Bea Arthur: A beloved, ballsy dame

You’ve probably heard by now that Bea Arthur passed away on the weekend. Like so many other people, I was really sad to hear this news. I was actually once graced by breathing air in the vicinity of Bea Arthur. My friend Dan and I heard that she was going to be making an appearance at the 519 community centre in Toronto’s gay village, so we raced down to see her. I can’t remember what exactly the circumstances were–this must have been about five years ago–but I remember Bea Arthur sweeping past me, and I felt like I was in the presence of royalty. Sure, she was aging, but her height and that steely look in her eye were even more formidable in person than television conveys.

I’ve been thinking about what I want to say about her on Confabulous, but other people’s tributes are so much better than what I could say. Muriel Sims, who blogs over at In Other Words, wrote a lovely reflection:

I was a 12-year-old Black preadolescent growing up on the Southside of
Chicago when Bea Arthur first entered my life – 5-feet-9 and deep-throated when I was being socialized to squeaky-speak. I don’t recall making the racial distinction, after all, this was during the era when positive Black television characters, female or male remained rarities. I recall now that Maude Finlay had a maid, Florida Evans, a take-no-shit Black woman with challenges and troubles of her own that were later portrayed in the sitcom Good Times (which left me with an entirely different perception of Blacks, women and men).

Nonetheless, much of whom I am – an independent minded Black woman free to say and do as she pleases unrestricted most of the time by cultural and family dictates – is rooted in what I observed, and did not see on television. Maude – outspoken, politically liberal, three times divorced, an advocate of civil rights, and a woman’s right to choose – was my hero. By the time the show left the air in 1978, I had been married two years and was expecting my second child, but not before submitting to two abortions; mirroring in my own life Maude’s revolutionary decision to have an abortion in her late ’40s.

Seven years later, Bea Arthur re-entered my life as Dorothy Zbornak, the
middle-aged, divorced retiree sharing a home in Florida with her mother and two women of similar age in the television sitcom The Golden Girls. Rue McClanahan’s character Blanche was the epitome of middle-age sexual freedom and femininity, while Betty White’s character Rose Nylund was just plain funny to laugh with. Now 50 years old, I still dream of spending my last days in the intimate company of close platonic “girlfriends” comfortable enough with one another to candidly discuss politics, feminist theories, civil rights, sex and ex-lovers over cheesecake and coffee.

I also really liked Jezebel’s treatment with their “Bea Arthur’s Top 5 Contributions to Pop Culture.” It had some stuff in there that I didn’t know before (like her ambivalent relationship with feminism), and it included that incredible (and incredibly hilarious) song with Rock Hudson about drugs. Never seen it before? Let me indulge you:

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Tagged as: RIP, television, women