Golden Girls Forever

by Jim Colucci

  Lonny told me, “They’re going to write something for you.” It was a total shock! And then they came up with this idea of a flashback, showing Dorothy as a young woman. I think mostly what they wanted was the opportunity to show people that Estelle was not old. Estelle was thrilled to get the chance to look good!

  As I went in to do the first episode, “A Piece of Cake,” I knew I didn’t want to do an imitation of Bea. But I did study many episodes on tape, to observe how she moved, how she held her hand when she delivered a line. There were things that she did, and I knew I could do one or two of those and people would recognize the connection between my young Dorothy and Bea.

  I was told that Bea had watched my performance in “A Piece of Cake,” and that she was pleased. For me, that was as good as it could get. I was just a guest performer, and was only about thirty-one years old, and Bea Arthur had watched me; I was happy. I do also think I caught Bea smiling as she was watching the taping of one of my scenes once.

  SEASON 3

  EPISODE 52

  BRINGING UP BABY

  Written by: MORT NATHAN & BARRY FANARO Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: OCTOER 3, 1987

  When Rose gets a telegram stating that her uncle Hingeblotter has died and left her his baby, she and her roommates excitedly prepare for impending motherhood. But it turns out that the baby is not a baby, but Baby, Hingeblotter’s prized pig. And he’s also a cash cow, coming with a hundred-thousand-dollar stipend for his care.

  At twenty-nine, Baby has already exceeded typical porcine life expectancy, and so the greedy Girls agree to put up with their new male roommate’s belching and destructive tendencies just long enough to bring home the bacon. Sure enough, Baby soon takes ill, and Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia take to the mall, to spend their new riches in advance.

  But when a visiting veterinarian (Tom McGreevey) diagnoses that Baby is actually dying of homesickness, a guilty Rose makes arrangements to ship the pig back to Minnesota—with initially resistant Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia now arguing for him to stay. Ultimately, days after sending Baby back and relinquishing the money, Rose gets a letter from the animal’s new caretaker informing her that after just thirty-six hours with Cousin Gustav, Baby died peacefully in his new pen.

  COMMENTARY: The Girls had already appeared with a cat and, in season two’s “Joust Between Friends,” a living room full of dogs. But now, largely due to the actresses’ real-life passion, the animals showing up on-screen are getting larger. The title of this episode is the same as that of the classic 1938 screwball film comedy; but for the TV version, it’s the Girls taking care of a pig rather than Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn looking after a leopard.

  Also noteworthy for production purposes: with this episode, the first shot for the show’s third season, The Golden Girls moved from the Sunset Gower Studios to the nearby independent Ren-Mar (now renamed Red Studios Hollywood), the onetime home of I Love Lucy and its stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s company, Desilu. Through the mid-1990s, the lot would be a similar mini-empire once more, as the home of a handful of Witt/Thomas sitcoms including Empty Nest and Nurses.

  Sophia tolerates a visit from the Girls’ newest roommate.

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

  “Four grown women decide to live with a pig, and he’s the one with the mental problem?”

  —DOROTHY

  KATHY SPEER: I remember this episode because it was an example of how Bea could take a line that was not really a strong joke and make it huge. Dorothy didn’t want to have Baby the pig around, but the moment she found out about the money involved, Bea did one of her turns and said, “Welcome, Baby!” Every time she did that, she killed me.

  BETTY WHITE: I’ve been working with the LA Zoo for nearly fifty years, so don’t think you’re ever going to find an animal I don’t love to work with! I was excited that in this episode I got to sleep with a pig—an actual pig! Everybody who ever mentions this episode to me seems to think it was a piglet, but it was actually this huge, pink, three-hundred-pound pig! He was so good, though—a really good actor.

  TERRY HUGHES: As we rehearsed this show, of course we couldn’t have the pig there all week. The way we staged it, the pig had to cross the lanai. So as we did our camera rehearsal, we’d say, “Enter the pig.” But there was no pig there. So I’d estimate the timing for the actresses by saying, “Okay . . . pig, pig, pig, pig, pig . . . now speak!”

  On the night of the taping, the pig was great at hitting his marks and crossing through the room correctly. In fact, the next week, as we were rehearsing a scene, Estelle had to cross the room, and she said to me, “I can’t figure out how to get the timing to work here.” So I just said to her, “Well, the pig did it.” After that “the pig did it” became one of our internal catchphrases.

  LEX PASSARIS (associate director): In the first few seasons, we used an establishing shot of a house in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles to represent the Girls’ house in Miami. And this episode marked one of the few times we ever shot any live scenes there as well, with a cab pulling up in the driveway to drop off [an unseen] Sophia, and then a tow truck towing the Girls’ Mercedes away at the end.

  EPISODE 54

  STRANGE BEDFELLOWS

  Written by: CHRISTOPHER LLOYD Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: NOVEMBER 7, 1987

  As the ladies wrap up a campaign party for Gil Kessler (John Schuck), candidate for city councilman, they find a forgotten folder. Blanche is elected to take the materials over to his house, only to be “caught” by paparazzi who turn their photos into a major extramarital scandal. Blanche insists that nothing happened—but when Kessler plays along with the publicity, her roommates refuse to believe her, knowing her appetite for men. Only when the candidate finally refutes the story do the other Girls realize they owe Blanche an apology. And apparently now hooked on the honesty Blanche advised, Kessler decides that he should also admit to another secret from his past that ultimately costs him the election: he used to be a she.

  COMMENTARY: Interestingly, although this episode touches on transgender issues, it does so only as an ending beat for a story that is actually about the hurt feelings that come from friendship betrayed. Its writer, Christopher Lloyd (not the Taxi and Back to the Future actor), began his writing career as an apprentice on The Golden Girls, then moved up the writers’ ranks, eventually becoming an executive producer on the gay-sensibility-friendly hit Frasier, before most recently co-creating Modern Family.

  CHRISTOPHER LLOYD: For this episode, we originally had a different ending, but then we sort of pasted this together. At some point in the story Gil had to allude to rumors about him, so that the Girls could take that to mean an affair he was having with Blanche. And originally, he had some other dark secret, although I don’t remember what it was. The episode had a good issue at its center, an emotional place where Blanche’s roommates didn’t believe her because of her reputation. But the ending is often where all the hard work comes in in storytelling, and I think if there was a fault in the writing of The Golden Girls, it was that sometimes there could be a sort of slapdash ending to some of the episodes. This one even at the time seemed slightly unsatisfying.

  RUE McCLANAHAN: The reason Blanche gets so upset in this episode is because her dearest friends are calling her a liar. There’s no way she can prove that she’s telling the truth, and it’s very painful and devastating. This one was easy to do because those emotions were very clear and true the way they were written. It was also easy to have a crush on John Schuck, who played Gil Kessler. I thought that it was a delicious piece of casting, that he was once a woman, and John played that with such subtlety and humor. It may not be politically correct how the ending suggests that because he’s transgender he can’t get elected, but that is still going on today.

  Gil Kessler’s campaign headquarters.

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

  JOHN SCHUCK:
I had been a big fan of The Golden Girls right from the beginning. When I auditioned for the role of Gil Kessler, I thought it was a delightful and fun script. But I was a little nervous about doing the show. I had worked with Betty White on game shows, and had known her from doing some animal rescue work, but I had never before worked with Bea Arthur, and I’d heard she could be difficult.

  But Bea seemed happy with the show, and made good suggestions about her character. The only time I saw Bea get a little impatient was when Estelle was having trouble remembering her big “Picture it: Sicily”–type speech. Eventually, we did have to record that again after the audience went home, with Estelle using cue cards for the lines.

  But that was the only moment of dissension. Most of my stuff that week was with Rue, and we just laughed from beginning to end. It was a great week, because the script was in very good shape. Everyone was off book very quickly, and the director, Terry Hughes, was extremely supportive of all the actors.

  The episode’s ending, where Gil turns out to have been born female, was actually the clincher that made me really want to play the part. I had done a failed series with Sharon Gless called Turnabout, in which our characters went to sleep, and our spirits switched bodies. And so when I wake up, I’m the woman. In those days, it was very funny for Sharon to chomp on a cigar and do all sorts of butch stuff, but my part was harder to pull off. Audiences then would have had a hard time if I were to have become truly effeminate, and so I always had to look for psychological gestures, like pantomiming taking off an earring when I put the phone to my ear. So now, having had that experience, I knew instantly what I was going to do with Gil at the end. I wanted to find a gesture that would not be offensive to anybody, and yet would get the point across immediately. So I did a sort of Jack Benny take, with my hands on the side of my face—and it worked.

  EPISODE 55

  OLD FRIENDS

  Written by: KATHY SPEER & TERRY GROSSMAN Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: SEPTEMBER 19, 1987

  Sophia befriends elderly black man Alvin Newcastle (Joe Seneca, 1919–96) on a bench on the boardwalk, bonding over her veal-and-pepper sandwich. But when Sophia asks Alvin about his late wife, Edna, he suddenly becomes upset.

  The next day, Dorothy thinks it best to tail her mother down to the boardwalk, where she confers with Alvin’s similarly concerned daughter, Sandra (Janet MacLachlan, 1933–2010). When Dorothy then breaks the news to her mother that Alvin has Alzheimer’s disease, and soon will have to go live with a doctor nephew in New York, Sophia decides to savor whatever laughs the two of them have left.

  Meanwhile, believing it to be junk for donation, Blanche mistakenly gives Rose’s teddy bear, Fernando, to seemingly helpful “Sunshine Cadet” Daisy (Jenny Lewis)—who then refuses to return Rose’s cherished childhood memento. It turns out Daisy is a Sunshine Cadet with a dark side; when her demands are not met, she sends Blanche a message she can’t refuse, in the form of a stuffed brown ear. In-person negotiations don’t go much better, with Daisy threatening the bear with a pistol filled with red ink until the Girls agree to buy her a ten-speed Schwinn.

  When Rose comes home and sees Daisy with a one-eared Fernando, she initially demands that Blanche pay the ransom to set things right. But by the next morning, Rose has seemingly had a change of heart. Taking Daisy by the shoulders, Rose gives the girl a heartfelt speech about accepting loss; then, just as Daisy least expects it, Rose grabs the bear and pushes the brat out the door with these words of wisdom: “Sometimes life just isn’t fair, kiddo.”

  COMMENTARY: Guest star Joe Seneca had started his career as a singer and songwriter, penning hits like “Break It to Me Gently” and “It’s Gonna Work Out Fine.” On-screen, he portrayed two college presidents, in Spike Lee’s 1988 film School Daze, and as the head of the fictional, historically black Hillman College on The Cosby Show. Ironically, at the time he played Alzheimer’s-stricken Alvin, his real-life career was just starting to sizzle. In fact, Golden Girls showrunners Terry Grossman and Kathy Speer remember, Joe had just come off back-to-back roles in the hit films Crossroads and Silverado at the time, so his casting was considered a coup for their Saturday night sitcom.

  Interestingly, the episode’s other main guest star may not have had a musical connection at the time—but she does now. In 2015, singer/songwriter Jenny Lewis revisited her child-star past in the music video for her single “She’s Not Me,” with a reprise of her character from the 1989 film Troop Beverly Hills as well as a re-creation of her teddy-threatening moment in the living room of “The Gilded Gals,” with Zosia Mamet as a Dorothy look-alike, Vanessa Bayer impersonating Rose, and Fred Armisen as an eerily convincing Sophia.

  The Girls’ new studio for season three and beyond, Ren-Mar, was in what was then a seedier section of Hollywood, but the new digs offered more room for some fun new toys. This episode marks the first time we see the show’s boardwalk set; it would return later in the series, such as in fourth-season episode “Sophia’s Wedding: Part 2,” as Sophia and her new husband, Max Weinstock (Jack Gilford), decide to open a stand selling pizza and knishes.

  With its multiple levels, angles, and even lighting effects suggesting lapping waves, this boardwalk is the type of set for which the show’s production designer, Ed Stephenson, had already become famous—or perhaps infamous. By the show’s later days, writer Jamie Wooten remembers, “When we wrote our scripts, we would have to write in the stage directions ‘a small banquet room,’ ‘a small convent.’ Because Ed was from the movies, and would build these things huge and cavernous, and they were expensive. So our line producers would ask us always to stress the word ‘small,’ because that’s how they kept him reined in.”

  TERRY GROSSMAN: This was the episode we submitted for Emmy consideration for The Golden Girls’ third season—the year we lost. But I think this was a really good episode. In fact, afterward, we would get mild pressure from the network about the character of Daisy: “You could bring her back. You established that she lives down the street.” Especially because we had a show about older characters, the network was always looking for a way to get younger people in there. But we countered their suggestion by noting that we didn’t need a child character, because we knew we already had children in the audience tuning in to watch Estelle.

  TERRY HUGHES: I know Betty was really anxious about pushing the girl. She was concerned about whether the audience would accept it. She asked me: “What are people going to think?” And I told her: “They are going to cheer, because the girl is a little monster, and she’s asking for it!” Rose’s actions were totally justified by the episode’s setup. And when that moment came, and the audience did erupt, I think Betty felt a great deal of relief.

  BETTY WHITE: This episode ended up being one of my favorites. I was working with a little girl actress, a very professional little girl. She was very much the little spitfire, and had a kind of stagey mother with her. We rehearsed the scene, and by the time we got to play it in front of the audience, I thought, “I’ve kind of had it with this little actress.” So I really grabbed that bear and pulled it in, and the audience fell apart, because I think they were feeling the same thing: get that kid’s bear! The character was a monster, so actually I’m sure my feelings were for the character, not for the little girl. At least I hope with all my heart that I was better than that! But I can’t be sure. I’d like to say I pulled my punch, but I’ll bet I gave her a pretty good shove. Because I really had to pull the bear away, shove her and slam the door quickly, and make sure the door didn’t hit her. In the heat of the battle, when you’re playing the scene, that’s a lot to keep track of. In the end, I loved that moment, because Rose, the one you’d least expect, got the chance to stand up for herself. She didn’t often get the chance to come out on top.

  Sophia with her new friend on the board-walk, Alvin Newcastle (Joe Seneca).

  Photo by ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC via GETTY IMAGES.

  Grab That Dough host Guy Corbin (Jim MacKrell) helps Blanche spi
n the show’s big wheel.

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

  EPISODE 63

  GRAB THAT DOUGH

  Written by: WNIFRED HERVEY Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: JANUARY 23, 1988

  Sophia has four contestant tickets to be on the Girls’ favorite game show, Grab That Dough. Problem is Sophia accidentally gave the show the wrong return address; she had the tickets routed through Sicily, and now the Girls have until tomorrow to get themselves out to Hollywood for the taping. On their last-minute westbound flight, the airline promptly loses their luggage. And what’s worse, the officious desk clerk Nancy (Lucy Lee Flippin) has already given away their hotel rooms.

  For a seventy-five-dollar bribe, Nancy lets the girls sack out in the lobby, where during the night, somebody else plays Grab That Dough by stealing all of their purses. Still, they do make the morning’s game show taping, where Blanche suggests to Dorothy that they dump Rose and Sophia and team up with a couple of ringers from Milwaukee, the Kaplan brothers. Dorothy points out that splitting up doubles their chances of going home with prize money, but a suddenly-smart Rose isn’t buying it. In fact, while Willard Kaplan (Charles Green) keeps forfeiting points with his itchy buzzer finger, Rose and Sophia clean up in the trivia lightning round.

  But Dorothy and Blanche’s green team is back on top when they win the chance to Grab That Dough in the show’s signature vacuum-pressured money booth, and Dorothy gives it a go, hauling in nine hundred dollars with—as host Guy Corbin (Jim MacKrell) so indelicately puts it—her “big meat hooks.” But greed then gets the better of the Girls, as they impulsively trade their winnings for what’s behind curtain number three: an electric skillet and a lifetime supply of soup.