by Jim Colucci
Paul Witt remembers that the search for Coco became harder than the producers had imagined. “We wanted an actor who could play gay life with dignity,” he explains. “That’s very tricky.” And, again at odds with Jones and Provenza’s memories, Paul explains, “We didn’t want to get laughs out of outrageous, campy stuff.” When it came to finding the actor who could deliver all that, he says, demographics didn’t matter. “It never occurred to us to cast a straight guy versus a gay guy. We just knew that we wanted the character to integrate in a way that he would be part of this family.”
Enter Charles Levin
IT WAS NBC president Brandon Tartikoff who suggested Charles Levin, who had three years earlier begun a groundbreaking recurring gay role on Hill Street Blues. Charles’s character, Eddie Gregg, was a flamboyant men’s room hustler who formed an unlikely soul-matching friendship with Bruce Weitz’s detective Belker.
Charles remembers that when he first met with the Golden Girls pilot’s Jay Sandrich, he was surprised at the director’s resistance to the same gay affectations that had worked so well in the Eddie role. “Jay told me, ‘I don’t want you coming in here, doing a lisp or mincing around,’” Charles remembers. “He did not want the character to be flamboyant at all—just a regular guy who was gay. The trouble was, that wasn’t what was written on the page. Susan Harris had written that he was a ‘fancy man’ [as Sophia still calls him in the pilot to this day]. And his lines were outrageous, hilarious, and way over the top.”
Charles was unnerved, but he tried to follow Jay’s direction. “But it really threw a wrench into my plans,” he says. “I didn’t feel comfortable just coming in and ‘playing it straight.’ I needed that mask of whatever I chose to do to portray a gay person.” When he had his big reading in Brandon’s office, Charles read the lines as Jay had specified. “And there wasn’t a peep in the house. They looked at me like, ‘What the hell are you doing? This isn’t funny.’ And they said, dismissively, ‘Thank you very much.’”
Charles left the audition convinced that he had blown it—and angry with Jay Sandrich for his bad advice. “They had chosen me based on a prior character, and Jay wouldn’t let me play anything like that character,” he remembers. Later that night, Charles got a call at home from NBC’s VP of casting, Joel Thurm. “He said, ‘We don’t know what you were doing, but would you please come back tomorrow and just play Eddie Gregg?’ So the next day I went back and did Eddie Gregg. And with the first word out of my mouth, these people were in stitches . . . And I got hired right then and there.”
BEING A FRIEND
A CONVERSATION WITH . . . ELAINE STRITCH
(1925–2014)
I’M NEVER IMPRESSED with sitcoms. They’re not my kind of thing. I don’t think my humor fits sitcoms, either. But I went out to LA and auditioned for The Golden Girls, and in my one-woman show Elaine Stritch at Liberty I told the story what the meeting was like.
I met a room full of people who were just stonewalled against me, and it was terrifying and not pleasant. Before I started to read, I tried to explain that there was some of the dialogue that didn’t sit comfortably with me. And I said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to change a few things.” And Susan Harris said, “Hopefully just the punctuation.” And I thought, “I’m up against something here.” Well, her answer didn’t sit well with me, and I guess the devil came up in me. So I said, “For example, on page seven where Dorothy says, ‘Don’t forget the hors d’oeuvres,’ do you mind if I say ‘the fucking hors d’oeuvres?’ Well, that made her mad.
The whole thing didn’t go down very well, and I was very nervous. Cut to the chase, it was so the right thing to happen. The Golden Girls and I did not fit. First of all, the idea really didn’t appeal to me at all—three broads living together in Florida? What could be less exciting? But in retrospect, I do think the show turned out excellent—and it’s amazing the life it’s had. And I’m so glad it happened to Bea, making her life certainly a lot more luxurious. But I think if I’d have gotten the part and been stuck out there in LA, doing a sitcom for seven years, I might never have sobered up.
I think we can all look back in retrospect and realize that most things that happen to us happen because they’re meant to. So we have to accept them one day at a time. And I get a lot of mileage from this story in my show because The Golden Girls is such a popular thing, and I treat my own hurt feelings about it with humor. I get laughs in the theater, and so the whole experience has served its purpose and given me what I needed—a good piece of writing in my show coming out of a very bad experience.
3
CURTAINS UP
“Normally with new shows, they take only a few minutes’ worth of clips to show the advertisers each May. But with The Golden Girls, they decided to show the whole pilot. And from what I’ve been told, the audience in the grand ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria hotel laughed so loud that they ended up missing some of the lines. Five minutes after it finished, my phone rang, and it was my friend Grant Tinker, who was then at NBC. He said, ‘Betty, don’t make any plans for the next couple of years. I think you’re going to be very busy.’”
—BETTY WHITE
ON THE NIGHT of April 17, 1985, as The Golden Girls was taping its pilot episode, it was immediately evident to all that a potential classic—and certainly a show with long-term potential—was being born.
The producers had known even earlier that they were on to something special. From the first time the pilot script was read aloud around a rehearsal table, Paul Witt says that “everyone there, from the performers to the craft service guy to the network to us knew it was a home run.”
The Witt/Thomas/Harris sitcom methodology, developed over the decade-long span of shows like Fay, Soap, and Benson, called for two tapings of any given episode, in front of two separate live audiences. The first show, referred to as the “dress show,” was used to work out any kinks; if something fell flat, it could be rewritten during dinner, where the cast could be given new lines to perform at the “air show” later that evening. As such, The Golden Girls pilot was actually taped twice, in front of two different audiences. And both audiences went wild for it.
Jay Sandrich remembers the huge laughter that night when, as the actresses had cooked up onstage that week, Dorothy put Rose in a choke hold to keep her from blabbing to Blanche about the true nature of her intended husband. And there was an even bigger explosion when Sophia summed up the situation with a simple: “The man is a douchebag!” (an epithet that had to be reshot as “scuzzball” before NBC’s censors would allow it.)
The show’s producers were not surprised at the reaction. According to Jay, Estelle had been getting such big laughs from the start that she inspired a change to the structure of the show; now, instead of Sophia living at Shady Pines, and making only recurring appearances, she would be a regular character, living with the three girls after Shady Pines burns down. Sophia was now a full member of the family.
As production ramped up for the much-buzzed-about new series, Florida governor Bob Graham made a pitch for the Girls to film on location in the Sunshine State.
From the collection of LEX PASSARIS.
Good-bye, Coco
AS FORTUITOUS AS Sophia’s promotion was for Estelle, it ultimately spelled curtains for Coco. As Charles Levin remembers of the pilot taping, “old pros” Rue, Betty, and Bea brought down the house. But when Estelle, the one unknown, came in, “They didn’t know what to make of her, and they fell in love with her.” That night, not only did Estelle Getty hold her own against these three television heavyweights, but also “she sandbagged everybody. During the rehearsal, she was insecure. But like the true stage pro she is, when the lights went up, Estelle was on fire. The woman couldn’t miss, and everybody saw it. It wasn’t, ‘Did you see what Estelle did?’ It was, ‘Oh my God, Estelle is stealing the show out from under three real comic pros.’”
Meanwhile, the pilot’s audience had gone cuckoo for Coco, too. As Charles explains, “They’d ne
ver seen a character like him. They’d seen characters flirt with being gay or hint at it. But this guy, as soon as he opened his mouth, was way out there. So far out there, they found it hilarious and endearing.” But with four other characters also getting big laughs, the house was getting a little too crowded.
All week, as the actors prepared for the taping, Charles remembers Estelle’s lack of confidence. “She and I gravitated toward one another because we were the lesser knowns,” he recalls. “She was certain she was going to be fired. She said, ‘If it’s between you and me, Chuck, you’re obviously staying. I’m gone.’ I didn’t see it that way, and rehearsals were going so well, I didn’t have those worries.”
But after the taping, when the supposedly twenty-three-ish-minute pilot clocked in at over twenty-eight, some painful cuts had to be made. “Everybody lost stuff,” Paul Witt explains. And although it might be tempting to wonder whether, in the height of the AIDS panic in 1985, Coco might have been cut to appease an already Love, Sidney–scarred NBC, everyone insists he was eliminated for purely artistic and practical reasons.
“It really came down to that there wasn’t enough room in a half hour,” Paul explains. “Charles Levin was a terrific actor, and was terrific in the part, but we had too much.” As Susan Harris adds, “We couldn’t possibly service all five regular characters adequately. It would have been unfair.” Perhaps seeing Jeffrey Jones’s earlier point about Coco’s storylines being somewhat off topic, the producers decided to whittle the show down to its very core—the relationships among just the four women.
In justifying the painful decision, the team admitted that maybe it wasn’t a good idea anyway to have someone working for the Girls; without some housework to busy themselves with, all the actresses would be doing was sitting. And for a show about the struggles of older women living together, partly out of economic need, a live-in houseboy might suggest that they were too well-off. “We wanted people to identify with them,” Susan says. “We needed the element of struggle so that the audience would worry about them.”
Warren Littlefield says that far from being worried about any backlash due to airing a show with a gay character, he was actually a little reluctant to let Coco go, but he eventually yielded to Paul Witt’s logic. And so, through the use of some pickup shots filmed later and additional looped dialogue, The Golden Girls’ gay houseboy was excised from as many pilot scenes as possible. And because this was the era before “TV on DVD” gift sets, with their lost scenes presented as “extras,” most of Levin’s work fell forever to the cutting room floor.
4
WHAT MAKES THE GIRLS
SO GOLDEN
“Back then, Saturday was a night where no one was dominating. So the way that Brandon looked at it was that we could dominate if we found the right shows. He thought that the reason the HUT [households using television] level was down on Saturday was because nothing good was on.”
—GARTH ANCIER,
former head of current comedy at NBC:
Saturday Night Dead
ON ITS SEPTEMBER 14, 1985 debut, The Golden Girls earned golden ratings—and did so on a night where successful sitcoms have been rarer than platinum. Although Saturday night had once been home to CBS’s classic 1970s comedies—The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, All in the Family, and The Carol Burnett Show—the powerhouse programs had since been shifted to shore up the network’s other flagging nights. By 1985, Saturday had been all but abandoned. So when they heard that their promising new show was to air Saturdays at 9:00 p.m., the producers of The Golden Girls feared the worst.
But NBC had research to justify the bold decision. After all, the show’s presumed target audience—the older set—is often the only group home during prime weekend partying hours. Through testing, the network had learned something else: beyond anyone’s prediction, the pilot showed just as much appeal to just about all other age groups, too, including young adults, teens—even kids. Test audiences predicted that The Golden Girls would be an across-the-board hit. And with a hit early enough on Saturday night, NBC could draw people over fifty as they settled in for the night with the kids and grandkids, as well as those between eighteen and forty-nine before they decided which movie to rent or club to attend. And hopefully, the network could keep them around through the 1:00 a.m. end of Saturday Night Live.
Premiering just before the rise of cable TV, The Golden Girls became one of the last of the old-school broadcast network hits. With little Saturday night competition, the Girls routinely drew a thirty-plus “share,” meaning that 30 percent or more of the television-viewing audience was tuned in to the show; producers of today’s shows are ecstatic if they draw a share in the double digits. In all parts of the United States—red states and blue—The Golden Girls was a watercooler hit, unifying people of varying demographics and geographics if only for a half hour every Saturday.
Golden Appeal: Why People Love The Golden Girls
EVER SINCE THE Golden Girls went off the air in 1992, Saturday night has been abandoned again. The broadcast networks have once again hung the GONE FISHIN’ sign, airing no original scripted programming. But for so many of us who remember the show fondly today, The Golden Girls ushered in a comedy tradition, a comfortable world of funny grandmas and cheesecake to snuggle into on a Saturday night. Harkening back to the wholesome early days of TV, here was a show about grandparents you could watch with your grandparents. It aired on a night when bedtimes were relaxed and extended families might be together. It was witty enough for adults, while research showed that kids related to brash little Sophia.
For generations X and Y, Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia became regular babysitters, seeing kids and young teens through Saturday nights at home while parents and older siblings might be out on dates; thirty years later for those grown-up kids, reruns on cable carry an air of nostalgia. For older viewers, The Golden Girls was the rare network show centered on relatable women “of a certain age,” bringing dignity and visibility to an otherwise-ignored bracket.
And right from its start, The Golden Girls was a watershed show for the LGBT community as well. Just as gay people often build surrogate families of their friends, the Girls choose to be together, even to the point of eschewing contact with their biological relatives. Instead of hanging out with kids who would treat them like helpless old ladies, they’ve built the fantasy family any fan would yearn for, founded on the acceptance for which so many gay and lesbian viewers yearn.
“I feel that The Golden Girls is the granddaddy—or grandmammy—of all female ensemble shows, and that’s because of the purity with which Susan created it. She took the three qualities that make up human beings and devised a character around each, of course with additional flourishes. If you consider Sophia off to the side and look at the other three, Dorothy is the intellectual, Rose the emotional, and Blanche the physical. It was so beautifully constructed that their points of view were always so different. And you knew how they were going to react in any given situation.”
—MARC CHERRY, writer
But the big draw for viewers of all ages was always the show’s impeccable writing. Working from a template designed by the revered Susan Harris, the show deftly managed a delicate balance of compelling, moving storytelling with razor-sharp jokes. As the only show on the air with such mature leads, The Golden Girls had the advantage of “owning” certain subject areas—and it mined them brilliantly for every vein of their inherent humor. What other show could bring four old ladies to a nudist colony—and wring a laugh out of their every cringe? Or have them arrested as Miami’s unlikeliest hookers? As it packed on the clever wordplay and double entendre, The Golden Girls far surpassed the IQ level of its 1980s peers and enticed veteran comedy writers and talented newcomers to join its writing staff. By the end of its run, the show had become a training ground for some of today’s hottest writer/creators, including Mitchell Hurwitz of Arrested Development, Marc Cherry of Desperate Housewives and Devious Maids, and Christopher
Lloyd, one of the executive producers of Frasier and co-creator of Modern Family.
The Power of Four
THE GOLDEN GIRLS defined a generation’s view of older women, and single-handedly resurrected comedy during prime time on Saturday night. But perhaps the show’s most lasting innovation is the comedy formula it pioneered. Call it the Golden Rule of Four.
“Four points on a compass,” as Betty White aptly describes them, the characters of Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia match up to four classic comedic types: respectively, the Brain, the Slut, the Ditz, and the Big Mouth. Comedy duos are a classic tradition, but a completely different animal. And while it’s certainly true that three women can work, especially in film—think 9 to 5—having three lead characters in a sitcom might leave one character having to carry the B plot on her own.
But four leaves us with infinite possibilities. Rose takes Dorothy’s night-school class in order to earn her diploma, while Blanche and Sophia compete for a suave Latin lover. Or Blanche and Rose try out for the road show of Cats while Dorothy tries to prove that her mother is faking her injury.
Having popularized the Golden Rule of Four,1 The Golden Girls is the thematic ancestor of many shows that followed. Only one year after the Girls’ premiere, along came the Southern version (Designing Women), followed in the 1990s by the black version (Living Single) and the urban version (Sex and the City). In recent years, the formula has shown a resurgence in popularity, spawning a suburban version (Desperate Housewives), a middle-aged version (Hot in Cleveland), a Latina version (Devious Maids), and, inevitably, more than one gay version (Noah’s Arc and Looking).