It wasn’t quite love at first sight for Bonnie Bartlett and William Daniels.
The “Boy Meets World” alum revealed his now-wife’s brutal rejection when he first asked her out for coffee in college: “You’re too short.”
The couple — who will be celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary next month — recalled their first meeting in an interview with the Daily Mail on Monday.
Daniels first laid eyes on Bartlett while they both attended Northwestern University. He spotted her sitting in the back of their classroom while she read from a play.
“I’m very good at the heavy stuff, and so what happened was that he was listening, and he didn’t think that these actors were very good. And then he heard me,” she told the outlet, before Daniels gave his perspective of the meeting.
“And I looked, and in the back of the room, there was this blonde, and I thought, ‘Oh my goodness. She looks interesting,’” the actor said.
He waited for the class to file out and then gained the courage to ask — but was met by the harsh reaction.
But Bartlett — who was a half inch shorter than Daniels at the time — quickly overcame any fears about Daniels’ height.
“I didn’t mean it as an insult,” she insisted. “I just meant, ‘Oh, no, no, you’re too short. I’m too tall for you.’ And he said, ‘Oh, come on,’ and we’ve been together ever since.”
By the way they talk about each other 75 years later, it’s hard to picture them starting out on the wrong foot.
“I wouldn’t be with anyone else in my life than this woman sitting next to me,” Daniels, 99, gushed.
“It just happened,” Bartlett, 96, added. “You don’t plan for it. You really don’t plan for it. I’m not at all romantic or anything like that. I’m a big believer in today, you know? And then all of the sudden it’s 75 years. It’s kind of amazing, I must say.”
“It is amazing, especially in our business,” she noted, referring to the many divorces in Hollywood.
During the interview, the couple also clarified the rules of their “open marriage.”
“It’s funny, the press will pick up on something and make more of it than it was,” Bartlett prefaced. “There was never any discussion as to what we were going to do, but in 75 years, the two of you together, you know, it would be abnormal if you … weren’t attracted occasionally to other people.”
Bartlett added that, “there have been times, yeah, both of us, on both sides,” which she wrote about in her 2023 memoir, “Middle of the Rainbow.”
However, they never outright discussed the arrangement. They each had their own respective affairs until Bartlett realized she “could no longer tolerate any kind of open marriage.”
“Bill and I never sit down and make rules,” she said. “We never sit down and talk about these things. We just don’t. We just live our lives. And if he’s away for a year, he’s away for a year.”
“Our lives just went on, but we never got unhinged … We never got unhinged, but our lives did go in different directions occasionally.”
“The Little House on the Prairie” alum had previously revealed that the two had an “open marriage,” which was “very painful” and “didn’t work well.”
“And it was a time when people were doing that,” she continued. “It was at a time in New York when there was a lot of sex and a lot of people doing all kinds of things, you know — very free.”
The couple tied the knot on June 30, 1951. Throughout their marriage, they played each other’s spouses in three different projects, including “Boy Meets World” and “St. Elsewhere.”
Ten years into their marriage, they welcomed son William Jr., who died 24 hours later. They went on to adopt two sons.
