by Jim Colucci
RUE McCLANAHAN: Every time they’d give me a chance to dance, I was all for it. For this episode, they gave us a really cute little soft shoe to do, and we dressed up in those top hats and tails and went to the hospital to dance for Dorothy, which was a lot of fun. Betty picked up dancing very quickly, so she was easy to work with. I certainly never studied tap; that was something I had to learn to do. I was a natural, too, at least in soft shoe, and could pick things up very fast.
BETTY WHITE: Rue and I put our tap shoes on on Monday of that week, and we just kept them on. I’m not a trained tap dancer, but you just ad lib and make it up when you practice on your kitchen floor. I’ve been doing that all my life. All week, Rue and I were walking up and down the halls, getting used to that click of our taps. And pretty soon, you can’t wear tap shoes in a hallway without playing a little bit. Rue has a great sense of fun, and we’d challenge each other to come up with new things.
EPISODE 23
THE FLU ATTACK
Written by: STAN ZIMMERMAN & JAMES BERG Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: MARCH 1, 1986
As the Girls eagerly anticipate their night at the Friends of Good Health awards, Rose is beginning to feel feverish. Before long, she, Blanche, and Dorothy all have symptoms their doctor (Sharon Spelman) confirms to be the flu. And with at least a week of recovery required, Saturday night’s banquet plans are now off the table.
Miserable and angry about missing the big night, the three patients squabble over heating pads and the primo spot on the couch. Then, just as they’re about to reconcile, Sophia enters with news: when she called to cancel the other Girls’ banquet reservations, she got the sense that one of them was set to win the night’s trophy in recognition of her volunteer work. Suddenly, the Girls forget all about their flu, as their competitive natures take hold. They pull themselves together and show up—only to watch Sophia take home the prize.
COMMENTARY: Here, as The Golden Girls prepares to wrap its first, already-successful season, Sophia gives an acceptance speech that underlines the series’ overall theme: the value of friendship. The episode is known for one of its visuals as well, with the three sick women, Blanche, Dorothy, and Rose, arranged on the couch, clutching their ailing orifices in “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” poses.
TERRY HUGHES: This was a hard episode to do. When people have the flu, they’re crabby, depressed, and slow moving. So the trick we had to pull off was playing that, but also playing against it so that we didn’t turn people off. The actresses did such a great job that by the end of the week, we all had convinced ourselves that we really did have the flu, because we’d been living with the suggestion all week.
BEA ARTHUR: People often ask me how I didn’t break up, with all the outrageous things the Girls did and said. But in this episode, I just broke up and broke up and broke up. There was a charity auction, and Don Johnson was supposed to emcee. This was at the height of Miami Vice’s popularity; all the men were doing the no-socks thing. But at the last minute, they announced onstage that Don couldn’t make it, but he had sent his wardrobe. And they held up a hanger with a white jacket on it. I’ve never seen anything funnier in my life. I couldn’t not break up. I think eventually they had to just cut away from me.
Rose counsels her newly blind sister, Lily (Polly Holliday).
Photo courtesy of PHOTOFEST, with permission from DISNEY ENTERPRISES, INC
EPISODE 24
BLIND AMBITIONS
Written by: R. J. COLLEARY Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: MARCH 29, 1986
Rose’s visiting sister, Lily (Polly Holliday), thinks she has a handle on living without her sight. But when she panics after accidentally causing a grease fire on the stove, Dorothy and Blanche convince Rose that she needs to intervene. Lily, however, has her own plan, to ask Rose to move back with her to Chicago. After agonizing over the decision, Rose ultimately finds the strength to stop coddling Lily and instead shows some tough love, convincing her scared sister to seek professional help to get on with her new life as a blind person.
Meanwhile, the Girls plan to raise money for a new TV by holding a garage sale. But after haggling with a few customers, they soon realize they can’t bear to part with any of their so-called junk.
COMMENTARY: Six years after she last told her boss Mel Sharples to kiss her grits on CBS sitcom Alice, Polly Holliday has left Phoenix and arrived in Miami, albeit a little less independent as Lily Lindstrom, Rose’s newly blind sister. Here, she gets a taste of her own sassy grits from Rose—and Betty White gets a chance to shine in a more serious, dramatic moment.
R. J. COLLEARY: I was on the writing staff of Witt/Thomas/Harris’s show Benson during its final season, which overlapped with the first season of The Golden Girls. On Benson we worked basic sitcom hours, and on weekends only in a rare emergency. But The Golden Girls was so new, and had become a hit so fast, that at this point its writers, all of whom had come from Benson, were pretty crazed in trying to figure out what the show would become.
Shows today don’t even use freelance writers, but back then they did, if only to get a script draft down on paper that the writing staff could later go back and fix. But it’s generally really hard to try to come in from the outside and write a show. And it’s even harder if, as in this case, the show is still airing its first season, so there aren’t many episodes to study. Still, I was happy to be asked to write a freelance script for this new show that people were seeming to like. But of course, I didn’t realize what it was going to become. Now, this one episode of The Golden Girls is the credit that my daughters and their friends, who are in their twenties, are most impressed by.
Bea Arthur and Rue McClanahan prepare to rehearse the lunch scene on the lanai.
Photo by WAYNE WILLIAMS.
TERRY GROSSMAN: Even today, I don’t think people give Betty White credit for how great an actress she is. She doesn’t have just comedy chops, and it’s not just her personality. I remember in this episode, watching the rehearsals, and noting how fabulous an actress Polly Holliday is, particularly in the serious moments between Lily and Rose. At the time I worried, “Maybe Betty’s not going to be able to hold her own with her.” But then on Friday night, the audience came in. And once the cameras started rolling, Polly Holliday virtually disappeared. Betty’s performance was so brilliant and touching, it made this other great actress seem not to exist. I remember that dramatic moment more than I do so many of the big comic moments of the show.
EPISODE 25
THE WAY WE MET
Written by: KATHY SPEER, TERRY GROSSMAN, WINIFRED HERVEY, MORT NATHAN, & BARRY FANARO Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: MAY 10, 1986
Blanche brings us back to the morning she finally kicked out her previous two roommates, as she first meets a cat-carrying Rose while posting roommate-wanted flyers on the bulletin board in the neighborhood supermarket. Evicted by her landlord for refusing to give up her rescued aforementioned feline, Mr. Peepers, Rose prattles on about her “wild” habit of eating raw cookie dough. Blanche is about to call the whole thing off—until she witnesses her potential roommate’s purity of heart, as Rose gives Mr. Peepers to a young boy (Edan Gross) grieving his own lost pet.
With one roommate selected and one to go, Blanche gives a house tour to quack psychic Madame Zelda (Shirley Prestia, 1947–2011), who scares her with visions of murder and demonic possession. Enter Dorothy Zbornak, with her mother in tow. Dorothy’s fears that Sophia’s stroke-induced candor has jeopardized the interview prove unfounded, as Blanche agrees for the former to move in. But soon, as new roomies Dorothy and Rose meet for the first time, there’s already tension; Blanche has mistakenly promised each of them the same bedroom.
Their final memory is of their first food-shopping trip as a household. As Dorothy and Blanche consider each other’s grocery selections extravagant, ridiculously honest Rose keeps correcting prices for the cashier—in the store’s favor. The bickering spills over into the kitchen, and just as the threeso
me is about to conclude that living together just won’t work, Rose pulls out her St. Olaf story about the famous Great Herring War. And as they laugh together at the image of a circus-trained herring being fired from a cannon, the Girls realize that perhaps their sensibilities will prove compatible after all.
The supermarket bulletin board by which the Golden Girls first met.
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
COMMENTARY: The best sitcom pilots begin with a bang, an “inciting incident” that changes the lives of the show’s heroes and sets up the situation we’ll be watching for, hopefully, seasons to come. In the pilot episode of Frasier, dad Martin moves in; on Friends, Rachel leaves her groom at the altar. The Golden Girls, too, had its own big moment, with the unexpected arrival of Sophia after the destruction of her nursing home, Shady Pines. But now, with this episode, we get so much more. In comic book terms, this episode depicts the Girls’ full “origin story,” the circumstances by which Blanche, Rose, and Dorothy came to be such a powerful trio.
The episode also contains a brief appearance by Dom Irrera, as a produce clerk in the Girls’ grocery; Dom had appeared earlier in the season as a waiter in “The Flu Attack,” and during The Golden Girls’ original casting days, had auditioned to play the ultimately doomed character of Coco.
TERRY HUGHES: This show made for an interesting week. It probably looks like we meant to save this story of how they all met for the last show of the first season. But actually, it was because we didn’t have a script. We shot a show on Friday, and we didn’t have anything to start working on the following Monday. I remember that the whole gang of writers worked on this episode over the weekend, and when I came in on Monday morning and met them in the parking lot, they were all bleary-eyed, having been able to go home for only about three hours. Then, when we did the table read of the show that day, there were gales of laughter—and you should have seen the looks of relief on the writers’ faces. We would end up doing more episodes that were constructed from individual vignettes and flashbacks. And it was all because this one ended up going so wonderfully.
GOLDEN DIVERSIT
WHEN IT COMES to sitcoms, they don’t make ’em like The Golden Girls anymore. Chasing the all-important Adults 18–49 Nielsen rating, today’s youth-obsessed network executives would rather OD on Metamucil than try to sell advertisers on a sitcom where all four characters are age fifty plus (and then some!).
But there’s another reason why you might not see a small-screen foursome that looks like Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia today, and it’s a nobler one. Now, more than ever, networks are committing to programming with racially, ethnically, and even sexually diverse casts, and from a more diverse pool of writers and producers.
The Girls, of course, were not just four older ladies, but four older white ladies at that. But even back in the less progressive eighties when the characters were born, The Golden Girls producers were mindful of the diversity of cultures to be found in the show’s Miami setting, and worked to cast some of its secondary characters accordingly. When Dorothy’s son, Michael (Scott Jacoby), turned up in town with Lorraine (Rosalind Cash, 1938–95), the woman he wanted to marry, she turned out to be not only much older, but African American. And she came complete with her mother and two elderly aunts (Virginia Capers, Lynn Hamilton, and Montrose Hagins), to whom fans today often refer as the Black Golden Girls. Sophia first cozied up to a neighbor’s Japanese gardener (played by the venerable Chinese American actor Keye Luke, 1904–91), and later befriended Alvin (Joe Seneca, 1919–96), an elderly black man, on the boardwalk. Dorothy was dedicated to her prized pupil, a Cuban American kid played by the Mexican American Mario Lopez. And, further reflecting the Cuban flavor of South Florida, Rose began working for consumer advocate Enrique Mas, a man who could roll his Spanish r’s hilariously—a feat even more impressive when you consider that he was played by Italian American actor Chick Vennera.
“Paul Witt and Tony Thomas, and especially Susan Harris, were always cutting edge and progressive,” says Chick, who had worked with the producing trio on a previous sitcom, the female-president comedy Hail to the Chief, and who before Enrique Mas had also played a different character, Cuban boxer Pepe, in a Golden Girls episode, “Fiddler on the Ropes.” “Hail to the Chief was way before its time. With Soap, they were the first to show a family with a gay son. The Cuban population in Miami is really huge, so of course it makes sense they wanted to create a Cuban American character.”
Later, too, three of the Girls would work at the titular hotel in Golden Palace alongside African American hotel manager Roland Wilson (Don Cheadle) and Mexican American chef Chuy Castillos (Cheech Marin). But behind the scenes, the world of The Golden Girls was less colorful. Writer Winifred Hervey was not only one of just a handful of women ever to write for the show, but during her three seasons on The Golden Girls was the sole person of color on its writing staff. “I don’t think that really affected the job much, though,” says Wini, who, after all, had just finished working with the Girls’ show-running foursome Kathy Speer, Terry Grossman, Mort Nathan, and Barry Fanaro on another Witt/Thomas show, one with an African American lead, Benson.
On one occasion, the writers, all together in the writers’ room, cooked up a story about the Girls hiring, and then firing, Caribbean-born maid Marguerite Brown (Paula Kelly), who they then think has put a voodoo curse on them (season three, “The Housekeeper”). Perhaps to eliminate the potential for racial insensitivity, the producers assigned the fleshing out of the story idea into a script to Wini. “I remember feeling wary about that one,” she remembers. “It was a hard script to write, because it was a black woman as the housekeeper. There hadn’t been that many black characters, and this one has to put a voodoo curse on them? So I came up with a solution: we should find out she’s going to law school. And the producers were fine with that being how we redeemed the character. They were always very receptive to that kind of stuff, because they never wanted to offend anybody.”
Wini adds that the producers were also amenable when, during dress rehearsals, she sometimes suggested that in order to better reflect Miami they should add people of color among the background actors. “The producers were totally open to it, because it was a realistic note,” she remembers.
But of course, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Eventually, the Golden Girls producers received a letter from a peeved fan. “It said: ‘I’m tired, every time the Girls go to a restaurant, of seeing all these black people in the background!’” Wini recalls with a laugh. “It was only one letter, but it was hilarious to receive it.”
Dorothy’s extended family (left to right): new daughter-in-law, Lorraine (Rosalind Cash); son, Michael (Scott Jacoby); and Lorraine’s mother, Greta (Virginia Capers).
Photo by JOSEPH DEL VALLE/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK via GETTY IMAGES.
SEASON 2
EPISODE 26
END OF THE CURSH
Written by: SUSAN HARRIS Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: SEPTEMBER 27, 1986
Blanche is startled to discover that she may be pregnant. But when the doctor’s diagnosis is instead the onset of menopause, she goes into a deep depression. Meanwhile, the other three ladies decide to breed minks for profit. Their efforts are thwarted, however, when the minks fail to show any interest in each other. After the other Girls drag Blanche to a psychiatrist to deal with her depression about menopause, another doctor, a handsome veterinarian (Philip Sterling, 1922–98), arrives to check on the minks—and a perked-up Blanche decides to question him on other “animal” matters in private. Rose argues that the minks are not useless just because it’s turned out they are too old to breed, and Blanche wholeheartedly agrees. Then, two of the minks do start to get frisky after all. The problem is, they’re both males.
COMMENTARY: Gay minks! Actually, the alternative lifestyle of the minks may be the only aspect of this episode’s B plot that Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, and Betty Whi
te found amusing. All three of them animal activists, the ladies hated doing an episode showing the Girls farming animals for fur, but all agree that it was too late in the process to refuse to do the script, lest they have nothing to shoot that upcoming Friday. “I absolutely hated that part of this episode, and to this day I am sorry that we did it,” Bea explains. “But it was the first episode of the second year, and there was nothing we could do. It was already written and scheduled.”
Here playing veterinarian Dr. Barensfeld, Philip Sterling would show up again in season three episode “Three on a Couch,” as Dr. Ashley, the therapist mediating the Girls’ housemate disputes.
TERRY GROSSMAN: I knew Betty was an animal activist, but none of us realized Bea and Rue were, too. In the first season, Bea had told me that on Maude, Norman Lear had assured her that “if there’s an episode that we make and you absolutely hate it, I will not air it.” I knew I couldn’t make the same promise, but I did offer what I thought was the next best thing. I said, “I promise that if you hate an episode, I’ll stand up for you. I’ll go in to Paul Witt and Tony Thomas’s office, and say, ‘I’m leaving if this episode airs.’” Susan Harris had written this episode, and really she would have had to be the one to agree to any changes. And in the end, Bea was willing to go through with the episode and just get it over with. I admired the integrity she had. She just wanted to do good work, and not present messages that were harmful.