Two's Company: A Fifty-Year Romance with Lessons Learned in Love, Life & Business - Hardcover

SUZANNE SOMERS is the author of twenty-six books, fifteen of which are New York Times bestsellers, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers Sexy Forever, Knockout, Ageless; Tox-Sick; I'm Too Young For This!; Bombshell; Breakthrough; Keeping Secrets; Suzanne Somers' Eat Great, Lose Weight; Get Skinny on Fabulous Food; Eat, Cheat and Melt the Fat Away; Suzanne Somers'  Fast & Easy; and The Sexy Years. Suzanne is dedicated women's health advocate, and an award winning comedienne, lecturer, entertainer, and entrepreneur. For more information about Suzanne, visit SuzanneSomers.com.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

Nothing’s impossible I have found, for when my chin is on the ground,

I pick myself up, dust myself off and start all over again.

—­Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, “Pick Yourself Up”

Alan Hamel is an interesting guy, and I would say that even if he weren’t my husband.

That we even met is the stuff of dreams; he was the son of Polish immigrants who luckily escaped from the jaws of Hitler. His father lived in a settlement called Little Pietrokov on the Polish-­German border with dirt floors and thirteen children. Somehow in 1905, at thirteen years old, he managed to get the equivalent of eight dollars (an enormous sum of money at that time) to ride steerage on a ship to America. With that many children, it probably wasn’t noticed much when he took off on foot to Bremen to a new life. He wanted to get himself to Texas and become a cowboy. Speaking no En­glish, amazingly he did just that. And then eventually at sixteen, he wound up in Chicago, where he was clubbed over the head and blinded in his right eye by police on horseback who were rounding up union troublemakers. (He was not one of them, just a casualty.) That incident led him to seek out relatives who had immigrated to Canada, and that is where he stayed.

Alan’s mother’s mother also emigrated to Canada, but she became lonely and returned to Poland. Sadly, once back home again, she was rounded up by Hitler in the worst of ways along with boxcars of her family and met with an unthinkable death.

Alan’s mother wanted to expose him to all cultures, so as a young boy he was sent to Knox Presbyterian Church for his first year in nursery school. That year he was chosen to perform in the Christmas play and dressed up as one of the three wise men. He carried one of the gifts to put under the manger for Baby Jesus but was so intrigued by the glitter of the gifts that after the ceremony he grabbed the present and ran all the way home and up the stairs to the bedroom. He ripped open the beautifully wrapped gift to find it . . . empty. It was his first life lesson. He cried when his mother was angry with him for stealing. He hadn’t thought of it that way.

Alan was your typical Canadian kid, loved playing ice hockey in the winter. He was typical, that is, until he was eight, when a gang of monsters, teenage bullies, hung him by a rope and left him to die. An angel in the form of an old man heard the whimpering of this small boy inside an abandoned building and cut him down in the nick of time. He repressed this horrible memory until much later in life, when his mother told me about it, but surely this incident shaped him in ways that took a lifetime to understand.

At home his life was idyllic. He grew up in a boardinghouse run by his mother; sixteen people all lived together; his parents and sister, a black Nigerian prince, eight Chinese brothers, a Presbyterian minister, a stripper whose name was Rita (who took him to his first girlie show), a British engineer, and a blind alcoholic trumpet player who smoked in bed and almost set the house on fire on a regular basis.

His mother worked morning till night, cooking dinner for the group, cleaning, and doing laundry (whatever it took), and in her spare time she ran a candy store. Every morning Alan—­or Sonny, as he was called—­came down the stairs to find his mother holding his still-­warm, fresh-­pressed shirt and a spoonful of castor oil; mothers at that time ruled the roost, and refusing the spoonful of “dreck” (his word) was not an option.

So that was his life. Who knew this son of immigrants would grow up to be one of the most popular and beloved TV personalities in Canada? In Canada today, he is referred to as a television pioneer. His picture is positioned front and center and prominently displayed in the Ryerson Hall of Fame. Lucky for me, being Mr. Canada just wasn’t enough for him. Though still to this day, whenever he hears “O Canada,” he tears up.

I was raised in San Bruno, California, a lovely, small, middle-­class town about twenty miles from San Francisco. Ducky Mahoney was my father, and his father emigrated from Ireland. His people were hardworking, staunch Catholics, with more than a bit of an alcohol problem. And in and from that, I was shaped and formed. The Irish are fun-­loving, and my father was no exception. He told great stories and was a true entertainer, although he didn’t realize it; he was able to hold the attention of a crowd, whether at a dinner table or at a school assembly. He would make people laugh, and his stories had an element of great physical humor, which he acted out using his body to make a joke work. On the dance floor, he could wow a crowd.

In his twenties, he was an all-­star baseball player and won a scholarship to the University of San Francisco, at a time when very few went to college. It was quite a special honor, and for sure everyone thought he was destined to play professional baseball. He was in line to be chosen for the farm team for the San Francisco Seals, a pro ball club. Their star player then was Lefty O’Doul, and my father most likely would have ended up in the same league as Lefty—­everybody was sure.

With the onset of World War II and like so many men of that time, his dreams were cut short to serve his country. He became a Merchant Marine stationed on a ship outside Nagasaki, during the time the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He describes his job as the worst on the ship, loading bombs into the bottom of the hull, knowing that if the ship were hit, there would be no way out for him. His stories of that time were horrific and must have shaped him in some deep way. The demons were surely in his dreams. After he came home in 1945 (I was born in 1946), he put aside his aspirations of pro ball out of necessity and he took a job at a brewery—­a terrible choice for a budding alcoholic. And with that choice, and in that moment, all he could and would have been slipped away.

Everyone loved being around Ducky, the fun-­loving, funny, life-­of-­the-­party guy. But by the time I was growing up, his disease had progressed, and that person was rarely the reality anymore.

That great guy faded, and the person who emerged was the drunken one: mean, frightening, abusive. Laughter was replaced by long scary nights hiding from him in a locked closet (rigged on the inside by my brother Danny) where my brother, sister, and mother and I trembled in fear, praying he wouldn’t find us and hoping he would just pass out. In an alcoholic family, everything revolves around the needs and feelings of the alcoholic, so the rest of the family is left to figure it out on their own. I feared him, loved him, hated him, loved him, an unhealthy vicious cycle, which never ended until a teenage pregnancy shamed me from living in the only environment I knew and condemned me as bad.

In these horrifying nights of my childhood my self-­esteem took a hit; in his drunkenness, my father decided each night who would be the object of his rage and ridicule. The booze made him act viciously and say terrible things: “You’re stupid, hopeless, worthless, you’re nothin’, you’re a big zero!” He also repeatedly told me, “You’re gonna get knocked up.” I didn’t even know what knocked up meant; I had never even had sex at this point. Sadly, his rants became my reality. I believed I was what he said, and the only time I did have sex (if you can call it that) I got knocked up. My mother, confined by her Catholicism, stated sadly, “You made your bed, Suzanne, now you must lie in it.” Abortion was out of the question. On the night before the wedding once again my father drunkenly ranted, “I always knew you’d get knocked up,” which had me sobbing on the floor of my closet wishing I could die. I was convinced he was right about my worthlessness and felt I deserved my punishment.

In this chaos, I found myself not only pregnant, but a teenager with neither the means nor the skills to be a mother. This time was, in retrospect, the hardest period of my life.

My new husband was a nice guy, a good guy, but we were both kids. The responsibilities of being parents and of being married and starting a real life just didn’t and couldn’t work out for us. We parted amicably and I got custody of our son, which was the custom of the time. The whispers in my small town for being their first divorcée were too much to bear, so I moved away to try my best to make a good life for us.

Life has a way of sending you what you need when you need it, even if you don’t feel ready. And “it” was my child, my beautiful little baby son, Bruce, who would give me my reason for living. As they pulled him from my body, while still on the delivery table we locked eyes. His stare was so intense, and he looked so worried that I said out loud, “I promise I will make a good life for you.” I meant it. I would keep that promise. When I think back on it, I believe Bruce was sent to save me. My childhood had so damaged my self-­worth that I was a walking ball of shame. But with Bruce there was no shame, only love and acceptance, and somehow together we would survive and thrive.

My low self-­worth was soothed only by my mother, a woman of divine sweetness whose example was such that it didn’t feel right to feel sorry for myself. Her life was terrible; if she could do it, I could do it.

Even though we had very little money for luxuries, my mother, Marion Mahoney, was an elegant woman with exquisite taste who always dressed beautifully. She had few pieces, but all were of great quality, an ethic she taught me. “Buy good,” she would always say. “Better to have one great cashmere sweater than a bunch of junk.” She was right. It didn’t take me long to figure out that the cashmere felt better, looked better, and lasted longer. She had attended Lux School of Design, a prestigious San Francisco design and art school. But once she was married, like so many women of her time, she put her dreams aside. Who knows what she dreamed of being? She was a wonderful seamstress with a great eye, and lucky for me she made most of my clothes as a girl, allowing me to create my own styles with great fabric we would buy together in the theater district.

I imagine my mother thought that by marrying the most popular guy in town—­the sports hero, the life of the party—­she was going to have the life she dreamed of, that he’d bring her out of her shell and release her shyness. Instead, his drunken behavior horrified her and made her feel even more shy and withdrawn in public. Everyone in our community liked her a lot because she was so sweet. She never said a bad thing about anyone and was always happy for any good thing that happened to people. There was a real purity about her.

After the divorce, my ex and I had no qualms over visitation, the more the better. I was at least responsible enough to want the best for my little boy whom I loved fiercely. The mother instinct, I believe, is wired into the birth process. From the moment of delivery, a protective feeling takes over and regardless of your age and what you think before becoming a mother, afterward, you instinctively know that you’d throw yourself in front of a bus to protect your child.

And so I began a new life, one that revolved around me and my darling baby child. Two of us against the world. My little pal. So close and so bonded; a teenage mother with a baby.

And then life sent me something and someone else unexpected: Alan Hamel.

. . .

In the beginning, passion, for sure, was the initial draw. The “I gotta have you now, and then again, and then it’s still not enough” kind of passion. Flying to each other’s cities, even if just for a few hours, knowing that any time together was worth any difficulty of pulling it off. That went on for years, and it’s what got us through the bad times. And yes, there were years of bad times.

When I think back, it would have been so easy to cut and run. I did think about it—­a lot—­in the early years. How many great love affairs never come to fruition because it is too easy to walk away? But I am getting ahead of myself.

It was 1967, and I was broker than broke, a teenage mom, and a divorcée, at a time when no one I knew had gotten a divorce, and I was too ashamed to go home and ask for help. Even if I had gone home, the dysfunction of alcoholism that had my family in its grip would not have allowed me to improve my situation. Besides, since I was the one who had screwed up, I had to figure this out on my own.

I did what I could to keep my little boy Bruce and me with shelter and enough food. I worked odd jobs, played extras in movies, and sewed children’s dresses. I was an Avon Lady going door to door and a convention model—­my big job was dressing like a squirrel for the American Walnut Association and passing out nuts. I made chocolate desserts for local restaurants, and I did odd modeling jobs for different companies, like for the ad that liquor stores put on their doors that showed me as the girl smoking extralong cigarettes. (I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life.) I was also the girl standing next to the Chevy on a bluff in Monterey, and I was the budding bride modeling wedding veils. Once in a while, I’d get a commercial, but nothing national, and that was where the money was.