Touch me
In secret places
No one has reached before
In silent places
Where words only interfere
In sad places
Where only whispering makes sense.
These are the opening lines of “Touch Me,” the title poem in Suzanne Somers’ 1973 poetry collection—because, yes, in addition to being an actress best known for playing one of the 20th century’s most indelible dumb blondes on Three’s Company, a mistress of the ThighMaster, and a booster of dietary supplements and superfoods and some serious medical hooey, Somers was a poet. She died on Sunday, a day shy of her 77th birthday. The cause was breast cancer.
Of the people who remember Somers’ poetry—which explored themes of sensuality, love, and womanhood and also included another collection, titled, naturally, Touch Me Again—most do so ironically. Kristen Wiig once performed a comedic reading of the poems, in footage that’s still available on YouTube. Browsing reviews of Touch Me on its Goodreads page, there’s lots of this sort of thing: “the best terrible poems I’ve ever read.” In a similar vein: “Seriously, I cannot recommend enough: stage dramatic readings, in public or at parties, from this collection of poems.” On Amazon, one reviewer wrote, “The poems are terrible—self-important, sophomoric, trite, no meter, no rhyme,” but nevertheless gave the book five stars. If you want to judge the poems for yourself, you’ll have to pony up, as used copies currently start around $118. Here’s another excerpt, this one from the end of a poem called “Two-Week Love”:
It was only two weeks
But we loved
God how we loved
Until you had to go back home with gifts for the children
And though it’s hard to remember your name
And even your face
I remember it was really beautiful each time
And I remember to resurrect that love sometimes when I’m sad
It’s not all that uncommon for celebrities to release books of poetry—Drake came out with one in June, and Lana Del Rey and Florence Welch, of Florence and the Machine, have published collections of their own in recent years. Those are musicians who are known for their lyrics, so maybe poetry isn’t a huge leap, but it’s also not completely out of the question for actors to do the poetry thing—Amber Tamblyn, Viggo Mortensen, and Leonard Nimoy are all published poets, believe it or not. Still, Somers may be one of the earliest stars to engage in this particular vanity project. And what’s even more curious is that she wasn’t all that famous in 1973, when Touch Me came out. In fact, rather than being a byproduct of her success, Touch Me may have indirectly led to her breakout career moment.
In the early 1970s, Somers’ biggest credit was working on a talk show called Mantrap, which was hosted by her future husband, Alan Hamel. There, she crossed paths with Valley of the Dolls novelist Jacqueline Susann. “I owe everything to Jacqueline Susann,” Somers told a newspaper in the ’70s. After discovering she wrote poetry, Susann asked to read some of Somers’ work and ended up liking it so much that she encouraged the budding actress to seek a publisher. She did, and to be fair, she wasn’t a total nobody—I’m guessing the spot on a national talk show, even if it’s one hardly anyone remembers now, as well as a tiny part in American Graffiti, helped her manuscript finds its way to the top of the pile. Regardless, Johnny Carson certainly didn’t know who Somers was when she met him by chance while on an audition for another show. In a 1987 Washington Post piece b Jeffrey Frank (headlined “Suzanne Somers Beyond Jiggle”), Somers recalled meeting the Tonight Show host: While she was waiting around the studio, Carson and his producer stopped to chat: “They talked with me because I was the only girl there and they said, ‘What do you do,’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m an actress. And an author.’ So they wished me luck. And that afternoon, I just sent everyone in the Tonight Show office a copy of my book.” Her pluckiness paid off in the form of an invitation to appear on Carson’s show.
Johnny Carson liked talking to me because I was so, uh, non-Hollywood. There was nothing slick about me at all. I really was just a small-town girl. So he said to me the first time, he said, “How long have you been in Hollywood?” And I said, “One week.” And he said, “Gee, you don’t waste much time, do you?” And I said no.
This first appearance is available on YouTube, and it’s strange to modern eyes—she seems to be on this incredibly famous stage for no other reason than that Carson gets a kick out of her. Carson liked her so much that he invited her back, and she frequently read her poems on the air. According to the Post, those appearances, and the $320 fee that came with them, helped her get by for a while. They also got her seen by the ABC executive who decided to put her in Three’s Company, the show that eventually made her a household name. I’m not sure exactly when her poetry collection started to hit amid her meteoric rise, but she told the Post that it was the top-selling poetry collection for at least one year of the ’70s, outselling Rod McKuen, the now little-remembered poetry superstar of the decade. (For more on him, listen to this episode of Slate’s Decoder Ring podcast.)
It’s been said that the genius of Somers’ Three’s Company performance is that she was in on the joke, so one wonders if the same could have been true of the poetry. In between all those Goodreads and Amazon reviews praising the book’s so-bad-it’s-good quality, there were occasional claims to more earnest appreciation: “She has a way of sharing her inner need for someone to care and poking it with the reality of what is her humorous, sad reality,” one person wrote on Amazon. A LitHub write-up of the Kristen Wiig performance of the poems came to a similar conclusion: “I think Suzanne Somers knows this shit is funny. I don’t think you can write a poem about the universal yearning for love with an iconic dig at dog people without a sense of humor.” That’s a reference to a line from “Extra Love,” wherein Somers laments, “If anyone has any extra love, even a heartbeat or a touch or two, I wish they wouldn’t waste it on dogs.”
In one of the few serious considerations of the poetry I could find, PopPoetry Substack writer Caitlin Cowan called it an attempted “reclamation of [Somers’] body through text”—she’d been a model, and even before she famously played a bimbo, that probably wasn’t an altogether unfamiliar label for her. Cowan eventually drew the conclusion that the “book succeeds in a memoiristic dimension but ultimately lacks the qualities that make poetry great: image, metaphor, attention to language, surprise, meditation, and deep cognition.”
In a 2013 blog post, the poetry professor Kevin McNeilly agreed that the poems “buckle and wilt under even the slightest pressure of a close reading.” But, he wrote, he nevertheless considered his copy of the book a prized possession, and suggested considering the poems not as poetry but instead as “a key instance of what early 1970s, post-Jonathan Livingston Seagull American popular culture would have understood as aspirational self-expression.”
I’m not qualified to judge the poems as literature, but when I think of all the things a budding starlet could have done with herself in the ’70s, I like that Somers chose to write poems. Even as nothing more than an obituary bragging right, being able to say that she wrote a bestselling poetry book called Touch Me 50 years ago is pretty cool. I won’t be touching anyone, but I will say: Touché, Suzanne.
