by Jim Colucci
—BEA ARTHUR
THE FIRST THING I noticed about The Golden Girls pilot was that it was a beautiful script. It had an extra character, a gay house man, who was very charming, but they cut him by the very next episode. I don’t think they had any idea that just the four of us would be so strong together. And we were lucky enough to have brilliant writers on the show and a fabulous director, Terry Hughes. It was a great combination of all the elements.
I think the relationship between Dorothy and her mother makes for one of the most brilliant comedic duos I’ve ever known. First of all it was so ludicrous, with the fact that physically Estelle and I are so completely different. And then their love/hate relationship, where they could be so sweet yet so cutting with each other, was so real, and was just marvelous the way it was written. I also loved Dorothy’s relationship with Stan. She could be so mad at him, and claim she hated him, but the lines were written to say that they obviously still loved each other. And so it became a comedic relationship that really paid off.
I remember one scene [in season 3 episode “My Brother, My Father”] where Stan is staying over, and I’ve made him sleep on the floor. The camera is on me, and suddenly I hear him laughing. And I have a line like, “Stanley, if you’re doing what I think you’re doing . . .” I remember saying to the writer, “How are we permitted to do this?” We certainly got away from the censors more than we had on Maude, where every third day of every week we had to read the entire script to the network and then Norman Lear would start his negotiations with them. “I’ll cut that line or that section, but Bea has to say that line.” It was one fight after another. And that struck me when we were doing “Journey to the Center of Attention” in the seventh season, and Rue does a thing whereshe sits in a guy’s lap and does the “is that a gun or are you just happy to see me” joke. But it seems like that leeway came with time, because in the pilot episode, we had to change the line where Sophia calls Blanche’s fiancé a “douchebag.”
Sometimes rather than a written line, the writers would want a reaction shot from one of us. They and Terry Hughes were so good at knowing what was and was not going to work. People always ask me about my “slow burn.” I just know that I tried to keep my reactions honest. I didn’t even start out doing comedy, but I think you have to be real. So many really brilliant actors, once they are told that they’re in a comedy, turn into people from another planet. There is no similarity between their characters and reality. So you just have to make sure as an actor to make everything real for yourself.
That had been easier for me on Maude, because we taped on Tuesdays, which meant we had a few days over the weekend of not rehearsing where suddenly it would pop into my head “I know how to do that!” But there were at least a few things about Dorothy that were easy for me to find real, because they are like me. I always tell people we’re both 5´9½˝ in our stocking feet, and both of us have very deep voices. But we’re also the same in that like Dorothy, I hate bullshit. I call it bubble-pricking. Being the great leveler, the voice of reason who brings other people back down to earth. Dorothy was the voice of reason on that show. Left to their own devices, I don’t know how the other women could have survived.
I also get asked all the time if we’re going to do a reunion. But the way I see it, why would we? We’re not going to be any better than we were, or top some of the great shows we did. I left Maude after six years and Golden Girls after seven, because even then, I realized we couldn’t top what we’d already done. Golden Girls started to strain a bit by the end, and wasn’t as hysterical as it had been, so I thought it was time to leave. Today, I still have people constantly recognizing me, saying “Oh my God, it’s Dorothy!” It is so sweet and so nice. Often, flight attendants will come up and say something to me when I’m traveling. After all these years, I am delighted. It is incredible when you realize, The Golden Girls is all over the globe.
AUTHOR’S UPDATE:
After leaving The Golden Girls, Bea returned once to small-screen Miami, as Dorothy Zbornak spent a two-part episode in the fall of 1992 visiting her Girls at their hotel, the Golden Palace. Throughout the ’90s, she was in demand as a lively talk show guest, and popped up in such unscripted fare as a tribute to her former Mame co-star and close friend, Angela Lansbury, and as a presenter at the Tony Awards. In 2002, she appeared on both The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and on an Oscar-themed comedy special, The Big O! West Hollywood Story, hosted by that show’s gay movie critic [and the author’s husband] Frank DeCaro.
Bea continued to appear on TV comedies as well, with guest spots on Dave’s World in 1997 and Futurama in 2001, and in recurring cameo appearances on Showtime’s Beggars and Choosers in 1999. In 2000, Bea was nominated for an Emmy for her guest role as babysitter Mrs. White in the first season of Malcolm in the Middle, and she popped up again in another prominent role, as Larry David’s mother, in a 2005 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
But after finding TV fame as Maude Findlay and Dorothy Zbornak, Bea ended up being most compelling when she appeared on the small screen just as herself. At The New York Friars Club Roast of Jerry Stiller, televised in 1999 by Comedy Central, comedian Jeffrey Ross made a hilariously crude reference to “Bea Arthur’s dick,” and Bea’s reaction from the dais was priceless.
Then, in 2005, it was Bea’s turn to do some roasting, as she read aloud from the semi-autobiographical novel Star Struck by honoree Pamela Anderson, her friend and fellow supporter of animal rights. “The story concerns a blonde, very large breasted actress, imaginatively named Star, who plays a lifeguard on a hit television show,” Bea deadpanned. “And she becomes actively involved romantically with a tattooed rocker. And a videotape that they have made of their sexual escapades is leaked to the public. Pam, where do you come up with this shit?!” 83-year-old Bea proceeded to read particularly tawdry passages from the book, with her elegant, Broadway-honed elocution. And she killed.
Having gotten her start in theater, Bea continued to perform on stage throughout her life, appearing in Los Angeles-area productions of Renee Taylor and Joe Bologna’s Bermuda Avenue Triangle in 1995-96, and in Anne Meara’s After-Play in 1997-98. Having developed a traveling act in the ’80s and ’90s, she continued to tour through 2006, including a 2002 New York run titled Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends. A collection of stories and songs based on her life and career, the show was extended beyond its initial limited run, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event.
In the spring of 2008, Bea rejoined Rue McClanahan and Betty White in Santa Monica, California for the taping of the 6th Annual TV Land Awards, where The Golden Girls was honored with the network’s Pop Culture Award, presented to the three ladies by Steve Carell.
It was to be Bea’s last televised appearance. Beatrice Arthur, née Bernice Frankel, died of cancer on April 25, 2009 at the age of 86.
At her memorial service that September at New York’s Majestic Theater, her longtime friend Dan Mathews, vice president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, spoke about his beloved Bea as both a force of nature and a fascinating study in contradictions. Although tall and physically imposing, he noted, Bea would often be reduced to tears by stories of animal suffering. And yet, on one afternoon at her home in California’s Pacific Palisades, when Dan the ardent vegan was helping prep for a fundraising dinner, the equally ardent non-vegetarian Bea asked him to cut up some onions and press them into the meatloaf she was preparing. “And I thought, ‘I’m a hardcore vegan, here at Bea Arthur’s house for a PETA meeting, and I’m helping her make a meatloaf?!’” Dan remembers. “But then, I don’t know if it was the look in her eye, or the knife in her hand—but I did what she said!”
BILLY GOLDENBERG
Bea’s Friend and Longtime Accompanist
REMEMBERS BEA ARTHUR
a Star Who Gave Back to the LGBT Community
I MET BEA in 1981, when we were asked to work together to prepare material for a benefit for the ACLU. We rehearsed f
or a day, and the next morning she called me up and said, “Would you come to dinner?” I said, “Of course”—and that was the beginning of a very long friendship.
It turned out we hated all the same, often very famous people. There is no bond like hating the same people! After a while we started to work on some songs together. After all, people who came to parties at Bea’s house were always asking her to sing. And she knew a lot of songs and performed them well, from Kurt Weill to Bob Dylan. One day, our mutual friend Nick Perito, who was the musical director for Perry Como, urged us to do a show.
As Nick reminded us, Bea knew every funny writer in the business, so we started interviewing writers and asking them to submit ideas. But they all wanted Bea to do what they were used to from her: very campy and gay material. We wanted the show to be more personal to Bea—not necessarily autobiographical, but about things Bea thought about life. So I sat Bea down with a tape recorder, and asked her to tell every funny story she’d ever told me, with her particular inflection, and with her typically funny asides and comments. We had it transcribed, we edited it, and we had a show, which we tried out in Palm Springs during Bea’s weekend break from The Golden Girls.
We did the show—that we had planned for 30 minutes but which turned into an hour, because of Bea’s ad-libs and the audience’s laughter—at the town’s most prestigious golf course, and all of the richest gay men were there. We eventually traveled the world with the show. We had our best reaction in South Africa, where I’m told The Golden Girls was on seven times a day. African-American audiences in particular loved Bea, too. But of course, gay men were her biggest fans. We always knew when the audience was predominantly gay, we couldn’t miss.
In 2005, we did a one-night-only show in New York to benefit the Ali Forney Center, which Bea had become very devoted to, doing interviews on their behalf and whatever else they needed to serve the city’s homeless LGBT youth. And throughout the years, we very often played for an AIDS audience. After the show, Bea would come out the stage door, and all these guys in wheelchairs would be waiting. Bea would talk to them, and go and kiss a couple of them. She spent hours, and they appreciated it incredibly. But Bea had a special way like that, always liking to help people.
Soon after Bea and I started doing the show together, we were invited to take it to Westport, Connecticut, to the White Barn Theater. In the first rehearsal, the director, our friend Donald Saddler, reminded me that if I was going to be on stage with Bea Arthur, people would be looking at the both of us, so I couldn’t just look at my music or at the piano. He told me the first rule of performing was reacting. And so Bea and I began to try things out each night on stage. Some nights, as we walked off, she’d say, “You did something tonight—I want to know what it was.” I’d tell her, and she would often say, “Okay, I think we could do something further with that,” and we would invent fun little bits of interplay.
I’ll always remember one of those bits: another director later suggested that before Bea would sing “The Man in the Moon Is a Lady,” one of her famous songs, in the encore, she should walk over to me and whisper something in my ear. It didn’t matter what she would say—it could be “fuck you”—and often was. She would then walk downstage, and I would have a line: “You’re not serious.” He expected we’d get a big laugh out of it. So the first night, Bea whispered in my ear, and I said my line right away—and no laugh. The second night, I tried making a disdainful face—and still nothing. So on the third night, I decided to try something. That night, I let Bea walk off almost to the edge of the stage, and then I said to her, “You’re not serious.” It got a huge laugh.
As we walked off stage that night, Bea said to me, “Darling, you’ve just discovered the secret of comedy.”
I said, “What’s that?”
And she said, “Waiting.”
To this day, I can tell a joke better than anybody because of all the training I got with Bea. I learned from the best.
Golden “Girls”: Drag Tributes to TV’s Fab Foursome
NEW YORK, NY
IN 2003, NEWLY dating couple John Schaefer and Peter Mac first came up with the idea of celebrating the Girls’ appeal to gay viewers via an all-male stage production of two of the show’s episodes, “Break In” and, inspired by the fun they had pronouncing the word “LES-bian” à la Rue McClanahan, “Isn’t It Romantic?” As a payback to Estelle Getty for her early fund-raising to fight AIDS, their show Golden Girls . . . Live, which ran for sixty performances at the cabaret room Rose’s Turn in Greenwich Village, raised money to fight progressive supranuclear palsy, the disease with which Estelle had been at the time diagnosed. (The diagnosis was later changed to Lewy body dementia.)
After coverage in Entertainment Weekly, the tiny cabaret club routinely found itself with a wait list seventy-five deep. “It was a lot like Rocky Horror,” Peter remembers, because the audience comprised of gay men, bachelorette parties and sorority groups “would say the lines with us. People had fun being so close to the ‘Girls’ who weren’t trapped in that little box anymore.”
Then, in the spring of 2014, writers Nick Brennan and Luke Jones reprised the idea by joining with Chad Ryan and John de Los Santos for Thank You for Being a Friend, an unauthorized parody musical at the Laurie Beechman Theatre featuring four characters named Dorothea, Blanchet, Roz, and Sophia as well as original odes to Miami and, of course, cheesecake.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
IN 2006, SAN Francisco drag icon Heklina began staging a tribute to the Girls in a friend’s home in the city’s Lower Haight neighborhood. Quickly outgrowing that original parlor, the show then moved to the five-hundred-seat Victoria Theatre, where it has become an annual holiday tradition. The Golden Girls: The Christmas Episodes stars Heklina as Dorothy, female impersonator Matthew Martin as Blanche, Pollo Del Mar as Rose, and Cookie Dough as Sophia, complete with rattan purse and shuffling gait. “It’s a perfect fit,” Heklina explains, “because with the clothes they wear, the situations they get into, Bea Arthur’s genius comic delivery and Blanche’s reputation for being a slut, the Golden Girls are all like drag queens anyway.”
Clockwise from top: Heklina, Matthew Martin, Cookie Dough, and Pollo Del Mar as the Girls.
Photo by KENT TAYLOR.
LOS ANGELES, CA
IN THE SUMMER of 2014, another California drag doyenne, Jackie Beat, teamed up with an import from New York, Sherry Vine, and actors Sam Pancake and Drew Droege for their own Golden Girlz Live at LA’s underground Cavern Club Theater at the Casita del Campo restaurant. Tall Jackie, whose own home contains a room she has turned into a shrine to the four holy ladies of Miami, made for the perfect Dorothy, while Sherry essayed a vampy Blanche, Drew a ditzy Rose, and Sam a bespectacled comic Sophia in performances consisting of two episodes from the troupe’s growing repertoire of episodes, including “The Flu,” “Blanche and the Younger Man,” “Isn’t It Romantic?” and “A little Romance.” The foursome reconvened in the spring and summer of 2015, with more weekends scheduled to come. But Jackie says she’s already noted some VIPs in the basement theater’s tiny audience. When Golden Girls writer Winifred Hervey caught the show in 2014, Jackie says, “she came backstage after the show and said, ‘Thank you for keeping our words alive.’”
PORTLAND, OR
IN 2013, INSPIRED by Heklina’s holiday success, Trenton Shine decided to round up some “Girls” of his own to reenact the Girls’ two holiday episodes at Portland’s Funhouse Lounge. After their sell-out success, the Portland Girls returned the following summer, presenting “Isn’t It Romantic?” and “Sisters of the Bride” with a revised cast including Trenton himself as Dorothy—“which people expected me to do, because I’m tall and sarcastic,” he explains—and the roles of Rose, Sophia, and Blanche played by Scott Engdahl, Randy Tutone, and locally known drag queen Honey Bea Hart. By yuletide 2014, the troupe’s repertoire included “My Brother, My Father” as well, with impressive impersonations of Stan and Uncle Angelo by Andy Barrett and Sean Lamb.
And at Christmas 2015, the show evolved again, this time with an all-new script in which the Girls performed in a nativity pageant at Dorothy’s school.
All told, the productions have raised over twenty-eight hundred dollars for the antidiscrimination advocacy group Basic Rights Oregon, and five thousand dollars each for the human services charity JOIN and the Cascade AIDS Project. The performances—each of which began with a selected audience member singing “Thank You For Being a Friend” as the cast acted out the opening credits—had a profound effect on their audiences as well, Trenton explains. “We’ve found that people are really emotionally attached to The Golden Girls, and will come up to us, crying, to say, ‘Thank you so much for doing this.’”
The LA troupe’s recreation of season 1 episode “Blanche and the Younger Man,” starring Mario Diaz as Dirk, Drew Droege as Rose, Sam Pancake as Sophia, Sherry Vine as Blanche, Melanie Hutsell as Alma Lindstrom, and Jackie Beat as Dorothy.
Photo by JACKIE BEAT.
NEW ORLEANS, LA / PROVINCETOWN, MA
HAVING ONCE PLAYED Blanche when Heklina brought her Girls to New Orleans, drag diva Varla Jean Merman joined her longtime friend and collaborator Ricky Graham in 2012 to mount their own hometown stage rendition. Their Big Easy production of The Golden Gals became such a smash, selling out its two month-long weekend runs, that Varla then decided to export the Gals to the gay summer mecca of Provincetown, on the tip of Massachusetts’ Cape Cod. The summer 2014 edition, stitching together the full episodes of “In a Bed of Rose’s” and “Isn’t It Romantic” with one of the vignettes from “Valentine’s Day,” proceeded to sell out every single one of its nightly performances at the Art House theater from early June through Labor Day weekend; the Gals then returned in the summer of 2015 and beyond. Each time, the show’s cast has included Varla, with her perfect impersonation of Blanche—“I’ve noticed that Rue as Blanche always led with her breasts, so I play it with my breasts shaking and head bobbing,” she says—plus Ptown theater impresario Ryan Landry as Dorothy, Olive Another as Sophia, and Brooklyn Shaffer playing Rose. That last role, Varla explains, is always the hardest to cast, “because Rose has to be sweet and innocent, and it’s hard to find a man who can play that.”