Suzanne Somers spent more than twenty years believing she had been the one cast out of television’s most beloved apartment, punished for asking to be paid what she was worth, escorted past her own co-stars by a security guard and reduced to a voice on a telephone in a scripted exile. Then, in the summer of 2003, John Ritter called her at a beauty salon and said four words that reversed the direction of two decades of silence: “I forgive you.”

 

Somers, who died on October 15, 2023, one day before her 77th birthday, never publicly resolved the contradiction those words created. She had wanted to challenge him. She had wanted to ask what, exactly, he believed she had done.

Instead she swallowed the question and answered with a single word: “Thanks.”

 

 

That decision, recounted in detail in a newly circulating account of the final months of Ritter’s life, now stands as the last recorded exchange between the two performers whose comic timing defined ABC’s “Three’s Company” from 1977 until Somers’ acrimonious departure in 1981. Ritter died on September 11, 2003, roughly one month after the call, at age 54, from an aortic dissection. The project the two had agreed to pursue together never received a script, a title, or a first meeting.

 

 

 

The call came without warning. Somers was seated in a beauty salon when a receptionist told her John Ritter was on the line. She had not heard his voice in years.

Two words were enough to collapse the distance. “Hey babe.”

 

 

Ritter had not called merely to reminisce. He told her he forgave her. Somers’ instinctive response, according to the account, rose immediately: “You forgive me?”

She believed she had been the one expelled from the show, the one punished for seeking parity with her male co-star, the one whose name had been turned into a warning for other actresses considering similar demands.

 

 

She stopped herself. She said thanks. The line stayed open.

 

 

 

Ritter then told her about “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter,” the ABC sitcom he was then headlining, and about a nightmare sequence in which he hoped Somers and Joyce DeWitt would appear. For the first time since the isolated phone tags that wrote Chrissy Snow out of the apartment, Jack, Chrissy, and Janet were being discussed in the future tense by two of the people who had played them.

 

 

Somers pushed back on the premise. She told Ritter the audience had waited too long to see them together again for their reunion to vanish after a brief dream sequence. Why not find a proper project, something that allowed the chemistry to age rather than treating the past as a punchline?

Ritter agreed they would both look.

 

 

Somers had long imagined Jack Tripper and Chrissy Snow eventually marrying. Now there was at least a path toward discovering what their older selves might become. Nothing was signed when they hung up.

There was no title, no script, no first meeting on a calendar. Only a shared intention to find the right way back.

 

 

About one month later, on September 11, 2003, Ritter began sweating, feeling nauseated, and suffering chest pain while rehearsing “8 Simple Rules.” He was taken across the street to Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, the same hospital where he had been born.

Doctors initially treated him for a presumed heart attack, but the emergency was a type A aortic dissection, a tear in the body’s largest artery. His condition deteriorated rapidly. Surgery could not save him.

Roughly four hours after entering the hospital, John Ritter was dead.

 

 

He was 54 years old, six days short of his 55th birthday. The date was also the fifth birthday of his youngest child.

 

 

The rupture Somers and Ritter had only begun to repair traced back more than two decades, to a fifth-season contract dispute that turned a family comedy into a public execution. Somers was earning approximately $30,000 per episode. Her husband and manager, Alan Hamel, negotiating on her behalf, asked ABC for $150,000 per episode plus a share of the profits, using Ritter’s salary and the pay of comparable male stars as the measure.

 

 

 

Somers and Hamel saw equality. ABC treated the demand as an ultimatum. The network’s position had already hardened during a hiatus arrangement and Somers’ absence from several tapings, while the cast and producers still had a weekly show to finish.

 

 

Hamel later said an anonymous caller warned that executives intended to “hang a nun in the marketplace,” making Somers an example for other actresses. None of that power belonged to Ritter. He had not set her salary and could not fire her.

Yet his name appeared in every comparison, and he and DeWitt returned to rehearsal unsure whether their third partner would be there.

 

 

Somers later believed Ritter’s anger came from losing the performer whose timing his own depended on, not from the number she had asked ABC to pay.

 

 

What followed was, by Somers’ own account, punishment. She still owed the production work, but she no longer entered it as a member of the family. A security guard met her at the back door and escorted her past the main set without allowing her to see Ritter, DeWitt, or the regular cast and crew.

On a small side set there was a chair, a lamp, and a telephone. A wardrobe employee brought in her clothes. One camera recorded roughly a minute of dialogue.

Then the guard led her out again.

 

 

The script said Chrissy had gone home to care for her sick mother and was calling Jack and Janet from her parents’ house. Viewers could still hear the familiar voice at the other end of the line. But Somers was no longer permitted to step into the apartment that had made that voice famous.

 

 

 

She later described the treatment as punishment for being a bad girl. The father who had torn her dress was nowhere near the studio. Yet the old verdict had followed her through the back entrance.

 

 

 

That verdict had been forming since her childhood in San Bruno, California, where Suzanne Marie Mahoney was born on October 16, 1946, the third of four children in a working-class Catholic family. Her father, Frank, had returned from World War II to a job loading beer cases onto boxcars, then came home from the brewery drunk and continued drinking through the night. Furniture broke.

Insults crossed the house. His wife and children learned to disappear before his rage found them.

 

 

On the worst nights, Somers’ mother gathered the children into a cedar closet and hid there with them. At school, undiagnosed dyslexia turned letters and numbers into another threat. Teachers saw a girl who could not keep up.

At home, her father supplied the explanation she feared was true, calling her stupid until the word began to feel like a fact.

 

 

The night before her first junior prom, Somers’ mother finished a dress they had spent a week choosing and sewing together. It hung on the back of the closet door, a rare promise that the 16-year-old might leave the house and be seen as someone beautiful. Frank entered her room drunk, mocked her for imagining boys might notice her, then seized the dress and tore it in half.

When her mother protested, he struck her.

 

 

Somers, standing on the bed to get away, reached down for a tennis racket and brought it down on her father’s head hard enough to give him a concussion. Her mother took him to the hospital. Suzanne stayed behind and cleaned his blood from the room, the walkway, and the family’s white picket fence.

By morning, the dress was still torn. Her father was in the hospital. Suzanne was asleep in the same closet where the family had learned to hide from him.

 

 

 

At 18, she became pregnant and left college. She married Bruce Somers at 19, gave birth to their son, Bruce Jr. , and was divorced by 22, a young mother taking modeling, sales, and television jobs while rent and bills waited at home.

Then in 1971, six-year-old Bruce was struck by a car and nearly died. For months he woke from nightmares and night sweats. The medical costs deepened the pressure, and mother and son both entered therapy.

 

 

 

Six years later, John Ritter would meet Suzanne Somers as a last-minute audition choice with almost no comedy training. A few seconds as the unnamed blonde in the white Thunderbird in “American Graffiti” had made her recognizable without even giving her character a name. Visits with Johnny Carson kept that face in circulation, and ABC remembered it when “Three’s Company” still could not find the right Chrissy.

 

 

Somers nearly missed the chance. The day before her audition, she and Alan Hamel had been aboard a small plane in the Caribbean when lightning closed around it and the aircraft dropped hundreds of feet. Passengers were warned it might crash.

After landing, Somers could barely make herself board another flight, but production in Los Angeles was almost ready to begin, and she went anyway.

 

 

Ritter and Joyce DeWitt were already cast. Somers arrived with almost no time left to win the room. ABC hired her after the test.

She crossed the country with the terror of one falling aircraft still in her body, then stepped into apartment 2011.

 

 

John, Joyce, and Suzanne had arrived as strangers. Within weeks, their timing would make viewers believe that front door had always opened for all three. Somers had never studied comedy, so she watched Ritter.

He could vault over a sofa, fold himself across a chair, or turn a startled retreat into a dance, then repeat the fall from the same angle on the next take without making it look rehearsed. She studied the pause before his body moved, and the way Jack’s reaction could make another character’s line twice as funny.

 

 

Many of Chrissy’s lines were simple misunderstandings, but Ritter listened as if her logic might be right, let doubt cross Jack’s face, and made the audience discover the mistake with him. Somers learned not to chase the laugh. She gave him something sincere enough to believe for one dangerous second.

Ritter, in turn, understood that Chrissy could not merely be foolish. Somers played her as innocent, literal, and incapable of malice, a woman whose logic wandered but whose moral compass did not.

 

 

Joyce DeWitt gave Janet the steadiness that held both of them together. Somers would later say that Jack and Janet felt like the parents while Chrissy was the child, allowing her to live a childhood on television that fear had denied her at home.

 

 

When “Three’s Company” premiered in 1977, the premise sounded risky for network television: one man sharing an apartment with two single women while pretending to be gay so the landlord would tolerate the arrangement. What viewers returned for was less scandalous and more intimate. When one story literally handcuffed Jack and Chrissy together, every stumble depended on each performer feeling the other’s movement before the audience saw it.

 

 

 

Jack cooked. Janet rolled her eyes. Chrissy misunderstood a sentence.

And by the closing credits, the three roommates had usually repaired whatever confusion had shaken their home. Even their chaos carried a promise. However many doors slammed, Jack, Janet, and Chrissy would be at the same table the following week.

 

 

 

Somers came from work and still had to make dinner for her son. Ritter carried the responsibility of leading a production built around his physical precision. DeWitt had trained for years before the break arrived.

Yet on Tuesday nights, those separate lives compressed into a sofa, a kitchen table, and a front door friends entered without knocking.

 

 

Somers passed over several film opportunities while the series was consuming her time. She had finally found the place that made her visible, and she placed much of her future inside it.

 

 

When the final telephone tag ended, Hollywood went quiet. Somers later remembered sitting in her living room on a cold, gray day, asking why she had risked the best job she had ever held. “Three’s Company” kept moving without her.

Ritter and DeWitt kept working. The face once everywhere became a warning other employers preferred not to touch.

 

 

Eventually, she carried the one asset ABC could not take. Millions of viewers still knew her name. In Las Vegas, she accepted the humiliation of being treated like a discarded sitcom star and learned one audience at a time to hold a room without a laugh track.

By 1987, she was Las Vegas Female Entertainer of the Year. “Step by Step” later gave her seven seasons inside another television family, while more than 10 million ThighMasters turned her image into an empire she controlled.

 

 

The reversal was enormous, but it answered only the question of whether Suzanne could survive. It could not return one ordinary year with John and Joyce.

 

Then in 1995, chance placed Somers beside the one person who could carry her back across that distance. During the Broadway premiere of “Victor/Victoria,” Amy Yasbeck entered the women’s room and found Somers there. Yasbeck introduced herself as Ritter’s partner, learned Somers would sing at the afterparty, and promised to make sure he said hello.

Back in the theater, she asked Ritter to name the last person he wanted to see there, then told him Somers was in the building. He remained shaken through the rest of the performance.

 

 

At the party, after Somers sang, she turned, watched Ritter walk toward her, and met him in an embrace. Yasbeck later said Ritter had never wanted to attack Somers publicly and had continued to love his former friend from afar. For that moment there was no producer, contract, or camera between them.

Eventually the party ended around them. They returned to separate lives, and the ordinary calls that might have turned one embrace back into a friendship never began.

 

 

Five years after that embrace, Somers was diagnosed with breast cancer. Treatment placed mortality inside her daily life. But Ritter was still someone she remembered rather than someone she regularly called.

 

 

 

Three years later came the salon call, and then, one month after that, the death that ended every possibility the call had opened. Somers later said the conversation gave her resolution, not because it decided who had been right, but because their final act was no longer silence. Ritter had reached for her.

Somers had kept the line open. Both had chosen a future.

 

 

Nine years later, Joyce DeWitt sat opposite Somers on her online program, more than 30 years after their last meeting, and greeted her with an embrace. Each woman described the rupture from the side on which she had lived it. DeWitt had returned to a cast under pressure, while Somers had been isolated, labeled greedy, and removed from the room.

For once, no producers stood between their accounts. When Ritter’s name came up, both women cried.

 

 

Somers had now reached both former roommates. DeWitt could answer her embrace. Ritter could not.

 

 

 

By then, Somers had lived through more than a decade of breast cancer and the destruction of her Malibu home in a 2007 wildfire, watching clothes, scripts, and keepsakes turn to ash before beginning again. She lived another 11 years after embracing DeWitt. When cancer eventually returned, Somers died on October 15, 2023, with Alan, Bruce, and other loved ones near her, one day before her 77th birthday.

Her family had gathered to celebrate it. Instead, they ate her favorite cake in her memory.

 

 

The next day, John Ritter had died on his youngest child’s fifth birthday, while Suzanne Somers left on the eve of her own. For one family, the date already belonged to a five-year-old. For the other, a cake was waiting for 77.

Neither birthday could remain what it had been meant to be.

 

 

On “Three’s Company,” a misunderstanding could lock Jack, Janet, and Chrissy on opposite sides of a door. But 22 minutes later, the door opened, and the apartment was home again. Outside the show, their real rupture consumed more than 20 years.

The first telephone allowed Chrissy’s voice to remain while keeping Somers away from Ritter and DeWitt. The last telephone carried Ritter’s voice back to her. The past was still disputed, but Somers chose thanks, and Ritter chose a future.

 

 

 

The first call was written to separate them. The last call almost brought them home. Time never gave them a third.

 

 

 

That is why apartment 2011 can still feel warm and painful at once. The family survived perfectly in reruns, while the people who created it reached one another only just before it was too late.