On August 18, Suzanne Rogers celebrated her 50th anniversary on DAYS with a special episode dedicated to her beloved character, Maggie Horton Kiriakis.
“I’m kind of shocked that I’ve been on the show for 50 years; I mean, how many people can say that?” poses Rogers. “Not many. I’m touched that they wanted to do something. I’m honored and very moved, and I’m grateful. I guess it’s a testament to the fact that the show wanted to keep me around, and the audience liked the character. And I still love what I’m doing, so it’s all a win.”
Rogers recalls joining the show in 1973 and initially signing a three year contract. “I thought that was so long,” she recalls. “Then, when that contract was coming to an end, about six months down the road, they wanted to sign me to seven years. I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness’. But by that point, I realized how much I loved what I was doing and how nice it would be to have a steady job.”
So she signed on the dotted line and never looked back, all leading to the 50th anniversary episode that began with Maggie mourning Victor and remembering the good times she shared with him, as well as her first husband, Mickey. “Julie came to see Maggie,” recounts Rogers. “There was a nostalgia thing of how they both got together… Julie came to Maggie’s house on the farm to visit her. Maggie’s stove blew up, and Julie got burned. That’s how they got to be close, because of that. It brought back so many memories.”
Viewers got to take a walk down memory lane, too, as the episode contained flashbacks from Maggie’s past, including special moments with Mickey and Victor and the aforementioned fire at the farmhouse. “That was a hard scene to do when we did it,” remembers Rogers. “They put clothes on me that had to be dipped in some kind of stuff that didn’t catch fire, because I had to roll Julie up in a rug. And the fire was all over the place. They had to pull my hair back, so it wouldn’t catch on fire. It was the real thing. They had the fire people there and fire extinguishers. It was all these technical things, and I was going, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ Remembering all that brought tears to our eyes, both Susan [Seaforth Hayes, Julie] and me.”
It was particularly difficult for Rogers getting through the scenes where Maggie reminisced about Victor. “I was going through the whole thing with John in real life as well as on the show,” says Rogers referring to actor John Aniston’s death in November 2022. “We got along really well, John and I. We kind of worked the same way, and he had this dry sense of humor. I was afraid of him at first, and I guess I was afraid of him at the end, too. He was such a presence, and you always wanted to live up to his standards.”
Rogers, who was lucky enough to have had two great love stories on the soap, actually thought her days were numbered after Mickey passed away in 2010. “I thought I would be off the show within a week,” she admits candidly. “I didn’t know how things worked. I figured when the love of your life dies, that storyline would be wrapped up and they would move on to other couples.”
Instead, a new romance quickly began brewing with Victor. “I think the audience had a big thing to do with that,” asserts Rogers. “When Victor brought flowers over to Maggie’s house after Mickey passed away… Whatever those scenes were, the audience loved it. I guess all the wives he’d had before wanted something from him. They wanted his money or they wanted this or they wanted that. Maggie didn’t want anything from him. She had her own money. She had run two restaurants. I think that was the attraction that Victor had to Maggie. This was somebody he couldn’t manhandle so to speak. And the audience loved them.
“Obviously, I loved the idea of Victor and Maggie getting together too, and the fact that the audience gave them a name,” adds Rogers. “All the other couples on the show had these cute little nicknames, half of their names [put together]. When they came up with ‘Magic’ for us, John came up to me and said, ‘Well, I get the Mag. What am I, the ic?’ He was so funny about that.”
Regarding her first DAYS pairing opposite John Clarke, Rogers recalls it being “a very lovely romance. Mickey came to the farm. He had amnesia and didn’t know who he was. He thought he was Marty Hansen. Maggie was very naive and on crutches. As a cripple, she thought she was never going to experience falling in love, getting married or having children. But they ended up falling in love, and the audience just loved it. Mickey was very gentle and caring and made Maggie feel important and beautiful.”
It all led to one of Rogers’s favorite DAYS stories, “The red shoes. Bill, Mickey’s brother, was going to operate on Maggie, and Mickey came to the hospital and brought her red shoes,” she recounts. “He said, ‘I want to see you with these shoes on, and we’ll go dancing.’ That was the impetus. Then, of course, when she first came out of the surgery, she couldn’t walk. Because she thought in her mind if she could walk, Mickey was going to leave her for the beautiful blonde doctor, Laura. What did she know? She thought as long as she was crippled, he’d stay with her.”
This special anniversary has made Rogers nostalgic about her overall experience at DAYS. “Very much so. I have a lot of pictures around my house of different people that I’ve worked with, different times on the show and different parties, anniversaries and Emmys,” rattles off the actress. “I see those and I go, ‘Wow. Remember when?’ I remember when we went to Australia on a public appearance. It was 1985. I was there for a week. I took my mom, because she’d never been out of the United States.”
Rogers, however, was never part of any of the show’s splashy location shoots. “I never got to go to Europe or Louisiana or stuff like that,” she notes. “My character was a homebody. First she was out on the farm. Then she was married to a lawyer, so she was always there in Salem. I was basically working with Mac [Carey, ex-Tom] and Frances Reid [ex-Alice] and Susan [Seaforth Hayes] and Bill [Hayes, Doug]. Mary Frann [ex-Amanda] was on the show and Lanna Saunders [ex-Marie]. It’s just a lot of wonderful memories.”
And along the way she’s forged some special friendships. “I call Bill and Susan every Sunday to talk,” says Rogers, sharing that they were close from “the very first day. They had seen Follies at the Shubert Theatre. That was the musical I was in that brought me out to California. Bill said, ‘I know who you are. I saw Follies.’ That opened the door to us knowing each other on a different level other than the show. We could talk about theater. We could talk about music. When I got married [to Sam Groom], Susan and Bill had my shower in their backyard. [Former Executive Producer] Betty Corday was there and all the women [from the show]. And the waiters were the male actors on the show — Robert Clary [ex-Robert], Bill Hayes… They were the one that waited on us.
“My best friends on the show were Mary Frann and Lanna Saunders,” Rogers continues. “The four of us, Mary, Lanna, Susan and I celebrated birthdays together in the summer, because we weren’t all that far apart with birthdays. So we all would go somewhere — to the beach, to a restaurant, down to Chinatown… We would always go somewhere, when we were still on the show together. That was something we always did. As a matter of fact three weeks ago, Susan and I went to The Smoke House, and we remembered Mary and Lanna.”
Reflecting on what this 50-year milestone means to her, Rogers responds quickly. “I guess success,” she shares. “I was from a little town in Virginia and never though I’d leave Virginia. I went to New York. Then I went to California. I’ve been on this wonderful show for 50 years. My goodness,” she gasps. “I still talk to a few people from back home and they say, ‘When are you going to retire?’ I say, ‘Well I’m still enjoying what I’m doing.’ I never thought this would be and how joyful it has been. I really am dumbfounded with how my life has gone. I really am. I didn’t go to college. I was in high school, and I went to New York at 17 years old. It showed you don’t have to have a college education. If you have whatever you have expertise in and do it the best you can, it can work. It’s worked out for me. I’m still touched that DAYS is even doing anything. I really am, but 50 years is a long time. I’m a golden girl.”
