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Sally Struthers knows how beloved Betty White was in Hollywood, but her experience with the late actress was anything but golden.
“Now that she’s gone, I’m going to talk about Betty White for a moment,” Struthers, 77, said during the Monday, January 13, episode of the “Let’s Talk About That! With Larry Saperstein and Jacob Bellotti” podcast. “I know everybody loves her. They loved her so much.”
Struthers acknowledged that White’s fans successfully “signed petitions to get her to guest host Saturday Night Live” but confessed, “I didn’t have such a great experience with her.” (White died in December 2021 at the age of 99.)
The Gilmore Girls alum called White a “very passive-aggressive woman” and recalled an awkward encounter at White’s home decades earlier.
Struthers explained that she once went to fellow sitcom star White’s home in Los Angeles to work on a pilot for a new game show. While there, White asked her housekeeper to bring the group a snack.
“Then the plate was set in the middle, and it was cookies, I think,” she recalled. “So I reached for a cookie and she said in front of everyone, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you dear, you don’t need a cookie.’”
Struthers claimed that White “totally fat-shamed me in front of the rest of the people in the room. And I thought, ‘Gosh, that’s not nice.’”
While Struthers didn’t have the fondest memories of White, she was close with the actress’ Golden Girls costar Bea Arthur. (White played ditzy Rose on the comedy from 1985 to 1992 opposite Arthur’s sardonic Dorothy. Arthur died in December 2019 at the age of 86.)
“She was a force of nature,” Struthers said of Arthur — whom she met when Arthur guest starred as Maude on All in the Family in 1971. “Bea Arthur was filthier than a drunken sailor on purpose.”
Struthers, who played Gloria on All in the Family, remembered running into Arthur at the grocery store in Brentwood, California, after she moved to the area for the spinoff, Maude, years before Golden Girls’ debut.
“She would trash everyone we ever knew,” Struthers said with a laugh. “I loved how filthy she was. She was a big deal. I loved her.”
The actress also remembered Rue McClanahan, who played saucy Blanche on Golden Girls, being a “sweetheart.” McClanahan died in June 2010 at the age of 76.
While Struthers’ encounter with White wasn’t the norm — White was one of the most loved actresses of her time and an American treasure — she wasn’t the only one who didn’t instantly connect with White.
Arthur and White butted heads on the Golden Girls despite playing best friends alongside McClanahan and Estelle Getty, who played Dorothy’s wise-cracking mom Sophia.
“During our time on set, I never felt tension between the two,” Golden Girls writer Stan Zimmerman wrote in The Girls: From Golden to Gilmore, which came out last year. “I only heard stories and recently learned, from producer Marsha Posner Williams on a podcast, that Bea thought Betty was two-faced.”
Zimmerman noted that “Bea liked real people,” writing, “I had the sense that Betty was more like Sue Ann Nivens, the character she played on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, than she was like Rose. More conniving than the innocent airhead from St. Olaf.”
