Aurora Starchild
The Golden Girls may have been a feel-good sitcom centering on four women who lived together, but there were some not-so-good sentiments rolling around on set. According to casting director Joel Thurm, Bea Arthur once called Betty White a harsh slur. The two women had an ongoing feud and bounced between friends and enemies.
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Golden Girls Casting Director Claims Bea Arthur Called Betty White the “C-Word”
According to Thurm, who published Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season: Confessions of a Casting Director in January of 2022, the real beef came from Bea Arthur. Thurm isn’t the first to mention these animosities, but he lent some insight into what happened.
“It was well known that Bea didn’t like Betty,” Thurm wrote. “She felt Betty wasn’t ‘a real actress.’”
Thurm claimed that he heard Arthur call White the “c—” word. “’Oh, she’s a f—ing c—’ She called her the c-word. I mean, I heard that with my own ears. And by the way, so did Rue McClanahan,” he wrote.
However, Thurm also said that what viewers saw on the show wasn’t a representation of Arthur and White’s tensions.
“Whatever disagreements these women had in private, they never interfered with the show itself,” he wrote.
Bea Arthur and Betty White Had Different Approaches to Acting
Freelance entertainment writer Jim Colucci wrote Golden Girls Forever: An Unauthorized Biography in 2016. In his book, he talks about the differences in Arthur and White’s acting techniques, and why that rubbed Arthur the wrong way. He elaborated on this in an exclusive interview with Closer.
“[Bea] came from the old school of [television writer] Norman Lear where sitcoms were filmed like stage plays and done with up-close reactions,” Colucci told Closer. “[Betty, on the other hand], was from the Mary Tyler Moore school where everything is a very subtle character moment. The jokes are more gentle.”
“Bea would hold the script in her hand until the very last minute,” Colucci elaborated. “Betty, almost at the table read, would be off-book. She could incorporate new lines just by hearing them, so she was able to clown around with the audience.”
For an actor, it comes without saying that memorization skills help with the trade. So, for Bea Arthur, it may have been intimidating or annoying to have her co-star skirt around the script or jump to improvisation when she’s trying to play by the book.
Bea Arthur’s Son Says She Was Annoyed When Betty White Talked to the Audience
Arthur’s eldest son Matthew Saks told Closer that his mom was also put-off by White’s tendency to break the Fourth Wall.
“It would make my mom unhappy that in-between takes Betty would go and talk to the audience. It wasn’t jealousy. It was a focus thing,” he said.
“When they shot the sitcom, sometimes they had to stop, Saks told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016. “My mom would stay concentrated, maybe stay backstage, stand in her place there. And sometimes Betty would go out and smile and chat with the audience and literally go and make friends with the audience. Which is a nice thing — a lot of them have come from all over the country and are fans.”
“I think my mom didn’t dig that,” Saks continued. “It’s more about being focused or conserving your energy. It’s just not the right time to talk to fans between takes. Betty was able to do it and it didn’t seem to affect her. But it rubbed my mom the wrong way.”
Bea Arthur Was a “Quirky and Complicated Woman”
Colucci called Arthur a “quirky and complicated woman” who basically had a list of demands, which included extra allowances for herself and banning certain practices.
“If you were chewing gum on the set, she would try to have you fired,” he told Fox News. “She also never wanted to wear shoes. She had it written into her contract that she was allowed to not wear shoes as long as she agreed not to sue the producers if she hurt herself.”
The Golden Girls Writers Engaged in Habitual “Dorothy Bashing,” Which “Wore” on Arthur
Colucci also said that the show’s writers incorporated a lot of harsh banter between the characters and that over time Arthur internalized the insults.
“When the writers called Rose [Betty White] dumb or Blanche [Rue McClanahan] a slut or Sophia [Estelle Getty] old, it could roll off those women’s backs because they were not like their characters,” he told Fox. “Unfortunately, the things that were said about Dorothy were that she was big and ugly. And that wears on an actress after a while.”
Colucci said the scriptwriters were inclined towards “Dorothy bashing.”
Maybe it was the writers’ fault, or maybe it was Betty White’s acting differences, but Arthur’s son Saks said his mom needed to let out her feelings somehow.
“My mom unknowingly carried the attitude that it was fun to have somebody to be angry at,” Saks told Closer. “It was almost like Betty became her nemesis, someone she could always roll her eyes about at work.”
Despite “Feud,” Betty White and Bea Arthur Were Friends Outside of Work
However, Saks also said that the “nemesis” dynamic didn’t leave work. “There was no fighting at all,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “They were friends. At one point they lived close enough that they would drive each other to work.”
Rue McClanahan, the actress who played Blanche, backs up Saks’ claim that White and Arthur were actually friends. In an archived interview with The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, she said that while she wasn’t personally very close with Arthur, White was.
“Bea and I didn’t have a lot of relationship going on. Bea is a very, very eccentric woman,” she said. “She wouldn’t go to lunch [with me] unless Betty [White] would go with her.”
McClanahan also claims that Arthur was a little jealous of White. In her biography My First Five Husbands…And the Ones Who Got Away, published three years before her death, the actress claims that White’s 1986 Emmy win for Outstanding Lead Actress in a comedy series was undeserved in Arthur’s eyes.
Betty White was asked about this during a TimesTalk interview in 2011 (via The Village Voice).
“Bea had a reserve. She was not that fond of me,” said White. “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!”
