Reality TV
Why Ellen From The Golden Bachelor Came Close To Quitting The Show
Her best friend Roberta helped talk her out of it.
The most beautiful relationship in the first season of The Golden Bachelor, arguably, was barely featured on camera: It was the one between contestant Ellen Goltzer and her best friend Roberta Zaktzer. Goltzer memorably went on the show at Zaktzer’s request as a way to keep her spirits up while she battled breast cancer — and it turns out Zatker helped keep Goltzer from quitting the reality dating show before filming even began.
The One That Almost Got Away
Goltzer spoke about her time on The Golden Bachelor and her 60-year-long friendship with Zaktzer in the Dec. 22 episode of iHeartRadio’s Ben and Ashley I Almost Famous podcast. On top of admitting she wouldn’t have applied to be on the Bachelor spinoff if it’d been up to just her, she revealed a barrier that popped up after she’d been chosen. It came in the form of a golf ball-sized abscess on her face.
“I developed an abscess on my cheek,” Goltzer said. “And it was, like, three weeks before I was supposed to go, and I said, ‘Oh my God, I can’t go.’”
Goltzer and her sons thought the mass on her face was too bad for her to appear on the show, but Zaktzer kept encouraging her. She told her, “Never say never,” to keep her from giving up and pushed her to take the shot at love. “‘You’re going on that plane,’” Goltzer recalled her saying. “‘You’re going to get to go. You are not going to look like a monster. You’ll be fine.’”
With the help of a dermatologist in New York, the abscess improved enough that Goltzer could hide it with makeup. “I was able to go,” she said. “So there was, like, somebody, a higher power that was way above Roberta or me.”
A Well-Timed Elimination
Although Goltzer joked that Golden Bachelor lead Gerry Turner was “yummy” and “really not hard on the eyes,” she’s glad he eliminated her when he did. It gave her the chance to say her goodbyes to Zaktzer, who died in early September, before the season began airing.
“If I was with him and he picked me, it probably wouldn’t have been a good match, and I wouldn’t have been able to say goodbye to her,” Goltzer said. “So everything happens for a reason.”
As she said on The Golden Bachelor, the experience was “one of the best” she’s ever had and it helped renew her “optimism about love and [the] possibility of finding love” in her current stage of life. She reflected further on her journey to The Palm Beach Post in November, saying, “It opened me up to a lot of new experiences here, so that’s encouraging. I was going to give up and I am definitely not giving up anymore.”
And that’s exactly what Zaktzer wanted for her.
