A day after Susan Saint James died on Monday, October 26, at 80, the woman who spent six seasons across the kitchen table from her on Kate & Allie reached for the plainest words she had. “We lost a decent person today,” Jane Curtin said in a statement shared with ABC News. “Susan St. James was a decent person who made Kate and Allie a joy.”
Saint James was born Susan Jane Miller in Los Angeles on August 14, 1946, and her representative told People she died after a pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Our full obituary covers the roles that made her famous. This is the rest of the story: why she vanished from McMillan & Wife, the six-week romance that became a 45-year marriage, and what Susan Saint James’s son Teddy left behind after his death at 14.
Why Did Sally McMillan Disappear Before the Final Season?
Viewers who came back to McMillan & Wife for the 1976-77 season found Rock Hudson’s police commissioner a widower. Saint James had walked away after the 1975-76 season over a contract dispute, and the writers wrote Sally out by having her die in a plane crash. NBC shortened the title to McMillan, and the show lasted one more season without her. Neither she nor Hudson spelled out the terms in any interview we could find.
The McMillan years gave her something that outlasted the role. While she was filming in California, she was asked to help the Special Olympics, and she later wrote in a tribute for the organization, “It was 1972 at the California Special Olympics State Games when I first met Mrs. Eunice Kennedy Shriver.” She went on to serve on the international board, then on the Connecticut board after she moved east for Kate & Allie. “I don’t think my life would be anything without the Special Olympics,” she said, as quoted by the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame. Her old co-star had not forgotten that part of her either.
What Did Jane Curtin Remember Most?
The two women had first worked together in the 1980 comedy How to Beat the High Cost of Living, four years before CBS paired them as two divorced mothers sharing a home. Curtin’s statement this week went past the sitcom. “She juggled a really full life from the Ed Sullivan theater in between working on stage and being the Mom on set,” she said. “She worked tirelessly for organizations she believed in like the Special Olympics. All the while raising children and going through the horrors of losing a child.” She closed with four words: “I’ll miss her.”
Jamie Lee Curtis, who started out as a Universal contract player just as Saint James had, wrote that she “LOVED Susan and her free spirit, no nonsense, tongue-in-cheek way as an actress, beautiful, and a little ballsy.” Curtis called her “a bit of a spirit guide and good friend” and added, “She was a very special woman and will be greatly missed.” The family Curtis mentioned in that post had started on a single Saturday night in New York.
How Did One ‘SNL’ Hosting Job Lead to a 45-Year Marriage?
Saint James hosted Saturday Night Live on October 10, 1981, when Dick Ebersol was running the show as executive producer. They married on November 21, 1981, in a small ceremony at her Hollywood Hills home, about six weeks after they met. She brought two daughters, Sunshine and Harmony, from her marriage to makeup artist Tom Lucas, and together she and Ebersol had three sons, Charlie, Willie and Teddy.
The marriage was not always easy. She filed for divorce in 2002, and the couple reconciled later that year. “We had a second chance,” she told People. “I’m amazingly happier, so that’s a good sign.” Twenty years later, Ebersol called her “the greatest partner I’ve ever had by far” in his memoir From Saturday Night to Sunday Night. They would need that partnership sooner than either of them could have imagined.
What Happened on That Snowy Runway in Colorado?
On November 28, 2004, a chartered jet carrying Ebersol and two of their sons crashed on takeoff from Montrose Regional Airport in light snow. It was bound for South Bend, Indiana, where Charlie was a senior at Notre Dame. Teddy was killed, along with pilot Luis Alberto Polanco and flight attendant Warren T. Richardson III. Charlie went back into the wreckage for his father, and Ebersol later said on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006, “He not only got me off of the plane… he ran back into the plane.”
Less than three weeks after the crash, Saint James talked about her youngest with Tim Russert on Today. With the older children grown and gone, she and Teddy had been “like roommates,” she said. “I’m his best friend in the whole wide world for sure.” He was a Red Sox fan growing up in a Connecticut she called “half Yankees, half Red Sox,” and he had watched Boston win the World Series a month before he died. “Teddy had found peace,” she said. “He found peace on Earth. He was one happy guy.”
The grief never fully lifted. “I’ve never touched his clothes, I’ve never been able to move his things,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2006. Even so, she had already found a way to help the people she still had.
Where Is Susan Saint James’s Son Teddy Remembered Today?
Her family revealed this week that in the weeks after the crash, “she delivered his eulogy as a note to each of her other children and her husband, giving them words to heal.” In their statement to People, they added, “Even in the deepest grief of her life, she put everyone else first.”
Teddy’s love of the Red Sox found a home of its own. Red Sox chairman Tom Werner, a friend of the family, started a project to rebuild four uneven, often flooded ballfields along the Charles River Esplanade in Boston, and the Red Sox Foundation joined Hill House and the Esplanade Association to pay for the $1.8 million renovation. Teddy Ebersol’s Red Sox Fields at Lederman Park were dedicated on June 10, 2006. The Boston Globe reported that the plans included a granite bench carved with Teddy’s name and the words “Curse Reversed 2004,” next to a bronzed baseball glove like the one he used.
Children’s soccer games began there that September, and baseball and softball followed the next summer. Saint James never claimed the grief had passed. “Life is so powerful,” she told Oprah, “you just go on living.”