SOMERS NEVER ENDS
Entertainer writes ‘A New Way to Age,’ which includes tequila & sex
Nowadays, two is company for Suzanne Somers.
The veteran entertainer was in New York this week promoting her new book “A New Way to Age” along with her husband Alan Hamel, whom she insists she’s spent every night with since they married in 1977.
According to Somers, 73, one of the keys to longevity is four to five date nights each week, where she and Hamel, 83, meet in the bar inside their Palm Springs, Calif., home, drink tequila, dance and see where the night leads them.
“We work at our relationship, we date,” Somers told the Daily News. “We have a bar at our house called Big Al’s bar where we have a tequila most nights — clear tequila because there’s little or no sugar, so I don’t gain any weight. We talk, sometimes we dance, and it’s romantic.”
A couple nights a week they both get lucky. “I look forward to it,” Somers said. “Some nights I get dressed up.”
Somers admits that in recent weeks, date night has been dampened by a hip injury she suffered a few weeks ago.
“When you have a broken hip, there’s no sex,” she confessed. “You can’t from the front or behind or the side, it all hurts. It is what it is.”
Whether or not that injury occurred during a tequila-fueled date night she won’t say.
“I’ll never tell!” Somers joked.
Big Al’s is named in honor of Hamel, who she says is “still sexy and great.” Calling the bar the Regal Beagle, which was the fictional watering hole frequented by Somers’ and her colleagues in the 1970s sitcom “Three’s Company,” was never a consideration.
“I’ve moved on,” she said.
Long before she wrote “A New Way to Age,” her 27th book, which hits stores Tuesday, Somers played ditzy bombshell Chrissy Snow on the ABC comedy starring John Ritter and Joyce DeWitt. The show ran from 1977 to 1984, though Somers left after Season 5 when, according to her, producers refused to discuss a raise despite the program’s enormous success.
Somers felt misinformation about her departure from the show led to former colleagues giving her the cold shoulder for decades. “I never talked to any of them again and they wouldn’t talk to me,” she recalled.
Though Ritter died in 2003, Somers said she and DeWitt reconciled in 2012. Somers doesn’t see a point in reviving the hit sitcom without Ritter, but would consider a reboot featuring her old character.
“It would be interesting to see what Chrissy is like all these years later,” she said. “If somebody comes up with an idea, I’m up for it.”
According to Somers, filming a show charged with sexual innuendo like “Three’s Company” during the #MeToo movement would have been a different experience.
“If it happened 40 years earlier, I would now own ABC,” she laughed.
Somers plans to write five more books by 2025 and feels her healthy organic diet coupled with not being “pilled up” helps her recall and articulate what she’s experienced over the years.
“There are so many advantages to aging,” she said. “I have a few wrinkles, but not too bad.”