Who Is Suzy Weiner? Mark Spitz’s Rarely Seen Wife

Suzy Weiner stood on a chartered boat in Marina del Rey in April 1973, a few days before her wedding, while a Sports Illustrated photographer set up the shot that would become the magazine’s cover that May. She was twenty one, a UCLA student who had left before finishing her degree, and she was marrying Mark Spitz, the Olympic swimmer who had won a record seven gold medals in Munich the year before and turned that into a wave of commercial endorsements worth millions.

The couple married on 6 May 1973 at the Beverly Hills Hotel and have now been married for more than fifty years. In the two years after Munich, they appeared together often, in magazines, in advertisements, and once on a television drama. Then, within about a year of that magazine cover, the visibility stopped almost as suddenly as it began.

Meeting Mark Spitz

Spitz came home from the 1972 Munich Olympics with seven gold medals and no fiancee. His engagement to a girlfriend from his Indiana University days had ended, along with his plans to attend dental school. Weiner, a UCLA theatre student who modelled part time, came into his life through her father’s business. Both men worked in the scrap metal trade, and a salesman who knew both families showed Spitz a photograph of her. Spitz telephoned the Weiner household and spoke to her father before he ever spoke to her.

“Mr Weiner, you’ve got a beautiful daughter,” he told him, later admitting, “I felt like an ass.”

A blind date followed. Weiner had read about Spitz beforehand and expected an arrogant man. She found him “lovable and shy” instead. Their engagement was announced two months later. One of Spitz’s own publicists made the announcement, not the couple, an early sign of how managed his public life already was.

A Wedding, and a Boat Named for Her

She left UCLA before completing her degree, and the couple married in a traditional Jewish ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The boat used for the Sports Illustrated shoot eight days earlier had its own story. It was leased from Schick for a dollar a year and named Sumark 7, for Su, Mark, and his seven gold medals, in that order. His own management had put her name first.

The newlyweds settled into a small, two room condominium in West Los Angeles that they decorated themselves. Weiner also picked up modelling and commercial work in this period, appearing in adverts for 7 Up and BankAmericard, and alongside her husband in a campaign for Schick razors.

Her Only Screen Role

That July, a reporter asked Spitz whether his wife had acting ambitions of her own. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think she would do anything that would conflict with me,” before adding that he did not mean an acting career itself would be the issue.

Four months later, the two of them acted together anyway. In November 1974, Weiner and Spitz appeared in an episode of the NBC drama Emergency! called “Quicker Than the Eye.” Spitz played a character named Pete Barlow; Weiner played his television wife, who is accidentally shot in the episode’s plot. A later review of the episode described the casting as built around the couple’s fame rather than their acting. It was the only scripted role either of them is known to have taken.

After that November, Weiner did not appear on screen again. In the decades since, she has resurfaced in the public record on three occasions that are clearly documented. The first came in 1988, when Spitz finally shaved the mustache he had worn since college. The second came in 2008, in a family feature for Sports Illustrated. The third came in 2023, at a public appearance in Florida.

Spitz had talked for a year about shaving the mustache before he actually did it. When Sports Illustrated asked Weiner about it, she said, “He looked great with it, don’t get me wrong, but he looks so handsome without it.”

Family Life

The 2008 feature, the second of those three occasions, was written when the couple’s two sons were 26 and 16. Matthew was born in October 1981 and Justin in September 1991, both nearly a decade into the marriage. Justin later swam competitively for Stanford. Asked in 2008 about her husband’s habits around the house, Weiner said he helps out “unless it’s in the kitchen.”

Back in 1974, before either son was born, Weiner had explained why they were waiting. “We want to cherish this time,” she said, “because once we have kids, it will never be the same.”

Correcting a Few Persistent Claims

The scarcity of public statements from Weiner has not stopped inaccurate details from circulating about her. She is sometimes described as having a specific ethnic background, though no verified source, including detailed 1974 reporting on her family, actually states one. She is also sometimes described as a former competitive swimmer, when the documented record shows she trained in theatre and modelled part time, not as an athlete. The story of how she met Spitz is sometimes told as a chance encounter at a party as well, though the version confirmed by two independent period sources involves the scrap metal connection and a photograph, not a party.

Suzy Weiner and Mark Spitz Today

The couple still live in Los Angeles. The third of those occasions came in May 2023, on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, when they returned to the International Swimming Hall of Fame in Fort Lauderdale. Bruce Wigo, the hall’s curator, found the original Sports Illustrated issue in the archive and asked Weiner to stand the way she had fifty years before, on a boat that had once carried her name ahead of her husband’s.

She posed the same way, with their son Justin and his fiancee there to see it. Outside of that wedding, the 1974 profile, the 1988 quote, the 2008 feature, and this one afternoon in 2023, Suzy Weiner has left almost nothing else on the public record.