“I tend to drift downstream. Like flotsam,” he told me. “I go along until something reaches out to snag me.”
On the one hand, this sounded like a lovely Zen way to be, but on the other hand…Oh, dear, I thought when he gave me that analogy, we could get into trouble here. My style was the opposite of passive. I tended to run for the cliff like a stampeded buffalo—BAH-RUMPH! BAHRUMPH!—and leap over, all feet flying. Maybe not the best setup for a lasting relationship, but have I ever let anything like that stop me? Hell, no. BAH-RUMPH! BAH-RUMPH! Stand back, Sally! I’m dangerous! And you can’t teach an old buffalo new tricks. At least, not without more therapy than this buffalo had had.
It was easy for me to start rationalizing: “Hey, this Keel thing could work. This should work. He’s a good man with a lot of qualities I find very attractive. Lovely, masculine, sexy qualities! What’s not to love?”
The man could shinny up a tall tree to get me a bird’s nest. Up he goes! Like a kid! Where does a man of fifty get that kind of energy? His physical gifts were bewitching. His personality was fun. His Texas accent and colorful way of expressing himself were charming. He made chili from scratch. He mixed well with people. He drove like a pro. He was reliable. Maybe a bit unenlightened, but he was willing to be taught. (Like I knew enough to be teaching anyone. Please! I was a fourth-grader teaching a kindergarten kid. I tell you—I’m dangerous.)
Long story short, we were married April of 1984 in Ardmore at my father’s house, with about a dozen old friends. The night before the wedding, we went to The Hamburger Inn, a place we used to frequent in high school, and although I was now a vegetarian, we ordered the same humongous hamburgers we’d had in the good old days. With all the fixin’s! Yum, yum! I spent the subsequent hours of that chilly, moonlit night in the front yard, upchucking like crazy, Keel at my side. I kept remembering how I’d thrown up my fish dinner during my honeymoon night in Maine with The Italian. Was this a foreboding, or just my natural reaction to eating a hamburger? Buffalos are vegetarians, after all.
The wedding was very nice. I wore a little white silk suit and he wore a dark one. We looked terrific—trim, young, and very happy. On our way to L.A., we stopped at some little town in New Mexico, where he bought me a lovely pair of silver and amethyst earrings. Of course, I still have them. We found a justice of the peace, then went to a motel, where he started drinking beer, his libation of choice. He downed one after the other and quickly…got somewhat plastered. Glued to the TV. Oh, no, here we go again, I thought. Everything’s fine until the honeymoon, and then—thud.
In L.A., Keel’s son, David, joined us, following his mother’s wishes. He did need his father at his age, and it was fun having him around.
Tom Keel and me in high school, Ardmore, Oklahoma, 1950. Hot ’n’ heavy at the time.
Tom Keel and me cutting our wedding cake, 1984. Hot ’n’ heavy again.
He was a cute kid who wanted to be a rock ’n’ roll drummer. Mark was still into rock ’n’ roll, although it had caused tinnitus in one ear, a condition he’s struggled with ever since. David kept the drum set in his bedroom—Mark’s old bedroom—and practiced a lot. Hey, drummers gotta drum. Rockers gotta rock. But I was happy when Keel told me, “I play a classical music cassette in the car when I’m driving him to school.”
I said, “Oh, that’s good. Classical music.”
Keel and I were in an L.A. bookstore one day and ran smack into Norman Hartweg wheeling around a corner. I’d neglected to tell Norm I was getting married. Caught off guard, I made awkward introductions.
“Norman Hartweg, meet Tom Keel…my husband.”
Norm blatantly gave me a look like I had lost my mind. Yes, Norman. I got married—again! You don’t have to look at me like I’ve been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.
Norm said, “Rue, I’ve been thinking we should write a play together. I’ve done some research on an old play by Plautus about an Athens merchant and his son.”
I was intrigued. I bought an IBM home computer, Keel taught me the bare basics of operating it, and Norm and I started writing.
Keel was very dependent on my company, which soon became a problem, but what else could he be? He’d left his life and everyone he knew in Dallas. I knew he was lonely, and oh Lord, it made me painfully aware of how selfish I was. While he waited for a job to open up at the phone company, he did repair work on my pool. He knew how to do that kind of thing, a talent that’s always thrilled me. And how sexy he looked doing it! Watching him repair that pool was a treat for me. As I sat at my computer creating a whole new ancient Greek world on paper, he’d pass by the window pushing a wheelbarrow full of cement, grinning in at me with an expression I can only describe as…sweet and full of longing. I was working on my creation, happy as a clam, and he was working on the pool with that lonely-puppy look. I would often go out to visit him while he worked.
Watching Keel when Lil was around was harder to take. She told him when to roll the car windows up or down, how fast to drive, practically told him when to breathe!
“Why don’t you tell her to go to hell? Make your own fortune,” I urged him.
But he just shrugged. “I don’t need the aggravation.”
He eventually got hired by the phone company and started to make acquaintances, bringing one or two fellows home for supper. I thought they were stupnagels, boring, not in his league. Still, I was grateful he had some new friends. He was really a darling, happy to drive me to rehearsals for a play I was in, happy to come to the performances, happy to meet my showbiz friends, who of course found him an odd choice for me but never said so. (God knows what they said behind my back.) He got along with everyone, and we had some great chili parties.
Having snagged him as he drifted by, I felt responsible for this marriage. I tried to develop more patience and endurance, but there was just no intellectual connection. Within a year, I was around the bend, trying to make the ill-fitting match a success. I felt like I was in a leghold trap. He and David went to Texas for Christmas, and before they left, I bleakly said, “Maybe we should call it quits when you get back.”
Perhaps because he was also unhappy—or perhaps because he was drifting downstream—he agreed.
Over the two weeks he and David were gone, I was at peace, then toward the day they were due back, I started to feel lonesome for sweet, sexy Keel. When they drove up, I ran out to welcome him, asking him to stay longer, and he was happy to. But nothing substantially changed.
That April, Lil gave Tom $2,000 for a wedding anniversary trip to the same Kauai resort hotel she had stayed in umpteen years ago. (Of course, $2,000 wasn’t nearly enough to cover it, so I kicked in the rest, but it’s the thought that counts, right?) The hotel Lil had picked for us was one of the most luxurious on the island, but it was covered in tall palms that dropped coconuts like bombs every few minutes. Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! After a day or two, the hotel personnel warned us not to walk on the grounds, since some people had been conked out by the falling coconuts. We moved to a less expensive—and less dangerous!—place, drove all over Kauai, visited the perpetual rain forest, and saw Arsenic and Old Lace at the VHW lodge, played by the townspeople. The postmaster played the Cary Grant role facing upstage to deliver his lines and walking with his left arm moving forward when he stepped with his left foot, his right arm forward when he stepped with his right foot, like a toy soldier that had been engineered wrongly. It was sheer heaven!
We snorkeled, surrounded by bewitching fish of all colors, and took a kayak trip up a river past the ruins of an ancient village. So peaceful. Unforgettable. The island of Hawaii had eucalyptus trees of unimaginable beauty and a bubbling volcano interspersed with green growth. We walked barefoot on black lava, and I picked up a small, long-cooled hunk of volcanic rock to take home, although it was illegal and Tom objected. (Hey, now—I still have that rock!)
We stopped at a diner for lunch one day, and while Tom went to the men’s room, I shuddered at the music being piped through the re
staurant—various short snippets of classical pieces with a BOOM-da-da BOOM-da-da disco rhythm accompaniment underneath. BOOM-da-da under Beethoven’s Fifth, BOOM-da-da under Mozart, BOOM-da-da under Tchaikovsky. Tom came back and, as I was about to take a bite of some juicy island morsel, he said, “Oh, that’s the classical tape I play every day in the car for David.”
If this had been a movie I’d have done a spit-take. Folks, there’s only just so long you can pretend you’re listening to the same Beethoven. When we arrived home, I said to Keel, “Let’s face it. We really don’t belong together.”
I remembered something told to me by an actor friend who’d married his high school sweetheart and subsequently divorced: “I was hoping she’d grown up, and she was hoping I hadn’t.” That rang a gong in my head.
Keel and I parted with no animosity, just regret. He wanted to leave Harrod, which was fine with me but not with Harrod, who began to howl and bark after Tom drove off and kept it up for two months. He did eventually settle down and get contented, though, becoming my dog. A year later, Keel came back for him.
I know people were urging Keel to sue me for half the money I’d earned during the marriage, and I was nervous about being tomato-juiced again, but he says he never even considered it. When our tax return of $5,000 came in, he asked if he could borrow it for a while, and I said sure. Hell, the man deserved compensation for putting up with my foolishness. He signed the divorce agreement and our business was settled. And he did some mighty nice things for my father—and for me—over the next many years, including repaying me the $5,000 in 1995, when Lil died, finally leaving him his inheritance of half a million hard-earned bucks, which he quickly and cleverly parlayed into a million.
All this time, Norman and I had been whizzing along with our musical farce, having a great time. Still untitled, it was set in Athens in 457 B.C. We alternated writing every other scene, and I wrote all the music and lyrics. Norm was a terribly talented writer but needed to be ridden herd on, tending sometimes to go too far for my taste. He whipped off the final scene in one long night’s session, pulling all the disparate threads of the farce together. Well, it was certainly full of action, but it was a holy mess. He had characters leaving through windows and coming immediately through doors in totally different costumes—things like that. I spent weeks straightening it out, taking what he’d created, and making it flow.
Meanwhile, Mama’s Family wrote my character out of the show. The fates that ruled Mama’s Universe had Aunt Fran choke to death on a chicken bone.
I did not grieve her passing. In fact, that turned out to be the luckiest chicken bone ever choked on. Must’ve been a wishbone!
In February of 1985, I was languishing in Love Boat limbo. By this time, I’d done five stints in Captain Stubing’s celebrity purgatory, as well as guest shots on such timeless classics as Gimme a Break! and Charles in Charge. I was cautiously optimistic when Sylvia Gold, my agent at ICM, gave me the heads-up about a pilot script she was sending by messenger.
“I think you’ll like it,” she said. “It’s called The Golden Girls.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“We can be bought, but we can’t be bored.”
—LYNN FONTAINE OF LUNT & FONTAINE
When I opened the bright yellow pilot script from NBC, a tingle ran up my spine, giving rise to a strong, immediate feeling:
“This one’s a winner.”
The Golden Girls story line concerned four women of a certain age joining up for financial reasons to share a house but finding in each other the love and support of a family. I started reading. And I started laughing. The zingy, spot-on dialogue crackled like sparklers.
I instantly loved these characters: Sophia, the nursing home escapee with outlandish tales of her Sicilian girlhood. Dorothy, the acerbic divorcée with a wisecrack for every occasion. Rose, the farm-fresh ninny with her sweetly guileless take on life. And—ooh-la-la—Blanche, the Southern miss with her free, joyful sexuality and sassiness.
(BLANCHE ENTERS)
BLANCHE
Oh, Dorothy, can I borrow your mink stole?
DOROTHY
It’s Miami in June. Only cats are wearing fur.
ROSE
Are you going out?
DOROTHY
No. She’s going to sit here where it’s a hundred and twelve degrees and eat enchiladas.
BLANCHE
I just need some cucumbers to put on my eyes.
DOROTHY
You’ll have trouble seeing, Blanche.
BLANCHE
It’s very good. It reduces puffiness.
ROSE
Does it work on thighs?
BLANCHE
I don’t know, honey. I don’t need it on my thighs.
(SHE EXITS)
I called my agent at once.
“Sylvia? Rue. This script is definitely for me. I’m perfect for Blanche!”
“Actually, they’re thinking of Betty White for Blanche,” she said. “They want you to read for Rose.”
“Oh, God…Rose? But I have no connection with Rose. And I know exactly how to play Blanche!”
“Well,” she said, “you can either go in tomorrow and read for Rose, or pass.”
I read and reread the script, becoming more certain that Blanche and I were made for each other. Oh, dear Saint Dymphna! Don’t pull another Aunt Fran on me! I went to NBC and read Rose for the pilot director, Jay Sandrich, and after a scene or two he said, “Rue, I know it’s an unorthodox thing to ask, and you’re not prepared, but would you mind going down the hall to an empty room and taking a look at the role of Blanche?”
“Why, Jay,” I cooed, my heart leaping. “I wouldn’t mind one bit!”
Not prepared? Please. I’d all but memorized it. I went down the hall for a few minutes, then came back and gave Jay the full Blanche treatment: “In high school, I had to break up with Carl Dugan, captain of the football team. I was very nervous, but I just spit it out—‘Carl, I’m dumping you for Coach Wilkins!’”
Next day, they asked Betty White to come in and read Rose opposite my Blanche. Caught by surprise, Betty gave Rose an absolutely hilarious interpretation, with a childlike charm that was not your runof-the-mill ninny: “What a great day! It’s like life is a great big weenie roast and I’m the biggest weenie!”
Susan Harris, the creator of the series, called me later that day.
“Rue, we offered Bea Arthur the part of Dorothy, but she turned it down,” she told me. “Do you think you could help persuade her?”
I hadn’t seen Bea in seven years. We didn’t really stay in touch after Maude closed in 1978, because, for one thing, she’d kept The Greek on her party guest list, while I was summarily removed. Being excluded from my former pal’s parties hurt my feelings, but I didn’t hold that against Bea. The Greek was great at parties. Hell, I should’ve kept him on my party list instead of marrying him. Over the years, I’d hear news of Bea through the grapevine—a Woody Allen play at Lincoln Center, a couple of pilots that fell on their fannies. But I loved working with Bea, and she was perfect for Dorothy. I was on the phone within minutes.
“Bea? Can you tell me why you’re not jumping at the best script to come along in twenty years?”
“Because, Rue,” Bea replied in her distinctive baritone, “I don’t want to do Maude and Vivien Meet Sue Ann Nivens. Boooorrrrrring!”
“No, Bea, I’m doing the sexpot, Blanche. Betty is the dimwit.”
A pause, then, “Oh, really? Well, now, that’s interesting.”
Within a day or two, NBC had us three, along with Estelle Getty, who’d already been hired as Sophia, come in to read for the big suits. We read cold—no rehearsal—but the chemistry was plain as a preacher’s daughter.
(BLANCHE ENTERS)
BLANCHE
Oh, Rose, I’m borrowing your earrings. Lord, I’d love to get a face-lift by eight o’clock.
DOROTHY
Blanche, who is Harry?
BLANCHE
&n
bsp; Oh, girls, he’s just wonderful. He’s very gallant. He’s a perfect gentleman. He’s a great dancer and doesn’t make noises when he chews.
DOROTHY
Chewing. That’s way up there on my list. Comes right after intelligent.
BLANCHE
He doesn’t talk loud at the movies, doesn’t take his own pulse—and he’s still interested!
ROSE
In what?
We had those guys wetting their pants, and—bam—that afternoon, it was settled.
Like Rose says: “Dorothy, you’re the smart one, and Blanche, you’re the sexy one, and Sophia, you’re the old one. And I’m the nice one. Everybody always likes me.”
To which Sophia replies, “The old one isn’t so crazy about you.”
We taped the pilot, which had the audience inebriated with laughter, and were picked up by NBC for thirteen episodes, to begin taping in July.
Heaven on wheels!
Our set was a happy one. Guest stars always remarked on how congenial it was, how different from most TV shows. This was remarkable, since Betty, Bea, Estelle, and I came from drastically different performance backgrounds. Bea had worked on the stage in New York for years before Norman Lear brought her to L.A. to do Maude. Though she was a natural for sitcom, her roots remained in the theatre. Betty, on the other hand, was truly an American television institution, getting her start on one of the first TV broadcasts in 1939 and doing her own daytime talk show in the early 1950s.
My First Five Husbands Page 25