I stumbled onto this rabbit hole the way most people probably do — watching an old Saturday Night Live clip late one night, then falling down a Wikipedia hole about Chevy Chase, and somewhere around the third link I hit a name I’d never heard before: Suzanne Chase. His first wife. And then… nothing. No photos worth mentioning. No interviews. No “where is she now” piece with any real substance behind it.
So I went looking. And honestly? There’s a lot less out there than you’d expect for someone who was married to one of the biggest comedy stars of the 1970s.
That’s actually what made me want to write this. Not because I found some secret trove of information nobody else has, but because almost everything else out there about her is padded, guessed at, or flat-out invented to fill space. I’d rather give you the honest, sparse picture than pretend to know things I don’t.
Who Is Suzanne Chase Really?
Here’s what’s actually documented, as far as public records and old entertainment write-ups go: Suzanne Chase was born Susan Hewitt in 1949, somewhere in the United States. She married a young, not-yet-famous Chevy Chase on February 23, 1973 — right around the time he was starting to make noise in comedy circles, a couple of years before he’d become a household name on SNL. The marriage didn’t last long. They divorced on February 1, 1976, just shy of the three-year mark.
That’s it. That’s basically the entire verified timeline. Two dates, a birth year, and a name change.
And look, I get why that’s frustrating to read if you came here wanting the full story — her childhood, her family, what she’s doing now, maybe even a photo or two. I wanted that too, if I’m being honest. But I’d rather tell you the trail goes cold than make something up to fill the gap. A lot of the articles floating around online do the opposite: they take those same two or three facts and stretch them into a full “biography,” complete with invented details about her personality, her upbringing, and her life after the divorce. None of that is actually sourced to anything real. It just reads that way because it’s written confidently. So no, I’m not going to do that here.
Life Before Chevy Chase
There’s genuinely very little on record about Suzanne Chase’s early life. No school records that surfaced publicly, no family interviews, nothing from old classmates or neighbors that ever made it into print. Given that she was born in 1949, she would have grown up well before the internet existed — back when a private person really could stay private, without a digital footprint following them around forever. That alone probably explains a good chunk of the silence.
Think about it this way: someone born in 1949 would have been a teenager in the early 1960s and in her early twenties by the time she met Chevy Chase. That’s a full childhood and young adulthood that unfolded entirely off the record, at least as far as anything searchable today goes. People from that generation, especially those who weren’t chasing fame themselves, just didn’t leave the same paper trail we do now. No social media accounts, no old blog posts, no tagged photos from decades back. It’s not mysterious in a spooky sense — it’s just what “private” actually looked like before everyone became searchable by default.
I think that’s worth sitting with for a second, because it says something about how differently we think about privacy now. If someone got married today and then quietly stepped out of public life, there would still be a trace — old Instagram posts, a LinkedIn profile, something. Suzanne Chase belongs to a generation where disappearing from the record was still genuinely possible, and she seems to have done exactly that.
The Marriage to Chevy Chase
By the early ’70s, Chevy Chase was still grinding. He hadn’t hit it big yet — he was writing sketches, doing bit parts, hustling around New York’s comedy and improv scene, a few years out from the gig that would define his career. He and Suzanne married in February 1973, well before Saturday Night Live even existed as a concept, let alone the show that would launch him into stardom in 1975.
It’s worth sitting with that timeline for a second: she was with him during the unglamorous, uncertain years — not the fame, not the movie premieres, not the “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not” era. That’s a very different kind of marriage than the one people usually picture when they hear “married to a celebrity.” There was no red carpet. No paparazzi following them to dinner. Just two people, married in their early twenties, navigating a career that hadn’t taken off yet.
Three years later, in 1976, they split. Public records confirm the divorce date, but not much else — no stated reason ever made it into the press, which honestly tracks with how private this whole chapter of his life seems to have been kept, even by Chevy Chase himself in later interviews. He’s talked plenty over the decades about his career, his struggles with fame, even his personal battles that became public knowledge. But his first marriage rarely comes up, and when it does, it’s usually just a passing mention — a name and a date, nothing more.
Chevy Chase went on to marry twice more. He married Jacqueline Carlin in 1976, not long after the divorce from Suzanne, though that marriage also ended within a couple of years. He then married Jayni Luke in 1982, and that marriage has lasted — they’re still together decades later, with three daughters. Suzanne, meanwhile, stepped out of the frame entirely after 1976. She didn’t stick around the entertainment world in any documented way, didn’t do the tell-all interview circuit that so many exes of famous people eventually get pulled into, whether willingly or not.
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Did She Have an Acting Career?
You’ll see this claim repeated in a few places online — that Suzanne Chase dabbled in acting before or during her marriage. I went looking for anything to back this up: credited filmography, old cast lists, industry databases, even fan forums that sometimes dig up obscure credits nobody else has bothered to catalog. I couldn’t verify it against anything solid.
It’s possible she worked in some capacity within entertainment circles, given the timing and her proximity to that world through Chevy Chase’s early career. People who date or marry into show business sometimes end up adjacent to it in small ways — assisting on a production, doing background work, that kind of thing — without ever building a public-facing career out of it. But I’m not going to present a rumor as a fact just because it’s been copy-pasted across a few low-effort blogs that all seem to be quoting each other rather than any original source. If there’s a real, documented acting credit out there, it hasn’t surfaced in any reliable source I could find, and I’d rather say that plainly than dress up a guess as a fact.
Why People Are Still Curious About Her
Honestly? I think it comes down to contrast. Chevy Chase became one of the most recognizable comedic faces of a generation — Caddyshack, Fletch, the Vacation movies, that unforgettable original SNL run where he was the first breakout star of the whole cast. Meanwhile, the woman who was married to him during his rise chose the opposite path completely. She disappeared from view and, as far as anyone can tell, never looked back or cashed in on the connection, not with a memoir, not with a tell-all interview, not with so much as a quote in a magazine.
There’s something almost admirable about that, if you think about it. In a world where everyone’s one Google search away from being findable, she managed to just… not be found. And that’s rare enough now to be genuinely interesting on its own, even without the celebrity connection attached. A lot of people who brush up against fame, even briefly, end up leaning into it later — writing books, doing podcasts, showing up at fan conventions decades later to talk about “the old days.” Suzanne Chase apparently never did any of that.
I’ll admit, part of what pulled me into researching this in the first place was just curiosity about that choice. Was it deliberate? Did she actively avoid interview requests over the years, or did nobody ever really ask? We don’t know, and honestly, we may never know. But it does make her one of the more unusual footnotes in celebrity history — someone connected to fame who simply walked away from it and stayed away, for good.
The Broader Pattern: Celebrity Exes Who Chose Privacy
Suzanne Chase isn’t entirely alone in this, if you zoom out a bit. There’s a small but real category of people who were briefly married to, or dated, someone who later became famous — and who chose not to become part of the public narrative around that person’s life. Some avoid it because they simply value their privacy. Others avoid it because staying out of the spotlight is easier than dealing with constant questions about a relationship that ended decades earlier.
What makes Suzanne Chase’s case stand out a little more is the timing. She wasn’t with Chevy Chase after he became famous — she was there before, during the uncertain years, and then she was gone by the time the fame actually hit. That means she never really had to deal with being a “celebrity spouse” in the way people usually picture it. No public appearances at his side, no photographers waiting outside restaurants, none of that. Her exit happened before that world ever fully arrived.
The Bottom Line
If you came here hoping for a deep, detailed portrait of Suzanne Chase’s life, I wish I had more to give you. But the honest answer is that she’s remained almost entirely private, and any article claiming otherwise is probably filling in blanks that were never actually confirmed by any real source. What we do know is simple: she married Chevy Chase on February 23, 1973, divorced him on February 1, 1976, and quietly exited public life afterward, choosing not to trade on the connection in any documented way.
Sometimes the most interesting thing about a person’s story is how little of it was ever told — and how deliberate that silence seems to have been. In an era obsessed with sharing everything, there’s something almost refreshing about someone who simply didn’t.
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FAQs
Q: What was Suzanne Chase’s birth name?
A: She was born Susan Hewitt. “Chase” came from her marriage to Chevy Chase, and it’s the name she’s most commonly referred to by today.
Q: When did Suzanne Chase marry Chevy Chase?
A: They married on February 23, 1973, a couple of years before he became famous on Saturday Night Live.
Q: How long were Suzanne Chase and Chevy Chase married?
A: Just under three years — they divorced on February 1, 1976.
Q: Is Suzanne Chase still alive?
A: There’s no publicly confirmed information either way. Given her long-standing privacy, this isn’t something that can be answered with any certainty from available records, and speculating on it wouldn’t be responsible.
Q: Did Suzanne Chase remarry?
A: Not that’s been publicly documented. Like most other aspects of her post-divorce life, this simply isn’t on the public record, and no credible source confirms it one way or another.
Q: Was Suzanne Chase an actress?
A: This claim shows up in a few places online, but there’s no verifiable filmography or industry credit to support it. It’s unconfirmed rather than false — just not something that can be stated as fact.
Q: Why isn’t there more information about her online?
A: Mostly because she chose privacy — she wasn’t in entertainment long-term, didn’t give interviews, and largely avoided the spotlight even after her connection to a famous name. Combine that with being born before the digital age, and it makes sense that so little survives publicly.
Q: Did Chevy Chase ever talk about his marriage to Suzanne Chase?
A: Not in any significant detail, at least not publicly. He’s discussed much of his personal life over the decades, but this particular chapter tends to only come up as a brief mention rather than a topic he’s expanded on.
