Golden Girls Forever

by Jim Colucci

  The garage, puzzlingly located somewhere on the Girls’ property, was the site of the Girls’ equally puzzling foray into mink farming.

  Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.

  BETTY WHITE: We all hated this episode. Bea was the one most upset. We were so glad to get through it. It was a difficult week, as I remember—and not that funny. I’m sure we all gave opinions about certain things in it, and we made the point about what happens to the animals. And anyway it was so out of character for the Girls to be raising minks—but it was too late to change.

  RUE McCLANAHAN: I would have preferred having [our characters] see the light about fur, but that’s how they wrote it. And I have to say it was a funny ending when the two males started copulating.

  EPISODE 27

  LADIES OF THE EVENING

  Written by: BARRY FANARO & MORT NATHAN Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: OCTOER 4, 1986

  Burt Reynolds stops by for an impromptu lunch date with Sophia.

  Photo by ALICE S. HALL/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK, via GETTY IMAGES.

  BURT REYNOLDS

  “Which one’s the slut?”

  Blanche, Dorothy, and Rose dress up for the premiere of Burt Reynolds’s new movie, but are instead arrested as Miami’s most “experienced” hookers when they stop for a drink in the lobby of a South Beach hotel. Whilst in the slammer, the Girls dispense some aged wisdom to their young, sex-working cell mates; they even talk Meg (Rhonda Aldrich), coincidentally a St. Olaf native, out of “the life.” When none of the three Girls is willing to relinquish her spot at the premiere to Sophia in exchange for bail, Sophia grabs the tickets, attends the event alone—and makes fast friends with Burt Reynolds, who later shows up at the house to escort her to lunch.

  The Miami jail cell where the Girls encounter their fellow “prostitutes.”

  Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.

  KATHY SPEER: As we talked about Florida in the writers’ room, the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre kept coming up. We’d write lines like: “We’re going to see Mr. So-and-So at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre.” Burt Reynolds had been and still was a huge movie star, and I think perhaps the only reason he was willing to do our show at all was because it gave him a chance to dispel the false rumors that were circulating at the time that he had AIDS.

  BARRY FANARO: Right from season one, people in Hollywood knew about The Golden Girls, and wanted to be a part of it. We would find out celebrities were watching. Betty would sometimes come in and say, “You know who loves the show?” In one case it was Burt Reynolds. So we asked Betty, “Do you think he would do an episode?” And she agreed to find out. Burt’s appearance turned out to be our first big cameo, and it drove the writing of this episode. We knew he wanted to do only a couple of lines, and so we decided to save him for the end. We came up with the idea that the ladies would win Burt Reynolds movie premiere tickets, and then worked backward from there.

  Burt was terrific, even though he was, weirdly enough, kind of nervous. We put him in a tough predicament, having to come in cold and deliver punch lines at the end of the episode, and he was afraid he was going to flub. If you listen to the episode carefully, you can hear his throat kind of catch. But the scene ended up working perfectly. From the shock of seeing him at the front door, through Sophia saying she knows him, through his question, “Which one's the slut?” and the three Girls replying in unison, “I am!” there were huge, rolling laughs that went on forever.

  RUE McCLANAHAN: This one was a heck of a lot of fun to work on. For one thing, one of the little chippies in the cell with us was played by my niece, Amelia Kinkade, before she became a very successful pet psychic. Burt Reynolds had just one scene at the end, and as I recall he came in only on tape day. But certainly, we realized our show was a big deal when we got Burt to come on!

  LEX PASSARIS (associate director): Our costume designer, Judy Evans, God bless her, had dressed all the hookers as sexy as they could be while still being in good taste. But by the time we got to the middle of shooting the dress show, the first of two times we taped the episode that night, one of the young ladies, Rue’s niece, had apparently decided she needed to tart it up a little more. So where Judy had given her a flesh-colored brassiere for under her top, she had opted not to wear it. The director made sure we got a close-up of her saying her one line, and suddenly there she was, with her top semi-exposed for the camera to see. We didn’t have the term then, but it was a “wardrobe malfunction.”

  “I can’t believe these dumb cops would think anyone would pay money to sleep with you!”

  —SOPHIA

  Everyone in the booth simultaneously screamed, “Oh my God!” Food, falling out of people’s mouths. And of course, Judy ran into the booth and said, “It wasn’t me! I gave her a brassiere!” Once everyone realized who it was, we realized, “Okay, she’s just being a little ambitious.” So we fixed it for the second show, the one that aired, and she still has her line, but while properly dressed.

  Sophia visits the Girls in jail before using their tickets to Burt Reynolds’ movie premiere.

  Photo by ALICE S. HALL/NBCU/NBC PHOTO BANK via GETTY IMAGES

  Jean (Lois Nettleton) professes her true feelings to Rose.

  Photo by NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK via GETTY IMAGES.

  EPISODE 29

  ISN’T IT ROMANTIC?

  Written by: JEFFREY DUTEIL Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: NOVEMBER 8, 1986

  Dorothy gets a visit from her college friend Jean (Lois Nettleton, 1927–2008), who is mourning the loss of her partner, Pat. As only Dorothy knows, Pat was short for Patricia; Jean is a lesbian. During her stay, Jean finds she has much in common with Rose; but problems then arise when Jean admits to Dorothy that she may be falling in love with her naïve roommate. Sophia reveals she always suspected about Jean’s lesbianism, but Blanche is shocked—and jealous that Jean would prefer Rose over her. The last to catch on, Rose feigns sleep as Jean awkwardly attempts to explain her feelings of affection one night at bedtime. But the next morning, Rose tells Jean that she’s flattered, and the two women decide that friendship is certainly enough.

  COMMENTARY: This episode marks the first time the post-Coco Golden Girls addressed the issue of homosexuality. Its most famous joke in its most famous scene—where the concept of liking anything but men is so foreign to Blanche that she briefly confuses the words “lesbian” and “Lebanese”—was conceived as an in-joke referring to producer Tony Thomas’s famous family.

  Prior to this episode, Estelle Getty had not met Lois Nettleton, but they shared a mutual friend in TV director John Bowab. John had advised Lois to downplay the character as much as possible, “because if you try to compete with those four ladies, you’ll come up a loser. It’s not a funny role, so play it as honestly and simply as you can.” Lois took her friend’s advice to heart. And as John recalls, although Estelle had at first loved the idea of casting a feminine woman like Lois to play Jean, “at the table reading, she thought Lois sounded dull. Estelle says she thought to herself, ‘Gee, she’s one of those actresses who’s not going to do anything at the table reading.’ Then, the second day of rehearsal came, and Estelle thought, ‘She’s really not doing anything. I wonder when she’s going to do something!’ On the third day, Estelle was convinced the producers were going to fire Lois: ‘She’s not doing a damn thing! She’s just lying there!’ And then, Estelle says, on the fourth day, she realized, ‘That bitch! She’s making the rest of us look like we’re overacting!’” John says that from that point on, Estelle and Lois became great friends. “And Estelle ended up telling that story five thousand times, and said that she learned so much herself that day.”

  Loaded with first-time on-TV laughs, this episode earned a 1987 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series. For directing it, Terry Hughes took home not only the Emmy, but that year’s Directors Guild of America Award as well. And after Betty White�
��s 1986 Emmy win for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, Rue McClanahan took home the trophy in 1987, partly due to her performance here.

  PAUL WITT: This was a great episode. We knew that people loved the show, and we didn’t worry about any backlash about doing an episode with a lesbian character. The idea that these [experienced] women, among their children and friends, would never have had contact with gay men and women would have been absurd.

  MORT NATHAN: Because the show was a hit, we had the license at the time to try things that other shows couldn’t do. When we would talk about gay and lesbian relationships, it wasn’t so much that we wanted to do a “gay” show or an “issues” show that was controversial, but more that we thought this was an area that seemed interesting, funny, and organic to what we do. We felt there would be big laughs there, areas of unmined comedy, and we could get away with it because we were who we were. We loved taking advantage of those opportunities, like having Blanche, someone with so much sex experience, turn out to be a little ignorant of terminology and not even know the word “lesbian.” It was a chance to make fun of how she thought she was sexually sophisticated. The fact that people were emotionally touched by us reaffirming gay rights or any of the social issues we brought up was an additional benefit. We weren’t consciously trying to make a preachy show, but we were touched later that people appreciated what we did.

  RUE McCLANAHAN: After Blanche singing on the piano at the Rusty Anchor, that [“lesbian”/“Lebanese”] scene is my second favorite because the writing is so brilliant. Blanche has her areas of conservatism, and she obviously didn’t know what a lesbian was; she didn’t get the word. And then it’s such a beautiful turnaround from that to being jealous. Blanche wanted to be queen again, no matter what the context.

  BETTY WHITE: Even someone as naïve as Rose is able to sense when something is outside her ordinary realm of experience, and so she senses that Jean is attracted to her. In the eighties, we weren’t quite where we are today when it comes to gay issues, and so particularly for the time, I’m glad Rose let Jean down easy.

  For the scene with Jean talking to Rose in bed, the director kept close-up on my face all the while, and when she started talking, I popped my eyes open and didn’t move a muscle. That was the thing about the way the show was directed. A lot of the comedy was not from what was said but what was not said—the reactions.

  JEFFREY DUTEIL: I had watched The Golden Girls’ first season and was surprised that after the gay houseboy in the pilot the show hadn’t featured any other gay characters. So, during the summer between the first and second seasons, I wrote this episode—“Isn’t It Romantic?”—as a spec script. Shortly afterward, I saw the name Winifred Hervey, with whom I had worked on The New Odd Couple, in the show’s credits, and sent the script to her. I was so naïve. Producers almost never agree to read spec scripts of their own shows; actually they barely have time to read anything at all.

  But Wini liked my script, and forwarded it to the showrunners, who called me in to meet with them. As it turns out, The Golden Girls had been looking to do a gay episode, and when mine came across the transom, the timing was just right, and they bought it. And in fact, they ended up bumping it up to be the fifth episode of the season, rather than the twelfth or thirteenth as originally planned.

  In the first draft I’d written, Dorothy’s friend visits with her daughter, and it was the daughter who was gay. But everything seemed wrong about the story, and I was struggling to get through it. And then something happened that has never happened to me before or since. My partner, Scott, and I were in Las Vegas, and I dreamed the entire episode as I ended up writing it. I woke up in the middle of the night and scribbled it on a yellow pad. The show just laid itself out, a beginning, middle, and end. I can’t explain it.

  The lines that people like to quote from this episode, where Blanche confuses the words “lesbian” and “Lebanese”—“Isn’t Danny Thomas one!”—came from my original script; in fact, I recently came across a copy that I’d typed out on my Selectric. This was the first episode where we ever saw Rose’s bedroom. And in the scene there between Jean and Rose, my original script was the same as what ended up airing—up until the point where Jean says, “I’m quite fond of you.” I had written that when Rose—not knowing how to react—fakes snoring, Jean would just get under the covers and go to sleep too. But when I went to the episode’s taping, I saw that they had added a couch to the bedroom, so that at that moment, Jean instead would take a blanket and move over to this little lounge, and sleep separately. After the episode’s table read, I hadn’t been invited to rewrites or to run-through rehearsals, so I don’t know at what point it changed, or who called for the change; I wondered if it had been NBC’s Standards and Practices. But someone had obviously not wanted to leave the impression that Jean and Rose were going to stay in bed together for the rest of the night. I guess this was, after all, 1986.

  BLANCHE:

  “I’ve never known any personally, but isn’t Danny Thomas one?”

  DOROTHY:

  “Not ‘Lebanese,’ Blanche! ‘Lesbian!’”

  LOIS NETTLETON: When they were casting Jean, I think what they were probably looking for was the way I actually played her, and that is, as a very straight person. Not “straight” in the sense of not being gay, but rather as an ordinary-seeming woman. I had played a gay woman one other time in the early seventies, on Medical Center, and I think that character was similar to what they wanted for Jean—someone who just didn’t seem stereotypically masculine in any way.

  I guess this is a somewhat historic episode, but I just approached Jean not by concentrating on her sexuality but by figuring out who she is as a human being. Straight or gay, we all have so many different types of relationships with other people; what are hers? Well, from that wonderful, hilarious script, you could see Jean was sensitive, outgoing, and had a good sense of humor, at ease with herself and with life. She’s suffered a loss, and I’ve had mine, too; all I had to do was substitute a woman for a man. And it wasn’t hard to imagine falling in love with Rose. It was perfectly logical, because her character was so charming and honest and innocent—the kind of person anyone can like and feel affection for.

  All week during rehearsal, I laughed when I saw Rose’s wonderfully funny reaction when I tell her I love her, where her eyes pop wide open facing away from me in bed. And I’ll always remember the lines in the scene where Blanche gets jealous that Jean picked Rose over her. The writing was great, and so were the women, getting laughs all over the place. In fact, after rehearsal one day I told my friend John Bowab that I was starting to get nervous that I wasn’t getting any laughs. Was I approaching this the wrong way? He told me to keep doing what I was doing, because I was there to be the “straight man.” And he turned out to be right. The episode worked beautifully.

  EPISODE 33

  DOROTHY’S PRIZED PUPIL

  Written by: CHRISTOPHER LLOYD Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: MARCH 14, 1987

  Dorothy does homework with young tutee Mario (Mario Lopez).

  Photo by ALICE S. HALL/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK via GETTY IMAGES.

  Dorothy surreptitiously enters one of her students’ English class papers in a writing contest, but the surprise turns out to be an unpleasant one for young Mario Sanchez (Mario Lopez), an illegal Cuban immigrant, when his first-place win draws the attention of the INS and gets him deported. Meanwhile, Rose’s sudden streak of losing things leads her to become Blanche’s wiedenfluegen—in English: slave—for an entire week when it appears she’s lost a pair of her earrings. But in the end the roles are reversed, after Blanche’s boyfriend Sam Burns (John Braden) stops by with an entire cache of Blanche’s jewelry he’s found between the cushions of his loveseat.

  MARIO LOPEZ: Even before The Golden Girls, I had already gotten to work with Bea Arthur a couple of times—the very first time I was on television, on a Norman Lear–produced show called a.k.a. Pablo, and on a pilot for Witt/Thomas Productions call
ed The Arena. I loved her. Even as a kid, I could recognize how brilliant and funny all four of those ladies were, and of course now as an adult, I appreciate them even more.

  They were class acts, the way everybody should be. I was just some kid, but they were so sweet, inviting me to lunch, which they didn’t have to do. And they were always willing to help me with my lines—which meant learning from the best. Even today, people come up to me and tell me they loved the episode, and it just cracks me up. That show is timeless, and I’m happy to have been part of it.

  EPISODE 34

  IT’S A MISERABLE LIFE

  Written by: BARRY FANARO & MORT NATHAN Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: NOVEMBER 1, 1986

  The Girls pass around a petition to oppose the city’s efforts to widen Richmond Street, which would require chopping down a historic tree. But the owner of the property on which the tree sits, Frieda Claxton (Nan Martin, 1927–2010), won’t sign.

  Ever the optimist, Rose plies the no-good neighbor with pastries, until finally she appears to agree to support their cause. But when the Girls present the petition to the city council, and Mrs. Claxton testifies about her hatred of all living things, Rose commands the misanthropic matron to drop dead—and then, right there on the spot, she does.

  Rose resolves to put together a funeral for friendless Frieda. The Girls all agree to chip in, despite the high prices quoted by mortician Mr. Pfeiffer (Thom Sharp), but their expensive gesture is nearly for naught, as no one shows up to pay any respects. Then, just as they’re about to give up hope, one elderly woman (Amzie Strickland, 1919–2006) approaches the casket—only to give it a good kick when she realizes it’s not her good friend, but mean old Mrs. Claxton inside.