My First Five Husbands

by Rue McClanahan

  “I actually started in silent television,” she used to wisecrack.

  A graduate of Beverly Hills High School, she was a TV baby, playing not just to, but with, the audience, flirting with them between scenes, hiking her skirt up and calling out, “Hi, sailor. Long in town?” She wasn’t fond of stage work, but she loved TV game shows, interviews—I think she even liked the public service announcements we did, staying late after taping. We never had time to learn the copy, seeing it just minutes before we had to perform it. The rest of us read the copy from big cue cards, but Betty, blind as a bat, couldn’t read the cards and wouldn’t wear her glasses, so she had to memorize her lines after seeing them once. And she never made a mistake. I just figured she was a witch. There’s no other explanation.

  Estelle Getty, meanwhile, had raised two sons in New York, doing Off Off Broadway plays until she was almost sixty, when she was cast as the Jewish grandmother in Harvey Fierstein’s hit play Torch Song Trilogy. She toured the country with it for four years, finally playing Los Angeles in 1985, where she was seen by the Golden Girls producers, who snatched her up to play Sophia. I’d seen her in Torch Song and she was dead-on funny. For me, she saved the play. But not having done sitcom, she was a fish out of water and kept asking, “Can’t we make Dorothy and Sophia Jewish?”

  Estelle always had me rolling on the floor with anecdotes about her Jewish neighbors in Queens. I kept telling her, “Estelle, you should do stand-up!” and made her repeat one story in particular over and over. She did a priceless imitation of her elderly neighbor. “Oh, Eshtelle, vas terrible! You shudda been dere! I bang over to pick up the hong-yungs and I cou’n garrup!” And Estelle acted it out, bending over to “pick up the onions” and not being able to “get up.” (It’s impossible to write the thick Jewish dialect with anything approaching the inspired Getty delivery.)

  Her little quirks gave Betty and Bea and me a lot of laughs. She never got the point of a funny line; we had to explain every joke, why Sophia was saying a particular line and why it was funny. She also had a way of delivering certain lines with the accent on the wrong syllable. We called it her “marble cake” delivery, because she had once had a line about marble cake but had pronounced it “marble CAKE” instead of “MARBLE cake,” leaving us in stitches. It was like saying, “I’ll tell you a bed TIME story,” or “I used to have a COCKER spaniel.” Give me a slice of marble CAKE? As opposed to what—marble popcorn?

  I don’t know how the rumor got started (possibly Estelle’s PR firm), but a lot of people who watched the show thought Estelle was the youngest of us four, and that Sophia was a combination of brilliant acting and clever makeup—which, of course, she was. However, folks, let me set the record straight: I was the spring chicken on that set. Bea, Estelle, and Betty were all born during the Harding administration, and I came along a dozen years later with FDR’s “New Deal.” By the time that always-on-hand cheesecake appeared in what would become one of the most familiar kitchens in America, I had done a lot of stage work in New York, seven or eight movies, played five years on Maude, two seasons of Mama’s Family, seven episodes of Apple Pie, and felt at home in all media. Although I, too, observed the theatrical fourth wall for the first few seasons, I eventually said, “What the hell,” and began joking with the audience between scenes with Betty.

  My salary was based (as they do in television) on what I was paid for my most recent series, Mama’s Family—peanuts. Lower than peanuts. What’s lower than peanuts? Squeegee sponges? Probably the lowest of us all, certainly tens of thousands below what Betty and Bea were paid, but, hey—all I can say is tanks Gott for that chicken bone, or I would have still been stuck in prim little dresses playing Aunt Fran, bored out of my gourd, and not available for The Golden Girls. Whew!

  In May, the pilot of The Golden Girls was taken to New York and Chicago to be played for subsidiary market heads—the bigwigs who decide what programs they’ll run on local stations—and we girls were asked to go. Betty and I happily complied, and it was thrilling. Reception in both cities—overwhelming! People were on their feet! They knew they had a surefire hit on their hands.

  Mark was off living his life, playing guitar, traveling the world, studying Stone Age cultures, collecting primitive art. I was so proud of the good man he had become. Over the years, I never stopped encouraging his father to get to know him. I had stayed in touch with Tom after the whole EST adventure, and after Keel and I divorced, Tom and I occasionally went out to dinner and jazz clubs. He was full of gaiety and fun, and when I gave one of my frequent parties, he was right there. Mr. Sociable. I have scores of photos of him looking handsome, laughing and chatting with Mark and Lette and Jack and other guests, carrying on like monkeys. He was full of cheer, friendly, even affectionate at times.

  He always left my driveway with a warm hug, saying, “I love you, lady.”

  And I always said, “I love you, too.” Whatever the hell I thought that meant.

  The old addiction, the Tom Lloyd fever, still had me by the curlies, and over time I started to believe again that things might somehow work out between us. Early that fall, while The Golden Girls was taping, we saw more and more of each other, and eventually we came up with the brilliant idea that he should give up his little apartment in Beverly Hills, move his few pieces of furniture into my house, and make a stab at getting closer. Hey, stranger things have happened…right? (Can you name three?)

  Tom was working as a composers’ agent, and every night he brought home three bottles of champagne, which we drank before, with, and after dinner. The conversation and laughter were as bubbly as the bubbly, but when I asked him to sit and talk, he went dumb. I kept urging him to tell me what in God’s name had happened back in 1958. Even after twenty-seven years, I was still trying desperately to make sense of it and thought honest conversations might help.

  “I’m not trying to attach blame,” I told him. “I’m just trying to understand what happened. What were you going through?”

  “I don’t know, babe. I can’t give you any answers.”

  “Well, did you ever miss Mark or wonder about him all those years?”

  “Lady, I don’t have any words to talk about this. What good would it do, anyway?”

  “Tom, you must have some memory of how you felt.”

  “I can’t talk about something that’s not there. It’s impossible!” he said in frustration. “I don’t have any words!”

  His inability to answer reminded me of my inability to find the place to cough after my gallbladder surgery. There seemed to be no mechanism for it.

  “Okay, how about this,” I persisted. “You told me a long time ago that you felt like you were thirteen. Do you still feel that way?”

  He thought for a moment, then said, “No, I’ve gotten to eighteen.”

  Eighteen? At fifty-two? At this rate, I wouldn’t live long enough to see him grow up.

  During the nine months he lived with me, we slept in the same bed but had no sex. Zilch. He never touched me. I kept looking for ways to please him, like when I’d had my hair dyed auburn for our wedding. Only this time, he said he was put off by a woman’s hair south of the Mason-Dixon line, if you get my drift, so I got waxed in that tender area, which is less fun than getting your tongue unstuck from a frozen lamppost. He still had the libido of a box turtle.

  All through the first season of The Golden Girls, Blanche was enjoying a wahoo sex life, but this gal’s name was under “celibate” in Webster’s. I appeared as Cinderella in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but I didn’t ride in a golden carriage. Appropriately enough, my magical conveyance had turned back into a pumpkin, and I was carted down Broadway in the bitter cold, decked out in a décolletage off-the-shoulder ball gown over my long underwear, mouthing the song “A Good Prince Is Hard to Find.” A bit too much irony that early in the morning. I don’t do Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades anymore.

  But ho ho ho, the holidays were upon us. For Christmas, Tom gave me an electric vibrator.
I assumed it was a joke, but he said it wasn’t. Yep, nothing says “Happy Birthday, Jesus!” like a three-speed sex toy, right? This from the man who’d found my gift of Levi’s to be in bad taste? Hello?

  And no, I don’t still have it.

  People always ask if I’m really like Blanche, and I say, “Well, consider the facts: Blanche was a glamorous, oversexed, self-involved, man-crazy Southern belle from Atlanta—and I’m not from Atlanta!”

  There’s a scene from one of the last shows of our first season that beautifully sums up who Blanche is and what she and I have in common. The episode revolves around an unwanted visit from Blanche’s pen pal, Merrill, who’s just been released from prison. Sophia dryly observes, “That’s going to be rough. I bet after ten years in the jug, he’s going to be pretty short on foreplay.” But when Merrill shows up, quick-thinking Dorothy tries to save the day, pointedly telling Blanche, “We were just explaining to Merrill that there’s no telling when Blanche will be back.”

  Immediately catching on, Blanche says, “Oh, Lord, no. There’s no sense waiting around. You wouldn’t like Blanche anyway.”

  “She’s not your type,” Rose chimes in.

  “That’s right. She isn’t,” Blanche agrees emphatically.

  “She’s very cold,” says Rose.

  “Frigid! Hardly likes men at all,” says Blanche.

  “And she’s ugly, isn’t she?” says Rose.

  “Well…ugly is a strong word,” says Blanche.

  “And wrinkled! Isn’t she?”

  “No, she’s not wrinkled!”

  “And fat!”

  “Stop it! Stop it right now!” Blanche stamps her foot. “She’s none of those things, Rose Nylund! She’s gorgeous! Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous!”

  “Sounds good,” says Merrill. “Tell Blanche I’ll be back.” And he exits.

  “And stupid,” says Blanche. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

  Playing the scene, I realized, “Hey, Blanche thinks she’s gorgeous, and I look just like her, so…”

  I learned a lot from Blanche about optimism and joie de vivre, feeling confident about what you have to offer the world, and the ability to bounce back from life’s momentary failures. Blanche Devereaux is a masterful rebounder, never down for the count, always back up to fight again, to look again on the bright side. I loved that about her. When Blanche’s daughter Janet doubts the existence of God, Blanche says, “Oh, honey, of course He exists! Just look at the beautiful sky, the majestic trees. God created man and gave him a heart and a mind…and thighs that could crack walnuts.”

  Of course, it’s that last part that gets her into trouble. And me, too. Too often.

  Blanche and I both have a lot of love to give, and I don’t mean just in bed. She and I do share a genuine enjoyment of men and an adventurous spirit. I loved her matter-of-fact acceptance of that part of herself.

  “Is it possible to love two men at one time?” Rose wonders, and without missing a beat, Blanche says, “Set the scene. Have we been drinking?”

  She figures, hey, it’s natural, it’s fun, why make a fuss? Even though this inevitably sets her up for a lot of razzing from her housemates. Dorothy quips that Blanche going without sex is like Raymond Burr saying, “No gravy.” And Sophia never hesitates to use the word “slut.” Or “slutpuppy.” Or “Sheena, Queen of the Slut People.”

  I decided right away that Blanche would laugh whenever Sophia shot a poisoned arrow her way. One of the best instincts I had in creating Blanche’s character was that choice to see Sophia as a darling old thing whose barbs were endearing, not hurtful. After all, putting up with that sort of thing was, as Blanche breezily put it, “the curse of every devastatingly beautiful woman.”

  The Golden Girls kept me very busy, not just taping the shows but going to unending events. We were the toast of the town. After we completed the first season and went on hiatus, I found an opportunity to drag Tom Lloyd to my therapist, who gave our story serious thought before saying, “Tom, I think you see Rue as your father.”

  His father? Could I have heard that correctly?

  After a moment, Tom said, “Yes, I think you’re right.”

  Me, his father? But—he hated his father. The Authority Figure, The Tyrant, who demanded that he behave responsibly. Good grief! What guy can have a romantic relationship with his father? Tom became crystal clear to me that instant. And after it really sank in, I was finally cured of that old fever. That long-crippling Tom Bish virus.

  Still, I had been planning to take Mark on a trip to Europe that summer and had invited Tom to go with us, because I continued to hope that the two of them might become closer—unless Tom was confusing Mark with his hated aunt Edna, of course. We decided to stick with that plan and flew to Amsterdam, where we bicycled through the impeccable woods that connected the impeccable residential areas to the impeccable business areas. (My Lord, those people are clean!) We flew over the Alps and drove from Milan to Florence to see Michelangelo’s David. In Venice, we mingled with jazz artists in a villa bordering a canal. We had nice accommodations everywhere we went, but I wished to God that Tom and I had been given separate rooms. He picked a fight with me every night. Mark stopped talking to both of us. So much for the big bonding experience. And to top it all off, not one Italian man pinched my fanny.

  When we returned to L.A., Tom moved out of my house, and finally I was glad to see him go.

  I didn’t need him. Wasn’t in love with him. Didn’t want him back.

  I was free.

  A few years later, when Tom was diagnosed with advanced liver disease, I rushed to see him in intensive care at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Beside his bed was a blond bombshell in a snow-white gym suit. She looked over and said, “Hi. I’m Tom’s lady.”

  I said, “Hi, I’m his ex-wife.”

  Tom wasn’t expected to make it, throwing up fountains of blood, but he pulled through, and after a few weeks was released, weak and pale. A few days later, he returned to intensive care. More fountains of blood. Once again, he recovered. After that, I didn’t see him again for almost fifteen years.

  In 2005, Mark decided that he wanted to pay a visit, so we tracked him down in Los Angeles. Tom was seventy, looked eighty, and acted ninety, although seeing us did pick up his spirits. His slurred speech got clearer, and he kidded around and laughed. It depressed me to see the dreadful change in him, but Mark felt good about the visit, and we were both glad we’d gone.

  Eleven months later, Tom died quietly in his sleep.

  When I heard that no one had stepped forward to claim his body or belongings, I thought about that spring day in 1985 when I had just started The Golden Girls and Tom moved in with me. I was on the brink of something really wonderful in my career, and now I had another chance with this man who’d owned my heart for so many years. At the time, a big tomcat had been terrorizing the female cats on our street for several weeks. I’d been putting out food for him in the front yard, but he wouldn’t let me get close to him.

  The day Tom moved in, he appeared at my front door carrying that cat.

  “Hey, babe!” he said. “I got Buster Big Balls here.”

  Buster moved in, becoming docile and happy, but he did wander off now and then. He wore a collar with my phone number on it, so sooner or later someone would call and I’d go fetch him home. The last time he left, nobody called and I never found him. My father said he’d gone off to die.

  Some cats do that.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Listen, Sir Walter, elephant shit or chicken shit, it’s all the same on your shoe.”

  —QUEEN ELIZABETH I

  Back in 1972, I watched Secretariat win the Belmont Stakes, finishing a full record-smashing thirty-one lengths ahead of the rest of the horses.

  “Secretariat is all alone!” blared the track announcer. “He’s into the stretch…Secretariat leads this field by eighteen lengths…Twice a Prince has taken second…My Gallant has moved back to third…Here comes Secretariat to the wire! Un
believable! An amazing performance!”

  That horse was the Isaac Newton of horsedom. A phenomenon. The rules of horse racing are simple and finite. The fastest pony wins, and anyone with the sense to stay sober at the track can plainly see which horse that is. Showbiz awards don’t work that way. Occasionally, an actor wins an Oscar, Emmy, or Tony by rising head-and-shoulders above all competitors. But that’s rare. The Great Winner is usually among equally excellent competitors. The decision of the judging committee is entirely subjective, their opinions divided by a hairsbreadth. The Nobel Prize is sometimes divided between two equal winners, but show business awards insist on one big winner in each category. It’s just plain silly. How can any one performer—or any one show, really—be “The Best”? Maybe one of the five best, or one of the three best, but let’s be reasonable here.

  I don’t cotton to awards shows. Back in the seventies, during my first sojourn in La-La-Land, as Brad Davis called Hollywood, I was invited one year to be on the Emmy Awards judging committee to choose Best Actor in an Hour Comedy Series, and the next year, Best Actress in a Sitcom. What an eye-opener! We were presented with the five best performers picked from hundreds of actors by the Television Academy voters. The best five. So far, so good. For my money, all five were winners, having been voted by the entire Academy as the best of the bunch.

  But now a dozen judges were to pick the Best Performer. And who were the venerable twelve? Well, there was a disc jockey, a daughter of a local L.A. radio personality, a few small-name actors like me, and a handful of even dimmer bulbs on the marquee. Might as well have been a dozen hardware store owners. We watched one show each entered by the five competitors, then ranked them #1 to #5. The actor with the most #1s got the Emmy. That’s how it’s done. And my #1 choice never won, so I maintain the system is a crock!

  That first season of The Golden Girls, Bea, Betty, and I were all nominated for Emmys and Betty won, along with all the writers and Terry Hughes—seventeen Emmys in all. The second season, we were all nominated and I won. The next season, we were all nominated and Bea and Estelle won. The fourth season, we were all nominated and Candace Bergen won. Oops. Oh, well. Hers was a new show that year. The kid needed a break. She also won for the next several years, but hey—we stayed in the Top Ten, which seemed to amaze Betty, who expected us to get canceled every year, the funny little skink.