Alan Hamel

there was none of that. You'd get a call from the network and they'd say, we're doing a show, do you want to come in and talk to us? And we'd go in and talk to them and they give us a job. So when I came here, I didn't know about managers and agents. So I called ABC and I said, who's the head guy? They said Elton Rule. I said, put me through, so he takes my call. I said, I am Ellen Hammond. I did a lot of TV in Canada, and I did a late night satirical show for five years, out of Control. I said,

there's nothing like that in the States. There's no uh, there's nothing. There's no that that was the week that was there's no laughing, there's no Saturday Night Live, there's none of that. I'd like to show you a three and a half minute clip. He said, great, he said, can you be here tomorrow afternoon? Yes, you're calling him from Toronto from l A. I'm in l A, okay, and I'm thinking, now what, I don't have a job. Okay,

I've got some money, but i have no job. So the following day I go up there and he's got his two programming people there and he said, okay, he said, there, where's the clip? So I handed to him and he hands it to some an assistant and they put it up and they play it back and the clip is me on my late night show in Canada called Nightcap, interviewing a topless dancer in front of a live The ins who's topless? And I'm interviewing her like man on the streets. Okay, I'm not looking at her chest, no

lascivious remarks, just boring interviewer questions. So when it's all over, they all looked at each other around the room like, what the hell did we just see? Because the three biggest shows in those days were my three Sons, Beverly Hillbillies, and Green Acres. Okay, there was nothing else on. It was all pablum. So they said, you know what, let's do something together. So we negotiated a deal for me to do a ninety minute comedy special, and they housed

me around the corner in the Hollywood Palace. I had offices in the Hollywood Palace. Jerry Lewis doing his show there yet, no, not that I was aware of anyway, Okay, and I'm thinking, I'm at Hollywood and Vine. I can't leave it, okay, And every day at lunchtime, I'd stand at the corner of Hollywood and Divide and think, I'm at Hollywood and Vine and my offices are in the Hollywood Palace. Okay. Anyway, we do the show and nobody knew who I was, so ABC said I was producing

it and also starring in it. ABC said, nobody knows who you are, so you need a big time guest. So I called Robert Wagner, who had this huge TV series and I can't remember what it was called. How did you know Robert Wagner? I didn't know Robert, okay, but I was cooking cold calling everybody, so I said, here's what I want you to do. He laughed. I said, and here's the money. He said. Forget the money, he said, I live in Palm Springs, just getting me the world's

greatest golf cart. I said, done. So we do the show, and we're ten minutes into the show, and I said to the audience, I said, you know, every big time special needs a big time guest. We have ours, Laises and gentleman Mr Robert Wagner. And you know the way he looked, I mean handsome, okay, with the cuff links and the perfect shirt and hair, everything perfect, right. He walked out a huge applause and whistling from the women.

He goes to center stage. He takes a deep bow, it goes like that, thanking the audience, then walks down three steps into the audience, up the aisle and out the front door over here, and I said, okay, now that we've met our big star, we can carry on with the rest of them. So the whole show is like that. Okay, we took on everybody. It was a satirical show, but like today, it would be no big deal. But those people were screaming, and we took on everybody.

We took on the Catholics, the Protestants, the Jews, the Poles, the little whiny. We took on everybody, and I got death threats. My favorite death threat came from a guy in Libertyville, Illinois, and I said, the name of where you live is sort of the antithesis of this letter you've written to me. You want to do me in? Okay? Because I don't. I assumed I had the liberty of free speech in this country. Okay. So he wrote me back and there were only two words in his letter,

and the second word was you. Okay. So where were we? Okay? So you had a one in that ninety minutes special? Okay? So that special aired? Okay, and then what happened to results? People freaked. It was the second highest rated special all year, next to Tom Jones. Okay, what's ther word? In what year? Again? And the uh it's on ABC? It aired in prime time? When did it air prime time? So? Um? The show aired. The switchboards for ABC lit up across the country. People

were furious because they've never seen anything. You have to ask in light of you know, they always talk about censorship. You had this crazy show. They let you wear it. They didn't say, hey, this a little too edgy. Okay, they said to me when the script was written, okay, they said, you're never going to get this passed. What was her name, Grace Johnson? I said, who's Grace Johnson. She's in charge of standards and practices. We didn't have

that in Canada. I said, what, what are standards and practices? She decides what is not going to make air. So I called her, I said, would you have lunch with me? And I took it to a little place on Vine Street, a little French place I can't remember the name of it. I ordered the best bottle of wine and we sat there with the script all afternoon, eating and drinking wine, and every time she turned a page she would go, okay, my mother used to do that, and I thought, I'm

dead I'm dead meat. Okay. We get to the final page and we've knocked off the entire bottle of wine, and we're getting along and she closes the script and she said, let's do this really okay. So we did it, and so now it airs and you're getting negative feedback, you're also getting good, good pet feedback, getting good feedback, right, good feedback from people actually, you know a lot of Brits wrote because British comedy The Goon Show with Peter Sellers and Spike Man. I mean that's been I was

raised with that. Okay. In Canada is a Commonwealth country, so I was used to satire. I love satire, but this country had never experienced satire. So they were in shock. Okay. They turned on ABC to see I don't know what show we replaced, okay, but we replaced some show and it was obviously nothing like this. So we got great ratings. And the Miami ABC guy called me and he said, I own the affiliate station in Miami. He said, we love the show. He said, if I financed this series,

would you do it? I said of course. He said, I'm going to come to to l A. I'm going to meet with the top guys at ABC, and I'm going to make a proposal. And the proposal was, uh, Miami will pay for the production of the show the network and have two free runs as long as the Miami station owns the back end syndication rights. And ABC said we wouldn't consider it. And that was that. Okay.

So getting back to where I met Suzanne, I get a call from ABC right after that, saying, um, you did a lot of on camera in Canada, right, I said, yeah, I said, I did from nineteen fifty five until nineteen from fifty five until sixty Okay, so in the ninety minutes specially, you were not on camera. No, I was. I was on for the whole show, That's what I think. So they saw you. Yeah, I was the guy, right,

so they saw you. What was the question? Okay? The question was, would you like to host a game show in ABC? I said great, So I go on and talk to them, and that was They had the Newlywed Game, the Dating Game, and my show was called the Anniversary Game. Okay. So it was this troika and they said, we don't have any studios in l A. Would you mind shooting in San Francisco. I said great, So I go to San Francisco and I'm up there for a couple of weeks.

In pre production, we're laying out what the set looks like and who the people are, and we're hiring you know, production people, etcetera. And first day of production, I'm standing on the stage at ABC in San Francisco and on the other side of the stage I see the most beautiful girl woman I've ever seen in my whole life. And I'm thinking I have to go over there. So I start walking across the stage and I'm not good with come onlines. Okay, I always thought Hi. If I

say hi, I'm Alan Hamill, the bullshit light starts flashing. Okay. So I get right up to her, and I still don't know what I'm going to say. So I said, would you mind getting me a cup of coffee? And she did and we've been together ever since fifty years. Okay. Yeah, Uh, there's so much there. The average person became aware of Suzanne when she was in American Graffitian. Okay, but you never got credit on the on the she she was not credited on that movie. You could go through the credits,

you will not see the name Susanne. Was that intentional? No, it was that she had. She mouthed I love you, that was it. She was like an extra. She couldn't even say it out loud. And George Lucas Lucas, who had seen her a few days before um I had cast her. And then she her agent called her and said, you got this thing, and it's a small part, and what is it, well, you have to say I love you. So Suzanne stayed up all night practicing how to say I love you, and when she got there, he said,

just mouth it. So she was not credited and was interesting. After she she was on Three's Company, which was from seventy seven on ABC ran American Graffiti, and they promoted it by saying, American Graffiti starring Susante Summers. Okay, so you meet your in sixty nine or what you meet her in sixty eight? Okay? So what happens between sixty eight and seventy three? For her UM, she she had

won a scholarship to Lone Mountain College. I think it was a girl's college, Catholic girls college, and UM because she had done Guys and Dolls in high school. And you're old enough to remember Walter Winchell. Of course, Walter

Winchell turned up for this production. In this San Bruno would just a little blue collar used to be a blue collar town in northern California to see the production because he was represented in Guys and Dolls by one of the characters, and I can't remember which one it is. After the show, he came up on stage. We have a picture of this, and he walked up to Suzanne and he said, quote, you're going somewhere, sister, And that's how she got a scholarship to Lone Mountain College. But

the first year she was there, she got pregnant. And Catholic girl gets pregnant. Okay, church didn't like it. We're not we don't like you very much because you got pregnant you weren't married. So she got married and within a year she was divorced. And then I came along and I had just gotten a divorce as well, and we realized that this was not just a a dating situation. I had never felt this way before. And she called her mother that day and said the day we met

and said, I met the man, I'm going to marry. Okay, So it was for real. I didn't know what I was feeling. I just knew that this was serious, okay, Because in Canada I had I had being on television every day, I had access to a lot of attractive women, and most of them didn't go anywhere. It was just a I won't say what it was. It was just a short relationship. This was very very serious for me, and all they wanted to do was to be with her constantly, So since we started living together in the

early seventies, I think around seventy. Okay, let's go back to when you met her in sixty eight. What was she doing every day? She was struggling. She Uh, she her family were, except for her mother, Uh, we're all drunk, serious alcoholics. She had been raised in a house with a physically violent, crazed alcoholic father whose job was to put cases of beer on box cars. And they didn't

have coffee breaks, they had beer brakes. And he'd come home every night ship face and uh, you know, bang down a few shots of whiskey and some more beer, and then he would start to hunt down the family. So the family, uh, he slept most nights in a little closet. Suzanne, her two brothers, her sister, and her mother, and they had a lock on the inside of the closet so he couldn't get to them. And that's where they slept most nights. And this went on for years.

And one night, Uh, Susanne, I guess was fifteen or sixteen going to her first prom. Her mother aid her dress and it was this beautiful dress. Susanne described it to me, and she had it hanging in her room so that she could lay in bed and look at it and dream. And her father burst through the door in the middle of the night, flipped on the light and went right to the dress and ripped it up and ripped it in half, and she started screaming and crying.

Her mother came in. What's going on here? The father hit the mother in the breast. The mother went down. Suzanne picked up her tennis rocket and heard her father over the head and blood gushed out of his head. They took him to emergency. When he came home, his head was all bandaged up. From that time on. Um. What Suzanne realized was her father was afraid of her, because that was the first time anyone in the family I have her fought back. Okay, so the family was

drunk for years. The father was this crazed, craze guy who wanted to be my friend, and I had no interest in being his friend. And the more I pushed him away, the more he'd tried to be my friend. And he was not stupid at all. He was he was smart, and he was funny, funny guy. I think that's where Suzanne got her comed againstincts. But it was brutal growing up that way. And one day Suzanne Uh said to announce to her family, one day, I'm going to be a big star. This is when she was

in high school. I'm gonna be a big star, and my mother is going to be sitting in the front row. And guess what it happened. Opening at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for the first time, there's her mother sitting in the front row. H Okay, what happened to the rest of the kids in the family. They all stopped drinking, including the father, really the mother. The mother would clean up after the father every night. He had this thing about going into the refrigerator and throwing food

all over the place, breaking dishes. Then he would pass out and throw up on the floor with all the broken dishes, and she would clean it up, clean him up, and drag him off to bed. She went to Alanon and alan On said, don't pick him up. Let him wake up and realize what he had done. So she started leaving him on the floor and that's when he decided to go get sober. And her siblings are they all okay today? Younger brother died when he was forty seven.

He was an alcoholic and a drug addict. And uh, the seven children and gone okay, and the other siblings. The other siblings are in great shape. Her older brother has a carpeting business which he's owned for most of his life. Uh. The sister married her childhood sweetheart, the only man she's ever been with. They celebrated their fiftieth anniversary about five years ago, I guess. And those two have produced a family of fifty one people between children.

Grandchildren are s Bruno and great grandchildren. They lived down the street in U. It's an upscale community, Hills Hills. I don't know that anyway. They live in a And to what degree when Susie had becomes successful, are they asking her for money? Not that I'm aware of, Not that I'm aware of. She had written a book, um, I think it was a nineteen in the late eighties called Keeping Secrets. And we had all read books about written by famous people, uh, who talked about they're usually

their father being an alcoholic. Keeping Secrets was about Suzanne, who didn't drink, but how it affected her because when you're living with an alcoholic, you become as sick as the alcoholic, even if you don't drink, and her her thing was not drugs or alcohol. Her craziness was spending money she didn't have, creating a crisis, because crises were familiar for her. Okay, when you spend every night hiding from your father in a closet as a crisis, you're

living in constant fear and terror. So she was most comfortable that way. And she said to me one day, I could tell the mood my father was in by looking at the back of his head. And she said, I would then behave as is. In other words, she wouldn't behave the way she felt she wanted to behave. She would behave in a way that was resonant with him. So to keep the cap on. Okay, but it never worked, of course, Just to be clear, when she spent money she didn't have. That was before she had money or

after she had money. No, before she had money. Okay, I remember the book. So she has a child, she's out of the college before she meets you. What is she doing and how does she end up on the set? She gets a call. She had a semi agent in California, in San Francisco, and she got a call saying they're looking for a prize model on this game show. She had never been on a TV studio in her life,

so she turned up. No one bothered giving her any direction, Like when you open the refrigerator door, and you know, you look at the camera with the red light. So she opened the refrigerator door, but she didn't look at the camera with the red lights. So they fired her the first day. You know what, It's good they fired her because if they didn't fire her, I don't know whether. I don't know whether we would have had an evolved relationship.

So it were evolved mentally or evolved into that it happened. I in all the years I did television in Canada, I never messed around with any of the women who worked with me. Ever, Uh, it was too dangerous and what happens if it doesn't work out? Now you're see him every day. Absolutely, So I never did that. So would I have done that with Suzanne if she had gotten the job and stayed on the show. Um, I don't know. It was pretty pretty powerful action. Okay, so

you become involved with Suzanne. It's an instant romance. Um. Now, you had a long career where you were in front. Did you immediately say to yourself, I'm gonna put her in front. I kept going back to Canada to do television after I moved here, and from nineteen nineteen seventy four or five until I did the Alan Hamill Show, which was like Carson. A matter of fact, the production people we hired we stole from Carson because we wanted Carson's roller decks, so I had every guest Carson ever had.

Um So I did that show and then her contract with three Company was up in night, and uh so it was time to renegotiate, which is normal in the industry. Okay, how many years was the initial contract? Was? He was five usually and was everybody else on five? Yes, but they had renegoted. John and Joyce had already renegotiated because they had hired them before Suzanne. So I go to the negotiation and at ABC and the ABC lawyers there, one of the producers is there and some other guy,

and within two minutes they told me she's fired. I said, fired for asking for what She's fired. That was it. There was no explanation, She's fired. So I got up and I left. Okay, Then I discovered that Laverne and Shirley had renegotiated their deal three weeks earlier, and it was a monumental deal. I mean, without Laverne and Shirley, there's no laverniture. Okay. So they scored big time, huge, and the parent company of ABC and today, if if they decided to do this at a board meeting, they

all be thrown in prison. The parent company of ABC decided, we have to stop women from asking to be paid parody with the men, So let's fire the biggest female star in television. And no other woman will ever ask to be paid parody with the men. So they did. It was the dumbest, you know. I ran into a guy from KATS, which is an independent distributor of TV shows, at one of those conventions, and he said to me her firing was known as the biggest self inflicted wound

in the history of television. He said, we know that they lost over a billion in terms of license fees and back end. He said, by the time this show plays out, he said, will be more than that. Okay. On the street, the word was that she asked for too much. That wasn't a factor she actually asked for. I actually asked for half of what men were making. Whose shows were in the top twenty. Her show was

number one. She had the highest demographics. See what what you're what you're saying to me right now is what the pr company for the producers did. They destroyed her after that, since she was this greedy bitch and she didn't deserve to have the job, and we gave her the job and all she wanted. She's a money grubber, etcetera, etcetera. I asked for fifty percent of what the men were making and a piece of the back end. Okay, it wouldn't have mattered if I had asked for a nickel.

They had decided to fire Suzanne Summers, so it had nothing to do. Nothing to do with my request for a new contract, and nothing to do with that. They had decided to fire her. And I had gotten a call from someone who was with the parent company who was a mutual friend, and he said, we're not have in this conversation, he said. I came out of a meeting and he said, they've decided to fire No, they've

decided to hang a nun in the marketplace. But the Romans used to do right, They've decided to hang it nun in the marketplace. And Suzanne Summers is going to be it, okay, And I said, you're kidding. He said, no, they're going to fire her. I said, are you kidding? The greatest chemistry on television between Suzanne and John and Joyce are gonna fire. They're gonna destroy this show. He said, they're gonna fire her. He said, this decision is not

coming from creative people. It's coming from business people. They're just looking at the bucks. That's all they care about there, looking at the dollar signs. Okay, and that's how it happened. Okay, let's go back. So you meet her in to what degree you have your parallel career, To what degree are you involved in her career. I'm not really involved in her career at all. Um, she was trying to make

ends meet. I didn't know this. She kept it from me. Um. I was spending four days a week in San Francisco. She moved to Saslito, which of course is across the Bay right to get away from I think, from her family, and so I moved to So I was living in a Japanese hotel in San Francisco, the Miyako. I moved to Saslito and got myself a house boat. I thought, if I'm going to live in of course you gotta do it up right, I have to be on a houseboat, right.

So on one side of me, I had a surgeon, and on the other side of me, I had a drug dealer. So I knew if I had any health problems, the guy's right next door, and I didn't have to go into town to buy any drugs. The guy's right next door on the other side, by the way, I

don't do drugs. Um. So every night, Um, she'd put her son to bed, and the babysitter would come, and she'd come to my house Voute and I'd cooked dinner for her and Um we'd sit and watch the moon come over the Golden Gate Bridge and it was just this wonderful romance. It was like incredible, and I hated being away from her, and so for the past let me go back. She gets fired. I said to her, I'm leaving my talk show and she said, don't do that. She said, you'll miss it. I said, I've talked to

everybody I want to talk to. Okay, I'm ready. Okay, I've been doing television for twenty five years. I'm really ready. She said, what are you gonna do? I said, you don't have an agent, you don't have a manager, you have nobody. You don't know what you're doing. I said, you're gonna give it away and you'll just fade. I said, we're gonna make this work for us. I know how to do this. Okay. That was and she spent a year well before we go there, okay, just to lay

out the thing. How did she end up getting threes company? She got a call from uh, actually from a woman who worked for me in casting, who said, can I work with Susanne? I said, yeah, sure, So she somehow got a call and sent UH called Susanne and Suzanne went in and Suzanne had done like eight or nine pilots, none of which it's sold. And I used to joke with her and said, anyone who does eight or nine pilots must be a stewardess. By the way, we can't

use the word stewardess anything that light attendant. Now, okay. I got a big discussion with something. They said someone was from India. You know, they're South Asian. You know the I go out of my way to be politically incorrect. It pisces me off that someone should decide what my language should be. Okay, there's something called the First Amendments and it's the Freedom of Speech Amendments, and I exercise

it liberally. And the idea that you know, when the Internet started, When the Internet started and I started emailing in caps, I started getting people saying to me, why are you yelling at? I said, who? Who? Excuse me? Whose rule is that? Who decided that caps were yelling? I said, I write in caps because I'm over forty five and most of the people I deal with are over forty five and they would appreciate reading caps rather than lower case. Okay, they said, you're yelling. So I

never found out who made the rule. Somebody made the rule. Okay, but I hate all that politically correct bullets. Okay, Okay, let's go what but you can't say the N word? Right? No? Okay, So but there are limits. There are limits. Well, it's like you know, running into a theater yelling fire. Right, it's the same deal. Okay, let's go back. How does a nice Jewish boy from Canada end up on television when I graduated? First of all, how do you know

I'm Jewish? First? Hamil's a Jewish name. Secondly, it's all over online that you're Jewish, Jewish Jewish Holidays, so that's another thing. You know. If I wasn't Jewish, I couldn't say a nice Jewish boy. But I am, so I can't. I thought I might have run into you with the steam bath. Okay. Uh. I graduated from high school in Canada when I was so let's see when I was eighteen. Let's stop for a minute. We're in Canada and your parents Canadian or they came from the Old Country. Both

they came from the Old Country and Canadian. Okay, where did I come from? From Poland? My father came from uh from Poland right after his bar mispre five it was borne two. How many people have fathers who were born and so he came over and in those days, the federal would be immigrants wanted to live in New York, Philadelphia, Boston or Chicago. So the federal government said, we will give anybody a one way train ticket to anywhere else

in America other than those four cities. So my father went to Texas to be a cowboy, and he loved it. He lived in Austin, Texas for three years and just always talked about the Texans, how polite they were, how wonderful they were. And I don't know what he did. He had some were some blue collar job there, and he slept in a what he called a flophouse every night. And he said I had to sleep on my boots, otherwise someone would have stolen them. Okay. And I said,

so how did if where did you eat? If you didn't have a kitchen? He said, there was a brewery and for a nickel, they would give you a big stein of beer, and then they'd lay out all these uh lunch things, breads and and sliced meats and pickles and things. He said, I didn't drink beer, so I would take my stinn of beer and I'd sell it to somebody else for three cents, and then I would eat. And he said I would have one meal a day,

and that would that would be it. Okay. My mother came over after World War One, and the two of them, My mother had a job. He's in Texas. When does he leave Texas for Toronto? He leoh, a good, good question. Leaves Texas in nineteen oh eight or nine because one of his brothers had moved to Chicago so he goes to Chicago. My father gets a job working in a sweatshop making pockets Taylor not a tailor, an operator, the operators, and within a week they go on strike. So my

father doesn't know what a strike is. So I didn't have strikes in Poland. Okay, they killed you. So they go on strike and he's standing there and of a sudden, a cop on horseback rides in, clubs him over the head and blinds him in his right eye. That's when my father decided, I'm getting out of this country. So he moves to Toronto. If youn't know anybody interropted. He had a sister living there, no a brother, another brother.

She moves to Toronto and loves living in Toronto. And then World War One happens and he gets, you know, sucked into the military and he says to the recruiter, but I'm blind in my right eye, and he said, so you'll shoot with your left eye. And I mean even today they don't know how many people they lost in World War One. It was like by the pound. They just kept loading guys onto ships and sending him overseas.

So then my parents met. My mother's first job was scrubbing floors in the train station, and my father got another job making pockets, which was his lifelong job. And my father was the most honest, purest man I've ever met in my whole life. And I learned that less in the hard way. When I was about fifteen or sixteen, I had a date, one of my first dates, okay, with Molly, and then Susie came along, and I really wanted to go out with Susie. So I made a date with Susie. But I had to give I had

to give Molly a reason why I wasn't available. So I said to my dad, so if Molly calls, tell her blah blah blah blah blah blah. And I left and I went out with Susie. When I came home, I asked my dad. I said, did uh Molly called? He said yeah. I said, would you tell her? He said, I told you were out with Susie. That's what I realized. My father was not capable of lying okay and uh. He was a functional literate. He would spend his days reading, reading, reading, reading.

He couldn't write. He could barely sign his name. So my mother did everything. And my mother like most immigrants, round a boarding house and which they bought the house in uh Boon the twenties, I can't remember when. And it was a little house, but we there were seventeen people living there, okay, one toilet. We had eight Chinese brothers. Four had been born in Hawaii for in China. We had Reverend Johnny saw the Linda Scottish minister. We had Eric de Luz, a trinidaddy and artists. We had Van

van Alphin who was a Dutch cartographer. We had a blind alcoholic trumpet player. We had Harry Lando, a Jewish taylor. And we had Bill Monger, a British engineer, plus my sister, myself and my two parents. And I slept in the dining room with my parents. Stilla was eight years old. Never had my own room. Okay. Oh. We had one other guy, Oka Chukka Johnny, who was a Nigerian prince who was going to the University of Toronto medical school.

And I loved living with him. He had this great barrel laugh and we were we just we were good together, okay. And he was a great farter. In the middle of the night, I'd be awakened, okay, I'd wake up, and I'd say okay. He would call him okay, okay, are you kidding and he'd say well, and he had he had a great laugh. He um. He'd go to Nigeria every summer for vacation, come back with a big bag, canvas bag filled with twigs, and the twigs were about

four or five inches long. And that's how he brushed his teeth. And he'd hold a twig in his mouth till it softened up, and then he'd brush his teeth with it. And he had the greatest teeth in the world. Okay, so there's something wrong with our favorite Okay. Uh So anyway, um, where were you graduate from high school? Graduate from high school?

Everybody in my family as a doctor, everybody except my father. Um. And because all their parents came from the Old country and the most respected man in the village was the doctor. So when they got to Canada, they said to their sons, you're going to be a doctor. If you're not going to be a doctor, you're going to be a lawyer. And if you're a loser, you'll be an accountant. Okay, so they all became doctors. If that's why I became

a lawyer, Okay, is it doctrinated from you know, consciousness exactly. Yeah. So I didn't want to become a doctor because Okay, who was going to the medical school, would take me to the lab, okay at night where he was experimented on rabbits and rats and things, and the smell in the lab was horrendous, and I couldn't stand blood, looking at blood. And he'd open up a rat and show me the rests heart beating inside, and I think, I can't do this. I can't, So I'm not going to

become a doctor. Okay. So I graduated from high school. I don't want I'm gonna do. I don't know where I'm gonna go, what I'm gonna do, And I had had I've always worked. My first job was when I was six. I worked at the campus gross Steria across the street from our house on Saturdays, and I was in charge of opening the door for the shoppers and I made it. I made a buck a day. That was a lot of money. But my favorite job I worked for the Canadian National Railway from the time I

was thirteen to the time I was seventeen. I was a newsy Okay, what does the news he do well. I would walk up and down the aisle of the train, and some of these trains were like two miles long. I'd have a basket on this arm, and i'd have a case of cokes on this arm. In those days, coke cases were made out of solid wood and bottles. Of course. Okay, this arm, I'm right handed. To this day, my left arm is stronger than my right arm. Okay.

And i'd walked down the island, I'd say cigarettes, matches, chocolate bars, chewing gum, peanuts, biscuits and oranges, novelty, contraceptives, pillows, and comic books. Did you okay, did you sell any newspapers? No? No, there's no money in selling newspapers, right, So I was making three fifty four hundred dollars a week cash. And this was in let's see there, you say this was in the early fifties. My father was making twenty five dollars a week, okay, making pockets. Most people were making

bucks a week. Okay, So I started buying custom suits. Okay, we're just to know. Were you that good at new z all newsies make that kind of money? No, well, I don't know. I don't know what other newsies were making. I was really good at it. And I was a kid, okay, who doesn't want to help a kid. I didn't have to say to people I'm working my way through anything. I just I was a kid, okay. And uh so

they bought they bought from me. And the night before I would go on the train, i'd go to the butcher and I'd have him cut slices of ham for me. So he cut a slice of ham and hands me and say, is this thin enough? I hold it up to the light and if I couldn't see the light through the ham, I'd say, no, no, it's got to be thinner than that. So I would get a hundred and fifty slices of ham. I think a hundred and fifty slices, maybe a pound. I'd buy a white bread.

It was the only time whitebread ever made us way into my house, okay. And I would make ham sandwiches and ham and cheese sandwiches, and I would sell him for thirty five cents and forty On the train, okay, I would rent pillows, little baby pillows going west and then coming east, I turned the the cases inside out and rent them. On the way back, I'd rent comic books for a nickel. Uh. The novelty contraceptives, Okay, there were three of them. I had the French tickler. You

can only imagine what that is. I had the alligator, you can only imagine what that is. And the third one was and the clown face what was that? Okay? It was a condom with a clown faces again okay. And those I could saw those day and night. It was amazing, mainly to young men, young soldiers going home, you know, on vacation, to see their girlfriends or their wives or whatever. And they would always buy all my

novelty contraceptives. And I would buy them in Winnipeg for I think i'd get three of them, three of them in a pack, for thirty cents, and I could sell them for anywhere between a dollar and four dollars. Okay. When you got on the train Toronto, where did it go? Okay? In the summertime, I'd go a cross country. I'd go Toronto Vancouver, and we stopped in Winnipeg overnight and I'd stay in this hotel next to the train station. It was two dollars and fifty cents a night, and there

was no toilet no bath, no toilet, no shower. There was only a sink, and I wouldn't use the sink because I knew that every guy who stayed there pete in the sink. Okay, so you have to go down the hall to get a shower, and you know, use the let um. On weekends when I was going to school, I would use short halls to Toronto, Attawa, Toronto, Montreal, Toronto, Muskoka, Gravenhurst, etcetera. But I love the summers and I got to see

the country. Okay. I got all the way from Vancouver, all the way to Newfoundland, and most Canadians have never been east of Montreal. East of Montreal is Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. Most Canadians have never been there, which is a travesty because some of the most beautiful country on the planet is there, and the people are incredible. People in Newfoundland incredible. Newfoundland is closer to Ireland than it is to the rest of Canada.

That's how far east it is. As I remember being at the turn of the millennium and it's like a half hour, you know, It's like, you know, that's how they're celebrating what's going on? Yeah, Well, in uh Nova Scotia's like to drink and they have a rome called screech. And if you go to Nova Scotia, you go into one of their saloons. Uh, you can be screeched. What does that mean? Well, first of all, you buy everyone in the saloon a drink a shot of screech. Okay,

it's this awful, awful roum right. Uh. So for you to be screeched by the bartender, you have to kiss a cod a real codfish, on the lips, and then you bang down a shot of screech. Everyone applauds, and then they give you a certificate saying you've been screwed. Okay, so you're selling stuff on the train. Uh. You continue to go to school and you start your show business career. No, I continue, No, I wasn't in show business then. I

was between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. Okay, so you graduate from high school, then what do you do When I'm eighteen, I don't know what I'm gonna do. And one of the guys in my class says to me, um, what are you gonna do? And I said, I have no idea I don't know. I'm not going to be a doctor. I know that. He said, you gotta figure out what you're gonna do. He said, you're not gonna go work. I said no. He said, you know Ryerson Ryerson University in Toronto. Uh, they have a radio and

television arts course, and you have a nice voice. He said, why don't you go down an audition. That's what I did. I walked in. I saw TV cameras. I thought studios like this, and I thought, I'm home. This is perfect for me. Okay, So, uh, I went there for one year. I want a scholarship and uh writing a midterm exam in year two. The professor comes up to me and he puts a little post it on the on the

table with a name and an address. He said, they're auditioning at the CBC Radio network for someone to host a daily three hour classical music show. I think you could get it. I said, oh great. He said, put down your pencil and just quietly leave the room. I told them you'd be there in twenty minutes. So, as far as I know, my mid term exam is still sitting on a desk somewhere. You know Ryerson, UM that was my first job in show business, which I hosted

that show for five years. I loved doing it, and I had studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music. I think my mother decided I was going to be a concert pianist like all Jewish mothers, okay um. And that's how I got the job, actually, because the audition was a little tricky, like they had words in there that unless you knew how to pronounce them, you would not pronounce like divor Jack. There's no it's devor ac, which is the incorrect way of pronouncing it. Right. So I nailed.

I nailed the audition, got the job, and they sent me to Windsor, Ontario, which is across the river from Detroit, and I my first year I made three thousand, three hundred dollars okay, and I'm thinking I made a lot more money working on the trainer, right. So then I started doing commercials in Detroit for Chrysler and uh So

in nineteen so I was there. I went there in nineteen fifty five, and in nineteen fifty six, along with my my three thousand, three hundred dollar money I got from the CBC, I made twenty five thousand dollars doing commercials. So I call it, Who do you call when you make twenty dollars? Your mother? So I called my mother. I said, guess what I made twenty five thousand dollars, And without taking a breash, he said, and how much have you saved? So that was the beginning. I stayed

in Windsor for five years. Did you say any did you blow it? No? I blew it. I blow it was it was making custom suits. I was going to the New York Custom New York Custom Shirt Shop or whatever was called, having custom shirts made with my initials on the sleeve. Uh. I was wearing black silk stockings with garters, not guarter belts. But you know, just below the knee. I don't know who that person is. Okay.

Even today I look back on it and I see pictures of myself and I'm thinking, what were you thinking? Who did you think you were then? And the answer is I don't know, okay. So then I moved to Toronto in nineteen sixty. Back to Toronto in nineteen sixty as a classical DJ. Well I gave up the After five years, I gave up the classical DJ job and I moved into TV at the CBC in Toronto, and I was in TV there from from sixty to sixty eight when I moved here. Okay, how does one make

the transition from radio to TV? How do you make the transition? Well, I'll can tell you. Um, while I was in Windsor in nineteen early sixty there was a store called the Metropolitan and they had a terrible gas explosion in the store. There were people, uh, there were fatalities, people wounded, and it blew all the stuff from the store out into the street. And the radio station was

half a block away. So I was the first guy on the scene doing reports, right, And what was tragic was everything was covered in dust and you you you, I thought I saw a baby. It wasn't a baby, it was a doll. And the it was filled with people, people who were really badly wounded. So I started doing reports and next thing, I'm doing reports for Toronto as well, and I'm doing some reports for American outlets as well.

And I got a call from Toronto saying we have an opening, and he said, she said, we rarely have an opening. She said, we'd like you to come and join us. So I went moved to Toronto and I went into TV, and at first you're doing what, pardon, what is your role? At first in television? The first role was sitting in a booth every night for hours saying, this is the CBC television network. That was it. What

did that evolve? It was the next step. The next step was doing commercials, live commercials on a primetime music show. And once I did that, that was became like my showcase. Okay, and then I started getting calls and I by the time I finished television in Canada, I had done close to four thousand hours of network okay, just very quickly. So you're doing commercials. What's the next step? What do you do to ultimately work your way up to the Johnny Carson esque talk show? I just did a lot

of shows I did. I did a My first series was a show called Razzle Dazzle. It was a kids show that was on every day on the network, every day for half an hour. It was live. I did that for five years. The host I was the one of the hosts and one of the players, one of the Then I did a simultaneously. I did the show called Nightcap, which was the satirical show, and that ran for five years. Um I did the commentary at the Tokyo Olympics in X four. I did the commentary in

early six eight at the Mexican Olympics. I did a show called cine Club, which was a show about short film festival films. I did a show called on the Scene, which was a show where we'd go to a different venue, a different location or a different city every week. And I created a show called Sports Date that specialized in sports that we're not on TV. No baseball, no football, no hockey, like why World of Sports in America. We we did ballooning over the Alps, we did Thailand boxing,

we did skydiving in Ava, through in British Columbia. We did all the off So then I created the the Canadian International Deep Canadian International Invitational Deep Sea Fishing Tournament in the Bahamas, Okay, and we invited the heads of all five oil companies and they loved coming. And we had hats and we had little medals, and we had the whole thing. And it was all to get the hell out of Toronto, Okay, right right right, as far as I know, that thing may still be running. Okay.

Key to your success was, or is wow, my mother. Okay, explain a little bit further. My mother, Um, it was very smart. So she ran a boarding house. Right when she died, she was a millionaire from the boarding house. Um. She believed in me no matter what I wanted to do. When I told her when I was thirteen years old, I'm getting a job on the railroad and I'm going to be traveling all over the country, she said, great, Okay. Uh. How many mothers would say to their thirteen year old,

especially today. None. So whatever I wanted to do, she was behind me all the way. She encouraged me. When I won a scholarship, she turned up. Um. So I have to believe that my both my parents heavily influenced my life. My father because of his purity and his honesty and his loyalty. Um. And I suffer from some of those diseases myself. But my mother just, uh, you can whatever, you can do it, whatever you want to do.

But I've I've also been in Los Angeles, i e. Hollywood for so long to know that there are certain stripes of people, usually people who can't fit into the regular world, who have certain skills that allow things to go forward, whether it be the gift of gab or creativity in terms of making up shows or something. What

skills do you believe helped you in that area? Okay, I've I've always had the gift for gap and I think it happened when I worked on the trains, Okay, because aside from just running up and down the train, you know, selling stuff, I talk to people. I talked to adults. You know, when kids talk to adults, they yet to be adult. And I think that that helped me a lot in my life and in my business.

Um I am somewhat introverted normally. Uh When Susanne and I go out to a big party, I usually find a nice quiet place at the bar, and she loves working the room and I just kind of hang out at the bar and I don't care if anyone talks to me or not. And Susanne has given up saying why don't you talk to people? I said, I'd rather just stand here and watch people. Okay, And uh so the answer is, I don't know. In front of a camera, I'm not introverted at all. Okay, I'm I'm right out there.

I love performing, um or, I loved past tense performing and today Susanne and I do uh two or three Facebook live shows every week. Well before we get there, let's clean up the past where we can after threes company. Okay, So thank working for the CBC. Even when you hit the ceiling with a nightly talk show, it's not that lucrative.

It was pretty lucrative. It was when I left the CBC in um the first month I was living in l A. I get a call from the CBC saying, we're doing a new show on Saturday night, called in person. We'd love you to host it. And I said, I'm living in l A now and they said, so you'll fly back. We'll shoot you know, two or three shows at one time, and it won't be a big deal. I said, okay. I said, just pay me what I made the last year at the CBC, and they said,

it's not a problem. I get a call back three days later and the guy says to me, we can't pay you what you made last year. I said, but you paid me what I made last year. Yeah, but we can't just pay you you earned it. I said, well I'm going to earn it again. You want me to do the show? No, but you did so many shows that you you you made four times and more than the president of the CBC, I said, but my ratings are better than the president of the CBC. Okay, anyway,

he said, Okay, we're gonna figure this out. So they did. I made. I made. I made a hundred and sixty thousand dollars and that was a nineteen sixty seven. Okay, a lot of money, A lot of money. I think you know. Baseball players they were lucky, were making a hundred yeah, and hockey players are making eight thousands. Okay, do you play hockey or you a hockey fan? I played hockey every day of my life, okay, every day

of my life. And the only fist fights I ever got into were on the ice, so no one ever got hurt. You don't get hurt fighting when you're on ice. But I played every day, every single day. I love playing hockey. And uh I gave up hockey when I started working. So there's a bunch of crazy Canadians who live here, okay. And I get a call probably once a month and they say, okay, we need one more on, we need look forward. So said, we're it's go next week at the blah blah, and I say, are you

freaking crazy hockey? I'm an old guy one body checking in the hospital. No, no no, but we don't body check. I said, don't tell me that. You guys get out on the ice and you think you're eighteen again. Okay, and you forget the rule about no body checking and your body checking. He said, well it happens. Okay. So I run into Gratzu Wayne Gretzky one night at a party and the two of us are standing at the bar, and I said to him, I tell him the story

about the crazy Canadians. He said, I get the same call. I said, what do you say? He said, are you see? Are you serious? Are you freaking crazy? You think I'm gonna come out and play hockey with you guys? Okay, So you have your nightly talk show in the seventies. That the last time you're in front of the camera, in front of a network camera. Yeah, the last time I did a series. Okay, but we're now doing a different kind of show. Okay, but let's before I told

that first secade. Okay. So you meet Suzanne in at what point do you get married? We get married in seventy seven, when she got hired for three company. I said, Okay, you finally got a job, so let's get married. Okay, so I'll tell you something interesting about her first paycheck, which was not big, okay, but she had never had a paycheck okay. So she was supporting her. So I

was paying all the bills. And I didn't have any money either, okay, because when I got my divorce, I did not want life to change for my two children. They were going to school and uh West Brent, Brent was i'mwhere private school. I didn't want their life to change, so I simply left. All I took was my car with me, Okay. I rented an apartment um in Beverly Hills for two hundred dollars a month, and it was this terrible, crummy one bedroom. One bedroom was like a

little bigger than this desk. But it was my place. And that's where Susanna and I started living together. We'd been essentially living together before that. She'd come to l A and I was living with a buddy of mine and bell Air and I'd go to to San Francisco to Sasolito, etcetera. But we officially started living together in seventy early seventy. Sometimes uh so I'm so depressed after leaving my wife. What was the motivation for leaving your wife?

I only knew her for two weeks before we got married. We shouldn't have gotten married. Okay. We got married when I was twenty or twenty and how long did that last? Ten years? But I was away. I think I created those shows for the CBC to get me out of town. It's not that I just I didn't dislike her. I really liked her a lot. She was a very talented artist and a lot of humor, et cetera. But I wasn't in love with her. We should have just been friends. Okay,

So it wasn't this terrible, awful thing. It's just that we just kind of grew apart and it was kind of natural to had a divorce. Uh. So I walked away with my car. I didn't take any money. I didn't take I took nothing, and I rent this crummy apartment. And I'm really depressed, really depressed, And for a good year and a half two years, I didn't answer the phone, I didn't open a letter. I didn't want to see anybody.

I was depressed and humiliated. Um I knew how my mother felt about it because she told me, she said, nice boys don't leave their wives because no one in the family had ever gotten a divorce, even though they shouldn't. They should have gotten a divorce. I mean, my parents were together for sixty three years. They should have you gotten a divorce twenty years earlier. Um, but no one,

just no one did that, of course. Okay, So one day I come home to my crummy two apartments and I walked in and uh, I had an aquarium with guppies aquarium. So I said, he is, where's my aquarium? And she said I had to sell it. I said why. She said, to pay the rent. But who's saying that I had to sell your aquarium to pay the rent? I said, we who. No one's going to pay you two hundred dollars for that crummy little look. She said, I also sold your clothes. I said, you sold my clothes.

She said, You've never been poor, have you? I said no. Even when I was living with my parents and I was poor, I didn't realize I was poor because we had everything. Okay, I said, so, no, I've never been poor. She said, well I have. She said, when you're poor, you sell your stuff. And then when you have money, you buy more stuff. I said, Okay, So suddenly I had very few clothes. I actually had quite a wonderful wardrobe. Okay, I had kashmere suits in the pants lined in silk.

I had wrapped around overcoats made out of camel whatever they call it, camel hair. That was all gone. So there are guys walking around l a your clothes and if they look into their inside pocket, they'll see my name. I'll see my name and the date that it was. It was mad it made for me. These are all custom clothes. Yeah, so how did you get out of

the rut? Out of the depression. So after a year and a half or two years, I'm in the bathroom and uh, really feeling terrible about myself because I'm thinking, this isn't me. I just feel awful and I've never been depressed in my whole life, and I'm really depressed. I'm not suicidal, but I just feel like crap. I feel like I'm useless, and I feel badly because I left my children. So I'm in the bathroom and I look around. There's no toilet paper. It's going to get

a little graphic. All that was in the bathroom was the nash Old geographic. Okay, have you ever used a page out of the Nationals? Can't imagine it? The page is this thick, it's also shiny that paper. Okay. So I thought, okay, I finally hit the wall. This is it. So I call a commercial agency called Abraham's rubil Off and so they do commercially. Said, they have people and they send them out to do commercials. And I talked to U Neil Noel rubil Off and he said, oh,

come on down. So I go down there and we talk and what do you do in Canada to television? Blah blah blah. I said, okay, said I'll send you out. So I was in those days. Well, I won't get to this. He sends me out to audition for a company called Household Finance. I don't even know, h okay, I don't know if they're still around, I don't know. Okay. So I walk in, I do the audition. There are these eight guys from the agency sitting around the conference table.

I do the audition and the guy in sharde says to me, you sure sound like the right guy, but you don't look like the right guy. And I said, what are you talking about? He said, go down the hall, there's a bathroom, look at yourself in the mirror, and ask yourself the question, would you borrow money from a guy who looks like this? So I came back. I said, you're right, because during the time I was depressed, I stopped dressing and I was wearing funky jeans, work boots,

um denim jacket, some kind of funky shirt. I had a big natural I had a mustache, I had a beard, a small beard, going, etcetera. I said, I agree with you. I said I would not borrow money from a guy who looks like me. I said, are you guys here tomorrow? And they said yeah. I said, can I come back? Yes? So next morning I turn up at eight o'clock for an eight thirty meeting, and at eight thirty, these all eight guys walk in. They walk right by me. They

didn't they didn't recognize me. Right, I walked in and they said, you got the job. I had a haircut, I shaved, I put on a suit with a shirt and a tie, and I looked like a guy you'd borrow money from. So I did three national spots. I mean fifty thou dollars, which was a lot of money when you have no money, even if you have money, fifty thou dollars a lot of money. And then I started doing a lot of commercials voiceovers and I really enjoyed it. It was easy money and I didn't have

to get dressed for you know, any voiceovers. They called me to turn up and I shoot, you do a couple of commercials. And then in nineteen nineteen seventy three, maybe seventy three, Um, I get a call to audition war a supermarket called Alphabeta. Of course, and uh, they also want Susanne to audition. And no one's ever heard of Suzanne Summers in nineteen seventy three, right, So the two of us audition as a as a couple. I

get the job, she doesn't. So I did thousands of commercials TV and radio for Alphabeta from nineteen seventy three, I think to night and or nineteen seventy nine maybe, and uh, I actually I didn't get sick of doing them.

But it was like I became the Alphabeta man and the the the tagline at every commercial was tell a friend, and wherever I had to go at people would say tell a friend, and I'd go, like the first time I heard it, So it's now no, okay, Susanna and I. It's now and Susanne and I are on a red eye to New York for a meeting and she just finished shooting Three's company and she's tired. We get on the plane and we start arguing about nothing, and then

we stopped talking to each other. And now we're sitting beside each other. We're flying to New York and we're not talking. We get to New York, we get into the car, the driver to take us to this meeting. We get to the building, and instead of pushing the express elevator that goes to the floor, I pushed the one that goes to three. Okay, now we're not talking to each other. Okay. We get on the elevator. We

get as far away from one another as possible. The door opens on the second floor and a guy gets on. He looks at Suzanne, looks at me, smiles and says, and I said, fuck you, okay, And I was surprised that I said that, but I was piste off at Susanne. We weren't talking. There was this anger thing. Now the guy that I said that too. I felt so badly afterwards. I wish I could apologize to him. He couldn't wait to get off the elevator because Mr happy that he'd

seemed to tons of commercials. Okay, suddenly he's trapped in this steel room with this lunatic okay, who's yelling at him? Anyway, he gets off, Susanne and I looked at each other. We started laughing. I realized, what are we fighting about? It so stupid? Okay. So and by the way, from the time she was fired, which was when I left my talk show two today, because we're in business together. We have not spent one night apart in over forty years,

and we're together twenty four hours a day. Wow, that's amazing. Okay, let's start there. She gets fired, what's your plan, because you do reinvent her and you have a lot of business enterprises. What was your What were your thoughts at the time? And I had no business enterprises. Um, I didn't have a plan, but I knew I could come

up with a plan, which I did. So we're talking, and you know what we're gonna do and where we're gonna do it, and how we're gonna do it and the three company people were ignorant about branding because I went to them and I said, we should brand Chrissy Snow. Okay, we should brand the like the hair thing and the hot pants and the boots and the and there should be a Saturday Morning animated cartoon, you know, the Adventures of Chrissie's. And they say, all we care about is

the show. We don't care about anything else. I said, but don't you understand this brings more audience in, it brings more loyalty to No, we don't care about that, okay. So one of the things that I talked to Susanna about was branding, and branding was a fairly new word in there weren't too many people branded. I said, everybody knows who you are. I said, the firing, in one sense was really good because it puts you on every

newspaper in the country and talk show and interviews. And I said, that's all they're talking about is ABC fires Chrissie Snow from Three's Company. I said, so we're starting off by the fact that you are extremely well known and will globally be well known as well, because the show ran in like a hundred and thirty countries. So she said, you know, um, I did guys and Dolls in high school and I really enjoyed it. She said, I'd like to do a show in Las Vegas. So

it was her idea, her idea. Yeah, So I said, uh, jokingly, can you sing? And she try to try to hit me. So I go to Vegas. I go to the Sahara Hotel. They offered two weeks big money. Went cold once again, no agent, no nobody else. I go to the Riviera two weeks big money, and I realized, oh, that's the format for big TV stars because they don't think they're gonna last longer than two weeks. So the Mob was still running Vegas. Then okay, they were just beginning to transition,

but the Mob was still in charge. So I go to the MGM Grant and the president's name is Bernie Rothkoff. Bernie Rothkoff was the nephew of Modalitz. Modlitz was head of the the Cleveland Mob okay Jewish Mob. So uh, I bypassed the entertainment director. I learned from my first sale to ABC, go right to the top. I'm total believer in that the first who can say yesterday. That's right. And they may say that's not me. You have to talk to Fred. But why go to Fred first? Okay?

So I walk into Bernie Rothkoff's office and it's huge. It's he's fifty feet away from I'm not kidding. There's no furniture, okay, other than he had a little desk probably three or four ft wide, and he's sitting in one chair there and there's one chair on the other side. That's it. There's no art on the wall, there's nothing. So and he's writing. He doesn't even look up. He's writing something and this is like I'm walking to the death chamber, and without looking up, he says, what do

you want? And at that moment I realized he's like all my uncle's he's they're all a tough, tough talking guy, heart of gold. Okay. So I said, I want a two year deal for Susanne Summers and I don't care what the money is. So he puts the pencil down and he said, why do you want a two year deal? I said, I told him about the Sahara and the river. I said, I don't want to come here with two weeks. I said, it's a waste of time. I said, I don't know if she's going to succeed in two weeks.

So that's where I want a two year deal, because everything she does, she succeeds. Okay, you ever watched Threees Company? He said, I love threes Company? He said, okay, did she succeed? He said yes. I said, so two year deal. What have he got to lose? He said, no, one's got a two year deal. He said, I've got Dolly. He named all this all the stars he's got got cause I got love. I said, they have six weeks, a six month, six eight months deals. He said, no

one is. I've never heard of a two year deal. He gives me a two year deal and the money

was more than I was asking threes Company for. So now we got to put a show together and we've never done it, and she's never been on stage other than in high school for guys and dolls, and uh so I bring in some of the people I had worked with in Canada, and one of them in particular, who was a buddy of mine in Toronto, and he became a head of comedy at NBC and he and his partner produced a lot of big variety shows when variety was big in this country. Sali Wilson and So

I told So, I said, we got this deal. I said, you know, I want you to help us out, he said with pleasure. So he took charge. He became the producer of the original show, and he brought in the choreographer, He cast all the singers, he cast all the dancers. I said, don't even think about what it's gonna cost. Whatever it's costs, we're fine, I said, just do just do a great show. So we had projection, we had everything, because I wanted all this there so that Suzanne's not,

you know, naked on stage all by herself. So we opened and her opening theme music is playing in Susanna and I were standing in the wings and it's time for her to go on, and she's not going on. So I put my foot on her rear end and gently pushed her out on stage. Okay, And when she got on stage, when she was out there, she was very comfortable. She loved it. It was a great show. We were sold out and we I think we were at the MGM for a week or two weeks, and

that was the beginning of Vegas. She became UH Female Entertainer of the Year one year we live. We lived in Vegas for ten years and we worked in Vegas for thirty five weeks a year. She still holds the record for selling the most tickets over a two and a half year period. For two and a half years we were at the Las Vegas Hilton. We had a gigantic show there, cast of sixty people. It was the

Mula Rouge, and she wound up starring in the Mula Rouge. Strangely, I get a call from the president of the Hilton, Henry Lewin, who was a German jew who had run for his life, you know, during the war and spent the war years in China. And he called me and said, Allen, I have this show and I want to do as an accent. He said, I have this show and I'm paying these guys in Paris UH a lot of money

and royalties. Every single week he said, we have more people on stage than we have in the audience of night. He said, would you and Suzanne come and look at it? So that night we go look at the show. I love big. I love big production shows in Vegas. Okay to any production show. Beautiful girls with feathers and you know, a lot of music and dancing. I love that, so, I said, Henry, Henry lewin was I said, Henry, it's it's a beautiful show. He said, I know, I know.

He said, but what's wrong? I said, you don't have an anchor. I said, there are two other shows in Vegas that have French names. I said, nobody knows what those the shows are. They It's like, what's the move long Route? What is it? Okay? I said, here's what I suggest. Suzanne opens the show, she does her act in the middle of the show, and she closes the show. Okay, we will do that. If you promised to do this, he said, I'll do whatever you want me to do.

I said, you have to buy every available billboard in Las Vegas. You have to buy every available billboard in the feeder cities, Okay, Phoenix, Burbank, l A, et cetera. I will produce to video commercials and several radio spots. I will give you photo ready art to use in print. You have to just forget about what it's costing and just lay it on. And if you do that, I promise we will succeed. So that was I can't remember what month it was. Two months later, we opened eight

hundred seats at the Las Vegas Hilton. I was a little worried, okay because the night we were there to watch the moon law Rouse that were probably maybe a hundred people. And it's off the strip. Okay, it's off the strip, so we don't even have the benefit of people walking by. So I gave him a picture, a head shot of Suzanne sexy head shot. I said, put this on your on the the what do they call it, yeah,

the Marquis. Okay, we opened, were sold out. It was the first time the the balcony had people sitting in it since Elvis was there in the sixties. Okay, they were storing lighting equipment in the balcony. So we sold out to two hour shows every night, seven nights a week. Those were the days when Vegas hotels provided entertainment every night of the week. After year and a half or two, and we're still selling out like crazy. I said to Henry lew And we gotta have a day off. And

he said, Allan, is it money. I said, it's not the money. I said, we're happy with everything, with everything. I said, it's not that at all. I said she needs a day off just to lay in bed. He said, okay, okay, Monday. So that started all the hotels only doing shows Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and sometimes Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Okay, it broke. The

seven day rule was an unofficial rule. So we did that for two and a half It's You and a half years and sold gazillions of tickets, and that established her as a headliner in Las Vegas, and we started playing theaters around the country and that got old after a while. You know, one playing nighters and you finished doing the show and you're eating crap on the road. By the way, that's another conversation. All the people, all the entertainers who have been on the road all their life,

okay forty fifty years. I don't know if you've noticed or not, but they all have dementia or Alzheimer's. And why because they're doing nighters. They get to the venue, they're nervous, so not eating. They do a sound check, rehearsal, they do the show. Eleven o'clock at night, they say to the the road manager, go get some food. So

what's open? You know, what's open at eleven o'clock at night if you're lucky, because he brings back crap food that's it's sprayed with poison and who knows what else. And that's what these people have been eating for forty and fifty years, and I believe it's the food. Okay, how does the thigh master happen? Get a call from a guy I casually knew in Toronto and he says to me, and he's part of a film development company. There are three of them. He said, I got this

exercise device. He said, I don't know what to do with it. He said, I want you to take a look at it. So he comes to what we're living in, Palm Spring. He comes to Palm Springs and it's called a V Toner because it's shaped leg and it's an upper body workout. It's not for thighs, its upper body. And the idea is if you use it for your upper body, your upper body will be shaped like a

V as well. So it's called a v Toner and it was invented by a Swedish doctor and it's Swedish looking, kind of gray, has a gray utility, sort of looked to it, and it'd been around for fifteen or twenty years and they couldn't sell a unit. So Suzanne takes it, puts it between ear thighs and started squeezing it and says to the guy, is this good for thighs? And he says yeah, but it's an upper body. She said, okay, leave it with us. So during the next two weeks

we came up with the name. Suzanne says it was her, I said it was me um, and we changed the color combination so it had a red knob and blue handles, and we shot the commercial and the commerce you a little flaccid. The results were a little flaccid. We weren't losing money, but we weren't making the money we thought we were going to make kah, So we had to

figure out what do we do next? So we added three pages called Susanne Summers Helpful Hints for Healthy Eating as a premium and I took off like a rocket. What do you why do you think that was people like getting free stuff? Yeah, okay, so most people who have a heyday on TV, certainly at that time, I want to get back on weekly TV. What was your feeling about that about me getting back? Well, she had done most people don't even think think about this. She's

done two hit series. Three's Company. Then she did seven years with Patrick Duffy on Step by Step seven years. That's a that's a hit TV show. She did Candy Camera for two years. I believe she did a she did the first um, the first time they produced a virgin sitcom for syndication. Usually it goes to the network and then so they decided, Lorimar decided, let's produce a sitcom for syndication before it goes to They'll never go

to a network. Right. It was called She's the Sheriff, and Susanne was the sheriff, of course, and she she did not like doing the show. I said, why why don't you like doing the show? She's I don't like what I have to wear. I said, okay, okay, but they're paying you every week, right, She's yeah, but I don't like Okay. So that show ran for I think a year, maybe two years, I can't remember. So she's

done a lot of TV, A lot of TV. We did music specials for CBS, a lot of guest starring on music specials with Paul Anka and you know, John Wayne, etcetera. So a lot of television. Does she want to go back to TV? Um? I think if she went back to TV, it wouldn't be to do a sitcom because it's never going to be as good as what she's done. Uh. She would probably go back to do a talk variety show remember those of course, Okay merv Griffin, and you

know she'd go back for that. She'd probably said, well, let's do it out of Palm Springs. Okay, so we do it out of Palm Springs. But what we're doing right now is um. She was on the shopping channel HSN for seventeen years, one of the top vendors, and we started with jewelry, then we went to fashion, then we went to small kitchen appliances, then we went to organic food, then we went to audio video, then we went to publishing. Uh, and then we went to candy

and chocolate, and then we went to bedding. I'm probably missing okay, but I had. Your memory is phenomenal, um. And she was one of the top vendors and they referred to her as the Queen of TV shopping Okay, seventeen years. So then she started writing these books and she wrote her first book was seventy three She wrote a book of poetry called touch Me and Uh. That's

the story in itself. She came down to audition for the Dom Delawis Show and she had a call back, so she went to the commissary at NBC to wait to be called back. It was mid afternoon. She was the only one in there in watch Johnny Carson, and she thinks, oh my god, there's Johnny Carson. Oh my god, Johnny Carson is coming over to me. So he comes over to her and says, hey, little lady, what are you doing here. I'm here for Don Delawi. He said, Oh, he's a friend of my and I hope you get it.

She didn't have an eight by ten. She hands him her book of poetry, so he takes it. That was Wednesday, Friday. She's on the Tonight Show having purchased address with a bad check. Okay. Carson loved her because she was a small town girl, totally open. I mean he would say to her, when did you get to town? She'd say this afternoon okay. Um. So he had her on I

don't know every month. He loved having her on. And um so from that Fred Silverman, so Freddie was head of NBC, there were no They didn't have committees then to decide if they're going to do a show or not. Now it's by committee because no one wants to, you know, get be responsible. Yeah, but they all take credit from a win. Right. So Fred had watched Suzanne on the Tonight Show often. They had done two pilots with two other Chrissie Snows that did not test well. So he

said to the producer producers, I've got the girl. So they called Suzanne, and Suzanne said, you know, and I did a bunch of pilots and none of them sold. I think I'm done. I'm going to teach cooking. Okay, now he's coming for this one, lad. Okay. So she goes in not caring if she gets the job, which of course is the best way to get the job, right. And she gets home, the phone rings, you got it and we start Monday, Monday, Monday, Okay, not with a pilot.

We're in production Monday, and the first order was for six shows, which was normal in those days. Okay. She walks in to the room where they're all sitting around the cast and the producers and the writers are sitting around for a table read and she's never been to a tape will read. She's never done done anything right. So the first thing she announces to everybody, Okay, this is a small town girl speaking. I've never had an acting lesson, and I I'm not quite sure what I'm doing,

but I learned fast. All the professionals were sitting around and I'm sure they were thinking, what this is one of the three stars of the show who's never had an acting lesson and doesn't know what she's doing. Okay, but that was her honesty. I'm just telling you. I'm telling you people who I am. Okay. So the first she doesn't like the first year of threees company, she said, I didn't hit it okay, but by the second year, she was hitting it out of the park. She got that.

She I said, it's very hard to be a likable dumb because most dumb lawns are irritating. She said, I created a moral box for this character, and in the moral box, I don't lie ever, and I'm never going to steal anyone's husband or boyfriend. That's my moral box. Okay. Always tell the truth, never come on to anybody's guy, okay. And that's why people love that character. Okay. So but now that you were saying a couple of times, you're

doing Facebook shows. So we have a we have about a thousand products that we've all of which we've developed over the years. We have Susanna Organics, which is and by the way, Susanna Organics came out of you know, for every downside, there's an upside. The downside was twenty or twenty one years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and she couldn't figure out why she would host this terrible disease. And she realized it was because she

was staying up late at night writing, Uh, she was eating. Uh, you know when you're doing when you're doing a TV show, there's the craft table cross service. I call it the crap table, okay, because there's orange things there. There are no natural foods other than oranges that I know of that they're covered in orange powder. And you're a little nervous. Every time you go by, you grab something and just throw it in your mouth. And then if they serve,

you know, lunch, it's not with a gourmet food. It's the cheapest food they could find. Right, So she figured a part of it was staying up late not getting enough sleep, uh, being too busy and not being aware of the food I was eating. So she decided to change her life and ultimately my life, and uh, get all the toxins out of our life. Okay. We got rid of all the stuff in our house for cleaning, which is poison. We created a home cleaning system that

you could drink. It tastes awful, but you could drink it okay, and it works incredible. We created Susanne Organics. It's uh organic skincare, organic hair care, organic cosmetics. Okay, because when you see the the stuff that you buy commercially for skin care and hair care, you wouldn't want to go anywhere near it. Okay. So on your Facebook live show, do you promote these products? Absolutely? So what

we do is it's like a reality show. Oh. A few years ago, John Feldheimer, who's a dear friend of ours who runs a lions Gate, he said, I want to do a reality show with you and Sudan. We said, but we don't argue, we don't fight. We're not like you know, all these reality shows they kick the crap out of each other. Okay, and that's the show, and we don't do that. He said, that's why I want to do it with you guys. I know you so well and you don't argue, but you have this great,

loving relationship. That's what I want. So I said, okay, So for three days we had two guys with big cameras like this following us around. I called John. I said, I can't do this, Okay, I said, I there are things that I want to do that I can't do because I know it's going to be on camera. I said, and even though you know we we have the final look in terms of it, I said, we can't do this. Okay,

we can't do it least I understand. So what we do now with Facebook Live and we simulcast on I g TV, Instagram, and we're on our way to another nine or ten digital platforms. We've been doing this for about a year and a half. We've archived about a hundred hours which you can You can go to Suzanne Summers Facebook and you'll see them all there. There's no script Susanne and I don't discuss what we're gonna do.

The only thing that we plan ahead is what products are we going to be selling and how much are we charging? Okay, we discount our products like crazy. How lucrative is it? Well, it depends on your definition of lucrative. I mean everything is relative, you know. But okay, how long are the shows, like between forty and to an hour show? What is the range of the lowest amount of gross product you could sell to the top. I

don't know how to answer that question. Um, most of the show is Suzanne and I or if our families there are families on just goofing around. Um, I'm the bad boy, okay, I say things that we know. The audience goes, oh did you hear what Allan said? And I'm not making it up? Who I happened to be? I like being a bad boy? Okay. So we have fun doing these shows, and we market not all of our products. Um, like we did a show with a thime master a few weeks ago, and I mean we

keep a good supply of thime masters. Okay. So when you email, you always emailed with me with marketing wisdom. So as you look at and you talked about branding earlier. So what are a couple of lessons you can tell my audience in terms of selling their products. But first of all, you have to believe in your products. The first aside from my experience on the train, I got a job selling food freezer plans in Canada. That's like

selling you know, ice to the Eskimos. Really uh. And the sales manager said to me, I don't care if you like the food freezer plan or not. Okay, I said no, no, he said, I don't care if you like it or not. He said, you have to talk yourself into believing that you love it. If you can believe that you love it, you can then get anyone to love it. Okay. So I said, okay. So that was my first lesson in marketing to people that may not want to buy anything. So with all the products

we have, we developed all of them ourselves. So there are no products there where someone comes to us and says other than thy master. That happened in the eighties. Um. We we created all these products. Okay. We we have a formulator. We do it all ourselves. We have a team of four that runs our digital programs. Uh. Soon we're gonna get into the podcast business. We've been avoiding it for a long time, but it's time okay. Uh. And we sell our products. Um. We don't spend a

lot of time during the hour. During the hour, it's mostly goofing around and every so often and we try to make it look homemade. There's nothing slick. There are so in other words, let's assume I'm watching your Facebook live show. Where do I buy it from Susanne Summers dot com? So you're driving everybody to Suzanne Summers. Yeah, okay, we could go out for hours. You're you know, your incredible rack and tour. You've been listening to Alan Hamlet.

We could listen all day telling his stories, you know, just about Canada, never mind threes Company. Thanks so much for being here and informing my guests what's going on in the Billy of the Beast. Well, thank you for inviting me. This is my first podcast. Well it's not your first time around the block talking Alan. Thanks so much. Thank you. Until next time, This is Bob Left six