William Daniels' unwavering loyalty to his long-term wife, Bonnie Bartlett, is a testament to their enduring bond. That's why the Boy Meets World veteran affirmed that he "wouldn't be with anyone else" but the St. Elsewhere actress, who in her 2023 memoir, Middle of the Rainbow, revealed that the couple had an "open marriage" after tying the knot in 1951.
"It's amusing," Bonnie quipped during their joint interview with The Daily Mail published on May 18th. "The press tends to pick up on something and blow it out of proportion." The 96-year-old clarified that she and William, 99, had a more "unspoken" arrangement when it came to affairs. As she put it, "There was never any discussion as to what we were going to do, but in 75 years, the two of you together, it would be abnormal if you…weren't attracted occasionally to other people."
"Bill and I never sit down and make rules," Bonnie continued. "We just don't. We just live our lives. And if he's away for a year, he's away for a year." While Bonnie noted that "both sides" experimented outside of the marriage, she and William remained each other's top priority at the end of the day.
"Our lives just went on, but we never got unhinged," she added. "We never got unhinged, but our lives did go in different directions occasionally." In fact, Bonnie—who shares two sons with William—has argued that many other couples lived with similar arrangements back in the 1950s.
"You have to have lived during that time as an adult to see what that was like. The culture is simply different," she told People in 2023. "Hollywood was really the saving grace for our marriage, because once we got to Hollywood and living like a normal family and having weekends at home with our kids and doing things, it was a totally different story."
Indeed, Bonnie wrote in Middle of the Rainbow that she "never felt tied to fidelity, and neither did Bill" during the early days of their marriage. However, she did admit that William's fling with a New York-based producer in the 1970s left her "devastated" to a point where she "could no longer tolerate any kind of open marriage."
From then on, she and William made it their focus to continually work on their relationship. "Bill and I have moved forward day-by-day and eventually, the days added up," she wrote in the book. "We've been happy together and sad together, and somehow stayed together for seven decades."
