The Queen of the Infomercial

By Celia Aniskovich

October 14th, 1993 — Los Angeles

Backstage at The Tonight Show, the chaos hums like a machine about to overheat. Camera operators scurry, a makeup artist sprints by wielding a powder puff like a weapon, and a stagehand barks something about a lighting cue into a headset. In the middle of it all stands, 

 Susan Powter.

She is unmistakable in high-waisted black jeans, a bright red scoop-neck bodysuit that clings to her with athletic ease, and short black kitten heels that click sharply on the linoleum floor. Her platinum buzz cut shimmers under the overhead fluorescents. Susan’s posture is perfect. Upright, almost regal. The kind that comes from years of lunges, planks, and teaching people how to reclaim their bodies. 

Standing off to the side is Rusty Robertson — forever assessing a situation’s potential, forever in Susan’s orbit — talking to producers, networking hard. The show hasn’t even started and she’s already pitching Susan for her next appearance, whispering about future projects, dropping names and numbers. She’s a redhead with a ruddy complexion who is wearing her usual: a crisp suit, perfect makeup, and heels that click twice as fast as Susan’s. If Susan is the storm, Rusty is the PR professional trying to harness the lightning.

But she doesn’t check in with Susan backstage. There’s no prep. No dramatic pep talk. Susan never needs coaching. She never needs a script. She just goes out and does what she is meant to do. 

This moment is the height of their empire — the culmination of everything she and Rusty had worked for.

A glance passes between them. They know what’s coming after the show. Somewhere, hundreds of miles away, Jerry Frankel — the businessman who had backed Susan, invested in her, helped build the infomercial machine — will be fuming.

“Why didn’t you hold up the product?”

“Why didn’t you say the 1-800 number?”

“Why didn’t you sell, goddammit?”

Always furious. Always yelling. Always obsessed with control.

He isn’t the one in front of the camera. But he talks like he is. He doesn't understand Susan’s instinct for connection. He only thinks in conversions. Sales. Branding. Money. He's always shouting at someone, always on the brink of a heart attack, and still running everything.

After the show, Susan and Rusty will go back to the hotel room and deal with that call the way they always do. They will laugh. Gossip. Debrief. Rusty will tell her about the producer she charmed. The deal she might’ve landed. The next appearance on the horizon.

Susan never remembers the details. But she remembers the rhythm: do the thing, do it well, move on.

In so many ways, they built this routine together, these two women from opposite ends of the American dream. Susan: the loudmouthed, self-made fitness savant with a TV-ready body and deep personal scars that hadn’t quite faded. Rusty: the Dallas businesswoman with a sixth sense for branding and a Rolodex full of the right people. They were fire and flint, and for a while, that friction lit up the world.

Lately, something’s been off. Susan can’t name it, but it’s there, flickering beneath the surface like static. A subtle unraveling. But before she can chase the feeling, Jay Leno’s voice cracks through the hallway like a starter pistol, yanking her back into the moment. 

“If you’ve turned on your television in the last year, you’ll recognize my next guest…she is a fitness instructor, a motivational speaker, and an author. This is her new book, Stop the Insanity! Here she is - QUEEN, THE QUEEN of the infomercials - Susan Powter, ladies and gentlemen!”

The stage manager appears like a ghost in motion, waving the newly anointed queen forward.

Susan adjusts her shirt, smoothes the invisible creases, and strides toward the curtain, every muscle in her body pulsing. She rolls her neck once like a prizefighter about to enter the ring, and pushes toward the light. As the curtain parts and the cheers rise, she flashes a smile — bold, self-possessed, unmistakably hers.

Rusty stands, watching the woman she’s helped launch walk out into the light. 

For now, Susan owns the room. The message. The moment.

But not the script. Not yet.

June, 2024 — Nevada Desert

It’s 120 degrees in Las Vegas. A sun-scorched moss green Prius idles in the parking lot of a stucco apartment complex, the kind where the mailboxes are rusted and the palm trees lean like they’ve given up.

Inside the car, a woman shifts restlessly. Her dark hair is yanked into a tight bun, more functional than flattering. Sweat slides down her temple, carving paths through sun-leathered skin that doesn’t so much age her as announce that she’s been through it.

She drums her fingers on the steering wheel. Taps her heel against the floor mat. Glances at the phone, then again.

DING.

The Uber Eats chime pops like a spark. She grabs a paper bag from the passenger seat in one smooth, practiced motion — bam — the door swings open, and she’s already halfway out before the app finishes buzzing.

There’s no hesitation in her movements, even in the heat. No languid pace. She marches across the lot with the energy of someone who used to lead rooms full of people — someone who, even now, can't help but bring the room with her, even if the room is a sweltering Vegas stairwell.

At apartment 3C, she knocks. Sharp, twice. The door cracks open. A hand reaches out.

“Thanks,” a kid mutters.

“You bet,” she fires back, already turning.

Back in the car, she reaches into a small cooler bag and pulls out ginger turmeric shots, beet juice, carrot juice, and almonds. This is not a woman who “snacks” — she eats. The chill of the ginger makes her eyes flutter shut for a second. Maybe it’s relief. Maybe it’s memory.

From the stillness, you might think she’s waiting for someone. She has that air about her — the quiet confidence of someone who’s lived a life with an audience.

It’s only now, engine running, phone lit up with the next order, one foot hovering over the gas, that you realize:

Susan Powter — once a media phenomenon, the platinum-haired icon who yelled at America to Stop the Insanity! — is now delivering someone’s dinner in the Nevada sun.

She’s not in her element. But somehow, still, she is the element.

She taps DELIVERED, sets the phone in the cradle, and waits.

The bell chimes again.

And Susan drives on.

December 22, 1957 — Somewhere near Sydney, Australia

Susan Powter enters the world somewhere just north of Sydney, Australia. There’s no birth certificate that she’s ever seen. No tidy paperwork to mark the moment. Just stories. She is the second of three children — born into a life that, on paper, looks just right.

Her father is brilliant. A civil engineer with a passport thick with foreign stamps. He builds roads in Borneo for the Sultan of Brunei. Glamorous stuff. There are photos — black and white, sun-faded — of her parents' wedding in Indonesia. They are beautiful, stylish, sun-kissed. Her father looks composed, grounded. Practical. The kind of man who draws the world into shapes and blueprints.

Susan’s parents on their wedding day in Indonesia. Provided by Susan Powter.

Her mother? More complicated.

She is elegant, magnetic, fiercely social. The kind of woman who can turn a hallway into a runway and a dinner party into performance art. Makeup immaculate. Posture regal. She can speak with anyone — diplomats, priests, strangers in the grocery store. People love her.

But beneath the charm is something wound tight and painful.

Her mother’s father, Susan’s grandfather, died in World War II. Killed in action. Susan’s mother and her sister, Jill, were sent away after that, locked inside a convent for 12 years. Twelve years of ritual, silence, and abuse. The nuns told her mother about her father’s death with cruelty — no softness, no mercy, just hard, institutional fact. The stories that trickled down to Susan decades later were, in her words, “unfucking believable.”

Her mother came out of that convent sophisticated, scarred, and determined never to show a crack. She built her identity like armor: charming, well-dressed, always in control. Except when she drank. 

She teaches Susan how to run a house, how to persevere, and how to walk into a room like you belong. But she doesn’t know how to hold a crying child. She doesn’t know how to make space for defiance or noise or questions. And Susan has all three in abundance.

From the outside, Susan describes her childhood as “magnificent.”

Inside? Not quite.

The family bounces between Brunei and Australia, setting up temporary homes with well-pressed curtains and impossible expectations. Her older sister is the golden girl. Her younger brother is the surprise. And Susan — stuck in the middle, loud, wild, and inconvenient — is the kid who never quite landed where she was supposed to.

Susan and her family outside their home on Cherrywood Avenue in Australia. Susan stands to the left of her mother. Provided by Susan Powter.

At 6 years old, she is sent to a Dominican convent school: daily mass, starched uniforms, nuns with silent mouths and screaming eyes. Discipline comes fast and hard. And while the other girls fold into it, Susan chafes. She rolls her eyes. She asks questions. 

Her mother, social, sharp, camera-ready, hosts dinners for the nuns. They sit around the table in their habits while Susan fidgets, her dress too tight, her smile too forced. The home is filled with beauty, matching dresses, and unspoken rules. But underneath, Susan can feel something boiling: her mother’s frustration at being forced into the role of housewife, her own refusal to behave. It’s a kind of tension that has no name but is always just behind the wallpaper.

By 10, her family is preparing for a new start. Her father’s years-long push for American visas and a new life abroad has finally paid off. The plan is in motion: they are leaving Australia.

Passport picture for their trip to America. Susan, her siblings, and mother. Provided by Susan Powter.

1966 — Tuckahoe Village, Suburban Virginia 

The house is brand new — the paint still smells like plastic, the sod hasn’t taken root yet, and the mail hasn't started showing up regularly. They’d moved halfway across the world to live in a house that looked like all the other houses on the cul-de-sac, in a town that felt like it had been built overnight for people with good intentions and laminated schedules. Their neighbor, a proud Confederate holdout, belts out Ballad of the Green Berets like it’s the national anthem, his voice echoing across the Virginia cul-de-sac like a warning. For Susan’s family — newly arrived from Australia — it is like landing on another planet.

Susan hates it immediately.

The air here is heavier — humid in a way that sticks to your skin and makes your hair limp. She and her siblings are enrolled in Catholic school within a week. Uniforms again. Mass again. Nuns again. Different accents, same old fear.

Susan (center), her sister, mother, and a nun, standing in front of their house in Virginia.  Provided by Susan Powter.

Her mother, once poised and polished, seems brittle now. She tries to make it work. She hosts polite teas for neighbors and practices her American accent over the phone. But something about the distance from Sydney, the distance from who she used to be, clings to her like a fever.

Then comes the bombshell. Her mother and father sit the children down to break the news. “I’m pregnant,” her mother states, as naturally as if she is telling them what was for dinner that night. Her mother is 38. The pregnancy is labeled “an accident.” Susan calls it something else: the Catholic mistake.

The birth doesn’t go smoothly.

Her mother hemorrhages, loses massive amounts of blood. A priest is called for last rites. The doctors perform a radical hysterectomy. It is supposed to save her life — and it does — but it also throws her body into surgical menopause overnight.

Susan’s father doesn’t explain it. The nurses don’t either. But Susan knows something has broken.

Her mother comes home pale and hollow, too weak to climb the stairs. The woman who once moved with elegance now shuffles from room to room, one hand gripping the wall for balance. Her skin looks too thin. She cries sometimes, without warning.

Susan steps in.

She changes diapers, bottles formula, rocks the 10-pound baby that had nearly killed her mother. She is only 11, but already knows what it means to be needed in ways a child shouldn’t be. She loves her baby brother fiercely. “It was another level of love,” she’d say later. “He wasn’t just my brother. He was mine.”

The year passes like fog. Virginia was never meant to be forever. It was a layover, a holding pattern while her father looked for something more permanent. But it left its mark.

By the time they leave for New York, Susan is different.

She has held life in her arms. Has watched a woman break. Has stepped into shoes no one gave her.

1967 — Pelham Manor, Scarsdale, New York

Susan’s house in Pelham Manor. Provided by Susan Powter.

The move to Pelham Manor came quickly. Her father got a job on Fifth Avenue and suddenly they were in a big white house on a quiet street with tennis courts and lawn crews and neighbors who hosted garden parties that looked like magazine spreads.

The house is immaculate. High ceilings. Real fireplaces. Staircases meant to be swept down dramatically in a silk gown, which her mother could have pulled off if she wasn’t quietly unraveling.

Her mother recovered physically from the trauma of her youngest son’s birth in Virginia, but something inside her was permanently altered. She still moved with elegance, still smiled on cue, still applied makeup with military precision. But now there was a tremor beneath the performance. Her health wasn’t steady. Her nerves were thinner. The premature menopause had taken something from her.

So she leaned into the only thing she had left — appearances.

They joined the country club. Paddleball matches. White wine lunches. Big parties with big voices and everyone pretending they weren’t afraid of falling apart. Susan’s mother hosted with grace, but her hands sometimes shook as she passed hors d’oeuvres.

Susan stood at the edge of those parties, watching it all like a foreign film. Her mother was playing a role she didn’t believe in anymore. Her father worked late and came home later. Her siblings stayed quiet. And Susan did what came naturally.

She left.

At only 11, Susan had figured out the train schedules. The right platform. The way to look like she belonged downtown. Her parents gave her too much money and not enough attention, so she disappeared into Manhattan like she owns it.

She wanders the streets. Talks to adults. Flirts with danger. Buys records. Smokes cigarettes. Stares down strangers. She explores department stores and bookstores, sits in diners, watches the city pulse.

She doesn’t know it then, but she is starting to carve out a sense of self from the sheer act of moving. Always forward. Always away. Always somewhere other than where she came from.

1968 — Dorothy’s Fabric Shop, Pelham Village

There is one place in Pelham that Susan enjoys. The shop smells like cedar and starch, with bolts of fine fabric stacked in tight rows and glass jars of buttons arranged like jewelry. Susan loves the tactile pleasure, the quiet, the sense that everything in the room has a purpose. To this day, Susan finds peace in a fabric store. She can’t explain why.

It is run by a woman named Dorothy Simpson — a creative force with a quiet fire, the kind of passion no one paid attention to back then, especially not in women. She is tall, gangly, and awkward in a way that makes people underestimate her, and she knows it. Not country club beautiful, not polished — just real.

Dorothy is also a self-admitted alcoholic at a time when women didn’t go to AA, let alone talk about it. But she did. Openly. Calmly. She has kind eyes, a dry wit, and a mind much sharper than she lets on.

She isn’t part of the neighborhood’s social scene, she is something rarer: present.

And Dorothy notices Susan.

Over time, they talk. Eventually, Susan blurts out everything about her mother’s illness, about the silence in the house that made her want to scream.

Dorothy never flinches. Never offers cheap comfort. Just listens.

One afternoon, she looks at Susan and says, gently, “You know, there’s a meeting for people like us. It’s called Al-Anon.”

Susan doesn’t ask what that means. She just asks where it is.

The room is dim. Fluorescent bulbs buzz above metal folding chairs. A silver urn of coffee sits on a table covered with a vinyl cloth. The smell of cigarettes embedded in every corner. It is cold, sterile, quiet.

Susan is the only child.

Around her, adults speak in low voices about alcoholic parents, partners, the ways they’d learned to survive without making noise. No one looks at her like she doesn't belong. No one asks why she is there.

She comes back the next week.

It happens fast.

Her mother calls out — a strangled noise from the hallway — and when Susan runs to her, there is blood. All over her blouse. Pouring from her mouth. Her esophagus has ruptured, a violent complication of her alcoholism no one saw coming.

Susan freezes for half a second.

Then moves.

She calls Dorothy.

Ten minutes later, Dorothy shows up. Calm as ever.

She walks into the house, takes one look at the scene, and says:

“Put on some sunglasses. We’re going to a meeting.”

Susan’s mother doesn’t argue. She is pale, shaking, still bleeding. But she slips on dark glasses and a coat, and follows Dorothy out the door.

Susan watches them go.

No ambulance. No hospital. Just the only kind of emergency response their world allows — conceal it, compose yourself, and walk into a room full of strangers and try to rebuild your life. 

The psychiatrist’s office is beige and dead quiet. Susan lights a cigarette without asking. She is maybe 11, maybe 12 — who even kept track anymore. The woman behind the desk looks up, startled.

“You can’t smoke in here,” she says.

Susan doesn’t flinch. “Then I’m leaving.”

The woman blinks, then nods. And just like that, the cigarette stays. Susan takes a drag and thinks to herself, You dumb fucking woman. It is supposed to be some kind of school-mandated counseling — talk therapy for a kid too wild for the principal’s office. But what were they going to do, punish her into sanity? The whole thing is a joke.

She spends more time in the back parking lot of the junior high than in the classrooms anyway, hanging out with the seniors, smoking cigarettes and weed before detention and convincing herself she can telepathically talk to the other kids across the room. The teacher, Mr. Fishman, just keeps showing up. And so does she. But none of it means anything. By the time her report card comes home, it looks like a crime scene — five big red F’s across the page. Her father stares at it like it is a foreign language.

“Susan,” he says slowly, “how in God’s name does one fail gym?”

She shrugs and laughs. What is he going to do? Ground her?

She runs away that summer. First time. She is 13. No warning, no goodbye. Just grabs a few things and leaves. She takes off with her best friend — the kind of girl who doesn't flinch when Susan says, “let’s go.” They sleep under trestles in the city, curl up together in the dark, keeping each other warm with whispers and weed smoke.

It isn’t romantic, but it is love. Female love. Wild and loyal. Susan’s first taste of being chosen, of having someone who follows her, mirrors her, breaths in rhythm with her. The girl does everything Susan does. And Susan likes the power of that.

She starts staying at her best friend’s house. Her friend’s mother doesn’t ask a lot of questions. She isn’t stupid; she can see it in Susan’s face. Whatever is happening at home isn’t safe. Isn’t stable. There is violence, and silence, and a kind of madness that sticks to the walls.

And then, suddenly, she is in Florida.

Susan reading in Florida where she’d later run away with her boyfriend. Provided by Susan Powter.

Even Susan isn’t sure how she got there. It just happens. One day, she is a runaway kid in New York, the next she is in the humid heat of the South, staying with a man, working in a nursing home under a fake name. She lies about her age. She looks older. She moves like someone who knows exactly what she is doing, even when she doesn't.

The nursing home is the only place that makes sense. She loves the routine. The rhythm. The truth of it. Changing sheets. Feeding patients. Holding hands with people who are dying. It makes her feel useful in a way nothing else does.

Outside of work, it is chaos. Drugs, strangers, nights that bleed into days. People she doesn’t know. People who don’t care how young she is. And for a while, she doesn’t care either.

Then one night, she picks up the phone. Calls her father. No emotion, no explanation. Just, “Come get me.”

There is already a 13-state alarm out on her. A child gone missing. A teenage girl who has vanished, who has slipped through the cracks like smoke.

He shows up.

Takes her back.

But something in her stays gone.

Because once you’ve disappeared like that, once you’ve walked away from everything and survived, a part of you always knows you can do it again.

And no one — not a parent, not a teacher, not a psychiatrist — can stop you.

The family is still living in Pelham, but already halfway out the door. Texas is on the horizon, a promise her parents keep making like a threat. But Susan isn’t going anywhere she doesn’t want to go. Not now. Not at 16, not with the city just a train ride away and her life already moving too fast to stop.

She is in a limousine, riding through Manhattan with a man nearly twice her age. He is the heir to Harbor Shipping Lines. He wears too much cologne and likes to say her name like it means something to him. That night, he takes her to the 21 Club, tuxedos and hushed laughter and crystal chandeliers. She drinks what she wants, says what she wants, and when they leave, he tries to hold her hand.

When they get to Studio 54 there is a line of hundreds.

She leaves him there.

Someone opens the velvet rope and picks her. Her. Just her. And she slips inside like she belongs. The lights, the music, the bodies moving without shame. It is a church built for people like her — too loud, too strange, too much for anywhere else.

Back in Pelham, everything she did irritated her mother. The way she walked. The way she spoke. The shape of her body — especially her breasts, which arrived early and declared themselves like scandal. Her mother didn’t hide it. Susan could feel the hate in the pauses, in the long stares across the breakfast table. Her presence was a provocation.

So Susan stopped trying to behave.

One night — the memory is sharp and soft at the same time — she pours quaaludes and “other stuff” into her mother’s vodka. Enough to make a point. Enough to hope.

She doesn’t think of it as murder exactly. She thinks of it as removing the problem.

Someone finds out. She doesn’t remember who. A sibling, a friend, maybe one of the neighbors. They send her to therapy. Mandatory, of course.

The therapist brings her to his house. Basement office. The carpet smells like mildew and disappointment. His wife is upstairs making tuna sandwiches. And according to Susan, she seduces him.

“I wasn’t victimized,” she says now. “I was running the show. They were so stupid, and I was so fucking bored.”

The therapist doesn’t just sleep with her. He also brings her once a week to a social research institute, where she sits in the middle of a classroom and lets graduate students ask her anything they want. They are fascinated.

The worse she is, the more they want to hear. Her pain becomes performance. Her rebellion, curriculum.

It gives her a taste of something that feels a lot like power.

Somewhere in all that chaos, she meets a man. A rock star — famous, but soft. He won’t sleep with her. He calls her Cupcake. He says, “You’re better than that.” And somehow, she believes him.

He convinces her to go to secretarial school.

She doesn’t have a high school diploma, but her father — desperate to tether her to something — pays the tuition up front. No one asks questions after that.

Two years of steno pads and typing tests. She hates it. Hates the neatness of it, the tight skirts and timed drills. But she sticks with it. Learns to move fast, to listen faster.

She graduates. Takes a job at a big firm in the city. Secretarial. The executives are dumb as bricks, and she does everything — writes their memos, schedules their lives, manages their egos. They look at her like she is decoration. She sees right through them.

Every paycheck, she blows it all.

Sometimes on lobster lunches at The Palm. Sometimes she walks out of the office and hands her whole week’s pay to the homeless man on the corner. Just like that. Because she can.

She starts seeing a man who lives on Long Island. He has a boat. Cases of Dom Perignon. Coke piled high. They go out on the water, drink champagne straight from the bottle and burn through nights like they are trying to outpace themselves.

She temps at Ms. Magazine for a while, just long enough to clock the feminism and the flaws.

And then one day, her parents leave for Texas.

The house in Pelham empties out. The furniture, gone. The future they’d tried to script for her dissolves like sugar in water.

Susan stays behind. New York is still hers.

Late 1970s — Manhattan

The diagnosis comes not in a doctor’s office, not with a clipboard or soft lighting, but over the phone. In the middle of a chaotic New York recruiting office, where landlines tangle like snakes and deals are made between cigarette breaks.

Susan picks up the call, expecting nothing. A routine Pap smear.

“Grade three something,” she hears from the voice on the other end. “Cervical.”

She blinks, disgusted. Who tells someone they might have cancer over the phone? At work?

She hangs up and walks straight to the desk of her friend Deborah — her co-conspirator in chaos. Deborah is on the phone, five lines blinking, mid-sentence with a client. Susan announces the news.

Deborah doesn’t say much. Just nods. Hangs up the phone.

They walk the city for hours — two women in motion, talking about everything and nothing, as Manhattan pulses around them. It isn’t fear Susan feels. It is a kind of shock, a detachment. 

She tells her father next. He flies up from Texas immediately. They meet at the Waldorf Astoria, where he promises her the best care. There is talk of surgery, solutions, no big deal.

“We’ll take care of it,” he says. And that was that.

She has a conization — a surgical procedure to remove the precancerous tissue. She doesn’t remember much. Only that her midwife, years later, would confirm:

“Your cervix was cut. I can feel it.”

So yes, it happened. But what she remembers most isn’t the surgery. It’s Deborah. That afternoon in New York. The walking. The friendship that lasted years.

The moment she was told she had cancer was also the moment she remembered what it felt like to be held — not by medicine, but by a woman who knew exactly what to do.

Texas is cheaper. That’s how her father sold it. New York is impossible, everything is a struggle — money, space, air. In Texas, he says, you can breathe. And Susan, 24, exhausted from the chaos of her youth and too tired to fight for another zip code, gives in.

That’s how she ends up at a gym in Dallas and that’s how she meets Nick. He is tall, soft-spoken, and invites her over for baked potatoes, which feels impossibly kind at the time. They start seeing each other. It moves fast. Maybe because Susan has never been with a man who doesn’t want something violent or broken. Maybe because she is just tired of searching.

“I remember thinking I’d marry him because he is one of the only nice men I’d ever met.”

They get married at her mother’s house — a hot, tense day where someone "forgets" to turn on the air conditioning. The rooms are full of sweat and side-eyes. Susan wears a dress and a tight jaw. She remembers trying not to pass out.

After the wedding, they move into a house on lower Greenville Avenue — not Upper Greenville — but the arts district, not yet gentrified. Susan remembers it as a “sexy” time. The house has a cozy den-like atmosphere. She buys an English antique outdoor deck chair, old and funky, and places it in the living room. 

It is barely six weeks later that she gets sick. At first, she thinks it is cancer again. But it isn’t.

It’s morning sickness. She’s pregnant.

She decides to keep the baby. Not out of romance or excitement, but because something in her said this is hers. A future. A line in the sand.

Susan in the Greenville Ave house, 5 months pregnant. Provided by Susan Powter

They move again, this time to Irving, to a modest home her father buys them. She tries to make it work. Nick is working at Ariel’s, the restaurant her father purchased. Susan stays home, she runs a tight ship.

But cracks form fast.

She finds out Nick is cheating. First with a friend. Then with the receptionist at her father’s restaurant. Susan doesn’t scream. She doesn’t beg. 

She gives birth to her first son. And almost immediately, she is pregnant again.

During one of the births — she can’t remember which — she labors for 33 hours at home with a midwife, refusing to go to the hospital until she has no other choice. When they finally drive there, the midwife has to disappear in the parking lot.

“Being a midwife was not acceptable in Texas,” she says. “Or at least they made it feel that way.”

The hospital staff treats her like trash. Cold hands, cold voices. No reverence for what she has just survived. That’s how she remembers it.

Meanwhile, Ariel’s is crashing. The business is mismanaged, the food is inconsistent, and the affair doesn’t help morale. It plummets into the ground, as Susan puts it.

So does the marriage.

She divorces Nick and her father buys her a new house in Garland, Texas — a suburban sprawl where she feels completely out of her element. 

“I was in shock every day in Garland. That place was a hellhole.”

And then one day, the house burns to the ground.

Susan stands outside and watches it — flames licking through every room, every memory, every piece of the life she’s tried to keep upright. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t call for help.

She watches.

And when it is gone, she starts to write.

Her first book comes from those ashes.

But before all that — before the pages, before the stage, before the scream — came the mirror.

She walks past a window at a children’s store, Mervyn’s, and catches her reflection. She stops.

She stares.

And she weeps.

She doesn’t recognize herself. She hates the way she looks. Hates the weight. Hates the way her body moves, the way her life has hardened around her. She makes a decision, right there in the parking lot.

She is going to lose 150 pounds.

She is going to build a new body.

And eventually, she will build an empire.

But for now, it starts with the fire. With the mirror. With the version of Susan that refuses to disappear — not this time.

Photo provided by Susan Powter

When she loses the weight, Susan doesn't feel triumphant.

She feels awake. Her body is smaller, but her life is still heavy — two kids, bills stacking up, mornings that start before the sun rises and end somewhere near complete exhaustion. But she moves differently now. And when she starts teaching aerobics classes in Dallas community centers and rec rooms, other women notice.

They tell her she is inspiring. That she has the energy they want. That she is doing a good job.

Provided by Susan Powter

And something strange happens in those spaces. Between the lunges and the high kicks, between her voice counting out beats and the way women look at her, Susan feels a pull. Not just admiration. Not just gratitude. But something softer. Deeper.

She starts falling in love with women.

Not one in particular, at first. Just mothers. Women who know what it is to lose themselves inside someone else’s needs. Women who don’t flinch when she says she is tired. Women who touch her arm a little longer than necessary. Their voices soothe her. Their presence charges her. It is romantic. Electric. A secret she holds close.

But love doesn’t pay the rent. And Susan is drowning.

She needs money. Fast. Without fanfare.

She hires a Seventh-Day Adventist babysitter named Nikki, a sweet, quiet woman who has no idea she is about to be handed the highest paycheck of her life. Nikki shows up promptly at 10 a.m. each morning. Susan already has the boys dressed, breakfast made, the kitchen wiped clean.

She kisses her kids, hands over the schedule, and walks out the door. 

The Texas sun is already high when Susan pulls into the cracked parking lot behind The Black Forest Bakery, a German bakery on a side street off of Lower Greenville Avenue, with a sign that’s hard to miss — big, yellow, and unapologetically blocky, like something out of a roadside postcard. The building itself is a low, brown-roofed structure with a kitschy Bavarian theme — wooden cross beams on beige brick, tiny false balconies above the windows, as if someone once tried to make Vegas feel like Stuttgart. 

She parks facing the dumpster, where no one will see her.

She shuts off the engine.

The radio stays on — Stevie Nicks, softly, wafts through static.

Susan leans back in the seat. Closes her eyes.

For just one second, she disappears. Not mentally. Not emotionally. Physically. She erases herself.

Then she opens the glove compartment and pulls out the wig.

Long. Layered. Elegant. Blonde with a little bounce. She pins it on with muscle memory — a quick twist, a snap of the wrist, one hairpin clenched between her teeth. Next comes the dress: floral Laura Ashley, petticoat and all, the kind of thing a Sunday school teacher might wear.

She slips it over her tank top. The zipper sticks. She yanks it.

Lipstick next. Pink, chalky, a shade that doesn’t belong to Susan.

It belongs to Bernadette.

In the mirror, Bernadette stares back. Her smile is softer. Her eyes are empty in the most peaceful way.

The bakery door jingles somewhere behind her. A man steps out carrying a paper bag. He doesn’t notice her.

Provided by Susan Powter

Day Shift, 1980s — Million Dollar Saloon, Greenville Avenue

The lights are low even at noon. Red bulbs, sticky barstools, and a haze that seems baked into the walls. A long mirror stretches behind the bottles, reflecting every man in the room like he is waiting for a version of himself that never quite showed up.

Then comes Bernadette.

She doesn’t explode onto the stage. She appears, like vapor.

No stilettos. No grinding to Billy Squier’s The Stroke. That is the standard. This is not standard.

The DJ cues up Stevie Nicks — Leather and Lace — and those first few notes drift across the room like something personal. Something forbidden. Something not meant for a strip club in the middle of the day in 1980s Texas.

She doesn’t dance. She moves.

Slowly. Hips swaying just enough. Arms loose. Eyes locked on a spot in the distance where no one sits. A woman wrapped in gauze and defiance.

A table of men in pressed suits take the booth just left of the main stage. They’re executives celebrating something, loud but respectful, the kind who order champagne without looking at the price.

One of the men tips her a few hundred dollars right away. Then follows her from stage to stage.

By the time her set is over, she’s made $900. More than ever before. More than she knew how to count without folding the bills twice.

Afterward, she walks over to their table, thanks him, smiles, and goes straight back to the dressing room. She doesn’t come back out. 

Bernadette lives in the in-between: between daylight and dim bulbs, between motherhood and myth. She dances in cotton, speaks in whispers, and leaves before anyone figures her out.

By the time the music ends, she’s already gone. Back to the car. Back to the babysitter. Back to dinner, baths, and folding tiny socks.

The Businessman from the club returns. And keeps returning. 

One night, he flies Susan out to dance at a bachelor party for some of Dallas’s wealthiest men. Not a limo. Not a car. A helicopter. She stands in her heels on the tarmac, wind whipping up around her, skin humming from adrenaline and the roar of the blades. Before stepping aboard, she calls her father.

Only her father knows the full story. She tells him in case something happens. “Just in case,” she says. “So someone would know where I was.”

Not long after, Susan starts dating The Businessman — a man whose name doesn’t matter. The only thing that needs to be remembered is the way he looked, handing her things. He was high-profile and sharply dressed. But she stayed. Not for the sex. For the leverage. For the illusion of safety. For the chance to breathe without dancing.

On her 30th birthday, he picks her up in a limousine and hands her a new purse — expensive, stiff leather — with $5,000 in cash tucked inside. Neatly stacked. No words.

Susan smiles, slips the money back inside, and says, “thank you.”

That night, they head to her mother’s house, where a surprise party is waiting. Susan smiles through it. But in the bathroom, she pulls her friend in close and they count the money, fast and quiet, cash brushing against tile.

Susan at her 30th birthday party. Provided by Susan Powter.

She doesn’t expect gifts. She doesn’t even want them. But later, she asks for what she actually needs — a washer and dryer for her boys’ cotton diapers. A new kitchen, if he is feeling generous.

She dates The Businessman for a long time. Long enough that he eventually asks her to stop dancing.

“If I pay you a thousand dollars a week, will you quit?” he asks.

She agrees. She lets the club go.

The cash is regular. Clean enough. And The Businessman’s vice president — a man who once got shot in the ass while trying to climb out a window after a certain indiscretion — becomes one of Susan’s favorite people. She likes the honesty of it.

But The Businessman becomes less charming. Less fun.

Susan tries to leave.

He threatens to call the IRS, says he’ll report her for not paying taxes on the cash he gave her.

“Good,” she says. And hangs up.

Susan Powter isn’t someone who breaks down. She gets busy.  

It is back to teaching aerobics again, this time at clubs across the city. The kind with granite locker rooms and blowout packages. She fills every class, has women sweating and laughing and pushing harder than they ever have. And still, she keeps getting fired.

Too loud. Too intense. Too Susan.

When the Premier Club lets her go, something in her snaps — not in despair, but in clarity.

“Fine,” she thinks. “I’ll build my own.”

She sits with her ex-husband on a curb outside her father’s house in North Dallas, sweat sticking to her forehead, rage bubbling under her ribs, as she explains what is going to happen next. 

“Here’s the deal,” she says. “You’re gonna take care of the kids now. I’ll get a duplex. You’ll live downstairs.”

He agrees. Probably because he needs the money. Probably because he knows she isn’t asking.

She pays him to watch the boys while she works, a deal that will last six years.

Dallas in the ’80s is glistening with cocaine and oil money. Susan can feel it — the city’s pulse, the hunger in its women. There are wives with time, bodies to fix, and pain that can be sweat out if someone shows them how. She sees the opportunity for what it is: a crack in the system wide enough to climb through.

Then she finds the space.

A local studio has gone under. It has mirrors, a ballet bar, a front desk, a tiny office. Nothing special. But she can see it. The landlord is skeptical. Single mother, no capital, no plan. But she talks him into six months.

That is all she needs.

The studio opens with no staff. Just Susan.

She teaches 26 classes a week. She mops the floors at night. She wipes down mirrors. She stocks towels. She sleeps four hours a night and lives on black coffee and momentum.

Women flock to her.

Susan teaching a workout class in her studio. Provided by Susan Powter

They’ve never seen anything like it — not just the physical intensity, but the truth in it. Susan doesn’t talk about shrinking yourself. She talks about power. She talks about getting your body back from all the places it has been stolen.

And then, somewhere in the middle of all of it, Susan’s mother dies.

The grief is quiet. Icy. She doesn’t fall apart. She just keeps teaching. A weight leaves the room, but another one replaces it. Heavier. Quieter.

Still, she shows up.

Still, she works.

Because now, it isn’t just about surviving.

It is about becoming.

And the woman who once danced under another name is now stepping into the light with her own.

Susan Powter. Loud. Unstoppable. Almost ready for the world to know her name.

The air in Rusty Robertson’s PR office is thick with perfume, fax machine heat, and the low vibration of women who know how to spin chaos into headlines.

Susan walks in like a weather event — cropped hair, workout clothes still damp from the morning's class, and $3,000 in cash in a manila envelope.

She drops it on Rusty’s desk like it’s bail money.

“I need someone to get the word out,” she says. “That’s what I can offer to start.”

Rusty raises an eyebrow, eyes flicking between the envelope and the woman in front of her.

This isn’t some perky aerobics instructor. This is someone. She just doesn’t know who yet.

They talk.

And halfway through the conversation, Rusty leans in and asks, almost offhandedly, “Do you know you’re funny?”

Susan blinks. “What?”

“You can tell a story,” Rusty says. “A real one. That’s rare.”

Susan hadn’t thought about that. She wasn’t trying to be funny. She was just trying. To build a business. To raise her kids. To not drown in bills and tiny socks and expectations.

The next morning, Rusty shows up to take a class.

It would be years before she’d leave. 

Within a week, interviews are being set. Local press. Community bulletins. And then, a radio appearance on Larry Noth’s fitness talk show, a Christian-leaning station with a loyal, low-impact kind of audience.

Rusty warns her to be mindful.

Susan smiles. They walk into the studio and sit down in front of the mic — a thick black foam dome hovering in front of her face.

The first words out of her mouth?

“Oh my God, look at this huge black thing in front of my mouth!”

There is a beat of stunned silence. Then the phone lines explode.

Somewhere across town, a man named Richard Frankel — overweight, discouraged, skeptical — calls in.

He’d heard the segment. Heard her.

He tells the host, Larry, how miserable he feels in his body. How he wants to change but doesn't know where to start.

Susan doesn’t miss a beat.

“Come to my class,” she says. “Wednesday. New to Fitness. I’ll be waiting.”

That Wednesday, Richard Frankel walks into the studio looking like he’d been dared to be there. Susan doesn’t coddle him. Doesn’t shame him. She moves him. Makes him laugh. Teaches him how to breathe again.

By the end, he is grinning like a kid. And he comes back. Again and again.

What Susan doesn’t know is that Richard’s brother is Jerry Frankel — one of the most connected businessmen in all of Dallas. Deep pockets. Deep instincts.

A few weeks later, Rusty gets the call.

Jerry has heard about Susan, the classes, the charisma, the off-the-cuff one-liners that turned strangers into disciples. He wants a meeting. Rusty is over the moon. 

February, 1991 — Downtown Dallas, TX

As she remembers it, Susan sits in a penthouse hotel room in a new luxury hotel in downtown Dallas. “Nobody was there with me,” she says. “And Jerry had at least four people in the room - a couple of them were lawyers. It was just me, alone, in a room with five men, signing a contract.”

They offer a 50/50  deal — infomercials, lectures, books. They don’t want to change her. They want to scale her.

“You come up with the message,” Jerry says, “I’ll raise money and manage the finances.”

“But if it’s 50/50, how do I know you will let me be me?”

“You’ll have complete creative control. You have my word. I’ll never do anything without you.”

Susan pauses. 

“Honey, don't worry,” he says. “I’ll protect you.”

He pushes a stack of papers in front of her. 

“They’re fair, equitable, standard for this kind of business,” he says.

She signs. Signs away her rights to the studio for $10.

And overnight, the world opens up.

Susan moves into a larger place — two studios, two offices, a front desk that buzzes with new memberships, and a growing staff. Flyers. Mailers. Branding. 

And the women come. By the dozens.

They show up after school drop-off with car keys in hand and stay for hours. The studio stops being just a workout space — it becomes a sanctuary. A waiting room for reinvention. Women sit in the lobby drinking coffee and talking about their marriages, their fears, their plans.

Susan watches it happen — quietly, between classes, towel around her neck, sweat still fresh.

“When women gather,” she thinks, “something happens.”

Not gossip. Not idle talk.

It was starting to click. She hadn’t just built a business.

She was building movement. And a movement.

And the world hadn’t even seen her on TV yet.

Provided by Susan Powter

June 4, 1993 — Los Angeles

It was one of the last live-audience morning shows on television: The Home Show with Gary Collins and Sarah Purcell.

Susan has no idea what she is walking into. She flies to L.A., lands, and is picked up the next morning at 4:30 a.m. by the ABC shuttle.

At the studio, the setup looks like a theme park for television: cameras on wheels, stage lights swinging from overhead rigs, half-assembled sets built on top of each other like cardboard towns. Susan sits in the green room, trying to make sense of it.

Then a production assistant waves her forward. It’s time.

Gary and Sarah have just wrapped the last segment. They cross the stage casually, like they are walking into a neighbor’s living room. Gary glances at Susan and, half under his breath, points at her and says:

“What the hell is this?”

Then the red light goes on.

Without missing a beat:

“Hi, I’m Gary Collins, welcome back to The Home Show, where today we’re talking to—”

And just like that, they’re live.

Susan sits in a suburban living room setting, leans in toward the camera, and without permission, without prep, without blinking, talks directly to the women at home. She glances back towards Gary and Sarah occasionally but she’s here to talk to the mothers - the ones stirring oatmeal, folding laundry, screaming inside.

She tells them everything no one else on morning television dares to say.

No jargon. No fluff. Just truth.

She explains intensity, pace, fat, muscle — fast, clear, with her full body.

And when it’s over, she turns it back to the hosts. That is it.

Susan walks off set, certain she’ll never be invited again — which is fine by her.

But the next morning, Rusty gets a call.

“We want her back.”

Provided by Susan Powter

They booked her the week of Thanksgiving — a week where diet and wellness segments were guaranteed ratings flops. But Susan’s numbers? Higher than ever.

Then comes the third call. Then a meeting upstairs with one of the network execs.

“We’d like to make you part of The Home Show family.”

“As what?” Susan says. “The family member you’d never fess up to?”

The joke tanks. But she still gets the job.

A weekly segment. National exposure. More calls. More offers. More everything.

She starts flying to L.A. every week from Dallas — while raising her sons, running her household, teaching 26 classes a week, managing her studio, and juggling an ex-husband downstairs.

And inside that tiny Dallas duplex — that controlled chaos of kids, casseroles, and contracts — she sits down for an interview with Connie Chung.

This meant: She had arrived.

Susan prepping for a television show. Photo provided by Susan Powter.

After that, the offers seem like they never cease. 

The Dallas Morning News, Texas Monthly, local press come sniffing. One afternoon, a reporter is interviewing Susan in her studio office while the phone rings off the hook, nonstop. Memberships, class signups, TV requests. She picks up between questions.

“This is what happens,” she says. “When you tell the fucking truth.”

That truth is about to become a book, too.

Her literary agent, Jan, lines up eight publisher meetings in one day. Susan, Rusty, and Jan fly to New York, heels clicking through glass lobbies and catered boardrooms. By the end of the day, they have seven offers.

But it is Simon and Schuster editor Bob Asahina who matters.

Susan sits in his office and talked to him, not about fitness, not about marketing, but about hats and high colonics, for two full hours. He listens. Really listens. On the way to the elevator, he turns and says, “I’m giving you $2 million.”

No paper. Just trust.

When Susan gets back to the studio, she pulls out a crayon and scribbles on a piece of paper:
“Thanks for the belief. Love, Susan.”  Then she faxes it to Bob.

As a joke.

But it’s not that easy.  Simon and Schuster, wants a ghostwriter. A sanitized version of Susan in book form. Clean, commercial. As Susan sees it, hollow.

After a few failed pairings, she calls Bob.

“You just pissed away $2 million. If you don’t let me write this fucking book myself — or at least give me a chance — you’re gonna have a flop on your hands.”

Bob pauses. Then says, “What do you want to do?”

“Start writing. Today.”

He lets her.

The infomercial comes next.

Stuart Hirsch from Time Warner approaches her. “Let’s make a tape,” he says. They call it Lean, Strong, Healthy. It does okay.

Susan wants more.

She wants real women in an arena, not some sterile set. No one asks what she is going to wear. No one gives her a script.

So she walks out in a white jacket with shoulder pads, stares at the crowd of women, and into the mic says, “Elvis is in the building.”

Then she talks.

For hours.

No teleprompter. No rehearsal. Just Susan on a stage, winding through stories, breaking down the lies of diet culture, making women laugh, cry, sit up straight. It isn’t a pitch. It is a sermon.

When she sees the edited version, she is furious.

They cut out the jokes.

The soul.

The her.

So she takes the footage to motivational author Zig Ziglar’s studio, and with a couple of editors and a roll of Scotch tape, they cut it themselves.

“I’m not kidding,” she says. “We were splicing reel-to-reel tape at 1 a.m. because it was the cheapest time to rent.”

When the final version airs, the phones blow up.

Conversion rates through the roof. Orders flying in. Susan’s voice ringing in kitchens, basements, bedrooms, women pressing their fingers into landlines saying yes. Finally, yes.

“They heard something authentic,” she says later. “It was the women of America. Nobody else made Stop The Insanity happen. It was the fucking women of America.”

At the height of the infomercial boom, Susan finds herself face-to-face with Greg Renker, co-founder of Guthy-Renker, pioneers of the infomercial industry, at a convention. “You’re Susan Powter. Stop the Insanity. I threw your package in the trash,” he reveals. “Wasn’t that the biggest fucking mistake of your life?” she asks.“Yeah,” he admits. “Good to meet you, Greg,” she says, and walks away.

The infomercial is a wildfire, and Susan stands at the center of it — books flying off shelves, workouts on VHS, appearances, sitcom cameos, Murder, She Wrote, radio deals, syndication offers. The world keeps saying yes — louder, bigger, richer.

It’s love, love, love all the time.

Limos in, limos out. Every day, a new pitch, a new offer, a new studio dressing room filled with craft services and people who want something.

Susan doesn't remember much of it — not the green rooms or the flight schedules or the interviews that blur, one into the next. Most of the heyday is gone from memory. But the faces of the women who bought her book? That she remembers. Crystal clear.

She remembers the woman at the bookstore in Des Moines who whispers, “You saved me.”

The mother in Houston who says, “I played your tape while I did dishes every night.”

The woman in Chicago who bursts into tears mid-sentence.

“That’s what stuck,” Susan says now. “Not the cameras. The women.”

But the higher she climbs, the more acquiescence is required. Meetings where she has to be "easier," photo shoots where she has to wear what they lay out, producers who want volume, not truth.

It is fun — for a while. But fun doesn’t always mean free. And authenticity isn’t the priority.

Provided by Susan Powter

Behind the applause, something starts to change.

In meetings, Jerry Frankel — who once treated Rusty like a partner — begins snapping. Cutting her off. Talking over her. He doesn’t see her as essential anymore. Just a middlewoman in the way of scale.

He begins calling them after every media appearance, berating them for failing to hawk the products. 

Then, one day, on a plane, Susan leans back in her seat, jet-lagged and spent, and Rusty, sitting next to her in the window seat, turns nervously and says:

“Suse, I want to talk to you about something. You and I are going to do this and I’m going to put my whole life into it. I want 50%. It'll be my business too. Just you and me.”

Susan says, “You have it.”

No lawyer. No contract. Just altitude and trust.

And with that, Rusty held half of Susan’s 50%. 

According to Susan, years later, in court for one of many lawsuits that would rain down — as they tend to on people getting lots of attention — a lawyer leans forward, disbelief thick in his voice, and asks Susan:

“Do you expect this judge and this court to believe you gave that woman fifty percent of millions of dollars without a single word on paper?”

Susan doesn't blink.

Her voice is flat. Calm.

“You’re gonna have to believe it. Because that’s exactly what the fuck happened.”

Photo provided by Susan Powter

But back then, it felt golden.

“I’ve never laughed so hard in my life,” she says of Rusty. “We were together all day, every day, in every situation. We’d go back to the hotel roaring.”

They built an empire out of oxygen and instinct — until the empire began to crumble.

It starts during a meeting, when Rusty interrupts:

“Oh, what Susan means is—”

And just like that, Susan isn’t speaking for herself.

She starts to feel the press of hands on her voice — not silencing it, but managing it. Steering it. Softening it. Rusty pushes her toward television, chasing syndication. And Susan does it — guest spots on The Fresh Prince, sitcom cameos, pilots with Linda Bloodworth Thomason and Teri Garr.

It works. She’s good at it.

But she hates it.

Long days. Hollow scripts. Hurry-up-and-wait energy that makes her skin itch. She is used to being live. Being real. Not sitting in trailers sipping lukewarm coffee between set-ups.

Around 40, Susan decides she wants to adopt a child.

Not a husband. Not a rescue. Not another project. Just a child.

“I wanted no man involved. And maybe,” she admits, “I wanted to give my teenagers birth control through proximity.” 

Perhaps knowingly, perhaps not, she envisions it would be a coming-of-age moment for her boys, just as her little brother’s birth had been for her.

The choice splits her further from Rusty.

Then comes the radio deal — NetStar. Susan is behind the mic again, finally in her element, her voice bouncing across the airwaves, back in control.

But now, for the first time, Rusty is on the other side of the glass, with four men in suits.

Susan can feel the wall between them. Physical. Metaphorical. Permanent.

She detaches. She stops looking at the numbers.

Stops asking questions, signs what people put in front of her. 

Jerry is selling things with her name on them that she doesn’t know about. He’s skimming off the top. 

Someone else is always handling the contracts. Signing her name to everything. Susan doesn’t think it is blind faith. She thinks it is alignment. The people around her know Susan’s priorities. They want land, solitude. To build a space for single mothers, a program, something that matters.

She doesn’t need more fame. She wants to build something that will outlive her.

So she lets go of the wheel.

Until Rusty says someone is suing for six million dollars.

Susan doesn’t understand.

Doesn’t know what has been signed.

Doesn’t know how far from her own story she has wandered.

1990s — Production Office, Avenue of the Stars - Los Angeles 

The room buzzes in that typical L.A. way — coffee cups, click-clacking keyboards, assistants pretending not to panic. A whiteboard reads: NETSTAR / Susan Powter / Q3 Broadcast Calendar.

Susan sits at the head of the table, the baby asleep against her chest in a cloth sling. She's exhausted, but clear. Focused. These meetings are always noise. She knows how to cut through it.

A producer pitches something, a syndication workaround. It’s messy, but workable. And then a voice, someone she doesn’t recognize, from the corner of the room, says casually, “Hey Russ, I think, uh… one of your other clients might actually be perfect to solve this problem.”

There’s a pause. It isn’t long, but it’s long enough.

Rusty doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t correct him. Doesn’t even flinch.

Susan blinks. Looks across the table.

Other clients?

When Rusty asked for 50% on that fateful plane ride, she’d told Susan she was all in on her and her alone. That’s why she wanted an equal cut. 

Susan had never asked, really. They’d been in the trenches for so long, in hotel rooms and greenrooms and courtroom lobbies. It never occurred to her that there might be others.

Photo provided by Susan Powter

Susan follows Rusty down the stairs. The California sunlight bounces off the glass. She’s still wearing the baby.

“Do you have other clients?” she asks, quietly. Not accusatory. Just a question.

Rusty keeps walking.

No answer.

No nothing.

Susan stops on the path. Watches her disappear through a door.

There’s no yelling. No meltdown. Just a click of a pen and the soft rhythm of keys.

Susan types a single paragraph:

“RPR and Associates, and/or Rusty Robertson, no longer represent Susan Powter or Stop the Insanity.”

She prints it. Faxes it to Time Warner, to Carolyn Reedy, to every executive, every name that’s ever sat across a negotiating table from her. Her hands don’t shake, for Susan has been here before, as a child under that trestle, in Miami, after her marriage ended in Texas, and countless other times, too. If nothing else, Susan knows how to leave. She is built for it.

And this is the cleanest break she’ll ever make.

The call comes in almost immediately.  Rusty’s voice is tight, tremoring.

“How dare you.
How dare you do that to me.
I made you.
You are nothing without me.”

Susan doesn’t respond. She just holds the baby, who’s starting to stir.

Susan flossing with a knife. Photo provided by Susan Powter.

1998, Seattle — Wallingford Neighborhood

Susan stands in front of a rental house — it’s small but charming in a way that doesn’t try too hard. She unlocks the front door with one hand, the other cradling her 2-year-old.

They step inside. Seattle is wet, unfamiliar. But quiet. That matters.

She doesn’t know what comes next. But she knows she can start again. She always has.

A letter arrives. Her ex-husband is suing for alimony.

Then the phone rings. It’s Carolyn Reedy, the former president of Simon & Schuster.

Susan’s pitched a new book. She’s excited.

Carolyn sounds tired. Hesitant.

“We can’t publish the book. Your ex-husband’s lawyer sent a letter.  They intend to sue us if we pay you.”

Susan goes silent.

“Also…” Carolyn adds, tentatively. “Do you know the last check we sent was for one million dollars, and do you know who we sent it to?”

“I do not” Susan states matter-of-factly. “I assumed so,” Carolyn exhales. 

She thanks Carolyn, hangs up the phone, and sits in silence.

The numbers, the details — they’d come later. The realization that every check had been split 50/50 and that expenses — flights, hotels, lunches, meetings — were quietly bleeding from her 25 percent. 

“My money was being hemorrhaged, and no, I didn’t ask.” Susan says. “I never asked to look at the bank balances, never asked to see what was going where. I totally trusted my manager and all the lawyers, accountants and financial people I was paying to do what they were being paid to do. My mistake. I not only take full responsibility for it, I’ve paid the highest price for the last 25 years because of it.”

Not because she’s stupid. Because she trusts. Completely.

And now?

It’s over. Not just the business, but the story they’d built.

She doesn’t rage or scream or spiral. She doesn’t call back. She just… moves on.

“It’s hard to describe the feeling of having just left everything as massive as Stop the Insanity! was and moving to Seattle with my family, but I suppose I should try,” Susan explains.  “Within a very short time, I never thought about it again. Never. I never thought about Rusty or the business again. Some, most, would call it emotional compartmentalizing, but I can tell you that’s not what it is. It’s me. It’s me. When I know I know, and there’s nothing more I need to know once I do. When I know the truth I’m done, and I never look back.”

Susan never made a formal announcement.

There was no press release, no farewell interview, no big reveal.

She just… stopped being Susan Powter. 

Not the person, but the icon. The woman with the platinum buzzcut and the rage against diet culture. The one who sold millions of books and screamed from late-night infomercials in spandex.

She keeps teaching. Quietly. A few classes here and there. Local women. Small studios.

But the volume goes down.

And then her father dies.

Around 2010, Susan packs what is left of her life and moves, yet again, to Taos, New Mexico. A town that looks like it stopped growing a hundred years ago — adobe homes, dirt roads, sun so wide it made you squint at your own thoughts.

She is inspired by friends who live in Earthships — off-grid, self-sustaining homes that look like something between a spaceship and a compost bin. That’s the dream: no mortgage, no chaos, no systems.

She adopts a dog named Em, a mutt with sad eyes and good instincts.

She doesn’t have a car.

She rides her bike everywhere, water bottle clinking against the frame. Groceries in the basket. Em trotting beside her like a tiny shadow.

She takes odd jobs to make it work.

She teaches small fitness classes in community halls with squeaky wood floors. Helps a friend film wellness vlogs — standing behind the camera, directing shots, adjusting the tripod, holding reflectors in the desert light.

One day, Good Morning America calls. They want to do a “where are they now” interview.

Susan says yes. But when it airs, she doesn’t recognize herself.

They paint her as eccentric. Washed-up. A woman who has thrown everything away. It stings.

“That’s not what I said,” she mutters, clicking the laptop closed.

Her son is 15 now. Tall. Quiet. Restless.

He hates Taos. Calls it a “dead-end town.” Says the air feels too still. The people, too slow. There are no kids his age. No skateparks. No future he can see.

Susan doesn’t believe in school. Never has. But her son wants to go. Not for the grades — for something to do.

They argue. They talk. They sit in silence.

And then, she lets him go.

He moves back to Seattle to live with Bessie, a former nanny who has always loved him like her own.

Susan stays.

Susan starts a YouTube channel, vlogging from her little house in the hills. No ring light. No branding. Just her — hair gone thin, face lined, voice the same — talking about life, about movement, about food and grief and resilience.

The views are low. The comments, kind.

She makes coffee on camera. Walks Em through the dust. Talks about solar power and hauling water. Talks about being alone and choosing it anyway.

The woman who once filled arenas now speaks to a few hundred subscribers.

And she is okay with that.

By 2013, she is bored again and out of that boredom and borrowed bandwidth, her next class is born. 

Susan has seen those glitchy Skype interviews on Oprah — grainy, pixelated faces laughing through lag — and thought: I could do this. But with movement. Connection. Sweat.

She calls it The Skypettes. Just a few women, screens glowing, squatting in their kitchens or living rooms while Susan barks encouragement from a corner of her modest apartment.

One of those women is Karen Anderson, who’d taken Susan’s early fitness classes years ago and somehow found her again. Another was Cindy, whose husband owned an RV parked in Henderson, Nevada. She makes an offer:

“Come stay in the RV. Start your internet business here.”

Susan says yes.

She packs what she has and moves to the desert.

Vegas is strange in the daylight. Susan walks the Strip at 7 a.m., watching tourists wobble by with Hurricane cocktails in hand, sunburned and smiling like they'd just been reborn.

“This,” she said, grinning, “is why I love Vegas.”

It is wild and lawless and ridiculous. She fits right in.

She takes gigs, works in a strip club, cooks as a sous chef, hustles where she can. Then one day she finds a pod — a human-sized metal storage unit for $500. She doesn’t have the money. Her sons pool it for her.

She moves in.

2015 — KOA Campground

The pod sits tucked into a corner slot at the KOA campground off Boulder Highway. It’s wedged between rusted rigs, half-functioning trailers, and the unsteady bones of lives in motion. The neighborhood is rough, but to Susan, it feels safe. Casino proximity means 24-hour security, and nothing says protection in Vegas like corporate surveillance guarding slot machines.

For years, it is home.

Not perfect. Not private. But home.

From the moment she and her dog, Em, pull in, it feels like a weird little urban village — dusty, loud, full of stories and half-fixes. There is Mister, who has two RVs crammed against the back wall and a new complaint every day. Evel Knievel’s son lives on the left-side wall for a while — legendary for his drinking and for the casino security that saved him, again and again, until he didn’t make it back. There is the cat lady, whose trailer is raided by animal control. They trap 17.

Susan loves her spot — a few down from the office, right next to the bathrooms. She cleans those bathrooms part-time to lower her rent, jokes with the staff, works the Strip selling timeshares for fifty bucks a pop.

The setup still felt like an art project, not poverty. Not yet.

Everyone loves Em, even the head of maintenance, a guy named Bill — ex-Navy, hungover half the time. Bill’s daughter lives in the park, too. Everyone knew everything.

Then there is Mr. Security, a gun-loving, Tea Party die-hard who figures out who Susan is before anyone else. Creepy, yes. But if you need someone with a short fuse and a badge, you want him on your side.

There is Frank from Canada. His wife gambles, he drinks coffee, and every morning at 5 a.m., Susan sees him heading out as she comes back from work. They chat. Laugh. Check in. 

She loves Boulder Highway. Loves its haunted history — the road Marilyn drove, the real Vegas, before the Strip was a marketing fantasy. And she loves the original Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign designed by Betty Willis, who never copyrighted it, never made a penny. Just gave it to the city.

That sign means something to Susan.

KOA does too.

So when the eviction notice shows up on the pod door one November, she is stunned.

“You have until March.”

New corporate policy: No RVs over ten years old.

She realizes later they'd been walking the grounds for weeks, deciding who to cut loose. Scouting people like expired milk. Susan’s 1950s Aristocrat camper is clearly on the list.

“I thought we were different,” she tells herself. “I thought they liked us.”

They did. Kind of. But not enough. They give her a few extra weeks. 

But corporate is corporate. And in the end, they all have to go.

The KOA is over. Home is no longer home.

And Susan will have to figure out where to go — again — with no car, no map, and the weight of a life packed inside a steel pod.

2017 — Circus Circus Hotel — Parking Lot

She rolls her pod onto the asphalt at Circus Circus, Em riding shotgun.

Within a few days of moving, Em dies. No warning. No explanation. Her only constant, gone.

Before she can process it, hotel management tells her to leave.

They’re repaving the lot.

Frank from Canada keeps calling for a year after Em dies, asking about her. Susan never answers. What would she say?

2017 — Fremont Street — Under the Bridge

There is nowhere to go.

So Susan moves under a bridge on Fremont Street. No running water. No food. No shelter from the elements or the people. Just concrete and risk.

She is 60-something now. Her body still strong. Her mind still sharp.

But she can’t outrun the loneliness. 

Her relationship with her children begins to fracture.

Her oldest had always been the one she leans on when things break, especially the car.

But when he flies to Tokyo for a vacation before his baby is born — and doesn't tell her — Susan feels betrayed. 

When her car breaks down for good, she sells it for $1,500 to a mechanic.

No one shows up.

No one calls.

Her youngest son helps her move the pod into storage. She refuses to ride in the car with him.

“He was trying to help,” she says, “but I couldn’t bear it.”

She sits in silence, trying not to break.

Eventually, Susan moves to Harbor Island — a low-income, transitional housing area in Las Vegas. It’s a place with frequent violence as it attracts people in crisis, at the margins. The atmosphere is dense with despair, a place where hope feels like a luxury. For Susan, it marks a personal rock bottom — emotionally, financially, and physically.

Think, Vegas heat on pockmarked pavement. Chain-link fences, late-night shouting, people surviving rather than living. A place you land in, not arrive at. And one you try to leave as soon as you can.

She applies for an apartment and lets herself feel it — pity. The weight of everything that has come before.

She starts driving for Uber Eats, and a string of other food services.

Late nights. Car full of takeout. Music on low. No one recognizing her.

This isn’t the woman on the infomercial. This isn’t the woman with the leotard and the mic.

This is Susan Powter — tired, but alive and still fucking standing.

2019 — Harbor Island Walkways, Afternoon

Susan walks the perimeter of the complex, filming with her phone. Not for followers. Not for content. For proof.

She documents the fights, the shouting, the men with knives pacing in the parking lot. The stairwells smell like piss and bleach. She posts the videos online, not knowing who watches.

Some part of her is saying:

“See? Look. This is what it looks like when someone is forgotten.”

Apartment — Night

She sits on the floor of her empty living room. She calls her middle son. She doesn’t want to. But she has to.

He picks up, half asleep.

“I can’t stay here,” she says. “I need help.”

He doesn’t have the money. She knows that. But he borrows it from a friend. She doesn’t cry.

October, 2020

She moves into an apartment complex offering low-income housing for seniors. The woman who runs the place eyes her suspiciously.

The apartment is bare. Again. She sleeps on the floor. Again. Her bones are older now. Her breath tighter.

Her heart and blood pressure are acting up. She doesn’t trust doctors. Hates the smell of clinics. The condescension. The needles.

What she fears more than illness is this:

Being at the mercy of her oldest son.
Ending up in state-run care.
Being folded into the system she spent her life trying to break.

Susan lies on the floor, hand resting on her chest. She’s not sick. Not yet. But she’s listening for something — a sign. A way out.

“All summer long, I said to myself — There’s no way out, Susan. You gotta face this. You gotta look at it.”

She mourns her own death in real time. Not metaphorically. Literally. Whispering goodbye to a body that won’t quit.

“How can I kill this body?” she says through gritted teeth.

“It is so strong.
It won’t die.”

There’s no drama in it. Just exhaustion.

January 2023 — 5:03 a.m. — Charlie’s Bar, Summerlin, Nevada

The hybrid hums.

Susan sits in the driver’s seat, eyes swollen, Uber Eats bag slumped in the passenger seat, her phone still glowing with the last failed delivery. It's quiet. Empty. A Nevada desert kind of lonely.

She’s crying — full-body sobbing, fists clenched on the steering wheel, like she could maybe crack it open and crawl out of her own life. She’s done. She’s ready for it all to be over. This life that started a million miles away in suburban Australia is going to end in a parking lot in Nevada. 

She means it. She’s thought it through. The hose is looped from the tailpipe into the cabin. Engine running. Windows up. No panic. Just conclusion.

Her eyes blur. Her chest burns. She’s mourning herself. All the moments of her life flashing before her…

— Leno’s studio lights explode in applause
— “Stop the Insanity!” flashes across a monitor
— Susan, red bodysuit, arms flexed, voice booming across America
— Books stacked high at Costco, women crying in signing lines
— Sweat. Stage lights. Empire.

No lights now. Just Susan. Just enough fuel in the tank to keep the engine — and maybe her heart — idling.

She breathes shallow. Checks the dash. Waits for the dizziness. The suffocation. The escape.

— Rusty shouting backstage, cue cards flying
— A Jane Fonda parody skit. A punchline she didn’t write.
— Grocery store aisle. Her own face on a cereal box.
— A tabloid headline: “Whatever Happened to Susan Powter?”

Nothing.

She sniffs. Frowns.

The hybrid. It’s too green.

Too damn efficient.

Too polite to kill her.

And then — a laugh.

It comes from somewhere deep, ugly, honest. She laughs until she’s coughing, pounding the steering wheel, the tears mixing with something else: disbelief.

“This fucking car,” she gasps, “won’t even let me die dramatic.”

She slumps back in the seat. Window cracked. Eyes wide open. The sky is just barely pink at the edges.

And in that laugh — that single, jagged, breathless bark — something shifts.

It’s not hope. Not yet. But it’s something new, something she doesn't recognize.

A Few Days Later, Afternoon, Susan’s Apartment, Las Vegas

Susan’s phone buzzes with a message from an unknown number.

It just says:

“Is this Susan Powter?”

Her stomach drops.

She stares at it, heart racing. It’s not recognition that scares her — it’s exposure. In her mind, only three types of people could possibly have her number: her kids, her best friend Maryanne, or someone she’d just delivered Uber Eats to.

And if it’s the latter… what did they recognize? What do they want?

“Fear,” she says. “Not because I cared if someone recognized me. It was the feeling — the fear that something I didn’t control was creeping back in.”

She immediately calls Maryanne.

“Can you call the number?” she asks. “See if it’s some lunatic talking about Burger King. I can’t deal with crazy right now.”

Maryanne takes the number without hesitation.

Ten minutes later, she calls back.

“He’s not crazy,” she says. “He’s a documentary director. He wants to talk to you.”

Susan pauses.

A beat.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Zeb Newman, the documentary director, has been looking for Susan Powter for 9 months.

It starts in a meeting with television host RuPaul’s team, a casual creative brainstorm about fitness culture, the golden era of VHS workouts, and the larger-than-life women who helped shape the wellness industry before it had a name. Jane Fonda, Kathy Smith… and then someone says her name.

“What ever happened to Susan Powter?”

Zeb can’t let it go.

He calls yoga studios in Sedona, health food stores in Portland, women’s empowerment circles. He leaves voicemails for old agents, publicists, and possibly a retired masseuse. The internet offers only contradictions: blurry YouTube clips, outdated bios, parody skits, dead links. All signs point to a woman who had once burned white-hot in the public eye, and then … nothing.

The longer the silence stretches, the more he knows there has to be a story there. You don’t sell ten million books and just disappear.

And then one night, while scrolling through the digital equivalent of a junk drawer, he finds it: a dusty Instagram profile belonging to one of Susan’s old friends. It hasn’t been touched in nearly a decade. Just a few faded photos, and in the bio, a phone number, an old prerequisite to joining the app, which now no longer exists.

Zeb stares at it for a moment. Then sends a text.

“Is this Susan Powter?”

No reply.

9 Days Later, 6:02 a.m., Los Angeles

Zeb’s phone rings before dawn. Unknown number. He picks up, groggy.

“This is Susan Powter.”

The voice is unmistakable. Commanding. Raspy. Turned ON. 

She doesn’t ease into it. She wants to know who he is, how he got the number, and why he is trying to find her.

Still half-asleep, Zeb stumbles through his words. He tells her the truth: he is a filmmaker. He’s been trying to track her down for nearly a year. He isn’t interested in mockery or nostalgia. He wants to hear the real story, from her, in her own words.

A pause.

“I live in Vegas,” she says. “I’ve got an interview with Vice this week. First one in over a decade. If you’re serious, you’ll drive out here. Come listen.”

Click.

Zeb shows up to the Vice shoot not sure what to expect. It is a small production, bare bones, just a rented house with a few crew members setting up lights in the living room.

And then Susan walks in.

She is wearing her signature black tank top and ballet shoulder cover. No makeup. No stylist. But everything about her presence fills the room. Everyone — from the gaffer to the production assistant — stands a little straighter.

She turns to Zeb and says, flatly, “No photos. No recording. You just sit and watch.”

He nods. She sits. The camera rolls.

And then, magic.

For three full hours, Susan delivers her life like a monologue she’s been writing in her head for 20 years. The rise. The infomercials. The empire. The betrayal. The crash. Her voice is on fire again. It is 1993, but sharper. Smarter. Pure rage — in the best way.

When it wraps, she turns to Zeb like she’s been waiting to speak to him, not the cameras.

“Let’s get lunch.”

The restaurant is noisy, packed with kids and clinking silverware. The second they walk in, Susan begins scanning the room, tense. Fidgeting. Her voice drops.

“I haven’t eaten inside a restaurant in years,” she says, low.

They sit down. It is loud. Too bright. Too much. Susan looks unsettled.

And then, she cuts to it.

“So, what’d you think of the interview?”

Zeb tells her he thinks it was incredible. But, he says, he isn’t sure if there is anything left for him to do. Vice has just filmed the comeback. What more is there?

Susan puts down her chopsticks and leans in, eyes rimmed red.

“I saved the real story for you, Zeb.”

Then she tells him the truth: That she is broke. That she is delivering Uber Eats to survive. That she’d once warned the world about processed food and is now handing out McDonald’s in the desert.

That she doesn’t know why, but she trusts him.

“I need help,” she says. “And I think you might be the one to do it.”

Zeb nods. Quietly. Unsure of what help looks like. 

I-15 Back to Los Angeles

Zeb is rattled.

He has never seen someone so strong — someone who had once ruled the media cycle — that beat down. And still… luminous.

To process, Zeb does what he always does. He opens the daily gratitude list he shares with a circle of sober friends. It’s a thing they do. It keeps them anchored.

He types:

1. Found Susan Powter

He hits send.

A few minutes later, his phone rings again.

Jamie Lee Curtis.

Zeb had been added to her private gratitude chain by someone months before. He’d forgotten he was even connected.

Her voice comes through the line with zero hesitation:

“Tell me everything.”

He does. From the first text to the ramen shop. From the Uber Eats shifts to the stories she didn’t let Vice have.

When he finishes, Jamie doesn't pause.

“You are going to do this,” she says. “You will go back to Vegas, and you will film Susan. This is a film. ”

Zeb grips the wheel. Blinking. Breath short.

And that’s how it starts.

Not with a pitch deck. Not with a manager. Not with a plan.

Just a ghost, a text, a bowl of ramen, and one woman’s refusal to be erased.

February 25, 2025 — Backstage, SiriusXM, Hollywood

The elevator doors slide open on the 10th floor of the SiriusXM building. A rush of laughter, hugs, and high-watt recognition fills the small, mirrored space.

Reality TV star and show host Jeff Lewis heard about Susan through a friend. He invites her to his show. He’s flanked by his assistant Shane Douglas, who spots her immediately — Susan Powter, in her signature black sweatpants, tank top, and flip-flops, a pair of heels dangling from one hand, already halfway changed. They greet her like an old friend, like an icon. Because she is.

“Do you have everything you need?”

“Do you want coffee? Water?”

“Can I carry your bag?”

The vibe is part red carpet, part homecoming. Jeff, glowing, tells everyone within earshot: “She’s an icon. She gets the VIP treatment, understand?”

They head into a large conference room. The energy is warm, almost sacred. Jeff kicks things off like a proud big brother, explaining to the producers, Shane, and Carnie Wilson how he met Susan the night before at her hotel. How they stayed up late talking about her years in Vegas, her self-published memoir, and how she’d arrived in L.A. with less than $12 in her bank account.

“She’s not looking for a handout,” Jeff tells the room. “No GoFundMe. No charity case. What she wants is dignity. What she deserves is to sell a fuck-ton of books.”

He says it plainly. The room nods.

They take a group selfie, post it to Instagram. Susan slips into her heels. And then they walk, through the corridor, past the glass walls and giant logos, into the studio.

A tech adjusts her mic. She nods. Calm. Alive. There’s a hum under her skin, a recognition. She’s done this before — hosted a syndicated talk show, commanded thousands of rooms with her voice alone. This? This is home.

Carnie Wilson sits across from her, grinning, already clocking that Susan doesn’t need a warm-up act. Jeff looks lit up, like a fan who finally gets to share his hero with the world.

And then it begins.

The red “ON AIR” light glows. The studio is still. Susan leans toward the mic — poised, electric, unmistakably herself.

The woman who delivered Uber Eats the day before.
The woman who has less than a sandwich-worth of cash in her bank account.
The woman who still showed up — sharp, hilarious, unbreakable — to do the damn thing with the same impossible momentum that made her a household name in 1993. And that helped her survive all those years before that. 

Only now, she’s got more stories. Less tolerance. And absolutely nothing left to lose. 

New Mexico Desert, 9 a.m.

The wind is tearing through the desert like it’s trying to unmake the land. Forty miles an hour, maybe more. But inside her small front room, Susan Powter sits cross-legged in a worn chair, a ball of yarn rolling across the floor, knitting needles clicking like a metronome.

She’s been up since before sunrise, working on the shawl she’s been showing off in Instagram videos. Outside, the sky stirs violently. In here, her hands move with surgical calm.

Every few minutes, she looks up.

A cluster of birds cut through the gusts like they belong to it. They don’t flap. They don’t fight. They just tilt and ride. 

“If you ever just wanna relax completely, just watch birds fly in the wind,” Susan announces as if it is the most wonderful thing anyone has ever witnessed. “And I'm not, you know, I don't sit and put my index finger and thumb together and meditate. I'm not that gal. But dammit it is the most beautiful thing how they navigate these gusts of winds. Pull into a parking lot, look up in the sky and watch the damn birds.”

This isn’t some dramatic comeback moment. No spotlight. No training montage. No agent calling with a deal. Just Susan, a woman with a past like a warzone and a future she’s stitching together one book sale at a time. 

She smirks, shakes her head. Not in disbelief but in recognition. If there’s one thing Susan Powter knows, it’s rock bottom —  what it feels like and, most importantly, how to get from there, all the way back to the top. She’s done it before. Dozens of times before. Who says she can’t do it again?

The day before Susan went on the Jeff Lewis show, her self-published memoir ranked #87,000+ on the Amazon best seller rankings. As someone noted on Reddit, just a few days after the show aired, it had jumped to #132.

Since the first Jeff Lewis interview dropped a few weeks ago, 2,100 copies of her self-published memoir have sold. Five dollars a book. It’s not millions, but it’s movement — real money to cover bills, to exhale, to start imagining a future that isn’t just survival.

And then something familiar happened.

The phone rang.

Then rang again.

Bethenny Frankel invited her on her show.

Jeff asked her back.

The calls just started coming — just like they did the first time. Only now, she’s the one picking up.

A single choked laugh escapes. She shakes her head. 

After everything — the rise, the fall, the years in the margins — the world is tilting its head back toward Susan Powter.

And this time, she’s writing the script.

A comment on a Reddit thread discussing her Jeff Lewis interview:  

She is very close to being her own hero I think.

Celia Aniskovich is a New York based documentary filmmaker, the owner of Dial Tone Films, and the Editor in Chief of Switchboard Magazine. The only thing she loves more than a good story is the New York Mets (who rarely provide a good story).