Blanche Devereaux

Family

Blanche Elizabeth Marie Hollingsworth Devereaux born in November 1932, grew up near Atlanta, Georgia, at her family's mansion, Twin Oaks. Her parents were the late Elizabeth-Ann Margaret Bennett (later seasons named her "Samantha Roquet") (Helen Kleeb) and Curtis "Big Daddy" Hollingsworth (first Murray Hamilton, and after Hamilton died, David Wayne), the latter a revered man in his neck of the woods. Much to Blanche's dismay, he married a young widow named Margaret Spencer (Sondra Currie) years after Blanche's mother, Elizabeth, died, but she grudgingly accepted the marriage. Her father, Big Daddy, later died, and the news of his affair caused a shift in their father-daughter relationship. She attended the fictional Miss McIver's Finishing School. Blanche is a member of "the Alpha Gams" (Alpha Gamma Delta) but it is not known which university she attended. On occasions, Blanche states that she was Baptist. She is proud of her status as a southern debutante, but when tracing her family history is shocked to learn that she has a Jewish great-grandmother named Rosalyn Feldman from Buffalo, New York, which prevents her from joining The Daughters of the Old South, a conservative southern women's organization.

Blanche has four siblings. Charmaine (Barbara Babcock) is the spoiled oldest sister, who infuriated Blanche when she wrote a sordid novel that Blanche thought was about her, but when it was revealed that the book was about Charmaine and not Blanche, they made up and apologized to each other. Virginia Hollingsworth Wylde (Sheree North) is the youngest sister, with whom Blanche shares a mutual loathing. They buried the hatchet when Virginia went into renal failure and Blanche offered her kidney to her sister. However, their relationship became strained once more after their argument following Big Daddy's death in which Virginia accused Blanche of being too selfish and self-centered to say goodbye to her own father. Blanche also has a younger brother named Clayton (Monte Markham), who appears in season four (1988) and season six (1991). Blanche is troubled to some extent when she learns that Clayton is gay; her reluctance to accept Clayton's sexual orientation nearly cost her relationship with him. During The Golden Palace, it was revealed that Blanche has a mentally challenged brother, Tad (Ned Beatty), who has spent most of his life in a Chattanooga institution. Blanche also has a promiscuous niece named Lucy (Hallie Todd), who visits her during the first season.

Love life

Although notoriously man-hungry, Blanche was faithfully married for decades to her husband George Devereaux (George Grizzard). George died four years (1981) before the start of the series in 1985, and at some point earlier, they had moved from Atlanta to Miami.

In a 1990 episode, Blanche had a dream that George came back from the dead nine years later (he said that he faked his death to escape criminal prosecution for fraud; for which he was framed by his own business partner). Rue McClanahan has said that George was the love of Blanche's life, and that her promiscuity was in fact a desperate search for the next love of her life. The cause of George's death is never definitively established in the series: he either died immediately during a car accident when Blanche was at home, or after being in a coma when Blanche was getting a pedicure.

During her senior year in high school, Christmas 1949, when she was 17, she almost eloped with Deck Boughvenlough, the father of her rival at cheerleading with the sole purpose of having her taken off the squad. From this story, we learn that Blanche was born in 1932. This made her 53 when the first season begins and 61 when The Golden Palace went off the air in 1993.

On the show, Blanche is shown to have dated various men, some of them unsavory. She almost married a bigamist in the pilot episode before he got caught by the police. Another man stole her necklace at her full moon-leap year's party, and he too was caught by the police. One boyfriend named Rex was emotionally and verbally abusive, until her roommate Dorothy helped her see his true colors. Another boyfriend Gary (Jerry Hardin) cheated on her under her very roof by sleeping with Rose's sister Holly (Inga Swenson) who was visiting. Yet another, who appears in The Golden Palace, turns out to be a gigolo (Barry Bostwick). Blanche overcame her apprehension of dating Ted, who was in a wheelchair, only to find out he was married, so she terminated the relationship based on the fact that she has never been the "other woman" in extramarital affairs and never wanted to be. The only other time that occurred was when, through a bizarre turn-of-events, her beau's wife was revived by paramedics after she was declared dead. But Blanche has also ruined good relationships with worthy men: Jake (Donnelly Rhodes) was perfect and wanted to marry her, he was charming, romantic, but they had too many differences and she turned him down, to the disgust of her roommates, and regretted it later, and when Steven (Robert Mandan) was hospitalized, she refused to visit him until much later, by which time he reconciled with his ex-girlfriend, Karen. Unlike Blanche, who feared commitment and having another man die on her, when Karyn heard of Steven's illness, she went right to his side when he needed someone. She also dated John Quin (Edward Winter) and considered breaking up with him because he was blind and she felt self-conscious because she knew he wasn't attracted to her physical beauty. She later apologized to him and made plans to go out with him again, but the relationship apparently ended, as he is never mentioned on the series again. Blanche's most frequent (but only seen once in Season 6) date was Mel Bushman (Alan King), who was always available whenever she lacked male companionship. The one time he wasn't, Blanche assumed he was dead and promptly fell in temporary love with him when she realized he was alive. Because of his zipper manufacturing business, Mel was known as "The Zipper King". When Blanche's death is reported mistakenly in the paper, Mel Bushman sends flowers and a note, saying he's gone back to his ex-wife.

On the show, Blanche is portrayed as a promiscuous woman, with her initials spelling out the word "BED." However, Viola Watkins calls her "Blanche Marie." She spends a great deal of her time with members of the opposite sex, and this is a source of both condemnation from and amusement to her roommates. Blanche's seemingly liberated human sexual behavior is a contrast to the sexual climate of the 1980s, when AIDS was beginning to seep into a nation's consciousness. However, in the episode "72 Hours," it is mentioned that Blanche was cognizant of the dangers of HIV and STDs; she always used protection and knows every lover's full sexual history. It is also implied in one episode that she has had numerous interracial sexual liaisons with African-American men, though no such relations were ever depicted on camera.

In spite of her promiscuity Blanche was actually pretty conservative in many respects. She was a Republican plus she had a hard time accepting her brother Clayton's homosexuality when he came out to her in a 1988 episode and still seemed to have issues in regards to his sexual orientation when he visited her again in a 1991 episode with his partner Doug (Michael Ayr).

Age

Throughout the course of the show Blanche's precise age was never told. During the Mother's Day episode, Blanche's mother says that she was 17 in 1949, which would have put her being born in 1932, roughly. In an episode later in the series, Rose successfully got all of Blanche's documentation, but when she sat down with the other girls to go over the information she had received, in the age columns of all of papers it said "Deleted by Authority of the Governor", implying Blanche had slept with the governor to get the information regarding her age struck from her record.

In real life, Rue McClanahan was the youngest member of the show's cast (ten years younger than the other three series regulars), and the same is true of her character.

Children and grandchildren

At various times over the course of the series, Blanche mentions six different children, including two daughters (Janet and Rebecca, both of whom appeared in the series) and three sons (two of them — Biff and Doug — were mentioned in the episode "Bringing Up Baby," while the third, Matthew, was mentioned in the episode "To Catch a Neighbor" and made an on-screen appearance on an episode of The Golden Palace, played by Texan comic Bill Engvall). In the third-season episode "Bringing Up Baby", when Dorothy questions an impulsive car purchase, Blanche says to her: "I have had four children, I have never had a Mercedes". This makes it possible that "Biff" or "Skippy" were nicknames for two of Blanche's sons. During the series, Blanche learns that George also had a son named David (Mark Moses), as the result of an affair.

During the course of the show, Blanche is revealed not to have been very 'hands-on' as a mother, as she frequently left her children to nannies and housekeepers. She had a strained relationship with both of her daughters, especially Janet, something that led to some of the most dramatic storylines as she expressed regrets that she wasn't there for her children more (the relationship between her four sons is never mentioned). However, Blanche slowly rebuilt her relationships with Janet and Rebecca throughout the series. By the time the series ended, both Rebecca and Janet had healed their relationships with their mother.

Blanche's daughter Rebecca was seen most often on the show, although she and Blanche had frequent falling outs and bitter fights. When Rebecca (Shawn Schepps) was first introduced, she was overweight and about to marry a verbally abusive man (Joe Regalbuto). Later in the series, they fought over Rebecca's (Debra Engle) decision to be artificially inseminated. They then feuded over Rebecca's choice of a "birthing center" instead of a hospital, and finally feuded again when Rebecca believed that Blanche was using her baby to "get men". In each case, they eventually made up again (something Blanche seems not to have entirely done with Janet).

Blanche also has at least four grandchildren, David, Melissa, and Sarah (all born to Janet, who married a "Yankee"), as well as Rebecca's child, Aurora.

Blanche's grandson David visited the girls, but was unhappy and rebellious, due to problems in his home life (his parents fought and ignored him). After David confided in Blanche, she told Janet that she wanted David to live with her, leading to a bitter falling out between mother and daughter. David was depicted as being 14 at the time, which would have made him born in 1971. This would have made Blanche a grandmother at 39 or 40 years old, which means that Janet likely was a teenage mother (or is the result of a continuity error).

Relationship with her roommates

Blanche acts as co-roommate and landlord to Rose Nylund, Dorothy Zbornak, and Sophia Petrillo. Throughout the series, she and Rose are often involved in the same activities. Though she, like Dorothy and Sophia, is annoyed at times by Rose's constant storytelling, she saw her as both her best friend and a surrogate sister. To be sure, Blanche had her own collection of strange stories which she also shared from time to time, often tales of her rivalry with sisters Virginia and Charmaine or of the promiscuous stunts she pulled as a teenager.

Her relationship with Dorothy is mixed with envy and condemnation and sisterhood on both parts: Dorothy envies and condemns Blanche's sexual comfortability, while Blanche envies Dorothy's intelligence and condemns her fashion sense, among other things. And yet, both she and Dorothy at times isolate themselves from Rose, ganging up on her when the latter said anything particularly foolish, and taking turns hitting her on the head with a newspaper or magazine. Their relationship is also symbiotic: in one of the last episodes in the series, Dorothy admitted that Blanche has helped her be comfortable with her own sexuality, while Dorothy herself has always served as Blanche's other voice of reason. Although Blanche is only three years younger than Dorothy (born 1929) and one or two years younger than Rose (born 1930 or 1931), she frequently rubs in the fact that she is the youngest roommate in the house.

Blanche considers Sophia as both a mother figure and as a mean old lady. Sophia considers Blanche as one of her own daughters and, very vocally, as a street prostitute. In the pilot episode, Sophia bluntly tells Blanche, "You look like a prostitute."

Significance

Rue McClanahan said playing the role of Blanche made her "one of the most recognizable women in the world," and resulted in her being named the "Fifth most beloved celebrity over 55" in the world. She said the fame of Blanche Devereaux, on television "week after week for decades", made McClanahan inseparable from Blanche in the public eye.

Blanche and the other three women were hailed as breakthrough television role models for older women, being attractive, stylishly dressed, and romantically active.

Additional appearances

Outside The Golden Girls and The Golden Palace, Blanche appears in the Empty Nest episode "Fatal Attraction" and the Nurses episode "Moon Over Miami".