At 5′ 1” tall, TV legend Sally Struthers is quite petite. Her showrunners took advantage of this, surrounding the diminutive actor with performers that towered above her for comedic effect. Even on the ’90s Disney Afternoon cartoon “TaleSpin,” Struthers voiced Rebecca Cunningham, a brown bear entrepreneur who was about half the size of her lackadaisical employee, the sloth bear pilot Baloo, yet twice as intimidating. Indeed, what Struthers’ characters lacked in stature, they made up for in outsized personality.
On Norman Lear’s classic ’70s sitcom “All in the Family,” Struthers was a whole (meat)head shorter than her onscreen husband, the 6′ 2” Rob Reiner. She also stood well below her costars Carroll O’Connor (5′ 11”) and Jean Stapleton (5′ 8”). The show got a lot of mileage out of this sight gag, with Reiner’s hippie Michael “Mike” Stivic and O’Connor as the right-wing Archie Bunker frequently bellowing at one another — very literally — over the protests of Struthers’ Gloria. This similarly fed into Gloria’s relationship with her parents; to Archie and Stapleton’s Edith, she really was their little girl, even as a grown-ass adult woman.
The height difference did, however, provide a challenge whenever the show cut to a close up of Struthers standing next to another cast member on the same surface. Speaking in an interview archived online by the Television Academy, “All in the Family” costume designer Rita Riggs (who passed away in 2017) revealed how early ’70s fashion provided a helpful workaround for this.
As luck had it, platform shoes — which originated as beach footwear in the 1930s — had come into style as part of the disco music culture that had emerged the prior decade. So, all Struthers had to do was strap on a pair of groovy booties and suddenly her problems were solved.
Thanks to “All in the Family,” Struthers went from playing a no-name “dancer girl” on “The Tim Conway Comedy Hour” to one of the most famous daughters in sitcom history. With her dainty build and unmistakable raspy voice (which was extra gruff the day she auditioned for Lear due a case of laryngitis), it was all the easier for Struthers to stand out from the rest of the cast. Riggs recalled just how small the actor was compared to everyone else, explaining:
“She was so short that to get her into camera range with Carroll and [Jean] and Rob particularly she wore — thank god at that time platforms were fashionable — but she wore the tallest platforms you have ever seen with those little cute short skirts.”
Gloria eventually came into her own on “All in the Family,” refusing to kowtow to the men in her life and embracing the ideals of the women’s liberation movement (albeit only after Struthers threatened to leave the show). Her stylings, on the other hand, stayed more or less consistent. “She always wore young things,” Riggs explained. “I think we tried to keep what we had started with, even though this family had grown up with America now.” The only cast member who did dress noticeably differently over the course of the series was Reiner. As Riggs put it:
“He was really despicable-looking in the beginning, wasn’t he, with those tie-died awful shirts. […] I love chambray shirts and that was very much a statement politically in the ’70s. All of the protestors and students and the working-class protests wore the chambrays and the jeans, so he became very much a symbol of the ’60s’ other point of view.”
One imagines Archie would’ve cracked a smirk at Riggs calling the young Mike “despicable-looking.”
