by Jim Colucci
LYNNE STEWART: It was so much fun playing a nun—and actually, every once in a while in an interview someone will recognize me from this episode, despite the habit. And that habit was much more comfortable than being dressed up in Miss Yvonne drag, with the high heels and corset and huge wig, which made me unrecognizable in a different way.
Sophia spruces up her spare chambers with an icon of her own.
The convent Mother Superior would like Sophia to leave . . . yesterday.
Photos courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
EPISODE 138
MRS. GEORGE DEVEREAUX
Written by: RICHARD VACZY & TRACY GAMBLE Directed by: MATTHEW DIAMOND Original airdate: NOVEMBER 17, 1990
In “Mrs. George Devereaux,” things get weird at 6151 Richmond. First, Blanche lands a secret admirer, who sends her a florist shop’s worth of roses. Stranger yet, the bounty is even greater for Dorothy, who has her choice of two different famous men: Sonny Bono (1935–98) and 1970s TV heartthrob Lyle Waggoner.
After accepting a lunch date with her admirer, Blanche is stunned to learn that the attention has been coming from her supposedly dead husband, George (George Grizzard, 1928–2007), who turns out to be alive and well. After following an upset Blanche home, George explains that he staged his death nine years ago in order to evade embezzlement charges for a crime his business partner had committed. But now, not only is George back, but he also has a proposal, asking Blanche to be his wife once more.
Furious with the man, Blanche refuses his phone calls, and even sets a date with her old standby, Mel Bushman. But Rose intervenes, pointing out that most widows, like her, would do anything for a second chance with their beloved mates. And so Blanche has a talk with George, confessing to having seen other men—many, many men—in the past nine years.
Meanwhile, the two actors escalate their attempts to woo the lady Zbornak, with Sophia cheering on Team Sonny, and Rose on Team Lyle. Eventually, Dorothy picks Sonny—and Blanche wakes up, revealing that the whole episode has been another instance of her haunting, recurring dream. But this time, she tells the Girls, it was a good dream, because it ended differently: she got to hug George one last time.
COMMENTARY: This episode is remembered for its campy cameos, which offset a very touching A story for Blanche. George Grizzard returns as George Devereaux, having previously played the character’s twin brother, Jamie, in the fifth-season installment “That Old Feeling.”
As they insult each other in their competition for Dorothy’s hand, the episode’s two other guest stars, Sonny Bono and Lyle Waggoner, good-naturedly play on their own images as seventies TV icons. Teamed with his wife, Cher, Sonny Bono had been a musical sensation in the sixties, writing and performing hit singles like “I Got You Babe” and “The Beat Goes On.” The two then cemented their status as pop culture icons as they starred in their own musical variety shows throughout the seventies. At the time of this episode, Sonny Bono was serving as the mayor of Palm Springs, California, an office he would hold until 1992. In 1994, he was elected to Congress, representing the state’s Forty-Fourth District until his death in a skiing accident in 1998, at age sixty-two.
Sonny Bono (left) and Lyle Waggoner show up on Dorothy’s doorstep, vying for her affections.
Photo by RON TOM/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK via GETTY IMAGES.
Tall, dark, and handsome Lyle Waggoner is beloved from two of his great TV roles, as a featured player from 1967 to 1974 on The Carol Burnett Show, and from 1975 to 1979 as Major Steve Trevor on Wonder Woman.
TRACY GAMBLE: This is my favorite episode that Richard Vaczy and I ever wrote. We dictated it, and it came in exactly right, at forty-five pages, perfect and balanced. At this point, we’d been on the writing staff longer than anybody else, but we still rarely got to do Blanche episodes; the show always seemed to need Dorothy or Rose episodes. We wanted to do something meaty and substantive for Blanche, and to show how, beneath all her sexual bravado, her husband, George, had been the only man she ever loved. And so Richard suggested, “What if George had staged his death?” We didn’t want to undermine the series, though. So we decided to turn it into a dream, but we had to fool the audience. We came up with a setup I was really proud of: in the cheesecake scene, Blanche tells the women and the audience that she has a recurring dream.
BLANCHE:
“Come on, Dorothy. How much trouble can I get into in a public place?”
DOROTHY:
“How soon we forget the Greyhound terminal incident.”
RICHARD VACZY: This was also my favorite episode that Tracy and I wrote. I acknowledge that dream episodes are usually cliché, but I think here the dream provides a framework for a funny Dorothy story and a Blanche story that was emotional and meaningful.
All through the week, as we negotiated with guest stars, we kept swapping names in and out: at one point, one of the guys was going to be Telly Savalas. But in the end, Sonny Bono and Lyle Waggoner were great to work with. And because it was a dream, we were able to step outside reality. It was a tough balancing act, because the audience doesn’t know it’s a dream until the end. We could go a little crazy, but we also made sure to ground it in some sort of reality by saying that the guys were playing locally at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre, which made it make at least a little sense.
MATTHEW DIAMOND: I found this to be a stunning episode, with an amazing concept. I salute the writers, and the actresses for playing it one hundred percent straight. It’s such a sweet story, and it’s written with a very light touch. Blanche isn’t blown away or scared by George’s return, but instead just thinks it’s wonderful.
In the middle of Sonny and Lyle competing for Dorothy and all the other madness going on, the writers planted a line where Blanche says she’s been having a recurring dream. It sounds like a throwaway line at the time—until the end, when you realize how well constructed the episode has been all along.
LYLE WAGGONER: When I think about this episode I get nostalgic, because Sonny Bono was there. What an interesting man he was—businessman, entrepreneur, politician. I had known him for a long time, because I had guest starred on Sonny and Cher a few times, which was shot on the stage right next to where I was working on The Carol Burnett Show.
Doing The Golden Girls was a different experience for me, coming from Carol Burnett. Both were three-camera shows in front of a live audience, but on The Golden Girls, they had to, but didn’t like to, stop and do pickups if you made a mistake. On Carol, if we’d make a mistake, we’d usually just leave it in, because the audience got such a kick out of it. And I loved working with the ladies. I knew Betty, and had worked with Rue a few times on the road, and Bea on Maude. But I had never met Estelle, who was so cute, and so much fun. It was such a happy set, with them all making each other laugh. After all, they all had such great comedy instincts.
EPISODE 139
GIRLS JUST WANNA HAVE FUN . . . BEFORE THEY DIE
Written by: GAIL PARENT & JIM VALLELY Directed by: MATTHEW DIAMOND Original airdate: NOVEMBER 24, 1990
Sophia has the hots for Tony Delvecchio (Cesar Romero, 1907–94), so she enlists Blanche’s help in making her irresistible for their upcoming date. The date does go well—so well, in fact, that in a postcoital moment in bed, Sophia gets caught up in the moment and lets slip the “L word.” Unfortunately, Tony’s response is a little lacking: all he can manage is “I care for you.” Furious, Sophia storms home, where Blanche offers advice not to divulge her feelings. But ultimately, Sophia decides to avoid playing games and instead confronts Tony, who confesses that he hasn’t expressed affection for a woman since his wife died. He finally does say “I do love you,” and they kiss, settling in for a pleasant evening of looking at old family photos.
In the episode’s B plot, Rose receives a letter from the St. Olaf Department of Water and Coffee decreeing that in order to alleviate the town’s current drought, all native St. Olafians must abstain from sex. As ridiculous as the request s
eems, Blanche advises her to use the situation to her advantage; the way Blanche sees it, holding out on her boyfriend Miles (Harold Gould) without explanation will help Rose score more of the control in their relationship. So Rose uses her homespun ingenuity to find ways to hold Miles’s libido at bay—for example, taking him out for an evening of lesbian poetry. But when Miles ultimately breaks up with her, Rose realizes she too needs to ignore Blanche’s bad advice and just tell him the whole ridiculous truth.
Together, Marc Cherry and Jamie Wooten and the show’s costume designer took their 84-year-old character and made her look like a 65-year-old drag queen.
Photo by ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC via GETTY IMAGES.
“I want to present Blanche Devereaux’s latest creation. I took an eighty-four-year-old woman and made her look like a sixty-five-year-old drag queen.”
—BLANCHE
COMMENTARY: This episode offers a rare glimpse into Sophia’s sex life, showing her in bed with a man without that visual itself being the joke. Of course that man was Cesar Romero, otherwise known for his lavender suit and his propensity to wear waaay too much makeup. The Golden Girls producers had placed the actor on their casting wish list at least as early as season four. And, stripped of all the Joker’s accoutrements, it turns out that his portrayal of Tony is rather endearingly shy and romantic.
Cesar Romero began his film career in the early 1930s, playing a Latin lover in musicals and romantic comedies and a tough hombre in Westerns. He appeared in the original The Thin Man film in 1934, and in multiple movies with Shirley Temple. His film career continued with such titles as 1960’s Ocean’s Eleven and the 1985 comedy/Western Lust in the Dust, starring Divine. From 1985 to 1988 he played billionaire industrialist Peter Stavros, love interest of Jane Wyman’s Angela Channing, on CBS’s prime time soap Falcon Crest. But it’s of course from one TV role, as the Joker on ABC’s campy 1966–68 Batman series, that Cesar Romero will always be remembered.
Sophia says a few words too many in bed with Tony Delvecchio (Cesar Romero).
Photo by ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC via GETTY IMAGES.
The episode also features the return of Harold Gould as Miles—something that might not have happened if other TV fortunes had gone differently. After his appearance in the latter half of season five, in the episode “Twice in a Lifetime” in February 1990, Harold began headlining the new NBC show Singer and Sons. The network, however, ordered just four episodes to sample the delicatessen-set sitcom—and then aired them in a deadly time slot, on four Saturday nights in June (ironically, following The Golden Girls and preempting reruns of the Girls’ spinoff Empty Nest). With the summer show’s quick cancellation, Harold was available once again to portray Miles, and most Golden Girls fans were none the wiser that he’d ever been gone.
The restaurant where Blanche meets her “secret admirer,” aka her dead husband George.
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
MATTHEW DIAMOND: When Sophia comes back from her date, she tells Dorothy why she confessed her love to Tony: “I just wanted to hear someone say ‘I love you’ to me one more time.” I thought that was wonderful, one of the great things about The Golden Girls. So few shows served an older generation in this kind of a complex fashion. Frequently, it’s the curmudgeonly grandfather who lives downstairs, a character who’s one-dimensional.
MARC CHERRY: Jim Vallely’s original joke about Sophia’s makeover was that Blanche took an eighty-four-year-old woman and “made her look like a sixty-five-year-old gay man,” but the censor wouldn’t let us say it. He thought that we were saying that all gay men are drag queens or wear dresses. Immediately, our showrunner Marc Sotkin turned to Jamie and me and said, “You’re gay. Get on the phone with this guy.” It was a fascinating moment for me, because I never thought of Jamie or myself as “the gay writers,” but in that moment they suddenly needed a spokesman, and looked to us right away. It stunned me to realize that when they look at me they first see “gay guy,” but I didn’t mind. So I got on the phone and said to the censor, “I’m gay, but I am not offended by this joke.” And the censor, who was not gay, was so protective that despite my arguing and arguing, we had to turn “gay man” into “drag queen”—which is still funny, in a different way.
EPISODE 140
EBBTIDE’S REVENGE
Written by: MARC SOTKIN Directed by: MATTHEW DIAMOND Original airdate: DECEMBER 15, 1990
As Dorothy prepares to give the eulogy for her cross-dressing brother, Phil, Sophia is intent on continuing her twenty-six-year feud with Phil’s widow, Angela (Brenda Vaccaro), who is coming to Miami for the funeral. With neither of them able to understand the reason for Sophia’s anger, Dorothy convinces Angela to stay for a few days to try to mend fences with her mother-in-law. But Sophia isn’t budging; she insists on staying mad at Angela, as she claims, over a bounced dowry check.
Furious at the thought that Sophia had become distant with her and Phil over a forty-seven-dollar dispute, Angela writes a check to make amends. But perhaps Rose’s days at the grief center truly did teach her something, because surprisingly, it is the naïve supposed nitwit who recognizes what is truly going on here: Sophia is mad at Angela because she never stopped Phil from dressing as a woman. When Rose reassures her—via a St. Olaf story, no less!—that there was no shame in loving Phil, Sophia admits that every time she saw her son, she wondered what she had done wrong. With Angela’s added affirmation that her son was indeed a good man, Sophia finally lets her true feelings show. In one of the show’s few downbeat ending lines, Sophia finally mourns as she cries out, “My baby is gone.”
ROSE:
The point is, it was shame that kept Aunt Katrina from loving Slow Ingmar. And it ruined her life. Don’t let that happen to you, Sophia. Let go of the shame. So what if he was different! It’s okay that you loved him.
SOPHIA:
I did love him. He was my son, my little boy. But every time I saw him, I always wondered what I did, what I said, when was the day that I did whatever I did to make him the way he was?
At her son Phil’s funeral, Sophia can’t bear to sit next to her estranged daughter-in-law, Angela (Brenda Vaccaro), who for years she’s insultingly called “Big Sally.”
Photo by ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC via GETTY IMAGES.
COMMENTARY: Isn’t it interesting: a mere four seasons earlier, the unabashedly heterosexual Blanche Devereaux hadn’t even known the word for “lesbian.” (See season two, episode thirty, “Isn’t It Romantic?”) But now, as she attempts to correct Sophia, Blanche shows she is up-to-date on the difference in connotation between “gay” and “queer.” One might cynically conclude that as with so many other inconsistent Golden details, Blanche’s vocabulary varies in order to serve each individual episode’s storyline. But perhaps Blanche really has learned something about the LGBT community, just one of the many benefits of having an out gay brother—whom, it turns out, she’ll confront again in just two more episodes. (See episode 142, “Sisters of the Bride.”)
It was writer Tom Whedon who suggested that unseen in his casket Phil should be said to be wearing a woman’s teddy. “Over the years, the show had had all these cross-dressing jokes about Phil,” he explains. “So I figured this was the one last cross-dressing joke we could do.”
Here, playing Angela, is Brenda Vaccaro, who started her career in such classic films as Midnight Cowboy in 1969, 1971’s Going Home, and Airport ’77. She had previously been nominated for an Oscar and had won an Emmy before receiving her third Emmy nomination (of four, to date) for her work in this episode, as Outstanding Guest Performer in a Comedy Series.
JERRY PERZIGIAN: I had heard that earlier, before my time on the show, the producers had started getting phone calls from Cher, who would say, “I love The Golden Girls. I watch video tapes of it while I’m on my treadmill!” and that she wanted to be on an episode. So several times, they created roles for her, and each time, she would decline at the last minute. This
character, Angela, was one of the roles they created for her, and I think the last time they tried.
The cemetery where Phil is buried.
Phil’s funeral chapel.
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
MARC SOTKIN: By the time of this episode, we had pretty much used up the unseen character Phil comedically. He had served his purpose, and I was sort of tired of the cross-dressing jokes. What I found more interesting was if this guy is indeed a cross-dresser, how did that happen? Everybody can make jokes about having a cross-dresser in the family, but I’ll bet it messes up the dynamic in some way. His wife obviously had found some way to live with it, and to love him and raise a family with him, and I wanted to explore how she did that.
Emotionally it turned out to be a tough week. We were talking about someone’s son dying, and actors don’t just turn the emotions off just because they’re done rehearsing. It was particularly hard for Estelle. On that Tuesday night, she actually called me and said she didn’t want to do the episode. It took quite a while on the phone before I realized what was bothering her: early in the week, when we rehearsed them going to the church, Sophia originally went up to Phil’s casket. But Estelle really had a problem with looking at her dead son and making jokes. It didn’t feel honest to her—and she was absolutely right. So we changed it, and it became a better piece, and got nominated for a Writers Guild Award.
BRENDA VACCARO: I was transfixed by how brilliant Bea was, in the eulogy Dorothy gives in this episode for her brother, Phil. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. That speech, about understanding and loving one’s family, was one of the most amazing things that Bea ever got to do on the show. She was such an amazing talent, and there will never be another like her. I think the reason why she could be so funny was because she was free. Bea said it the way it was, and nobody scared her about the truth. And in the end, the truth is what you have to have, and who you have to be.