by Jim Colucci
Before we started writing, Richard and I talked to HIV experts at UCLA and asked what information they’d like us to put across. At that time, there was a cottage industry of testing centers where people could walk in, and then would call up days later for the results. And while it was good that people were getting tested, the UCLA people stressed that there needs to be counseling for people when they get their results, whether positive or negative. So we were happy that this episode became an opportunity to get the message out there that either way, people need support—which is what we have the doctor say to Rose when he says that she’s fine. In Rose’s case, she has the built-in support system of Dorothy, Blanche, and Sophia. They are the ones to help her make it through the three-day waiting period and all of the denial and panic. And they do it by letting her know that no matter what Rose’s test results might be, she is going to be okay because she is loved.
EPISODE 123
SISTERS AND OTHER STRANGERS
Written by: MARC CHERRY & JAMIE WOOTEN Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: MARCH 3, 1990
Blanche gets a call from her estranged sister Charmaine (Barbara Babcock), who is coming to town for a bookstore signing of her novel, Vixen: Story of a Woman. As Charmaine and Blanche reminisce, they’re shocked to see that maturity has brought them the possibility of friendship; they get along so well that when Charmaine asks for Big Daddy’s pocket watch, Blanche promises to bring it to the signing. But before that can happen, Blanche tears through the roman à clef and decides it’s a cheap, sensationalistic retelling of her own romantic life. She makes a scene at the signing, and later refuses her sister’s calls. Only when Charmaine comes back to the house and barges into Blanche’s bedroom looking for the watch do the two reconcile as they realize the true reason they never got along: they’re too much alike—to the point that even their tawdry escapades seem similar.
Meanwhile, Stan’s cousin Magda (Marian Mercer, 1935–2011), a recent émigrée from Czechoslovakia, visits Miami; and when she can’t stand Stan’s cheap ways, she stays with the Girls instead. Magda loves Slurpees, but is otherwise very critical of America and longs for simpler Communist days. At the bookstore, Dorothy suggests two tomes for her to read to understand the importance of freedom: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and Vanna White’s autobiography. Ultimately, it’s the latter that does the trick, convincing Magda to return to her homeland in order to be part of its new, free future.
COMMENTARY: When the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, the oppressed peoples formerly behind the Iron Curtain gained the potential for a new freedom—and The Golden Girls writers gained a new storyline. This episode, written just weeks after this major shift in world politics, addressed the differences between the dueling ideologies of communism and capitalism the way only this witty sitcom could: with both intellectual debate and jokes about 7-Eleven and Wheel of Fortune.
Playing Stan’s cousin Magda, blonde musical comedy actress Marian Mercer had won a Tony Award for her performance in 1968’s Promises, Promises. In 1980, she appeared in the classic film comedy 9 to 5, and was soon cast in the role for which she is perhaps best known, as Nancy, the maître d’ in the rooftop restaurant at the center of the Witt/Thomas/Harris sitcom It’s a Living.
JAMIE WOOTEN: This episode was another example of how Marc Cherry and I came up with ideas for the show because we had been such big fans as viewers. We knew from earlier episodes that Blanche had a sister, Charmaine, whom she did not like. And I’m from North Carolina, so I loved the idea of a Southern sister you already don’t trust. Then we added to that by figuring: what makes it worse? Having her come to town to bite you on the ass with her new book! I still have the prop book that we used in the episode, in fact. The prop people made the cover for Vixen: Story of a Woman, and we put it as a book jacket over a copy of the Mary Wilson memoir Dreamgirl: My Life as a Supreme. Which is pretty gay. And after all, only gay men could come up with an arcane word like “vixen” in the first place.
The cover of Charmaine’s controversial book.
Photo courtesy of JAMIE WOOTEN.
BARBARA BABCOCK: Sometimes you can have a very good actor playing opposite you, but it’s almost like making music, in that if the other person’s rhythm is different, it might not work. Perhaps partly because Rue and I were both using Southern accents, I found we were both right in sync. Early in my career, I’d played a lot of small TV roles where I became known for doing accents, and I’d done Southern in a few Tennessee Williams plays. You can slide a lot of insinuation into a Southern accent, moving your voice through the word and adding all kinds of innuendoes.
I don’t have a sister, so the sibling rivalry between Blanche and Charmaine was something I had to imagine. But it wasn’t hard, because I found that Rue and I worked very well together. When Blanche and Charmaine both look up and check themselves out in the mirror over Blanche’s bed, that was something Rue and I cooked up during the week, during rehearsal. It added a nice, silent endnote that underscored their relationship.
EPISODE 124
CHEATERS
Written by: TOM WHEDON Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: MARCH 24, 1990
After Dorothy gets a phone message from Glen O’Brien (Jerry Orbach, 1935–2004), the married man with whom she’d had an affair four years earlier, she stays home waiting for another call. Glen does phone again, mentioning something important to discuss, and leading a nervous Dorothy to his apartment doorstep.
Newly divorced, Glen proposes rekindling their romance, kissing Dorothy and leading her to the bedroom. The next thing you know, Dorothy’s taking him home to meet Mom and the rest of the Girls. But even before they walk through the door, a bribe of cannoli in hand for Sophia, the man asks Dorothy to marry him.
Blanche and Rose profess their joy, and Dorothy can’t believe her own happiness. But the next day at his apartment, their bliss is interrupted by a call from Glen’s ex-wife, Bernice. When Glen lies to her and claims he’s alone, Dorothy’s eyes are opened to Glen’s true motives, to score a wife to take care of him.
Meanwhile, at the mall, Blanche and Sophia fall prey to a scam artist (Sam McMurray), who pretends to find a wallet full of cash, and his accomplice, a “nun” (Nancy Lenehan). Tricked out of two thousand dollars, the two Girls admit the embarrassing affair to Enrique Mas’s newest protégée, Rose, who informs them they’ve been victims of a con called the Pigeon Drop, and urges them to contact the police. Blanche does ultimately speak to a Sergeant Delfino, who asks her not only to come to the station to make an identification from a lineup of nuns, but also to have dinner with him that Saturday night.
Dorothy rekindles her romance with a very different-looking Glen O’Brien (Jerry Orbach).
Photo by ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC via GETTY IMAGES.
TOM WHEDON: In the show’s first season, Dorothy had had an affair with Glen O’Brien (then played by Alex Rocco), only to find out he was married. I wanted to put her into that situation again. It was about Dorothy being a woman, not a big ugly woman like some of the Girls’ insults too frequently implied. There’s a moment at the end of the first act, where Dorothy and Glen are about to go into his bedroom, and she says to him, “The last thing my mother said to me was that she wanted me to keep my feet on the floor.” And he says, “My mother wanted me to be a priest.” To which Dorothy replies, “I guess it’s a bad day for mothers,” and walks with him into the bedroom. Bea was so happy with the episode, and told me that closing line for the act was her favorite line ever on the show.
SAM MCMURRAY: I had worked with Witt/Thomas before, including on the first episode of Empty Nest after the pilot. My mother was an actress and was friends with Bea, and I’d worked not only with Rue, but even with Estelle, when she guest starred on a series I did in New York called Baker’s Dozen. But really, when I got the call asking if I’d do this episode, the main reason I said yes was Jerry Orbach. I didn’t know him, but I wanted to. So I had a lot of fun doing the episode—even though I thought it was rea
lly odd. After all, I play a con man—who gets away with it!
NANCY LENEHAN: It was thrilling getting to work with people like Bea Arthur and Jerry Orbach. But I also remember this episode because my character was supposed to confuse everybody with her scam—but the whole thing just ended up confusing me. I would do take after take, and I kept double-talking myself until I was so confused. I couldn’t get it straight, and I swear by the end I had my eyes crossing. Finally, Rue had me put the lines on her chest so that I could just read them.
EPISODE 125
THE MANGIACAVALLO CURSE
MAKES A LOUSY WEDDING PRESENT
Written by: PHILIP JAYSON LASKER Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: MARCH 3, 1990
Dorothy’s goddaughter Jenny (Tanya Louise) is about to marry the grandson of Giuseppe Mangiacavallo (Howard Duff, 1913–90), the man who had been arranged to marry teenaged Sophia in Sicily but stood her up at the altar as he fled to America—and so naturally, young Sophia put a curse on him and all future generations of his family.
Meanwhile, the other Girls are having problems of their own: after lending dateless Dorothy one of her men, Blanche tries to steal Doug (Stuart Nisbet) back. And with Miles out of town, Rose will be solo, too—which presents a problem, because ever since Rose’s own nuptials with her late husband, Charlie, weddings have made her uncontrollably horny. So, as Dorothy and Blanche have a showdown in a ladies’ room stall, Rose flirts with a waiter (Jonathan Schmock), and then leaves on Doug’s arm—before ultimately coming to her senses and catching a flight to meet up with Miles.
Finally, just as the man who once jilted Sophia asks her to dance, the curse kicks in, as the bride and groom quarrel on the dance floor. Giuseppe asks Sophia to undo her malediction; and as he recounts his own teenage fears of being trapped in marriage and in his tiny village, he gives Sophia closure by revealing that leaving her behind had been the hardest thing he ever had to do. At the same time, Dorothy intercepts Jenny in the ladies’ room and encourages her to go talk with her new husband, Joey (Myles Berkowitz). And by the time Sophia and Giuseppe open the doors of the bridal suite, it’s abundantly clear the couple has reconciled.
COMMENTARY: This episode expertly weaves its two main stories, Sophia’s Mangiacavallo curse and Dorothy and Blanche’s rivalry, with yet a third storyline, or “runner,” about Rose’s suddenly raging sex drive. As writer and theater lover Tom Whedon explains, it was he who came up with “Mangiacavallo” (Italian for “horse eater”), stealing it from the surname of the male lead in Tennessee Williams’s Tony-winning 1951 play The Rose Tattoo.
Howard Duff, here playing Mangiacavallo, started his career in radio, as Dashiell Hammett’s famous private eye in The Adventures of Sam Spade from 1946-50. Recognized today from his role as Dustin Hoffman’s attorney in 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer, Howard built his career in film noir and Westerns of the ’40s and ’50s, often appearing opposite his wife Ida Lupino. By the eighties, Howard had found another niche in TV’s primetime soaps such as Flamingo Road, Dallas, and Knots Landing.
As Dorothy and Blanche look on, Sophia snubs her onetime fiancé Giuseppe Mangiacavallo (Howard Duff).
Photo by ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC via GETTY IMAGES.
Playing the waiter, actor and writer Jonathan Schmock is probably best known for another restaurant role, as the snooty maître d’ in the 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. This episode marked his first Golden Girls appearance, but he would soon pop up in three more in the show’s final two seasons: as a robber in “Melodrama,” a theater director in “Even Grandmas Get the Blues,” and a cop in “The Monkey Show,” and would later pen the Christmas episode of its spinoff, Golden Palace.
PHILIP JAYSON LASKER: Tom Whedon came up with the name “Mangiacavallo,” which made me laugh. The rest of the title, “Makes a Lousy Wedding Present,” was the type of thing I would typically come up with at three in the morning. I obviously like to come up with odd titles, like “Like the Beep Beep Beep of the Tom Tom” [a play on a lyric from Cole Porter’s “Night and Day”]. I remember one time, right after we finished a table read for an episode—it could have been this one—Bea muttered aloud to herself, “Do you bring in someone to come up with these lousy titles?” I was sitting right across from her, and I said, “Bea, that’s my title.” This is where Bea’s brutal honesty came in, and I loved her for it. She said, “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings, but . . . it’s a lousy title.”
BEA ARTHUR: Growing up, I idolized Ida Lupino. That’s who I wanted to be: a little blonde floozy who gets involved with bad people in roadhouse movies. Howard Duff, her former husband, had been a very famous radio detective. He was always very sexy, and very interesting. But when he came on The Golden Girls, I was disappointed that he wasn’t young and gorgeous anymore. The part here wasn’t even something heroic, and I caught myself wondering, “Why is he doing this?” Then I remembered how my mother would say the same things about Bette Davis, and I would get so angry with her.
SEASON 6
EPISODE 129
BLANCHE DELIVERS
Written by: GAIL PARENT & JIM VALLELY Directed by: MATTHEW DIAMOND Original airdate: SEPTEMBER 22, 1990
As Rose announces her intention to revive her long-forgotten figure skating career in the U.S. National Senior Sports Classic, Blanche prepares for a visit from her now-pregnant single daughter (Debra Engle). Rebecca’s latest surprise is that she’d like to have the baby in Miami—and not in a hospital, but in a birthing center.
Luckily for Blanche, when the Girls visit said center, run by a vegetarian midwife (Leila Kenzle), Rebecca is scared off by all the screaming that accompanies the unanesthetized version of the miracle of birth. But when Blanche, still embarrassed by the stigma of artificial insemination, presses her luck by attempting to convince her daughter not to deliver in her hometown, Rebecca vows to leave in the morning for Atlanta, alone.
However that night, in the beginning of labor, Rebecca comes to Dorothy and Sophia for help. Rose screws up the one little job with which she’s tasked, calling the wrong “coach”—her ice-skating instructor Mr. Ninervini (John O’Leary)—to the hospital instead of the woman from Lamaze. The delivering doctor (Ken Lerner) orders everyone out, but Blanche insists on staying to support her daughter. And in the end, it’s Blanche’s compliments about her daughter’s bravery that give Rebecca the strength to make that one last push, bringing a new little girl into the world.
Rose, Blanche, and Dorothy coach Blanche’s single daughter Rebecca (Debra Engle) through childbirth.
Photo by NBCU PHOTO BANK via GETTY IMAGES.
Rebecca briefly considers having her baby in this New Age–meets–Victorian birthing center.
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
COMMENTARY: This episode features the return of Blanche’s daughter Rebecca, whose artificial insemination storyline in the episode “The Accurate Conception” had proven to be an audience favorite. Both Rebecca’s storyline and the show’s B plot, about Rose’s push for ice-skating accolades in order to please the long-gone Lindstroms, touch on the theme of parental expectations; as Dorothy advises Rose: “It doesn’t matter what your parents want. You’re never going to make them happy.”
GAIL PARENT: On many sitcoms, the writers would plan out story arcs for the characters, and that would give them six shows laid out at a time. But on The Golden Girls, we never sat down to do that. We would revisit stuff later, though, and here we realized that because Rebecca had been inseminated about a year earlier, it was about time that we could have her give birth. The first episode with the sperm bank had gotten a great audience response, so we thought, “What would be the next step? How are they going to deal with the birth?” Because no matter how much you search for the “big topics” in writing a show, the most meaningful shows are usually the ones about birth, death, or marriage. That’s it.
JIM VALLELY: I am proud to say that Gail Parent and I were the first to write a vagina re
ference into the show. Throughout the episode, Sophia keeps telling Dorothy how hard it had been to give birth to her. She says Dorothy’s birth weight was thirty-two pounds, three ounces. She says it took days. Finally, as they wait in the hospital for Rebecca to give birth, Dorothy has had enough. She says, “Ma, you’re hurting my feelings.” To which Sophia replies, “Not as much as you hurt my oonie.” It was the first time we’d said anything like that. Sophia’s response may seem tame now, but back then, it was pushing the line. As a writer, you always want to be one of the people who are moving that line. And I think The Golden Girls moved a lot more lines than most people realized.
DEBRA ENGLE: Right after my first episode [season five, “The Accurate Conception”] the producers had told me that they wanted to use me again. But this ended up being a difficult episode for me to do. Not necessarily physically, because they had an extra off camera who did a really great birthing scream for me (although because she had been chewing gum, Bea had wanted to have her replaced). But not long before, I’d had a late-term miscarriage, and so pretending to have a baby on camera was emotionally hard. Especially when they brought in the real baby for me to hold—played by twins, who were screaming in the background. Later, when I came back to do another episode, I had had my daughter. I brought her with me, and all the Girls were very sweet to her.