“Normally with new shows, they take only a few minutes’ worth of clips to show the advertisers each May. But with The Golden Girls, they decided to show the whole pilot. And from what I’ve been told, the audience in the grand ballroom at the Waldorf Astoria hotel laughed so loud that they ended up missing some of the lines. Five minutes after it finished, my phone rang, and it was my friend Grant Tinker, who was then at NBC. He said, ‘Betty, don’t make any plans for the next couple of years. I think you’re going to be very busy.’”
—BETTY WHITE
ON THE NIGHT of April 17, 1985, as The Golden Girls was taping its pilot episode, it was immediately evident to all that a potential classic—and certainly a show with long-term potential—was being born.
The producers had known even earlier that they were on to something special. From the first time the pilot script was read aloud around a rehearsal table, Paul Witt says that “everyone there, from the performers to the craft service guy to the network to us knew it was a home run.”
The Witt/Thomas/Harris sitcom methodology, developed over the decade-long span of shows like Fay, Soap, and Benson, called for two tapings of any given episode, in front of two separate live audiences. The first show, referred to as the “dress show,” was used to work out any kinks; if something fell flat, it could be rewritten during dinner, where the cast could be given new lines to perform at the “air show” later that evening. As such, The Golden Girls pilot was actually taped twice, in front of two different audiences. And both audiences went wild for it.
Jay Sandrich remembers the huge laughter that night when, as the actresses had cooked up onstage that week, Dorothy put Rose in a choke hold to keep her from blabbing to Blanche about the true nature of her intended husband. And there was an even bigger explosion when Sophia summed up the situation with a simple: “The man is a douchebag!” (an epithet that had to be reshot as “scuzzball” before NBC’s censors would allow it.)
The show’s producers were not surprised at the reaction. According to Jay, Estelle had been getting such big laughs from the start that she inspired a change to the structure of the show; now, instead of Sophia living at Shady Pines, and making only recurring appearances, she would be a regular character, living with the three girls after Shady Pines burns down. Sophia was now a full member of the family.
As production ramped up for the much-buzzed-about new series, Florida governor Bob Graham made a pitch for the Girls to film on location in the Sunshine State.
From the collection of LEX PASSARIS.
Good-bye, Coco
AS FORTUITOUS AS Sophia’s promotion was for Estelle, it ultimately spelled curtains for Coco. As Charles Levin remembers of the pilot taping, “old pros” Rue, Betty, and Bea brought down the house. But when Estelle, the one unknown, came in, “They didn’t know what to make of her, and they fell in love with her.” That night, not only did Estelle Getty hold her own against these three television heavyweights, but also “she sandbagged everybody. During the rehearsal, she was insecure. But like the true stage pro she is, when the lights went up, Estelle was on fire. The woman couldn’t miss, and everybody saw it. It wasn’t, ‘Did you see what Estelle did?’ It was, ‘Oh my God, Estelle is stealing the show out from under three real comic pros.’”
Meanwhile, the pilot’s audience had gone cuckoo for Coco, too. As Charles explains, “They’d never seen a character like him. They’d seen characters flirt with being gay or hint at it. But this guy, as soon as he opened his mouth, was way out there. So far out there, they found it hilarious and endearing.” But with four other characters also getting big laughs, the house was getting a little too crowded.
All week, as the actors prepared for the taping, Charles remembers Estelle’s lack of confidence. “She and I gravitated toward one another because we were the lesser knowns,” he recalls. “She was certain she was going to be fired. She said, ‘If it’s between you and me, Chuck, you’re obviously staying. I’m gone.’ I didn’t see it that way, and rehearsals were going so well, I didn’t have those worries.”
But after the taping, when the supposedly twenty-three-ish-minute pilot clocked in at over twenty-eight, some painful cuts had to be made. “Everybody lost stuff,” Paul Witt explains. And although it might be tempting to wonder whether, in the height of the AIDS panic in 1985, Coco might have been cut to appease an already Love, Sidney–scarred NBC, everyone insists he was eliminated for purely artistic and practical reasons.
“It really came down to that there wasn’t enough room in a half hour,” Paul explains. “Charles Levin was a terrific actor, and was terrific in the part, but we had too much.” As Susan Harris adds, “We couldn’t possibly service all five regular characters adequately. It would have been unfair.” Perhaps seeing Jeffrey Jones’s earlier point about Coco’s storylines being somewhat off topic, the producers decided to whittle the show down to its very core—the relationships among just the four women.
In justifying the painful decision, the team admitted that maybe it wasn’t a good idea anyway to have someone working for the Girls; without some housework to busy themselves with, all the actresses would be doing was sitting. And for a show about the struggles of older women living together, partly out of economic need, a live-in houseboy might suggest that they were too well-off. “We wanted people to identify with them,” Susan says. “We needed the element of struggle so that the audience would worry about them.”
Warren Littlefield says that far from being worried about any backlash due to airing a show with a gay character, he was actually a little reluctant to let Coco go, but he eventually yielded to Paul Witt’s logic. And so, through the use of some pickup shots filmed later and additional looped dialogue, The Golden Girls’ gay houseboy was excised from as many pilot scenes as possible. And because this was the era before “TV on DVD” gift sets, with their lost scenes presented as “extras,” most of Levin’s work fell forever to the cutting room floor.