Thank you for being a goddess
I usually take pleasure in celebrity death, especially the unexpected ones. But it is with misty eyes and a sunken heart that I admit the following: Bea Arthur has died. I am still in disbelief. Yes, she was 86. Yet her passing still comes as a shock. Arthur is the second Golden Girl to die in the past year. Unlike Estelle Getty, whose demise was slow and relatively public, Arthur’s fatal battle with cancer was an amazingly well-contained secret. In retrospect, she did look alarmingly ill at her Television Hall of Fame induction this past December, as the below photos demonstrate.
However, with octogenarian celebs, it’s tough to surmise whether drastic appearance changes result from illness, or simply the natural aging process (Paul Newman would be another good example of this). After all, Andy Rooney and Larry King have looked like death warmed over for a good thirty years now.
On a personal note, only a handful of celebrities have affected my life, my identity even, as much as Arthur. (And even fewer of those celebs died in my lifetime—Jim Henson, Redd Foxx, and George Harrison spring immediately to mind.) Her powerful, commanding presence was reliably intoxicating, even when she was being little more than Bea Arthur. But she also oozed sex appeal. In an age when third wave feminism was equating sex with power (see that alleged Golden Girls ripoff, Sex and the City), Arthur’s rapier wit and brittle confidence seemed not antiquated, but alluringly exotic. She was a take-me-as-I-am proposition, and one hell of a fun proposition at that. Her every movement promised to show you a good time, full of engrossing anecdotes and delightful conversation. She’d be amazing in the sack, and she’d probably teach you a thing or five in the process. The fantasy of a night with Bea Arthur became every bit as stimulating as the fantasy of a night with Natalie Portman, and until today, she was near the top of my “5 Celebrities Worth Jeopardizing a Relationship For” list. She carried herself with a grace, an authority, and an intellect that many women on TV (not to mention in my life) lacked. And that made her every bit as sexy as, say, Tina Fey or Jennifer Aniston, and a great deal sexier than the vapid pin-ups, from Farrah Fawcett to Paris Hilton, that too often populate the airwaves. Her physical beauty, even into her 80’s, was routinely underestimated and diminished, in the same way we tend to attack anybody who challenges or threatens patriarchal order and the oppressive standards of “beauty” it enforces. (Arthur was by no means immune to these demands, as she had numerous cosmetic procedures throughout her life.) But moreover, Arthur’s down-to-earth, proud, often complicated humanity was a beauty that enhanced her already considerable physical assets.
This is easily the biggest celebrity death of 2009 (suck on it, John Updike). Bea Arthur was an icon. She was a towering figure in an era when the possibilities for women seemed endless, when “feminist” was a compliment rather than an insult or, worse yet, a marketing buzzword. She will be as missed as the era that inspired Maude Findlay and Dorothy Zbornak.
