Golden Girls Forever

by Jim Colucci

  EPISODE 131

  ONCE IN ST. OLAF

  Written by: HAROLD APTER Directed by: MATTHEW DIAMOND Original airdate: SEPTEMBER 29, 1990

  It’s hard to believe no one could spot Sophia in this two-walled elevator.

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

  Sophia is scheduled to undergo surgery for the hernia she seems to have incurred while moving a wicker couch out of the garage at Dorothy’s request. On the day of Sophia’s operation, Rose, ordinarily a candy striper, works the hospital admissions desk, where she meets Brother Martin (Don Ameche, 1908–92), a fellow native of St. Olaf. Instantly sensing their connection, the monk asks Rose if she knew an Ingrid Kirklevaner, a nineteen-year-old chatterbox who worked in the kitchen of his silent monastic order. In fact, not only does Rose know of her, but she also knows the tragic story of Ingrid’s death in childbirth. Rose herself was that baby—and as the holy man then explains, he himself is her father.

  After at first avoiding the issue, Rose finally confronts Brother Martin, who is convinced that their reunion is a sign he has God’s forgiveness. He seeks the same absolution from his long-lost daughter—and gets it, as Rose realizes how grateful she is to have ended up with good parents in the Lindstroms, and a life that included a loving husband and children.

  Meanwhile, after getting a call that someone has misplaced Sophia, Dorothy rushes to the hospital to find her. After a farcical search of each floor, the Girls prepare for the grim task of checking the one place they haven’t looked: the morgue. But as they get on the elevator, there Sophia is, having been left there on a gurney, hallucinating that she’s in Heaven. Dorothy delivers a tearful apology, which guilts her mother into coming clean: her hernia was caused not by moving furniture, but by a prank she and her fellow seniors pulled on Gladys Goldfine, lifting her VW onto a lawn.

  By apparent divine design, Rose meets her birth father, Brother Martin (Don Ameche).

  Photo by ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC via GETTY IMAGES.

  COMMENTARY: When we first met Alma Lindstrom (Jeanette Nolan) in the show’s first season, Rose gave no indication that the woman was not her natural mother. Nor was there any hint when blind sister, Lily, visited that she was not Rose’s sibling by blood. It was only in the season-four episode “You Gotta Have Hope” that Rose had finally revealed details of her eight earliest years in St. Olaf’s orphanage. From then on, the writers went with that version of her origins, and were inspired to create this storyline about Rose meeting her long-lost birth father.

  Playing Brother Martin is film legend Don Ameche, who in 1939 played the part with which he would be most closely associated, as the inventor of the telephone in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell. His career had heated up again late in life, courtesy of a pair of big-screen roles in 1983’s Trading Places and 1985’s Cocoon, for which he won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor at the age of 78.

  BETTY WHITE: This was an interesting week. Working with a star of Don Ameche’s magnitude was wonderful. But we were all really worried about Don, because he was having a difficult time with his lines. We wanted to protect him as much as you can, but in the end there’s nothing you can do to help. You just have to sweat it out and dig your nails into your palms as you hope he’ll get through it.

  EPISODE 133

  WHAM, BAM, THANK YOU, MAMMY

  Written by: JAMIE WOOTEN & MARC CHERRY Directed by: MATTHEW DIAMOND Original airdate: OCTOER 20, 1990

  As the Girls help Blanche prepare her late father’s possessions for auction, Blanche gets a call from Viola Watkins (Ruby Dee, 1922–2014), her former “mammy” who then disappeared without a word when Blanche was just ten. Having read in the Atlanta newspaper about the sale, Mammy Watkins arrives with a request for an antique music box she had once given the family—actually, in particular to Big Daddy, her longtime lover.

  Blanche is horrified, and even considers burning the letters the woman leaves with her as proof of the affair. The next night, persistent Viola comes over to explain that Curtis—tellingly, he wasn’t “Big Daddy” to her—was the only man she’d ever loved; in another time and place other than the Jim Crow South, they would have been married. But it turns out, the affair isn’t the main thing bothering Blanche; it’s the abandonment she felt when Mammy suddenly disappeared from her life. That’s when Mammy reveals something remarkable; not only did she continue to ask Big Daddy about Blanche, but she even sneaked into the back of Blanche and George’s wedding and hid among the help, so that she could watch the bride dance to the “Tennessee Waltz” with her father. And so finally, Blanche agrees to give Mammy what she came for—only for the women to realize the music box among Big Daddy’s possessions is not the right one. This one is walnut, and plays the theme from Bonanza—clearly a gift from yet another woman.

  Meanwhile, Sophia surreptitiously hires matchmaker Mrs. Contini (Peggy Rea, 1921–2011) to find a date for Dorothy. Not knowing that Jack (Richard McKenzie, 1932– 2002) is an ex-convict, Dorothy initially has a great time on their night out—until he spills the beans about the source of the blind date. Furious, Dorothy decides not to speak to her mother—until Rose reminds her that Sophia was merely trying to ensure that her daughter wouldn’t be lonely.

  Deceased Big Daddy’s possessions splayed out on the lanai.

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

  COMMENTARY: In this episode, Mammy Watkins sure does stir up a maelstrom—and it’s not just the one about the music box. The woman who raised Blanche up until age ten now reprimands her by her full name, Blanche Marie Hollingsworth. But later, in the seventh-season premiere episode, “Hey, Look Me Over,” it would be revealed that Blanche’s middle name is actually Elizabeth. That would make sense; it was the first name of Hollingsworth matriarch Big Mommy. And, in a poetic cosmic sense, the middle name of Elizabeth would make the initials of Blanche’s married name spell B.E.D. Perhaps, in some great Southern tradition, Blanche has more than one middle moniker. So is she Blanche Marie Elizabeth or Blanche Elizabeth Marie?

  Playing the bearer of such vital information was the venerable actress Ruby Dee. Having appeared for five decades on Broadway, where she originated the role of Ruth Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 landmark play, A Raisin in the Sun, Ruby was theater royalty. She and the late actor Ossie Davis were both also civil rights trailblazers, and were one of Hollywood’s longest-married power couples until his death in 2005.

  But as Jamie Wooten reveals, the role had originally been conceived not for Ruby Dee but for another African American icon, Esther Rolle (1920–98). The then sixty-nine-year-old actress was beloved by TV audiences from her days as Bea Arthur’s most worthy foil on Maude, and then later, when her character Florida Evans was spun off on to her own groundbreaking Norman Lear sitcom, Good Times.

  JAMIE WOOTEN: Marc Cherry and I wrote this part originally for Esther Rolle, because we were such fans of Maude. We wanted to be the ones to bring Esther Rolle and Bea Arthur back together—and she was going to do it, too. But then, she had a terrible, near-fatal car accident on the way to Las Vegas and was in the hospital for weeks. Marc and I were devastated that she couldn’t do it. The part then went to Ruby Dee, whose delivery I found a little bit slow. But I think really, I wasn’t satisfied with the performance mostly because I was so resentful that it hadn’t worked out to be Esther Rolle.

  MARC CHERRY: I was a big fan of the older actress Beah Richards, but when I suggested her for this role, Paul Witt didn’t think she was attractive enough. I was fascinated by that, because I thought, “The character is a very old woman. How attractive does she have to be?” So they got Ruby Dee, and of course had to put her in a gray wig because she looked fantastic, and was around the same age as the other women. And as great an actress as she was, there were a couple of moments in the episode where I think you can see Ruby struggling to maintain the age of the character.

  EPISODE 134

  F
EELINGS

  Written by: DON SEIGEL & JERRY PERZIGIAN Directed by: MATTHEW DIAMOND Original airdate: OCTOER 27, 1990

  Dorothy is excited to teach an English class for an entire semester at St. Sebastian’s high school. But not everyone is so thrilled, especially star football player Kevin Kelly (Christopher Daniel Barnes), whom Dorothy is flunking, making him ineligible to play in the weekend’s game. Nor is the boy’s coach, Nick Odlivak (Robert Costanzo), supportive of Dorothy’s emphasis on education. Stressing how much the team needs Kevin, Odlivak first tries to sweet-talk Dorothy into relenting about the boy’s grade. When that doesn’t work, he calls in the big guns, sending the school’s dean, Father O’Mara (Frank Hamilton, 1924–91), to beseech the teacher via veiled threats.

  Dorothy offers Kevin private tutoring, but he rudely refuses. But karma catches up with the kid, who does play in the game but is then blindsided in a tackle, destroying his knee. And so later that day, Dorothy shows up at the hospital, not just to sign Kevin’s cast but to begin educating her captive student with a reading of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.

  Meanwhile, Rose returns home from a dentist’s appointment with the uneasy feeling that Dr. Lou Norgan (George Wyner) may have been fondling her breasts while she was under anesthesia. At Blanche’s urging, Rose confronts the pervy DDS at her next appointment—but he manages to convince her that she had hallucinated the incident. Then, just as he gets to work on her crown, horny Norgan aims his light at her apparently irresistible breasts and lets out an audible “wowie wow wow wow.” This time, Rose isn’t having any excuses, fending the man off with his own air gun as she vows to report him to the state dental board.

  COMMENTARY: This episode touches on two different scenarios involving workplace ethics, with Dorothy and Rose each challenged to stand up for her beliefs. And all of the challengers happen to be played by recognizable character actors whose careers have spanned decades.

  Playing Coach Odlivak is Robert Costanzo, who has made a specialty out of playing Italian American characters like the father of Matt LeBlanc’s Joey Tribbiani on Friends and who also appeared on Witt/Thomas’s shows Soap, It’s a Living, and Empty Nest.

  In October 1990, Christopher Daniel Barnes was just seventeen years old like his character in this episode, but had already appeared as a series regular in both the 1986–87 ABC series Starman and the 1988–89 NBC sitcom Day by Day. In film, Christopher had played a landmark role as the voice of Prince Eric in Disney’s 1989 animated The Little Mermaid; but his face may be best known as that of the new Greg Brady, in the 1995 Brady Bunch Movie and its 1996 sequel.

  And prolific character actor George Wyner, who plays Dr. Lou Norgan, has been appearing on TV since the early 1970s, often as doctors, lawyers, and cops. His best known of these many roles is his five-season run as Irwin Bernstein on NBC’s hit police drama Hill Street Blues from 1982 to 1987. And among his many film roles, George says he’s most often recognized from his appearance in Chevy Chase’s 1985 detective comedy Fletch or as Colonel Sandurz, the clumsy henchman in Mel Brooks’s 1987 sci-fi spoof Spaceballs.

  DON SEIGEL: The main story, with the coach threatening Dorothy for flunking the star athlete, came from my own experience. I never thought I was going to be a writer; I had thought I was going to be a baseball player. My high school coach in Niles, Illinois was the real Nick Odlivak, for whom I named this character. He had himself been a star athlete who had played football for the legendary coach “Bear” Bryant at the University of Kentucky. Odlivak coached high school football and baseball for decades, and everyone was afraid of him. He would do anything to win the state championship. I was a terrible student in math and science, but he would intervene with my teachers. One time, he threatened my algebra teacher: “You pass him, or I’ll kick your ass!” It was so extreme. I was really embarrassed. But it worked—because somehow, despite my grades, I went downstate to play in the championships.

  For the B plot, we combined stories that had been in the news, of dentists allegedly fondling their patients, with a character from my real life. My next-door neighbor at that time was a gynecologist who was always making “pussy” jokes. It was unseemly behavior you wouldn’t expect of a doctor. It got me thinking: “Why do we trust doctors, really? They’re human beings. What makes a woman take off her clothes in a doctor’s office, when she wouldn’t do it for a guy on a third date?”

  JAMIE WOOTEN: You may notice that after a while, and particularly in seasons six and seven, there are a lot of weird names for the guest characters, many beginning with the letter n. That’s because it became so difficult to get character names approved by NBC’s legal department, who simply would not allow us to use anyone’s name on the air if there was a living person with that name anywhere in the greater Miami area. [The showrunner] Marc Sotkin got sick of having character names not being approved, and of wasting his staff’s time coming up with and submitting potential names to NBC. So he simply started changing the first letter of the last names to the letter “N.” So if we wrote “Lou Morgan,” he would send it in as “Lou Norgan.” And of course it would be approved, because who is named Lou Norgan? The names became more and more ludicrous, but it was a game that NBC had started.

  GEORGE WYNER: When you’re a guest star, the best thing to do is just simply to observe and do your thing. You don’t intrude into their world unless you’re invited in. Well in my case on The Golden Girls, I was prepared to walk quietly onto the set. But Betty White was remarkable, greeting me with open arms. She literally ran over to me. I actually turned to see if there was someone behind me, but no, she was greeting me. She started talking about how much she loved something I’d done. She had a way of making a guest feel comfortable in her home, which is very important. When Betty White hugs you and says these wonderful things, all of a sudden you just exhale and realize you can go have some fun.

  EPISODE 136

  HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE SOPHIA?

  Written by: MARC CHERRY & JAMIE WOOTEN Directed by: MATTHEW DIAMOND Original airdate: NOVEMBER 10, 1990

  When her best friend—albeit one we’ve never heard of before—Sister Agnes dies, Sophia hears God’s voice at the funeral, calling her to the habit. It’s apparently a vocation she had always wanted—that is, until age seventeen, when her future husband first put his hand in her blouse. Sophia somehow manages to pass her preliminary postulant’s examination, and lands a spot in the convent. But when she can’t give up her worldly wise-ass ways, Mother Superior (Kathleen Freeman, 1919–2001) wants her out. It’s up to Dorothy to break the news, pointing out that Sophia does plenty of good works in her secular life.

  Meanwhile, without permission, Blanche borrows Rose’s car in order to execute what she considers a “meet cute”: rear-ending prospective dates. Unfortunately this time, Blanche’s victim, Mr. Arthur Nivingston (Paul Willson), sues Rose for his supposed whiplash, and so the two Girls concoct a plan to catch him on camera, getting physical in Blanche’s bedroom.

  COMMENTARY: Kathleen Freeman, who plays Mother Superior in this episode, was a veteran character actress who might be best-known to modern TV audiences as Peg Bundy’s mother on Married with Children, and who found one of her biggest successes just before her death in 2001, receiving a Tony nomination for her role in the Broadway version of The Full Monty. And if her subordinate Sister Anne looks at all familiar to you but you can’t quite place her, try picturing her minus the habit and plus a hairdo that’s even taller. Yes, that’s none other than Lynne Stewart—Miss Yvonne from Pee-Wee’s Playhouse!

  Paul Willson, who here plays Blanche’s accident “victim,” appeared in the beloved cult film comedy Office Space, and spent four seasons on Fox’s The Garry Shandling Show. But Paul is best known for his years as a barfly, also named Paul, on NBC’s landmark sitcom Cheers.

  JAMIE WOOTEN: Marc and I were looking for a mother/daughter story, and we thought the show hadn’t yet dealt much with Dorothy and Sophia’s Catholicism. We said let’s do something church o
riented—Sophia? Nun? How can we make that work? It turned out to be an easy sell. The second the producers heard that pitch, they said, “Write it.”

  Blanche works her powers of persuasion on Mr. Nivingston (Paul Willson).

  Photo courtesy of the ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES via GETTY IMAGES

  MARC CHERRY: With Kathleen Freeman, I felt like I was working with a piece of TV history. But there were so many of those on The Golden Girls, you got kind of jaded. One of my favorite things about doing this episode was researching it, because we met with a woman who had been married and had a family, and then became a nun at age fifty-five. She said one of the things the church did was psychological testing, so that Rorschach inkblot test in the episode is actually based on truth.

  I had a joke in this episode that got rewritten—and I had loved it. In one scene, Sophia is praying, asking God what he wants from her, and what is her purpose in life. I had written that when Dorothy enters her room, she would be behind Sophia, and would announce, “The nuns want you out.” Then Sophia would reply to God, “I didn’t think your voice would be that low.”

  The show actually nearly got sued over this episode. There had been a joke where the Mother Superior asks Sophia why she found a copy of Dianetics in her room. And Sophia says, “Dianetics? I thought it said ‘Diuretics!’” The Church of Scientology threatened to sue, and Paul and Tony realized it was cheaper to remove the reference than to fight it in court.