Golden Girls Forever

by Jim Colucci

  An early publicity shot featuring all five of the “Girls,” prior to Coco’s untimely demise.

  Photo by HERB BALL/NBCU PHOTO BANK via GETTY IMAGES.

  CHARLES LEVIN: I had no concern whatsoever about playing a gay character. I grew up in the theater, and played all different parts, heterosexual and homosexual. The eighties were a more innocent time, a time of coming out. But they were also still a time of lisping, effeminate gay characters on TV. My physical type doesn’t lend itself well to that stereotype, but what I could do was affect it.

  Unlike my Hill Street Blues character, Eddie Gregg, whose life ended heroically but tragically, Coco was a gay character being played for laughs. Susan Harris has a great track record of doing that, like with Billy Crystal on Soap. The way she wrote Coco, he was obviously gay and loving it. Even though he was way over the top, this was a real person, and you’re allowed to laugh and enjoy him without feeling self-conscious or afraid that he’s gay. And he was completely acceptable to all the women in the house; that was the irony of the title, that he, too, was a Golden Girl.

  Susan wanted to write a character who gave you insights as to what gay guys do—their love lives, their private lives. But as I found out during rehearsal week, that was verboten. I had a scene where I come in and announce, “That’s the last time I date a cop!” I pour my heart out to Sophia, my confidante, and she decides to cheer me up by taking me to the dog track. Well, word came down that this was offensive to NBC, who did not want any reference to what Coco was doing with other men. The scene was cut. Nobody wanted to know what he did on the outside. His only function was to be within the house, dealing with the women. I think one of the real problems was that Rock Hudson was dying of AIDS. I think it threw everyone for a loop, especially those in TV. Because now, how do you deal with gay characters when there’s this threat of a horrible death hanging over their heads? So any mention of intercourse between men was just not going to be tolerated. It was too frightening.

  The night of the taping, I went home on cloud nine. Over the next few weeks, as I waited for the official pickup of my “option,” my wife and I were getting calls about when the limo would be picking us up for the network affiliates meeting, and what to wear. And then, two days before the option deadline, Paul Witt called and said, “Chuck, it’s not going to work out.” He explained that there were too many people in the show, and that they really wanted to concentrate on the women. They didn’t want to have to give me less to do just to keep me in the show; it wouldn’t be fair to me.

  I was devastated, simply because it was such a great show. I didn’t care about the money; that stuff has never been important to me. But I’d fallen in love with Bea and Estelle. I’ve actually never seen the pilot as it ended up airing. I refused to watch it because I remember what it was, and it’s too disappointing to see how it was butchered. Basically what you see now is that I’m sort of a walk-through.

  I still think back on my Golden Girls experience fondly, and don’t have any regrets. I just sometimes grieve the loss of that character, who could have grown into something wonderful.

  EPISODE 4

  GUESS WHO’S COMING TO THE WEDDING?

  Written by: WINIFRED HERVEY Directed by: PAUL BOGART Original airdate: SEPTEMBER 21, 1985

  As she awaits Kate’s (Lisa Jane Persky) arrival, Dorothy reveals to the Girls that she’s anxious about meeting the man her daughter is bringing along. Dorothy is excited that said boyfriend Dennis (Dennis Drake) is a doctor—and even more thrilled when Kate announces that in just a few days, the two plan to wed. When Blanche and Rose suggest throwing the wedding at the house, Kate accepts—on the condition that her father, Stan Zbornak (Herb Edelman, 1933–96), also be on the guest list.

  But on the big day, when Stan arrives, sporting a new toupee but without his new wife, Chrissy, Dorothy slams the door in his face. When Dorothy declares she can’t bear being in the same church with Stan and plans to stay home, Blanche forces her to her feet and out the door. Later, at the living room reception, Blanche even teaches her friend a sorority trick of squeezing a friend’s hand in times of stress; and so, Dorothy makes it through Stan’s obnoxious toast. Sophia advises her daughter to confront Stan instead of internalizing her anger. So after the guests depart, Dorothy unloads her thirty-eight years’ worth of feelings for the man she once loved, this time saying good-bye on her own terms.

  COMMENTARY: This episode introduces the character of Stan Zbornak, a philandering louse nonetheless played so charmingly by Herb Edelman. We’d heard about Dorothy’s former husband in the series’ pilot, but here we meet the man in the flesh and toupee. Stan would be back again and again, often with get-rich-quick schemes and, in the series’ finale, with a blessing for Dorothy on her new marriage. The show’s most frequently recurring character, Stan would ultimately appear in twenty-five of its episodes, becoming a de facto fifth Golden Girl.

  Playing Stan and Dorothy’s daughter, Kate, is Lisa Jane Persky, whose movie credits include The Great Santini, The Cotton Club, The Sure Thing, Peggy Sue Got Married, and When Harry Met Sally.

  This episode was shot as the Golden Girls’ fourth. But “Guess Who’s Coming to the Wedding?” must have been one that the producers considered an early calling card for the series, because it was moved up on the schedule. As in any early episode of a TV series, some things are just being worked out. Rose is a little less dumb than she would come to be, and Blanche a little more grounded. The show has a few production bugs to work out as well. Take a close look at the episode’s final climactic scene; at about the 22:50 mark, as Dorothy is winding up her heartfelt speech, a TV camera briefly rolls into the left side of the frame.

  Herb Edelman (center) with script supervisor Robert Spina (left) and assistant director Lex Passaris.

  Photo by KARI HENDLER PHOTOGRAPHY.

  KATHY SPEER: When we introduced Stan in this episode, we didn’t know he would become a recurring character. At one point in the casting process, I know one name that had been mentioned was Carl Reiner, but I don’t think he was ever asked to play the part. Because Bea was going to have to get along with whoever was chosen, the producers asked her for her thoughts. Bea knew Herb and liked him.

  TERRY GROSSMAN: Everyone liked Herb Edelman. It was always a pleasure working with him, for us and for Bea. Kathy and I just worried that maybe we found him funnier than the rest of the world did, the way he played a lovable shlub, because when he would play Stan, we would be crying with laughter.

  WINIFRED HERVEY: When I wrote the episode, we knew Stan would be tall, so as to match up to Dorothy. And we knew he was going to be bald. I think I just made up that he wore a bad toupee, and they went with it.

  LISA JANE PERSKY: In this episode, when Kate hugs Dorothy, that was very genuine, and easy for me to act, because that was really me hugging someone whom I’d always admired. I grew up with liberal parents who were a lot like Maude Findlay. So it wasn’t that much of a stretch for me to consider her a mother figure.

  On the set, all Bea really said to me and to many people the whole day would be “Good morning, everybody,” and then not much after that. When we weren’t acting as Dorothy and Kate, she didn’t really give me any advice, except she asked me not to put my arms around her neck. That made me laugh when she first said it, because I wasn’t sure if she was kidding. I don’t know whether she thought I was going to block her face, or whether it was uncomfortable for her, or whether she felt it wasn’t right for the characters. But of course, she knew what she was doing, so I did what she said.

  “It’s settled. Now call your father, and tell the dirtbag he can come.”

  —DOROTHY

  EPISODE 5

  TRANSPLANT

  Written by: SUSAN HARRIS Directed by: PAUL BOGART Original airdate: OCTOBER 5, 1985

  Blanche dreads the upcoming visit from her youngest sister, Virginia (Sheree North, 1932–2005). That “conniving little witch” is always out to get something of hers, a petty-sounding Blanche
insists—but this time she’s right. Because Virginia needs a kidney.

  With their older sister, Charmaine, already deemed an ineligible donor, Blanche debates the possible sacrifice. Blanche ultimately makes the right decision, and leaves to meet Virginia in Atlanta for the surgery. But Blanche, too, is deemed unsuitable just as another donor is found: a retired Mormon schoolteacher. Blanche returns to Miami victorious, with two kidneys, a date with a handsome doctor, and a sister to love anew.

  Meanwhile, Rose, Dorothy, and Sophia are consumed with caring for baby Danny, son of neighbors Ted and Lucy—all of whom we’ve never heard of before, and never will again.

  COMMENTARY: Actress Sheree North played Blanche’s younger sister, but in real life was two years older than Rue McClanahan. A trained dancer whom Hollywood initially sought as a possible successor to Marilyn Monroe, Sheree ended up finding fame on TV, as Lou Grant’s girlfriend Charlene on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in the seventies, and famously as Kramer’s mother, Babs, on Seinfeld in the nineties. The actress had appeared in a regular role on an earlier Witt/Thomas sitcom, the short-lived I’m a Big Girl Now in 1980–81, and would return in a second Golden Girls episode, season five’s “Ebb Tide,” in which Blanche and Virginia clash again at Big Daddy’s funeral.

  This episode marks another Golden milestone, in a major change behind the scenes: “Transplant” became the last of four episodes helmed by director Paul Bogart. Renowned for his work in TV’s earliest days and as the regular director of the landmark sitcom All in the Family, Bogart had a style that just didn’t fit in with the Girls. “Paul told me that he’d gone in and told the Golden Girls staff, ‘Just give me the show in the beginning of the week, and by the end of the week, you’ll have an Emmy winner,’” remembers Jim Drake, Bogart’s friend and onetime protégé who would go on to direct the following eight episodes of the show before a regular director, Terry Hughes, was ultimately hired.

  Bogart’s pronouncement hadn’t endeared him to the Golden Girls’ hands-on producers Tony Thomas and Paul Witt, nor did the perception that the director was trying to sway the actresses’ opinions in the inevitable creative differences that followed. Indeed Rue McClanahan did initially favor Bogart, who allowed her to play Blanche with the Southern accent Jay Sandrich had discouraged for the pilot. But in the end, the director didn’t have the full support of the Girls either. Just as Bea Arthur had sometimes bristled at Sandrich’s softer style as evidenced in the classic Mary Tyler Moore Show, this time it was Betty White who had issues with the way a Golden Girls director wanted her to play her part. Bogart had come from the Norman Lear school of sitcoms, where arguments were loud and emotional moments played in extreme close-up. (For example, note the atypical Golden Girls close-up here on Blanche at the end of her dinner with Virginia.) And he wanted Betty to be bigger on-screen.

  “Bea was very happy with Paul Bogart. And he was probably great for other things, but not for Rose,” Betty explains. Two weeks before this episode’s taping, during production of “Job Hunting” (a troubled episode that, although shot as the series’ second installment, was ultimately delayed for airing until the following March) Bogart had urged Betty “to get really mad, and yell and scream,” Betty remembers. But “Jay Sandrich had set such a wonderful course for the character of Rose for me in the pilot, and to me, screaming was more Paul Bogart than it was Rose Nylund. I was very uncomfortable with it.”

  Still, a trouper who always tries not to argue with her director—“I figure a director has a more objective view and may know more than I do,” Betty explains—she tried it Bogart’s way. “But it was just so un-Rose. She was scared, but she wouldn’t suddenly turn into a strong New York woman and scream. I just couldn’t find an excuse for it, and I felt like I’d lost the character.” Then, during a run-through of “Transplant” for the writers late in that week, Jay came back to observe the proceedings on the show he had helped launch—and noticed right away that something was amiss. Jay urged Betty to speak her concerns to Paul Witt and Tony Thomas, and when she was reluctant, he apparently did so on her behalf. Soon, Tony walked on to the set. “He told me: ‘Do it the way you think you should,’” Betty remembers. “And the next week, Paul Bogart wasn’t there.”

  To make her case for a kidney, Virginia takes Blanche to this fancy restaurant.

  Photo courtesy of the EDWARD S. STEPHENSON ARCHIVE at the ART DIRECTORS GUILD.

  TERRY GROSSMAN: Rue adored Paul Bogart, because he was a real actor’s director. But from the writers’ perspective, he was all about the “moments,” and not the jokes. The comedy was suffering.

  Just as the show’s first season was starting, Susan Harris had been feeling sick, and so the production order of some scripts was changed. Kathy and I ended up being the guinea pigs, with our episode “Job Hunting” being the first to be shot after the pilot. We found Paul’s working style to be territorial, gathering the cast around him and excluding the writers. That wasn’t how we were used to working on Benson, and we complained to Paul Witt and Tony Thomas. When we shot “Transplant,” written by Susan, Paul [Bogart] did the same thing again—and that was it. He was gone.

  ROSE:

  “Sophia, if you hated your sister, would you clean the house?”

  SOPHIA:

  “I’d put Vaseline on the tips of her walker.”

  PAUL WITT: The storyline of someone needing a kidney has been done on almost every comedy series that runs for any length of time, because it’s such a natural. There’s also definitely a hypochondriacal strain among the three of us—Tony, Susan, and me—and we always liked to ask ourselves, “Would you?” “What would you do if . . . ?”

  LEX PASSARIS (associate director): At the time of this episode, Sheree North was suffering from some kind of neurological symptom that caused her hand to shake, but we managed to shoot around it. This was the first prominent guest star spot since the pilot, and I was excited to hear that she had been cast. Because now, for the first time, I got the sense that we were going to get to work with some really cool people on the show. With the real richness to this story, it was clear that The Golden Girls was going to be able to do anything it wanted to. The show could get as serious as it wanted, and as funny and as out there as it wanted, and it was all going to be okay because of the writers who balance it just right, and the actors who make it work onstage.

  RUE McCLANAHAN: Sheree North had been one of my favorite actresses for a long time. I was thrilled to death they had hired her, and that we got to work together. I still have an 8x10 of us in that episode, and it looks like we really could be sisters. Working with her was a thorough delight, and I enjoyed the entire week.

  In this episode, Blanche has a terrible decision to make. You’d think a person would make that decision on the spot: of course I’ll help save your life! But as written, there was quite a bit of animosity between these two sisters, perhaps born of jealousy. Blanche was always worried about not being the queen bee. I think it explains here that she was the middle sister, so that might explain some of her attitudes. But I think she would have been jealous of any attractive sister, and of any sister who competed for the love of Big Daddy. When I approached this episode, I could figure out how Blanche felt based upon what we knew about her family. I myself have a sister, but the one thing I couldn’t do was relate to Blanche’s jealousy, because I had wanted a baby sister so badly!

  Left to her own devices, Blanche tended to be less responsible than she could have been. That’s why it was so good that she lived with the other women, because they often put her on the right track. Obviously Blanche was happy how this turned out: she didn’t have to give her kidney. I was happy about that, too—and happy as well that she’d decided to give it.

  EPISODE 6

  ROSE THE PRUDE

  Written by: BARRY FANARO & MORT NATHAN Directed by: JIM DRAKE Original airdate: SEPTEMBER 28, 1985

  When Blanche and Rose double-date brothers, Blanche’s beau Jeffrey turns out to be a dud, but surprisingly,
Rose has a great time with Arnie (Harold Gould, 1923–2010). But when Arnie invites Rose on a romantic cruise to the Bahamas, the widow of fifteen years panics at the prospect of sleeping with a man other than her first and only. A widower himself, Arnie is sympathetic, and elicits from Rose her true, deeper fear: sex with her might kill him; after all, her husband Charlie died while making love to her. The scene onboard fades with Rose and Arnie in a tender embrace. But when Rose returns home, and the Girls press her for sexy details, we learn that the physical contact did indeed go a lot further than that. And to Rose’s relief, Arnie is still alive and well.

  COMMENTARY: This episode marks the first appearance of Harold Gould—but not as Miles Webber, Rose’s longtime squeeze. (See season five, “Dancing in the Dark.”) Here, he’s Arnie Peterson from Plainfield, New Jersey—and equally charming as he consoles a vulnerable Rose on their cruise.

  The episode would be momentous for Betty as well; it’s the one from the show’s first season she chose to submit for Emmy consideration in 1986. And that night, she won, becoming the first of the Girls to bring home the trophy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.

  BETTY WHITE: I love that in this episode they let the romance show between Rose and Arnie. Rose was so confused and reluctant, and then all of a sudden, romance won out. That was a rare chance for Rose; she didn’t often get that.

  JIM DRAKE: The idea in the scene with Rose and Arnie on the cruise was to put them in a small stateroom. Not so small that it becomes a scene from the Marx Brothers, but to make it seem like they’re really on top of each other, and underscore how trapped Rose feels. The scene ends with a touching moment, where Rose asks Arnie to sit on the bed with her, and says, “Hold me.” I give credit for that to [the show’s former director] Paul Bogart. Having worked with him, I had observed how well he used more dramatic punch lines or “scene buttons.” And The Golden Girls ended up with its share of those, too.