Rue McClanahan (1934–2010)

I finally reached the State of Oklahoma in the reading challenge and have looked forward to this book all year long. Unfortunately, it only gets a 3-star rating by me. Yes, you definitely hear her voice in these words, which I loved, but there was a LOT of stuff about the hundreds of plays she was cast in and lots of name dropping of people and earlier celebrities that I know nothing of, which made it just a little boring at times.

Eddi-Rue McClanahan of the Golden Girls was born on Feb 21, 1934 in Healdton, Oklahoma, and died Jun 3, 2010, at age 76, of a brain hemorrhage at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She was cremated and her ashes handed to her family. Her autobiography was published in 2007, just three years before her death.

She started ballet in 2nd or 3rd grade and had been drawn to the stage ever since. By the time she was a senior, she was helping to teach ballet when the teacher up and moved off. She was put in charge and paid for her work, and soon owned that school. Her family took a little summer vacation to New York City, and there, at that very moment, she knew where she was going. She enrolled in the University of Tulsa where she majored in drama, then moved to New York with a girl friend with barely enough money to live on for two weeks. She took a part-time job as a file clerk, meanwhile auditioned many off broadway plays. What she learned during this time was that her drama training at the University of Tulsa didn’t do jack-crap for her. She took up some more training in New York.

Most actors start out in New York in theater in Off-Broadway and work themselves up to On-Broadway shows that travel, then to television series and movies in Hollywood. This book tells of all her struggles, barely making ends meet. One year she auditioned for over 60 plays in a four year period and wasn’t cast in not a one. She claimed you had to be gorgeous for film star-dom or absolutely talented. She name-dropped some very talented people who were not very gorgeous...Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Gene Hackman...but were damn good actors and actresses. Well, if she can throw them under the bus, I can throw her too. I really didn’t think she was all that pretty, BUT, I truly admired her for the way she carried herself...like she was the most beautiful woman. She carried herself that way in real life too. So, yes, in a sense, she was beautiful. Also, I never cared for her acting. I felt she was more suited to theater, BUT I did love and watch the Golden Girls as a whole back in the 80’s.

Rue had one son, Mark, who would often go and live with her mother when she was just too poor to take care of another mouth. Her and friends often shacked up with each other to make living in either New York or California affordable enough that they could still pursue their dreams.

And, yes Rue was married five times and had many lovers in-between that she talks about in the book. But, it wasn’t like her character on Golden Girls. She was actually a virgin throughout her college years and up until she moved to New York and met her first soon-to-be husband. She got knocked up and they got married. Rue was afraid of being alone, just spending time in her own head. She always had to have somebody. Her first husband mentally beat her down when she was fat and pregnant, but she loved him until the day he died. The Italian used her and beat her and squeezed her like a tomato and took all of her savings for her sons college and more from her. One was always just a friend, and they loved and helped each other until the day he died. One was just a mistake...but he was A in bed. And her last marriage to Will Morrow in about 1997 was everlasting. He helped her through chemo and dealing with her breast cancer. Rue was married to him the longest and still married the year her book was published in 2007. She seemed extremely happy. I’m sure she was still married to him until the day she died.
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A FEW TIDBITS ABOUT RUE MCCLANAHAN I DON'T WANT TO FORGET:

She read "Gone With the Wind" while in sixth grade. That's amazing! I read the book when I was a senior in high school, and I will tell you that was one hard book to get through. She read biographies of Pavlova and cherished Nijinsky, but her favorite book in her high school years, which she claims to have fingered to death, was "The Marx Brothers".

She went out a few times with Robert Guillaume, the black man who played in the TV series, "Benson". It started as a blind date, and she thought he was fine. She even stayed with him for a while during her financial struggles and gave him an A in bed. She definitely was not a racist.

She tried and hated Hollywood and left it for good, she thought, in July 1964, but how strange that she would leave behind all her grandmother's quilts, her diary, most of her clothes, her old car. I wonder if anyone found them, especially her grandmother's quilts and her diary. Of course, in the 1980’s she was chosen to play Blanche in the Golden Girls and moved back to California where she bought a huge house in Encino, Los Angeles, California, which she could barely afford, until payments started coming in from The Golden Girls...$1,000,000 a season.

In 1979, Rue began working on a King-sized Mexican quilt. She worked on that quilt-from-hell for 29 years, but never did say if she ever finished it...or what happened to it. I wished she would have taken a picture and put inside her book with all the other photos.

Around 1997, Rue found a lump under her right arm...breast cancer. Her doctor told her it was due to the synthetic hormones she had been on for the past 17 years. She went through chemo-treatment and lost her hair. She was beautiful without hair. There is a photo of her in the book.
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GOLDEN GIRLS
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Rue was very naive about things of life (such as who was gay on the set and who wasn't). Bea Arthur used to think she was faking, but Rue was actually a pretty sheltered child growing up.

Rue was cast on the tv show “Maude” with Bea Arthur. That is how they come to know each other. When Rue’s mother had her first heart attack on October 15 (my birthday AND, incidentally the day I started reading this book) in, I think, 1973...Rue was about 39 years old...then two more heart attacks shortly after, in which the 3rd heart attack killed her, Bea opened her house for Rue to stay with her for a few days so she wouldn’t have to be alone. They were good friends for about seven years, then it dwindled off a bit because after Rue’s divorce with the Italian, Bea continued to invite that swindler to her house parties. Rue quit going.

Bea was annoyed with Betty White during the filming of The Golden Girls because Betty liked to mingle and entertain the audience between shoots. Bea thought that was entirely inappropriate.

Estelle had major memory and panic attacks while shooting on Fridays. She would do good and remember her lines until showtime. She finally had to use cue cards in telling her…."Once, long ago, in Sicily..." stories. Rue felt so sorry for her and tried to help her as much as she could. Maybe it was a precurser to the Alzheimers she would get later on, or Rue noticed Estelle didn't have a memory problem after Bea left the set at the end of the run and they went into filming for the Golden Palace.

Rue was an animal lover. She had six dogs (small and large) and eight rescued cats. She often did benefits for PETA. Bea had two enormous German shepherd guard dogs. Betty had a little poodle but would adopt a retired seeing-eye dog every few years. Estelle didn’t have pets until Rue encouraged her to get a cat for company when she we t home each night. Estelle did and it drove her crazy because the cat was crazy. So Rue encouraged her to get another cat for company for the cat. And that worked. Estelle grew to love those two cats like they were the only cats in the whole wide world.

After a 7 year run and success of the Golden Girls, Bea wanted out. So the producers decided to continue with a show called the Golden Palace. It was suppose to simply start up on the same channel and at the same time as the Golden Girls, but the channel dropped them without notice. It did run for a few shows on another channel, but since it wasn’t advertised or anything, the Golden Palace was dropped. I never even heard of it. Guess I will have to YouTube it and see what its about.

In 2007, when the book was published, Rue was getting 2 cents for every DVD of the Golden Girls sold. I have every Golden Girl DVD there is..."Your welcome, Rue". She didn’t say how much she was getting for re-runs on television.… (plus d'informations)

I'd like to thank everyone who helped make this award possible. The rest of you will be in the book.
Rue McClanahan's Emmy Award Acceptance Speech, 1987

Let me preface this by saying that it's deeply satisfying to wake up to a Mooch alert - an email telling you in so many words that a book on your wishlist is now waiting for a new home. I really enjoy Bookmooch and I wish more of the books I wanted were given up by other people. I really urge you to give it a try - I got rid of titles I no longer cared for and I'm receiving books I'm interested in in exchange.

Rue McClanahan, as you may know, is most famous for her role as the scandalous Southern belle Blanche Devereaux in one of my favourite TV shows, The Golden Girls. She passed away last June and there's always something slightly peculiar reading someone else's life after their death. But what a life that was! I found My First Five Husbands... and the Ones Who Got Away to be a truly inspirational account of an ambitious, disarmingly funny woman who did everything from waitressing in her underwear to acting on Broadway. She met lovely people and terrible ones whom she ended up marrying but learned a lot from everyone.
The book is interesting and written in a friendly manner, which I greatly enjoyed. It's more Rue talking to a pal and exchanging gossip than Someone Famous cashing on their fame. Rue worked from day one and never stopped - she says at some point that she saw other people whose ambition in life was to marry into money but her wish had always been to earn it. Her life really deserved its own book - she accomplished so much and did got everything she wanted in the end.
I dreaded her chapter narrating her days filming The Golden Girls, I didn't want my superlative opinion of the show and its stars to be tarnished - while she reveals that the set wasn't the idyllic place I imagined it to be (somehow I thought such wonderful women with such a wonderful script could only have been best friends all along), it remains special and I can now add a very nice anecdote in my collection of Golden Girls gossip - one involving no less than The Men of Blanche's Boudoir, a scrapbook Blanche puts together with nude pics of her lovers that she offers to her housemates and which remains to this day one of my favourite scenes of the series.

I truly enjoyed this book, which was one hell of a ride. Turns out Rue wasn't very different from Blanche, though Blanche got truly lucky in her choice of men. At the beginning of the book, Rue explains that she devised a system to rate her lovers' performance in bed, ranging from A to F. I have a feeling Blanche got a life filled with As. Now let that be something to look forward to ;)

Rose: Is it possible to love two men at the same time?
Blanche (not missing a beat): Set the scene - have we been drinking?

… (plus d'informations)

The Golden Girls is one of my favorite shows so I borrowed this from a friend. I read it in a weekend.

One of my favorite quotes from the book is

Eating habits are hard to change, but it can be done, and with some added exercise, you can change your weight, which matters a lot more than your age. Regular sexual activity is excellent exercise. So is lifting weights. It all depends on what's available. Dumbbells are pretty easy to come by, but since many of them are married, I suggest lifting weights.

Now that's funny.… (plus d'informations)