The toughest of the Golden Girls (no, she doesn’t want a reunion) first conquered Broadway, then TV. Now she’s taking her lifetime of showbiz stories on the road in a wild one-woman show

By Margy Rochlin

Bea Arthur’s getting sicker by the minute. It’s just a few hours before she’s scheduled to perform her one-woman show, “And Then There’s Bea,” at the Orpheum Theatre in Phoenix, and Arthur is fighting a rotten cold. Seated in an armchair in her hotel suite, she touches her forehead, eyes widening in alarm. In a voice octaves deeper than her familiar baritone, she says, “I think I’m getting warmer.”

At these moments, the famously indomitable 78-year-old television legend seems so delicate that it stirs protective feelings. Phoenix marks the near end of a rigorous 30-city tour she is using to ready her show for a special six-week run as “Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends” at New York’s Booth Theatre. Recently, while performing in Louisville, Kentucky, Arthur was caught off-guard when an interviewer politely asked her why, at her age, she wasn’t taking it easy.

“When I finally collected myself, I said, ‘I’ve never heard of actors retiring,’” Arthur says. “No actor retires. They’re like old soldiers. They just fade away.”

If anything, time has brought Arthur a sharper focus. On cable television, where her two hit series, Maude and The Golden Girls, are in heavy-rotation reruns, she seems inescapable, especially to college-age couch potatoes who find Arthur’s smart, brash characters so hilarious. “Kids love (Golden Girls),” she says. “Let’s face it, it’s on three hours a day all over the world. There’s no way out. They have to watch it.”

Two years ago, she showed the world that her impeccable comic timing was intact with a guest bit as Mrs. White, a forbidding baby-sitter, on Fox’s Malcolm in the Middle. “I flipped when I read the script,” says Arthur, who wishes the episode had ended not with White’s demise but as outrageously as originally written. “In the last scene, we were in a car and the kid (Dewey) was sitting next to me with his hair dyed jet-black and I said to him, ‘Now remember. From now on, your name is Pepe.’” She pauses. “Then, of course, I realized there’s nothing funny about kidnapping.”

In her stage show, though, Arthur gets to push the envelope as far as she wants to. She tells an off-color joke about a nun and a cabdriver and a particularly explicit anecdote involving Tallulah Bankhead and bisexuality. In between, she belts out her favorite show tunes while her old friend, composer Billy Goldenberg, plays piano and hangdog sidekick. In a way, the show succeeds because of how easy it is to imagine Arthur’s television alter egos talking like this if it weren’t for network censors. But it also feels as if we’re getting close to the real Bea.

These days, the real Bea would rather wax nostalgic onstage than plot a return to episodic television. “There are people who are after us to do a Golden Girls reunion,” she says. “I feel it’s so dumb. I mean, what are we going to accomplish? We’ll never be able to top some of the goodies we did. It would be out of the question anyway because Estelle (Getty) is very ill. She has Parkinson’s disease. It’s very, very sad.”

Indeed, any Golden Girls greatest-hits clip reel would have to include some of the classic bickering between Getty’s Sophia and Arthur’s Dorothy. The two actresses were so convincing as mother and daughter that it was hard to believe they were really the same age.

“I think the relationship we had on the show is one of the great comic relationships ever,” boasts Arthur, who was born Bernice Frankel in New York but was raised in Cambridge, Maryland, a small Chesapeake Bay town. Her parents, Philip and Rebecca, who ran a women’s dress shop, recognized a born performer in their daughter when she was a teenager, and they scraped together enough cash to send her to summer drama camp. A star was not born.

“They taught us theater history and [how to do] makeup like ‘Old Indian Man,’” says Arthur, still indignant. “I mean, it was so dumb and a waste of money.” She puts her hand to her forehead. “Am I getting hot?” she booms. “Damn it!”

Arthur’s true acting education began at the age of 21, when she moved to Manhattan and studied alongside Walter Matthau and Harry Belafonte at the prestigious Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research. By this point, she had a new name, Beatrice Arthur. How did she pick Arthur? “I didn’t pick it darling. I had a very early marriage to a young playwright, but no, no, no—I won’t tell you who,” says Arthur, who is famous for being tight-lipped about her private life. As for Beatrice from Bernice? “I always hated my name,” she shouts.

Onstage and off, Arthur’s humor is all about her dry delivery, well-timed pauses and the blunt force she applies to her unexpected comments. “You never know what she’s going to say,” notes Goldenberg, Arthur’s dear friend since they performed together at an American Civil Liberties Union benefit 20 years ago. (It’s been a love affair,” says Arthur with a loaded pause. “Without exchanging body fluids.”) In her five-decade career, Arthur has won a Tony (for the 1966 Broadway production of “Mame”) and two Emmys (in 1976 for Maude and in 1988 for The Golden Girls). Besides the 1970 comedy “Lovers and Other Strangers,” there aren’t many notable movies on her resume. But if there was an award for interview honesty, she’d get one just for her review of the 1974 film version of “Mame,” in which she starred with Lucille Ball, who played the title role.

“It really stunk,” thunder Arthur, with a big, horsey laugh. “I only did it because Lucy really wanted me to, and at the time I was married to Gene Saks, who directed it [they divorced in 1978], He said, ‘As my wife, you owe it to me to do the part.” (Arthur has two sons with Saks, Matthew 40, a house renovator, and Daniel, 37, a set designer.)

Arthur is nothing if not a trouper. Even her one-woman show grew out of a commitment she begrudgingly kept three years ago when she and Goldenberg agreed to appear at a posh AIDS benefit held on a golf course in Palm Springs, California. “Ten days before, we found out it was just us,” says Arthur, who hastily put together a 20-minute routine of songs she loved interspersed with some of her best-received party stories.

The act was a total hit. Afterward, Arthur and Goldenberg, besieged with booking requests, began polishing and lengthening the show before packed houses, which often included close friends of Arthur’s who weren’t aware that they’d be referenced in her patter. “She caught me by surprise in respect to the way she introduced me,” admits her longtime “Mame” pal Angela Lansbury, whom Arthur characterizes in her show as having “the mouth of a longshoreman.” Lansbury took it in stride. “Bea’s a great raconteur, and an unexpectedly warm, compassionate person—she never means any harm by anything she does or says.”

It’s been more than 20 years since Arthur appeared in Woody Allen’s play “The Floating Lightbulb” and her name could be seen regularly on a Broadway marquee. How does she feel about her return to the stage? “I honestly don’t know,” says Arthur, who suspects that critics will dismiss her as a mere TV star. “It won’t be the end of the world if New York doesn’t take me into its heart. As I say, ‘hank God, it’s not going to kill me if they don’t like it’”.

With that, Arthur blows her nose. At 8 P.M., the tall, white-haired actress takes the stage in a billowy black silk pantsuit. Within minutes, the audience is hers. She hits every note, scores with every punch line. In one of her closing numbers, “A Chance to Sing,” the lyrics sum up her philosophy: “Before the time/When we must fly away/We have a chance to sing.”

“Whatever happens along the way, don’t forget that we’re here and just live,” Arthur explains. Then she pauses. “You know what I mean?”