Barry
I have not watched a sitcom on TV in over forty years.
Not a single Seinfeld, Cheers, The Office, Big Bang Theory. Not one episode of Friends, my friends.
That’s because I bet you never knew that in the pilot episode of The Golden Girls, there was a gay character named Coco, the ladies’ housekeeper and cook.
He was supposed to be one of the leads, alongside Dorothy, Rose and Blanche.
Estelle Getty, who famously played Dorothy’s mother, Sophia, was originally just a guest star. She was to appear on occasion
but never be a series regular.
That role was Coco’s.
But everything changed when the pilot was shown to test audiences. Sophia was such a hit with viewers that she was promoted
to a full-time cast member. The audience adored Sophia’s mix of withering one-liners, honesty and maternal tenderness.
But perhaps, in retrospect, they were a bit too scared to say they did not like the out gay character, who—at the time—was
a rarity on TV save for, say, Jodie Dallas on Soap, played by Billy Crystal.
Instead, producers blamed the kitchen.
If you ever watched the show, you know that the kitchen was the center of the women’s universe in Florida.
It was pure ’80s grandmotherly glory with its laminate countertops, builder-grade cabinets, peel-and-stick tile, neutral tones,
copper molds everywhere, vintage Italian ceramic vegetables on a jute rope, a rolling island (probably from Pier 1), café curtains and the famed
faux bamboo dinette set that included . . .
. . . only three chairs.
If you don’t know anything about television, set design or blocking, here’s a short lesson: Blocking is a collaborative but
carefully choreographed plan between a director and actors for the physical movement that occurs during a performance. The Golden Girls was taped before a live studio audience. This means—as with the live theater I produce with my friends—that an actor cannot
be seated with his or her back to the audience. Thus, there can only be three chairs so those seated can be seen by the audience.
Bea Arthur—the tallest and the one whose facial reactions to her castmates’ conversations were TV gold—was always seated in
the middle. The others rotated, with the fourth member always standing nearby or entering/exiting the kitchen.
All of which meant that a fifth cast member clogged the kitchen.
Coco was cut.
And no one ever knew he was missing.
Except the young actor who portrayed him.
He went on to audition for hundreds of roles, big and small, for TV and film. He auditioned for thousands of commercials.
He auditioned for infomercials. He auditioned for walk-on roles and spots as corpses on crime shows, but his career ended
before it even started.
As an out gay actor during a time in Hollywood that didn’t embrace such honesty, either he was considered a bad omen for being cast out of a successful sitcom, or he would open his mouth to utter a few words and immediately be typecast in the minds of casting agents as a gay man in an industry where gay roles didn’t yet exist.
His entire life became an endless reel of, “Thank you! NEXT!”
As a result, Coco went loco.
He—quite literally—turned the tables on all those who turned him down.
Professionally, that is.
Hollywood’s rich “straight” men—producers, directors, actors, screenwriters—who always said “No!” to Coco during an audition
in the light of day were the ones who always said “Yes!” to Coco at night.
So Coco took names.
And pictures. Along with some grainy video.
He was paid quite nicely, ironically, as an actor to not say a word but rather to keep his mouth shut and disappear.
Then Coco—like so many stars before him—slinked into the desert, where he could live behind a hedge and sunglasses in a cloak
of anonymity, warm days and cold cocktails merging into one, a place where young men were looking for older men to take care
of them, and where Coco could continue to see himself as he once was—young, unlined, innocent, filled with hope—in the faces
of the men he devoured at night like a vampire.
And then one summer day many years later—quite by accident—Coco got a second chance to start over with (ah, the irony!) two
new men “of a certain age”: his therapist, Dr. Doolan, and one of Dr. Doolan’s clients.
Hold your horses here: It might have been hot (temperature wise), but it wasn’t hot.
On a sweltering Tuesday, Coco arrived on time for his appointment, but the door to Dr. Doolan’s office—a bougainvillea-drenched casita overlooking a pool and a low-slung 1930s Spanish home with a terra-cotta roof—remained closed.
Coco took refuge in the shade. While he waited, he heard a deep, dramatic, sarcastic voice booming inside the casita—a voice that sounded so familiar and yet so triggering—and he sneaked to the door and put his ear to it.
Is that, Coco thought, the voice of my former costar, Bea Arthur?
Did the cosmos conspire to bring us together again?
Was the nasty Hollywood gossip true? Was Bea a lesbian who found her way here to the scorching heat of the desert to melt
away her facade and find her truth like me? I mean, she had taken up the cause of LGBTQ+ youth homelessness of late and been
an outspoken advocate.
The door suddenly opened, and Coco stumbled inside. He had not made such a hammy pratfall entrance since he was cast as a
Cylon robot on Battlestar Galactica and was killed in the show’s opening, falling through the entrance of a spaceship.
A very tall figure simply stepped over his body and—as the shadow exited the casita—turned and said, “You’re one chromosome
away from being a potato. Grow up! I’m not that interesting!” The figure stopped. “Actually, I am.”
Coco looked up. It was a man who looked and sounded much like Dorothy Zbornak.
As he walked away, he said, “I’m Teddy, and, yes, Coco, I’ve seen every episode of The Golden Girls. And if you were that bad an actor, I can see why they cut you.”
At our meeting that day, after I talked about Teddy’s resemblance to Bea, Dr. Doolan told me I suffered from Peter Pan syndrome.
“You are an adult who—like so many gay men—are trapped in childhood,” he said.
“You have difficulty growing up and taking on adult responsibilities because you never got the childhood acceptance or experienced firsts—first date, first kiss, first love—that everyone else did. Now you want it back, and you become trapped in a fantasy world—even for a few moments—that is not real.”
Dr. Doolan offered an idea: “What if you staged a performance of the show that ruined your life as a way to deal with your
long-term anger and depression over losing a career-defining role? A way to, essentially, grow the hell up once and for all
and perhaps meet some nice men your age who could become the friends and role models you desperately need?”
Coco held auditions, and the three men he finally selected—Ron, Teddy and Sid—were ones he had met over the years. No one
he had ever slept with—or wanted to, for that matter—so it seemed like the start of a perfect career and life remake.
But the show—like his career—didn’t get much attention or make much money. They staged it once a month at a local community
theater, the men kicking in the money to keep it going.
And then, at the height of COVID, The Golden Girls was reborn. The show was streamed for some eleven million hours, making it as popular today as it was when it originally
aired. It became a way for younger people to connect with their grandparents and a way for the LGBTQ+ community to connect
with their aging parents and start a discussion about who they really were and are.
People started coming to the show.
As the only surviving member of the show, Coco began to work again.
It took only forty years.
Coco began to travel to 1980s sitcom fan festivals across the country and tour assisted living facilities, signing—for ten
bucks a pop—the one and only cast photo he ever appeared in with Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty
before being excised from it forever.
If you want to know one thing about gay men, they’re survivors.
The screenwriter of The Golden Girls did an interview with People not long ago stating that it was “smart” to axe Coco, but he wished they’d had a concluding arc for his character at some
point.
“I wish they had dealt with Coco, or had him back for a special episode,” he said. “Maybe he fell in love . . . Maybe he opened
a B&B in Key West.”
But I don’t need a screenwriter to tell you how it turned out for Coco.
Coco never fell in love, but he did become best friends with the men from their show, The Golden Gays—including Teddy from Dr. Doolan’s office who would become Dorothy—and they all moved into a fabulous mid-century modern house
together just like the gals they portrayed.
How do I know?
I am Coco.
And I still hate being in a kitchen with a bunch of old queens.