The Golden Girls Utopia

I can clearly recall watching the pilot episode of The Golden Girls when it premiered on Saturday, September 14, 1985, at 9 PM. I was in my parents’ bedroom with my mother, and I was a little kid at this point who very much wanted to be an adult. Older women were talking in a kitchen, and an older blonde woman named Rose missed the point somehow. “Well,” my mother said. “I guess we’re going to have to get used to Betty White being stupid.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if she knew this show was going to be a hit, and it was a big hit with pretty much everyone, anchoring NBC’s line-up on Saturday night for seven years to such an extent that there were spin-off series set in Miami that aired around it.

On Saturday nights as I was growing up, when you turned on NBC, it was possible to imagine entering a kind of world of The Golden Girls filled with bright colors and a spirit of endurance and pleasure and put-downs that were made with some kind of love. My grandmother enjoyed watching “the old women,” as she called them, and I can remember watching the show with her and how she would throw her head back and roar with laughter at the jokes. She was just five years older than three of the stars, Bea Arthur, Betty White, and Estelle Getty, all of whom were born in the early 1920s, and she shared the tough, enduring quality that was a hallmark of that generation of American women.

There was a spin-off series called The Golden Palace that lasted for one season, and Estelle Getty’s Sophia Petrillo guest-starred on one of the spin-offs, Empty Nest. In 1997, the Lifetime channel purchased the rights to air re-runs of The Golden Girls and would air episodes many times a day in between their own TV movies, so that it was basically The Golden Girls channel a lot of the time, and for over ten years this won the show new fans and retained the old ones.

In the early 21st century, watching The Golden Girls re-runs was nearly a way of life for many. “I love The Golden Girls,” declared the great playwright Edward Albee in 2011. “I watch reruns all the time.” The severe Albee, who to put it mildly was not easily impressed, praised the “skillfulness” of the show, “given the limitations and definitions of the characters…very, very splendid work.” DVD sets of the series began to come out in the 2000s, and in 2005 a large group of fans crowded the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Chelsea in Manhattan to get the season three DVD set signed by Bea Arthur, Betty White, and Rue McClanahan, all of whom were greeted like rock stars as they entered.

All four of the leading actresses had come up the hard way and only found their major success later in life. Arthur and McClanahan were middle-aged (fifties and forties, respectively) when they starred together on the 1970s sitcom Maude, and White was in her fifties when she made her mark as Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show in that same period. Getty had a much harder time getting steady work as an actress and had to keep her day job as a secretary until making a success on stage in Torch Song Trilogy when she was nearly 60 years old. So all four of these women had a lot of life experience and struggle to draw on when they got the parts of their lives on The Golden Girls, and none of the four could take their success for granted. All of them had suffered more than their share of setbacks and disappointments in their profession, and long periods when they couldn’t get work at all.

The Golden Girls is notoriously inconsistent on details, but only little minds make such hobgoblins too important. The show was created by Susan Harris, who wrote the pilot and some of the best episodes, but like most long-running TV shows it was a group effort forged by many different writers who had to produce results quickly. Fans have long questioned the layout of the house owned by Rue McClanahan’s Southern belle Blanche Devereaux, particularly the placement of the bedrooms for all four of the leading characters, but the comedy often depends on the Girls being able to make exits off the same hallway, and this was particularly important for Blanche, who would strut off like a runway model down a catwalk.

Blanche’s house on 6151 Richmond Street in Miami looks and feels spacious, and there is even a sense of unused space; only Sophia ever sits in the chairs in back of the couch by the fireplace. There is a feeling of renewal and abundance in this house, as if we are entering a sanctuary with tacked-up foliage by the front door and an expansive backyard lanai for special dinners; there are pitchers of chilled orange juice always at the ready in the kitchen, and the sun is almost always shining unless there’s a hurricane a-coming.

Blanche’s bedroom has a couch and chairs in it, and so does Rose’s bedroom, and so they can have visitors stay over with room to spare. Lois Nettleton’s Jean, a widowed lesbian, is able to retire to a peach-colored couch after making a gently phrased pass at Rose (“I’m quite fond of you,” Jean says) on the second season episode “Isn’t It Romantic?” The only thing marring the dream are the microphones that are sometimes caught at the tops of the frame by the cameras.

The core of The Golden Girls is the loss and fear the four main characters feel in late middle age and the start of old age and the new and unlikely security they find in friendship with each other. Arthur said in a 2002 interview that she didn’t think that the relationships on the show could flourish in real life, and she was probably right about that, but then her character Dorothy Zbornak always tried to be the realist of the four. The Girls were friends without question, and their friendship has the quality of love because it is based on faith, on a feeling that cannot be explained or justified with words. Most people don’t make close new friends in their fifties and beyond, but the Girls held out the possibility of that.

Aside from the odd line of dialogue here and there, the Girls play just fine in this era of excessive policing of correct social attitudes. This show is one of the few cultural artifacts of a superficial and selfish era that still holds up, and it has radical moments, like when Blanche talks about how much she enjoys getting catcalled by construction workers: “It makes me feel like a lady again,” she says, a quip that punctures and destroys, momentarily, the sexual hypocrisy she grew up with. McClanahan told Golden Girls writer Mort Nathan that she herself loved when construction workers grabbed themselves and said suggestive things and cried out, “Blanche!” as she walked by.

Arthur said she didn’t understand at first why the show had so many young fans and why it continues to attract young people as viewers until she realized that the atmosphere of the show was “anti-establishment.” Dorothy votes Democrat, which was a losing ticket when this show was on from 1985 to 1992, and Sophia does, too, but surely Blanche and Rose voted for Reagan and Bush, a potential divide never addressed on the show. There are two episodes of The Golden Girls in which homelessness is featured as a plot point, and on the second one a very angry priest makes a directly critical remark of Reagan’s policies on the homeless that got much angry fan mail from some viewers.

The four women have their memories and their sessions with cheesecake in the kitchen, and who knows how true any of their stories are? (Careful viewing shows that McClanahan sometimes happily eats and swallows the cheesecake during scenes, which White noted, and McClanahan had it in her contract that she got to keep Blanche’s custom-made wardrobe, which aligns her with the hedonism and materialism of Blanche.)  Arthur’s Dorothy is the voice of reason and Arthur herself made a career out of her withering stares at the three women in that kitchen as they went off on their flights of fancy.

Like many older people, Rose, Blanche, and Sophia feel the urge and the need to exaggerate and embellish stories about their past, and Dorothy famously looks askance at all that, yet she stays there with them and lets their inventions warm her up, which is what viewers can do as well. Rose, Blanche, and Sophia are seizing control of their lives and what has happened to them; they are fantasists, and their fantasies get increasingly outlandish. Kissing and telling, Blanche says in the first season, is half the fun, and with her it’s even more than half.

For the first three seasons, The Golden Girls was a warm and somewhat serious show about aging and friendship, and seasons four through seven were less serious in tone and sometimes verged on the bitchery of a drag act (episodes of The Golden Girls staged live have been popular vehicles for drag queens for a long time now). What has kept people coming back to the show is the sense that the Girls are somehow getting away with something, creating a utopia for themselves after their duties as wives and mothers was done, and so of course this appealed to women, to young people, and to gay people who create family-like units out of friendships, which has an exciting element of the forbidden about it. (Like some gay men, Blanche is capable of getting laid not just on Saturday nights but on Tuesday mornings.)

In one of the last episodes, “Home Again, Rose,” the Girls are barred from seeing Rose in the hospital after she has a heart attack because they are not official family members, and this is clearly a reference to what was happening to gay men during the AIDS crisis of this time period. When they finally get in to see Rose, look at how upset Sophia becomes when an unconscious Rose cannot respond to one of her Blanche jokes and you can see why women and gay men so often rely on insult humor as a cover for deep emotion.

The men on The Golden Girls are fond memories or schmucks, and the children of the Girls come and go. Blanche had lots of children with her husband George, but it is made clear that she was barely a mother to them, and her tentative efforts to do better in this role are not likely to last long. “Family you can see anytime, but a one-night stand only happens one night!” Blanche counsels in the last episode of the series.

Blanche is the sort of character who can do and say things that should make her unsympathetic but she never is because McClanahan has an innate childlike likability and pleasure in herself that is magnetic. In the season five episode “Ebb Tide,” Blanche misses saying goodbye to her dying father for utterly selfish reasons, and so we can see why her sisters condemn and dislike her, yet McClanahan is heartbreaking when Blanche apologetically addresses her father’s grave. When Blanche confesses her insecurities after Dorothy has been stealing attention from her at The Rusty Anchor bar, Rose shrewdly observes, “Boy, when the mask falls off it really makes a thud!”

Arthur said that she often looked down on McClanahan’s own innocence and naïveté in life and how it led her into so many unsatisfying marriages, yet they were friends, and Getty was loved by all three of the other Girls even though her brash confidence in the first seasons evaporated over time due to extreme stage fright. By the fourth season, Getty often looks like she physically does not want to be noticed, and so the writers had to work around her difficulties in remembering her lines. In the season six episode “Ebbtide’s Revenge,” in which Sophia’s son Phil has died, it is very noticeable how the big confrontation between Sophia and her daughter-in-law (Brenda Vaccaro) is written so that Dorothy, Blanche, and Rose can carry the bulk of the scene until Sophia has to break down at the very end.

Arthur’s issues with White were based on their very different temperaments. White had started out on early television programs that sometimes lasted for hours on end, and so she had a jokey way of relating to the studio audience that was anathema to the serious, theater-trained Arthur, who was so sensitive that a crew member once observed her quietly crying because she couldn’t get a comic bit to work the way she wanted it to. White was often off-book at the first table read, whereas Arthur clung to her script until the very end, and Getty finally had to use cue cards when she couldn’t read her lines off her purse or the kitchen counter.

Arthur was often unhappy about how many jokes there were about Dorothy looking and sounding like a man and how she could never get a date, and so some of her feeling against White came from the contrast she felt in the way they were treated on the show. McClanahan’s Blanche did not intimidate Arthur partly because the character was written in a way that emphasized how much Blanche was bragging about her sex life and how this bragging wasn’t always based in truth.

Arthur’s comedy motto was, “Wait,” and she got her biggest laughs with…a frozen look of disdain that she held for beat after beat so that a laugh from the audience could build, but there were three separate times on The Golden Girls when Arthur allowed Dorothy to cross her eyes with frustration at the antics of her roommates. Arthur was also a master of the slow burn, and she would allow herself some marinated facial “takes” of outrage before finally exiting through the kitchen or front door.

White outlived all three of her co-stars and nearly made it to her hundredth birthday, and there were points when she was asked about her working relationship with Arthur, and she handled this very gracefully. “Bea was not that fond of me,” White admitted to Joy Behar during a 2011 interview. “I don’t know what I ever did, but she was not that thrilled with me. But I loved Bea, and I admired her.” Compare this to the public warfare that erupted between Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker when Parker wanted to continue doing Sex and the City long after its freshness as a show had faded; this became particularly ugly when Cattrall lashed out via social media after her brother died and Parker tried to offer condolences online.

By comparison, when McClanahan was taken seriously ill, White sent her a note that read, “Dear Rue, I hope you will hurry up and die so that I can be the last Golden Girl left,” and McClanahan laughed and found this hilarious, for this was in the spirit of the Girls. This note backfired somewhat when McClanahan died soon afterward in 2010, but getting that “nasty” gallows humor laugh from her was what counted for White, and the love that White felt for McClanahan is clearly visible on her face as she looks at her colleague and friend at a Paley Center panel on the show in 2006.

A comparison between Cattrall’s libertine Samantha Jones on Sex and the City and McClanahan’s Blanche Devereaux reveals generational changes in attitudes and social position for women. Blanche is someone who relies on male attention to bolster her ego, and she is fine with using sex to get just about anything she wants, no matter how minor, because she loves sex so much; she calls this “nature’s credit card.” Even bad sex with an unattractive man is appealing to Blanche, who is always in sexual overdrive. (In season six, Blanche says that if she has bad sex with a man she generously gives him two more chances to prove himself!) Blanche claims she was faithful to George throughout their long and sexually exciting marriage, but this seems particularly hard to believe.

“You’re not a bad person, Blanche,” White’s Rose tells her at one point in season three. “You’re just horny all the time.” Late in season four, Blanche pretty much announces to the others in the kitchen that she’s going to her room to masturbate, and this still feels very bold. In the episode where the Girls buy condoms in a grocery store, McClanahan’s Blanche takes control in a very Samantha Jones-like way and valorizes her own sex drive without apology, and McClanahan herself had moments like that on the set.

In the season seven episode “Room 7,” when Blanche handcuffs herself to a radiator in her ancestral home in order to keep it from being demolished, the key that was being used to free McClanahan from the handcuffs during rehearsal got broken; the lights began to go off in the studio, and McClanahan started to get a little scared and angry. The director of that episode, Peter D. Beyt, was gay and closeted at that time, and he had a handcuff key in his pocket, which he decided to take out in order to free McClanahan. The crew started to tease him about this, but McClanahan immediately shut that down: “Now you stop that right now!” she yelled at them. “There is nothing wrong with this boy having a healthy interest in sex!”

Look, too, at the delighted reaction McClanahan has when a dirty phone call gets through to her while being interviewed on the Larry King Show in 1988. McClanahan did an event at the gay bar Barracuda in Manhattan in 2007 to promote her memoir My First Five Husbands…and the Ones Who Got Away, and she did her standard line about how much she was like Blanche herself. I have been known to brag, Blanche-style, about the fact that I once hung out at a gay bar with Blanche Devereaux, and I would have gladly gone with her to The Rusty Anchor afterwards had this been an option.

The richness of Blanche’s character was based around the conflict she felt between her liberated sexual urges and the conservatism of her upbringing; you never know quite how Blanche is going to react to something because of this divide, which is what makes the character so exciting. The Golden Palace is most of interest because the writers really confront Blanche with her outdated or evasive attitudes and make her think them through and drop them, as in the episode where Don Cheadle’s hotel manager explains to Blanche why the Confederate flag she is hanging in the hotel lobby is like a Nazi flag to him; this prompts Blanche to remember that her beloved husband George once loudly complained at a hospital where she was giving birth when Blanche was placed in a room with an African-American woman, a revelation that complicates the many loving memories we have heard about him from Blanche on The Golden Girls.

There are a few times on The Golden Girls when Blanche behaves with men in a way that borders on sexual harassment, particularly in a rather nightmarish episode of Empty Nest, written by Susan Harris, where Blanche basically stalks their neighbor Harry Weston (Richard Mulligan). But on The Golden Palace, which ran in the early 1990s, Blanche learns that she can’t flirt with all men in her new role as a businesswoman who owns a hotel, and this lesson is immediately and comically challenged when one of her business associates turns out to be an amorous Ricardo Montalbán; it is very amusing watching Blanche try to stifle her enormous sexual appetite with the ever-sexy Montalbán because she is trying to improve her character for a different era.

Blanche is a social butterfly on The Golden Girls whose work at a museum sounds nominal, something a well-to-do woman does to pass the time. At one point Blanche tries to get the Girls to appreciate the non-representational art that is being displayed at the museum, but the art in George Bush’s America, I’m afraid, is the art of the deal, which didn’t seem so bad in the 1930s when these older women were children; though the Girls are fond of get-rich-quick schemes, they have a conscience about them. It has often been noted by fans that the Girls seem to spend an inordinate amount of their time on lavish charity events and theatricals, but this makes a kind of sense if we consider that it is Blanche who has these connections and takes Dorothy and Rose into a social world they would be barred from if they didn’t know and live with her.

In a first season episode called “Job Hunting,” Rose is forced to take a low-paying and physically taxing job as a waitress, but this is never mentioned again and she lucks into working for a TV program by the end of the series, maybe because she has the Girls pushing her to succeed. Dorothy finally does become a little more confident in her own sexuality because she’s been around Blanche so much, and she succeeds at many things she tries, making a hit as a stand-up comic when she wants to fulfill an earlier dream and dominating The Rusty Anchor with her husky song stylings, which makes Blanche jealous in one of the best later episodes, “Journey to the Center of Attention.”

The weakness of The Golden Girls comes from its now-obscure topical references, which are usually doled out by Dorothy or Sophia, and the lazier insult humor that was mainly given to Sophia at least partly because Getty became increasingly frozen and unable to remember too many lines. McClanahan observed that Getty was far more relaxed on The Golden Palace and could suddenly remember her lines much more easily, and so Getty’s stage fright must have been somewhat based in feeling intimidated by Arthur, with whom she shared many of her scenes.

There were points when McClanahan started to get tired of the constant jokes about Blanche’s promiscuity that the writers relied on as a crutch like the jokes about Dorothy’s unattractiveness and Rose’s dopiness. (The word “slut” is used for a laugh in relation to Blanche in what comes to feel like every episode.) White was lucky in that her own intelligence was never in question, and so jokes about Rose being dumb or naïve did not touch her personally the way that the jokes about Dorothy and Blanche started to bother Arthur and McClanahan themselves.

The show relied on conventions, but within these conventions it created a world that people wanted to bask in. The Girls would sit there on the wicker sofa and chairs in the living room reading magazines or books, as if waiting for the entrance of usually Blanche or Rose to stir things up; they rarely watched their TV. (There was one episode where Blanche and Rose watch an I Love Lucy marathon, which delighted Lucille Ball herself, who was a fan of the show.)

“You’re my family” Blanche tells the Girls in the pilot episode, “and you make me happy to be alive.” Dorothy says that they will stay together even if one of them gets married, but the Girls were split up when Arthur wanted to end the series and they married Dorothy off to Blanche’s uncle (Leslie Nielsen); both this marriage and Sophia’s return to the nursing home Shady Pines on Empty Nest were dictated by the exigencies of keeping shows and characters going rather than what we learned about those characters over seven seasons.

What happened to the Girls in their old age? Surely Sophia can’t last much longer, and it doesn’t seem likely that Dorothy’s marriage will be a lasting one. My feeling is that a widowed Dorothy will eventually return to Florida for Sophia’s funeral, and she will move back in with Rose and Blanche, who are not likely to be able to keep their hotel going for long. Where would the remaining Girls settle around 2000 or so, the turn of the new century?

Picture it, Sarasota, Florida….Dorothy, Blanche, and Rose as swinging singles in their seventies (Blanche admits now to age 50), learning to use the Internet, still going on dates, still eating the cheesecake that is somehow the key to their longevity. The stories around the table at Blanche’s condo get more and more outlandish, and even Dorothy takes part, to the extent of seeing her sleazy husband Stan through rosier-colored glasses.

Rose is the first to go, for she nearly dies in the penultimate episode of the original series, and then Blanche goes while making love in some elaborate way; both of their hearts were bad. Dorothy the stoic endures, smiling sometimes as she remembers her more colorful friends, and these are memories that keep her warm until her own death around age 90 in the Florida sunshine where so many fans would like to go if only to be with the Girls. How many times have you heard from a fan of the show, “I want to live with them,” or “I watched it with my grandmother” or “They were like my grandmothers.” The Girls are family, the family you choose, the family you have faith in.

Key Episodes:

The Heart Attack (Season One, writer: Susan Harris, Sophia seems seriously ill)

A Little Romance (Season One, writers: Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan, Rose dates little person Jonathan)

Adult Education (Season One, writers: James Berg and Stan Zimmerman, Blanche is sexually harassed by a teacher)

Job Hunting (Season One, writers: Kathy Speer and Terry Grossman, Rose gets a job waiting table)

Ladies of the Evening (Season Two, writers: Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan, Girls mistaken for hookers, Burt Reynolds cameo)

It’s a Miserable Life (Season Two, writers: Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan, Frieda Claxton is their anti-social neighbor)

Isn’t It Romantic? (Season Two, writer: Jeffrey Duteil, lesbian Jean falls for Rose)

The Actor (Season Two, writers: Barry Fanaro and Mort Nathan, inflatable bosoms for Blanche)

Dorothy’s New Friend (Season Three, writers: Robert Bruce and Martin Weiss, bigoted author Barbara Thorndyke causes trouble)

The Artist (Season Three, writer: Christopher Lloyd, an artist has the Girls pose naked for a sculpture)

Grab That Dough (Season Three, writer: Winifred Hervey, Girls go on a game show)

Yes, We Have No Havanas (Season Four, writers: Mort Nathan and Barry Fanaro, Sophia and Blanche compete for the same man)

Sick and Tired (Season Five, two-part, writer: Susan Harris, Dorothy suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Blanche tries to be a writer, McClanahan does a hilariously uninhibited scene of delirious fatigue)

Accurate Conception (Season Five, writer: Gail Parent, the Girls debate the artificial insemination of Blanche’s daughter Rebecca)

Ebb Tide (Season Five, writer: Marc Sotkin, Blanche misses saying goodbye to Big Daddy on his deathbed)

Mrs. George Devereaux (Season Six, writers: Richard Vaczy and Tracy Gamble, Blanche’s dream about George, Sonny Bono guest stars)

Journey to the Center of Attention (Season Seven, writers: Marc Cherry and Jamie Wooten, Dorothy and Blanche compete at The Rusty Anchor)

Home Again, Rose (Season Seven, two-part, writers: Gail Parent and Jim Vallely, Rose becomes seriously ill)