by Jim Colucci
When Jonathan tells Rose he has something important to discuss with her over dinner the next day, she agonizes over whether she is truly willing to commit to him, which would mean weathering public stares at the sight of a couple so physically different. But in the end, in a delicious twist, Jonathan is the one to dump Rose, when he realizes he just can’t reconcile continuing to date someone not Jewish.
COMMENTARY: Every sitcom takes a while to settle, for characters to find their voices and for audiences to get to know them and fall in love. In the series’ pilot, Rose was a little too wise, Blanche a little too ditzy. But here, with episode thirteen, the series’ first true classic, it’s clear that everything on The Golden Girls has fallen into place. The jokes are fast and furious and the character lines are drawn, with hilarious and everlasting results.
BETTY WHITE: When people ask me what is my favorite episode, it’s like asking what’s my favorite animal—and that’s anything with a leg on each corner. But this episode sticks with me maybe more than any of the others. They milked it for every short joke you could possibly have, but there was a sweetness about the episode, too.
BARRY FANARO: I always say this is my favorite episode, and Mort and I won an Emmy for it. It’s funny, but to me it’s also serious; it’s about discrimination, and it touches on racism and sexuality. To me, Rose’s dilemma is parallel to concerns about dating outside one’s race or religion. So yes, we did as many jokes as possible. But underneath it all, this episode was always about making the decision and commitment to be in love with someone unlike oneself. And it was perfect Rose that she would be able to do that.
EPISODE 16
IN A BED OF ROSE’S
Written by: SUSAN HARRIS Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: JANUARY 11, 1986
After a month of dating, Rose finally allows her new beau Al (Richard Roat) to stay the night—as long as he agrees to be quiet during the act. And silent he is; the next morning, Sophia enters the kitchen with the news that there’s a dead man in Rose’s bed. Sometime during their night of passion, Al expired, bringing back haunting memories for Rose of the night her husband, Charlie, also died in the sack.
Later that day, the Girls find a phone number for Al’s supposed sister—and Rose realizes she’s not really a live-in sibling, but actually his wife. When guilt-ridden Rose drives up to Boca Raton to see Mrs. Beatty (Priscilla Morrill, 1927-94), the widow assumes Rose to be just the latest in a long line of philandering Al’s ex-girlfriends. A few nights later, Mrs. Beatty comes over bearing reassuring findings from the coroner: Al would have had his heart attack whether in bed with Rose or not. And so, three months later, Rose reluctantly agrees to a romantic weekend away with Arnie—and they both do come home alive.
COMMENTARY: For the third time in this first season, we hear about Rose’s husband, Charlie, dying in bed, and Rose’s growing reputation as an inadvertent man killer. Here, after getting over the death of Al, Rose goes away for another romantic weekend with Arnie, whom we met earlier in the season in episode six, “Rose the Prude,” but whom we don’t get to see here. But we do get to hear about their rendezvous; the ending scene, where Rose fools Dorothy and Blanche into thinking she’s now killed not only Arnie but also a local sheriff with her lethal sexuality, is a favorite moment of the show’s fans.
In another interesting moment, Rose refers to native St. Olafian Inga Lundqvist, who didn’t need men—to which Blanche retorts, “Who was she, some Swedish lesbian?” Interestingly enough, world-wise Blanche knows the meaning of the word here; but by next season, when Dorothy’s friend Jean visits in “Isn’t It Romantic?,” she’s surprisingly forgetful, confusing the term with the word “Lebanese.”
SUSAN HARRIS: There had been a study that showed that men who are having affairs are much more apt to have a heart attack during sex. I’m sure I must have read that study before I wrote this. Or else I spurred the study.
GARTH ANCIER (former head of current comedy at NBC): Susan Harris wrote this great episode—and then the NBC Broadcasting Department told the Golden Girls producers that under no circumstances could they shoot it.
“Isn’t it interesting how the sounds are the same for awful nightmares and great sex?”
—DOROTHY
I did not see the problem. So I went to Broadcasting and said, “You can’t stop us from making this episode. You can only stop us from airing it.” Back then, as the head of current comedy, I could decide that we were making the episode, and we would pay for it from our budget if we had to. But that was a last resort. Before that would happen, I wanted to get everyone together to hammer it out.
So everyone sat down on the Golden Girls living room set, Susan and the Golden Girls people on one side and the NBC people on the other. And again, the Broadcasting people declared, “This script is just unacceptable to even think of airing.” I asked them, “All of it?” And they said yes; you can’t even fix this script. So I asked them to go through the script with me, which is a smart way to handle these differences, because it makes the person defend his or her decision that any particular part of it is not acceptable for the American public.
We started at the top. They said first of all: “It is unacceptable to reference a woman making noises during an orgasm.” That’s when Susan turned and, from behind her sunglasses, said to the guy—and I remember, because it made me laugh—“So is it NBC’s official position that it’s okay for men to make noises, but not women?” “Oh no, that’s not what I meant!” the guy replied, flustered. It was a session where we literally went page by page. And by the end, they had turned down every single page with some reason why “you just can’t make this.” But there was no good reason. And everything they objected to was adjustable anyway.
Susan didn’t write many episodes over the course of the show, but when she did, it was a real treat. We proceeded to shoot the episode, with very few changes, and the Broadcasting Department was so angry with me that they sent a note to the NBC chairman Grant Tinker saying that they wanted to go on record that they’d told Garth Ancier that this show would not air, and that they would not be responsible for the four hundred thousand dollars that was going to be wasted. But of course, NBC did end up airing the episode, and it’s actually a classic.
TERRY HUGHES: This episode was edgy, and came closely on the heels of other episodes that were that way, too. In this first season, the show had a run of episodes that were not only funny and heartwarming, but were about things that I hadn’t seen people do before on TV. One episode after another, the show was now going like gangbusters. We hit a stride that was becoming unstoppable.
EPISODE 17
THE TRUTH WILL OUT
Written by: SUSAN BEAVERS Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: JANUARY 18, 1986
Rose receives a visit from her daughter Kirsten (Christine Belford) and granddaughter Charlie (Bridgette Andersen, 1975–97), who is named for Rose’s late husband. Rose is nervous that as executor of her will Kirsten will get a peek at her finances; and indeed Kirsten is taken aback by the numbers, accusing her mother of blowing through the family estate. But there’s something this adoring daughter doesn’t know: her father, Charlie, wasn’t as successful an insurance salesman as she’d thought. Worse yet, from the stories Kirsten has passed on, even little Charlie has a rose-colored image of the grandfather she never met. When Rose sees that the initial white lies she concocted to bolster her husband’s memory are now affecting a new generation, she finally tells her daughter the truth: Charlie Nylund was a kind, warm, caring man—but he couldn’t balance a checkbook, never mind leave behind any appreciable inheritance.
COMMENTARY: Unlike so many sitcoms, The Golden Girls for some reason didn’t produce too many outtakes or bloopers. So in order to compile a “gag reel” of funny, behind-the-scenes moments, the cast and crew would sometimes resort to pranks—for example, the time the crew members substituted naughty photos in the “Men of Blanche’s Boudoir” prop calendar. (See season two, episode thirty-eig
ht, “’Twas the Nightmare Before Christmas.”)
But as the show’s production associate Robert Spina explains, the semi-prank that occurred during rehearsals for this episode has turned into “a clip that’s aired probably as much as any clip from the actual show, because it was a great moment showing Betty White just hamming it up.” At one point during the production week, as Betty was scheduled to rehearse the scene where she has a heart-to-heart with her young granddaughter as the girl sits at the makeup vanity in Rose’s bedroom, actress Bridgette Andersen was feeling sick. But Terry Hughes and his team still needed to camera block the scene—i.e., plan where cameras should be positioned based on the actors’ movements. And so Doug Tobin, then the show’s second stage manager, agreed to step in and read granddaughter Charlie’s lines.
The rehearsal was filmed—and the outtake that resulted aired several times in the late 1980s on Dick Clark’s series of TV Censored Bloopers specials. As Doug read Charlie’s lines—sometimes giggling as he assayed the innocent attitude of a preteen girl—Betty worked hard to pick up his cues and get her own lines out correctly. But as you can see in the clip, available on YouTube (search: Golden Girls—Betty White funny rehearsal), Betty’s body language belies her more prankish nature. In the scene, Rose is supposed to be applying makeup to her granddaughter as they chat, and so Betty takes the opportunity to grab a big laugh. As then–assistant director Lex Passaris remembers, “Doug was ‘follically challenged.’ So Betty took this Soupy Sales–type powder puff, and pounded him with it, caking his whole head with pancake makeup. By the end of the scene, it looked like he was doing whiteface.”
Betty White pranks second stage manager Doug Tobin, standing in for Bridgette Andersen for rehearsal as Rose’s granddaughter, Charlie.
Photos courtesy of LEX PASSARIS, with permission from DISNEY ENTERPRISES, INC.
The outtake is fun to watch, but unfortunately, this whole episode has a tragic coda. Young actress Bridgette Andersen was only eleven at the time of this Golden Girls guest spot, with already a long list of appearances on TV and film. But sadly, she died in 1997 of a drug overdose, just a few months short of her twenty-second birthday.
In the seventh-season episode “Home Again, Rose,” the character of Kirsten would return, but with Christine Belford replaced by actress Lee Garlington.
DOUG TOBIN: When we were working on this episode, I stood in to read Charlie’s lines in her scene with Betty White. Looking back, I now realize something: on those run-through Thursdays, they didn’t usually put tape in the cameras. So someone must have known in advance that something was going to go down here, because someone—maybe Terry Hughes or Lex Passaris—told the guys to turn on their cameras for real. I realize now that I was set up.
Betty and I started to do the scene, in Rose’s bedroom, where she’s talking with Charlie while at the same time giving her a lesson in makeup. Betty is absolutely as sweet as she seems on TV, and yet she has a playful and dirty side, too. So as Betty drew on me with an eye pencil, I started getting silly and messing around with my lines. Charlie is supposed to be talking about her date Robert, and I added that it was Robert Spina, our production associate: “He’s the P.A.!”
Well from that moment on, Betty had a look in her eye like, “Oh yeah? Well let me show you how it’s done!” And she did! As she got her own lines back on track, she clobbered me with a really loaded powder puff, completely coating the middle of my face.
The clip that’s available on YouTube shows only part of the scene—but originally, we played out the whole thing, with me now covered in powder. I was only twenty-eight at the time, and this was one of my first big jobs. And at some point during the scene, I realized that maybe the producers were watching this run-through, and they might get mad at me for screwing around. So actually, after Betty hit me with the powder, I started to get more serious, which made the whole thing even more ridiculous.
Looking back at that day, I realize how naïve I was. I was a young kid, and was trying to mess with Betty White? What was I thinking? The woman could destroy me in a second! As I got serious about finishing the scene, I was hoping I hadn’t pissed Betty off as well; in the moment, I wasn’t sure what was happening. But looking at the clip, it’s obvious she was just playing and having a good time.
EPISODE 18
NICE AND EASY
Written by: STUART SILVERMAN Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: FEBRUARY 1, 1986
When Blanche’s twenty-year-old niece, Lucy (Hallie Todd), visits Miami ostensibly to interview at colleges, it soon becomes obvious that the girl is a chip off the old slut. First, she’s barely inside the Girls’ front door when she announces she’s off to a date with a doctor she met on the plane. Soon, she’s having a rendezvous with her university interviewer—and then the airport cop who arrests him for transporting weed.
Finally, Blanche has had enough. But unfortunately, her scolding attempt to curtail her niece’s activities backfires, sending the girl and officer Ed (Ken Stovitz) off into the night. After Blanche consults with Dorothy and Rose, the threesome tracks Lucy down to Ed’s smarmy Miami Vice–themed bachelor pad. In private, Blanche explains to the girl the difference between “alluring” and just “available”—acknowledging her own hypocrisy in giving a lecture on sexual mores. As Lucy admits to compensating for childhood insecurities, Blanche reminds her of the importance of liking and respecting herself foremost.
Meanwhile, a disgusted Dorothy finally corners the mouse she’s spotted in the kitchen, only to realize she’s not someone who can kill a living thing.
COMMENTARY: With its jokes about Miami Vice, this episode winks at The Golden Girls’ own origins. The Girls would continue to make reference to NBC’s megahit cop show, including a few episodes later in “The Flu Attack,” with a gag about star Don Johnson’s wardrobe.
Playing Lucy is then-twenty-four-old actress Hallie Todd, who had started her career in 1984 playing Penny, the bar owner’s daughter on the Showtime sitcom Brothers. The real-life daughter of Ann Morgan Guilbert—a.k.a. The Dick Van Dyke Show’s neighbor Millie Helper—Hallie went on to regular roles in several series, including as the mother of the title character in the Disney Channel sitcom Lizzie McGuire.
HALLIE TODD: When I got to the set, I remember everybody telling me that I shouldn’t be offended if Bea Arthur didn’t talk to me, because she was just really shy. But I had gone to grammar school with her son Matt. I mentioned that, and she was a total sweetheart to me the whole week, as was everyone else.
I was already such a fan of Rue McClanahan’s, and so when I noticed her doing yoga backstage, I was thrilled she invited me to join her. Rue was such an actress of substance that I think she definitely wanted to create a relationship with me, and make the episode real for herself. For me, that made everything easier, too—because for one thing, I had to do an accent. I’m from Pacific Palisades, California, not the South. So I just listened to Rue, and tried to do what she was doing. I felt like I was cheating. Rue made it easy because I was able just to listen to her.
KEN STOVITZ: I had stumbled into acting, getting cast in a commercial during my senior year at UCLA. But I did the opposite of what most actors do, acting only to support another career, which for me was going to law school. I never studied acting, and when I came on to a set like The Golden Girls—where I think I got the job because they thought I was silly and naïve enough to look like a young, wannabe Don Johnson—it was obvious that everyone else but me knew what they were doing!
I loved the great twist, that it was really Rose that this guy was pining for. But right about at this moment, my life flashed in front of me, and I knew that as soon as I passed the bar, I had to get away from acting. I knew what I was good at—and this wasn’t it. And I saw that I could probably end up as a third banana on a show, never having a great career. I’d be a thirtysomething guy with a ponytail, chasing eighteen-year-old women—a lot like this character.
“Good night, Ed. We’re going to go home
now. And I want you to know, we’ll all sleep a lot better knowing you’re . . . off-duty tonight.”
—DOROTHY
EPISODE 19
THE OPERATION
Written by: WNIFRED HERVEY Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: FEBRUARY 8, 1986
Just as she is set to dance with Blanche and Rose in a recital, Dorothy injures her foot in tap class and needs surgery. At the hospital the night before, Dorothy freaks out and heads home. Sophia convinces her to return for the operation. When she does, she discovers she has a new roommate, Bonnie (Anne Haney, 1934–2001), an old pro on the eve of her second mastectomy. Bonnie’s upbeat outlook brings an epiphany for Dorothy, who admits that in comparison, she feels “Like a fool. Like a damn fool.” On the day following the surgery, all three Girls emerge victorious, as Blanche and Rose visit Dorothy’s bedside fresh from the recital with news: the former Tip-Tap Trio is now known as the Two Merry Widows, with a whole new routine that knocked ’em dead.
COMMENTARY: At the end of season 1, we’re really getting to know the Girls and their histories. Here, Dorothy and Blanche reveal childhood traumas, but the episode provides the most surprising insight into the character of Rose, as the ever-competitive blonde throws some tough love at Blanche, forcing her out of her stage fright and out of the house.
WINIFRED HERVEY: I loved that we got them dancing—and I remember we all said, “Damn, Betty has some good legs!” This episode was also a good way to see a new side of Dorothy. The thing about Dorothy—and the thing about Bea to some extent—was that she had this very tough exterior, but really there was a very soft and gentle person in there. So by showing Dorothy’s fears about the surgery, this was a situation where that could come out. It wasn’t a side of the character we got to see all the time.