The final telephone call came on a summer afternoon in 2003, and Suzanne Somers knew immediately that the voice on the other end belonged to John Ritter. She was sitting in a beauty salon when a receptionist said his name, and the years that had separated them collapsed into two familiar words: “Hey babe.” It had been more than two decades since they had shared the small screen as Jack Tripper and Chrissy Snow, the beloved roommates of ABC’s “Three’s Company,” but the intimacy of their old friendship returned in an instant.
What John said next, however, caught her completely off guard, and it would force her to make a split-second decision about whether to challenge him or protect the fragile bridge he had just built between them.
John Ritter told Suzanne Somers that he forgave her, and the words struck her like a physical blow. Her first instinct was to fire back with a question, “You forgive me?” because she had spent years believing she was the one who had been wronged, the actress expelled from the show and punished for demanding equal pay.
But she stopped herself, swallowed the challenge, and answered with only a single word: “Thanks.” That one word kept the line open, and in the weeks that followed, the two former co-stars began to imagine a future together, a proper project that would allow Jack and Chrissy to grow older on screen, perhaps even to marry as Suzanne had long envisioned. Roughly one month later, John Ritter died without warning, and the future they had chosen together vanished before it could ever take shape.
The story of that final call begins long before the beauty salon, in a working-class Catholic home in San Bruno, California, where a frightened girl learned that belonging could disappear with the sound of a man entering the room. Suzanne Marie Mahoney was born on October 16, 1946, the third of four children, and her father Frank had returned from World War II to a job loading beer cases onto boxcars at a local brewery. He came home drunk most nights and continued drinking through the evening, and the family learned to measure danger by his footsteps as furniture broke and insults crossed the house.
On the worst nights, Suzanne’s mother gathered the children into a cedar closet and hid there with them, waiting for the rage to pass, and the closet became a place of refuge that would haunt Suzanne for decades.
At school, undiagnosed dyslexia turned letters and numbers into another threat, and teachers saw a girl who could not keep up while her father supplied the explanation she feared was true, calling her stupid until the word began to feel like fact. The night before her first junior prom, Suzanne’s mother finished a dress they had spent a week choosing and sewing together, and it hung on the back of the closet door as 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, and when her mother protested, he struck her.
Suzanne, 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, and her mother took him to the hospital while Suzanne stayed behind to clean 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, and Suzanne was asleep in the same closet where the family had learned to hide from him. At 18, she became pregnant and left college before she had been given much chance to discover who she might become, marrying Bruce Somers at 19 and giving birth to their son Bruce Jr. before being divorced by 22.
She was a young mother taking modeling, sales, and television jobs while rent and bills waited at home, and 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 to face what the accident had opened in them, the same way Suzanne would later use therapy to confront the violence of her childhood.
Six years later, John Ritter would meet Suzanne as a last-minute audition choice with almost no comedy training, and nothing in Chrissy Snow’s smile would reveal the woman who already knew how quickly an ordinary day could split a family apart. A few seconds as the unnamed blonde in “The White Thunderbird” in “American Graffiti” made Suzanne recognizable without even giving her character a name, and visits with Johnny Carson kept that face in circulation until ABC remembered it when “Three’s Company” still could not find the right Chrissy. Suzanne nearly missed the chance because 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, with passengers warned it might crash.
After landing, Suzanne could barely make herself board another flight, but production in Los Angeles was almost ready to begin, and she went anyway, carrying the terror of one falling aircraft still in her body as she stepped into apartment 201.
John Ritter and Joyce DeWitt were already cast when Suzanne arrived with almost no time left to win the room, and ABC hired her after the test. John, Joyce, and Suzanne had arrived as strangers, but within weeks their timing would make viewers believe that front door had always opened for all three. Suzanne had never studied comedy, so she watched John, who 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, and many of Chrissy’s lines were simple misunderstandings, but John listened as if her logic might be right, letting doubt cross Jack’s face and making the audience discover the mistake with him.
Suzanne learned not to chase the laugh, giving him something sincere enough to believe for one dangerous second, and John in turn understood that Chrissy could not merely be foolish. Suzanne played her as innocent, literal, and incapable of malice, a woman whose logic wandered but whose moral compass did not, and Jack did not laugh at her from a distance but was pulled into the world she created and fought his way back out. Joyce gave Janet the steadiness that held both of them together, and Suzanne 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, but 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, and Jack cooked while Janet rolled her eyes and Chrissy misunderstood a sentence. By the closing credits, the three roommates had usually repaired whatever confusion had shaken their home, and even their chaos carried a promise that however many doors slammed, Jack, Janet, and Chrissy would be at the same table the following week. Their timing made the apartment feel lived in, and Suzanne came from work and still had to make dinner for her son while John carried the responsibility of leading a production built around his physical precision.
Joyce 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, and Suzanne passed over several film opportunities while the series was consuming her time.
By the fifth season, success had changed the temperature behind that door, and Suzanne earned about $30,000 an episode while Allan, now negotiating for her, asked for $150,000 plus a share of the profits, using John’s pay and the salaries of comparable male stars as the measure. Suzanne and Allan saw equality, while ABC treated the demand as an ultimatum, and ABC’s arrangement during the hiatus and her absence from several tapings had already hardened the network’s position while the cast and producers still had a weekly show to finish. Allan later said an anonymous caller warned that executives intended to hang a nun in the marketplace, making Suzanne an example for other actresses, but none of that power belonged to John, who had not set her salary and could not fire her.
Yet his name appeared in every comparison, and while he and Joyce returned to rehearsal unsure whether their third partner would be there, Suzanne later believed his anger came from losing the performer whose timing his own depended on, not from the number she had asked ABC to pay.
Suzanne still owed the production work, but she no longer entered it as a member of the family, and a security guard met her at the back door and escorted her past the main set without allowing her to see John, Joyce, or the regular cast and crew. On a small side set, there was a chair, a lamp, and a telephone, and a wardrobe employee brought in her clothes while one camera recorded roughly a minute of dialogue before 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, so viewers could still hear the familiar voice at the other end of the line, but Suzanne 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, and the father who had torn her dress was nowhere near the studio, yet the old verdict had followed her through the back entrance.
When the final telephone tag ended, Hollywood went quiet, and Suzanne 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, and John and Joyce kept working while 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 who still knew her name, and 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, and “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, and it could not return one ordinary year with John and Joyce.
Then in 1995, chance placed Suzanne beside the one person who could carry her back across that distance, and during the Broadway premiere of “Victor/Victoria,” Amy Yasbeck entered the women’s room and found Suzanne there. Amy introduced herself as John’s partner, learned Suzanne would sing at the afterparty, and promised to make sure he said hello, and back in the theater she asked John to name the last person he wanted to see there before telling him Suzanne was in the building. He remained shaken through the rest of the performance, and at the party after Suzanne sang, she turned, watched John walk toward her, and met him in an embrace.
Amy later said John had never wanted to attack Suzanne publicly and had continued to love his former friend from afar, and for that moment there was no producer, contract, or camera between them, but eventually the party ended around them and they returned to separate lives.
Five years after that embrace, Suzanne was diagnosed with breast cancer, and treatment placed mortality inside her daily life, but John was still someone she remembered rather than someone she regularly called. Three years later, in the summer of 2003, she was sitting in a beauty salon when the receptionist said John Ritter was on the telephone, and unlike the phone tags the studio once wrote for Chrissy, this call existed because John himself had chosen to make it. Suzanne took the receiver and heard the greeting that collapsed the years at once, “Hey babe,” affectionate, familiar, and close enough to the old rhythm that she knew the voice before he had to identify himself.
Yet John had not called merely to remember Jack and Chrissy, and he had something to say about the rupture neither of them had ever truly finished discussing, delivered without the long explanation Suzanne might have expected.
Then John said, “I forgive you,” and her first response, “You forgive me?” rose at once because she believed she had been the person expelled from the show and punished for asking to be valued. While John had remained inside, their embrace in 1995 had acknowledged the affection, but it had never answered that old question, and Suzanne could challenge his choice of words and risk letting the past take over again, or she could protect the reason he had finally called.
She swallowed the challenge and said, “Thanks,” and the answer was only one word, yet it kept the line open. John told her about “8 Simple Rules” and a nightmare sequence in which he wanted Suzanne and Joyce to appear, and for the first time since those isolated phone tags, Jack, Chrissy, and Janet were being spoken of in the future tense by two of the people who had played them.
There was no studio between the voices now, no salary figure, and no side, only a decision about what they might still do with the years ahead, and Suzanne wanted to work with him but not as the joke inside a nightmare. She told John that the audience had waited too long to see them together again for their return to disappear after a brief dream, and why not find a proper project for the two of them, something that allowed the chemistry to grow older instead of treating the past as a punchline. John agreed that they would both look, and Suzanne had long imagined Jack Tripper and Chrissy Snow eventually marrying, so now there was at least a path toward discovering what their older selves might become.
Nothing had been signed when they hung up, and there was no title, no script, and no first meeting on a calendar, only a shared intention to find the right way back, yet for the first time since a guard had placed her beside that telephone on the side set, Suzanne was no longer outside John’s future.
About one month later, on September 11, 2003, John began sweating, feeling nauseated, and suffering pain in his chest while rehearsing “8 Simple Rules,” and he was taken across the street to Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, the same Burbank 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, and his condition deteriorated rapidly while surgery could not save him.
Roughly four hours after entering the hospital, John was dead at 54, six days short of his 55th birthday, and the date was also the fifth birthday of his youngest child. The project he and Suzanne had agreed to seek never received a page, a set, or a first meeting, and she had spent more than 20 years imagining what might have been said, but when John finally called, the future they chose lasted only weeks.
Suzanne later said the call gave her resolution, not because it decided who had been right, but because their final act was no longer silence, as John had reached for her and Suzanne had kept the line open, and both had chosen a future. Nine years later, Joyce DeWitt sat opposite Suzanne on her online program, more than 30 years after their last meeting, and greeted her with an embrace, and each woman described the rupture from the side on which she had lived it. Joyce had returned to a cast under pressure while Suzanne had been isolated, labeled greedy, and removed from the room, and for once no producers stood between their accounts.
When John’s name came up, both women cried, and Suzanne had now reached both former roommates, as Joyce could answer her embrace but John could not.
By then, Suzanne 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, and she lived another 11 years after embracing Joyce. When cancer eventually returned, Suzanne died on October 15, 2023, with Allan, Bruce, and other loved ones near her, one day before her 77th birthday, and her family had gathered to celebrate it but instead ate her favorite cake in her memory. The next day, John had died on his youngest child’s fifth birthday while Suzanne left on the eve of her own, and for one family the date already belonged to a 5-year-old while for the other a cake was waiting for 77, so 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, yet outside the show their real rupture consumed more than 20 years.
The first telephone allowed Chrissy’s voice to remain while keeping Suzanne away from John and Joyce, and the last telephone carried John’s voice back to her while the past was still disputed, but Suzanne chose thanks and John chose a future. The first call was written to separate them, and the last call almost brought them home, but time never gave them a third, which is why apartment 201 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, and when you remember Jack, Janet, and Chrissy, the moment that makes that apartment feel like home again is the one where they all sit down together at the kitchen table, laughing at a misunderstanding that somehow brought them closer, unaware that the real world outside would not always be so forgiving.
