Remembering the wonderfully bawdy Suzanne Pleshette -- she wasn't that character on "The Bob Newhart Show"



Suzanne Pleshette was a lot saltier than Emily Hartley. She'd be the person you'd want to sit next to a party because you were sure to hear some choice comments, delivered with sass.

Pleshette died Saturday at age 70 of respiratory failure. She had been treated for lung cancer two years ago.

She made movies ("The Birds," "Support Your Local Gunfighter"), TV movies ("Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean") and numerous guest-star shots ("Gunsmoke," "Columbo"). She played the mother of Karen (Megan Mullally) on "Will & Grace."

But Pleshette will always be most prized for Emily Hartley, the ingratiating wife on "The Bob Newhart Show." She reprised that role in the series finale of "Newhart." That show's conclusion, which aired in 1990, is still the most imaginative in TV history.

Pleshette met the press six years ago to promote another sitcom, "Good Morning, Miami." That NBC show was forgettable. Pleshette wasn't.

Time had given her this way-out-there vitality. With her deep voice, hearty laugh and intense stare, she could have taught the Golden Girls -- or female impersonators -- a thing or two. You might remember that ribald quality if you ever saw her chatting with Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show."

She wasn't the glamorous young actress anymore; she was an earthy dame, an Auntie Mame who wasn't afraid to tell a dirty story.

In talking about the new show, Pleshette said, "I'm just here for the ride, whatever it is. I don't want to work too hard because I want to go home to daddy."

That was Tom Poston, who died in April. He was a familiar TV presence for "Newhart," "Mork & Mindy," "To Tell the Truth" and "The Steve Allen Show."

Poston and Pleshette (pictured) had been involved romantically more than 40 years before when they acted in a Broadway play. They married others but remained friends. They acted together on "The Bob Newhart Show" -- he was Bob's college roommate, and Emily despised him.

After they were both widowed, Poston and Pleshette reunited. They were married in 2001. That's what I'll remember about Pleshette: how happy she was to be with Poston at a party in 2002. They were a delightfully zany couple.

"My uncle delivered his oldest child," Pleshette said of Poston. "My cousin is his jeweler. We've been friends all these years."

The deaths of their spouses brought them together. She lost her husband, Tom Gallagher, in 2000.

"He was sick for six years," Pleshette said. "He had cancer, which he survived. He died of the E. coli bacteria from a hamburger. He was so brave. And Kay, Tom's wife, had Lou Gehrig's disease. Both catastrophic illnesses. Two vital, wonderful people. So we're so grateful for every moment."

Poston said he called when her husband died to commiserate. "We started seeing each other and ended up married and happy as I've ever been in my life," he said.

Pleshette said he hoped to work with Poston on "Good Morning, Miami."

"I'm hoping I wake up in bed with him instead of Bob Newhart," Pleshette said, referring to the famous ending of "Newhart." "We have to rehearse a lot first."

Pleshette feigned concern over playing a grandmother, then explained her practical approach to taking roles.

"I work for wardrobe," she said. "Whenever I need clothes, I take a job. If I get maybe like six changes, then I'll be a grandmother, I don't care."

In marrying Poston, she became the stepmother of three children. Poston said, "She has a son who's a lawyer and a daughter who's a doctor."

"And a daughter who's a waitress-singer," Pleshette said, finishing his thought. "He's got the best kids."

"The children knew her all these years, love her and are so happy she's their stepmom," Poston said.

Pleshette blithely told a story about taking that 33-year-old stepson to the tailor, a bawdy story that couldn't be repeated in a family newspaper. But then she was an unconventional speaker.

Consider what she did when she spoke at a tribute to the late Lew Wasserman, the Hollywood titan and her longtime friend. She was the lone woman giving a speech in a group that included former President Clinton, director Steven Spielberg and mogul Barry Diller.

"Darling, you know how shy I am," she said. "It's so hard for me to speak. I did mention bikini waxes. Maybe that wasn't the appropriate place for it, but it got a laugh. Not for Lew -- I mean, he didn't get a bikini wax."

What do fans remember her for? "Leona Helmsley, 'The Birds' and probably Newhart," Pleshette said. "And then those porno films that Tom and I have been doing. You asked if he was working, didn't you?"

Poston: "I had to give that up. I got makeup poisoning."

Pleshette: "It doesn't show, though, darling. OK, we're going home. We have to feed the dog."

And so they left a Hollywood party. She was the life of the party -- and so different from Emily Hartley.

Actress Suzanne Pleshette Dies

Her face had ready-made drama: jet-black hair framing kabuki-white skin. Her gray-blue eyes could smolder on cue or, more readily, crease into a smile. The sultry voice and famously knowing laugh suggested a woman who had been places, had fun there and come back intact. Suzanne Pleshette was a perfect fit for the movies' golden age, in sophisticated romantic comedy (think of a brunette Carole Lombard, a springier Rosalind Russell) or the kind of elevated soap opera where she could lure a man to hell or sacrifice all in a tearful close-up. I see her swapping love banter with Cary Grant, taming Gary Cooper.

Unfortunately for her, Hollywood had stopped making the kinds of films that would have made Pleshette a star two decades before she got there. So she played Bob Newhart's wife Emily on his-six-year sitcom in the 1970s. That's how Pleshette is being remembered, on her death Saturday from respiratory failure. In 2006 she had undergone chemotherapy for lung cancer. But I prefer to think of her as one of those stars who got away — away from stardom, when the old dream factory forgot how to manufacture domestic glamour. She had all the goods, but at the wrong time.

She was born in New York City, the daughter of the manager of the Paramount Theatre in its movie-and-big-band heyday. She was on TV and on Broadway by her 20th birthday. She replaced Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker, as Helen Keller's teacher Annie Sullivan, and played opposite the young Tom Poston in The Golden Fleecing. Warner Bros. signed her to help fill its burgeoning TV production slate, which included such effluvia as 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye. But Warners was in the young-blond business, promoting girls (Diane McBain, Connie Stevens) and boys (Edd Byrnes, Troy Donahue) who embodied California's Aryan ethos. The very New York Pleshette had just arrived, and already she didn't fit.

More often than not, she was cast as the nice, bright girl whose charisma can't match the snazzy blondes the hero has fallen for. As a frumpy spinster in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), she loses Rod Taylor to up-market Tippi Hedren, then loses her life to the avian horde. She seems to have secured Donahue's love in the 1962 Rome Adventure until she catches him being kissed by mantrap Angie Dickinson. (Pleshette was married to Donahue for eight months in 1964.) Somehow her intelligence, which should have registered as high voltage — "intense" — was perceived by the studio as low-wattage: "sensible. " Being considered comfortable instead of dangerous had its compensations. It meant she would be a welcome presence in America's homes.

Annie Sullivan had a deaf-mute for her student; The Bob Newhart Show's Emily Hartley, also a teacher, had a class full of difficult charges. Husband Bob, a Chicago psychologist, was a ditherer whose tone mixed resignation with exasperation. The personalities of his patients and neighbors mostly verged on the clinical. The show's mild joke was that they were all dependent on Bob, who was dependent on Emily — the one grownup on the show. In a famous episode, Bob frets when he learns that her IQ is 22 points higher than his. To her it's no big deal; she has the grace not to consider herself superior. That's how a 70s TV wife subtly stooped to a level of equality with her insecure mate.

As combination wife, den mother and sounding board — the norm by which all the kooks on the show were measured and found wanting (though funny) — Pleshette made sardonic seem cozy. Essentially the straight woman, she could assert herself in a scene just by being there; she was the footnote you want to read before getting to the main text. Her voice could coax, critique and forgive in one sentence; she was champion of the verbal raised eyebrow, but never in contempt, always in amusement. Though Emily and Bob were more or less post-sexual, they often ended an episode in bed, rehashing the day's events, he still complaining, she offering the vocal equivalent of warm pats and cold compresses.

Newhart obviously thought Pleshette was a crucial anchor to his comic dinghy. In his subsequent sitcom Newhart, he had a different wife (Mary Frann) and a new set of kooks (including Poston). But in the last scene of the final episode he wakes, startled, to find Emily-Suzanne in their old bed, as if the eight years in New England had been a dream.

Other sitcoms, from Will & Grace to 8 Simple Rules, borrowed Pleshette's line-reading skills and Mensa warmth. She did voice work for Disney, lending her dusky chops to Zira in The Lion King II, Zeniba in the English-language version of Spirited Away. She also got a chance to play an old-Hollywood meanie: Leona Helmsley in a TV bio-pic, The Queen of Mean. And in a nice rounding off of her life, Pleshette married fellow Newhart alum Poston in 2001, 42 years after appearing with him on Broadway. He died last April.

"I don't sit around and wait for great parts," she once said. "I'm an actress, and I love being one, and I'll probably be doing it till I�m 72... " Not quite. She died 12 days before her 71st birthday. But on late shows and in reruns, Suzanne Pleshette will still be the soul of comic common sense, still sending out beams of a very reasonable radiance.