by Jim Colucci
TERRY HUGHES: This episode was before I joined as director. But I’d heard that for a while during the week, the episode wasn’t working that well. It wasn’t as funny as it needed to be. Susan was getting on a plane to go to New York, so she wrote a scene on the plane and phoned it back in to us. That became the cheesecake scene in this episode—the series’ first cheesecake scene—where Blanche discovers she’s horrified about how she looks in the hand mirror, and Dorothy advises her always to use the mirror while lying on her back, so that everything falls down and into place. And suddenly, they had a second scene that was hilarious. In fact, that scene ended up being worked in to the ten-minute sketch we performed for the Queen and Queen Mother at the Royal Variety Performance at the London Palladium in 1988.
Already a hot new show, The Golden Girls nabbed the cover of TV Guide magazine’s October 19, 1985, issue.
Courtesy of TV GUIDE MAGAZINE.
(Author’s note: the sketch is viewable on YouTube; search The Golden Girls on the 1988 Royal Variety Performance.)
EPISODE 11
BLANCHE AND THE YOUNGER MAN
Written by: STAN ZIMMERMAN & JAMES BERG Directed by: JIM DRAKE Original airdate: NOVEMBER 16, 1985
Rose receives a visit from her mother, Alma (Jeanette Nolan, 1911–98), an energetic, fun-loving woman whom Rose insists on treating like an invalid. Alma takes to hanging out with bad influence Sophia; and eventually, after some late-night jai alai hijinks, Alma stops to ask for directions, and is picked up by police officers who apparently also think that she must be confused. After retrieving her mother from the station, Rose ratchets up her smothering, and a frustrated Alma decides to depart for Rose’s brother’s house. Only after Dorothy intervenes with advice to treat Alma as an adult does Rose reconcile with her mother, who reminds her that “keeping me from living isn’t going to keep me from dying.”
Meanwhile, Blanche is preoccupied with her love life, having been asked out by her young Jazzercise instructor, Dirk (Charles Hill). Blanche starves and aerobicizes herself into a weight-loss frenzy. But over a dinner of watercress salad, Dirk turns out to be a big, beefy dud—and what’s worse, one who’s looking at Blanche as a mother figure and not a lover.
JIM DRAKE: Blanche was originally supposed to have the A story—but as rehearsals went on, it became clear that Rose’s story with her mother was going to take precedence, and that meant that Blanche’s would have to get shorter. But then, on the night of the taping, the Rose storyline presented a big problem. Jeanette Nolan had already appeared on Night Court, and later would appear again on an episode of that show that I directed. But she was getting to the point where she had become forgetful. She had been okay as long as she had the script in her hand. And through the week as we rehearsed, we figured “she’s doing what Bea does,” working toward being off book. And every day, she would get a little better.
Through all her radio and movie work, it’s possible Jeanette had delivered her lines in small sections, and never really had to put it all together. In our scene around the kitchen table, Alma has a long speech about how she found love with a farmhand after losing her husband. In rehearsal, Jeanette performed it well. But then, in front of the audience, she appeared to forget everything. I’ve experienced this quite a bit with older actors, and my attitude is, no problem—we can do pickups of parts of the speech at a time, and put it all together.
Then the phone rang; it was the producers in their booth, and they insisted that we needed to get Jeanette’s speech all in one take, straight through with all the other Girls’ reactions. We were already up to about take six, and it wasn’t getting any better. Between takes, the ladies called over to Tom Carpenter, our stage manager, and asked him to ask the producers not to do this. But as the director, I felt like I had a gun to my head. To make things worse, they tried putting a few new jokes in, hoping to make the speech fresh for her.
It was terrible, like watching someone being flagellated. You just want it to stop. Finally, somewhere around take eight, she got through it—and the audience really applauded.
STAN ZIMMERMAN: My writing partner, James Berg, and I had read a story in the New York Times in which Betty had said about her late husband, Allen Ludden, that not a day goes by where she doesn’t think of him. So we put that in the script for Rose to say about Charlie, because we really wanted to use a real part of Betty’s life. Well, little did we know how close to real life we were getting. It turned out that at the time, both Betty’s and Bea’s mothers were critically ill. And then, two days before taping this episode, Bea’s mother died. The producers offered to cancel the taping, but Bea wanted to go ahead. Toward the end of the episode, there’s a scene in the kitchen where Sophia thanks Dorothy for not treating her like an old lady, and tells her she’s a good daughter. Bea had trouble doing the scene, and they had to do it a few times. And whenever I see the scene, I always choke up, because you can see Bea choking up. She can’t even look at the camera, and has to look away.
BLANCHE:
“This is strictly off the record, but Dirk is nearly five years younger than I am.”
DOROTHY:
“In what, Blanche, dog years?”
EPISODE 12
THE RETURN OF DOROTHY’S EX
Written by: KATHY SPEER & TERRY GROSSMAN Directed by: JIM DRAKE Original airdate: NOVEMBER 30, 1985
Dorothy’s ex-husband, Stan, comes to the house with legal papers for Dorothy to sign, ridding the two of the last vestige of their thirty-eight-year marriage, an old piece of Florida property they purchased on their honeymoon. The next day Stan reveals the real reason for his visit: his young new wife, Chrissy, has already left him for a younger man. Stan persuades Dorothy to take a car ride out to the swampland that had once been their retirement dream, and as sentimentality overtakes them both, they wind up in bed together. The next morning, Dorothy is shocked to overhear Stan ordering roses to celebrate their “wonderful new beginning.” Dorothy takes Stan’s proposed reunion seriously, and agonizes over the decision, but ultimately realizes that she could never trust him again—and it’s a good thing, too. Because at Stan’s hotel the next day, Chrissy (Simone Griffeth) shows up, looking to reconcile. And Stan being Stan, the moment he realizes he’s out of luck with Dorothy, he chases after the young blonde anew.
COMMENTARY: Character actor Herb Edelman had made his first appearance as Dorothy’s ex-husband, Stanley Zbornak, in the series’ fourth episode, “Guess Who’s Coming to the Wedding?” At the time, Stan was not necessarily intended to become a recurring character. But as Herb immediately displayed a dynamic on-screen chemistry with Bea Arthur, the comedic potential became obvious. In fact, explains the show’s later longtime director Terry Hughes, Stan soon became his and the writers’ secret weapon of sorts. “If a script wasn’t working, or a scene needed levity, sometimes I would say, ‘We need Stan in here.’”
As much as Bea Arthur, too, loved working with Herb, this storyline of a divorcée confronting the ex-husband who’d abandoned her for a younger woman may have hit too close to home. Bea had divorced her own husband of twenty-eight years, director Gene Saks, under similar circumstances in 1978. “Apart from the episode we shot just after Bea’s mother died, this was the second toughest show I worked on,” says director Jim Drake.
In the beginning of the production week, when Bea first encountered the script at the table read, “you could see her face fall,” Jim remembers. “At first she said, ‘I’m not going to do this.’” But as Jim theorizes, “I think that once she told herself, ‘I’m a professional,’ she came around. And actually, the more we worked on the script, the more she was really relating to it.”
DOROTHY:
“Please, Stan, no hugging, no kissing. Let’s just do it and get it over with.”
STAN:
“Sounds like the last few years of our marriage.”
Then, just as the episode looked like it was back on track, came a casting coup de grâce; the casting department found its Chrissy
in Simone Griffeth, a beautiful blonde who had worked with Bea once before. The problem was Bea already disliked the young actress, who was now playing Dorothy’s younger rival. “I’m not telling tales out of school here,” Jim says. “Because Bea would have been the first to say that this episode was not to her liking, neither the concept nor the casting.”
BARRY FANARO: My writing partner, Mort Nathan, and I loved Herb Edelman from all the Neil Simon plays we had seen him in on Broadway. We were always looking for the best of the Broadway character actors for TV projects. And so when we wondered who could be Dorothy’s husband, he came to mind. I’m sure there were ten guys who came in to read, but Herb came in and was brilliant. And he was tall, to play against Bea. Kathy and Terry loved him and we loved him. He came in and he instantly was Stan.
PAUL WITT: The networks always seem to prefer comedies about people in their twenties and early thirties, but very few actors have gotten comedically proficient by then. But on The Golden Girls, we had so many great casting choices. Herb Edelman was just a dream for the part of Stan. He had a kind of forgivable quality. He was such a shlub that you couldn’t help but love him. You certainly couldn’t hate him, no matter how aberrant or over-the-top his behavior.
BEA ARTHUR: Herb Edelman was lovely and a wonderful funny, funny actor. I loved the relationship between Dorothy and Stan. It was just as bizarre as Dorothy’s relationship with Sophia, which made for great grounds for comedy.
SIMONE GRIFFETH: One day, my agent called and said he was sending over a script for The Golden Girls. And what I got was this piece of insane material. The character, Chrissy, was a flight attendant—well, really a stereotype of flight attendants. And she called Stan things like Big Stan and Stick Man. I thought, “Where did this dialogue come from—Gidget?”
I wondered how to pull this off and make the character seem real. Chrissy was obviously a “dumb blonde,” and I had played a lot of those already. So I worked on Chrissy’s lines, did the audition, and soon my agent called and said I had the job. And I immediately responded, “Well, quick, make the deal before Bea finds out it’s me.”
A few years earlier, I had done a [1983] series with Bea called Amanda’s By the Sea, set at a failing hotel. Really, nobody will ever successfully remake Fawlty Towers, but we tried, right down to similar-looking sets. Personally, I thought the show was really great, and we had such a great cast. But I never got to know Bea terribly well. She was not a person who was really all that accessible, and not just to me, but to others, too.
I think that having recently been through her divorce, Bea may have transferred some of her feelings about younger women on to me. I played her son’s wife, and our characters had a love/hate relationship. So we had a lot of scenes together on Amanda’s, and actually whatever feelings she had about me ended up working for the characters.
Still, I wondered what would happen when I walked on to the Golden Girls set for the first time. And sure enough, the moment Bea saw me she said, “Oh my God, is this an omen?” I think she was referring to the fact that Amanda’s had been canceled after thirteen episodes. But as it turned out, working on The Golden Girls was a really pleasant experience. Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty were so darling. And of course wonderful Herbie Edelman, with whom I’d worked on an earlier sitcom called Ladies Man, was there, so I had a ball. Even Bea was nice. I don’t remember specifically how nice, because it’s been a long time. I think all the ladies had the same amount of clout. They were all divas, but they were divas together, so nobody could out-diva anyone else.
“You had to bring him home? You couldn’t find a drunken sailor on a street corner?”
—SOPHIA
DOROTHY:
“Are you finished, or is there something else that you don’t understand?”
ROSE:
“Well, actually there is. I don’t understand how a Thermos keeps things both hot and cold.”
EPISODE 13
THE HEART ATTACK
Written by: SUSAN HARRIS Directed by: JIM DRAKE Original airdate: NOVEMBER 23, 1985
While cleaning up from a big blow-out dinner party, Sophia begins to experience chest pains she dismisses as merely “a bubble,” but that Dorothy fears may actually be signs of a heart attack. Worse yet, with a storm brewing outside, paramedics are unable to get to the house. Sophia dispenses some final words of wisdom and love to her daughter and her two best friends. But when the Girls’ physician (Ronald Hunter, 1943–2013) arrives, he quickly diagnoses her pains as symptoms of a gallbladder attack brought on by overeating. Sophia celebrates her new lease on life, and recants her earlier “deathbed” confession that Dorothy is her favorite child.
COMMENTARY: For the first time since the pilot, this episode takes place completely inside the Girls’ house at 6151 Richmond Street. Ostensibly, the reason is that there’s a storm outside; so for most of the show, the Girls are housebound, and visitors kept at bay by fallen trees. (The storm effects, the episode’s director, Jim Drake, reveals, were done super low-budget, with crew members whipping branches around outside the door.)
But there’s another, behind-the-scenes reason for this episode’s structure as well. Earlier that year, NBC had mounted a live episode of Nell Carter’s sitcom Gimme a Break, which had scored big-time publicity as the first live sitcom telecast since 1959. Based on that success, network chief Brandon Tartikoff devised a gimmick: to promote the late-night comedy Saturday Night Live, all of NBC’s prime time shows would broadcast live that night as well.
Tartikoff’s executives brought his idea to the showrunners of NBC’s Saturday sitcom lineup: not just Gimme a Break, but also The Facts of Life, The Golden Girls, and 227. Initially planning on playing along, Susan Harris structured this episode, “The Heart Attack,” as two continuous acts, each taking place in real time and almost entirely in the Girls’ living room and kitchen. But then someone at the network realized: how could Fred Dryer’s 10 PM detective show, Hunter, ever be staged live?
“And so one by one, the sitcoms, including The Golden Girls, backed away from the live plan,” Jim Drake remembers, adding that “doing a live show would have been tough for the ladies.” First of all, there was Estelle’s already debilitating problem with stage fright, even without the pressure of a live nationwide audience. Plus, Jim notes, “The way each of them worked was so different. Betty would sit down at the table read on Monday with the script, and then be off book and letter-perfect for the rest of the week, and able to make any additional adjustments to the script. But Bea was still learning her lines literally up until the moment before they went out in front of the audience. That was her process.” (In fact, early on during his stint on the show, the director remembers Bea requesting of Betty, “For God’s sake, don’t be off book so early. It makes all the rest of us feel bad!”)
DOROTHY:
“You know, Ma, you don’t look good.”
SOPHIA:
“I’m short and I’m old. What did you expect, Princess Di?”
The storyline of Sophia’s possible heart attack must have seemed to Susan Harris like the perfect way to anchor her action to the living room for an entire episode. But then, for the second time, fate dealt the Girls a behind-the-scenes blow. First Bea Arthur’s mother, Rebecca, had died during production of the episode “Blanche and the Younger Man.” And now, such a short time later, Betty White’s mother, Tess, passed away as the girls prepared for “The Heart Attack.” And so, as they played these scenes about motherly love and mortality, both Bea and Betty brought their own emotions to the screen. Here, as Rose remembers dressing her late husband, Charlie, for his funeral, we can see the real welling tears in Betty’s eyes.
JIM DRAKE: From the time Betty and Bea learned that their mothers were severely ill, they had been able to play the fun aspects of each episode, but they were really already in mourning, and their tears were real. They wanted to fight them, so I said, “Do what you need to do. Don’t call them up if they’re not there, but at the sam
e time, you don’t have to fight them either.” These episodes worked very effectively, and the show went very well in front of the audience.
SUSAN HARRIS: I am most interested when I write about death, and about what leads to that moment. It’s what everybody tries to avoid thinking about, but it’s been an obsession almost my entire life. Sophia’s possible death was the biggest thing I could think of to present in terms of a story, and it brings out every emotion in the other characters. There is no richer place to go, and nothing you have to manufacture as a writer to get there.
Rose with boyfriend Dr. Jonathan Newman (Brent Collins).
Photo by NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK via GETTY IMAGES.
EPISODE 15
A LITTLE ROMANCE
Written by: BARRY FANARO & MORT NATHAN Directed by: TERRY HUGHES Original airdate: DECEMBER 14, 1985
As Rose’s relationship with Dr. Jonathan Newman (Brent Collins, 1941–88) starts to get serious, she knows it will soon be time for her beau to meet her Girls. Blanche takes the initiative to invite him to dinner, but there’s just one problem: Rose has somehow neglected to mention that he’s a little person. Now, Rose prepares herself to sit through a dinner peppered with faux pas. (Blanche’s one-word offer of hors d’oeuvres—“Shrimp?”—is an audience favorite.)
