Creatives behind The Golden Girls shared funny and, at times, very candid behind-the-scenes stories during a 40th-anniversary celebration of the long-running hit show on Wednesday night.
The event, held at NeueHouse Hollywood as part of the monthlong Pride LIVE! Hollywood festival, featured a panel of writers, producers and others who worked on the show, which ran for seven seasons on NBC, from 1985-92. The series, created by Susan Harris, starred Bea Arthur as Dorothy Zbornak, Betty White as Rose Nylund, Rue McClanahan as Blanche Devereaux and Estelle Getty as Sophia Petrillo.
Casting director Joel Thurm was there from the beginning for the casting of all four leading ladies. He shared that Brandon Tartikoff, then-head of NBC Entertainment, originally did not want Arthur in the show, but Harris was dead-set on her, having previously worked with the actress on Maude (she wrote several episodes, including the legendary abortion episode). Thurm said Tartikoff’s resistance to casting Arthur had to do with her low Q scores in likability.
“[This] created a big problem, but I never knew how dug in Susan was, because I just wasn’t in the room where those kind of discussions happened,” he shared. “So my job, according to Brandon, was to find someone that Susan would be happy with instead of Bea Arthur. I should have realized that she wouldn’t have been happy with anybody besides Bea, but I was too naive, and I thought, ‘Oh, I have someone. Her name is Elaine Stritch. She has the same acidic quality, you know, stare at you and give you the same thing that Bea does.’”
Thurm shared that when Stritch came in for her audition, “None of the people associated with Golden Girls wanted her. So this woman had to walk into a freezer of an office and try to make it funny. Stritch asked Susan one thing, it was something like, ‘Is it OK if I change something?’ And Susan said, ‘Yes, only the punctuation.’ There was no love in that room. I felt so sorry for poor Stritch because she wasn’t her fault. She didn’t do anything. And had I known that, that Susan was immovable on this, I wouldn’t have done what I did and then try to find somebody else.”
Golden Girls co-producer Marsha Posner Williams, however, shared a different view of Stritch.
“I want to just say that I worked on a pilot, and Elaine Stritch was a guest star for one day,” she chimed in. “Before the day was half over, we were calling her ‘Elaine Bitch.’”
Meanwhile, Getty, who was then an unknown actress, came in to her audition and nailed it: “She did her homework and prepared for the part,” Thurm said, noting she was the first one of the four leads to be cast.
Incidentally, Cher was supposed to guest-star in the episode focusing on the death of Sophia’s son, playing his wife, but she never replied to the offer, and Brenda Vaccaro was cast instead.
Williams also brought up a topic that has been much-discussed and speculated on: whether Arthur and White got along in real life.
“When that red light was on [and the show was filming], there were no more professional people than those women, but when the red light was off, those two couldn’t warm up to each other if they were cremated together,” she quipped. Arthur “used to call me at home and say, ‘I just ran into that c” — meaning White, using the c-word — “at the grocery store. I’m gonna write her a letter,’ and I said, ‘Bea, just get over it for crying out loud. Just get past it.’”
In fact, the panelists shared that Arthur called White the c-word more than once. “I remember, my husband and I went over to Bea’s house a couple of times for dinner. Within 30 seconds of walking in the door, the c-word came out,” Williams said, and Thurm noted that he heard Arthur call White that word as well while sitting next to her on a flight. It’s a story he shared a few years ago on a podcast and then got surprised at the internet’s response over his revelation.
The panelists differed on their theories about why the two didn’t get along. Co-producer Jim Vallely thought it was because White got a lot more applause during cast introductions ahead of tapings, but Williams shot that down, noting that Arthur hated doing publicity and came from a different background (theatrical) than White (television).
“The show would have continued after seven years,” she shared. “Their contracts were up and … the executives went to the ladies, and Estelle said, ‘Yes, let’s keep going,’ and Rue said, ‘Yes let’s keep going,’ and Betty said, ‘Yes, let’s keep going.’ And Bea said ‘no fucking way,’ and that’s why that show didn’t continue. … And Betty would break character in the middle of the show [and talk to the live audience], and Bea hated that.”
Script supervisor Isabel Omero remembered it differently, noting that the two used to walk “arm in arm” to get notes together after the first of two tapings. Williams joked that was in case they were walking across the lot and a golf cart got out of control, suggesting that one of them might push the other in front of it.
From left: Jim Colucci, Jim Vallely, Rock Copp, Stan Zimmerman, Joel Thurm, Isabel Omero and Marsha Posner Williams.
Kimberly Nordyke
The event kicked off with a highlights reel of some of the show’s LGBTQ moments, including Blanche’s brother coming out as gay, Sophia’s coming to terms with her cross-dressing son and a politician’s revelation that he was transgender.
But behind the scenes, things weren’t so progressive, shared writer Stan Zimmerman. “People have to remember back then, we were told by a representatives to stay in the closet, so nobody knew we were gay,” he shared. “Our first day on the set, we noticed Estelle come running towards us, and she’s like … ‘I know. Your secret’s safe with me. You’re one of us.’ I thought she meant Jewish,” he quipped. “But she meant gay. She wasn’t gay, but she was probably the first ally ever.”
Zimmerman added that he was telling his co-workers how he had bought some vintage sweaters at a garage sale one day, and they told him to “go home and burn those sweaters because it was probably somebody that died of AIDS. … That was the climate then.’ I know you see all these progressive scenes and you think, ‘Oh, it was one big gay party there,’ but we couldn’t be who we really were.”
Omero, who came out as transgender in 2019, shared that she was in the closet for all seven seasons of the show. She said that one day, Arthur offered to give her an Indian sari that she had picked up on a trip.
“In my closeted, panicked, paranoid brain, all I knew is that at that moment Bea Arthur was offering me a dress to wear around the house, and I wish I had been in a place where I could have said something, to even accept the gift without ever using it, just so I could express something to someone. But fear and shame is a big thing,” Omero said.
Asked why The Golden Girls tackled so many different LGBTQ issues, Vallely replied: “I think it’s because we knew … we had a gay audience. They would play [the show] in [gay] bars across the country. … It was a big deal for middle America to see these women embrace the gay culture.”
The panel, which also featured story editor Rick Copp and was moderated by New York Times bestselling author Jim Colucci (Golden Girls Forever), ended with a highlights package of cut scenes from the pilot, which originally featured a live-in gay housekeeper and cook named Coco, who was played by Charles Levin. The character was cut from the show because Sophia — initially meant to be a recurring character — was so popular that they made Getty a regular; unfortunately for Levin, that meant another character had to be cut.
The panel spoke to a sold-out crowd on Wednesday night. Among those in the audience were actress Deena Freeman, who played Dorothy’s daughter Kate in an episode of the show, and production designer Michael Hynes.The Hollywood Reporter is the presenting media sponsor of Pride LIVE! Hollywood.
