The Funeral and Casket Details of Bea Arthur

Introduction

Bea Arthur died at her home in Los Angeles on Saturday 25 April 2009, aged 86. Her family spokesman, Dan Watt, said she died peacefully with her family around her, and that the cause was cancer. He declined to say anything more about the illness, and nothing more has been released since.

The Associated Press reported that same day that no funeral services were planned. None was held. The farewell came five months later, in a Broadway theatre in New York, on a Monday afternoon, with the doors open to anyone who wanted to walk in.

The Life and Legacy of Bea Arthur

She was born Bernice Frankel in 1922. The stage had her first. She played Lucy Brown in The Threepenny Opera in 1955, Yente the matchmaker in the original Broadway company of Fiddler on the Roof in 1964, and Vera Charles in Mame in 1966, which won her the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical.

Television found her at fifty. Norman Lear cast her as Maude, Edith Bunker's blunt and liberal cousin, on All in the Family, then built a series around the character; Maude arrived on CBS in 1972 and won her an Emmy in 1977. From 1985 to 1992 she played Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls, sharing a Miami apartment with the characters played by Betty White, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty, and won a second Emmy in 1988. The show took ten Emmys in all. The Television Academy records eleven nominations and those two wins, and later took her into its Hall of Fame at a ceremony that was among her last public appearances.

The News of Bea Arthur's Passing

The news went out on the Saturday she died. Watt, who had been her personal assistant for six years, confirmed the death and the cancer and called her a brilliant and witty woman, and then stopped. He named no type of cancer, no length of illness and no hospital. The family has added nothing in the years since. Toby Keith's family kept the same kind of silence.

She was survived by her two sons, Matthew and Daniel, and by two granddaughters. Her marriage to the director Gene Saks had ended in divorce. In 2001 she had given the Archive of American Television an interview that ran about two and a half hours, and when it asked how she wanted to be remembered, she said she wanted it to be as an artist, and an important one.

The Funeral Arrangements for Bea Arthur

There were none. The Associated Press reported on the day she died that no funeral services were planned, and none followed. For a woman who had worked in front of audiences for close to fifty years, the decision was to have no audience at all. George Harrison had no public funeral either.

Nothing about her own wishes has been made public, so whether the silence was hers or her family's is not known. Other performers settled the question themselves. Elizabeth Taylor had arranged the details of her own funeral well in advance, and Luke Perry had decided beforehand how he wanted to be buried, the kind of thing a family can set down calmly through casket pre-planning or a wider funeral plan. Arthur's family simply said nothing.

The Casket Details of Bea Arthur

With no funeral there was no casket that anyone saw, and none has ever been described. A casket normally becomes a matter of public record through the service itself, where mourners see it carried and a family chooses whether to name what it was, and that is where the differences between caskets and coffins and the casket types associated with famous funerals get noticed at all. Arthur had no service, so there is nothing to name.

No resting place has been made public either. Nothing has been released about a burial or a cremation, so there is no cemetery to point to, no marker to describe and no urn that anyone has seen. Lucille Ball also went without a funeral of any kind, and Mary Tyler Moore was buried at a graveside service with nothing about her casket ever made public. Arthur's family went further and released neither.

Attendees and Eulogies

The memorial was called Celebrating Bea Arthur, and it began at one o'clock on Monday 14 September 2009 at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway. Admission was free and the invitation was open to anyone. Angela Lansbury, who had starred opposite her in Mame, hosted it, and Playbill reported that she opened the afternoon by singing a song from that show.

Norman Lear, who had created Maude for her, spoke. So did Rue McClanahan, who had worked beside her on both Maude and The Golden Girls, and Chita Rivera, Rosie O'Donnell and Jerry Stiller. Playbill's account of the afternoon also has Adrienne Barbeau, who had played her daughter on Maude, the lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who wrote the songs for Fiddler on the Roof, the actress Zoe Caldwell and the producer Daryl Roth. Her sons, Matthew and Daniel Saks, spoke, as did her sister and a representative of PETA, where Arthur had served for years as an honorary director. Donations were requested for the Ali Forney Center in place of flowers.

The Impact on Fans and the Industry

Broadway dimmed its marquee lights for her on the evening of Tuesday 28 April 2009, for one minute. Charlotte St. Martin, executive director of the Broadway League, said the theatre had been fortunate that Arthur's roles had graced its stages. Fans were left to mark it on their own, as fans of Eddie Van Halen were when no public service was held for him.

What made the September memorial unusual is that it was not a private gathering at all. The theatre was open, the seats cost nothing, and Playbill described a capacity audience. People who had only ever watched Arthur on a screen could sit in the same room as the people who had worked with her.

Legacy and Remembering Bea Arthur

She left $300,000 to the Ali Forney Center, a New York charity that houses homeless LGBT young people. The centre says she had performed a one-woman show for it in 2005, that she had told it she would do anything to help young people thrown out of their homes, and that it learned of the bequest in 2009, the year she died. In 2012 New York City handed the centre a long abandoned building, which it renovated with the Cooper Square Committee.

The Bea Arthur Residence opened on East 13th Street in the East Village in 2017, with eighteen beds for homeless LGBT young people, and Village Preservation gave the renovation its Regina Kellerman Award the following year. There is no grave anywhere carrying her name, which was also the case after Diane Keaton died. There is a building with eighteen beds in it instead.

Conclusion

Bea Arthur's death was announced in one short statement and then the family stopped talking. No funeral, no casket, no burial, no resting place, and no further word about the cancer that killed her. The silence has held ever since.

What stands in place of a grave is an open afternoon in a Broadway theatre in September 2009, and a house on East 13th Street with her name on it. For an actress who said she wanted to be remembered as an artist, and an important one, it is a fair answer.

Sources

• Associated Press, "'Golden Girls' star Bea Arthur dies at 86", 25 April 2009, carried by The Herald (Everett), The Spokesman-Review and The Washington Times
• United Press International, "Golden Girl Bea Arthur dead at 86", 25 April 2009
• NBC New York, "Golden Girl Bea Arthur Dies, Aged 86", 25 April 2009
• Television Academy, "Golden Girl Bea Arthur Dies", 25 April 2009
• Archive of American Television, "Actress Beatrice Arthur Dies at 86", 26 April 2009
• Playbill, "Bea Arthur Remembered at Broadway Memorial", 15 September 2009
• Broadway.com, "Thank You For Being A Friend: Broadway Remembers Bea Arthur at Starry Memorial", September 2009
• BroadwayWorld, "Bea Arthur Memorial Set for September 14 at Broadway's Majestic Theater", 6 June 2009
• BroadwayWorld, "Broadway to Dim Lights Tonight for Bea Arthur", 28 April 2009
• Broadway.com, "Broadway Marquees to be Dimmed in Memory of Bea Arthur", April 2009
• The Ali Forney Center, "The Bea Arthur Fund"
• amNewYork, "Bea Arthur Residence is a 'Golden' moment for homeless gay youth", 23 July 2015
• Village Preservation, "Bea Arthur Residence: 2018 Regina Kellerman Award Winner", 21 May 2018
• The American Theatre Wing's Tony Awards, 1966 nominees and winners

Image credits

• Bea Arthur with Angela Lansbury at the 41st Emmy Awards, 17 September 1989. Photograph by Alan Light, published on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence (CC BY 2.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en