Secrets of the 'Golden Girls': Why Pregnant Rue Dumped Hubby, Married Estelle's Shack Up, Bea Really Hated Her Costars – and the Star Betty Refused to Work With
The 'Golden Girls' cast had plenty of secrets.
May 6 2025, Published 7:00 a.m. ET
The Golden Girls' Rue McClanahan, Bea Arthur, Betty White, and Estelle Getty played wholesome pals on camera.
But RadarOnline.com can reveal behind the scenes, the ladies led red-hot love lives.
Estelle Getty secretly shared a Hollywood apartment with a 30-year-old actor while still married to her Florida-based husband.
Here's the scoop on their bedroom antics.
In real life, McClanahan was a lot like her man-eating character, Blanche Devereaux – tying the knot six times.
She met her first husband, Tom Bish, in the 1950s, and the two quickly got hitched.
But their marriage soon soured, and when she discovered she was pregnant, McClanahan hightailed it to her parents' home to have the baby.
McClanahan – who died in 2010 at age 76 of a brain hemorrhage – saw her husband only once more, after their son, Mark, was born.
She wed an old friend only a few months after her divorce from Bish was final in 1959.
At 56, McClanahan dated 29-year-old Michael Thornton, and their romance had her acting like a 16-year-old.
She'd flirt with male crew members, and came to work drenched in perfume that caused others to say, "Everyone evacuate."
Divorces, STDs, young studs – Arthur, Rue and the rest sure weren't the retiring types.
Getty lived with a much younger man – while she was still married.
In 1989, while The Golden Girls was still being produced, then 65-year-old Getty – who played Sophia Petrillo, the feisty 80-something mother of Arthur's character – shared a Hollywood apartment with a handsome 30-year-old actor, J. David Krassner.
The two met while appearing in the Broadway production of Torch Song Trilogy from November 1983 to June 1984 – a period that Getty fondly called "the best time of my life."
While Getty was shacking up with Krassner, her husband, Arthur Gettleman, was thousands of miles away – running Getty's family's business in Florida.
The couple married in 1947, and Gettleman accepted that Getty put work before marriage.
"Sometimes I miss her greatly, and sometimes I don't. I'm glad that she's living with someone and not alone," Gettleman said at the time. The couple had two sons, Carl and Barry.
Getty battled both Parkinson's and Alzheimer's before passing away at the age of 84 in July 2008.
Bea Arthur contracted an STD during her Marine Corps service, leaving her unable to have children.
Arthur married twice, but never had children of her own – after a bout with venereal disease while serving in the Marines.
Although the Maude star denied serving in the armed forces, military records show she enlisted in the Marine Corps in early 1943 at the age of 21.
Arthur married a fellow Marine, private Robert Aurthur, while she was in the service, and her military records show a "misconduct report" was filed against her – for contracting venereal disease.
The infection left her "incapacitated for duty" for five weeks in late 1944. Shortly after her first marriage ended in 1950, Arthur married director Gene Saks. They adopted two sons in the 1960s.
Betty White once regretted refusing to marry Allen Ludden for a full year before finally saying yes.
Arther and Saks split in 1978. Arthur, who played Dorothy in The Golden Girls, died in 2009 at age 86. Insiders said Arthur secretly hated her fellow co- stars, especially White, and couldn't wait for the show to end.
Before her death, White revealed her greatest regret to Oprah Winfrey – and it involved Allen Ludden, her husband of 18 years, who died from stomach cancer in 1981.
"I spent a whole year, wasted a whole year that Ludden and I could have had together, saying: 'No, I wouldn't marry him. No, I won't. No, I won't leave California. No, I won't move to New York," she told Winfrey. "I wasted a whole year we could have had together."
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Rue McClanahan’s off-screen love life rivaled Blanche Devereaux’s, complete with six marriages and a 29-year-old boyfriend.
The Emmy winner, who was briefly married twice in the 1940s, had often gushed about the famed Password host.
In 2011, when asked by Joy Behar on The View to choose one decision she'd happily make again, White replied: "Marry Allen Ludden. No two ways about that. He was something special."
White, who played Golden Girl Rose Nylund, never wed again after Ludden's death.
"I had the love of my life," she said. "If you've had the best, who needs the rest?"
