So, everything was firing on all cylinders, professionally speaking, and any friction was only aired publicly in the form of gentle ribbing.
“Bea is a very, very eccentric woman,” McClanahan recalled in an interview she gave for the TV Academy’s Archive of American Television. “She wouldn’t go to lunch unless Betty would go with her.”
Even if White was late, Arthur always waited for her, and when the cast stayed for dinner while shooting on Fridays, they always sat next to each other. White also noted in her 1987 autobiography, Betty White in Person, that she and Arthur lunched together every day—and both she and McClanahan noted that Arthur was a foodie, to a fault.
White called Arthur “discriminating, knowledgeable, and appreciative…and a bit intolerant of someone else’s lack in this department…[My] unimaginative predictability drives her bananas.”
“Picky,” was how Getty characterized Arthur’s approach to food, reportedly prompting an annoyed look from her TV daughter.
“But it’s her total preoccupation,” White added when the cast sat down with the Washington Post in 1986. “It’s better than sex as far as Bea is concerned. Eating.”
