“In the beginning, Brandon Tartikoff and the people at NBC all thought, ‘Let’s not go the tried-and-true way and just give America a bunch of familiar faces. Let’s go to Broadway and Chicago and cast some faces they don’t know.’ We thought that was odd, but we did then go out to those cities and see many, many, women—and nobody was quite right. After all, the stars we ended up bringing in were stars for a reason. It was just luck that they were all available for a series.”
—TONY THOMAS,
producer
TWO OF THE show’s creators, Susan Harris and Paul Junger Witt, remember how these four quite different ladies—Dorothy Zbornak, Blanche Devereaux, Rose Nylund, and Sophia Petrillo—sprang forth from the pilot’s pages.
Dorothy Zbornak
RECENTLY DIVORCED FROM Stanley, her philandering husband of thirty-eight years, brainy ex-Brooklynite Dorothy is a no-nonsense substitute schoolteacher. “Dorothy was the easiest character for us to come up with,” Susan explains. “Because Paul and I are from the New York metropolitan area. And she had a mouth on her.” And, Paul adds, “A sarcastic, cynical voice we could hear fairly early.”
Susan says she may have been conscious of the name Dorothy in honor of either Paul’s aunt or her own childhood friend. But the origin of the character’s unusual last name is much more clear: she cribbed it from her assistant, Kent Zbornak, who later became a producer on the show.
Rose Nylund
A WIDOW FROM the seemingly moronic town of St. Olaf, Minnesota, naïve Rose somehow finds the wisdom to counsel others at a grief center—that is, before beginning an even more unlikely career assisting a consumer reporter at a local TV station. “Rose, too, was a fairly easy character for us to create,” Susan remembers. “Because she sounded a lot like Katherine Helmond’s character, Jessica Tate, from Soap.”
Since Rose was to be of Scandinavian heritage, Susan borrowed the last name Nylund from a Swedish woman whom she and Paul had met sailing the Yugoslavian coast. “Rose was more midwestern than prototypically Scandinavian,” she says. “And there are a lot of names like that in the Midwest.”
Photo by WAYNE WILLIAMS.
Blanche Devereaux
A GEORGIA PEACH who never fails to remind her roommates that she is still ripe for the plucking, the hypersexual, über-Southern widow, Blanche, is the owner of the house in which the Girls live—all the better to entertain a steady stream of gentleman callers. “Blanche was definitely the hardest character for us,” Susan says. “We wanted very distinct characters, and that’s why we placed their origins in different parts of the country.” Problem was Paul and Susan hailed from New York Yankee territory, and Tony Thomas grew up in Los Angeles. So the trio turned to a reliable source: Southern literature.
“Blanche is almost a literary figure in representing that classic kind of Southern femininity,” Paul explains. As Rue McClanahan remembers, Susan’s pilot script describes the character as “more Southern than Blanche DuBois,” her obvious namesake. “It’s an homage,” Paul says. “And certainly a way to remember which character was the Southern one.”
Sophia Petrillo
AN ESCAPEE FROM the fire-ravaged Shady Pines nursing home, the eightysomething Sophia shows up at daughter Dorothy’s door—and because she became so popular with viewing audiences, she never leaves. Sophia shows a tendency toward blunt honesty—caused, we’re told, by a stroke that destroyed the tactful part of her brain, yet left her with more than enough mobility to cause trouble.
As former New Yorkers, Paul and Susan say they had grown up with Italian friends and neighbors, and liked the “New York sensibility,” as Susan calls it, “either Italian or Jewish.” “It’s all very much the same,” Paul adds. “Except it’s probably less clichéd to show an Italian-American mother/daughter duo than a Jewish one.” Of course, this Brooklyn-bred Sicilian mama also knows her way around a knish, and her dialogue captures those cadences as well. She exhibits the best of both worlds because, as the half-Sicilian and half-Lebanese Tony explains, “The funniest rhythms in the world are Semitic. Sophia was Sicilian, but she has a lot of the comedy rhythms I grew up with as well.” In naming their pan-Mediterranean creation, Susan turned to her own childhood in Mount Vernon, New York, where the family name Petrillo “is a large part of Mount Vernon history.”
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 she 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 the 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.”
Paul Witt remembers that the search for Coco became harder than the producers had imagined. “We wanted an actor who could play gay life with dignity,” he explains. “That’s very tricky.” And, again at odds with Jones and Provenza’s memories, Paul explains, “We didn’t want to get laughs out of outrageous, campy stuff.” When it came to finding the actor who could deliver all that, he says, demographics didn’t matter. “It never occurred to us to cast a straight guy versus a gay guy. We just knew that we wanted the character to integrate in a way that he would be part of this family.”
Enter Charles Levin
IT WAS NBC president Brandon Tartikoff who suggested Charles Levin, who had three years earlier begun a groundbreaking recurring gay role on Hill Street Blues. Charles’s character, Eddie Gregg, was a flamboyant men’s room hustler who formed an unlikely soul-matching friendship with Bruce Weitz’s detective Belker.
Charles remembers that when he first met with the Golden Girls pilot’s Jay Sandrich, he was surprised at the director’s resistance to the same gay affectations that had worked so well in the Eddie role. “Jay told me, ‘I don’t want you coming in here, doing a lisp or mincing around,’” Charles remembers. “He did not want the character to be flamboyant at all—just a regular guy who was gay. The trouble was, that wasn’t what was written on the page. Susan Harris had written that he was a ‘fancy man’ [as Sophia still calls him in the pilot to this day]. And his lines were outrageous, hilarious, and way over the top.”
Charles was unnerved, but he tried to follow Jay’s direction. “But it really threw a wrench into my plans,” he says. “I didn’t feel comfortable just coming in and ‘playing it straight.’ I needed that mask of whatever I chose to do to portray a gay person.” When he had his big reading in Brandon’s office, Charles read the lines as Jay had specified. “And there wasn’t a peep in the house. They looked at me like, ‘What the hell are you doing? This isn’t funny.’ And they said, dismissively, ‘Thank you very much.’”
Charles left the audition convinced that he had blown it—and angry with Jay Sandrich for his bad advice. “They had chosen me based on a prior character, and Jay wouldn’t let me play anything like that character,” he remembers. Later that night, Charles got a call at home from NBC’s VP of casting, Joel Thurm. “He said, ‘We don’t know what you were doing, but would you please come back tomorrow and just play Eddie Gregg?’ So the next day I went back and did Eddie Gregg. And with the first word out of my mouth, these people were in stitches . . . And I got hired right then and there.”
BEING A FRIEND
A CONVERSATION WITH . . . ELAINE STRITCH
(1925–2014)
I’M NEVER IMPRESSED with sitcoms. They’re not my kind of thing. I don’t think my humor fits sitcoms, either. But I went out to LA and auditioned for The Golden Girls, and in my one-woman show Elaine Stritch at Liberty I told the story what the meeting was like.
I met a room full of people who were just stonewalled against me, and it was terrifying and not pleasant. Before I started to read, I tried to explain that there was some of the dialogue that didn’t sit comfortably with me. And I said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to change a few things.” And Susan Harris said, “Hopefully just the punctuation.” And I thought, “I’m up against something here.” Well, her answer didn’t sit well with me, and I guess the devil came up in me. So I said, “For example, on page seven where Dorothy says, ‘Don’t forget the hors d’oeuvres,’ do you mind if I say ‘the fucking hors d’oeuvres?’ Well, that made her mad.
The whole thing didn’t go down very well, and I was very nervous. Cut to the chase, it was so the right thing to happen. The Golden Girls and I did not fit. First of all, the idea really didn’t appeal to me at all—three broads living together in Florida? What could be less exciting? But in retrospect, I do think the show turned out excellent—and it’s amazing the life it’s had. And I’m so glad it happened to Bea, making her life certainly a lot more luxurious. But I think if I’d have gotten the part and been stuck out there in LA, doing a sitcom for seven years, I might never have sobered up.
I think we can all look back in retrospect and realize that most things that happen to us happen because they’re meant to. So we have to accept them one day at a time. And I get a lot of mileage from this story in my show because The Golden Girls is such a popular thing, and I treat my own hurt feelings about it with humor. I get laughs in the theater, and so the whole experience has served its purpose and given me what I needed—a good piece of writing in my show coming out of a very bad experience.