Art imitated life for Joyce DeWitt and Priscilla Barnes.
DeWitt, 76, and Barnes, 70, reunited at Southfork Experience at the Renaissance Dallas Richardson Hotel in Richardson, Texas, on Aug. 10 to talk about their time on Three’s Company. DeWitt played Janet Wood on all eight seasons of the beloved sitcom, which premiered in 1977. Janet had two roommates — John Ritter’s Jack Tripper and Suzanne Somers’ Chrissy Snow. When Somers left the series after the fifth season, Barnes’ Terri Alden moved into the apartment permanently in season 6. The two actresses were joined on their panel by Jenilee Harrison, who played Chrissy’s cousin Cindy Snow, who lived in the apartment in season 5 when Chrissy left.
But DeWitt and Barnes revealed during the panel that after Three’s Company ended in 1984, Barnes broke up with her long-term boyfriend and needed somewhere to live.
“I left a guy that I was with after about 10 years, and I moved in with Joyce,” Barnes said.
“She came for the night and stayed for six months,” Dewitt added.
“It’s really true,” Barnes confirmed, sharing the story of how their real-life cohabitation happened. “I called her and I said, ‘I need a place I can crash for the night.’ ” She showed up with her “fur coat and a Hefty bag.”
“She calls from a pay phone and goes, ‘Can I come over?’ ” Dewitt remembered. “And I go, ‘Yeah.’ It’s like, really late. ‘Maybe stay over?’ I go, ‘Sure, come on.’ ”
“And so I go down and here she’s dragging this Hefty bag in her fur coat. She goes, ‘I just left Joel,’ ” she said.
Barnes joked that DeWitt’s poodle, Peachy-pie, was in love with her while she lived there, but DeWitt had a different perspective on it. “Peach loved hanging out in Priscilla’s room because it was a pig sty,” she said. “The rest of the house was flawless all the time, whether or not the housekeeper was there, it was. And Priscilla’s room was like a bomb went off. Peachy-pie just loved going in there, wiggling around, all that stuff, climbing over things. In Priscilla’s closet, smelling her underwear.”
DeWitt also reflected on working with Ritter, who died in 2003 at 54, and Somers, who died in 2023 at 76, and all the physical comedy that the show asked of them. “We were just young and stupid,” she said about their comedic stunts. “We were willing to do anything we thought would get a laugh. It didn’t matter what that was. And it wasn’t like we had stunt doubles or stunt trainers or choreographers. We just made it up. And, fortunately, lived through it.”
But, she said, but the end of the series, she and Ritter “would say to each other backstage, ‘We’re getting too old to do this s—.’ ”
Three’s Company also starred Norman Fell and Audra Lindley as The Ropers, Richard Kline as Larry Dallas and Don Knotts as Ralph Furley.