Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Girl of the Day - Three's Company Version (Suzanne Somers)
Suzanne Somers' birthday is today; she turns 66. She was the blonde on Three's Company when it first started in the late 1970s -- sort of a poor man's Farrah Fawcett. She made the mistake of quitting the show to pursue what she thought would be a bigger and better career, sort of like McLean Stevenson quitting MASH. Bad idea. Hit shows are mostly serendipitous, and if you've got one once, you should hang on for dear life as long as it goes.
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ReplyDeleteMoments ago, I finished reading Suzanne's 2017 book, TWO's Company. She did NOT quit Three's Company!! She dared to ask for a raise to the level men were making, and CBS decided to "hang a nun in the marketplace" (the words of Suzanne's husband in the book) so that no other "uppity women" would think they could get paid as much as men. So they fired her!!! See pages 129-131.
ReplyDeleteOn pages 133-134, her husband (who had attempted to negotiate for her) writes: "Years later the head of a major independent syndication group told me that in the industry, this event [firing Suzanne] was known as 'the dumbest self-inflicted catastrophe in modern television history.' This insane, macho, sexist, ego-driven, amateurish, gigantic f__in' blunder cost the network and producers hundreds of millions of dollars and premature cancellation of the series. . . .By firing Suzanne, the number one woman on the number one TV show, they blew through more than one billion dollars in network licensing and back-end syndication. . . .[but in the meantime they] brought in their PR people to destroy Suzanne in the media for being a 'greedy bitch.'" [end of quotation of Alan Hamel's words] Suzanne had been making one-tenth of what a successful male star was making in the late 1970s, and Alan tried to negotiate to repair this inequality. He also lamented, "Where were all those women's organizations to stand with Suzanne . . . National Organization for Women . . . Women in Film? Not a peep."
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