By Drew Mackie
March 3, 2016 :: 8:30 AM
Nathan: TV Guide had done a piece on the show: “The Golden Girls—Is it still as good as it was the first year?” And they asked random people what they thought of the show, and this one housewife said she didn’t think the show was as good and that Bea Arthur’s character wasn’t as interesting. They mentioned her by name—Mrs. Betty Johnson, Sioux Falls, Iowa. So Bea reads this at lunch and then gets on the phone and asks information for this Betty Johnson’s number. And she calls her. And she picks up, this TV Guide woman, and Bea says, “This is Bea Arthur, and I want to talk to you about what you said in TV Guide.” The woman was horrified. She said she was misquoted. “I didn’t mean it. Is it really you? I love the show. I take it back.” And Bea goes, “That’s what I thought. OK, that’s better.”
Hervey: And then Bea said “That person’s going to go tell everyone that I called her, and no one’s going to believe her.”
Zimmerman: Years later, [Berg and I] were going to see that movie The Opposite of Sex, and ahead of us in line was Bea Arthur and Angela Lansbury. And we were like, “Holy fuck—we’re sitting right behind them. And they were laughing at the dirtiest stuff in that movie. And it was Mame. That was everything. We were like, “Who drove? How many cocktails did they have on the way over?”
Hervey: One time we were at the studio on Cahuenga and Bea had stopped for gas on the way home, and she realized she’d forgotten her credit card. So she tells the guy at the station, “I’m good for it. I’m Bea Arthur. I’m on The Golden Girls.” He had no idea who she was, and so she ended up driving with the guy back to the studio, back to her dressing room, to get her credit card to prove who she was. And we all thought that was funny—that the show was so huge and this guy who works two blocks from the studio wouldn’t know who Bea Arthur was.
Nathan: Rue hadn’t been a sex object for a while before the show started, and all of a sudden she was playing the femme fatale again. It was in the first few weeks of the show, and she said, “The most amazingly strange thing happened. I was walking down the street and these construction workers started screaming at me. They were screaming, “Hey, Blanche” and they were saying these filthy things and grabbing their personal parts suggestively.” And I said “No kidding!” And she leaned into me and said, “To be honest, I loved it.”
Wooten: I personally loved writing Blanche. I’m from North Carolina, so the southern vixen came easily to me. I just loved seeing what she did with it. There was an episode called “Journey to the Center of Attention,” where Blanche, who was the queen of the Rusty Anchor bar, took Dorothy there and then became jealous when Dorothy became as popular. Rue was wonderful in that.
Nathan: We were doing a thing where Betty White was on a harness and we had to swing her in at a specific time. She was literally coming down from the rafters, and we couldn’t get it right. So we’d bring her down, hoist her back up, and she’d be swinging around again. Sometimes she’d be upside-down. Sometimes she’d be flying around like a kite. This went on for a half-hour, and someone eventually says to me, “Mort, maybe you should give Betty a break. She’s in her 60s and you’re hanging her upside-down from a wire. So I look up at Betty, who was half-upside-down, and I ask, “Betty, would you like a break?” And she screams down, “That would be nice, darling!” We brought her down, but what struck me about that was that she did not want to break the professionalism of the moment. She would have hung there until she passed out before she’d break the rhythm of the show. I thought, “That is one tough lady.”
Zimmerman: People are always surprised when I tell them that when I was on Golden Girls, there were no gay people there. [Berg and I] were the first. Early on, Estelle pulled us to the side of the set and said, “You’re one of us.” And I was like, “Yeah, we’re Jewish.” And she was like, “No, gay.” She thought of herself as part of the family, because of Torch Song Trilogy. Right then and there, we fell madly in love with her.
Wooten: The gay community loved Estelle, and she loved them right back. I spent time with Estelle outside the show, and I saw firsthand just how much she meant to them—us. I never met her husband or her children, but she was never alone. I think a lot of us helped her fill her time off set. She’d set me up on blind dates. Some went well, and some went horribly awry. But she really blossomed late in life, and I really treasure my time with her.
Duteil, on the stirring defense of gay marriage that Sophia delivers in his episode: That speech coming from her made it better than if any other character had said it. You might have expected other characters to have said that, but for Sophia—the oldest one, who’s from a different generation—it meant more. It also meant a lot that they chose that episode to submit for the Emmys that year—just the fact that it dealt with that subject matter. They could have picked another episode, but they didn’t.
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