Nancy Burnet had a memorable 40-year relationship with the late Bob Barker.
“We had a very similar humor about things. Kind of rather dry humor,” Burnet shared during a Tuesday, December 12, interview with Entertainment Tonight, revealing what she misses the most about Barker on what would have been his 100th birthday. “I guess just chatting [too]. He had a really wonderful, charmed life.”
While Burnet initially turned away Barker’s romantic advances, she eventually relented, and the duo had a love that spanned multiple decades. The pair met at an animal adoption event in 1983.
“That first day, he walked over to me … and said, ‘Hi, I’m Bob Barker. Are you here to adopt a dog?’ And I said no and I ended up adopting a dog anyway,” she recalled. “It was the last one. He didn’t want to go back into his cage, so, of course I took him with me.”
Barker asked Burnet out to dinner that same day.
“I told him that I couldn’t, that my friends were with me and we were in my car and that it would have to be some other time,” she said, noting that Barker was quick to propose that Burnet’s friends drive her car home so she could go on the date.
They didn’t end up having dinner that night, but Barker was persistent, and their shared passion for animal rights activism helped them deepen their connection.
Barker died on August 26 at age 99., “It is with profound sadness that we announce that the World’s Greatest MC who ever lived, Bob Barker, has left us,” Barker’s publicist, Roger Neal, told Us Weekly in a statement at the time.
Weeks later, the longtime Price Is Right host’s cause of death was revealed to be Alzheimer’s disease.
Prior to his passing, Barker was married to Dorothy Jo Gideon from 1945 until her death from lung cancer in 1981. Barker eventually moved on with Burnet, whom he never married — but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
“When we first started seeing each other, I asked him if he ever intended to remarry,” Burnet told ET on Tuesday. “And he said no, and I said, ‘Perfect, because neither do I.’ We can move forward.”
Barker did, however, propose to Burnet “many times” over the years.
“I just had no intention of ever remarrying,” she explained. “And, of course, I didn’t want to live with anyone. I’m a Christian and I have some pretty strong values about that.”
One thing Barker did that will always make Burnet laugh is draft a prenup, for use in the unlikely event that she decided to marry him.
“He just didn’t really take no for an answer,” Burnet recalled, noting that she still has the prenup as a “keepsake” of the late star.
