Loni Anderson braced herself for Hollywood creeps by taking self-defense classes back in the day.
“I was prepared,” the actress, now 76, told Page Six. “I went to self-defense classes, I had my speech ready, I was just ready.”
Anderson said she signed up for classes after hearing alarming stories from other actresses during casting calls.
“You’d go for an interview, there would be 20 girls in the outer office, and you’d get talking,” she explained. “And they all had horror stories, so I wanted to prepare myself.”
Anderson, who had been a brunette for years, also recalled people starting to treat her “differently” once she dyed her hair blond.
“Like my brain dissolved with the bleach,” she joked.
Anderson told Page Six that she luckily never had to put her self-defense skills to use. However, there was a time when she was manhandled by Johnny Carson on an episode of “The Tonight Show,” a situation she says would “never happen today.”
Following the incident, Anderson became a star as the receptionist on the series “WKRP in Cincinnati.” The show ran from 1978 to 1982 and earned her two Emmy Award nominations.
The Minnesota native further proved she was a trailblazer by walking out on the sitcom during the 1980 summer hiatus. At the time, she requested a hefty salary increase, something she calls “the kiss of death.”
“I did it in a sneaky way,” Anderson remembered. “Howard Hesseman was also very popular on the show [as DJ Dr. Johnny Fever]. I went to him and said, ‘Let’s negotiate together, let’s be a team,’ and that’s what we did.”
“I had been on ‘Three’s Company’ with Suzanne Somers [who was fired] and she called me and talked to me about it,” Anderson told us.
“Of course, they threaten you all the way through negotiations and tell you that you’re totally replaceable and it’s a tough fight. Terrible things were thrown back and forth.”
Nevertheless, the studio conceded and Anderson and Hesseman got their pay bump.
Anderson is also famous for her six-year marriage to Burt Reynolds. It ended in an acrimonious split, with the late actor publicly accusing Anderson of being “an underemployed actress with low self-esteem” and a terrible mother to their adopted son, Quinton.
Despite their ups and downs over the years, Anderson refuses to badmouth her late husband and chooses to only focus on the positive memories.
“It’s been 30 years and so now I’m back to remembering all the wonderful times in those 12 years with Burt,” she told us. “You just have to get past it for your own mental health, well-being, for the health of my son.”
She continued, “I choose to focus on the positives and say, ‘Thank you, Burt.’ I had a really lovely life and met wonderful people and had a kind of princess existence and that’s what I choose to dwell on.”
The vivacious actress is working on a one-woman show that she hopes to tour with in the future. It can currently be seen in a special benefit performance of “Hollywood Squares” presented by The Hollywood Museum.
Anderson told Page Six she has fond memories of appearing in the original game show.
“I never said no to a job,” she shared. “I did every game show, every talk show, every special whatever it was. And ‘Hollywood Squares’ was a big part of that. It was a big part of being seen and remembered.”
