by Jim Colucci
HAROLD GOULD: I had done a lot of situation comedies before, sometimes with people who were green, who didn’t know where the phrasing was, or didn’t know timing. But you knew coming on to this set that the ladies were great at all of that. Their confidence was comforting, and that made the whole experience more relaxed and informal. Betty in particular was a great person to be in a scene with. We’d often work out bits of business that we’d come up with together. And when we’d be outside the door, waiting for our cue to enter and we’d look at each other, you could see she was having fun.
EPISODE 114
CLINTON AVENUE MEMOIRS
Written by: RICHARD VACZY & TRACY GAMBLE Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: FEBRUARY 3, 1990
When Sophia forgets her upcoming wedding anniversary, Dorothy fears that her mother’s memory may be fading. Later, as the two women reminisce over a family photo album, Sophia mentions a carving her late husband made on the backside of her Brooklyn pantry door: SAL LOVES SOPHIA. But Dorothy notes that the pantry door was actually where her father tracked his three kids’ height measurements.
So Sophia decides to jog her memory with a trip back to the old homestead, and she and Dorothy head north, ringing the bell of the brownstone apartment where now Mr. Hernandez (David Correia) and his family reside. Once inside, Sophia touches the unchanged wallpaper, catches the familiar view out the bay window, and then heads for the kitchen to prove to her daughter that the carving she remembers is for real. But she’s dismayed to discover Dorothy was right; even now, through layers of paint, the height marks are visible on the pantry door.
Dorothy consoles her mother with a memory of her brother, Phil, as a newborn; in a flashback, we see Sophia (Flo DiRe) and Sal (Kyle T. Heffner) fussing over their son’s bassinet in the kitchen as a jealous young Dorothy (Jandi Swanson) enters. But the reminiscence does little to soothe Sophia. For one last shot at remembering, she heads for the apartment’s bedroom. Pulling out his photo from her all-purpose purse, she asks her dead husband for guidance—and gets it, from a spectral Sal (Sid Melton) himself. Sal urges his beloved wife to work hard, even in old age, to keep up her spunk and sense of joie de vivre. And soon, Sophia is her old self once more. Because on the bedroom closet door, there indeed is the famous carving: just as she had remembered, but in the wrong place.
Meanwhile, Blanche declares her burning need for an appointment with Robert, Miami’s most talented hairstylist, but can’t afford his three-hundred-dollar fee. And so Rose helps her out with a job, hiring her to assist with the senior health care survey she’s conducting for Enrique Mas. But Blanche, accustomed to putting in a grueling twelve-hour week at the museum, turns out to be the world’s laziest employee.
COMMENTARY: By this point, in the Girls’ fifth season, we’ve already met Sid Melton’s Sal, and two different Dorothys, in both Bea Arthur and Lyn Greene. But up until now, there has only been one Sophia.
However “Clinton Avenue Memoirs” brings us a different kind of flashback, to an earlier time in the characters’ lives—and so it requires a whole new set of actors. Here, there’s yet another, even younger Dorothy. And if this new, young Sophia looks familiar, it’s because a season prior, in the episode “Foreign Exchange,” actress Flo DiRe was Gina Bosco, a young Sicilian look-alike who may or not be Sophia’s natural-born daughter.
BEA ARTHUR: I still laugh when I remember the scene where Dorothy takes Sophia back to the apartment in Brooklyn. When we ring the doorbell, and when the guy comes to the door, and I put my hand over her mouth because I know she’s about to say something about Puerto Ricans. I like the scene where he keeps saying to us, “Don’t take anything.”
FLO DIRE: After my first appearance on the show, I was so happy that the producers remembered me and wanted me back—and this time, to play Sophia herself! I had studied Estelle Getty’s mannerisms carefully, the way she would twist her head and stare at someone who’d said something she didn’t like. I did that as I said my line to the actor playing Sophia’s husband about the birth of their new baby: “Caesarean!” One of the writers watching the scene loved the delivery and cackled so loudly that we had to wait for her before we could go on. So I knew I was doing something right.
RICHARD VACZY: I have to admit I didn’t like the show’s St. Olaf stories. Early on they were okay, because they would take us to this offbeat world. But as the show went on, they got so out there and ludicrous, where we would sit in the writers’ room and try to top the last St. Olaf story in terms of weirdness. Instead, what I loved about the show was when it stayed in reality. This episode is an example I’m proud of, where Sophia went home to reclaim her memories. Tracy and I always tried to exploit the real things that face people at that point in their lives.
Sal’s carved declaration of love for Sophia, on their Brooklyn bedroom door.
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
TRACY GAMBLE: Every now and then we liked to do an episode where we addressed the fact that Sophia was much older than the others. We also always liked to do flashback episodes, because we got to work with Sid Melton, whom Tony Thomas called Uncle Sid. Estelle always enjoyed the flashbacks, too. She got an Emmy nomination for this episode, and even before that, I remember that she liked it and thanked us for it—whereas usually, her reaction was usually more along the lines of panicking, “Oh my God, look how many lines I have!”
EPISODE 118
AN ILLEGITIMATE CONCERN
Written by: MARC CHERRY & JAMIE WOOTEN Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: FEBRUARY 12, 1990
A mysterious young man shows up at the house looking for Blanche’s late husband, George, and is soon seen skulking around the Girls’ local supermarket and staked out down the street. Convinced the man is obsessed with her, Blanche confronts young David (Mark Moses), and is shocked when he claims to be George’s illegitimate son.
Meanwhile, Sophia persuades Dorothy to enter the Shady Pines mother/daughter beauty pageant so she can finally beat her archfrenemy, Gladys Goldfine. They roll in a piano and practice their talent: a duet of “I Got You Babe” dressed as Sonny and Cher. Later, they return from the pageant as runners-up, but feeling victorious; they beat Gladys, who sang “Try to Remember”—but couldn’t.
COMMENTARY: This episode contains one of the series’ most famous gags, a visual so perfect it will stay with you forever: Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty, as Dorothy and Sophia, impersonating Sonny and Cher brilliantly. Much of the credit for making this storyline work must go to the show’s costume designer, Judy Evans Steele, whose work in transforming the two actresses into the famous 1970s husband-and-wife singing duo Bea calls “incredible.”
JAMIE WOOTEN: We wanted to think of a story where something that happened to George could affect Blanche’s life today. Once we had that, the story became kind of obvious to us, and we couldn’t believe they hadn’t come up with it yet. We had ten stories ready to pitch, and once they heard this one, number three on our pitch list, they said, “That’s it.” We never even got to the rest. But the interesting thing is, although we pitched it with a mother/daughter pageant as the B story, the Sonny and Cher part was not in it. Marc and I later came up with that on our own, and we didn’t ask them if we could do it; we just put it in. We ran the risk that they could have gotten it and said, “What the hell is this Sonny and Cher thing!”
BEA ARTHUR: I had never done a Cher impersonation before, but of course I had seen her, so I picked up the hair flip and the tongue thing that I did in this episode. I actually was very upset that we didn’t get to do more than we did with it, because I loved it. I loved seeing Estelle with that little furry jacket and the moustache on.
TERRY HUGHES: Once Bea entered in the Cher costume, the audience reaction was so loud that she had to stand there and vamp, just picking at her hair while waiting for the laugh to die down.
EPISODE 120
LIKE THE BEEP BEEP BEEP OF THE TOM TOM
Written by: PHI
LIP JAYSON LASKER Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: FEBRUARY 10, 1990
Blanche hesitates in having sex with Simon (Robert Culp).
Photo by ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC via GETTY IMAGES.
When Blanche’s cardiac test results show a slow pulse, Dr. Stein (Peter Michael Goetz) encourages her to check into the hospital for installation of a pacemaker. Mere days later, Blanche is already physically on the mend, but emotionally scarred by this reminder of the loss of her youth and worse yet, someday beauty. On her first postsurgery outing with Simon (Robert Culp, 1930–2010), Blanche ends the evening early, afraid to finish the date with her usual exertions. Even as the Girls counsel her to resume her normal life, Blanche makes the pronouncement that she has officially given up sex.
For the next two weeks, Blanche copes with celibacy by sucking down a constant supply of popsicles. But dealing with Simon will prove much trickier. Finally, as they return from one sexless dinner date too many, Blanche confesses to him her fears about physical intimacy. So before he agrees to leave, Simon demands a kiss. And when that doesn’t kill Blanche, she leads him back into the bedroom. When the other Girls get back from their movie, they head down the hallway to check on their friend, and are reassured by Blanche’s happy purring that life is back to normal.
Meanwhile, as part of her work for consumer advocate Enrique Mas, Rose brings home a bag full of ridiculous weight-loss products, like slacks that hook up to the vacuum cleaner and an electric upper-arm-flab stimulator. Rose manages to prove that the gimmicky gadgets don’t work—and in the process, gains four pounds.
COMMENTARY: Contrary to common belief, microwave ovens do not affect the operation of today’s pacemakers, which have built-in protections from the types of interference caused by common household appliances. That’s why, as writer Philip Jayson Lasker explains, after complaints from microwave manufacturers, several lines of dialogue referencing the Girls’ need to give away their microwave were cut from the syndicated version of the episode, and also do not appear on the show’s season-five DVD box set. But the full scene is available on YouTube, under the search term “GoldenGirls cut scene NOT ON DVD.” There, in its full context, Sophia’s response, which remained in the episode, to Blanche’s depressed complaint about the meaningless of life—“Who’s for popcorn?”—finally makes sense.
PHILIP JAYSON LASKER: The genesis of this episode was that my wife had recently received a pacemaker. What was great about The Golden Girls was that because of the women’s ages, it was one of the few places where you could incorporate that kind of story. A big segment of our audience had probably dealt with something like pacemaker surgery, or was afraid to deal with it, so I was proud of the reassurance we were able to deliver.
Bye-bye, microwave?
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
EPISODE 121
72 HOURS
Written by: RICHARD VACZY & TRACY GAMBLE Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: FEBRUARY 17, 1990
Rose receives a letter from the hospital where she had her gallbladder removed warning that during her transfusion she might have been exposed to blood containing HIV antibodies. As the ladies accompany her to the hospital for an AIDS test, Blanche comforts a very frightened Rose by explaining that she too had the test and knows what her friend is going through. But after checking out fine physically, Rose is surprised to learn that she must wait three days for the test results.
Unable to sleep, Rose begins to become hysterical, leading the ladies to realize how traumatic waiting for results can be. They discuss times when they’ve had to wait and were afraid, then vow to help Rose through whatever comes along—even though, as Sophia points out, it’s scary when the disease is so close to home. The seventy-two hours finally over, the girls all breathe a sigh of relief as Rose finds out that she’s fine.
COMMENTARY: Again capitalizing on its license to tackle hot social issues, The Golden Girls was among the first sitcoms to mention HIV and AIDS at all, and further to suggest that the epidemic was a problem for everyone, not just the gay community.
RICHARD VACZY: Tracy and I really loved the idea of showing what must that time be like between knowing something might be wrong and finding out what it is. And with the theater backgrounds of everyone on the show and the people they knew with HIV and AIDS, we thought everyone would appreciate and therefore love it. We guessed wrong. It turned out to be the darkest week I ever experienced on that stage, because the material hit so close to home.
BETTY WHITE: Not only were people understandably afraid of AIDS, but a lot of people wouldn’t even admit it existed. So this was a daring episode to do, and the writers went straight for it. It’s interesting that they picked Rose for that situation. Blanche was such a busy lady, but if it had been her story it would have taken on a whole other color. But with Rose being Miss Not-Always-With-It, it came as a real surprise.
DAVID A. GOODMAN: When Richard and Tracy were pitching the idea for this episode, I have to admit I didn’t really get it. Rose is going to have an AIDS test? I didn’t see how that could work. Now, of course, having had a career on Family Guy making AIDS jokes, I can’t really point a finger.
A relieved Rose gets her AIDS test results from the doctor (Tony Carreiro).
Photo by ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC via GETTY IMAGES.
There was a running joke in the episode where Sophia would follow Rose around, washing everything she touched. Estelle, who was already a big AIDS activist, was not happy. She didn’t like the jokes, and so she really tanked them at the table read. In general, I remember that table read being very scary, because it didn’t score. And The Golden Girls was a show where otherwise, table reads had always gone very well.
RICK COPP: I was only twenty-four when I was hired on the show, a “baby writer.” I was semi-closeted—and I think part of the reason is that I was petrified about AIDS. This episode happened only a few years after Rock Hudson had died, and Elizabeth Taylor was among only a few people who were making a big effort to get the word out about the disease. There wasn’t a lot of information out there like there is now.
PETER D. BEYT(editor): It was while I was working on The Golden Girls when we found out my partner, Dean, was HIV positive. Estelle Getty was the first person I told. Her nephew was HIV positive, so she and I now had a connection. This was a new, scary world we both had to face. News stories would show the hospital room no one would go into, except in full hazmat suits. For six months, a family member—who works in infectious diseases—wouldn’t let me go near his children, because they didn’t yet know how HIV spread. It was a lot to go through. And when I would get to work, and be carrying all this baggage, Rue and Betty and Estelle, and occasionally Bea, were friends I could talk to.
Later on, I would start directing Golden Girls episodes. But when I was an editor, I would sit with the footage every Monday after tape night, and of course watch everything very closely and carefully. And I often felt like the episodes were really relevant to my life. In “Old Boyfriends,” Dorothy has a moment where she tells the dying woman, Sarah, “The only time you’re wasting is the time you and Marvin should be spending together.” That really hit home with me, and was one of the things that inspired me to take a year off to care for Dean. In a later episode, “Home Again, Rose,” which I directed, the Girls can’t get in to see Rose after her heart attack because they’re not immediate family; well, I’d just had the same experience with Dean, after he’d had a seizure in a restaurant
But it was really “72 Hours” that for me showed what TV can do, and how far a sitcom can reach. I hadn’t gone to the taping of the episode, but I was set to edit it. I hadn’t read the script, and I had no idea what it was about, or what was coming. This was in early 1990, a time when there was still so much shame about the disease. Having grown up in Louisiana, I already was feeling shame about being gay. My partner was dying, and now I was ashamed about that, too, and feeling on some level like I deserved this.<
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So here I was, editing away, watching the episode for the first time. And I got to the point where there’s an argument between Rose and Blanche. I looked up at the screen in time for Blanche to say, “AIDS is not a bad person’s disease, Rose. It is not God punishing people for their sins!”
My heart stopped. All of a sudden, unexpectedly, here was this woman on a sitcom I was cutting, talking about what I was feeling. I always admired Rue as a star and a friend anyway, but now a character I’d come to know so well was saying what I needed to hear. I broke down, of course. I had to stop working. And then I pulled myself together—and from that point, right in the middle of my partner’s battle, I no longer thought I was a bad person. The show changed me in that moment of desperation. And my God, did the world ever need that to be said!
TRACY GAMBLE: This episode was based on a true story that had happened to my mother. She got notified that if you had had a transfusion in this certain period of time, you had to get checked. She and my dad were scared to death. It ended up fine, and she knew that the odds were against there being anything wrong. But it was hell to sweat out those seventy-two hours until she got the results.
My writing partner, Richard Vaczy, and I thought it would be a good storyline for Rose, partly because the audience might view her—and she views herself—as the last person who might have to worry about HIV. After all, she’s just a Goody-Two-Shoes from Minnesota. We also liked how with the four characters, everyone could have a different opinion about the subject, which would be a good way to raise issues we wanted to raise while still being entertaining. So, Rose had the common reaction of thinking, “I’ve never been bad—why did this happen to me?” She then lashes out and says to Blanche, “You must have gone to bed with hundreds of men. All I had was one innocent operation!” When Blanche responds, “Hey, wait a minute; are you saying this should be me and not you?” it raises questions of what is “good” and what is “bad,” and what does it matter, anyway? As Blanche reminds her that AIDS is not a bad person’s disease, she’s saying that just because I’m promiscuous, that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.