge is expected to claim 562,340 American lives—famous and non-famous—in 2009.
In recent months, cancer has achieved an unusually high media profile, tragically claiming the lives of the iconic Farrah Fawcett, Patrick Swayze, Ted Kennedy, Ed McMahon, Bea Arthur, Dom Deluise and Dominick Dunne. One of its latest famous victims was Larry Gelbart, the Emmy-winning M*A*S*H writer/producer who in 1976 penned the first (jiggle-free) pilot of the ABC series that—on the heels of Farrah Fawcett-Majors-dom in 1977—would make Somers a self-merchandising poster girl and boob-tube superstar: Three’s Company.
Writes Somers, “After all the billions and billions of dollars thrown at cancer research, after all the marches for cancer by well-meaning women raising yet more money for pharmaceutical companies and after all the black-tie fundraisers … There is no cure! Only more and more money for the pharmaceutical companies to the tune of $200 billion a year!” Counters Posner, “Cancer is a recurring thread and marketing tool for her wide-ranging business interests … To many cancer experts interviewed by The Daily Beast, (Knockout’s promotion of bioidentical hormones as cancer ‘wonder drugs’) now makes Somers extremely dangerous. A flawed decision won’t lead to a lower sex drive or body aches. It will lead to death.”
Most of Posner’s quote eerily echoes the late John Ritter’s emotional words spoken to me in spring 2001 shortly after TV’s former Chrissy Snow revealed to Larry King (and the world) that she had breast cancer and eschewed chemo in favor of injecting the herb Iscador. The bestselling diet book author took to King’s show several days after The National Enquirer caught her coming out of a liposuction clinic—weeks before her third “Somersize” book, Eat, Cheat and Melt the Fat Away (!), was due to hit stores. Legit press picked up the scandal, which comedians dubbed “ThighGate.” In a move that stupefied and likely pissed off the medical community, an uncharacteristically fidgety, nose-scratching, hesitant and inarticulate Somers nervously claimed to King that she’d had lipo strictly to “even out” the disfiguring effects of radiation and a lumpectomy.
Days after her revelation, I met Ritter backstage at his Neil Simon-written Broadway play The Dinner Party. He was not a happy camper. Two weeks prior he’d poked fun of his once-beloved yet famously-long-estranged co-star’s lipo scandal when he reteamed with Three’s Company roomie Joyce DeWitt for a CBS Early Show “Retro Reunion” segment (Somers declined to participate). During the interview, John grabbed a Chrissy Snow doll, pressed its midsection to his mouth and joked that he’d given it “lip-osuction.” Joyce, the female host and off-camera crew guffawed. Suzanne, not so much.
Instead, she returned what she called Ritter’s “stab in the heart” with a stab of her own, telling King that Ritter’s “really low-class joke” played a role in her “higher power” pushing her to come forward as a breast cancer survivor … who just happened to have what may be the most bizarre—if brilliantly bad-PR-shifting—explanation ever for having cellulite sucked out of one’s post-ButtMastered hips, upper back and abdomen.
“The whole reason I was in (the lipo clinic)—my book was not even on my mind,” Somers told King after evading his lipocentric questions for a good 10-15 minutes. “The whole reason that I went in there is because of … of … I was affected by the radiation and what happened to me on the medication, and having cancer. Cancer … cancer throws everything off when you're in treatment.” Apparently, the infamously softball-lobbing King’s relentless pressing of the lipo issue also threw her off.
Ritter was unnerved, to say the least. “I talked to Joyce,” he told me in his Dinner Party dressing room, “and we don’t know if Suzanne has cancer or not, because she lies.”
In my 1998 book Come and Knock on Our Door, Ritter, DeWitt and several other Three’s Company staff members said Somers fibbed about her health and lied about Ritter and DeWitt in TV and print interviews while holding out for a 500 percent pay hike and series profits during the number-one-rated sitcom’s production in fall 1980. Ritter, the series’ lead, interpreted his once-close friend’s alleged cracked ribs (X-rays for which never surfaced) as a negotiation ploy, and he took what Three’s Company’s cast and crew perceived as her very public sick-out and very public grandstanding … well … very, very personally.
Flash forward two decades. Ritter was appalled that Somers might be using breast cancer—real or imagined—to leverage damage control during a public relations nightmare. “I take this disease very, very seriously,” he emphasized to me. One of his best friends, actor Paul Linke of CHiPs fame, lost his wife to breast cancer in 1986 after her valiant two-year battle, Ritter said, the crescendo building in his voice. Somers should be careful what she says, he added, because this wasn’t Three’s Company, circa-1980 back/rib injuries and a Somersize salary fight that threatened to sink a hit show. Forget livelihoods—this time, people’s lives were on the line.
“Do you think this scandal will do her in?” I asked Ritter.
“I’ve thought she was done a few times,” he responded, “but she always manages to come back.”
His words flooded back to me while reading Somers’ and Posner’s dueling blogs on TheDailyBeast.com. Posner quotes Dr. Nanette Santoro, the Director of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, as saying of Suzanne: “That she possibly aided and abetted her own cancer should have destroyed her credibility. The real miracle is her ability to continue to pitch her theories.” Counters Somers, “(D)octors who are onto ‘another way’ are afraid to speak up. I am speaking up for them. I don’t have a license to lose and I have the voice of a very large readership. My readers know I have never lied to them.”
The lipo debacle threatened to end Somers’ multimillion-dollar careers as a trusted diet author and health-and-fitness-product-hawking Home Shopping Network maven. Her breast cancer disclosure, however shaky in its delivery, miraculously not only helped save her lucrative contract with Random House (several diet and hormone-therapy books followed Eat, Cheat and Melt the Fat Away) but also enabled her to extend her brand identity as a disease-battling survivor. The requisite People magazine cover—with the ominous cover line “Is She Risking Her Life?”—soon followed.
And despite an initial flurry of medical-industry outcry underscoring that liposuctioned fat was not used to reconstruct breasts (“I think some of [Somers’ lipo story] is spin,” Dr. Susan Love, a breast cancer expert, told People), Somers emerged a poster girl for breast cancer, alternative treatment and, eventually, hormone-based health protocols. In late April 2001, her oncologists, Mel Silverstein and James Waisman, confirmed to NBC’s Dateline that Somers had a 2.4-cm tumor removed a year earlier, and she rejected recommended chemo in favor of injecting the medically-risky Iscador into her stomach on a daily basis. By this point in the news cycle, physicians, laymen and media pundits continuing to question Somers’ odd and suspicious story about her still seemingly-unrelated lipo were pretty much seen as harassing a cancer survivor.
Unfortunately for Ritter, some viewers unable to grasp the space-time continuum misinterpreted his lipo joke—told a full two weeks prior to Somers’ cancer admission—as a cheap-shot at a woman battling a breast tumor. Entertainment news shows reporting on her King appearance inevitably showed the clip of a solemn-voiced Somers chiding Ritter’s “low-class joke.” Suzanne did nothing publicly to clarify this not-so-wacky chicken-and-egg misunderstanding.
By the second week of April, John released this statement to the press: “My view regarding any tabloid story is to put it down and stomp it. I had no idea of the gravity of Suzanne's condition. I apologize from the bottom of my heart if I caused her any further pain by my ill-informed remarks.” When I interviewed him for TV Guide about Three’s Company’s 25th anniversary a year later, Ritter would publicly only say, “None of that [contract controversy] means anything beside [Suzanne] being healthy and happy as long as possible.”
For those who’d followed the still-healthy-and-happy Somers’ career, her masterful PR turnaround wasn’t totally surprising. Indeed, Suzanne is the ultimate Hollywood survivor, coming an incredibly long way since her star-launching 1973 book of poetry, Touch Me, which SNL’s Kristen Wiig spoofed last week in a hilariously nuanced, and now video-viral, dramatic reading.
But make no mistake: Suzanne has always been laughing her way to the bank. The smart sex bomb used Touch Me and her wee bit as American Graffiti’s mute blonde in the T-bird to land touch-feely appearances on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. Producers took note, as did ABC exec Fred Silverman, who saw her scene as a wacky stripper on Starsky and Hutch, recalled her double entendre-laden Carson bits and called her in to join up-and-coming sitcom staple and Waltons co-star Ritter and classically trained stage actress DeWitt in the series-making third pilot of Three’s Company.
Within four years as a Nielsen topper and Newsweek cover girl (Ritter and DeWitt claimed Somers manipulated the shoot—and her co-stars—to become the magazine’s center focus in February 1978), ABC’s favorite as-seen-on-TV bubblehead swelled to the size of Balloon Boy’s runaway mylar dirigible. Untethered to the reality that, despite her burgeoning celebrity, she was the third-billed actor in an ensemble comedy about a guy living with two girls, the quick-witted businesswoman behind TV’s jiggliest sitcom ditz fired her publicist-manager, Farrah’s legendary “starmaker” Jay Bernstein, and turned over the reigns of her career to her husband, Canadian talk show host and supermarket pitchman Alan Hamel.
Oops.
The power couple’s first item of business: unsuccessfully demanding a raise from $30,000 to $150,000 a week and 10 percent of Three’s Company’s profits in summer 1980. Her producers eventually cut Chrissy to a one-minute phone call at the end of each episode. A defiant Somers took to the media, claiming a back injury/broken ribs caused her to miss tapings, alleging on-set “mob fury” mistreatment and charging Ritter and a “jealous” DeWitt conspired to keep her off the show. The public began to sympathize with Somers, but she was still fired in spring 1981.
Twenty years later and still estranged from her co-stars, a pre-ThighGate Somers was enjoying a multifaceted career resurgence. In 1991, she’d fought her way back from Hollywood oblivion as a star, with Dallas’s Patrick Duffy, of ABC’s new family sitcom Step by Step (which ran to moderate ratings through 1998) and—more importantly—as the leotard-clad pitchperson of the ThighMaster. Since 1997, she’d publicly sworn by her slimming system of food combining (and related food products), called Somersizing, and she promised she kept her body trim and toned by using the ThighMaster, ButtMaster, Torso Track, Butterfly and other Somers-branded exercise gadgets now part of her multimillion-dollar health and fitness empire.
The public had come to trust Suzanne as a soul-baring author and inspiring voice of self-help. In 1988, after a blistering TV Guide cover story titled “The Rise and Fall of a TV Sex Symbol,” Somers dramatically recrafted her (to quote TV Guide) “gambling house chanteuse” image into that of a triumphant survivor of her alcoholic father’s physical and emotional abuse. Keeping Secrets brought the phrase “adult children of alcoholics” to the media forefront, and a thoughtful, heartfelt Suzanne hit the talk show and lecture circuits sharing her family’s touching story before playing herself in the book’s ABC telefilm adaptation timed to her Step by Step and ThighMaster comeback in fall 1991.
After a decade of firm thighs and good fortune, the Enquirer had to go catch her at a liposuction clinic. As Don Knotts’ landlord Mr. Furley would say, “Damn!!!”
Not that potentially career-killing scandal kept Suzanne down for long. In fact, by summer 1998, when Somers released her second autobiography, After the Fall—ostensibly about “blended families” but at its core a well-orchestrated response to my upcoming Three’s Company tell-all (for which Suzanne graciously interviewed)—the again-sitcom-less siren seemed ready for a media fight.
Ritter and DeWitt finally broke their silence about Somers in Come and Knock on Our Door and, subsequently, in the two-hour E! True Hollywood Story version of my book. Suzanne stuck to her story that ABC, wary after high-stakes Laverne & Shirley salary negotiations, and Company’s patriarchal powers-that-be planned her demise prior to her cast-and-crew-alienating sick-out and resulting media blitz—the latter factors inconvenient truths that she now omits from her tale of Three’s Company woe.
And the controversy-loving media forefront is where this onetime celebrity poet-turned-cancer warrior intends to stay. “I am the messenger, the filter for hundreds of doctors of great courage,” Suzanne writes in her Daily Beast blog. “I will be attacked most likely in this article, but read through the lines. I have no agenda.”
Media-shrewd actress-turned-bestselling author Suzanne Somers last week outraged many Americans—including the equally vocal Whoopi Goldberg, who just ripped her on The View—with her latest, publicity-magnetizing comment, which goes something like this: Chemotherapy poisoned the late Patrick Swayze. Last week's headlines took it a (logical) step further: "Suzanne Somers Claims Chemo Killed Patrick Swayze."
The always-outspoken Somers' remarks surfaced just days after Swayze died—and, ironically, less than a week after TV icon Farrah Fawcett's cancer documentary, Farrah's Story, was denied an Emmy amidst claims that Ryan O'Neal seized control of the NBC special and, in essence, muffled Farrah's voice in her final months. Retroality.TV recently broke news about Fawcett's hopes for the project—and revealed stunning details about her fight for life and O'Neal's alleged threats to kill Farrah's Story executive producer Craig Nevius—in this exclusive interview with Fawcett's producing partner and confidant.
To be fair, Suzanne's sound bite-worthy claims were derived from her longer, if equally unsettling, comment about the late Swayze's chemotherapy. In Somers' own words: "They took this beautiful man and they basically put poison in him. Why couldn't they have built him up nutritionally and gotten rid of the toxins in his body? I hate to be this controversial. I'm a singer-dancer-comedienne. But we have an epidemic going on, and I have to say it."
Goldberg today shot back: “In case she doesn’t know, Patrick did everything and went everywhere to try and stay healthy as long as he could. That he’s been gone a week and this statement came out is bad timing and bad taste and Suzanne, you know better. And I’m not sure that’s not what you meant to do, but you should have thought about it.”
"MaryscottOConnor"'s stinging comments following a New York Post story about the controversy also pretty well sum up the anti-Somers Swayze backlash:
"She's entitled to her opinion. As am I: and my opinion is that Ms. Somers is an utter moron, and an insensitive, opportunistic moron, at that. I believe she actually believes the stuff she's spewing, but I also believe she's spewing this particular stuff at this particular time—taste and tact be damned—because the publicity and attendant possible increased sales for HER book are just too tempting. Which makes her not only a moron but a venal, contemptible moron, at that."
Ouch. Somers' new book, Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer—And How to Prevent Getting it in the First Place, hits bookstores Oct. 20.
The breast cancer survivor, who in 2001 controversially announced she eschewed chemo in favor of injecting the herb Iscador, made her Swayze remark to Toronto-based columnist Shinan Govani just hours after the beloved Dirty Dancing and Ghost star succumbed to almost always-deadly pancreatic cancer following a valiant 20-month fight. “People won’t listen to me," the PR-savvy proponent of alternative medicine told the National Post gossip columnist. "If only they would listen to me.”
Monday, Somers apologized on her blog: "In a casual conversation at a private party (with someone who never identified himself as a reporter) at the Toronto Film Festival last week, I was asked about this beloved actor. It was never my intention to make an official statement about his passing. I was not informed or aware I was being interviewed. I would never have been so insensitive as to offer a public statement so close to his untimely passing. I sincerely apologize if my comment has caused any additional pain to his family during this difficult time. I send my deepest condolences for their loss."
(I wonder who Suzanne thought she was talking to when Govani chatted her up—or vice versa—at this industry event. Govani must've had a good memory, because apparently he quoted her accurately without wielding a pen or a tape recorder. Chances are, Suzanne will get the 411 next time.)
Timing is everything. Perhaps if Suzanne had waited a few weeks to reference Swayze's death, more people would be willing to listen. On the other hand, would her comments spread like wildfire once the media focuses squarely on (God forbid) the next untimely (and, in the case of Michael Jackson and Billy Mayes, non-cancer-related) celebrity death?
In Somers' defense, she says she just wants to get potentially life-saving information to the public. As someone who's had the honor of interviewing a few famous cancer survivors—namely Fran Drescher, Jaclyn Smith and Olivia Newton-John—I appreciate the value of Somers' voice in the public arena. And as the guy who literally wrote the book on her rise to superstardom and public war of words with her Three's Company producers and, many years later in my book, her former co-stars, I also appreciate Suzanne's passion to speak her truth, however controversial and, at times, completely at odds with seemingly everyone else's truth, it can be.
Perhaps she will be more successful in getting her potentially life-saving message out than was the late '70s sensation whose stratospheric stardom inspired Somers' own quest for instant made-for-TV celebrity. Farrah Fawcett devoted the final years of her life to fighting cancer and enlightening the public about alternative, life-extending therapies. Sadly, the brave TV Angel lost her three-year battle with anal cancer on June 25. But thanks to her "video diary" that documented her trips to a German clinic to find the treatment and hope that the U.S. health care system could not offer her, she left behind a legacy of courage, strength and potential change for millions afflicted with terminal cancer.
Tragically, according to my interview with Craig Nevius, Farrah's Emmy-nominated NBC documentary was riddled with misinformation, missing information and the misguided machinations of Fawcett's longtime lover, Ryan O'Neal, and close friend Alana Stewart.
Farrah's message was further muddled by the coincidental timing of Michael Jackson's shocking and suspicious death. What media attention and analysis Fawcett's death—and life—clearly merited gave way to the relentless feeding frenzy surrounding MJ's demise.
Not that Stewart had trouble promoting her well-timed (?) book My Journey with Farrah last month, though. People magazine gave her the cover treatment, and the talk show circuit spread the word. (Gotta love corporate synergy.) But when Nevius broke his silence recently about Stewart and O'Neal's alleged betrayal of Fawcett while they apparently took the reigns of the documentary Fawcett and Nevius had named—with NBC's apparent blessing—A Wing & A Prayer, the media turned a deaf ear.
So what if Nevius exposed Farrah's true—and apparently thwarted—intentions behind her cancer video diary? So what if he revealed for the first time why she avoided surgery to receive a colostomy bag, famously commented on weeks earlier by Ryan O'Neal? So what if he offered compelling details about O'Neal's alleged efforts to overtake the project and Stewart's supposed remarks that "at least (Entertainment Tonight) ran only the 'good wheelchair pictures'" while the celebrity news show exploited Farrah's final days last spring?
By early September, the media was more interested in showing Patrick Swayze's "final photos"—the same wheelchair trip home to die that Farrah had taken in April—and looking for the next death-related celebrity sound bite. Which Suzanne served up, unwittingly or not, during the oh-so-important 24-hour news cycle following Swayze's sad demise.
Somers will be on the talk-show circuit next month with her new book, offering more potentially breakthrough info in the fight against cancer. Thankfully cancer-free and otherwise able-bodied, she will have the chance to get her unfettered words across—an opportunity that Fawcett, according to her A Wing & A Prayer producing partner, was denied in Farrah's Story. (Farrah was indisputably unable to promote the NBC special last May; instead, O'Neal and Stewart walked the red carpet and spoke in place of the iconic Angel in numerous interviews.)
I trust that Suzanne will use this public platform responsibly and sensitively. If she invokes Swayze's or Fawcett's name—and she probably will and, under the right circumstances, maybe should—I hope for her message's sake that she tempers her product-publicizing passion with the utmost respect for the brave, though sadly silenced, celebs whose advanced and terminal cancers clearly couldn't be beaten with herbs and nutrition.
