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Last Updated: Aug 9, 2008 |
Reviews and Interviews By Scott Lewis
Lewis lives in Dallas, Texas, by way of Houston.
He writes Catching Up With . . . celebrity interviews for This Week in Texas as well as movie reviews .
Scott Lewis can be reached by e-mail HERE
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| Then and now |
I have to admit I am a Golden Girls addict. I have the DVD’s. I watch the show on TV almost daily. I love Rue McClanahan. Blanche Devereaux is in my opinion one of the top five funniest TV characters in television history. I was thrilled to hear that she was a part of the cast of Del Shores latest project: Sordid Lives: The Series. The cast of the newest project for MTV’s LOGO channel is a dream and the show is everything that you could hope it to be. Dysfunction has never been this funny. This is a great ensemble cast and a show so funny and so engrossing that I have been going crazy for more since watching the two episode DVD released to the press. It was very hard picking who to interview from such and incredible cast, but when all is said and done, who wouldn’t pick the woman that created Blanche Devereaux. I caught up with McClanahan at her New York area home.
Scott Lewis: Many of your fans will not know that you got your start on stages of New York City. Tell me about your start in the big city.
Rue McClanahan: I came to New York in 1964 and it was to audition for an off Broadway musical called The Secret Life of Walter Mitty that a friend of mine from Los Angeles was going to direct. He had started a theater group in Los Angeles, a study group that I had joined. Then he had gotten the job to direct a play called Calling Arnold, which was based on a play by Jules Pfeiffer. That is, half of it was a play by Jules Pfeifer and half was a musical revue called "From the Upstairs to the Downstairs and Other Clubs". I auditioned for it, although he didn’t know I had singing or dancing abilities, he knew he liked my acting, from his acting group. He let me audition, I blew him away to tell you the truth, so he hired me on the spot. Now that I had done the musical thing with him, when he got the job in New York to direct The Secret Life of Walter Mitty he said if I came to New York he would give me an audition. He couldn’t hire me because he wasn’t the producer, so I quit my job at a pharmaceutical company where I was a secretary. I had a five year old son, I took him to Dallas dropped him off with my mother. I had two suitcases, I left everything in California, all this stuff I never saw again.
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| 1969 on Broadway with Dustin Hoffman. |
I went to New York, it was a good month to six weeks before the audition. I slept on an army cot in the office of the director, who was this fellow named Mervin Nelson. I had to audition four times, usually three is the equity limit then they have to pay you for the fourth audition. Never the less, I auditioned and I got into the show. I was understudying one leading lady, it was Kathy Damon, and I was playing the small part of Hazel. It was a glorious experience; I also met my third husband in that show. That was not such a glorious experience. Out of it I got an offer from two agents. I sent out seventy two inquiries and reviews because I received really good reviews for the show. I heard back from two out of seventy two.
SL: Ouch.
RM: No that’s pretty high. One of them said I am starting my own office in a couple of months and I want you to come with me, and he did, and I did, and I was with him the entire nine years I was on the East Coast, before I went to the West Coast to do Maude. That is a long answer to your question.
SL: I understand that Norman Lear saw you….
RM: Five years later I was in another little off Broadway play, this one was not however, a musical. It was called "Tonight in Living Color" and it was by A. R. Gurney before he was at all fashionable or known. It was a character play, Tim O’Connor and I played Betty and Bill. It was a knock down drag out on stage with urns falling over on stage, we were getting punched and beaten up, turning summersaults. It was really raucous, but there was some poignant acting in it as well, but it was a comedy.
Norman Lear was there opening night because his daughter was married to a young man who was one of the producers of the show. He came and he was at the dinner that night after the party. He said he would love to use me some day, and I said, “I would love for you to!” It was two years later that he called me to come and do an "All in the Family". While I was out there he said “I’ve started a new show called Maude and I need a best friend," and I stayed and did that. That is what got me started on the West Coast.
SL: You’re best known for your role as Balance on the Golden Girls. This show was very progressive in dealing with Gay issues in the 80’s. There were two episodes on HIV/AIDS and several dealing with gay and lesbian friends and family. Do you think this is why you have such a tremendous fan base in the Lesbian and Gay community?
RM: I think it is part of the reason. I think if those shows weren’t in the roster we would still have a big following because we were innovative in a good way. We were a family that was not related except for Dorothy and Sophia. We supported one another and loved one another and fought like family. We lived like family. It was a loving show, very warm and very funny. Such writing, that's writing you don’t get everyday.
SL: What was your favorite episode of Golden Girls?
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| A recent reunion of the Golden Girls Cast. |
RM: Well, the lesbian one was one of them, the lesbian one where they're in the bedroom was one of the funniest most delicious zigzag, turn around, change of mind and change of heart, I got to do. That dialoughe sparkled. It is just wonderfully funny.
SL: That's the one where Blanche is very upset because a Lesbian finds Rose more attractive than Blanche.
RM: Well, that is the way it turns out. At first it is that a lesbian is finding Rose attractive. That is after she figures out it’s not a Lebanese, and she says, “What’s wrong with that, Danny Thomas is one.” (Dorothy says) “Not Lebanese, Lesbian!” Once she figures it out she says, “And she finds Rose attractive and not me?” That was Blanche’s character in a nutshell.
I also loved the one set in the Rusty Anchor where Dorothy comes in and sings and has taken the spotlight away from Blanche, because she was the queen of the Rusty Anchor. So, she gets dressed up in a red spangled dress and sits on top of the grand piano, or rather lounges on top and sings I Want to Be Loved By You and just makes the biggest mess of it. She looses her shoes, slides off the piano, bangs the keys, she swings the mike and looses control of it. She just humiliates herself.
Working on that number was terribly interesting and engrossing and challenging for me because I had written a musical that was running at the Golden Theater in Burbank called "Oedipus Schmoedipus" As Long As You Love Your Mother. The guy who was the choreographer there, I asked him the come in and choreograph this number because he was such a good choreographer. He did and then of course it had to be precisely worked out time wise and technically all in four days time. Then it had to be performed as if it were all just spontaneous and I found that very challenging.
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| In Sordid Lives: The Series |
That is the same reason I took the Mother Superior role in "Nunsence" many years later. There was a scene in Nunsence where Mother Superior was given this little vial of something that the nuns had discovered in a locker. She smells it and of course it is something that makes you high and I don’t know what they call these things, I think maybe sniffing glue, I don’t know (I think she is referring to Poppers). She gets very looped and she is sitting on a stool at a counter in the rectory of the nunnery and she has about a thirty second monologue where she gets drunker and drunker and ends up on the floor swimming like a whale. She thinks she is being Shelly Winters in Poseidon Adventure and she is screaming “Free Willy!” and they have to come and get her and drag her out. That is why I took that role, because that scene had to be very choreographed, just when to fall off the barstool, and what position you end up in, stuck between two stools and can’t get out. All of that had to be planned out to the nth degree and I love to have those technical things to do that I can make seem spur of the moment during the shooting and that was done on film for A&E. That is the kind of thing that I like to do.
SL: You are a longtime animal rights advocate and supporter of PETA. What led you to become involved in animal rights?
RM: I was that way from the very beginning. I was always concerned about stray dogs coming to the back door. We didn’t know anything about spade and neutering in those days and my mother had a black cocker spaniel named Dixie who had a litter every year and she always had like ten or eleven pups. Mother always had to find homes for them and she always did, but it never crossed anybody’s mind to have her fixed. I was overjoyed when I moved to California and discover that there was a society that cared about it. That I wasn’t alone anymore and that I could bond together with others. It was called Actors and others for animals. It still exists and then I found PETA a couple of years later, actually they found me.
SL: You are a breast cancer survivor. What do you say to someone fighting that battle today?
RM: You have to know that you are going to get well and you have to behave that way. You have to visualize and you have to meditate. Of course do what the doctor tells you. I had to have a lumpectomy and ten lymph nodes removed. It was in second stage when it was discovered. It never did show up on a mammogram, but under my arm there was a lump. Then I had to have radiation and kemo. That was the hard part.
SL: Your newest project for TV is for the LOGO network. It is a series based on the Del Shores play and Movie Sordid Lives. Tell me about your character and what attracted you to this project.
RM: What attracted me was the script. Last October Del Shores sent me the script and said remember me we met twenty years ago when you came to see my play Daddy’s Dyin’ Whose Got the Will? I did remember him. I read the twelve episodes that he had written and I said I’ve got to be a part of this. This is the funniest thing to come down the pike. It was certainly the best offer I’d had, and I’ve had quite a few series pass over my desk since Golden Girls.
He wanted me to play Peggy the matriarch. Now Peggy is a church going little mouse in a little tiny Texas town who has never had a beer in her life when the series begins and she ends up having a wild sexual affair with a young man. He’s a Vietnam war veteran who’s lost both legs from the knee down and can’t interest his wife in any sexual life because she can’t stand for him to take the legs off. But he can’t do it with the legs on, so they have a real problem. When Peggy and G. W. meet they just fall for each other very quickly, they fall in love although he’s twenty five years or so her junior, the age of her kids, perhaps even younger than her kids and it is terribly funny. This is just one story of Sordid Lives.
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| The cast of Sordid Lives: The Series. |
The cast of Sordid Lives is a gay mans dream. It is an amazing line up of women we love and Leslie Jordan, what was it like going to work on this set every day.
It was heaven, we shot it in Shreveport. I had knee surgery, my knee was not functioning. They had to take me in a wheelchair from my trailer to the set and back. Not knowing what it was I had stored a lot of lymph so that I was all swollen and full of lymph. I couldn’t understand it. I thought I was fat, but no diet had any effect on me. Then I discovered lymph drainage back in March. I have a bed now that you can crank the legs up and elevates them and that has also helped.
I also now am getting trained three times a week and getting massaged two times a week to get me in shape because there is a fellow that is putting together a one woman musical for me to do on Broadway next year. I have got to be very strong and able to do a soft shoe and sing eight songs.
SL: I hope you will tour with that.
RM: He plans taking it to ten or twelve American cities before bringing it to New York.
Sordid Lives: The Series premieres on Wednesday, July 23 on LOGO. This premiere is not to be missed. Sordid Lives: The Series is also the first series in a while to merit house parties. You know like the ones like we did for Dynasty and AbFab. Somehow it works out that there is a show about every ten years or so that is so good, so fun that we can not wait until the morning after for the water cooler chat. Once every few years there is a show that for our community at least truly is event television. The wait is over that show is here. So get on the phone, call all your best gal pals and make sure the bar is stocked and let the fun begin.
© This Week In Texas
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