Golden Girls is a wholesome, heartwarming show about four best friends, but behind the scenes, it is a whole other story. While the on-screen chemistry of the four friends kept the TV show running for almost a decade, the mood off-screen was far frostier than expected.
The Emmy-winning NBC sitcom is one of the most beloved comedy shows ever made. Starring Betty White, Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty as four best friends, Rose, Dorothy, Blanche and Sophia, the show follows their antics as they share a home in Miami in their later life.
Watching the series and seeing how well the four characters merge, with the four actors regularly improvising and reading each other’s cues perfectly, it would be easy to assume that off-screen was no different. It might be expected that the four actors were best friends in real life, carrying the chemistry off-set and even seeming to live the lives their characters do. But according to the sitcom’s casting director Joel Thurm, the atmosphere on set was nasty.
While appearing on The Originals podcast, Thurm shares the astonishing details of an off-screen feud between the stars. It was the relationship between Bea Arthur and Betty White that was especially bad, escalating to the point where Thrum recalls Arthur saying, “Oh, she’s a fucking c*nt,” about White.
“Bea Arthur called Betty White a C-word?” the podcast host, Andrew Goldman, asks out of shock. “Yeah, she called her the C-word. I mean, I heard that with my own ears,” Thrum maintains.
But it wasn’t just Arthur who used strong language about Betty White. Thrum continues, “And by the way, so did Rue McClanahan. Rue McClanahan said it to me in Joe Allen’s [restaurant]; Bea Arthur [when she was] on the set of ‘Beggars and Choosers.’”
Betty White also seemed to not get along with her other co-star, Estelle Getty, with Thrum claiming White was insensitive to her as she began to suffer from Lewy body dementia while filming. Getty would “write the lines on her hand” as she started to struggle to remember lines. Thrum recalls White would “make fun of her in front of the live audience”.
“That may seem like a minor transgression, but it really does get to you,” he continued, stating, “I have no idea how Estelle Getty felt, but I know the other two did not like [White] at all.”
According to a 2011 interview, White claimed the feud between the stars, especially with Arthur, came down to jealousy and clashing attitudes. She said, “Bea [Arthur] had a reserve. She was not that fond of me. She found me a pain in the neck sometimes. It was my positive attitude — and that made Bea mad sometimes. Sometimes if I was happy, she’d be furious!”
The Originals podcast host, Goldman, said of the feud, “ I don’t think you could survive [decades] in show business without having occasionally sharp elbows,” chalking Betty White’s lengthy career up to her ferociousness. But knowledge of the off-screen atmosphere does sour the jovial mood of the beloved TV show.
