Turnin’ on Bea

One of the greatest disappointments of my shallow, campy life is that during a particularly tumultous move in the early 90s, one box of my belongings went astray, never to be seen again. Inside was a jumbled assortment of videocassettes containing recordings from the late 70s and early 80s, the last gasp of the celebrity TV variety show.

One was my cherished tape of two installments of Musical Comedy Tonight, the public television program hosted by Sylvia Fine (Kaye), and featuring recreations of a few seminal Broadway musicals. Thanks to a benevolent friend, I recovered one of those shows a few years ago, the episode wherein Agnes DeMille talks about choreographing Oklahoma! and, most deliciously, Ethel Merman and Rock Hudson sing the duet "You're the Top" from Anything Goes.

Yes, Ethel Merman and Rock Hudson. "You're the Top." Please. There's no question in that pairing that Ethel had the titular role.

Coincidentally, also lost in that carton was another cassette featuring Rock Hudson. I was reminded of it, and cried yet again for its disappearance, when this clip popped up on YouTube the other day: Bea Arthur and Rock Hudson singing "Everybody Today Is Turning On" from the Cy Coleman and Michael Stewart musical I Love My Wife. It's taken from 1979's The Beatrice Arthur Special.

I'm often asked, when did you know? When did you know you were "that way"? While certainly years earlier Randolph Mantooth had aroused feelings in me while watching Emergency!, hands down I figured out I liked boys and showtunes definitively in 1979, when I had a serious crush on school chum Billy and I sat glued in from of the TV watching The Beatrice Arthur Special.

Bea was, of course, just coming off the six-season success of Maude and was also married to director Gene Saks, whose production of I Love My Wife was just ending its run on Broadway, which explains how both "...Turning On" and "Hey There, Good Times" wound up in Bea's TV special. In addition to Hudson, other guests on the show included Melba Moore and Wayland Flowers and Madame.

Uh-huh.

It was everything you'd expect the show to be, by which I mean campy fabulous. Bea did solo songs (including a delicious "How Long Has This Been Going On?" and another Cy Coleman treasure, "The Way I See It" from the 1979 flop Home Again), sketches (including one with Rock Hudson where they play a long-married couple discussing that something has gone wrong in their relationship—gee, y'think?) and duets with Hudson, Madame and Moore (plus a "surprise" cameo by Maude co-star Conrad Bain.

It was, in short, the gayest thing on television in 1979. Unsurprisingly, the handsome Bea Arthur superfan Kevin Buckstiegel has a few other clips from the show on his fansite but, oh, what I wouldn't give to have that box back and my cherished cache of tapes restored to me. Wherever it went, whoever has it now, I have only one thing to say: "God'll get you for that."

Comments:

<< Back to Must See HTTP://