Suzanne Chase, born Susan Hewitt, spent roughly three years married to a struggling young comedian named Chevy Chase, years before Saturday Night Live turned him into a household name. Then she stepped away from public life entirely and never came back. What’s left behind is a handful of verified facts, a lot of recycled speculation, and a useful case study in how the internet fills gaps around private people who happen to brush up against fame.
Who Was Suzanne Chase?
Suzanne Chase’s birth name was Susan Hewitt. She was reportedly born in 1949 in the United States, though no publicly confirmed birth date, birthplace, or family background has ever surfaced. She is not a public figure by choice or profession; she became a subject of public curiosity solely through her marriage, and by every indication, she preferred it that way.
On February 23, 1973, she married Cornelius Crane Chevy Chase in New York City, in what’s described as a small ceremony among family and friends. At the time, Chevy Chase was not yet famous. He was a working comedy writer and performer in New York, grinding through the same downtown scene, improv troupes, sketch shows, and the National Lampoon Radio Hour, which would soon deliver him to the original cast of Saturday Night Live in 1975. In other words, Suzanne Chase married a man before anyone, including possibly Chevy Chase himself, knew he was about to become famous.
Their marriage lasted a little under three years. They divorced on February 1, 1976, meaning Suzanne Chase was married to Chevy Chase precisely during the period when Saturday Night Live launched, and he became an overnight star. By the time the show made him famous in its first season, the marriage was already effectively over. She never had children with him, and no verified public information describes what she did professionally or where she settled afterward.
The Timing Is the Interesting Part
What makes this marriage more than a Wikipedia footnote is its timing. Chevy Chase’s career took off at a genuinely unusual speed. He went from largely anonymous comedy writer to the breakout star of the biggest new show on television within roughly a year of the show’s debut. Suzanne Chase was married to him through the lead-up to that moment and the immediate aftermath of it, the period when the phrase I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not became a real cultural touchstone rather than an inside joke among his friends.
Marriages under ordinary financial and emotional strain are hard enough. A marriage that has to absorb one partner’s transformation from unknown to famous, seemingly overnight, is a different kind of stress test, and it’s one that a lot of celebrity marriages don’t survive. Chase has spoken sparingly about the end of this marriage over the years, and in the biography I’m Chevy Chase… and You’re Not, written with Rena Fruchter, he reportedly attributed the breakup to infidelity on Suzanne’s part. That is his account; Suzanne Chase has never publicly responded to it, corrected it, confirmed it, or offered her own version. That silence is consistent with everything else known about how she’s handled her connection to Chase, which is to say, she hasn’t engaged with it at all.
It’s worth pausing on that asymmetry. In stories like this, the public typically only has one side, because only one of the two people involved chose a life that puts them in front of cameras and biographers. That doesn’t make the surviving account wrong, but it’s a good reminder that what’s publicly known and what actually happened aren’t the same thing when only one participant is talking.
A Marriage Sandwiched Between Two Others
Chevy Chase has been married three times, and the contrast between his wives says a lot about how differently these relationships have been documented.
His second marriage, to actress Jacqueline Carlin, began in 1976, the same year his divorce from Suzanne Chase was finalized, and lasted until 1980. Carlin was an actress with her own public profile, and their courtship reportedly played out partly around the logistics of Chase’s Saturday Night Live schedule, since Carlin was initially reluctant to relocate to New York while he was working on the show.
His third marriage, to Jayni Chase (born Jayni Luke), began in 1982 and has lasted more than four decades, making it by far the defining relationship of his adult life. Chevy and Jayni Chase have three daughters together, Cydney, Caley, and Emily, and Jayni is the wife most associated with his public persona today, having appeared alongside him at events and in interviews over the decades.
Set against those two marriages, the one to Suzanne Chase stands out for how little presence it has in the historical record. There are no interviews with her, no public statements, no photographs beyond a scattering of decades-old images that circulate on fan and gossip sites, and no acting career that kept her name in circulation the way Jacqueline Carlin’s did. She is, in the most literal sense, the wife the public knows the least about, not because her marriage mattered less to the timeline of Chase’s life, but because she never gave anyone anything to work with.
Why So Little Is Actually Known
It’s tempting, in pieces like this, to frame a private person’s silence as mysterious, as though there’s a hidden story waiting to be uncovered. In Suzanne Chase’s case, the more mundane explanation is probably the right one: she got divorced from a man before he was famous, and she simply continued living her life without being pulled into the entertainment industry’s orbit. There’s no scandal in that, no cover-up, no hidden career. It’s what a fairly ordinary divorce from a fairly ordinary young couple looks like, except that one half of that couple went on to become extraordinarily famous a few months later.
That’s also, frankly, unusual for a celebrity ex. Most people who marry into fame, or marry someone who later becomes famous, end up leaving some kind of trace, a later career, a memoir, an interview given decades on, at minimum a LinkedIn profile that gossip sites can screenshot. Suzanne Chase left essentially none of that. Some articles reference a few small acting credits attributed to her, but these claims are thinly sourced and impossible to verify against any consistent filmography, so they’re worth treating with real skepticism rather than repeating as settled fact.
The Content Mill Problem
If you search Suzanne Chase today, you’ll find a wave of near-identical articles published within the last year or so, all with titles like The Untold Story of Chevy Chase’s First Wife or What We Know About Chevy Chase’s First Wife. These pieces tend to restate the same three or four verified facts: the wedding date, the divorce date, her birth name, and then pad the rest with vague, interchangeable language about her privacy, her quiet life, and how little is known about her childhood. Several of them use nearly identical phrasing to describe her as having deliberately kept her life a mystery.
This is worth flagging because it’s a pattern, not a coincidence. When a real person has almost no public footprint, but search interest in them exists because of a celebrity connection, a certain kind of content farm will generate dozens of superficially different articles that all restate the same handful of facts with different padding. None of them adds real information; they mostly just repeat and lightly reword each other. It’s a useful reminder to be skeptical of any article that seems to know a great deal about someone’s private, quiet life, while, in the same breath, admitting it knows almost nothing concrete about that person.
What This Story Actually Tells Us
Strip away the padding, and Suzanne Chase’s story is genuinely simple: a young woman married a young comedian in 1973, the marriage ended in 1976 right as his career exploded, and she chose, consistently, for the past five decades, not to discuss it publicly. She’s outlived the marriage by fifty years and given the public nothing further to go on, which is itself a kind of statement, even if it’s one she never intended to make.
There’s something worth respecting in that. Fame has a gravitational pull that tends to drag anyone who was ever close to a famous person into its orbit eventually. Old classmates get interviewed, exes write memoirs, and distant relatives sell stories. Suzanne Chase appears to have simply declined to be pulled in, for fifty years running, through the entire arc of Chevy Chase’s career from Saturday Night Live to Caddyshack to National Lampoon’s Vacation to Fletch and beyond. Whatever the actual reasons for her divorce, and only one side of that story has ever been told, she has never used her connection to a famous man to build a public identity of her own, and no reporting has ever caught her trying to.
A Note on the Limits of This Story
It’s worth being direct about something: almost everything genuinely verifiable about Suzanne Chase fits into a single paragraph: her birth name, her wedding date, her divorce date, and the fact that she and Chevy Chase had no children. Everything beyond that, her later life, her career, her whereabouts today, is either unconfirmed, sourced to low-quality aggregator sites repeating each other, or simply unknown. Any piece that claims more than that is filling in blanks rather than reporting facts, and readers looking for a definitive account of what happened to Suzanne Chase should know upfront that no such account exists in reliable form.
Conclusion
Suzanne Chase’s place in pop culture history is small but specific: she was married to Chevy Chase for the three years that took him from unknown comedy writer to household name, and then she left both the marriage and the spotlight for good. Everything else, the childhood nobody has described, the career nobody can confirm, the mystery that dozens of near-identical articles insist she’s hiding, is speculation dressed up as biography. The more honest version of her story is shorter than most of the articles about her: a private person, briefly and incidentally connected to fame, who chose privacy and got to keep it. In an era when almost no one connected to a celebrity manages to stay out of the story, that alone makes her somewhat unusual.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Suzanne Chase?
Suzanne Chase, born Susan Hewitt, is best known as the first wife of comedian Chevy Chase. She married him in 1973, before he became famous, and has otherwise stayed entirely out of public life.
When did Suzanne Chase marry Chevy Chase, and how long were they married?
They married on February 23, 1973, in New York City, and divorced on February 1, 1976 , a marriage of just under three years.
Did Suzanne Chase and Chevy Chase have children?
No. No public record indicates they had any children together during their marriage.
Why did Suzanne Chase and Chevy Chase divorce?
Chevy Chase has said in interviews and in his biography, I’m Chevy Chase… and You’re Not, that infidelity on her part ended the marriage. Suzanne Chase has never publicly responded to or confirmed that account, so only one side of the story is on record.
What happened to Suzanne Chase after the divorce?
There’s no reliable public information. She never gave interviews, pursued a public career, or otherwise resurfaced in connection with Chevy Chase’s fame. Claims about her later life circulating online are largely unverified.
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