For most people, Bea Arthur comes with a ready-made image.
There’s the height (a few hairs under 5 feet 10 inches tall). The unmistakable deep voice. The impeccable comic timing punctuated by that trademark withering stare that could reduce another character to rubble before Arthur even bothered delivering the punchline.
And, of course, there are the two women who made her a television icon: the outspoken, politically progressive Maude Findlay of “Maude,” and the dryly sarcastic Dorothy Zbornak of the equally progressive “The Golden Girls.”
But Dan Watt knew a different Bea Arthur.
He knew the woman who read the Los Angeles Times and New York Times from cover to cover and expected him to be ready to discuss the news when he arrived at her house. The woman who remained intensely serious about acting decades after becoming famous. And the woman whose commitment to the LGBTQ community ranged from appearing at AIDS fundraisers during the earliest years of the epidemic to leaving $300,000 to a New York organization serving homeless LGBTQ youth.
That Arthur is at the center of Watt’s new documentary, “Bea Arthur: The Documentary – I’ve Done Everything Except Porn,” a roughly 100-minute film built around a never-before-seen interview Watt conducted with Arthur at her kitchen table about two decades ago.
SEE IT IN Orange County
‘Bea Arthur: The Documentary – I’ve Done Everything Except Porn’
When: 7:30 p.m. Oct. 6
Where: The Frida Cinema, 305 E. 4th St., Santa Ana
Tickets: $15
More Info: 714-285-9422; www.thefridacinema.org
When: 7 pm. Oct. 7
Where: Laguna Beach Cultural Arts Center, 235 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach
Tickets: $20
More Info: 949-652-2787; www.lbculturalartscenter.org
The film is now receiving a limited series of screenings, including Orange County engagements in Laguna Beach and Santa Ana. Proceeds from the Orange County screenings will benefit the LGBTQ Center OC in Santa Ana.
Celebration of a Living Legacy
For Watt, who served as Arthur’s personal assistant during the final six years of her life (she died in 2009), the documentary is both a portrait of a celebrated performer and an attempt to fulfill something Arthur once told him.
“She wanted to be remembered as a classically trained actress who hopefully left something behind that people will enjoy,” said Watt, whose previous credits include the Emmy Award-winning “Everybody Dance,” a documentary about five kids with neurological disabilities pursuing their dreams to dance.
That description as classically trained may surprise viewers who know Arthur primarily from television.
Long before “Maude” or “The Golden Girls,” Arthur was a serious stage actor working in New York. She studied at The New School, a legendary university whose influential Dramatic Workshop included students like Marlon Brando, Tennessee Williams, Harry Belafonte and Walter Matthau. Arthur performed in productions including “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Lysistrata.” She worked in cabaret and appeared off-Broadway in “The Threepenny Opera,” originated the role of Yente in the 1964 Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof” and won the 1966 Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for her performance as Vera Charles opposite Angela Lansbury in “Mame.”
She also appeared in the 1950s show “Shoestring Revue,” an early Off-Broadway production, where she crossed paths with people who would become major figures in American entertainment.
One was Norman Lear, who would go on to be one of the most successful and influential American television producers and writers of the 20th century, with a penchant for tackling subjects like race, abortion, sexuality and politics that most network television had avoided.
According to Watt, Lear saw Arthur perform in “Shoestring Revue” and told her that someday he would write a role for her.
Nearly two decades later, he did.
Groundbreaking Roles and Series
Arthur appeared as Maude Findlay on “All in the Family” in 1971 and 1972. Though she was in only two episodes, her role as Archie Bunker’s outspoken, liberal cousin proved so popular it led to “Maude,” which premiered in 1972 and ran for six seasons. Arthur won the 1977 Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for the role.
Eight years after “Maude” ended, Arthur struck sitcom gold again as Dorothy Zbornak on “The Golden Girls,” which ran from 1985 to 1992 and garnered 68 Emmy nominations, including wins for all four of its leading ladies: Arthur, Estelle Getty, Rue McClanahan and Betty White. Among its many laurels, the show became beloved in the gay and lesbian community for its campy humor, chosen-family dynamic and willingness to tackle sexuality and other subjects.
She eventually returned to Broadway with her one-woman show, “Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends,” in 2002 and was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 2008.
All this and a Marine!
There is one remarkable chapter of Arthur’s life the documentary largely leaves unexplored: Before any of that, she was a Marine.
Arthur enlisted in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve during World War II and rose to the rank of staff sergeant before her honorable discharge in 1945. Yet Watt said Arthur attached little significance to something that, more than 80 years later, seems like one of the more eyebrow-raising entries on an already formidable résumé.
“She said it was just her civic duty, like everybody else,” Watt said. “She’s no different than the other women that were joining then. Everybody did their part.”
Nor did Arthur believe the experience had much to do with the commanding presence she would later bring to the stage and television. Watt said she rarely discussed her military service.
“She didn’t even really want to talk about it because, again, it was her civic duty,” he said.
Watt’s film is less interested in replaying familiar television history than in excavating everything that came before and after it.
He deliberately avoided spending large sums licensing clips from “Maude” and “The Golden Girls.” Instead, he used that energy to track down people who had actually worked with Arthur.
The documentary includes about 30 interviews, among them conversations with Chita Rivera, Adrienne Barbeau and others who knew and worked with Arthur. Watt also received access to archival material at The New School, including photographs of a young Arthur in some of her earliest stage roles.
“I want people to know about the Bea Arthur that I know,” Watt said, “the compassionate, loving, vulnerable woman who was also a very, very good friend.”
Accidental Friendship Turned into Working Relationship
Their friendship began almost accidentally.
Watt, a dancer and choreographer who later moved into film production, had founded the Art Attack Foundation, a nonprofit providing scholarships to young people in the performing arts. Looking for a recognizable performer to headline a fundraiser, he cold-called Arthur.
She agreed.
The resulting performances at the Armstrong Theatre in Torrance sold out, and afterward Arthur hired Watt. At the time, he was also working at Columbia Pictures, which meant his Arthur duties frequently happened after work and on weekends.
Those duties weren’t the stereotypical celebrity-assistant chores. Arthur was fiercely self-sufficient, Watt said. Instead, he dealt with contracts, appearances, correspondence and an enormous volume of fan mail — sometimes 200 to 300 letters a week.
And they talked.
A lot.
They discussed theater, politics, current events and Arthur’s early career in New York. Eventually Watt jokingly suggested that he ought to interview her.
Arthur challenged him to do it.
“You think you can interview me?” Watt remembered her asking.
He said yes.
“Fine. Next Saturday.”
The resulting conversation became the spine of the documentary.
Watt put the interview away for years. Only recently did he pull it from a fireproof lockbox and reconsider what he had. Then he recalled Arthur saying how she wanted to be remembered.
Rather than simply tell Arthur’s story himself, Watt sought out people who had shared stages, rehearsal rooms and friendships with her. Their recollections illuminate an actress whose intimidating screen persona sometimes obscured how seriously she regarded her craft.
Serious about Acting and the LGBTQ Community
Even late in her career, while performing her one-woman show, Watt said she would retreat to her dressing room hours before curtain and reread the entire script. He remembers sitting alone on Arthur’s couch as she and pianist Billy Goldenberg rehearsed the roughly 90-minute show in her living room.
Afterward, Arthur asked Watt if he had notes.
His response was essentially: What notes am I going to give Bea Arthur?
But the documentary eventually moves beyond Arthur the performer.
Its final section focuses on a part of her life Watt believes has received far less attention: her decades of support for gay men and lesbians and, later, the broader LGBTQ community.
Arthur participated in AIDS fundraisers in Los Angeles during the early years of the epidemic, Watt said, sometimes alongside her friend Angela Lansbury. Watt recalls Arthur telling him about visiting a friend with AIDS in a veterans hospital after the man had been rejected by his family.
Years later, Arthur became involved with New York’s Ali Forney Center, which serves homeless LGBTQ youth. She performed a benefit that raised about $40,000 for the organization and ultimately left it $300,000 in her will. The organization later named a residence for LGBTQ youth in her honor.
Arthur herself apparently resisted the label “activist.”
Watt remembers her preferring “ally.” To Arthur, he said, an activist was someone such as Jane Fonda or Gloria Steinem – someone marching at the front of the protest.
Yet Arthur appeared at benefits, supported AIDS organizations and LGBTQ causes and participated in events connected to the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.
“She knew that her presence could make a difference,” Watt said.
That commitment also explains why Watt is using the documentary’s screenings to raise money for LGBTQ organizations in each city where it plays.
Passing on a Legacy
The arrangement gives the film a symmetry Watt clearly relishes. He sees himself as passing along Arthur’s legacy not only by preserving the story of the actress she was, but by continuing the causes she supported.
And, the documentary shows, lending her name and talents to those causes all stemmed from a lifelong commitment to her craft. Arthur didn’t suddenly materialize as Maude Findlay or Dorothy Zbornak, fully formed with that voice, that timing and that devastating stare; she spent decades learning how to do it.
As Watt put it, people may remember Dorothy’s perfectly timed look.
But Arthur “studied 50 years to give us that look,” he said.
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