Sally Struthers says her life dramatically changed after the success of “All in the Family.”
“It became apparent rather quickly that my life had completely turned upside down,” she tells Page Six Tuesday.
The actress, 76, says that she and her on-screen husband, Rob Reiner, would go out for lunch at The Grove in Los Angeles, and “within two months, we couldn’t do that anymore.”
Struthers — who was married to William Rader during her time on the CBS show laughingly adds that fans truly believed she was married to Reiner, who played Michael “Meathead” Stivic in the ’70s sitcom.
“When they saw me with my real-life husband, they [would] go, ‘Where’s your husband?’” she says.
When Struthers tried explaining to the fans that Rader was her actual husband, she said they refused to listen and insisted that she was married to “Meathead.”
“People are so funny,” she notes. “They get an idea in their head, they’re like an old dog with a bone.”
Struthers — who played Archie and Edith Bunker’s daughter, Gloria Stivic, on the show — says the sitcom, which ran from 1971 to 1979, was groundbreaking in so many different ways.
“The Bunkers came along and they flushed toilets,” she explains. “They didn’t have good manners at the table. They reached over one another for food … and they talked about real things.
“They peeled off the veneer. And you saw the less-than-perfect side of human beings. You saw the arguing and the vehemence and the bigotry. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle now. Everything got more honest after that.”
