3 minute read
Another Delmarva Diva: A.M. Foley
Another DelMarVa Diva
by A.M. Foley
Bernice Frankel’s 3,000-mile journey ~ from the West End of Cambridge to Brentwood in L.A. ~ wasn’t a smooth trip, but the onceunhappy little girl won many accolades and scored many triumphs along her way.
Bea Arthur (nee Frankel) came to Maryland’s Eastern Shore from Brooklyn in 1933, when her parents moved south to open P. Frankel’s clothing store. The distinctive personal fashion sense Bea later displayed on All in the Family, Maude, and The Golden Girls may have been honed on Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive, but it originated on Race Street.
The middle child among three daughters, Bernice was a pre-teen when her father remodeled a downtown Cambridge site from a theater into a store. Now Craig’s Drug Store, the site originally housed the Grand Opera House, an ornate backdrop where World War I doughboys had posed before shipping Over There. Seeing its exotic facade transformed into P. Frankel’s must have caused considerable comment around town.
Entering school, Bernice found herself among students whose families had lived along the Choptank River for generations. Her Brooklynese must have struck local ears as a foreign tongue, and vice-versa. Small wonder that shy Bernice felt a misfit in her new surroundings. Adding to the language barrier, her Jewish family attended neither Zion Methodist Church nor what was then officially Grace Methodist Episcopal Church (South).
By the time she entered Cambridge High School, Bernice had attained her adult height of fivefoot-nine and towered over classmates. The shy teenager spent every available hour with her head in Photoplay Magazine or in the Arcade Theater. “My dream was to become a very small, blond movie star like Ida Lupino and those
other women I saw up there on the screen,” she said.
Bea eventually combated her shyness by acting the self-described “class clown.” She became a legend among bobbysoxers, leaving them to the malt shop while she dared venture into The Grill, a male preserve in the depths of Dixon Hotel on High Street. Classmates voted her “wittiest girl” in class for her edgy Mae West imitations.
About the same time the Frankels hit town, two-lane Emerson Harrington Bridge was completed, linking Cambridge to Talbot County. As reported by journalist Brice
Stump, a teenaged Bea wrecked her father’s big silver Packard on the span. In what may or may not be related, she left Cambridge High for boarding school in Pennsylvania. Bea spent a stint at Linden Hall, a girls’ college-prep school with a strong equestrian program, where she learned to avoid horses. Her parents then sent her to Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute for training as a medical technician. Back home, she interned one summer at Cambridge Hospital and realized, “I’m not happy running urines. I’m really not. It’s fine, but I want to be a little blond starlet.”
Bea found 1940s Cambridge “a beautiful place to grow up, but barren creatively.” In later interviews, she preferred not to talk about her subsequent military service during
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