My First Five Husbands (36 page)

He always left my driveway with a warm hug, saying, “I love you, lady.”

And I always said, “I love you, too.” Whatever the hell I thought that meant.

The old addiction, the Tom Lloyd fever, still had me by the curlies, and over time I started to believe again that things might somehow work out between us. Early that fall, while
The Golden Girls
was taping, we saw more and more of each other, and eventually we came up with the brilliant idea that he should give up his little apartment in Beverly Hills, move his few pieces of furniture into my house, and make a stab at getting closer. Hey, stranger things have happened…right? (Can you name three?)

Tom was working as a composers’ agent, and every night he brought home three bottles of champagne, which we drank before, with, and after dinner. The conversation and laughter were as bubbly as the bubbly, but when I asked him to sit and talk, he went dumb. I kept urging him to tell me what in God’s name had happened back in 1958. Even after twenty-seven years, I was still trying desperately to make sense of it and thought honest conversations might help.

“I’m not trying to attach blame,” I told him. “I’m just trying to understand what happened. What were you going through?”

“I don’t know, babe. I can’t give you any answers.”

“Well, did you ever miss Mark or wonder about him all those years?”

“Lady, I don’t have any words to talk about this. What good would it do, anyway?”

“Tom, you must have some memory of how you felt.”

“I can’t talk about something that’s not there. It’s impossible!” he said in frustration. “I don’t have any words!”

His inability to answer reminded me of my inability to find the place to cough after my gallbladder surgery. There seemed to be no mechanism for it.

“Okay, how about this,” I persisted. “You told me a long time ago that you felt like you were thirteen. Do you still feel that way?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “No, I’ve gotten to eighteen.”

Eighteen? At
fifty-two
? At this rate, I wouldn’t live long enough to see him grow up.

During the nine months he lived with me, we slept in the same bed but had no sex. Zilch. He never touched me. I kept looking for ways to please him, like when I’d had my hair dyed auburn for our wedding. Only this time, he said he was put off by a woman’s hair south of the Mason-Dixon line, if you get my drift, so I got waxed in that tender area, which is less fun than getting your tongue unstuck from a frozen lamppost. He still had the libido of a box turtle.

All through the first season of
The Golden Girls,
Blanche was enjoying a wahoo sex life, but this gal’s name was under “celibate” in
Webster’s
. I appeared as Cinderella in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but I didn’t ride in a golden carriage. Appropriately enough, my magical conveyance had turned back into a pumpkin, and I was carted down Broadway in the bitter cold, decked out in a décolletage off-the-shoulder ball gown over my long underwear, mouthing the song “A Good Prince Is Hard to Find.” A bit too much irony that early in the morning. I don’t do Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parades anymore.

But ho ho ho, the holidays were upon us. For Christmas, Tom gave me an electric vibrator. I assumed it was a joke, but he said it wasn’t. Yep, nothing says “Happy Birthday, Jesus!” like a three-speed sex toy, right? This from the man who’d found my gift of Levi’s to be in bad taste?
Hello?

And no, I
don’t
still have it.

P
eople always ask if I’m really like Blanche, and I say, “Well, consider the facts: Blanche was a glamorous, oversexed, self-involved, man-crazy Southern belle from Atlanta—and
I’m
not from Atlanta!”

There’s a scene from one of the last shows of our first season that beautifully sums up who Blanche is and what she and I have in common. The episode revolves around an unwanted visit from Blanche’s pen pal, Merrill, who’s just been released from prison. Sophia dryly observes, “That’s going to be rough. I bet after ten years in the jug, he’s going to be pretty short on foreplay.” But when Merrill shows up, quick-thinking Dorothy tries to save the day, pointedly telling Blanche, “We were just explaining to
Merrill
that there’s no telling when
Blanche
will be back.”

Immediately catching on, Blanche says, “Oh, Lord, no. There’s no sense waiting around. You wouldn’t like Blanche anyway.”

“She’s not your type,” Rose chimes in.

“That’s right. She isn’t,” Blanche agrees emphatically.

“She’s very cold,” says Rose.

“Frigid! Hardly likes men at all,” says Blanche.

“And she’s ugly, isn’t she?” says Rose.

“Well…ugly is a strong word,” says Blanche.

“And wrinkled! Isn’t she?”

“No, she’s not wrinkled!”

“And fat!”

“Stop it! Stop it right now!” Blanche stamps her foot. “She’s none of those things, Rose Nylund! She’s gorgeous! Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous!”

“Sounds good,” says Merrill. “Tell Blanche I’ll be back.” And he exits.

“And stupid,” says Blanche. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!”

Playing the scene, I realized, “Hey, Blanche thinks she’s gorgeous, and I look just like her, so…”

I learned a lot from Blanche about optimism and
joie de vivre,
feeling confident about what you have to offer the world, and the ability to bounce back from life’s momentary failures. Blanche Devereaux is a masterful rebounder, never down for the count, always back up to fight again, to look again on the bright side. I loved that about her. When Blanche’s daughter Janet doubts the existence of God, Blanche says, “Oh, honey, of course He exists! Just look at the beautiful sky, the majestic trees. God created man and gave him a heart and a mind…and thighs that could crack walnuts.”

Of course, it’s that last part that gets her into trouble. And me, too. Too often.

Blanche and I both have a lot of love to give, and I don’t mean just in bed. She and I do share a genuine enjoyment of men and an adventurous spirit. I loved her matter-of-fact acceptance of that part of herself.

“Is it possible to love two men at one time?” Rose wonders, and without missing a beat, Blanche says, “Set the scene. Have we been drinking?”

She figures, hey, it’s natural, it’s fun, why make a fuss? Even though this inevitably sets her up for a lot of razzing from her housemates. Dorothy quips that Blanche going without sex is like Raymond Burr saying, “No gravy.” And Sophia never hesitates to use the word “slut.” Or “slutpuppy.” Or “Sheena, Queen of the Slut People.”

I decided right away that Blanche would laugh whenever Sophia shot a poisoned arrow her way. One of the best instincts I had in creating Blanche’s character was that choice to see Sophia as a darling old thing whose barbs were
endearing,
not hurtful. After all, putting up with that sort of thing was, as Blanche breezily put it, “the curse of every devastatingly beautiful woman.”

T
he Golden Girls
kept me very busy, not just taping the shows but going to unending events. We were the toast of the town. After we completed the first season and went on hiatus, I found an opportunity to drag Tom Lloyd to my therapist, who gave our story serious thought before saying, “Tom, I think you see Rue as your father.”

His father?
Could I have heard that correctly?

After a moment, Tom said, “Yes, I think you’re right.”

Me, his father? But—he
hated
his father. The Authority Figure, The Tyrant, who demanded that he behave responsibly. Good grief! What guy can have a romantic relationship with his
father
? Tom became crystal clear to me that instant. And after it really sank in, I was finally cured of that old fever. That long-crippling Tom Bish virus.

Still, I had been planning to take Mark on a trip to Europe that summer and had invited Tom to go with us, because I continued to hope that the two of them might become closer—unless Tom was confusing Mark with his hated aunt Edna, of course. We decided to stick with that plan and flew to Amsterdam, where we bicycled through the impeccable woods that connected the impeccable residential areas to the impeccable business areas. (My Lord, those people are clean!) We flew over the Alps and drove from Milan to Florence to see Michelangelo’s
David.
In Venice, we mingled with jazz artists in a villa bordering a canal. We had nice accommodations everywhere we went, but I wished to God that Tom and I had been given separate rooms. He picked a fight with me every night. Mark stopped talking to both of us. So much for the big bonding experience. And to top it all off, not one Italian man pinched my fanny.

When we returned to L.A., Tom moved out of my house, and finally I was glad to see him go.

I didn’t need him. Wasn’t in love with him. Didn’t want him back.

I was free.

A
few years later, when Tom was diagnosed with advanced liver disease, I rushed to see him in intensive care at Cedars-Sinai Hospital. Beside his bed was a blond bombshell in a snow-white gym suit. She looked over and said, “Hi. I’m Tom’s lady.”

I said, “Hi, I’m his ex-wife.”

Tom wasn’t expected to make it, throwing up fountains of blood, but he pulled through, and after a few weeks was released, weak and pale. A few days later, he returned to intensive care. More fountains of blood. Once again, he recovered. After that, I didn’t see him again for almost fifteen years.

In 2005, Mark decided that he wanted to pay a visit, so we tracked him down in Los Angeles. Tom was seventy, looked eighty, and acted ninety, although seeing us did pick up his spirits. His slurred speech got clearer, and he kidded around and laughed. It depressed me to see the dreadful change in him, but Mark felt good about the visit, and we were both glad we’d gone.

Eleven months later, Tom died quietly in his sleep.

When I heard that no one had stepped forward to claim his body or belongings, I thought about that spring day in 1985 when I had just started
The Golden Girls
and Tom moved in with me. I was on the brink of something really wonderful in my career, and now I had another chance with this man who’d owned my heart for so many years. At the time, a big tomcat had been terrorizing the female cats on our street for several weeks. I’d been putting out food for him in the front yard, but he wouldn’t let me get close to him.

The day Tom moved in, he appeared at my front door carrying that cat.

“Hey, babe!” he said. “I got Buster Big Balls here.”

Buster moved in, becoming docile and happy, but he did wander off now and then. He wore a collar with my phone number on it, so sooner or later someone would call and I’d go fetch him home. The last time he left, nobody called and I never found him. My father said he’d gone off to die.

Some cats do that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

B
ack in 1972, I watched Secretariat win the Belmont Stakes, finishing a full record-smashing thirty-one lengths ahead of the rest of the horses.

“Secretariat is all alone!” blared the track announcer. “He’s into the stretch…Secretariat leads this field by eighteen lengths…Twice a Prince has taken second…My Gallant has moved back to third…Here comes Secretariat to the wire! Unbelievable! An amazing performance!”

That horse was the Isaac Newton of horsedom. A phenomenon. The rules of horse racing are simple and finite. The fastest pony wins, and anyone with the sense to stay sober at the track can plainly see which horse that is. Showbiz awards don’t work that way. Occasionally, an actor wins an Oscar, Emmy, or Tony by rising head-and-shoulders above all competitors. But that’s rare. The Great Winner is usually among equally excellent competitors. The decision of the judging committee is entirely subjective, their opinions divided by a hairsbreadth. The Nobel Prize is sometimes divided between two equal winners, but show business awards insist on one big winner in each category. It’s just plain silly. How can any one performer—or any one show, really—be “The Best”? Maybe one of the five best, or one of the three best, but let’s be reasonable here.

I don’t cotton to awards shows. Back in the seventies, during my first sojourn in La-La-Land, as Brad Davis called Hollywood, I was invited one year to be on the Emmy Awards judging committee to choose Best Actor in an Hour Comedy Series, and the next year, Best Actress in a Sitcom. What an eye-opener! We were presented with the five best performers picked from hundreds of actors by the Television Academy voters. The best five. So far, so good. For my money, all five were winners, having been voted by the entire Academy as the best of the bunch.

But now a dozen judges were to pick the Best Performer. And who were the venerable twelve? Well, there was a disc jockey, a daughter of a local L.A. radio personality, a few small-name actors like me, and a handful of even dimmer bulbs on the marquee. Might as well have been a dozen hardware store owners. We watched one show each entered by the five competitors, then ranked them #1 to #5. The actor with the most #1s got the Emmy. That’s how it’s done. And my #1 choice never won, so I maintain the system is a crock!

That first season of
The Golden Girls,
Bea, Betty, and I were all nominated for Emmys and Betty won, along with all the writers and Terry Hughes—seventeen Emmys in all. The second season, we were all nominated and I won. The next season, we were all nominated and Bea and Estelle won. The fourth season, we were all nominated and Candace Bergen won. Oops. Oh, well. Hers was a new show that year. The kid needed a break. She also won for the next several years, but hey—we stayed in the Top Ten, which seemed to amaze Betty, who expected us to get canceled every year, the funny little skink.

Over my career thus far, there are many awards I’ve won and some biggies that I haven’t (yet). It sounds clichéd, but being nominated really does mean as much to me as winning, and I’m most proud of awards I received for service rendered, rather than competition. But I can’t deny it—winning that OBIE thrilled me to pieces, and I also loved winning the Emmy, even knowing how it was decided. The audience didn’t know! And I had finally been acknowledged.

Sort of.

When the envelope was opened, Emmy presenter Howie “Deal? Or no deal?” Mandel announced, “And the winner of this year’s Emmy for Best Comedy Actress is—
Miss Rue McCallahan!
”

Rats. Do your homework, Mr. Mandel.

T
he first two years we had a prop department that was as funny as the show, the two prop men, Kenny and Jim, full of mischief. They had a toilet sitting right spang in the middle of the prop room and huge inflatable dinosaurs hanging from the ceiling. Once during rehearsal, Kenny dashed through the set upstage of the action, dressed in a woman’s nightie, breaking everyone up. Their most memorable prank was a prop they concocted for an episode in which Blanche gives each of the other girls a “Men of Blanche’s Boudoir” calendar for Christmas. In the scene, Rose and Dorothy were supposed to open their calendars and gasp at the pictures.

Well, our creative prop masters had put together a real calendar with eight by ten photos of themselves and a few other young rapscallions who worked on the show, all scantily clad in sado-masochistic garb with all the fixin’s—whips, chains, you name it. They posed flogging each other, riding each other as horses, anything they could dream up—which was plenty. By the time Bea and Betty got to March, they had completely fallen apart laughing. We had to stop rehearsal, and everyone crowded around, flipping through to December. It was priceless, and of course, I still have it. Those two goofballs kept us laughing for two years.

As the show grew in popularity, rumors abounded about shark tales swishing just under the idyllically calm surface of our happy little set. Wanna hear the juicy inside stories?

Go ask someone else

I’m not going to dish.

Anyone who’s ever been near a cheerleading squad or a PTO committee or a sorority house or the kitchen during a family reunion or any roomful of women knows that women can be bitchy sometimes. Women can and often do simultaneously love and hurt each other. For heaven’s sake, look no further than
The Golden Girls,
if you want an example. In one scene, big-eyed Rose says, “The doctor explained to me where babies come from. I should never have believed Elsa Kreb’s story about the fetus fairy. Call me gullible!” And Dorothy shoots back, “That’s way down the list of what I want to call you.”

Dorothy’s strength and assertiveness might sound mean to someone who didn’t know how much she loves Rose. She routinely smacks Rose over the head with a newspaper and verbally chops her off at the knees. On the flip side, Rose’s sweetie pie act might strike some as cloying and fake. But somehow, it all works, because underneath they love each other. So it was with us four actresses. Four strong-minded, talented women tossed into the sitcom soup together. Things got pretty spicy once in a while, but what mattered most to each of us individually and all of us as a group: the chemistry worked. We were damn funny. And we did it together. That’s what counts at the end of the day.

Betty and I had so much fun together and even got to do some terrific little dance routines together over the years. We used to play word games backstage, including one where we’d go back and forth making lists in alphabetical order. Wild animals, devastatingly handsome actors, movie titles. Every once in a while we’d get all the way to X or Y and have to go and do a scene, and the whole time, we’d be thinking, “Hmmm…Xavier? There must be a handsome actor named Xavier!”

As for Bea Arthur, Queen of Timing, there’s no one with whom I’d rather play a two-person scene. Betty’s shmoozing with the audience seemed to get under Bea’s skin, since Bea with her stage-acting background assiduously observed “the fourth wall,” that invisible barrier between the performer and the onlookers, while Betty, a TV baby, had always flirted with the crowd. Both schools of thought are professional and each has its own value, but they are diametrically opposed. I think there’s something to be said for both. Does that sound wimpy? I usually see both sides of the question, as Pisces are prone to do. (You may have heard the one about the Piscean who was asked, “Is it true that Pisces are wishy-washy?” And he says, “Well, yes and no.”) I love both Bea and Betty and got a huge kick out of each of them. Their relationship with each other wasn’t all I wished it could be, but it never interfered with their work.

It was awkward to be pitted against one another in the nominations year after year. When Betty won the Emmy that first year, it didn’t seem to set well with Bea. Of course, she behaved impeccably in public, a composed pro on the red carpet, but behind closed doors, she seemed hurt and outraged. When I won the second season, I felt that Bea wasn’t able to be happy for me, even with the history we shared. She was making a lot more money than the rest of us, which you’d think would be a dandy consolation prize, but—no, scratch that. Money is never a substitute for love. The third season, Bea won for Best Comedy Actress and Estelle won for Best Supporting Comedy Actress, and I was thrilled for both of them.
Tank Gott!
They deserved to win. It obviously meant a lot to them and it made things a little less awkward. After that, we all had to bite the bullet together and put on our happy faces for Candace Bergen.

Despite any rumors of lurking tension, Bea refused to go to lunch without Betty every day. On Fridays, we had dinner in our bathrobes between the afternoon and evening shows, across the lot in a big dining room full of the cast and crew, where we got rewrites for the evening show. Bea would never walk across the lot to dinner until Betty was ready to walk with her, even if Betty made her wait, and they sat next to each other in the dining hall.

One running gag on the show was that whenever Rose said something dumb, Dorothy would say, “Rose, hand me that newspaper.” Rose would cheerfully hand it to her, and—
whack!
—Dorothy would hit her over the head. Betty never asked Bea to take it easy. She just made an
Ow!
face and patted her hair back in place.

Meanwhile, Estelle was having a hard time holding herself together enough to do the show. By the end of that season, she had grown terrified of performing, fluffing her lines repeatedly. The first three days of rehearsals she was fine, but by Thursday she was under a black cloud of anxiety, and on Friday—tape day—she was too uptight to think. Finally, she asked for cue cards, which appalled us all, and at first, the producers refused to stoop to such an unprofessional thing. But eventually, she had to be given cue cards for those deliciously funny Sophia stories.

“Picture it. Sicily, 1912. A beautiful young peasant girl with clear, olive skin meets an exciting but penniless Spanish artist. There’s an instant attraction. They laugh, they sing, they slam down a few boilermakers. They run naked through the piazza and almost start a war. Shortly afterward, he’s arrested for showing her how he can hold his palette without using his hands. But I digress. He paints her portrait and they make passionate love. She spends much of the next day in the shower with a loofah sponge scrubbing his fingerprints off her body. She sees the portrait and is insulted. It looks nothing like her, and she storms out of his life forever.” Sophia takes a meaningful beat. “That peasant girl was me. And that painter…was Pablo Picasso.” And when the others are skeptical, she shrugs and says, “Believe what you want. But while I’m spending my waning days in a tract house in Miami, my picture is hanging in some executive’s penthouse in Tokyo!”

The lines were just too delicious. Dear Estelle hated not being able to learn them. Even with cue cards, her panic grew worse each season. We tried everything we could think of, including hypnosis and an assistant to go over her lines with her every day, but nothing helped. I kept telling her, “Estelle, don’t try to think of it word by word. Just picture the story, what you want to tell, and it will flow naturally.”

She couldn’t. She was gripped in panic, and not only was it agonizing to watch, it brought us all down. Often, we stayed after the audience left, to retape her lines. This was a naturally funny woman, and thanks to clever editing the shows look fine on tape, but man alive, it took hell to get there! I’d seen other series being taped, and fluffed lines are not uncommon. But Bea and Betty and I were not of that ilk. One of us might make a fluff once in a while, but very rarely. We took professional pride in our ability to tape an entire show without stumbling.