‘The Golden Girls’ Revealed! Things You Didn’t Know About The Classic Series (Exclusive)

The success of the show pretty much caught everyone by surprise. 

Let’s face it, a sitcom about four elderly woman would not seem to be the sort of thing that would enjoy great success during its original run, let alone after. “Back in 1985, before they tested it, the network thought, ‘Only old people are going to watch this,'” notes Jim Colucci. “But the testing at the time came back as an across the board hit. And kids responded to Sophia, because she was this funny little loudmouth character.  I think it always had more built-in appeal than people gave it credit for, and that goes to show the kind of the misogyny and ageism with which we’re all raised, myself included. We’re all guilty to assume that nobody’s going to watch these old women. Whether they were old women or not, these were four comedy powerhouses, so to put them in one show is amazing.

“I also think — and this is a credit to the writing — that the show was socially conscious in a way that was so prescient. If you look back at it now, they were talking about gay marriage in the early 90s before anybody had it on their radar. They tackled AIDS early, they tackled homelessness, they tackled health care — things we’re still fighting about today, and they were talking about it then. Certainly the social issues are relevant.”

Not surprisingly, the series connected heavily with women.

Notes Jim, “We’re all human and we all have these feelings and I don’t want to leave anyone out, but I think that the show appeals to women, particularly young women, and to gay men. I think to women, there’s this theme of sorority, of women who are in it together. You know, if we stick together we can win, we can persevere. Even though society’s stacked against us, people may treat us like we’re invisible, people may laugh at us and treat us like we’re a joke, but if the four of us commit to living together, we make a pact to take care of each other, and when we do that, look how fabulous life turns out.

“Sophia, who had been in a rest home, now all of a sudden blossoms again and these other women who had been widowed, and in only one case divorced, blossom again and all of a sudden they’ve got dates all the time, it seems like almost every week they’re going to fancy charity events in formal gowns, and they can solve any problem in 22 minutes. Of course it’s fantasy that problems can be solved in 22 minutes, but it’s that fantasy for women that if we stick together, life can be fabulous. I think there are a lot of women, probably younger than the Golden Girls, maybe in youth to middle age, who might be in less than ideal marriages and who fantasize about, ‘I just wish I could live with my girlfriends and we could have this great life,’ and here’s that fantasy brought to life on screen. I think that’s why it appeals to women.”

There was also a strong connection between The Golden Girls and gay men.

“The feeling for gay men is the same thing about ‘we’re on the outskirts of society, but if we stick together there’s power,'” points out Jim. “I think for gay men there is just also the fact we all love a quippy retort and we love the fantasy that if you get woken up at two in the morning to have cheesecake, that the calories don’t count and that you’ll be in full hair and makeup. Also, the main thing is that gay people form a surrogate family often when their biological families are less than supportive, and so here it is, again, a surrogate family. Only two of them are related and they have made a bond with each other that’s unbreakable. As the world gets more and more horrific — obviously in some ways the world gets better, too — that message of, ‘Bond together with your friends and you can persevere,’ I think is more powerful than probably it was in the 80s. Add to that that the message is delivered in a completely witty way by great writing and expert performing, and that’s why the show is so popular now.”

Bea Arthur played Dorothy Zbornak.

Says Jim, “It’s funny, but when the first script was written, in the stage directions it described Dorothy as a ‘Bea Athur type.’ Everybody remembers Bea, maybe through her agent, turning it down, because she had been burned by television. She had done that short lived sitcom Amanda’s By the Sea, and she was having personal problems. She just didn’t want to go back into the grind. Bea doesn’t remember it that way. Bea thinks that she heard about this script at the last minute and she did say she had one beat of hesitancy. She thought that Rue and Betty were going to be switched the way they were on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Maude where Betty would be the man hungry one and Rue would be the mousier one. She didn’t want to retread that same territory and Rue had to talk her into it, but that was only one beat where Bea remembers not wanting to do the show.”

Elaine Stritch could have been Dorothy.

As Jim explains it, as badly as Golden Girls creator Susan Harris wanted Bea Arthur for the role of Dorothy, the actress’ resistance forced her to look elsewhere. “Susan had her heart set on Bea,” he says, “but they did do a brief, disastrous audition with Elaine Stritch when it looked like they couldn’t get Bea and then eventually talked Bea into it.”

Back in 2002, Variety elaborated on the situation, reporting, “Bea Arthur is starring in her own one-woman show at the Booth, Elaine Stritch started previews Wednesday night in her At Liberty at the Neil Simon. Look for sparks between the two houses. Stritch claims Arthur got the role in Golden Girls when she flunked a reading for the role… She says, ‘I blew it. I blew it. I didn’t get the job. Ha ha ha, I blew it. I blew a 35, 40 or maybe even 50 (if they wanted me badly enough) thousand dollars per episode for the first 13 weeks (and after that who knew ) job. I blew it. A multibillion-, zillion-dollar, international, syndicated residual-grabbing, bofferooni, smasherooni, television situation comedy titled The Golden Girls.’ The producers of Golden Girls tell me, ‘We had always wanted Bea Arthur for that part. Stritch came in for a reading — and didn’t read.'”

Rue McClanahan is Blanche Devereaux and Betty White is Rose Nylund, but it was almost the other way around. 

“They knew older, talented women were out there and not getting work, so they’d be eager to do the show,” offers Jim. “They thought, ‘Why not take our pick of them?’ They started this kind of really exhaustive search of women of that age and of that caliber, and ironically, ultimately came down to two of the most obvious choices, Betty and Rue. They picked Betty first and they cast her as Blanche, kind of going along The Mary Tyler Moore Show lines, and by the time Rue got offered a chance to come in and audition, she had her heart set on Blanche and they said to her, ‘No, that’s Betty’s role. If you want to do this show at all, you’d better read for Rose.’

“Having lost out similarly in Soap by holding out for a character that she didn’t get, Rue said, ‘All right, I don’t want to lose out again, I’ll read for Rose.’ It was only a little bit into the process when the pilot’s director, Jay Sandrich, saw Rue read as Rose and said, ‘I’m going to ask you to do something unconventional. I’m going to ask you to go into the other room and study the Blanche lines and see what you can do with that.’ Rue was, like, ‘Okay!’ Rue happily did that and then they broke the news to Betty that they really wanted to recommend the switch and to Betty’s credit, she acquiesced and so history was made really at the last minute there, too.

“All in all, there are so many facets to this casting. There was the character that they thought would be hard to get who turned out to be the first one they got, and who had to be aged up, because she had the attitude but not the necessary look. Then there was the actor that they wanted from the stage directions that came in at the last minute, because they had to talk her into it. Then there were the two roles that they thought, ‘Let’s look all over creation for them so that we can go unorthodox,’ and they went with orthodox, perfect choices.”

Estelle Getty played Sophia Petrillo.

Jim explains, “The network was afraid of the Sophia character in that they were asking, ‘How do we cast somebody who’s in her 80s and has all her marbles?’ Sophia was actually the character they looked for first. Estelle, of course, was not in her 80s. She was in her 60s and and wasn’t Italian American, she was Jewish. Of course, she pulled it off beautifully in her audition. She had gained some measure of fame doing Torch Song Trilogy, so she ended up being the first person cast. They thought she would be the hardest, but she was the easiest.”

Betty White is so nice she doesn’t even need a bathroom!

In reflecting on the experience of interviewing the four actresses for Golden Girls Forever, Jim says of Betty White, “She played Rose in a way that I don’t think anyone else could have and that’s why that role swap is so vital to the show’s success. Not that Rue isn’t brilliant and probably couldn’t have done something different with it, but I have always had this adage that it takes a brilliant person to play stupid. Betty is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and still is at 97. The fact that she played dumb so beautifully is because she’s able to process so many thoughts at one time, where she could remember her next line, hit her mark, play the attitude, and, the line she used was, ‘Keep the light out of my eyes.’ That’s the way she described it. If you’re going to play somebody that naïve and innocent, you can’t have a twinkle in your eye that says, ‘I know what I’m saying with this risque line.’ You have to seem like you’re saying it by accident. She had to keep that light out of her eyes, as she said, for seven years, actually eight years if you include Golden Palace. It required that level of brilliance and Betty brought that.

“It’s funny that my interaction with each of the women was so typical to who they are. Betty was so busy at 84 in 2006, that I had an hour with her. So I spent that hour with Betty in her butter yellow living room at home with her golden retriever Pontiac, who only recently passed away, lying on my feet and it could not have been a more Betty White experience. We’re in a cheery, yellow, kind of ’70s looking living room with a beautiful dog at my feet. Betty is a pro at interviewing and even though we only had an hour, that was the equivalent of three hours with somebody else, because Betty can speak in perfect sound bites and gives you what you need right away. Her memory’s impeccable, she has funny thoughts about everything. It’s funny, looking at my tape recorder you can hear at an hour and one minute on the recorder her assistant come in and says, ‘I’m sorry, Betty, there’s no more time for today.’ That’s how scheduled she was. We ended up having some phone follow up later, but that one hour ended up being almost enough time.

“By the way, when I arrived at her house, I had come from another interview and I had been at lunch and had had 20 iced teas over the course of this interview. By the time I got to Betty’s house, I had to pee so bad that when I rang the doorbell, I knew I had a minute or two that I needed to set up my equipment and my computer, but the first thing I could think of is, ‘Betty, I’m so sorry, but I need your bathroom right away.’ She and her assistant answered the door and they stood in the doorway, and Betty jokingly partially blocked my way for a second and said, ‘Oh I’m sorry, I don’t have one. I’m just so nice that I don’t go to the bathroom. You’ll just have to use the gas station down the street.’ I love that she knows her reputation for niceness and plays with it.”

Remembering Estelle Getty.

One of Jim’s biggest disappointments in writing Golden Girls Forever is the fact he never had the opportunity to interview Estelle Getty due to illness. “Even though she was alive,” he says, “I had just really missed the time when she was able to talk. I had been in touch with her people for a year or so before I really did the interviews, and they had said, ‘Maybe she could do it,’ but she was really fading in and out at that point. Of course I regret that, but I did talk to so many people in her life that I think painted a beautiful picture of her.”  

Rue’s interview can be seen online. 

Jim notes that he conducted his interview with Rue McClanahan on camera as a part of the Archive of American Television’s efforts to provide an oral history to as many TV shows and personalities as possible. “The funny thing about that is,” he says, “I had made an agreement with the Archive people and had them get Rue’s people to agree that because the Archive interview is about your entire life, I knew I wouldn’t get enough Golden Girls stuff — even though we were going to spend the whole day interviewing her. Everyone agreed that even when the cameras were off and Rue was in makeup or getting touch up or whatever, I could keep peppering her with Golden Girls questions. And she was a good sport about that, but the problem is at the end of a five-hour archival interview where you talk about your whole life, first of all, you’re exhausted and you get a little cranky. Then I was doing a novice interviewer thing, so it’s my fault, where, because the Archive gives you like 40 pages of questions to ask these people, we were having to cut questions for lack of time. I just tried to keep speeding up and ask multiple things at one time. Like, ‘Rue, when you did this TV movie and this one and this one and this one, which one’s your favorite?’

“When you talk that fast to somebody who’s been talking for five hours, Rue started to get snippy with me. You can see that in the interview. I view that as a fun memory, because I see that she had patience with me being an idiot and yet she indulged me many times during that day, because when she’d see that something was related to Blanche, she’d kind of do the voice for me. At one point she’d talk about her many, many husbands in real life and she went into Blanche and said, ‘My many, many husbands.’ She was making it fun for me and we’re, again, in her living room, so what could be more fun for a fan than that opportunity?”

In many ways, Bea Arthur had to be won over to be interviewed.

“I’ve actually told this story on stage,” laughs Jim. “I was given by the Actor’s Guild what they called a reference number, which turned out to be Bea’s home phone number. She didn’t have, I guess, an agent at that point, but I didn’t know that. When I called and I got the answering machine that says, ‘I can’t come to the phone right now,’ I stammered my way through leaving a message. It was, like, ‘Oh my God, I’m leaving a message on Bea Arthur’s machine.’ I had to call quite a few times and then finally I’m driving on Santa Monica Boulevard and I get a call and it comes up caller ID, Bea Arthur. How do you drive and talk to Bea for the first time? Especially because I thought I was going to get a ticket.

“I managed to stammer out that I wanted to talk to her and she initially kept turning me down, because she said it wasn’t the happiest time in her life and she doesn’t like looking back. I could sense even in her letting me down gently that there was part of her that was amenable. I said, ‘Can I call you again?’, and that started a three week process of us calling each other and getting to know each other a little bit over the phone, and her softening a little bit each time about whether she wanted to do the interview. She’d say, ‘Well call me again and we’ll talk.’ Finally she agreed — but I’m leaving out so many details of these calls. One time she called me and I was in the Beverly Hills Public Library and I thought I’d better answer this anyway. I’m having a phone call with Bea in the middle of the library and people are yelling at me to shut up and finally I just screamed at them, ‘F–k you, it’s Bea Arthur!’ That shut everybody up and Bea laughed.

“Eventually she did acquiesce. I went to her home. It turned out to be a temporary home that her sons were renting for her, because they were remodeling her regular home and so she didn’t know where things were a lot of the time in the kitchen. She had made a pact with me that she’d do the interview if I stayed and had a drink with her. She’d poured out a bottle of wine into two giant balloon goblets, so I was drinking a half a bottle of wine with her, making small talk. There are just moments where Bea Arthur’s got her bare foot up on the coffee table and you’re splitting a bottle of wine with her, making small talk, where you think, ‘This is surreal. I never thought this would happen as a fan.’ I mean, how delightful is that? People thought the way to interact with Bea was to be rough with her, because her characters were loud and tough and she was tall and she seemed tough. The irony is that could not be further from the truth. Although she did have an imposing exterior, she was such a vulnerable mushball on the inside — if you recognized that and treated her kindly, but yet without BS, because she didn’t like BS and wouldn’t tolerate it. You just had to be a straight-shooter. That was the key to her heart, and I feel like although even in the first hour of our interview she was kind of closed up, she really opened up to me by the end of three or four hours together. We ended up with a hug, which I hadn’t ended any of the others with. I felt like she had really shown me her true self and it was almost like making a friend over four hours, which doesn’t normally happen.”

The Golden Palace takes over from the Girls.

This spin-off series, which ran for a single season from 1992 to 1993, picks up where The Golden Girls left off. With Dorothy getting married and moving out, the other three ladies decide to invest in a Miami hotel that’s for sale, which is not nearly as profitable as it seems. In fact, the only remaining employees are hotel manager Roland Wilson (Don Cheadle) and the chef, Chuy Castillos (Cheech Marin). The show itself had the ladies interacting with each other, the new castmembers, and people checking into the hotel. While an interesting experiment, it didn’t work.

“I don’t know if anybody thought it was a mistake in the beginning,” Jim muses, “though a few writers may have told me they weren’t quite sure about it. What’s interesting is that Estelle had finally become comfortable playing Sophia. In a way it’s ironic, because she had such stage fright. Having done Torch Song Trilogy and maybe having some physical memory issues at the time, because she certainly ended up having dementia later on in life, she was so used to the theater where you learned that play once, you got it down cold and then you could act on top of that and be comfortable. Sitcoms are the exact opposite, where it changes not only every week, but every day within the week that they give you new rewrites. So she was terrified and had terrible stage fright as Sophia. However, I think after seven years maybe she found that playing Sophia was at least familiar and comfortable to her, and she didn’t want to go up and do anything else. So I think she wanted to keep working and for somebody who had so much stage fright, she played Sophia on more shows than any of the other’s played their characters. She went on to not only Golden Palace, but Empty Nest and she guested on Nurses. She played Sophia as long as she could.

“The other thing is that the three of them enjoyed each other, so they wanted to keep working. It seemed like a way to keep the show going. What the hell, they’re game, they’d try it, and the problem was, as Betty now describes it, it was like a coffee table with three legs. You really can’t lose any one of those four women or you lose the balance of the show. And it did. As much as they tried, and the three of them were delightful and we still got three people we loved, it really was unbalanced without Bea.

“[Executive producer] Marc Cherry points out, and I always felt this way, too, that the fantasy of The Golden Girls was that when you grow older, your friends will be there for you. That you’ll be able to take care of each other till the end, through thick and thin. The story of Golden Palace completely undoes that good message, because it says at one point one of you may decide to go off and get married leaving the other three of you having to sell your palace, buy a s–tty hotel in Miami Beach, and work like dogs as hotel maids well into your 70s and 80s. Surprise! So it really undid the goodwill of the message of The Golden Girls.”

Things wind down for The Golden Girls.

The series ended its run in 1992 due to a drop in ratings and the fact that Bea Arthur was pretty much ready to move on. “She felt that the show was about to start slipping in quality,” Jim points out. “And the show had become different; it had gotten more surreal and a little exaggerated. I remember a comedy writer once telling me that with particular types of jokes — for example, Rose’s St. Olaf stories — it’s like giving somebody a drug. The first couple of times a small dose will do, and then the doses have to keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger to get the same result. The St. Olaf stories had gotten bigger and everything had gotten more cartoony. I still love the last season of the show, but I think Bea felt it was getting to be too much. She also had a few points along the way where she wasn’t on the show and wanted to quit when the show would make fun of her and call her big and ugly. There were times when she wanted to get out of there, so she let it be known that the seventh season would be her last. And of course the show couldn’t survive without any one of the four, so they made it the show’s last season.”

Final Thoughts on The Golden Girls.

Over the course of writing Golden Girls Forever and speaking to so many people involved with the show’s creation, it’s actually surprising that Jim did not come away with great revelations he had never expected. “Because I knew what the show meant to people and I think that deepened,” he says. “I did a section in my book where I surveyed celebrities about what they like about The Golden Girls, and hearing a lot of the same things like it was a surrogate family, or it inspired me, or it brought this issue to mind for the first time, or just they were screamingly funny and they’re older women and it showed me that you can be funny and be older, or female, or all the things that we tend discriminate against. So, no I don’t think I learned anything shocking, I think it just deepened my appreciation for how all the right elements came together at the right time, and a lot of that is luck and a lot of that is skill and finding the right people. At the same time, you just need everything to go right. From the creator to the timing, to the writing, to the network executives, to the time slots, to the casting.  And I’ve noticed in other books I’ve written, too, about Will & Grace and other shows, every element has to go right and there are so many hurdles in a row to get over to get a show on the air. To just get it on the air, nevermind to be a hit, and continue to be hit, and be a lasting influence. That little pinhole of chance gets narrower and narrower. And the fact that Golden Girls made it all the way to the finish line in terms of getting all those things right? That’s probably what impressed me the most.”