by Jim Colucci
ANGELO:
“Is he still making you laugh like he used to?”
DOROTHY:
“Not really, but then again I haven’t seen him naked lately.”
Prior to my first appearance as Uncle Angelo, my wife and I had been living in Maui. But when we decided to spend more time on the mainland, I met with Tony and the gang, and ended up with a role on the show. I already knew Betty White somewhat, because we shared an agent and had worked on some animal causes together. And I had known Bea Arthur socially a little bit back in the fifties in New York, when I would watch her perform as a singer and comedienne at a nightclub called Le Ruban Bleu.
Among my original memories of coming to the Golden Girls set is Tony greeting me, and reminding me that I’m going to do a great job as Uncle Angelo, but that I should forget that I’m a writer. Normally, I describe myself as a writer/performer, with “writer” being the title that comes first. The words my comic character Jose Jimenez said were always about ninety percent mine. And on any other show I ever did, especially in comedy/variety shows, it was always kind of a free-for-all. Those shows’ writers and producers were usually happy that way, for actors to contribute lines and bits.
But here, what Tony was telling me was that what’s on the page is what goes to the stage. You were welcome to make suggestions along the way; once in a while, at a run-through, you could go to the director and say, “You know, it might be good if . . .” And he would take it to the writers. And obviously after the table read of each script, there would be changes. But there wasn’t usually much of a need to change anything, because those Golden Girls scripts were some of the best written I’d ever seen, practically ready to go on camera from the moment we sat down to read them. There was a unique discipline to the way The Golden Girls seemed to be written—and although I’ve never worked in legit theater, I know it’s the way things work on Broadway; as an actor, you can’t change an “a” to an “an” or add a comma without the writer’s permission. It doesn’t usually work that way on TV, but it did here, and I think that was a testament to how those people knew what the hell they were doing.
I ended up doing six episodes of the show. I never knew Uncle Angelo would become a recurring character, but it’s kind of a rule in TV that if something works, you keep going with it. The producers never made any kind of “multiple-show deal” with me or anything like that. My continued appearances were always just based on our friendship. I didn’t know that my sixth episode would be my last, or that the show itself would be ending soon after that. I’m sure if I had known I would have had some emotional reaction, because The Golden Girls was a lovely place to work.
EPISODE 72
LARCENY AND OLD LACE
Story by: JEFFREY FERRO & FREDRIC WEISS Teleplay by: ROBERT BRUCE & MARTIN WEISS Written by: MORT NATHAN & BARRY FANARO Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: FEBRUARY 6, 1988
Dorothy and Blanche fume as they pore through Rose’s diary.
Dorothy arrives home early from the beauty parlor, only to interrupt Sophia’s date with her new cigar-chomping, gambler boyfriend, Rocco (Mickey Rooney, 1920–2014). Dorothy resents the self-professed former Detroit mob boss’s bad influence over her mother, and is even more mistrustful when the man asks to store some of his stuff in Sophia’s bedroom—especially when one item turns out to be a satchel full of cash. Retracing the details of her day with her boyfriend, Sophia describes to the Girls what sounds like a bank robbery—and worse yet, one where she inadvertently drove the getaway car.
After Rocco readily admits to the heist, Sophia promises Dorothy she’ll get him to turn himself in. But Rocco proffers other plans, to whisk Sophia away to Mexico in the middle of the night. When Sophia tells him she can’t be in a relationship with a criminal, her paramour finally comes out with the truth: the closest he ever really got to hot water was as an assistant cook at the Chowder House in Bayonne, New Jersey. And the forty-five grand in his bag represents his hard-earned life savings, with which he intended to treat Sophia like the queen he sees her to be.
Sophia and Rocco (Mickey Rooney) rendezvous on the lanai.
Photos by WAYNE WILLIAMS.
Meanwhile, having secretly read Rose’s diary, Blanche and Dorothy are showing little patience for their goody-two-shoes roommate, who writes of the “two pigs” with whom she lives; and Rose is upset at the invasion of her privacy. But in a late-night counseling session in Sophia’s bedroom, the three reconcile, after Rose reveals that she didn’t even know her roommates at the time she kept that journal—a 4-H diary about the summer she raised two actual pigs for the county fair.
COMMENTARY: Guest star Mickey Rooney was a film and TV legend whose career spanned ten (!) decades. He started in vaudeville at the age of seventeen months; following his Golden Girls appearance, Mickey continued to appear frequently on TV and in films, all the way through two posthumous 2015 releases, including the second sequel to Night at the Museum.
As she ruminates about Rocco, Sophia is apparently not the only one who’s confused in this episode. Take a good look at the board game the other three Girls are playing late at night in their kitchen. They’re answering Trivial Pursuit–like questions, from red Monopoly Chance cards, as they navigate a board that’s clearly from the game Sorry.
ROBERT BRUCE: Mickey Rooney was really good, but he was also uncontrollable. He liked to do a lot of vaudeville shtick. He liked to go for big jokes—like in the one scene where he climbs over the wall onto the lanai. What we didn’t use was him grabbing his crotch.
TERRY HUGHES: Mickey didn’t have the same approach to the work that the ladies had. I don’t know if it was because he was having trouble remembering his lines or getting into the character as written, but he seemed to think the script was just a leaping-off point. He was a mighty force, and we had to work around him a bit.
EPISODE 76
MOTHER’S DAY
Story by: KATHY SPEER & TERRY GROSSMAN Teleplay by: MORT NATHAN & BARRY FANARO Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: MAY 7, 1988
The Girls are all decked out to go to a Mother’s Day brunch. But with each of them hesitating to leave the house before hearing from her kids, there’s plenty of time to reminisce about holidays past. Dorothy tells of a visit with her disapproving mother-in-law Zbornak (Alice Ghostley, 1924–2007). Blanche recounts a trip to her mother’s Virginia convalescent home, where she’s relieved to realize that the often-forgetful eighty-nine-year-old (Helen Kleeb, 1907–2003) still remembers all her slutty teenage antics. Rose recalls a bus station stopover en route to frigid St. Olaf, where she provides an alibi for an elderly nursing home escapee (Geraldine Fitzgerald, 1913–2005). And Sophia conjures Brooklyn on Mother’s Day 1957, when she, her husband, Sal (Sid Melton), and their young daughter Dorothy (Lyn Greene) convince her own mother to move in with them.
COMMENTARY: A “wraparound” show featuring each Girl in a separate Mother’s Day–themed vignette, this episode is noteworthy, first off, for the switch in which Bea Arthur plays Estelle Getty’s mother. So in essence, Bea became her own grandmother—and as Lyn Greene remembers (next page), in the end, wasn’t all that happy about it. This episode also reveals another bit of Golden Girls trivia. Blanche’s mother may advise her here never to disclose her true age, but this vignette discloses the closely guarded number nonetheless, revealing that Blanche’s near marriage to a sketchy older man happened on Christmas Day 1949, when she was seventeen.
But most interesting about “Mother’s Day” is the episode’s guest cast. Perhaps best known as Designing Women’s memory-challenged matron Bernice Clifton or as Bewitched’s bumbling Esmeralda, the late Alice Ghostley was a Tony winner and a TV icon. Here Alice plays Mrs. Zbornak, Dorothy’s tough-as-nails mother-in-law who secretly shares her daughter-in-law’s frustration with Stan, that perennial yutz.
Playing Blanche’s mother, Elizabeth, is character actress Helen Kleeb, best known as Miss Mamie Baldwin on CBS’s long-running drama The Waltons. And then
there’s the legendary stage and screen actress Geraldine Fitzgerald—who received an Outstanding Guest Actress Emmy nomination for her work in this episode—and who would return in season five, in episode 109, “Not Another Monday.”
MORT NATHAN: We always liked the idea of Estelle playing Sophia younger, which always worked well, so we decided to experiment with the idea of Bea playing Estelle’s mother. We asked Bea if she wanted to try it, and she was up for anything. We liked the idea, too, that there’s a genetic pattern in the family, where some women are really tall like Bea, and some really small like Estelle. It made us laugh in the writers’ room.
Sal Petrillo (Sid Melton) at right, facing three generations of females: his mother-in-law (Bea Arthur), Sophia, and daughter Dorothy (Lyn Greene).
Photo by WAYNE WILLIAMS.
LYN GREENE: When I read the script for this episode, I didn’t feel that the writing was as strong as it usually was for The Golden Girls. Then, on the set, I noticed that the writers seemed to be suffering from “producer laugh”—that’s when writers and producers laugh loudly at their own material, particularly when it’s not funny, as if they’re trying to convince themselves it is. That always sounds really stupid to actors, and I kept expecting Bea to call them on it. But to my surprise, she didn’t.
Bea was playing Sophia’s mother this time, meaning she was the one who had to get into the old-age makeup. It took forever, it wasn’t flattering to her, and I don’t think she enjoyed it. But frankly, the biggest problem was that Estelle and Sid Melton kept going up on their lines, and I never knew when to make my entrance. Walking into the scene that night was like entering an aphasia ward. Not only did the two of them never get their lines right, but what they did say was different with every try, meaning I had no idea when to wheel Bea into the scene.
I was in awe: I was pushing Bea Arthur in a wheelchair! And of course I didn’t want to do it wrong. The first chance I got, I guessed at my cue and wheeled her in, and nothing played well to the audience. I didn’t really have anything to do with the lack of response, but I felt personally responsible. Doing that scene was like hitting an iceberg. If there were jokes, nobody would notice them, because oceans of silence went by as you waited for the next person in the scene with something to say.
Sophia and Sal’s home in 1957 Brooklyn.
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
Then, the second time I wheeled Bea in, I accidentally pushed her into the door. As the takes went on, the scene got less and less funny—and yet more and more funny because of how badly things were going. At this point, Bea was not subtle about her displeasure. She said in her loud voice, and of course the audience could hear, “It’s not going to get any better the next time!”
It was a mess, and not a pleasant evening. And it was certainly not the scene I wanted to do, at long last, with Bea Arthur! As I looked down at an unhappy Bea, my idol, in my wheelchair, I was convinced some of the stink of this evening was going to end up on me. And I remember thinking that this was a sad way for me to have said goodbye to the show.
I was convinced they were never going to be able to salvage that vignette for the episode, but actually, when I saw it on the air, it came together much better than I had thought possible. And over three years later, they did ask me back on the show for one last episode, “Dateline: Miami.” In fact, so much time had passed that they called me and asked if I was still young enough to play Dorothy as a young woman. I was just glad that all was forgiven.
SEASON 4
EPISODE 77
THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF SOPHIA PETRILLO
Written by: KATHY SPEER & TERRY GROSSMAN Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: OCTOBER 22, 1988
While Dorothy, Blanche, and Rose have a lazy rainy day at home, Sophia sets out on her daily ritual: to take a round-trip on the bus to buy a nectarine. The three Girls snack, tell stories, and at one point fret over how poor Sophia no longer has anything constructive to do with her life. But little do they know, the old lady is actually out running circles around them. Sophia leads a senior citizens’ band to raise funds for a clinic. She volunteers as a Sunshine Lady at the local hospital, where she cheers up old Mrs. Leonard (Ellen Albertini Dow, 1913–2015) and gives her daily nectarine to a terminally ill young patient, Sam (Don “Kokko” Burnaby). Sophia returns home to find the Girls still in their pajamas from the previous night. As the three lie about the hard work they’ve done during the day, they ask Sophia what she has been doing that has kept her out so late. “What I do every day,” she replies. “I bought a nectarine.”
COMMENTARY: For as brilliant as Estelle Getty was in portraying Sophia Petrillo, and as perfectly as she landed the character’s many jokes, the actress was also often consumed with stage fright and plagued by problems remembering her lines. Sometimes, the show’s writers say, they would try to use Sophia sparingly, so as not to burden Estelle. On other occasions, particularly later in the series after director Terry Hughes had departed, it became necessary to allow the actress to redo her scenes after the audience had been released, reading her lines from cue cards. Still other times, the show’s editors would assemble some of Sophia’s longer speeches in postproduction, from bits of several different takes.
Estelle “was the only actress who ever asked for fewer words,” says Marc Cherry, who worked on the show in its final three seasons. “And if you would write something long that you loved for her, they would say, ‘Oh, she’ll break your heart.’ Because come tape night, we would have to stay late and ‘pick up’ that speech after the audience went home. And it was excruciating for her.”
Sophia’s volunteer station at the hospital.
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
Writer Richard Vaczy, too, remembers that although he and his fellow writers loved providing Sophia with her colorful stories, they eventually had no choice but to phase them out over time. “When we’d read the script on Monday, and there’d be a big Sicily story in there for Estelle, it would make us laugh,” Richard remembers. “Because after the reading, Estelle would start setting up excuses, or rationalizing why it was going to be difficult for her to do [during the taping] on Friday.”
“God bless her, Estelle had never really done anything like The Golden Girls before. That’s why she had a great deal of trouble,” explains Kathy Speer. Watching a feed from the stage on a writers’ room monitor, “we used to throw pencils at the screen, because of all the material that we’d written for her, and then had to cut back.” Estelle became famous for sneaking her lines into spots on the set, scribbling on the kitchen tablecloth, inside the cabinets, and even on the salt-and-pepper shakers—and if someone were to move one of her special props, she was prone to panic. But overall, producers opted for patience with the relative newcomer, not only because Estelle was beloved, but also because, as Kathy notes, “it worked. Estelle was petrified on most Friday nights. But with those eyes, the way she looked at everybody like a deer in the headlights—it sounds crazy, but it worked perfectly for the character.”
Sophia comes home with her customary nectarine.
Photo by NBCU PHOTO BANK via GETTY IMAGES.
Hidden within this episode in a brief exchange is a landmark moment in network television. At this point in 1988, the AIDS epidemic had been growing steadily for seven years, and yet almost no one on a scripted network show had even mentioned the dreaded virus. The Golden Girls wouldn’t tackle the subject directly until a year later (see season five, “72 Hours”); but here, although not specifically by name, the show does allude to the disease and its deadly toll, as Sophia provides encouragement for the young hospital patient she has befriended while volunteering.
ELLEN ALBERTINI DOW: This episode was my first on The Golden Girls—and the experience nearly broke my heart. When the show had first started, friends would ask me, “Why didn’t you audition for it?” And I answered them that at the time I was still a tea
cher. Now, just a few years later, here I was, on the show!
I was thrilled when I got the call to audition, and when I got the call that I’d gotten the part I was ecstatic and told everyone I knew. But then, I got another call, that they’d changed the script and written out the character I was supposed to play, Mrs. Leonard. Well, I cried and cried and cried. That’s why I remember this episode so well, this many years later. Because I vowed never again would I tell anybody I’d gotten a part until I’d actually filmed it. But then luckily, my agent called again, and guess what—they’d decided to put the part back in. It was a roller coaster I went through to get this part.
My husband, Gene Dow, who was a great actor and director, came to watch my rehearsals, and he gave me a little bit of direction. He said that on my way out, as I’m wheeling away the cart with the flowers, I should look at the flowers with excitement. Because even though Sophia is just using me to get out of delivering them, Mrs. Leonard is so lonely and is thrilled to think that someone has sent her all this. When the episode aired, I saw how Gene’s idea really helped make the scene, and I was delighted.
NINA FEINBERG WASS (producer): Estelle was paralyzed with stage fright. What should have been the most joyful experience for her, being on The Golden Girls, she was often crippled by. She was a little cowed by the fact that the other ladies never went up—which is almost freakish—and were always so spot-on. She would have periods that were almost a remission from it, and feel sort of liberated. But still, it was a weird chemical thing—Estelle would be so afraid she’d say she felt like she was out of her body, and she didn’t know what she was saying—but she’d still nail the joke.