Suzanne Chase: The Private Life and Story Behind the Name

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Detail	Info
Full Name	Susan Hewitt (known as Suzanne Chase during and after her marriage)
Born	1949, United States (exact date and location not confirmed)
Age	Approximately 76–77 as of 2026
Nationality	American
Occupation	Private individual; limited unverified acting credits
Known For	Actor and comedian Chevy Chase’s first wife
Marriage	From February 23, 1973, to February 1, 1976, Chevy Chase
Children	None from this marriage
Post-Divorce Status	Entirely private; no confirmed public presence since 1976
Net Worth	Unknown; no public financial records exist

The Woman the World Forgot — On Purpose

There is a particular kind of story that almost never gets told in Hollywood — not because it isn’t interesting, but because the person at the center of it refuses to be part of the telling.

Suzanne Chase is that story.

Born Susan Hewitt in 1949, she was the first spouse of a guy who would go on to become one of the most iconic comedians in American television history. Before the fame came, she wed him. She lived beside him as it started building. And then, in February 1976, she left — quietly, completely, and apparently permanently — just as the whole machine was reaching full speed.

In 1975, Chevy Chase gained widespread recognition. Suzanne Chase became nobody, entirely by choice.

That is not a tragedy. By most reasonable readings, it looks much more like a decision made with clear eyes and genuine resolve. She has sustained it for nearly five decades. In an era when former celebrity spouses routinely resurface on podcasts, reality television, and social media, her disappearance is almost aggressive in its thoroughness.

Understanding her story means understanding the world she stepped into — and the world she stepped away from.

Early Life: The Known and the Unknown

Here is the honest truth about Susan Hewitt’s early years: almost nothing is confirmed.

Her birthplace was in the United States in 1949. Her exact birthdate has never surfaced in any public record. No confirmed hometown, no documented family background, no schooling history appears in anything reliable. She is, essentially, a woman who arrived into recorded history at the moment she agreed to marry someone who was about to become famous, and receded from it the moment the marriage ended.

What can be said with reasonable confidence is this: she came of age in the 1960s, in an America that was rewriting its own social contract in real time. The counterculture was in full swing. Young people were moving to New York City in droves, chasing art, comedy, music, and something that felt more alive than the suburban lives their parents had built. She was part of that generation. She ended up in the orbit of the downtown New York comedy scene at exactly the moment it was producing some of the most important comedic voices of the twentieth century.

Whether she arrived there with ambitions of her own, or simply found herself in that world through circumstance and social connection, is not known. What is known is that she was there, and that she met someone who was trying very hard to make people laugh for a living.

Two People in Pre-Fame New York

To understand what Suzanne Chase and Chevy Chase shared, you first need a picture of what Chevy Chase actually was in 1973 — because he was not yet the man the world would come to know.

Cornelius Crane Chase, born October 8, 1943, was a Manhattan native who had drifted through an unsteady early adulthood. He had attended Riverdale Country School before being expelled, transferred to Bard College, graduated with an English degree, and then spent years doing odd jobs while hunting for an entry point into comedy. He had co-founded a small underground comedy group called Channel One in 1967. He had contributed writing to MAD magazine. By 1973, he had landed a performing and writing role on The National Lampoon Radio Hour — a satirical radio program that would turn out to be the talent incubator for Saturday Night Live. His colleagues on that show included John Belushi and Gilda Radner.

On February 23, 1973, Susan Hewitt wed this man in New York City. He was 29 and genuinely funny, but he was not yet famous. He was a downtown comedy guy with a sharp wit and an uncertain financial future. The wedding was simple and private, as both the occasion and the personalities involved seemed to demand.

Susan became Suzanne Chase that day. And for the next three years, she shared her life with a man who was moving fast, though toward what destination was still anyone’s guess.

Marriage During the Ascent

The years between 1973 and 1975 were, for Chevy Chase, a steady upward climb. He was building his reputation through The National Lampoon Radio Hour, through the Off-Broadway stage revue Lemmings — a musical comedy skewering the Woodstock generation, performed alongside Belushi and others — and through whatever New York comedy circuit work came his way. He was visible in the right circles. Lorne Michaels, a young Canadian producer with an ambitious idea for a late-night live comedy show on NBC, was watching.

In the fall of 1975, Michaels launched Saturday Night Live. Chevy Chase was hired primarily as a writer, but slipped into the on-screen role almost immediately. By the end of the first episode, it was clear he was not going to stay behind the scenes. His physical comedy — the carefully choreographed falls, the deadpan stares, the pratfalls that looked effortless — translated to television in a way that felt genuinely new. He introduced the show’s famous catchphrase. He anchored Weekend Update. He impersonated President Gerald Ford with a bumbling grace that made the sitting president look like a walking accident. America noticed.

Suzanne Chase was married to this man throughout the full first season of SNL. She watched him go from a National Lampoon writer who was funny at parties to a genuine national figure — recognized on the street, written about in magazines, talked about at dinner tables across the country.

She was at his side for all of that. And she kept quiet the whole time.

The Divorce and What Was Said About It

On February 1, 1976, Suzanne Chase and Chevy Chase finalized their divorce. The marriage had lasted just under three years. They had no children together.

The reasons have never been publicly confirmed by Suzanne herself — not in 1976, not ever. What exists in the public record comes almost exclusively from Chevy Chase’s own accounts, most notably the authorized biography I’m Chevy Chase… and You’re Not by Rena Fruchter, published in 2007.

In that account, Chevy described an affair on Suzanne’s part as a central factor in the marriage’s collapse. He claimed she had become involved with someone else — reportedly a person connected to a New York venue in their social circle — and that this infidelity ended things between them.

It is worth pausing here to note what that account is: one side of a story, told by the person who became famous, in a book about himself, more than three decades after the events described. Suzanne Chase has never responded to it. She has never confirmed it, disputed it, or added any texture to it whatsoever. Whether Chevy’s version is accurate, partial, or colored by the way memory works when we are the ones telling our own stories is simply not possible to determine from the outside.

What is certain is that the marriage ended. What is equally certain is that Suzanne stepped off the page entirely the moment it did.

Notably, in a 2025 CNN documentary about his life, Chevy Chase appeared to forget Suzanne’s name entirely when discussing his first marriage — a detail that says something, though exactly what is difficult to specify.

The Quiet That Followed

Chevy Chase’s life after the divorce was immediately and dramatically eventful. Within months, he married Jacqueline Carlin — a woman he had become infatuated with during his SNL season, the reason he would leave the show after just one year. He moved to Los Angeles. He made Foul Play with Goldie Hawn. He made Caddyshack. He made the Vacation films. He rose to become one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors. He had two more marriages, three daughters with his third wife Jayni Luke, a serious painkiller addiction, stints in rehab, feuds with colleagues, and a long complicated late-career unraveling that a CNN documentary eventually examined in full.

Suzanne Chase had none of that.

After the divorce, she vanished. Not in a dramatic, hiding-from-the-press sort of way. Just quietly. She did not file any lawsuits. She did not grant interviews. She did not publish a memoir. She did not attempt a career pivot into entertainment, activism, or anything else that would have kept her name in circulation. She simply stopped being visible.

Some sources list acting credits under the name Susan Hewitt — a handful of low-budget films from what appears to be roughly the same period as her marriage and shortly after. But the evidence connecting those credits definitively to the same Susan Hewitt who married Chevy Chase is thin. Responsible journalism requires acknowledging that the link remains unproven, and that whatever those credits represent, they do not constitute a substantial or documented career.

After 1976, there is nothing confirmed.

A Life Lived Beyond the Frame

There is a temptation, when writing about someone this private, to fill the emptiness with inference. She must have been hurt by the fame she didn’t get to share. She must have been angry. She must have rebuilt quietly somewhere.

The honest answer is: we don’t know. We genuinely don’t.

What we can observe is the pattern of the choice. She married young — 24 to Chevy’s 29 — during what was clearly a chaotic and fast-moving period in both their lives. She lived through the early years of his rise without seeking any spotlight of her own. She left the marriage before he became fully famous and before any of the wealth arrived. She took her birth name back or at least retreated from the Chase name professionally. And since then, no one has heard from her.

For nearly fifty years.

That is not an accident. It is not the result of simply not being interesting enough to attract attention. Former spouses of major celebrities do not disappear this completely without active, sustained effort to remain unseen. Suzanne Chase — Susan Hewitt — has worked at this privacy for half a century, and she has succeeded at it completely.

Hardship: The Story That Cannot Be Fully Told

The difficulty in assessing any hardships Suzanne may have faced is that all available information about those years comes from the other party. Chevy Chase described infidelity. He described conflict. He moved on quickly and publicly.

What Suzanne experienced during the marriage, what she felt about its end, what the years immediately after the divorce looked like for her — none of this has been shared. It would be dishonest and presumptuous to invent an emotional narrative about a real person who has chosen silence.

What can be acknowledged is that divorce in the mid-1970s, even for a childless couple, carried social weight and personal cost. That she married young, that her marriage ended before the benefits of her husband’s success materialized, and that she was left to build an independent life with no financial windfall from the brief union — these are facts that carry their own obvious implications.

Net Worth: What Can Honestly Be Said

Suzanne Chase has no confirmed net worth. There are no financial records attached to her name. The marriage produced no documented settlement. There were no children, so no ongoing child support. The couple parted before SNL money, before Hollywood money, before any of the commercial success that came later.

Susan Hewitt in 1976 was a 27-year-old woman who had been married for three years to a National Lampoon radio comedian and one-season SNL cast member. That is not the profile of someone walking away from enormous wealth.

In the fifty years since, she has had no known professional income streams, no businesses, no public investments, and no media earnings. Whatever financial life she has built — if she has built one, and there is no reason to assume she hasn’t — it has been built entirely outside the frame of the public record.

Where She Is Now

As of 2026, Susan Hewitt would be approximately 76 or 77 years old. She is believed, by those who have looked into the matter, to still be living — though even this cannot be confirmed with certainty. No obituary has surfaced. No confirmation of any kind has surfaced.

Her total disappearance from public life stands as one of the more extraordinary acts of sustained privacy in the peripheral story of modern American entertainment. Other former spouses of major celebrities have written books, appeared on podcasts, surfaced in documentaries. Not Suzanne Chase. Not once, not in any form, not over fifty years.

In the broadest meaning of the word, she is leading her own life.

Final Words

Suzanne Chase’s story is strange to write because it is, ultimately, a story about absence. The absence of documentation. The absence of public statement. The absence of any of the behaviors that, in modern celebrity culture, have come to seem almost compulsory for anyone who once shared a bed with someone famous.

And yet her absence is itself a kind of statement.

She married a funny, ambitious man in 1973. She watched him transform into a national figure during the year they were still legally married. She divorced him before any of the money, the movies, or the cultural permanence arrived. And then she simply got on with things.

What makes her distinctive — what makes her, in a strange way, admirable — is the completeness of her self-removal. She didn’t turn her privacy into a show. She didn’t make a big deal out of it. For fifty years, she simply did it.

In a culture that tells people their experiences are only valid when shared, that their connection to the famous carries value that should be converted into currency, that silence is a form of waste — Suzanne Chase lived the opposite premise quietly and stubbornly and apparently without regret.

That, honestly, is its own kind of legacy.

FAQs

1. Who is Suzanne Chase?

Suzanne Chase is the name taken by Susan Hewitt when she married comedian and actor Chevy Chase on February 23, 1973. She is primarily known to the public as his first wife. The marriage lasted about three years, ending in divorce on February 1, 1976. Since then, she has kept her privacy intact.

2. What is Suzanne Chase’s real name?

Her birth name is Susan Hewitt. The United States is where she was born in 1949. She adopted the name Suzanne Chase upon marrying Chevy Chase, and is referenced under both names across different sources. The verified documentation does not include her personal or professional name after the divorce.

3. How did Suzanne Chase and Chevy Chase meet?

The precise formal documentation of their formal conditions have never met. They came together in the context of the New York comedy and arts scene of the early 1970s, when Chevy was working his way through National Lampoon projects. No confirmed account from Suzanne’s perspective exists.

4. When did they were they were married?

They married on February 23, 1973, in New York City, in what was described as a private ceremony. The divorce was finalized on February 1, 1976 — almost exactly three years after the wedding.

5. Did Suzanne Chase and Chevy Chase have children?

No. This marriage did not result in any children. This is one of the few facts consistently confirmed across all available sources.

6. Why did they get divorced?

The only account of the divorce’s causes comes from Chevy Chase himself, most notably through his authorized 2007 biography. In his telling, an affair on Suzanne’s part contributed to the breakdown of the marriage. Suzanne has never publicly confirmed, denied, or commented on this account in any form.

7. Was Suzanne Chase present for Chevy Chase’s rise to fame on SNL?

Yes. She was still married to him when he joined the original cast of Saturday Night Live in the fall of 1975. The couple were married throughout the entire first season of the show. The divorce was finalized in February 1976, which is to say during SNL’s first season while Chevy was still an active cast member — he left the show later that year.

8. Did Suzanne Chase have an acting career?

Some online entertainment databases list a small number of film credits under the name Susan Hewitt, including low-budget productions from around the early-to-mid 1970s. However, no reliable source has conclusively confirmed that the Susan Hewitt listed in those credits is the same person who married Chevy Chase. The connection remains unverified, and the credits do not represent a substantial or documentable career.

9. What happened to Suzanne Chase after the divorce?

She entirely vanished from the public eye and has never made a verified, documented reappearance. No interviews, no published statements, no social media presence, no confirmed professional role. For nearly five decades she has remained entirely outside the frame of the public record.

10. Is Suzanne Chase still alive?

No obituary or death record has surfaced in any public source. Based on her reported birth year of 1949, she would be approximately 76 or 77 in 2026. The working assumption among those who have investigated is that she is still living, but this cannot be confirmed with certainty.

11. What is Suzanne Chase’s net worth?

There is no reliable estimate. The marriage ended before Chevy Chase’s significant professional earnings arrived, and there is no documented financial settlement. She has no known public income sources or business activities. Any amount associated with her name on the internet is conjectural.

12. How many times did Chevy Chase marry after Suzanne?

He married twice more. His second wife was actress Jacqueline Carlin, whom he wed in December 1976 — the same year his divorce from Suzanne was finalized. In 1980, that union also ended in divorce. He married his third wife, Jayni Luke, in 1982, and they remained together as of late 2025. He has three daughters with Jayni.