In Search of Suzanne (and/or Something Else)

NOTE: This is part one of an exploration of the meaning of celebrity in our lives and psyches, as assisted by the midcentury fan magazines. One could argue that all my blogs address this theme, so let’s just say we’re going head-on, like those clashing mountain ibis in the nature documentaries.

“If we are going to worship celebrity, let’s have a clear idea of who is up on the altar.” So said Maureen Orth in The Importance of Being Famous (2004). Given this admonition, and given my particular celebrity obsession, you might inquire, What do I really know of Suzanne Pleshette, about whom, as her obituary in The Guardian (Jan 21, 2008) noted, folks who remember her at all tend to have “two distinct memories: the sensual, dark-haired beauty of 1960s movie melodramas, and the more mature and light-hearted but still sexy wife in The Bob Newhart Show”?

The short answer: I know almost everything, I know almost nothing about Suzanne. She was born in Brooklyn, where her father managed the Brooklyn Paramount Theater, at the time “one of the most lavish performance spaces in the city” (The Brooklyn Paper, March 31, 2002), as well as its sister venue, the Paramount Theater on Broadway. She “was fed her 2 a.m. bottle in Lindy’s delicatessen” (Motion Picture, Jan 1964) and grew up around performers like Jerry Lewis and Milton Berle. She was Jewish in heritage and practice, never hiding or minimizing it as did some of her contemporaries; she sometimes signed notes to friends “the Jewess.” I know because I have one of those notes (not addressed to me).

She was devoted to her parents, next to whom she is buried, along with her second husband, Texas oilman Tommy Gallagher, whom she liked to call “the Irish prince.” Third husband Tom Poston occupies a grave just behind them all, a fact I know because I visited the cemetery and left a stone on Suzanne’s grave in 2009. I knew she’d bequeathed her personal papers to Syracuse University before the university did, having read about it in one of the tabloids; when I emailed to inquire as to when her papers might be available to the public, the university was flabbergasted — as well they might be, since she graced its halls for only a single semester.

I can tell you quite a lot about her education, though the midcentury fan magazines, like the studio biographies on which they relied, were notoriously obtuse. (For example, did Troy Donahue, reported in the fan mags as having studied journalism at Columbia, ever go to college at all? Did he even graduate from high school, i.e., the Hudson valley military academy where he met fellow student Francis Ford Coppola, who later gave him a part in The Godfather Part II, playing a character by the name of Merle Johnson, which happened to be Donahue’s real name? But that’s another obsession.) For Suzanne it was P.S. 9, then the High School for Performing Arts, then Syracuse where she aspired to be a social worker for that one semester, followed by a brief stint at tony (and now defunct) Finch College and, finally, Sanford Meisner’s two-year acting program at the Neighborhood Playhouse.

She was no stranger to that bailiwick: When she was ten, “Sanford Meisner picked her out of a dance class at the Neighborhood Playhouse for a role in a student production of Truckline Cafe. ‘I got good notices,’ Suzy remembers, ‘but when the production ended, there I was, a ten-year-old retired actress.’” (This from a feature in Look, Oct 23, 1962, when Suzanne’s star was on the rise and she was making four and five films a year.) Did Meisner himself pick her out of the dance class? I have my doubts, though she definitely had his attention later, landing a choice role in the Broadway play The Cold Wind and the Warm, in which Meisner himself was appearing. (I acquired the copy of his book, On Acting, that he’d warmly inscribed to Suzanne and that she later donated to the Motion Picture Home, which she supported in numerous ways over the years. One of my dogs decimated the book, though I managed to salvage the inscription.) She’s not listed as one of his famous students on Meisner’s Wikipedia page, though surely she’s at least as famous as Frances Sternhagen, Jennifer Sky or Susan Blakely. And of all her contemporaries on the list — including, among others, Jack Lord, Jon Voight, Lee Grant, Robert Duvall, Jessica Walter, Gregory Peck — only Grace Kelly and Steve McQueen came close to the nearly nonstop fan magazine coverage that Suzanne enjoyed from late 1961 through 1964, thanks to her lengthy will-they-won’t-they courtship with Troy Donahue, their glamorous wedding at the Beverly Hills Hotel and — while the magazine features were still touting the newlyweds’ mutual adoration — their abrupt and never fully explained breakup and divorce.

From that fan mag coverage I learned that “Suzanne became engaged when she was seventeen. The engagement lasted five years. ‘Unfortunately, we can’t select whom we fall in love with. He was a young novelist and just out of the Army. We remain very good friends, however,’” she told Moviegoers Tattler in September 1963. Motion Picture (Oct 1962) gave the young man a name, Roy Doliner, and a location for their first meeting, Fire Island: “‘I was standing on the beach and suddenly, from under a wave, this adorable creature swam up to shore, headed directly for me, said hi and spouted two lines of poetry. I ignored him. I was in my very, very intellectual period then. I figured any boy who would just swim up to a girl and quote two lines of poetry probably only knew two lines of poetry!’”

Roy Doliner, as it turns out, wrote a novel, published in 1960 and — despite its disclaimer that “All characters in this book are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental” — almost certainly based on their relationship. From the back cover: “She had success, youth and beauty — and a young man willing to give her everything. But no one man would ever have enough for Maggi Clair. To a brilliant, up-and-coming actress like Maggi, love was just another four-letter word and marriage — real marriage — wasn’t even in her vocabulary. Ben tried to tell himself that sooner or later she would have to give in — that this vibrant and thrilling creature was, after all, a woman. Then he woke up and found he’d been holding nothing but an armful of naked ambition sprinkled with stardust.” It’s a mediocre, blandly sordid novel in which no one behaves well, not what you’d want to read about a celebrity at whose altar you worship. But I have all those fan magazines to fall back on, replete with images from the film that started it all: Rome Adventure, a.k.a. Lovers Must Learn, which ends with Troy’s character waiting for Suzanne on the docks of New York, waving a candelabra (a symbol of his integrity — don’t ask), ready to declare his undying love.

I remember my distress when Troy and Suzanne split. I couldn’t understand why, after taking nearly three years to commit to holy matrimony, they’d blown it all up in less than six months. Something terrible must have happened. Suzanne, the fan magazines reported, refused to talk about it. She also refused to seek alimony, a noble gesture; I clung to that.

Life moved on, as did popular culture. Troy and Suzy effectively disappeared from the mass media — till the Seventies, when he turned up on the arm of Connie Corleone and she morphed into Emily Hartley. I was delighted. Though a perfectly fine dramatic actress, Suzanne seemed more at home with comedy — and, all grown up myself (so I thought), I was happy to watch without those primitive, discomforting feelings of celebrity worship.

And then came midlife, and midlife crises and the need to retreat, reshape, regress — and then came eBay.

Thanks to my resurging obsession, and the discretionary income that indulged it, I can now tell you much more about Suzanne and Troy. I can also relate many tidbits about Suzanne’s later life. From reading Dominick Dunne I know she was in the gallery for at least one day of O.J.’s trial, having escorted her friends Edie and Lew Wasserman (“the unassailable rulers of twentieth-century Hollywood,” as per Kathleen Sharp, Mr. & Mrs. Hollywood, 2003) to the proceedings. I have a copy of the limited-edition leatherbound book commemorating Lew Wasserman’s memorial service, which reveals Suzanne as the only woman who spoke at the service, in the company of movers and shakers like Spielberg, Jack Valenti, Barry Diller and former president William Jefferson Clinton. She also spoke at David Janssen’s funeral — I have a print of the news photo — with whom, according to her Lifetime television special, she had a passionate affair after the dissolution of her marriage to Troy. She might have married him, but Janssen refused to leave his wife.

Suzanne, it seems, got around. She was one of the people who in 1995 helped find the body of David Begelman, the former head of Columbia Studios who’d gotten caught in a forgery scandal, the night he committed suicide. As David McClintick’s bestseller, Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street (2002), recounts, Begelman had made an alarming phone call to a friend, talent manager Danny Welkes: “Welkes, now in a panic, called [Begelman’s wife] who, it turned out, was also frantic because she had just found that a gun that David kept in the house was missing. Welkes summoned Suzanne Pleshette, who lived in the same West Hollywood apartment building, and they hurried across town to Begelman’s home in Beverly Hills.” After talking with his wife, Suzanne and Welkes picked up another of Begelman’s close friends and drove to the Century Plaza Hotel, where he’d checked in under a false name. “None of the hotel staff knew the name David Begelman, but they instantly recognized Suzanne Pleshette, whose celebrity added credibility to her claim that Begelman was an important man in the motion picture industry and was despondent.” But they were too late to save him. Having finally identified his room, the hotel’s security supervisor found the body, a note beside it saying, “My real name is David Begelman.”

There’s much more I could tell you. And yet, of course, not only did I never meet Suzanne Pleshette, I lack access to the most critical understandings and insights about her. I know the public Suzanne, the publicized Suzanne. Though there may be less distance between her public and private personae than is the case with many celebrities — Warren Beatty, who knew her in the early New York days, once said, “To know Suzy is to recognize honesty in its rarest form” (Screenland Plus TV Land, Nov 1962)— it’s still a crucial distance. Or, as Susan Douglas and Andrea McDonnell note in Celebrity: A History of Fame (2019), it is a “pseudointimacy, an intimacy that is not reciprocated” but nevertheless conveys “great pleasure” for fans like me. We “collect autographs or pictures, or even possessions of [our] idols, documenting the existence of stars and possessing some modicum of their being, creating [our] own celebrity reliquaries.”

It’s a dangerous undertaking that, as Douglas and McDonnell (among others) point out, “may have a deep impact on the way in which we think and feel about our bodies, our relationships, and our very identities” — including, at its extreme, our social and cultural identities and our willingness to bargain away difficult truths. More to come on this… but for now, here’s to Suzanne Pleshette, actor, daughter, wife, philanthropist, Jewess, loyal friend to those for whom she cared, raconteur, designer of sheets, conduit of my dreams.

Image credits, first photo collage, clockwise from upper left: (1) the romance that started it all: Troy and Suzanne in 1961’s Rome Adventure, from a feature in Photoplay, Sep 1963; (2) promotional photo sent in response to my fan letter, 1963; (3) fan mag photo salvaged from my high school scrapbook, from Moviegoers Tattler, Sep 1963; (4) press photo by Peter Borsari, 1970s; (5) photo likely sold at an autograph fair, inscribed to a fan: “Suzanne Pleshette photographed by her beloved Roddy McDowall,” 1980s; (6) press photo taken in Italy during filming of Rome Adventure, 1961.

Image credits, second photo collage, clockwise from upper left: (1) press photo taken during filming of The Birds, 1963, with Rod Taylor; (2) publicity still for the film Hot Stuff, 1979, with Jerry Reed and Dom DeLuise, with graffiti and inscription by SP: “To Chuck I hate this picture Suzanne Pleshette”; (3) publicity still for the made-for-TV movie Flesh and Blood, 1979, with Tom Berenger; (4) publicity still for the series Good Morning, Miami, 2002, with husband Tom Poston; (5) publicity still for the made-for-TV movie The Legend of Valentino, 1975, with Franco Nero; (6) publicity still for an episode of Route 66, 1960 or 1961, with Martin Milner.

Image credits, third photo collage, clockwise from upper left: (1) wedding photo, from Motion Picture, Apr 1964; (2) The Bob Newhart Show’s Bob and Emily Hartley, as drawn by Al Hirschfeld, 1970s; (3) SP and husband Tom Gallagher at home, from publicity shoot, 1970s; (4) publicity photo from the Broadway production of The Golden Fleecing, 1959, with Tom Poston; (5) Playbill cover from the Broadway production of The Miracle Worker (SP replaced Anne Bancroft in Feb 1961); (6) publicity photo by Fred Fehl from the Broadway production of The Cold Wind and the Warm, 1958, with Eli Wallach.