Golden Girls Forever Read online

  Age before Beauty, Brains, and Naïveté

  WHEN IT CAME time to find actresses to embody the four ladies, the Witt/Thomas/Harris team, working with casting director Judith Weiner, knew they had plenty of talented—and underemployed—sixtysomething actresses to choose from. And so they focused first on the character they thought would be hardest to find: feisty octogenarian Sophia.

  Estelle Getty had been primarily a stage actress in local productions in Queens, New York, a late bloomer who had only recently scored her most noteworthy role playing the mother to Harvey Fierstein’s Arnold Beckoff character in the actor/playwright’s off-off-Broadway Torch Song Trilogy. As she made a name for herself in LA during the show’s subsequent West Coast production, Estelle landed some small Hollywood roles, including a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in Tootsie (costarring Doris Belack, who played her future TV daughter Gloria) and a larger role in the made-for-TV Western No Man’s Land. (Picture it: Estelle Getty? In a Western?) After the end of Torch Song’s 1984 run, Estelle returned to New York. Never believing that true Hollywood stardom would come for her, she made a deal with her manager, Juliet Green, to come back to LA for only two months during the spring of 1985. By the end of that brief trip, Estelle had nailed the role of a lifetime.

  Allison Jones, who was at the time working with casting director Judith Weiner, remembers that Estelle had auditioned on February 8, 1985, for the guest role of Michael Gross’s visiting mother on NBC’s Family Ties. Judith had seen Estelle in Torch Song, but “it was the first time I’d ever heard of her,” Allison remembers. “I even misspelled her name ‘Geddys’ on the call sheet.” Estelle didn’t get the part—but Judith remembered admiring her talent when it came time, a few weeks later, to cast her next project.

  Although Susan Harris says that she created the character of Sophia Petrillo with no physical type in mind, Juliet and Estelle remember hearing that the Golden Girls producers were looking for a “big, fat Italian mama with a bun.” As Estelle writes in her 1988 memoir, If I Knew Then What I Know Now . . . So What?, she thought she would be reading for the role of Dorothy, and at just sixty-one, was surprised to be considered for eighty-year-old Sophia. Still, age and ethnic she could do. She had played those things before. She said even “fat I knew I could handle.” When she confessed to her TV writer friend Joel Kimmel that she doubted she was right for the part, he encouraged her to “‘do what you do best—make ’em laugh,’” Estelle writes. “I would play Sophia my way. I would play her New York Brooklyn.”

  I’m Older than Dirt

  ALLISON JONES REMEMBERS that Estelle had an amazing first Sophia audition for Judith Weiner in late February 1985. “I remember the way she said, ‘I’m older than dirt!’ with her New York accent. She made it her own, and nailed it to the extent that it was a no-brainer.”

  Tony Thomas recalls that on the day the producers, who had “read a lot of people for Sophia,” were seeing another group of candidates, Paul and Susan were off working on one of the company’s other shows. “Estelle came in to see me, and it was actually frightening. You don’t expect to hear the words jump off the page that way. It was like, ‘Oh my God, this is everything we wanted!’” He set up a callback for Estelle to come in to see his fellow producers. “I told them if you don’t like her, have her do it again. Don’t let her out of the room until you’re satisfied, because she’s the one.”

  In her book, Estelle remembers that the audition process took over a month. “The producers seemed pleased, but there was also a reservation: they thought I might be too young.” Estelle got callback after callback—“I had never auditioned that many times for one role.” And each time, she was advised: don’t change a thing. “I kept wondering, ‘If they don’t want me to change anything, then why do they keep asking me back?’” Finally, Juliet got word that Estelle had made it to the final level: reading for the network. What neither woman knew, though, was that by now, Estelle was the only candidate being considered.

  It’s All about the Right Purse

  AS SHE CONTINUED building the character of Sophia Petrillo, Estelle decided she needed some props. “The quintessential bargain shopper,” as Juliet admiringly calls her, Estelle scoured the thrift stores of LA’s Fairfax District, searching for Sophia-like items: a size 12 polyester dress, lace-up orthopedic shoes, a straw hat with veil, gloves, and above all, a purse. “She was very insistent about finding the right purse,” Juliet remembers. And indeed, the one Estelle ended up picking out is the famous straw, top-clasping bag that her character toted around for all of the show’s seven seasons. The wardrobe department even ended up having a double made, in case of emergency. “She knew that a woman that age would have her medicines, her money, her whole life in her purse.”

  Betty White in The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1975.

  Photo courtesy of CBS PHOTO ARCHIVE.

  Juliet hired a makeup man to age Estelle’s face and spray gray onto her hair. “From the time she walked through the doors at NBC and entered the waiting room, she was in character,” Juliet remembers. “She walked in and said hello, and they just fell apart.” Warren Littlefield agrees. “When that little woman had those barbs hurling out of her mouth, it was like, ‘Excuse me, but I have to run down to the bathroom. I have no bodily control whatsoever.’”

  A Rose Is a Rose Is a . . . Blanche?

  WITH THEIR SOPHIA in place, the production team concentrated on finding ladies to play her roommates. They ran casting sessions in New York and LA, and as Paul Witt remembers, they “saw a lot of talented actresses. Anyone of a certain age who saw the script wanted to do it.”

  Bonnie Bartlett, who would ultimately guest star as snooty author Barbara Thorndyke in the third season, was among the many actresses who auditioned. Another, Jo DeWinter, was among those who made it through several rounds of tryouts. Instructed to read for both Rose and Blanche, Jo says she had a unique perspective on how good the pilot’s writing was. “I thought, ‘This is heaven,’” she remembers. “For the first time in a long time, this was witty material—not just setup/punch line. These were real people.”

  Eventually, as the producers and network executives narrowed their list, they decided to cast along traditional lines, picking actresses already known for particular qualities. At the time, Betty White was most famous for her recurring 1973–77 appearances on The Mary Tyler Moore Show as Minneapolis’s homemaker/neighborhood nymphomaniac Sue Ann Nivens. “She had played that part brilliantly on Mary,” Paul explains. “And so we knew she could play Blanche. We didn’t know if she could do the Southern thing, but we had to assume she could do anything, she’s so good.”

  Rue McClanahan, on the other hand, was best known to TV audiences for meeker roles, such as put-upon second-banana neighbor Vivian Harmon on Maude and mousy Aunt Fran on Mama’s Family. (Having originally been promised a feistier character, Rue was miserable playing a woman so dull, and wanted out; finally, during a long hiatus, Aunt Fran was written out as having choked to death on a toothpick.) The casting team zeroed in on Rue for Rose, realizing, as Paul notes, that even if the role was not as deeply written, “Rue was someone who had always worked well in great ensembles, and always carved out a really unique territory for herself.”

  Both Betty and Rue had crossed paths with the Witt/Thomas/Harris key players before. Betty knew the Girls pilot director Jay Sandrich from their time working together on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Rue had won but turned down Soap’s Mary Campbell role, which eventually went to Cathryn Damon; she had her heart set on playing Mary’s sister, Jessica Tate, but that part already belonged to Katherine Helmond. Similarly, when Rue told her agent that she loved the Golden Girls script and was thrilled to audition for Blanche, she was devastated to hear she would be considered only for Rose. “My agent told me that they had Betty White in mind for the Blanche part, and my heart sank,” Rue remembers. “I said, ‘How could I go to work every day playing Rose?’ because I knew instinctively that I was just too right for Blanche. And s
he said, ‘Well, it’s either that, or you don’t do the series at all.’”

  The Golden Switch

  NOT WILLING TO give up on making TV history—“I knew from the moment I opened the envelope and saw The Golden Girls written on the cover in cursive typeface that it would be a hit,” she claims—Rue acquiesced; she would play Rose. But then, on her first meeting with the pilot’s director, Mary Tyler Moore and Soap veteran Jay Sandrich, something historic happened. After her reading of Rose, “Jay said, ‘I’m going to do something unorthodox—would you mind reading Blanche for me?’” Rue remembers. “And I said, ‘If you insist.’”

  “I had never met Rue,” Jay explains. “After she read Rose, I said to her, ‘You’re really wonderful—but I don’t for one second believe you’re innocent.’”

  A few days later, when Rue and Betty came in to read for the director together, Jay had the same surprise for Betty; knowing from the Mary Tyler Moore Show that “she can get a laugh doing anything,” he asked her to read for Rose. “Betty had had no inkling,” Rue says. “And then her eyes widened and she said, ‘Rose?’”

  Betty remembers how Jay broke the news to her; he felt that if she were to play another nymphomaniac, the audience was going to think it was Sue Ann all over again. Susan Harris told Betty that Rose was actually her favorite character—which Betty suspected just be a ploy to bring her around. “But then the more I looked at Rose, the more I was okay with it,” she explains. “And I give Jay Sandrich full credit for helping me make it work. He said Rose doesn’t have a sarcastic bone in her body, that she isn’t witty or hip at all. She takes every single word literally and puts them all together and it makes perfect sense for her. And when he said that, it made sense for me.”

  And so, the qualities that had originally gotten each actress in the door were now thrown out the window. Rue was to be mousy no more, and Betty was to take a break from the man baiting. “Betty was hysterical as Rose,” Rue says. “Her eyes went wide and stayed that way for seven years. I used to call them her Little Orphan Annie eyes—white ovals with nothing in them. The irony is that she’s such an incredibly brilliant woman.”

  “And Rue took Blanche and went with her where I never would have had the guts to go,” Betty adds. “So it just worked out beautifully.”

  A Bea Arthur Type

  THE LAST OF the women left to cast was Dorothy, ostensibly the lead role. Susan had created the character with only one person in mind. She had even described the character in the pilot script as “a Bea Arthur type.” The problem was Bea wasn’t interested.

  Susan, who had worked with Bea on Maude—in fact, she wrote that series’ most famous episode, “Maude’s Abortion”—and on Soap, where Bea played God in a fourth-season episode, had her heart set. But with the actress refusing the role, the team was forced to move on. So NBC’s Senior Vice President of Talent and Casting, Joel Thurm, suggested a Broadway favorite. As Joel recalls, “I said to Brandon Tartikoff, ‘There’s one other woman who I think would be very good for this. And she has a lot of the same rough edges, and she’s new. No one has seen her on television, other than a British series she did for a while. Her name is Elaine Stritch.’”

  Brandon Tartikoff and Judith Weiner both agreed that auditioning Elaine would be a good idea. But only after striking a “test deal” with Stritch’s agent and arranging her plane ticket and hotel room, bringing her in and auditioning her, did Tartikoff fully understand just how stuck Susan was on Bea. And only Bea.

  Joel’s large NBC office, where Elaine’s audition took place, sat sixteen people around an L-shaped couch. “And on a good day, the vibes for an actor, looking at all those faces, could be horrendous,” he explains. “But that day, because Susan and Paul and Tony and some other people had the agenda in mind of accepting only Bea, the room was ice-cold. Add to that, of the NBC people, not everybody knew who Elaine Stritch was. Then when she started to read, she was really nervous and she had a couple of misstarts. Then her reading started out okay, but it got zero reaction. So what happens to a performer when there’s no reaction in the room? She starts getting bigger and bigger. It ended up being a disaster.”

  It was then, in that room, that Susan Harris revealed that she had written the part expressly for Bea. But never mind Bea’s feelings about the role— NBC didn’t want her anyway. Brandon Tartikoff worried that Bea’s “Q” scores, which track a performer’s standing among audience members, were exceedingly low. Undoubtedly because of Maude’s unabashed liberalism and TV abortion, “of those who knew her, only twenty percent liked her.” For weeks, all through the development phases of The Golden Girls, Tartikoff had been adamant: no Bea Arthur. But now that the Elaine Stritch plan had fizzled, there was no plan B.

  Finally, as the discussion became heated, Susan and Paul began to make headway with the network president. They argued that unlike Maude, The Golden Girls would be an ensemble piece. The show would not rest solely on Bea’s shoulders, and thus she could win over anyone Maude Findlay had possibly alienated. Finally, the network chief gave in.

  Maude and Vivian, Meet Sue Ann Nivens

  EVEN WITH NBC on board, Susan Harris still had to convince the actress to accept the part. So she prevailed upon Bea’s former cast mate Rue McClanahan to put the pressure on. And so Rue called Bea. “And I said, ‘Why on earth are you turning down the best script that’s ever going to come across your desk as long as you live?’” Rue says. “And she said, ‘Rue, I have no interest in playing Maude and Vivian meet Sue Ann Nivens.’ I said, ‘That’s not the way we’re going to play it, Bea. I’m going to play the Sue Ann Nivens vamp, and Betty’s going to play the Vivian role.’ And Bea took a beat and said, ‘Now that is very interesting.’” And with that, the team was set. “Next thing you know, the four of us, including Estelle, came in to read for the suits at NBC,” Rue remembers. “And we laid them low. And that’s the way they cast it.”

  Bea Arthur and Rue McClanahan in Maude, 1975.

  Photo courtesy of CBS PHOTO ARCHIVE.

  For her part, Bea doesn’t remember hesitating; she says she simply must have been the last person in town to get her hands on the pilot script. “I got a phone call from my agent, who said, ‘What’s this I hear about you doing a new show?’ I told him I had no idea what he was talking about, and he said there was a new show I was cast in,” Bea remembers. “I told him I know nothing about it, and nobody is calling me. A few days after, I did get a script, and found out that everybody in the country had auditioned for a part described as ‘a Bea Arthur type.’”

  Bea’s contract paperwork was rushed to her house just in time on that Good Friday, April 5. The cast began rehearsals the following Monday, April 8. There was now no time to lose in fleshing out Susan Harris’s leading ladies; nine days later, on Wednesday, April 17, 1985, The Golden Girls pilot was scheduled to be videotaped at Sunset Gower Studios in front of a live studio audience.

  Casting Coco

  BUT THERE WAS still one more character yet to be cast—the gay houseboy, Coco, named after Susan Harris’s dog.

  Golden Girls casting associate Allison Jones notes that the candidates for Coco ranged all over the Kinsey Scale, including her friend Dom Irrera and another Italian American comic actor, Paul Provenza—both of whom, in real life, display far more hetero swagger than swish.

  Early on, the producers began eyeing Jeffrey Jones, who had recently played a young, gay Brit in Caryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine, an effete emperor in the 1984 film Amadeus, and was generating buzz for his soon-to-be-infamous role as Principal Rooney in 1986’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But as he remembers, Jeffrey spoiled his chances himself.

  “I wasn’t concerned about playing another gay character,” Jeffrey explains. “But I didn’t think this character was very realistic, but more cheap. Obvious and jokey. When I went in to read, they asked what I thought, and I naively told them: I thought that Coco brought the show in the wrong direction, away from the women. He didn’t fit with the interplay of th
e characters and so he just seemed unnecessary. I guess I talked myself out of a job.”

  Although both Susan Harris and Allison Jones say there had never been a particular “type” at all in mind for Coco, both Paul Provenza and Jeffrey Jones recall being told that the casting team was thinking of Coco as a drag queen. “But they wanted an actor doing drag, not a drag queen trying to act,” Paul recalls. “Still, they weren’t sure an actor could really commit to being a drag queen. I said, ‘Let me think about it and let you know.’ With a plan in mind, Paul was referred through a mutual friend to actress/writer Hillary Carlip, who was then the lead singer of the band Angel and the Reruns. “Her entire garage was filled with costumes,” Paul remembers. “So I went to her house and picked out something I thought would work. Hillary decked me out, and a friend of ours did makeup. Rather than coming off like a big, flamboyant drag queen, I chose to look like a guy who’s trying to pass for a nice, average, Beverly Hills–esque woman.”

  Never having done drag before, Paul showed up on the studio lot for his audition “and was having the damnedest time in those fucking heels.” But his look was convincing—maybe too convincing. “On the way back to my car, I got hit on by the lot’s security guard, who said, ‘I’ve never seen you around here before. You must be new in town,’ which I thought was really funny. So I didn’t get the part, but I did have a fun time doing the audition.”