My First Five Husbands (37 page)

O
ur producers had their hands full and told me on more than one occasion, “Thank God for you, Rue. You hold things together. You’re the glue.”

Yeah? So how about a big gluey raise already?

Awards are nice, but let’s talk turkey.
The Golden Girls
was a massively popular smash hit, and the salary I received for a week’s work was a fraction of what the network received for one thirty-second commercial placed in the show. The third season, I hired myself a crackerjack lawyer to joust with the Disney moneyman, and he was able to get me a salary commensurate with Betty’s. (Betty, you may be laughing up your sleeve, but they
said
it would be commensurate with yours!)

Bea and Betty were already set for life before we began the show in 1985, both living in Brentwood in truly gorgeous homes. Bea had divorced Gene Saks, the director of
Maude,
after it was over, and Betty had inherited the rights to several game shows from her husband, Allen Ludden. (They’d built a lovely home on the ocean in Carmel, completed just four days before Allen died in 1985. Live for the day, people. Live for the day.) Estelle had been married to, then divorced from, a fellow who made plastic novelty gadgets, and she lived in a large Beverly Hills condo. Living in the little Studio City house I’d bought with The Greek back in 1976 was like living “thirteen telephone poles past the standpipe north of town” all over again.

We gals saw one another constantly at all the celebrity events we had to attend, but we moved in very different social circles. Betty’s old friends were Hollywood names: Mel Tormé, Adele Astaire, Carol Channing. Bea had her actor friends from New York and held court for a large following of gay men, some of them well known. Estelle also had a large coterie of young gay guys, many from
Torch Song Trilogy
.

I was mystified at first about the immediately huge popularity of
The Golden Girls
among gay men. Greenwich Village and West Hollywood gay bars began having Golden Girl Night, with patrons in costume and Best Blanche beauty contests. Gay Halloween parades began to feature the famous Miami housemates right alongside the swishy goblins and fairies. Recently, Mark and I were having a cappuccino at a little place in the Village, and a young gay blade came in, spotted me instantly, and squealed. As I signed an autograph for him, I asked, “Why is it that you gay guys are so crazy about Blanche?”

“Why,
honey,
” he said. “Isn’t is
obvious
? We all want to
be
Blanche!”

I still had the same motley crew of friends I’d made when I moved to L.A. in 1973, some straight, some gay, none famous, except Brad Davis, but all terrific. My Four Wise Men, Larry, Ken, Michael, and David—all of whom were Jewish—gathered at my house every year to decorate the tree, adding a lot of life to every Christmas party, along with Lette and Jack, Norman Hartweg, Brad, and Mark. My three
Golden Girls
castmates didn’t appear regularly at my parties, nor I at theirs. We all went to Estelle’s big birthday parties every summer, six months after Betty’s birthday. But never together.

Bea did attend a dinner party at my place with about forty guests, including a new acquaintance, the wonderfully funny and talented movie actress/singer Martha Raye. Many of my friends were too young to remember her, but plenty of others did, including Bea. During after-dinner drinks, Martha began to sing, accompanied on the piano by her escort. I came into the living room teeming with people, to hear her belting away, the guests enthralled. She still had powerful pipes. Not seeing Bea among the group, I asked a friend where she was, and he said, “Look in the garage.”

Mark and me at a party at my house in Studio City, California, 1987. Lookin’ good!

The garage?

At the end of the hall, I went out and found a small group gathered in the garage, listening to Bea sing. A cappella. No piano in my garage. A glass of wine in her hand, she was having a smashing good time. She sang one more tune, then wended her way homeward.

As the night wound down, Martha and her tipsy fella were backing their small black car down the driveway, swerved rather drastically, and straddled the curb with all four wheels, leaving the car perched up there like a showroom display. No amount of pushing could dislodge it. They had to get a ride home with another guest and return the following morning with a tow truck. As they dragged the little car away, I was still laughing. And wishing Bea had stayed long enough to see it.

F
or about five years, since 1982, I had been waking up, looking at my bedroom ceiling and walls, thinking,
Something’s wrong. I’ve got to get out of here!
One morning, I was hit with the realization that never before in my life had I lived in any house for over four years, and I’d been in this one for over eleven.
Well,
I thought,
no wonder!
I need a change.

So after work and on weekends, I started looking at all sorts of houses from Studio City to miles out in the boondocks—adorable little renovated places perched on hills, big ridiculous mansions the Middle Easterners were building chock-full of marble and chandeliers, ranch houses with ten acres and outbuildings, funky canyon houses with seasonal creeks, and everything in between. Some I could afford, some I couldn’t, but none of them was right. Then one day my Realtor took me to a 3,900-square-foot house on three acres in Encino, and well…it had possibilities. An ugly old swimming pool. Three acres of dead or dying trees and weeds going up hills on all three sides. You could barely get through the overgrown brush. A neighbor’s pool at the top side of the property had broken and swept trees and brush down into the area at the back. But through the tangled mess I saw potential for an astoundingly beautiful fairyland. The house was badly planned and old-fashioned, but with a lot of work from a talented architect and a good builder…

“How much?” I asked.

“A million five.”

Gulp. A lovely dream, but the asking price was out of my range, the market still going through the roof. But you just didn’t find three acres in a lovely area in Encino! All but unheard of! And I was earning money, I reasoned.
Real
money for the first—and possibly the
only
—time in my life. I’d signed a lucrative contract with Disney for the next three years. I probably wouldn’t be able to afford the property for long, but for once in my life, by God I was going to live in a breathtaking place, like a real Movie Star! Besides, the real estate market had done nothing but shoot up, year after year, so I figured I’d be able to sell the place after three years for—oh, three or four million! (And you thought it took a man to get me this excited.)

I got it for $1,350,000, put half a mil down, and took on a hefty mortgage—eight times what I’d been paying for the modest house in Studio City. I found a good builder, met with Carla Champion (the widow of Gower), who had become an interior designer, and we began making plans for the renovation.

Did I say renovation? Rebuilding! Reinvention! Resurrection!

We tore that house down almost to its foundation. You could stand in the front yard and look straight through to the back. After a massive amount of work, the new house would be five thousand square feet. The landscape architect took on the staggering job in the huge backyard—a new irrigation system, a tiled pool with a waterfall, a private little haven with a hot tub off my bedroom, a patio covered with lattice and tile and plants, pathways winding through the wild lilies, a big gazebo wired for sound. The area adjacent to where the neighbor’s pool had swept debris down the hill became a wildflower hillside, where one could sit on a bench with a glass of wine and look down to the house far below. Jungle flowers bordered a path to a kids’ swing, high above the fruit trees. The property was so gorgeous, so varied, so wonderfully landscaped, helicopter pilots thought it was a city park. (I only wish the city had been paying the water bills. I kept trying to come up with a scheme to achieve that.)

It was my piece of earth! Big enough to include two vegetable gardens and every kind of fruit tree you can think of. Even some you can’t—like kumquat. Yes, I had a small kumquat. I also had two tall loquats, even comelier than, though not as low as, the kumquat. (I’ve been trying to make a joke about those trees for years.) I planted figs, lemons, oranges, apricots, adding peaches and pears later on. One year, my apple trees yielded so much fruit, I ended up baking twenty apple cakes in October and freezing them for Christmas presents. Don’t ever try that. In October, they emerged from the oven, piping hot, crusty, and delicious. In December, they emerged from the freezer, soggy, shmushy, and ill-tempered. But I do think food is a terrific holiday gift, both for giving and receiving. Particularly receiving. Charlie Hauck, one of our superb writers on
Maude,
made mustard every year and gave it out in pretty little jars. I rationed mine jealously and made it last into summer. (Charlie, if you’re reading this, I want more mustard!)

But I digress, as Sophia would say.

That yard cost a bundle—more than rebuilding the house. Always prone to saving money, I was now spending it, but I was creating something divine. Even if I couldn’t afford it for life, for a while I would live in a little bit of heaven.

D
uring an early season of
The Golden Girls,
Tom and I went to see Lette in a production of
I Do! I Do!,
a two-hander musical, up in Solvang. During dinner afterward, Lette and I left the restaurant, crossing the street arm-in-arm, to go get God knows what. Jack told me later that Tom turned to him and said, “Now, there go two real girl friends.”

He said a mouthful.

Lette had been having pains in her left hip, and it was diagnosed as bone cancer. The goddamned breast cancer had metastasized. Eventually, she had a metal rod put in her leg, then more bones replaced with more metal.

“It’s incurable,” she said with minimal drama. “But it’ll progress very slowly.”

“Oh…Lette…oh, dear God…”

By 1987, the cancer was in her neck. If this was “moving slowly,” it was too fast for me.

“You know, they probably do have a cure,” she said. “The bastards are just withholding it to milk people out of money.”

In 1988, during the fourth season of
The Golden Girls,
I was busy with work and the Encino heaven-building, but I went over to Lette and Jack’s several times a week. Mark was still living in Van Nuys, working in his garden, teaching guitar, playing jazz. He had a steady girlfriend, a pretty little blonde who was a born-again Christian.

“I don’t like this uptight little miss very much,” I confided in Lette.

“I’m sure she has her own fire-and-brimstone opinion of you, Baby Rue.”

Lette was growing weaker, getting thin. She sat curled up on the sofa, still full of the devil. We still made each other laugh. I would take my king-sized Mexican quilt over and work on it, sitting by her bed. I’d been embroidering, embroidering, embroidering on it since 1979. One night, when she’d been bleary on heavy sedation for several weeks, I said, “Oh, Lette, this quilt goes on forever! What am I going to do with it?”