by Jim Colucci
Photos by SAM HATMAKER
Golden Galley
IN 2013, NEW York’s venerable auction house Christie’s hauled in $1.9 million for John Currin’s 1991 painting Bea Arthur Naked. (Fans thought they’d learned the identity of the anonymous telephone buyer when a week later, comedian Jeffrey Ross—who had infamously joked about Bea’s body parts during the 1999 Friars Club Roast of Jerry Stiller, broadcast on Comedy Central—tweeted a photo of himself with the painting, with a thank-you message to his generous benefactor, Jimmy Kimmel. But Jimmy replied with a tweet denying the purchase—and so the mystery continues.)
In the summer of 2007, years before the Currin sale made national headlines, Lenora Claire was also garnering press attention for curating the erotic art show Golden Gals Gone Wild. Outlets like CNN, NPR, NBC News, the National Enquirer, and TMZ reported how, inspired by yet a different topless Bea Arthur painting by Chris Zimmerman that she scored for a mere $110 on eBay, the onetime performance artist brought together over forty of the day’s up-and-coming artists for a four-week exhibition in the heart of Hollywood. Over two thousand curious art fans crowded the show’s opening night at the World of Wonder gallery, where original works were priced between $50 and $4,000. Then in 2009, a second edition of the show, featuring all-new art, sold out at the World Erotic Art Museum in the Girls’ hometown of Miami, and landed Lenora and company on the cover of the Miami New Times.
Today, just as the Girls continue to rack up tributes from writers and singers, they inspire today’s foremost visual artists as well. And so here, in this Gallery of the Girls, is a roundup of recent works of Golden Girls inspiration.
LENORA CLAIRE’S HIT EROTIC ART SHOW GOLDEN GALS GONE WILD
Canadian-born artist Glen Hanson’s popular 2006 Golden Girls caricature has been turned into T-shirts (www.huntees.com/glenhanson), mugs, greeting cards, Christmas ornaments, and even a shower curtain (www.sallyandmitch.com).
GLEN HANSON • LOS ANGELES • INK ON PAPER • 2006 • WWW.GLENHANSON.COM
Mike Giblin, a character designer for the British network ITV’s 2015 sketch show Newzoids, is a lifelong Golden Girls fan who as an artist has always admired the characters’ clearly defined personalities, which lend themselves to caricature.
MIKE GIBLIN • NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, UK • THE GOLDEN GIRLS-THE ANIMATED SERIES • DIGITAL • 2008 • WWW.MIKEGIBLINILLUSTRATION.COM
Instead of erotic art, Trevor Wayne decided to put the Girls in the world of “cos-play.” “So instead of being extreme, this piece has become definitely the most popular of all my paintings,” he explains.
TREVOR WAYNE • LOS ANGELES • GOLDEN HEROES • ACRYLIC ON CANVAS • 2014 • WWW.TREVORWAYNE.COM
As another sign of the show’s continuing international appeal, the Girls number among the caricatures the Australian artist Erin Hunting emblazons on prints and T-shirts and then ships all around the globe.
ERIN HUNTING • MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA • DIGITAL DRAWING • 2015 • WWW.ERINHUNTING.COM
Inspired by his memories of watching the show each night with a “punk as f---” roommate who owned her own record store, Jesse Beamesderfer combined The Golden Girls with the look of the ’70s band KISS. “To me, the Golden Girls are rock and roll, and will always remind me of Stacey ‘Vertigo,’” he explains.
JESSE BEAMESDERFER • PHILADELPHIA • PEN AND INK • 2012 • WWW.MOEBIUSGOLDBERG.COM
Originally created for a client in Canada, Barry Belcher’s illustration of the Girls around their kitchen table proved so popular on the artist’s website that he painted this second, almost identical work, titled Cheesecake Roundtable.
BARRY BELCHER • ATLANTA • CHEESECAKE ROUNDTABLE • ACRYLIC ON STRETCH CANVAS • 2012 • WWW.BARRYBELCHER.COM
“I was going through a phase of spoofing the masters with pop culture,” says Sam Carter of his mash-up of Botticelli and Bea Arthur. “This is probably one of my more shocking pieces. People either love it or hate it, but it definitely gets them to stop and look.”
SAM CARTER • ORANGE COUNTY, CA • THE BIRTH OF ZBORNAK • ACRYLIC ON CANVAS • 2009 • WWW.SAMCARTERART.COM
Sarah Hedlund conceived this piece as a tribute to both the Girls and to the Czech art nouveau painter Alphonse Mucha, “combining two of my pop culture favorites,” she explains. “I grew up watching The Golden Girls with my mom. I always wanted to create my own fan art, adding little details like the ! in the door that other super fans would appreciate.”
SARAH HEDLUND • LONE TREE, IOWA • DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION • 2015 • WWW.SARAHHEDLUND.COM
In 2014, former Golden Girls writer/executive producer Marc Cherry commissioned this drawing from New York artist Ken Fallin, whose work has appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal and Playbill
KEN FALLIN • NEW YORK • INK ON PAPER • 2014 WWW.KENFALLINARTIST.COM
A Bea a Day Allows an Artist to Play
IN FEBRUARY 2013, lifelong Golden Girls fan Mike Denison painted a homemade birthday gift for a friend featuring the Girls. A tile installer by day who trained as an artist at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mike was looking for a creative project and, partly inspired by John Currin’s topless Bea Arthur painting fetching nearly two million dollars, set out to create Bea-related art every day for a year.
Mike’s Bea a Day project, begun on his thirty- fifth birthday that September, took Bea and the rest of the Girls out of the kitchen and into more abstract settings: floating through space with a piece of cheesecake, or a Tarantino-style poster for a movie called Kill Stan. After brainstorming an initial list of over a hundred Bea-related ideas, “I knew the project would be sustainable, whether the works would just be straight homage to Bea, or be parodies, or even just bad puns,” Mike explains. “I enjoyed getting to challenge myself—especially because as soon as the idea came to me, it also came with a set of rules that I can’t explain. First of all, I had to create a new piece every single day. Second, I would never do anything tasteless. Yes, people suggested bad puns, and I’m open to that. But the idea could never be too much of a stretch.”
Mike had sold some of his prints at a comic book convention in Portland, Maine, and scored rave reviews first from Golden Girls superfan Dave Rubin, formerly the face of Logo TV’s weekly web series The Golden Girls Ultimate Fan Club and now host of Ora.tv’s The Rubin Report, and then on the Huffington Post’s Arts and Culture page. Soon after, Mike made his works from Bea a Day available as prints and T-shirts on his store page on etsy.com (www.etsy.com/shop/BeaADay).
Painted as a birthday gift for a friend, this “take on a classic Star Wars movie poster” became the inspiration for Mike Denison’s eventual Bea a Day and Betty a Day art projects.
Since then, the iPhone game Busy Bea, which features Bea a Day art, has racked up over ten thousand downloads, and the illustrations have been featured on the web’s hippest news and culture sites. But the best part of his newfound fame, Mike avows, has been “the fan community I’ve fallen into. You’ve heard of the ‘Bronies.’ Well, I’m calling this group my fellow Broldens.”
Girls Beneath the Skin
SOME GOLDEN GIRLS art has been preserved on quite a different type of canvas. On an April 2015 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host surprised guest Betty White with a type of tribute she’d never before seen. Courtesy of his video Wall of America, Jimmy introduced Betty to nine fans whose bodies bear her image. “Oh no! And you have to live with that all the time?” Betty exclaimed playfully, upon seeing a reproduction of her face with the words STAY GOLDEN upon the calf of a woman named Morgon, of Logan, West Virginia.
Los Angeles resident H. Alan Scott, host of the podcast Out on the Lanai, was next up to show his idol the image of all four Girls on his left arm. Then, Jimmy had a question for the then-ninety-three-year-old star, in reaction to further displays from Stephen, of Heber Springs, Arkansas; Gretchen, of Austin, Texas; Carl, of Ontario, Canada; Shawn, of Troy, New York; Maren, of Champaign, Illinois; Tiffany, of Mims, Florida; and Adrian o
f Houston, Texas:
“How does that make you feel?”
“It makes me feel wonderful . . .” Betty quipped. “And so glad that I’m not them.”
Writer/comedian Eliot Glazer shows off his Bea Arthur “Thank You For Being a Friend” tattoo.
Bea Arthur is on the menu at the Big Gay Ice Cream shop.
Golden Dessert
THEY’VE BEEN MUSES to artists, and their likenesses have graced every product from baseball hats to bangle bracelets. But ever since 2010, several of the cheesecake-loving Girls have also been the inspirations for their own desserts.
A year after Doug Quint and Bryan Petroff began driving their Big Gay Ice Cream truck around the streets of Manhattan in 2009, the two consulted with the Twitter-verse to come up with catchy names for the company’s signature confections. For one particular menu item—a golden-yellow cone filled with golden vanilla ice cream, drizzled with brownish-gold dulce de leche, and topped with golden Nilla wafer crumbs—one fan suggested the “Golden Girl.” At just that moment, Doug remembers, Bea Arthur’s historic bequest to New York’s Ali Forney Center was announced in the press. And so they dubbed the “Bea Arthur” in her honor, with some proceeds going to the charity providing housing for homeless LGBT youth.
Sales immediately jumped—and so in 2011, as the entrepreneurial duo opened their first brick-and-mortar store in New York’s East Village, they prevailed again on the power of the Girls. “We don’t normally start with a name and then come up with the recipe after,” Doug admits. “We would never set out to make a Lady Gaga cone and then figure out what should go in it.” But for the Rue McClanahan, the Big Gay owners made an exception. “We knew we wanted to come up with something that Blanche might have served to Big Daddy,” Doug explains. And with that, bourbon came to mind. “It was as if we channeled Blanche, and could hear her in our heads describing in her Southern accent the ingredients of this icecream sandwich: praline-pecan cookies and bourbon ice cream.”
The Bea Arthur has since been featured on the Food Network, and the Rue McClanahan has become the three Big Gay Ice Cream shops’ top-selling ice-cream sandwich. But, Doug notes, the other two Girls are not to be neglected. The company, whose policy is to name its treats after only the deceased, opted to honor Betty White by commissioning artist Jason O’Malley to create a five-foot-by-five-foot Warhol-esque portrait for its Philadelphia store. Jason’s smaller, similar depictions of Estelle Getty hang in both Philly and New York—and an Estelle-themed frozen dessert, some form of ice-cream-filled cannoli, is being concocted.
Artist Jason O’Malley’s rendition of Sophia in Big Gay Ice Cream’s shop in New York City’s West Village.
Photo by ELIO T GLAZER. Photos by DOUG QUINT.
Even in the company’s earliest days, as Doug manned the window of its first truck, he would make sure the beloved icon got her propers. “Not very often, but occasionally, someone would have waited in line for half an hour, and then would get to the window and ask for the ‘BEE-ya’ Arthur or the ‘BAY-ya’ Arthur,” Doug remembers. “And a couple of those times, I made the person go to the back of the line and research her on his phone, so that by the time he got to the window again he could give me a three-sentence dissertation on Bea Arthur and who she was.” But more often on such occasions, Doug notes, “When someone would order the Bea Arthur by the wrong pronunciation, I could just stand back and laugh. Because anyone who didn’t know who Bea was was chastised and taught a lesson by the other customers. People wouldn’t have it. They really took this cone to heart, because they wanted to remember Bea Arthur and make sure she was always respected.”
Girls Across the Water
FOR DECADES, AMERICAN TV has borrowed concepts liberally from abroad and turned them into stateside hits; that’s how England’s Till Death Do Us Part, Man About the House, and The Office became CBS’s All in the Family, ABC’s Three’s Company, and NBC’s . . . The Office. In recent years, the process has worked in the other direction as well, with countries like Spain, Argentina, Russia, and Turkey cooking up their own versions of The Nanny, Married with Children, and Everybody Loves Raymond.
The Golden Girls was way ahead of this reversal of trend, with foreign adaptations based on Susan Harris’s concept popping up as early as 1993 with Britain’s similarly seaside- set Brighton Belles. The original Golden Girls had been such a hit in the UK that they’d performed for their fan the Queen Mum at the Royal Variety Performance in 1988; but not long after, the Brighton Belles were a surprising outright ratings flop. Since then, adaptations have continued to pop up around the world. But as they’ve debuted throughout the nineties and up to the present day, vernacular versions of The Golden Girls in Russia, the Philippines, Turkey, and Spain have been unable to last past a single season. And it’s too soon to tell the fates of the particularly faithful adaptations that have premiered in Greece and the Netherlands in just the last few years.
Of course, none of those foreign productions has benefitted from the special magic bestowed by Bea, Betty, Rue, and Estelle—how could they?—which probably accounts for the middling results. But recently, two young writers in Australia—where The Golden Girls still airs every day as well—may have found a work-around to the problem. In 2012, Jonathan Worsley and Thomas Duncan-Watt presented the stage show they penned, Thank You for Being a Friend, at Sydney’s Darlinghurst Theatre to a late-night, predominantly gay and lesbian crowd. Their original episode featuring the Girls was acted à la the off-Broadway hit Avenue Q—that is, by puppet likenesses of our beloved American leading ladies, with their corresponding humans in full view.
When the producing team of Neil Gooding and Matthew Henderson then came aboard the show, they toned down its risqué humor to broaden its appeal to a more mainstream crowd, and most importantly, requested a key bit of recasting. After witnessing the actress playing Dorothy “spending her entire night trying to force her voice down into the bottom of her shoes,” Neil remembers, the two producers had an idea: why not just cast a man? “I know some audiences laugh, and think we’re going for camp,” he explains. “But really, having a male actor produces probably a better representation of Bea Arthur than having a female trying to re-create her voice. Bea had such a unique tool, and there aren’t too many women who can find that same droll depth of voice.”
The original Australian cast of Thank You for Being a Friend, with Julia Billington as Rose, Donna Lee as Sophia, Darren Mapes as Dorothy, and Chrystal de Grussa as Blanche.
Photo by MATTHEW MANAGEMENT and NEIL GOODING PRODUCTIONS.
Thank You for Being a Friend starts with its puppets reenacting The Golden Girls’ opening credits, and proceeds through Dorothy’s battle to get Sophia to the doctor, Rose’s attempt to write a song, and Blanche’s struggle to accept her gay son’s baby via an Asian surrogate. The revised eighty-five-minute show debuted in February 2014 at Melbourne’s Theatre Works as part of the city’s gay and lesbian Midsumma Festival, then proceeded to the Seymour Centre during the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. The fall of 2015 brought a revival that toured the eastern cities of Sydney, Brisbane, Tamworth, Port Macquarie, and Canberra; then, for the latter half of 2016, the producers plan on touring the show around the United States.
Golden Girls Forever
“Right from the beginning, young people liked the show. I thought and thought about why and I finally realized it is because the show may have been about older ladies, but it was still very antiestablishment.”
-BEA ARTHUR
ON JUNE 2, 2003, Lifetime aired The Golden Girls Reunion, which drew 4.2 million viewers to become the network’s highest-rated special ever in total viewers. Among both the Women 18–49 and Women 25–54 demos, it was the top-rated cable program of the night, and among all Adults 18–49, it was the night’s number four cable show, behind only such male-dominated fare as two editions of WWE Wrestling on Spike and an episode of American Chopper. Among twentysomething Americans that evening, the now-seventysomething Girls were more popular
than anything airing on MTV.
Until 2007, Nielsen did not take into account any viewership by dormitory-dwelling students; but even back in the show’s days on Lifetime, the network knew from their feedback that college kids are yet another niche audience, watching in huge numbers. Back then, Tim Brooks estimated that of the 250 to 300 e-mails the network received per month about the show, about 30 percent were from people in college or college age. And Betty White corroborates that pattern, explaining that to this day 70 percent of the mail she receives about The Golden Girls is from fans under age twenty-five.
Now, in the latter half of the 2010s, a sizable chunk of TV viewers, particularly those in the youngest, tech-savviest age demographics, has shifted to downloading and streaming their shows via the Internet or mobile devices, making tracking their consumption of any particular series much more challenging. But even as some networks are witnessing declines in their viewership on our traditional TV screens, today not one but three different cable channels are finding success by airing the Girls—each multiple times per day. After exiting Lifetime in 2009, and a brief run on WE from 2009 to 2013, the indefatigable Golden ladies have now set up shop at Hallmark, TV Land, and Logo, with each network proclaiming its positive and youth-affirming results.
Since acquiring The Golden Girls in 2009, Hallmark has aired the show multiple times per day, every day—except from early November through the end of each year, when the channel’s programming switches exclusively to Christmas movies (and its executives hear lots of complaints from Golden Girls fans looking for their fix). The show, explains Hallmark’s VP of Program Planning and Scheduling, Darren Melameth, “continues to deliver, wherever we put it.” In the age of the DVR and other forms of on-demand viewing, the show scores some of Hallmark’s strongest live viewership numbers of the day, particularly in its two-hour late-night block from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. “It’s pretty amazing,” Darren adds, “that the last episode at twelve thirty does even better than the first at eleven. The show continues to build on itself. I want to meet these women who at midnight and twelve thirty are watching The Golden Girls. These are my friends.”