Golden Girls co-producer recalls Betty White and Bea Arthur’s nasty feud: ‘The C-word came out’

“Those two couldn’t warm up to each other if they were cremated together,” Marsha Posner Williams said at a panel celebrating the sitcom.

Betty White and Bea Arthur on ‘The Golden Girls’.Credit: Alice S. Hall/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty

Bea Arthur and Betty White were not friends — they just played them on TV.

During a recent Golden Girls panel discussion at the Pride Live! Hollywood festival, several key figures who worked behind the scenes on the beloved sitcom discussed their memories of the legendary comedians — and co-producer Marsha Posner Williams insisted that the actresses behind Dorothy Zbornak and Rose Nylund were not fond of one another.

“When that red light was on [and the show was filming], there were no more professional people than those women,” Williams said of Arthur and White, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “But when the red light was off, those two couldn’t warm up to each other if they were cremated together.”

Williams said that Arthur, who died in 2009, used “the C-word” on more than one occasion to refer to White, who died in 2021. “[Arthur] used to call me at home and say, ‘I just ran into that [c‑‑t] at the grocery store. I’m gonna write her a letter,’” she remembered. “And I said, ‘Bea, just get over it for crying out loud. Just get past it.’”

Williams also claimed that when she and her husband went to Arthur’s house for dinner, “within 30 seconds of walking in the door, the C-word came out.”

Casting director Joel Thurm, who was also on the panel, has previously recalled Arthur using the same language when discussing White. “Bea Arthur, who I cast in something else later on, just said, ‘Oh, she was a f‑‑‑ ing c‑‑t,’ using that word,” he said in a 2022 episode of the podcast The Originals. “She called her the C-word. I mean, I heard that with my own ears.”

Betty White and Bea Arthur at a book signing in 2005.Desiree Navarro/FilmMagic

Elsewhere in the panel, Williams said that Arthur despised the way White conducted herself while taping the show. “Betty would break character in the middle of the show [and talk to the live audience],” she said. “And Bea hated that.”

Williams also claimed that Arthur was the sole holdout who prevented the show from continuing beyond its seven-season run, which lasted from 1985 to 1992. “The show would have continued after seven years,” the co-producer said.

“Their contracts were up and… the executives went to the ladies, and Estelle [Getty] said, ‘Yes, let’s keep going,’ and Rue [McClanahan] said, ‘Yes let’s keep going,’ and Betty said, ‘Yes, let’s keep going.’ And Bea said, ‘No f‑‑‑ing way,’ and that’s why that show didn’t continue.”

Golden Girls writer Stan Zimmerman previously wrote that Williams said Arthur “thought Betty was two-faced” when they worked together. “Bea liked real people,” Zimmerman wrote in his book The Girls: From Golden to Gilmore. “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.”