by Jim Colucci
I had had a lot of hair, but with a new round of really vicious amounts of chemo, it started to disappear once again. So I went to the woman, Judy Crown, who had done the hair on my wife Jenny O’Hara’s show, My Sister Sam, and bought a wig that made me look like a weathercaster. And my Golden Girls audition was the first time I went out on wearing it.
My part in the show was a fun one. In my scene, Pat’s character and Rose are on their date, and first one woman comes up and tells him off, and Rose is a little disturbed, but he passes her off as his sister. Then a second young woman who is clearly pregnant comes in and berates him. And because comedy comes in threes, I was the third beat, where, as the waiter, I come up and suddenly go really hissy on him. “You disgust me! After the way you’ve treated me, I should scratch your eyes out! Call me.” Basically, that was the joke.
I remember the director reminding me that when I first appear, I should make sure not to come off at all swishy. It’s supposed to come as a surprise, out of nowhere. Of course, I think the way it was shot, there’s not really time for any setup, where the audience at home could really notice who the waiter is before I go into it. I had a gay actor friend who tutored me on how to play a gay character, because I’d never done it before—which is surprising, because oftentimes in television in particular, it was like a shorthand: if you wanted someone to seem gay, or precious, or an academic, just give him an English accent. Let’s face it, all English people are gay in any case.
When I was hired for this episode, no one knew about my cancer. From rehearsals through the tape night, I wore the wig at all times—until we took our bows at the curtain call. I don’t know why I took it off; I was just fed up with the thing. I hadn’t wanted to go through the entire experience pretending I didn’t have cancer. But at the same time, I hadn’t wanted everyone pitying me, “Poor old fool!” So I did the work, and then I made the statement.
Rue McClanahan in particular was really terrific about it. About six weeks after I did The Golden Girls, I performed a one-man show I’d been doing earlier, about coming to America, having adventures, and getting cancer. My new treatments were going to be expensive, and my accountant suggested that I do the show as a benefit. Rue was very supportive, and got a lot of people to come. We sold out five nights at the little theater upstairs at the Pasadena Playhouse. And then I went off and had a bone marrow transplant—and I’m still here.
EPISODE 164
RO$E LOVE$ MILE$
Written by: JERRY PERZIGIAN & DON SEIGEL AND RICHARD VACZY & TRACY GAMBLE Directed by: LEX PASSARIS Original airdate: NOVEMBER 16, 1991
As Dorothy departs for a three-day Caribbean cruise with Lee, a doctor boyfriend we’ve never heard of before, she leaves Blanche in charge of Sophia. After going over a checklist of instructions regarding the old lady’s care and feeding, Blanche thinks she can handle the assignment—until Sophia informs her otherwise. “Fasten your seat belt, Slutpuppy. This ain’t gonna be no cakewalk!”
Later, while rooting through Dorothy’s things, Sophia finds the list she herself wrote in 1920, titled “Things I Want to Accomplish Before I Die.” Number three on the list was a vow to make amends with her first husband, Guido Spirelli—and so, while Blanche thinks Sophia is in her bedroom, spilling her feelings into a letter, Sophia sneaks off to Sicily to deliver the message in person.
Desperate to deduce the old lady’s potential whereabouts, Blanche consults Sophia’s brother, Angelo (Bill Dana), who suspects Sophia is just playing a trick, and is indeed still somewhere in Miami. But as we see moments later, after a plane, a train, a boat, and a burro, Sophia arrives at a Sicilian tavern, and offers her onetime suitor Guido (Phil Leeds, 1916–98) her heartfelt apology, in English. His sole response? “Ah, fuhgettaboutit.”
Meanwhile, after a date at a sleazy buffet, Rose realizes her boyfriend Miles (Harold Gould) has turned into a terrible tightwad. And so Blanche convinces her friend to cheat on her parsimonious partner by enjoying an expensive dinner on a double date with rich Texans Mort and Barry (John P. Connolly and Harvey Vernon, 1927–96). But wouldn’t you know it, who happens to show up at the fancy restaurant but Miles, making his customary purchase of discounted day-old éclairs.
Cuckolded by cuisine, Miles storms out. But a few days later, he makes it up to Rose by taking her to dine at the same establishment. There, the man finally admits what’s really going on: with his retirement looming, and his health still excellent, Miles fears running out of money as he lives long into old age.
Interior, Sicilian tavern, by way of Hollywood.
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
COMMENTARY: This episode contains one of the series’ standout visuals, of first Sophia and later Blanche riding a donkey through the hills of Sicily. In reality, of course, the scenes were shot locally, in the Santa Monica Mountains around Los Angeles. “It was a sunny, hot day, and I was on a donkey on that looong path,” Rue remembers. “They thought it would look like Sicily, and I think it did.”
DON SEIGEL: I liked writing Miles, because I thought it was interesting to see what kinds of men these women dated. But I thought that up until this point, the character was bland. I’ve always thought cheapness is a funny trait; Jack Benny sure went a long way with it! My writing partner, Jerry, didn’t think the jokes about Miles checking the prices on the menu would work, and it’s true the laughs there weren’t as big as I’d thought they’d be—maybe because most people actually do that. But I was happy because making Miles cheap gave Betty something to play off of. Whether Rose empathizes with him or gets frustrated, now she can show feelings about him.
BILL DANA: This episode contains one of the biggest laughs I ever got. Uncle Angelo had built up a whole fantasy about being with Blanche, and when he realizes it’s not going to happen, he says to her, “You mean I shaved my shoulders for nothing!” Well, the laugh that got was like walking against a hurricane. The blast that came out of the audience! Rue and I stayed in the scene with our eyes locked, for what must have been ten or fifteen seconds, during the longest laugh any of us ever remembered. You don’t hear nearly how long it was in the finished episode, because they had to edit most of it out.
EPISODE 165
ROOM SEVEN
Written by: JERRY PERZIGIAN & DON SEIGEL AND RICHARD VACZY & TRACY GAMBLE Directed by: PETER D. BEYT Original airdate: NOVEMBER 23, 1991
When Blanche learns that Grandview, her grandmother Hollingsworth’s plantation, is set to be demolished, she enlists the Girls for a road trip to Atlanta for one last glimpse of the house that was the setting for her fondest childhood memories. But once there, a distraught Blanche is unable to say goodbye to the bedroom she believes houses her grandmother’s spirit, and handcuffs herself to a radiator in protest mere minutes before the scheduled implosion. Meanwhile, after a near-death experience while choking on a piece of candy, and a brief reunion with her late husband, Sal (Sid Melton), in Heaven, Sophia decides to live life to the fullest—which apparently includes executing daredevil stunts like jumping off Grandview’s roof regardless of her advanced age.
COMMENTARY: Although Sophia’s storyline goes over the top and off the roof, it provides for a touching moment with her late husband, Sal—an appearance that would be Sid Melton’s last on the show. The episode also provides a powerful emotional storyline for Blanche, and fills in some of the Hollingsworth family history we began to hear the previous season in the episode “Witness.”
RUE McCLANAHAN: Here was Blanche’s family’s home, the house where she’d grown up, and it had meant so much to Big Daddy. And now a wrecking crew was about to tear it down, against her wishes. Because the circumstances were so painful for Blanche, I found this episode to be painful to play.
TRACY GAMBLE: Blanche was the most colorful character, and so all the Golden Girls writers wanted to do a Blanche episode. We competed for them, and Richard and I waited three years to write one. “Big events” like this B story about Sophia jumping
off the roof after a near-death experience tended to come up in the writers’ room, and we felt we could get away with it because the core of the episode was about Blanche going back to the place where she’d had happy memories as a young girl with her grandmother. So as over-the-top as the Sophia story was, the episode was grounded in reality. And the voice of young Blanche we hear echoing through the house is actually my daughter Bridget, who is now in her twenties.
RICHARD VACZY: In general, I liked the concept of this episode, about a character being about to lose a favorite place that she loves, and that’s why I hooked into it. Granted, it did wind up getting a little bit out there. That wasn’t the plan from the beginning. But we were getting late into the run of the show. Honestly, year after year, we’d start to notice that jokes we’d been doing for years just wouldn’t get the same reaction from the audience anymore. It was like a drug. The audience needed more and more of the drug to get the same effect.
MITCHELL HURWITZ: I was working mostly on [Witt/Thomas/Harris NBC sitcom] Nurses at the time, and I came over to the Golden Girls set after a Nurses rewrite session. When I saw what was happening in this episode, I remember thinking, “An eighty-five-year-old woman jumping off a roof into a haystack? I think we’ve crossed a line with this one.”
PETER D. BEYT: For a director, “Room Seven” was full of technical challenges. For one thing, there was a scene where Sophia jumps off the roof—which was not an easy task to make happen. It wasn’t a real person jumping, of course, and so we had to keep testing how it would look by throwing the dummy we’d made, and then adjusting its weight just right, so that it looked like it was Sophia, sailing by the window feet first. The Golden Girls was not usually a stunt-heavy show, so rigging that dummy took us a whole afternoon.
But the biggest technical challenge—and something I’ll always remember about this episode—happened with Blanche, and the handcuffs. I was really shy and closeted when I was on the show. We were rehearsing the scene where Blanche cuffs herself to the radiator in her grandmother’s abandoned house, and everything was going really well. It was during one of the first days during the week, where we rehearsed with just minimal crew. Rue was always very technical, as far as wanting to have a command of all the props she’d be using. To save time, we set it up that Blanche would have a pair of handcuffs in her purse, which she’d show the audience—but then she’d pocket them out of sight, and use a pair of cuffs already attached to the radiator. She’d slap that second set of cuffs on her wrist, and then she’d be really attached to the thing.
I called for us to run the scene one more time. Everything worked, and so we broke for lunch. Our prop master, Bob, had the key to let Rue out of the handcuffs, but when he tried to do so—oh my God, the key is broken! Then the big stage lights started to shut off one by one, each with a boom. And there was Rue, really handcuffed to a three-hundred-pound radiator, starting to get a little panicky, and claustrophobic, and pissed off.
Everyone was in shock over what to do. I just rolled my eyes, looked up at the sky, and realized: okay, I have no choice. I reached into my pocket and pulled out my keys, went over to Rue, and freed her—with a handcuff key I just happened to have on my key ring. As Rue was expressing her relief, a few of the crew guys realized what had happened, and started to tease me. “Now what do you have going on there!”
Interior of the soon-to-be-demolished Hollingsworth estate in Atlanta.
Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.
Rue was having none of that. “Now you stop that right now!” she yelled at them. “There is nothing wrong with this boy having a healthy interest in sex!” It was just like Blanche would have said—and after all, Blanche, too, would have had a key. I guess that’s why I so identified with Blanche. Rue shut them all down, and I never heard from anybody about it again. But now, everyone knew some of my personal business.
EPISODE 167
THE POPE’S RING
Written by: KEVIN ABBOTT Directed by: LEX PASSARIS Original airdate: DECEMBER 14, 1991
As Pope John Paul II says an outdoor Mass on a visit to Miami, Sophia schemes her way into a front pew so she can request a blessing for her ailing friend Agnes O’Rourke. Later that day, she comes home with something even better than a Papal intercession: the Pontiff’s ring, which slid off his finger as security whisked him away. Horrified, Dorothy makes her mother promise to return the jewel, a symbol of His Holiness’s authority on earth; but unfortunately, the ring then goes missing.
Sophia seems suspiciously convinced that the bauble will turn up in a day or two—not so coincidentally, the same time frame in which she hopes the Pope might pop by the hospital to see Agnes. Later, she’s disappointed when it’s merely a priestly emissary (Steven Gilborn, 1936–2009) who shows up at their door, but she puts in her request regarding Agnes nonetheless.
Meanwhile, Blanche competes with Dorothy over who can give Rose the better birthday gift. Blanche’s is definitely the most unusual: she’s hired a private eye to follow Miles (Harold Gould) and ensure his fidelity. Although Rose is initially hesitant to accept the strange present, Blanche reminds her that Miles is, after all, the man who through the Witness Protection Program had lied about his job, his past, and even his name.
But later, when Miles gets frisky on the lanai, Rose confesses about the gift, and draws the detective (Fred McCarren, 1951–2006) out of hiding in the bushes. Infuriated, Miles presses Rose to promise she’ll never again doubt his word; but when Blanche reads the investigator’s report, the Girls learn that Miles is scheduled for a secret surgical procedure. So the next day, Rose rushes to the hospital—and finds that Miles is merely undergoing cosmetic surgery on the bags under his eyes. Feeling foolish, Rose and Miles promise to trust each other—just as a commotion in the hallway signals the arrival of Sophia’s miracle: the Pope (Eugene Greytak, 1925–2010) has dropped by to bless the patients of St. Ignatius, including Agnes, on his way to the airport.
COMMENTARY: If the priest who comes to the house looks familiar, it’s because the actor, Steven Gilborn, went on to play quite a different kind of father—to Ellen DeGeneres, on her ABC sitcom Ellen. This was the final role for Fred McCarren, who had been in the infamous 1980 film musical Xanadu, and also, notably, was a series regular on Bea Arthur’s 1983 Fawlty Towers–esque sitcom flop, Amanda’s.
Just good times with “The Pope” (Gene Greytak) backstage: left to right, 1st Stage Manager Kent Zbornak, Script Supervisor Robert Spina, Director Lex Passaris, Assistant Director Tom Carpenter.
Photo courtesy of LEX PASSARIS.
And Gene Greytak certainly made the most of his uncanny resemblance to John Paul II, impersonating the Polish Pope also in films like Hot Shots!, Sister Act, and Naked Gun 33 1/3. But could any of his appearances top this episode’s tag, where the Pope plays poker with Sophia in the Girls’ kitchen, going so far as to wager his mitre?
KEVIN ABBOTT: Originally, I had conceived the story that Sophia had a competition with a Polish friend over whether Italians or Poles make the better Catholics. When she got tickets to the Pope’s Mass, she wanted to call the woman, just to rub it in her face—but her friend’s phone number had been disconnected, and now Sophia was worried. All through the episode, Sophia kept talking about how miracles are possible. And at the end, the two storylines come together, because Sophia found her friend’s new phone number and address on a piece of paper on the kitchen table, appearing as if by an act of God. When Blanche explained that she had had the private detective from Rose’s B story track down her friend as a favor, Sophia exclaimed, “Wait, you did something totally unselfish? It’s a miracle!” I thought it all worked very well. But it was one of those cases where the showrunner, Marc Sotkin, didn’t like the ending, and so in changing that, the writers ended up unraveling much of the story, including Sophia’s motivation for seeing the Pope in the first place.
For the B story, I had originally pitched Rose just following Miles around, suspi
cious, but someone in the writers’ room came up with the idea of the detective, which was very funny. And the reason for Miles’s evasion changed slightly too. I had recently read in Newsweek that a trend among older men was to get pec and calf implants. These were guys who always worked out and were in good shape, but now with age their bodies were starting to sag. I thought it was one of the funniest things I’d ever heard, and so that’s the reason I gave for Miles having surgery: pec implants. Rose even had a line where she asked him, “So you got a boob job?!” But Marc Sotkin couldn’t believe this was a real trend, and I couldn’t find the Newsweek article to prove it to him. So we changed the pec implants to another form of cosmetic surgery, but I didn’t think it ended up being as funny.
ROBERT SPINA (production associate): Thanks to this episode, Lex Passaris, [associate director] Tom Carpenter, and I have a backstage photo of us—with the Pope! When John Paul II died, I sent that picture out to the guys, with a [caption]: “Just good times with the Pope.”
EPISODE 168
OLD BOYFRIENDS
Written by: MARC CHERRY & JAMIE WOOTEN Directed by: PETER D. BEYT Original airdate: JANUARY 4, 1992
Sophia shops for a man in a senior citizens’ personals column and meets amiable Marvin (Louis Guss, 1918–2008). The problem is—supposedly because his eyesight is too poor for him to drive—the lovebirds are escorted everywhere by Marvin’s “sister,” Sarah (Betty Garrett, 1919–2011). When Sophia tries to get Marvin alone, the touching truth comes out: Sarah is actually Marvin’s dying wife, and she is trying to find a replacement who will care for him after she goes.