Long before they played secret lovers turned rivals on the HBO hit comedy “Hacks,” Jean Smart and Tony Goldwyn shared the screen in a groundbreaking “Designing Women” episode about the AIDS crisis.
Smart, 74, and Goldwyn, 65, recalled the heartbreaking inspiration behind the hard-hitting episode during an April 16 visit to TODAY to promote the final season of “Hacks.”
“This episode particularly was really special,” Goldwyn said. “It was about AIDS. It was 1987, I think, so right in the heat of the AIDS epidemic.”
Smart — alongside Delta Burke, Dixie Carter and Annie Potts — was one of the original stars of “Designing Women,” which aired on CBS from 1986 until 1993.
The show followed four women (and later, one man, played by Meshach Taylor) working together at Sugarbaker & Associates, a successful interior design firm in Atlanta.
Goldwyn appeared as a guest star in a Season 2 episode pointedly titled “Killing All the Right People.” The episode marked one of the earliest mentions of AIDS on primetime television.
“I played a young man dying of AIDS,” Goldwyn said of his character, Kendall Dobbs.
Kendall arrives at Sugarbaker & Associates to ask “his friends” to help design his funeral, Goldwyn explained.
“Because his family had rejected him,” Goldwyn noted.
Smart said of Goldwyn’s portrayal, “It was so moving. He was so wonderful.”
She also credited “Designing Women” creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who wrote the episode, with doing an “amazing job” handling the subject matter.
“Lots of times, half-hour shows that would tackle something really serious, you’d think, really?” said Smart, sounding unimpressed.
But Bloodworth-Thomason “was always able to pull off things like that,” Smart said.
Smart also revealed Bloodworth-Thomason’s personal connection to the AIDS crisis.
“Her mother died of AIDS,” Smart said, before Goldwyn explained that her mother died after a blood transfusion.
“She got AIDS the year before and she was enraged by what was happening and no one was talking about it,” Goldwyn added.
While accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award at the GLSEN 2013 Respect Awards, which honors those who help create safe schools for LGBTQ youth, Bloodworth-Thomason said her mother, Claudia Bloodworth, contracted AIDS in 1986 from a blood transfusion while undergoing heart surgery.
“She ended up on a hospital floor with 17 mostly young gay men,” said Bloodworth-Thomason. “This was a period when bigotry, hatred and ignorance concerning the AIDS virus were all around.”
Bloodworth-Thomason recalled the hospital’s staff treating AIDS patients “like pariahs” at that time.
“They were openly hostile, often refusing to touch patients. They placed medicine in rubber buckets routinely and kicked them into the rooms,” she said.
When her “beautiful mother” died, Bloodworth-Thomason couldn’t find a funeral home willing to take her body.
“Never before had I experienced such a feeling of profound rejection and hopelessness, of being vilified and shunned,” she said.
Bloodworth-Thomason said she realized the dejected feeling she was dealing with were the feelings so many gay people, particularly gay men with AIDS at the time, were experiencing.
Bloodworth-Thomason also recalled overhearing a woman saying, “Well, if you ask me, this disease has one thing going for it. It’s killing all the right people.”
“That just made me so angry,” she said. “I immediately wrote a script by the same title.”
Bloodworth-Thomason noted that in her script’s most charged moment, Dixie Carter’s outspoken character, Julia Sugarbaker, overhears an acquaintance making the same remark and passionately rebukes her for her bigotry.
Behind the scenes, Carter was more than willing to be the episode’s voice of justice.
“My dear friend Dixie, a lifelong conservative Republican, said to me, ‘Just give me the words and I will take her down,'” Bloodworth-Thomason said to cheers.
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