In February 1943, a tall 20-year-old named Bernice Frankel heard that the U.S. Marine Corps had just started taking women, and she was at a recruiting office within days. Three decades later the whole country knew her as Bea Arthur, the booming voice of Maude and later Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls. With Veterans Day arriving Wednesday, November 11, her story is worth telling again, because the woman who spent two and a half years in uniform would not admit it.
Parade revisited her service this week ahead of the holiday, but the paper trail has been public since December 2010, when The Smoking Gun obtained her Marine Corps personnel file a year after her death. What those pages show is a young woman eager to serve, a career that started on a North Carolina air base, and one written assessment that fans of Maude Findlay will find very familiar.
What Did Bernice Frankel Tell The Marines?
The Marine Corps announced its Women’s Reserve on February 13, 1943, and Bernice went to enlist just five days later. She was born in New York City on May 13, 1922, so she was still a few months shy of 21 and needed her parents’ consent to sign up. The Corps was so new to recruiting women that it enlisted them on U.S. Navy forms, according to the National WWII Museum.
Her handwritten letter in the file explains the hurry. “I was supposed to start work yesterday, but heard last week that enlistments for women in the Marines were open,” she wrote, and she decided the only thing to do was to join. She told the recruiters she was willing to “get in now and do whatever is desired of me.” Before the war she had tested canned food for mold and bacteria at a Maryland packing plant.
She trained at the first Women Reservists school at Hunter College, then worked briefly as a typist at Marine headquarters in Washington. She asked for a transfer to the Motor Transport School at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and by 1944 she was at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, working as a truck driver and dispatcher. She climbed from private to corporal and then sergeant, and when she was honorably discharged in September 1945 she was a staff sergeant. So why would anyone hide a record like that?
Why Did Bea Arthur Deny It?
The clearest denial on record came in 2001, in a videotaped interview for the Television Academy Foundation’s archive. Asked how World War II affected her, she answered, “Like everybody else,” and then called it “traumatic.” When the interviewer mentioned hearing that she had once joined the Marines, Arthur replied, “Oh, no,” as recounted by All That’s Interesting and other outlets that reviewed the tape.
Even her family heard very little. Her son Daniel Saks told Military.com by email that his mother “almost never” spoke about her time in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, “beyond saying she could drive any vehicle.”
She never explained the silence. The file does record a single disciplinary report from late 1944, which The Smoking Gun suggested might account for her reluctance. Others have wondered whether a woman of her generation simply did not think of herself as a “veteran.”
How Did A Staff Sergeant Become Maude?
Her discharge paperwork noted that she wanted to go to dramatics school, and she did exactly that. Beginning in 1947 she studied at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School in New York under director Erwin Piscator. In 1954 she played Lucy Brown in the off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera, and ten years later she created the role of Yente the matchmaker in the original Broadway cast of Fiddler on the Roof. In 1966 she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for playing the acid-tongued Vera Charles in Mame.
Television found her in 1971, when Norman Lear cast her as Edith Bunker’s liberal cousin Maude on All in the Family. The guest spot went over so well that CBS built a show around the character, and Maude ran from 1972 to 1978 and won her the 1977 Emmy for lead actress in a comedy. Here is where the rest of the Maude cast ended up.
Then came The Golden Girls, which ran from 1985 to 1992 and brought her a second Emmy in 1988, this time as a divorced substitute teacher sharing a Miami house with Betty White, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty. She walked away from the show after seven seasons, and today only a few of its stars remain, as we covered in the surviving cast of The Golden Girls.
Bea Arthur died of lung cancer at her Los Angeles home on April 25, 2009, at 86. Betty White, her co-star for all seven seasons, told Entertainment Tonight, “I knew it would hurt, I just didn’t know it would hurt this much.”
The Note In Her File That Sounds Just Like Maude
The best part of the whole record may be the personality appraisals Marine interviewers wrote when she applied in February 1943. They praised her “poised and trim appearance” and her “meticulous good taste.” They also called her “argumentative” and “over aggressive,” and then summed her up with a line that could have come from a CBS memo about Maude Findlay. She was “officious,” the interviewer wrote, “but probably a good worker if she has her own way!”
The file holds one more surprise for anyone who has ever said her name. In 1944 she married a fellow Marine, Robert Alan Aurthur, and her records include the marriage certificate she sent in with a request to change her name to Bernice Aurthur. The marriage ended a few years later, but she kept his surname, changed one letter, and became Bea Arthur. The name that headlined Broadway and two hit sitcoms was filed with the Marine Corps first, by a staff sergeant who would never say she had worn the uniform.
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