My First Five Husbands

by Rue McClanahan

  Over my career thus far, there are many awards I’ve won and some biggies that I haven’t (yet). It sounds clichéd, but being nominated really does mean as much to me as winning, and I’m most proud of awards I received for service rendered, rather than competition. But I can’t deny it—winning that OBIE thrilled me to pieces, and I also loved winning the Emmy, even knowing how it was decided. The audience didn’t know! And I had finally been acknowledged.

  Sort of.

  When the envelope was opened, Emmy presenter Howie “Deal? Or no deal?” Mandel announced, “And the winner of this year’s Emmy for Best Comedy Actress is—Miss Rue McCallahan!”

  Rats. Do your homework, Mr. Mandel.

  The first two years we had a prop department that was as funny as the show, the two prop men, Kenny and Jim, full of mischief. They had a toilet sitting right spang in the middle of the prop room and huge inflatable dinosaurs hanging from the ceiling. Once during rehearsal, Kenny dashed through the set upstage of the action, dressed in a woman’s nightie, breaking everyone up. Their most memorable prank was a prop they concocted for an episode in which Blanche gives each of the other girls a “Men of Blanche’s Boudoir” calendar for Christmas. In the scene, Rose and Dorothy were supposed to open their calendars and gasp at the pictures.

  Well, our creative prop masters had put together a real calendar with eight by ten photos of themselves and a few other young rapscallions who worked on the show, all scantily clad in sado-masochistic garb with all the fixin’s—whips, chains, you name it. They posed flogging each other, riding each other as horses, anything they could dream up—which was plenty. By the time Bea and Betty got to March, they had completely fallen apart laughing. We had to stop rehearsal, and everyone crowded around, flipping through to December. It was priceless, and of course, I still have it. Those two goofballs kept us laughing for two years.

  As the show grew in popularity, rumors abounded about shark tales swishing just under the idyllically calm surface of our happy little set. Wanna hear the juicy inside stories?

  Go ask someone else

  I’m not going to dish.

  Anyone who’s ever been near a cheerleading squad or a PTO committee or a sorority house or the kitchen during a family reunion or any roomful of women knows that women can be bitchy sometimes. Women can and often do simultaneously love and hurt each other. For heaven’s sake, look no further than The Golden Girls, if you want an example. In one scene, big-eyed Rose says, “The doctor explained to me where babies come from. I should never have believed Elsa Kreb’s story about the fetus fairy. Call me gullible!” And Dorothy shoots back, “That’s way down the list of what I want to call you.”

  Dorothy’s strength and assertiveness might sound mean to someone who didn’t know how much she loves Rose. She routinely smacks Rose over the head with a newspaper and verbally chops her off at the knees. On the flip side, Rose’s sweetie pie act might strike some as cloying and fake. But somehow, it all works, because underneath they love each other. So it was with us four actresses. Four strong-minded, talented women tossed into the sitcom soup together. Things got pretty spicy once in a while, but what mattered most to each of us individually and all of us as a group: the chemistry worked. We were damn funny. And we did it together. That’s what counts at the end of the day.

  Betty and I had so much fun together and even got to do some terrific little dance routines together over the years. We used to play word games backstage, including one where we’d go back and forth making lists in alphabetical order. Wild animals, devastatingly handsome actors, movie titles. Every once in a while we’d get all the way to X or Y and have to go and do a scene, and the whole time, we’d be thinking, “Hmmm…Xavier? There must be a handsome actor named Xavier!”

  As for Bea Arthur, Queen of Timing, there’s no one with whom I’d rather play a two-person scene. Betty’s shmoozing with the audience seemed to get under Bea’s skin, since Bea with her stage-acting background assiduously observed “the fourth wall,” that invisible barrier between the performer and the onlookers, while Betty, a TV baby, had always flirted with the crowd. Both schools of thought are professional and each has its own value, but they are diametrically opposed. I think there’s something to be said for both. Does that sound wimpy? I usually see both sides of the question, as Pisces are prone to do. (You may have heard the one about the Piscean who was asked, “Is it true that Pisces are wishy-washy?” And he says, “Well, yes and no.”) I love both Bea and Betty and got a huge kick out of each of them. Their relationship with each other wasn’t all I wished it could be, but it never interfered with their work.

  It was awkward to be pitted against one another in the nominations year after year. When Betty won the Emmy that first year, it didn’t seem to set well with Bea. Of course, she behaved impeccably in public, a composed pro on the red carpet, but behind closed doors, she seemed hurt and outraged. When I won the second season, I felt that Bea wasn’t able to be happy for me, even with the history we shared. She was making a lot more money than the rest of us, which you’d think would be a dandy consolation prize, but—no, scratch that. Money is never a substitute for love. The third season, Bea won for Best Comedy Actress and Estelle won for Best Supporting Comedy Actress, and I was thrilled for both of them. Tank Gott! They deserved to win. It obviously meant a lot to them and it made things a little less awkward. After that, we all had to bite the bullet together and put on our happy faces for Candace Bergen.

  Despite any rumors of lurking tension, Bea refused to go to lunch without Betty every day. On Fridays, we had dinner in our bathrobes between the afternoon and evening shows, across the lot in a big dining room full of the cast and crew, where we got rewrites for the evening show. Bea would never walk across the lot to dinner until Betty was ready to walk with her, even if Betty made her wait, and they sat next to each other in the dining hall.

  One running gag on the show was that whenever Rose said something dumb, Dorothy would say, “Rose, hand me that newspaper.” Rose would cheerfully hand it to her, and—whack!—Dorothy would hit her over the head. Betty never asked Bea to take it easy. She just made an Ow! face and patted her hair back in place.

  Meanwhile, Estelle was having a hard time holding herself together enough to do the show. By the end of that season, she had grown terrified of performing, fluffing her lines repeatedly. The first three days of rehearsals she was fine, but by Thursday she was under a black cloud of anxiety, and on Friday—tape day—she was too uptight to think. Finally, she asked for cue cards, which appalled us all, and at first, the producers refused to stoop to such an unprofessional thing. But eventually, she had to be given cue cards for those deliciously funny Sophia stories.

  “Picture it. Sicily, 1912. A beautiful young peasant girl with clear, olive skin meets an exciting but penniless Spanish artist. There’s an instant attraction. They laugh, they sing, they slam down a few boilermakers. They run naked through the piazza and almost start a war. Shortly afterward, he’s arrested for showing her how he can hold his palette without using his hands. But I digress. He paints her portrait and they make passionate love. She spends much of the next day in the shower with a loofah sponge scrubbing his fingerprints off her body. She sees the portrait and is insulted. It looks nothing like her, and she storms out of his life forever.” Sophia takes a meaningful beat. “That peasant girl was me. And that painter…was Pablo Picasso.” And when the others are skeptical, she shrugs and says, “Believe what you want. But while I’m spending my waning days in a tract house in Miami, my picture is hanging in some executive’s penthouse in Tokyo!”

  The lines were just too delicious. Dear Estelle hated not being able to learn them. Even with cue cards, her panic grew worse each season. We tried everything we could think of, including hypnosis and an assistant to go over her lines with her every day, but nothing helped. I kept telling her, “Estelle, don’t try to think of it word by word. Just picture the story, what you want to tell, and it will flow naturally.”


  She couldn’t. She was gripped in panic, and not only was it agonizing to watch, it brought us all down. Often, we stayed after the audience left, to retape her lines. This was a naturally funny woman, and thanks to clever editing the shows look fine on tape, but man alive, it took hell to get there! I’d seen other series being taped, and fluffed lines are not uncommon. But Bea and Betty and I were not of that ilk. One of us might make a fluff once in a while, but very rarely. We took professional pride in our ability to tape an entire show without stumbling.

  Our producers had their hands full and told me on more than one occasion, “Thank God for you, Rue. You hold things together. You’re the glue.”

  Yeah? So how about a big gluey raise already?

  Awards are nice, but let’s talk turkey. The Golden Girls was a massively popular smash hit, and the salary I received for a week’s work was a fraction of what the network received for one thirty-second commercial placed in the show. The third season, I hired myself a crackerjack lawyer to joust with the Disney moneyman, and he was able to get me a salary commensurate with Betty’s. (Betty, you may be laughing up your sleeve, but they said it would be commensurate with yours!)

  Bea and Betty were already set for life before we began the show in 1985, both living in Brentwood in truly gorgeous homes. Bea had divorced Gene Saks, the director of Maude, after it was over, and Betty had inherited the rights to several game shows from her husband, Allen Ludden. (They’d built a lovely home on the ocean in Carmel, completed just four days before Allen died in 1985. Live for the day, people. Live for the day.) Estelle had been married to, then divorced from, a fellow who made plastic novelty gadgets, and she lived in a large Beverly Hills condo. Living in the little Studio City house I’d bought with The Greek back in 1976 was like living “thirteen telephone poles past the standpipe north of town” all over again.

  We gals saw one another constantly at all the celebrity events we had to attend, but we moved in very different social circles. Betty’s old friends were Hollywood names: Mel Tormé, Adele Astaire, Carol Channing. Bea had her actor friends from New York and held court for a large following of gay men, some of them well known. Estelle also had a large coterie of young gay guys, many from Torch Song Trilogy.

  I was mystified at first about the immediately huge popularity of The Golden Girls among gay men. Greenwich Village and West Hollywood gay bars began having Golden Girl Night, with patrons in costume and Best Blanche beauty contests. Gay Halloween parades began to feature the famous Miami housemates right alongside the swishy goblins and fairies. Recently, Mark and I were having a cappuccino at a little place in the Village, and a young gay blade came in, spotted me instantly, and squealed. As I signed an autograph for him, I asked, “Why is it that you gay guys are so crazy about Blanche?”

  “Why, honey,” he said. “Isn’t is obvious? We all want to be Blanche!”

  I still had the same motley crew of friends I’d made when I moved to L.A. in 1973, some straight, some gay, none famous, except Brad Davis, but all terrific. My Four Wise Men, Larry, Ken, Michael, and David—all of whom were Jewish—gathered at my house every year to decorate the tree, adding a lot of life to every Christmas party, along with Lette and Jack, Norman Hartweg, Brad, and Mark. My three Golden Girls castmates didn’t appear regularly at my parties, nor I at theirs. We all went to Estelle’s big birthday parties every summer, six months after Betty’s birthday. But never together.

  Bea did attend a dinner party at my place with about forty guests, including a new acquaintance, the wonderfully funny and talented movie actress/singer Martha Raye. Many of my friends were too young to remember her, but plenty of others did, including Bea. During after-dinner drinks, Martha began to sing, accompanied on the piano by her escort. I came into the living room teeming with people, to hear her belting away, the guests enthralled. She still had powerful pipes. Not seeing Bea among the group, I asked a friend where she was, and he said, “Look in the garage.”

  Mark and me at a party at my house in Studio City, California, 1987. Lookin’ good!

  The garage?

  At the end of the hall, I went out and found a small group gathered in the garage, listening to Bea sing. A cappella. No piano in my garage. A glass of wine in her hand, she was having a smashing good time. She sang one more tune, then wended her way homeward.

  As the night wound down, Martha and her tipsy fella were backing their small black car down the driveway, swerved rather drastically, and straddled the curb with all four wheels, leaving the car perched up there like a showroom display. No amount of pushing could dislodge it. They had to get a ride home with another guest and return the following morning with a tow truck. As they dragged the little car away, I was still laughing. And wishing Bea had stayed long enough to see it.

  For about five years, since 1982, I had been waking up, looking at my bedroom ceiling and walls, thinking, Something’s wrong. I’ve got to get out of here! One morning, I was hit with the realization that never before in my life had I lived in any house for over four years, and I’d been in this one for over eleven. Well, I thought, no wonder! I need a change.

  So after work and on weekends, I started looking at all sorts of houses from Studio City to miles out in the boondocks—adorable little renovated places perched on hills, big ridiculous mansions the Middle Easterners were building chock-full of marble and chandeliers, ranch houses with ten acres and outbuildings, funky canyon houses with seasonal creeks, and everything in between. Some I could afford, some I couldn’t, but none of them was right. Then one day my Realtor took me to a 3,900-square-foot house on three acres in Encino, and well…it had possibilities. An ugly old swimming pool. Three acres of dead or dying trees and weeds going up hills on all three sides. You could barely get through the overgrown brush. A neighbor’s pool at the top side of the property had broken and swept trees and brush down into the area at the back. But through the tangled mess I saw potential for an astoundingly beautiful fairyland. The house was badly planned and old-fashioned, but with a lot of work from a talented architect and a good builder…

  “How much?” I asked.

  “A million five.”

  Gulp. A lovely dream, but the asking price was out of my range, the market still going through the roof. But you just didn’t find three acres in a lovely area in Encino! All but unheard of! And I was earning money, I reasoned. Real money for the first—and possibly the only—time in my life. I’d signed a lucrative contract with Disney for the next three years. I probably wouldn’t be able to afford the property for long, but for once in my life, by God I was going to live in a breathtaking place, like a real Movie Star! Besides, the real estate market had done nothing but shoot up, year after year, so I figured I’d be able to sell the place after three years for—oh, three or four million! (And you thought it took a man to get me this excited.)

  I got it for $1,350,000, put half a mil down, and took on a hefty mortgage—eight times what I’d been paying for the modest house in Studio City. I found a good builder, met with Carla Champion (the widow of Gower), who had become an interior designer, and we began making plans for the renovation.

  Did I say renovation? Rebuilding! Reinvention! Resurrection!

  We tore that house down almost to its foundation. You could stand in the front yard and look straight through to the back. After a massive amount of work, the new house would be five thousand square feet. The landscape architect took on the staggering job in the huge backyard—a new irrigation system, a tiled pool with a waterfall, a private little haven with a hot tub off my bedroom, a patio covered with lattice and tile and plants, pathways winding through the wild lilies, a big gazebo wired for sound. The area adjacent to where the neighbor’s pool had swept debris down the hill became a wildflower hillside, where one could sit on a bench with a glass of wine and look down to the house far below. Jungle flowers bordered a path to a kids’ swing, high above the fruit trees. The property was so gorgeous, so varied, so wonderfully landscaped, helicopter pilo
ts thought it was a city park. (I only wish the city had been paying the water bills. I kept trying to come up with a scheme to achieve that.)

  It was my piece of earth! Big enough to include two vegetable gardens and every kind of fruit tree you can think of. Even some you can’t—like kumquat. Yes, I had a small kumquat. I also had two tall loquats, even comelier than, though not as low as, the kumquat. (I’ve been trying to make a joke about those trees for years.) I planted figs, lemons, oranges, apricots, adding peaches and pears later on. One year, my apple trees yielded so much fruit, I ended up baking twenty apple cakes in October and freezing them for Christmas presents. Don’t ever try that. In October, they emerged from the oven, piping hot, crusty, and delicious. In December, they emerged from the freezer, soggy, shmushy, and ill-tempered. But I do think food is a terrific holiday gift, both for giving and receiving. Particularly receiving. Charlie Hauck, one of our superb writers on Maude, made mustard every year and gave it out in pretty little jars. I rationed mine jealously and made it last into summer. (Charlie, if you’re reading this, I want more mustard!)

  But I digress, as Sophia would say.

  That yard cost a bundle—more than rebuilding the house. Always prone to saving money, I was now spending it, but I was creating something divine. Even if I couldn’t afford it for life, for a while I would live in a little bit of heaven.