Big Bea

Once upon the days of the Depression, the twelve-year-old daughter of a clothier in Cambridge, Md., dreamed of becoming a star--"a very small, blonde movie star." But the little girl was 5 ft.

9 1/2 in. tall and most definitely brunette, and she grew up into a towering 5-ft. 11-in. handsome woman with the voice of a diesel truck in second gear. Last year that imposing, now graying, woman with the small blonde ingenue inside marched onto the nation's television screens as Maude. It took fate 40-odd years to get around to her, but Bea Arthur is finally a star.

If Actress Arthur is not exactly garden-variety glamorous, Maude is even less likely as the heroine of a TV situation comedy. In a medium that until a few years ago shied from portraying divorced women and left politics to the 6 o'clock news, Maude is on her fourth husband and her umpteenth outspokenly liberal cause. She bullies her family and neighbors with the steamroller self-assurance of a Marine sergeant marshaling a troop of Cub Scouts, and when that fails, she invokes the aid of the Deity. "God'll getcha for that," she warns those who cross her. She is a fighter who takes on city hall, featherbedding repairmen and department-store complaint departments. She can deck an adversary with an arch of a single brow as surely as with an adder-tongued retort like last week's explanation of a black eye: "I was jumping rope--without a bra."

Maude's first antagonist was Archie Bunker, when she stormed onto All in the Family two seasons ago as a visiting cousin. Since spinning off on her own last year, Maude has stirred things up with shows on the legalization of marijuana and the sham of radical chic, as well as a two-part episode on abortion that roused a particularly shrill outcry when it was rerun over the summer (TIME, Aug. 27).

Undaunted, the program kicked off the new season with a two-parter on alcoholism, and in future will confront the Supreme Court's ruling on pornography (as it applies to a fund-raising show for Maude's local library). Later in the season Maude will even have a face-lifting, after conceding that she feels "like an old hen with a turkey's neck and crow's-feet--I could be the centerfold for the Audubon Society." Her on-camera rejuvenation will be accomplished with tape and makeup, but the idea for the show came from Bea Arthur herself, who plans to have the real thing during the mid-season hiatus.

Big Lady. Maude's great appeal --the show consistently placed in the top five of last year's Nielsen ratings--is her realism, says Arthur. "Maude's age, her outspokenness, make her real. For the first time, a person is coming on in a TV sitcom." Much of the credit goes to Bea Arthur, who is a somewhat softer-spoken, toned-down version of her TV persona. "I'm a big lady with a deep voice, I'm a liberal, and if I get angry I speak out," she says. She is also a consummate comedienne and an accomplished actress who handles the show's serious moments with uncloying dignity.

Her career has been punctuated by intermittent "retirements" ever since she turned her back on a budding future as a registered lab technician in Maryland and took off for acting school in New York City. "I was marvelous. I had enormous breasts which started here," she says, pointing to her neck.

The statuesque student was soon playing suitably outsized roles: Lysistrata, Clytemnestra, Kate the shrew.

There followed "a variety of assorted flops in which I played interior decorators and madams," she recalls, and every now and then a solidly successful role, like her Tony Award-winning Vera Charles in the Broadway musical Mame.

Producer Norman Lear of All in the Family became a fan when he saw her singing a torch song called Garbage in an off-Broadway revue. He cast her in several TV sketches in the late '50s, and when he created Maude, Arthur was his first and only choice for the title role.

She and her husband, Director Gene Saks (Barefoot in the Park, Mame), live with their two adopted sons in a rented house near Los Angeles, while Arthur tapes Maude and Saks completes his film version of Mame (in which his wife re-created her supporting role). She is sensibly private about her personal life, but her late-blooming stardom overtakes her occasionally. "My God, you're Maude!" a waitress shouted at her recently. "To tell you the truth, I don't know if you look better or worse!"

On a trip to New York last summer, Arthur bought a wig to use as a disguise, but Saks refused to let her wear it. "Then one night it happened," she says. "We were chased down Broadway by a mob of people like in Suddenly Last Summer. It was awful. We dived into a bar to escape, and my husband said, 'Next time do me a favor. Wear the wig.' " A small blonde wig, perhaps?

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