by Jim Colucci
In fact, the Classic Interior proved so versatile that when The Golden Girls’ sequel series Golden Palace ceased production in 1993, Michael opted to keep the set in storage. He has continued to use the set for years, and has even rented it out to other production designers for their shows, donating the proceeds to the Thomas family’s beloved charity, the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Plywood walls, Michael notes, “last ten years if you’re lucky.” And yet, still viable today, the Classic Interior—“which, in scenery years, is Jurassic”—has proven to be atypically sturdy. In 2012, Michael brought the set to the stage yet again, for an episode of Hot in Cleveland. For a scene in which that show’s four leading ladies attended a hotel fashion show, “I painted it white and put the runway right down the middle.”
Then, just as the scene was ready to go, Michael asked Hot in Cleveland star Betty White if the surroundings looked familiar. “When I told her where the set came from, she flipped out,” he reveals. “She went up and touched it, and got very emotional” to be back again, literally in the same halls where The Golden Girls once stood.
GOLDEN DECOR
KITCHEN
MICHAEL HYNES: Ed had picked out the original kitchen wallpaper, beige with a very small pattern of white dots. Midway through the first season, we changed it. The new paper from Astor Wallcovering had a cross-hatch rattan pattern, then big banana leaves in a darker beige over that, with three colors of green in it as well. The reason we changed it was that in those days, cameras were more primitive than they are now, and things would “flatten out” a lot. So we always looked for wallpaper that added layers and depth.
JOHN SHAFFNER: It was very smart of the writers to make the kitchen a separate room, because it gave them private places to take stories to. The swinging kitchen door allowed the storytelling to go into this other room, where you could have a conversation that wouldn’t be overheard.
MH: By adding on the kitchen, we inadvertently created this little space behind the set walls that became a Golden Girls Bermuda Triangle. It was bounded by the baker’s rack on the bottom, the right side of the hallway, and the left side of the kitchen. Often the ladies would hang out there and study their lines. Plus, it often happened that after the ladies were first introduced to the audience, and the camera would sweep in for extreme close-ups, the producers upstairs would start nitpicking their makeup. So the makeup people waited back in the triangle to fix them. But usually, the ladies would just pretend to get touch-ups. Then they’d come back out, just as before, and the producers would say, “Ah, much better.”
JS: In the pilot, the kitchen table was a round, glass-topped piece from Tropitone, with matching chairs, which we got at a patio store in the San Fernando Valley. Later the chairs remained but the table was a different piece, on a pedestal. But really, post-pilot, the look was all about the tablecloths, which they would change for each episode both to switch up the look and also to complement the ladies’ wardrobe.
MH: Everything in the vicinity of the kitchen table was graffitied by Estelle. She would take a permanent marker and write her lines all over. I kept waiting for her to say a line from a previous episode, but she never did.
MH: The tablecloths quickly became a big deal on the show. Ed always wanted a pattern, but then after dress rehearsal, the producers would often note that the tablecloth clashed with someone’s dress. So we started collecting different options. I bought quite a few on a personal trip to Paris. We ended up with a whole rack of fifty to sixty tablecloths, which we kept right behind the refrigerator.
JS: When the four ladies were in the kitchen, one would take a seat on a stool rather than the fourth place at the table, which would have her back to the camera. Today’s sitcoms sometimes can take cameras deeper into the set, put up a section of wall and do a reverse shot, so that people can sit all around the table. But I think our classic multicamera, proscenium style is more appealing to the audience, because it’s more like going to see a play.
JS: The original piece here was a butcher-block table, on wheels so that it could be moved, which was later replaced with a taller butcher-block kitchen island. The way Ed had laid out the kitchen, the sink was on a diagonal looking upstage, and the refrigerator was on the side wall. It wasn’t a playable kitchen in terms of actually cooking, because all the appliances forced you to face away from the audience. So the kitchen island gave the actresses an area where they could do things facing downstage.
MH: Ed liked using things like the Jell-O molds over the sink to fill the space and cover blank walls. Sometimes we’d go to a design center, and he’d fall in love with things and say, “Let’s put this in the kitchen.” At one point, we added a ceramic keyholder he found, with a caged bird design on it. It was imported from France, and we put it in the space above and to the left of the phone. I still have it today.
JS: Because shows are limited on stage space, Ed had come up with a way to replace the It Takes Two/Golden Girls kitchen set with something else when it wasn’t needed. This area behind the swinging door, where he put the baker’s rack, is all you see from the living room of the kitchen when the swinging door opens, so that the rest of the set could be removed.
MH: The big secret about the Golden Girls kitchen was that there was no oven. The It Takes Two kitchen had had a built-in oven next to the refrigerator, but we’d had to take it out for lack of space. We did still have a range, downstage facing the audience, where we’d sometimes see Sophia cooking. But underneath, it was just a cabinet. We took off the doors and replaced them with a piece of plywood with a handle on it. And the ladies would have to fake like they were taking something out of the “oven.”
MH: We did change the kitchen curtains a few times, but they were always so stiff and not fun. If I could go back, that’s the one thing I would change. Come on, these were four ladies in Florida. At least have flowers or something!
LANAI
JS: For the lanai furnishings, I went with pieces made by Tropitone, which had a wrought iron and vintage look, with forties-era detail.
MH: The original plants on the lanai were plastic, but they were always getting bent up and dusty. So we replaced them with living plants. Ed kept many of them, and to this day, those original plants are all still thriving at his shop.
MH: The lawn beyond the lanai was of course fake grass mats, and the scenery beyond was a giant rented backdrop. It had originally been painted for Frank Sinatra’s 1959 movie A Hole in the Head.
LIVING ROOM
JS: It’s funny how people scrutinize things over time that at the beginning had no significance whatsoever. People often comment on the “exclamation mark” in the grain of the front door. All of the woodwork on the set was not actually carved, but was painted to look grained and textured. Any marks you may see on the front door were just results of the nature of the paintbrush.
MH: This chunky doorknob was a great piece. It was made to go in the middle of a door, so I had to have it rebuilt. I was worried the actresses might have trouble with it, but they never did.
MH: Having done time in Florida, Ed really wanted to capture the distinctive wormholed look of pecky cypress wood, which a scenic artist would recreate with paint. This was before the Internet, and it was hard to find pictures in California to show just what he wanted.
JS: I had done a short-lived show for Witt/Thomas/Harris called Condo, and had purchased this large, Chinese art deco wool rug for the WASPy family on the show. It was yellow and white, and had an asymmetrical design, with a few pink and peach flowers in two corners, and a big border. It had been expensive—about thirty-five hundred dollars in 1983—and it was all the right colors we wanted for The Golden Girls, so we used it again.
JS: Putting this Chinese vase just inside the front door was just a decorative way to take up that space, and to put something with color and shape in front of a flat wall. We had no idea when we put it there that it would soon become part of a plot point, as Blanche’s treasured vase that R
ose accidentally shoots and destroys.
MH: I had to have duplicate versions made of this vase, for the episode where Rose shoots it. It was a fairly standard shape, so we had to find a breakaway vase and paint it to look the same. And then of course the next week, the vase was back in the living room again, like nothing had happened.
JS: One of the first things you have to do on a sitcom is identify the big piece for the living room: the sofa. It helps tell you where else you can go with the room’s other elements. I decided I wanted a bamboo/rattan look. So I went to Harvey’s, a popular furniture store now on Beverly Boulevard in LA, which was known for carrying the Florida look, as it was being called at the time.
I chose this piece because, although most rattan couches tended to have flat arms, this one had more of a unique, fan shape, which I thought was more feminine. The couch was actually made out of sectional elements, so we had to wire them together. Then, we tested several color palettes of fabric to cover it with, and gravitated to the orange/peach color, because it also went with the paver tile linoleum floor. The couch and its two matching chairs looked great on-screen, but they did create some issues for the wardrobe department, because they clashed with so many things. So we kept a constant array of throw pillows on hand, to create more of a neutral background between the ladies’ outfits and the couch.
JS: Just a few years ago, I ran into Harvey’s owner, Harvey Schwartz, at an event, and said to him, “You’ll never remember this, but I bought the sofa for The Golden Girls from you.” And he said, “You have no idea how many of those I sold because of that!”
MH: Each Saturday, we’d change the sets over for the next show. One day, we were goofing around, and one of the prop guys put a lampshade on my head, and took a picture. They decided that Polaroid should go on the set, so they framed it and put it right near the sofa. It sat there for three or four seasons.
MH: The pilot had a different coffee table, a carved square piece in dark wood—but we replaced it immediately afterward with this large square rattan model.
JS: Today, any photograph, painting, or illustration you put on a set has to be legally cleared with the owner of the image. Back in 1985, we had no restrictions—but still, it was hard to find images in prop houses that worked, and that hadn’t been used too much on other shows. That’s where Ed Stephenson was a very clever businessman. He amassed a very large collection of two-dimensional and sometimes sculptural works, and opened a business renting works to The Golden Girls and many other shows. His shop, the Hollywood Studio Gallery, is still there on Cahuenga Boulevard today.
MH: Ed wanted the fireplace to capture another classic Florida look: cut coral was literally mined from reefs and cut into blocks. In our case, our scenic artist used paint to capture that same interesting natural texture.
MH: Ed Stephenson had a maxim: you must always design depth to a set, but do it in such a way that the director can’t really stage anything there—because if you stage something back there, against a flat wall, there goes the depth! Ed deliberately wanted to trap the action in the downstage area, which is where all multicamera scenes happen anyway. And then he made sure there was space upstage way behind the couch with a slanted roofline and fireplace that they wouldn’t be able to use.
BLANCHE’S BEDROOM
JS: Ed absolutely knew what he wanted to do with Blanche’s bedroom walls, without a moment’s hesitation. He asked me to find the big banana-leaf print wallpaper from the Beverly Hills Hotel. We cut it out along each leaf, and glued each individually to the wall. Then, we didn’t even have a headboard made. Instead, to continue the pattern right onto the bed, we had a double-sided, reversible bedspread custom-made to match the wallpaper. That was not cheap. In 1985, the fabric cost over fifty dollars per yard, plus the labor. Between the shooting of the pilot and the series, I was nervous the expensive bedspread would get lost. So I took this bedspread home—and used it on my own bed all summer.
DOROTHY’S BEDROOM
MH: I used to go to the department store Robinsons-May’s outlet store in Panorama City, California to look for cheap sofas and furniture, and that’s where I found this great pair of cabinets for Dorothy’s room, to put on each side of the window. They had lots of little drawers, and I got a great deal on them. I wish I had them! They ended up in the Warner Bros. prop collection, and so I’ve used them again on other shows since.
MH: This gray rattan desk in Dorothy’s bedroom came from a big design showroom in the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. It cost a fortune—but by that point, the show was printing money, so the producers didn’t care.
ROSE’S BEDROOM
MH: I got Rose’s bedroom furniture for cheap at Wickes Furniture, a chain home furnishings store, somewhere in the San Fernando Valley. They had a lot of pieces that were a more modern take on rattan, so I bought a lot there.
SOPHIA’S BEDROOM
MH: Our general idea for Sophia’s room was to make it look like some of the pieces had been in her home in New York, but had been put in storage when Dorothy put her in Shady Pines. Her bedroom was the smallest of the four in Blanche’s house; Edward Stephenson figured the other three ladies had already taken all the biggest rooms before Sophia moved in. I put in some white “antiqued” finish pieces, because that was something many women of Sophia’s generation bought in the 1960s and then hung on to forever. And I thought the marquetry vanity had an old-world feeling Sophia would have liked. The headboard and much of the rest of the furniture came from Wertz Brothers Used Furniture in Hollywood, a source we used often. But Sophia did have one designer touch in the room: her wallpaper, from Albert Van Luit.
The Golden Girls house in Brentwood, CA, in 2014.
Different on Outside Same on Inside
WHEN ASSEMBLING A new sitcom, choosing establishing shots—locations to photograph that represent the outsides of the characters’ homes—is a task usually saved for last. It’s thankless work, because by definition, no existing building’s exterior will ever align perfectly with a multicamera show’s three-walled sets. “There isn’t a show on television where you’ll ever see an exact match,” Michael Hynes explains. “So you can’t become overly anxious about it.”
Seen here in March 2001, the replica Golden Girls house at the Disney-MGM Studios theme park at Walt Disney World featured landscaping, and even the house number 245, recreated to match the original in Brentwood, CA.
Photo courtesy of FRANK DeCARO, Photo by JOSEPH TITIZIAN.
So, for the Girls’ house, the production team focused on finding a structure with at least the same overall “tone:” a low-slung house, with an overhanging roofline and surrounded by lush green shrubbery. Then, after the ideal candidate was located in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, Ed tried to match the feeling of its entryway by enclosing the Girls’ front doorstep inside an alcove, covered with vines of blooming bougainvillea.
In the middle of the Girls’ run, however, Witt/Thomas’s production partner, Disney, approached the show with an idea. As the company prepared to open its MGM theme park within Disney World in Orlando, the park’s designers planned one attraction to be an exterior street where sitcoms or other TV shows could be shot. After taking extensive photos of the real Golden Girls house in Brentwood, the company rebuilt the house in Orlando from scratch—and not just a façade, but a full, three-dimensional building.
“Disney wanted to be able to say honestly that the new house was ‘as seen on TV,’ on The Golden Girls,” the show’s associate director Lex Passaris recalls. And so for the remainder of the show’s episodes, some of the establishing shots—particularly specialized footage such as a special-effects shot of the house being pelted by hurricane-force winds and rain—were captured in Orlando. But don’t go looking to park in the Girls’ Florida driveway today; in 2003 the house, along with a similar structure built to represent the exterior setting for Golden Girls spinoff Empty Nest, was razed, as the MGM park knocked down its “Residential Street” in order to make room for a
new arena for the extreme stunt-show attraction “Lights, Motors, Action!”
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MIAMI, YOU’VE GOT STYLE
“Ed Stephenson did a brilliant job of making the Golden Girls sets look interesting without overpowering the actors. My job was to consult not just the scripts, but also the producers for their concepts for the characters, and the actresses about their own personal clothing likes and dislikes. As the costume designer, you’re putting a whole picture together, incorporating all those different inputs.”
— JUDY EVANS STEELE.
costume designer
DOROTHY AND ROSE once sang, “Miami, You’ve Got Style,” and the same could be said for the residents of Richmond Street themselves. Starting the moment they premiered in 1985, the Girls became icons not just for their senses of humor, but their fashion sense, too.
Whether it’s Dorothy’s long tunics or Blanche’s flowing negligées, credit for the Girls’ character-defining looks goes to the show’s hardworking costume designer, Judy Evans Steele. “I wanted to keep the show overall feeling like Florida: bright, with lots of prints,” Judy remembers. But of course, in order to make sure the four iconic actresses always looked their best, “You do take some license,” she admits. “Even though it’s hot in Florida, we didn’t do sleeveless shirts. And I layered clothes to be flattering, even though you might not do that if it’s a hundred degrees outside.” Furthermore, despite the show’s frequent plot points about the Girls running short on cash, “I didn’t worry about putting them in clothes it looked like they could afford,” Judy adds. “The main idea was to make them look good. We didn’t want the show to be about four dowdy ladies.”