by Jim Colucci
Rose is like me in some ways, in her optimism and her wanting to think that life always has a happy ending. That was in the script, so I don’t think I brought that to the role, but it was just something that was terribly comfortable for me. She also has a Viking temper—like me, I’m afraid—and wasn’t always sweetness and light. When she got mad, she got really mad. But I’m not as prone to telling someone off. No point in getting into a confrontation—I’ll just wait until they go home and then I’ll bitch like mad.
From the start, seventy-five percent of our mail has always come from young people, especially in their teens and early twenties. Fans will often come up to me and quote every line of a St. Olaf story, and I don’t blame them. They were brilliant. When I’d read a script and see one, I’d be thrilled. I don’t do accents, but there was just an undulating rhythm to those words that I was able to pick up on. Still, sometimes before work if I’d see a newspaper story with some very difficult-to-pronounce Scandinavian name, I’d think, “Uh-oh—I’m going to get it.” And sure enough, it would show up in the script. I swear the other girls would make bets that I’d never make it through some of these difficult words. So when I told a St. Olaf story, I always had to look over their shoulders instead of locking eyes with any of them. Because I knew they were just sitting there, thinking, “You’re going to screw up. You know you are!”
When the show premiered we were at number one, over Bill Cosby, who at that time owned the world. We felt, well, that’s just curiosity, that first show. Four old broads are not going to continue to get that kind of ratings. Well, we stayed, and I don’t think we were ever out of the top ten, which is such a privilege. It was just one of those things that comes along I would say once in a lifetime—but my “once in a lifetime” had already been used up with Mary Tyler Moore. So to get it again—and then on Boston Legal, with David E. Kelley’s writing—I mean, how lucky can one old broad get?
AUTHOR’S UPDATE:
In an appearance on Larry King Now in April 2014, Betty had to amend her last statement from 2006 to reflect her most recent work. When Larry asked how she would like to be remembered, Betty thought for a moment. “I think for Life with Elizabeth, maybe, or The Golden Girls. And Mary Tyler Moore!” Betty responded. “How lucky can you get? To get one big series or maybe two—but to get three, and now, with Hot in Cleveland! We’re having a ball.”
After The Golden Girls ended, the then-seventysomething Betty kept busy not only with a season of the doomed CBS sequel series The Golden Palace (1992–93), but by appearing in a variety of TV guest spots, plus in regular roles in the short-lived sitcoms Bob, opposite Bob Newhart, on CBS (1993); ABC’s Maybe This Time with Marie Osmond (1995–96); and CBS’s Ladies Man (1999–2001), playing the mother of Alfred Molina’s title character. After several guest appearances on ABC’s legal drama The Practice, Betty brought her secretary character, Catherine Piper, to the cast of its spinoff series, Boston Legal, where she appeared from 2005 to 2008. During much of that same period, from 2006 to 2009, she also popped up on CBS’s daytime soap The Bold and the Beautiful as Ann Douglas, the long-lost mother of that show’s matriarch Stephanie Forrester; the ever-energetic Betty ultimately outlived Ann, who died on the soap in November 2009.
Betty White addresses the press at the taping of an NBC special celebrating her 90th birthday in January, 2012.
Photo by AUTHOR.
Betty’s big-screen career blossomed as well, with hilarious roles as a foulmouthed, alligator-loving old lady in 1999’s Lake Placid, and in 2003, as racist busybody neighbor Mrs. Kline in Bringing Down the House.
But 2010 turned out to be Betty’s banner year; just as she turned eighty-eight, her career suddenly burned hotter than ever. In January of that year, she accepted the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award—an honor that usually comes at the end of a career, but for Betty turned out to be just the opening curtain of yet another act. That spring continued with what turned out to be a well-timed blitz, parlaying the heat from Betty’s role in the 2009 Sandra Bullock–Ryan Reynolds film The Proposal into a buzzed-about appearance in a Snickers commercial during the Super Bowl.
A Facebook petition that built throughout the spring of 2010 landed Betty the gig hosting a May episode of Saturday Night Live—for which she ultimately won her sixth Emmy Award. Just over a month later, on June 16, Betty debuted in yet another hit series, TV Land’s Hot in Cleveland.
In 2011, Betty published her seventh book, a volume of her wit and wisdom on such topics as love, friendship, animals, aging, and television called If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t); in February 2012, she became, at ninety, the oldest person ever to win a Grammy Award, beating out such competition as Tina Fey and Val Kilmer in the Best Spoken Word Album category for her reading of the book.
Also in 2012, she launched Betty White’s Off Their Rockers; the hidden-camera comedy show, which she also hosts and executive produces, ran for two seasons on NBC before jumping over to Lifetime for its third. To mark Betty’s big nonagenarian celebration in January, NBC gathered the biggest names in comedy for a tribute special. Before the cameras rolled, but after properly greeting her guests—such as Mary Tyler Moore, Valerie Harper, Ed Asner, Carol Burnett, Vicki Lawrence, Carl Reiner, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and her Hot in Cleveland costars, Valerie Bertinelli, Wendie Malick, and Jane Leeves—Betty, in a sparkly sky-blue gown, presided over a press conference in one of the ballrooms of downtown Los Angeles’s Biltmore Hotel. I asked her if Betty White was turning ninety, does that mean Rose Nylund and her Mary Tyler Moore Show character, Sue Ann Nivens, were as well?
“Rose may very well be ninety, but if Sue Ann is, she’ll never admit it,” Betty replied with a laugh. “She would lie, and would knock off a couple of decades.
“My mother always told me, ‘Never lie about your age. Brag about it,’” Betty added. “And when you get to this point,” she said—acknowledging with a sweep of her arm the sheer size of the celebration in her honor—“you get spoiled so rotten that I love being ninety.
“And I’ll see you again in ten years!”
SHARING CHEESECAKE WITH
RUE McCLANAHAN
(1934–2010)
“Betty says that I always ate the cheesecake, but it’s not true. I would actually put a bite of cheesecake on my fork and move it close to my mouth. Then when the camera cut to someone else, I’d put it on a plate under my chair. By the time they’d cut back to me, I would pretend to be chewing.”
—RUE McCLANAHAN
IT WAS STATED from the very beginning that Blanche was more Southern than Blanche DuBois. But the accent in Atlanta where Blanche is from is very slight—hardly funny enough. So I decided to go with my instinct and make her a kind of phony. My mother had a cousin, Ina Pearl, who was from southern Oklahoma like everybody else, but put on an accent that was part extreme Southern belle and part her idea of upper-class British. It was a remarkable accent and it was really obviously hers alone. Nobody in the family knew where she got it from and although she didn’t think she was being funny, I always did. So I played Blanche the way I felt Blanche. She thought an accentuated Southern accent like Ina Pearl’s would be sexy and strong and attractive to men. She wanted to be a Southern heroine, like Vivien Leigh. In fact, that’s who I think she thought she was.
But as we rehearsed the pilot, Jay Sandrich said to me, “No, no—I don’t want to hear a Southern accent.” He said he wanted just to hear my regular Oklahoma accent, which he thought was Southern. Well, there’s no arguing with the director. So I sort of did what he asked and used a modified sort-of-Southern accent. When I heard we got picked up for thirteen episodes, I worried about it for a couple of months. Finally, when we came back to shoot in July, I went to Paul Witt and Tony Thomas and said, “Okay, I know I’m not supposed to play it with a Southern accent, so I have an idea: I’ll do a real Mae West.” And they said, “What are you talking about? Of course Blanche has a Southern accent!” And I said whew! And was thrilled I got to play
it the way I wanted to in the first place.
I needed to pick a voice that wasn’t Rue that would work to help me create a character. You can’t just do your regular voice, your regular walk, your regular beliefs, your regular anything if you’re creating a character. For example, the Blanche walk came to me very quickly after the pilot. That’s not my natural walk, but it is hers. And I don’t think there’s anyone else on earth who walks like Blanche. Movement is very important to me in developing a role, and I think Blanche’s walk showed self-assurance and her always being on top of the situation. If she was at the Rusty Anchor or on a date, she felt it was irresistible and beguiling. The shoes were a big part of it, the sound they made. I always have to know what a character is going to wear, and once I discovered the walk, Blanche always wore those slingbacks.
As self-involved as she was, Blanche also had a sense of humor about herself, if the jokes were coming from the right place. It was a delightful thing for me to discover early on that Blanche would find Sophia adorable. It’s really her fault that Blanche got to be known as a slut, but Blanche would forgive her because she’d had a stroke, and find everything she said funny and endearing. So if Sophia said something particularly nasty, I’d laugh like “aw, you cute little thing,” and never took offense. It helped the jokes work, because it avoided a sour note of actual hurt feelings, and kept the audience with us.
Blanche also had a conservative side that was a lot unlike me; she could be homophobic, which I’m not, and for example she was grossed out by her daughter’s artificial insemination, which I wouldn’t have been at all. I had to act all that. Really, none of us is at all like our character—Betty probably the least of all, because she has nothing but brains. Estelle isn’t at all pushy and vitriolic like Sophia—but they both were New York funny. And because Dorothy is probably the “straightest,” least eccentric character, Bea is like her in that way. They both have a very funny take on people and are quick-witted, not suffering fools gladly. But certainly Dorothy’s failure in life is completely different from Bea’s huge successes. And when people ask me if I’m like Blanche, my standard answer is: Just look at the facts. Blanche is a man-crazy, glamorous, extremely sexy Southern belle from Atlanta. And I’m not from Atlanta.
But in truth, I actually don’t see Blanche as a slut at all. She actually had fewer dates than anybody if you go back and count. Sophia had more going on sexually than Blanche did. But Blanche talked a lot. I think that she was married to George for a long time, and she never got over him. She was always looking for a replacement; she was looking for love. She was also oversexed. I had a best girlfriend like that. They do go well together. I’m not oversexed, but I was looking for love, and I got myself into a lot of trouble that way. In fact, my memoir is titled My First Five Husbands . . . And the Ones Who Got Away. Maybe there is more similarity with Blanche than I’ve realized.
AUTHOR’S UPDATE:
Following the end of The Golden Girls and Golden Palace, Rue continued to pop up all over the small screen, in TV movies such as the 1994 made-for-TV sequel to Nunsense, and in guest roles on Boy Meets World, Murphy Brown, Touched by an Angel, and King of the Hill. In the fall of 1999, she played a regular role in the WB’s Safe Harbor, as the mother of the widowed sheriff, and grandmother to his three sons; the series lasted only eleven episodes.
Rue continued to appear on the big screen as well, in key roles in independent films and in small roles in the big-budget films The Fighting Temptations (2003) and Starship Troopers (1997). Also in 1997, she appeared in the feature film Out to Sea as Mrs. Ellen Carruthers, the owner of a cruise ship that apparently caters to a similarly Golden geriatric set, employing Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau as dance instructors. And that same year, Rue successfully underwent treatment for breast cancer.
With her return to New York, Rue also returned to the stage, off Broadway in The Vagina Monologues and in the Broadway productions of Wicked and The Women (2001). As that production’s Countess de Lage, she was wont to proclaim her need for “L’amour, l’amour!” Rue then catalogued her own similar real-life quest in her 2007 memoir.
Rue’s final acting role was in the Logo network series Sordid Lives in 2008. Although Texas matriarch Peggy Ingram had been played by actress Gloria LeRoy in the original film—in which the character died—in the series version, as embodied by Rue, she was not only alive but embarking on a secret love affair with a younger man.
The role offered the seventysomething Rue the chance both to play a still-vital woman and to support a series by her friend, out gay creator Del Shores. Rue supported presidential candidate Barack Obama in the 2008 election, and advocated for the legality of same-sex marriage. In January 2009, she appeared in the star-studded event “Defying Inequality: The Broadway Concert—a Celebrity Benefit for Equal Rights.” That following November, she was scheduled to be honored for her lifetime achievements at the event “Golden: A Gala Tribute to Rue McClanahan” at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre, but was forced to cancel due to cardiac problems. Following triple-bypass surgery, Rue suffered a minor stroke early the next year. After suffering a brain hemorrhage, Rue (née Eddi-Rue) McClanahan died at New York–Presbyterian Hospital on June 3, 2010, at age seventy-six.
In 2006, I sat down with Rue to conduct an interview for the Archive of American Television, a daylong discussion of the actress’s life and career. At the end of the grueling shoot, I asked her how she would like to be remembered. “As alive,” she quipped, before thinking more seriously about it, and turning the question back on me. “But you’ve got to ask me about my proudest achievement in life!” she insisted. And so I did.
“My son, Mark [Bish], the jazz guitarist,” Rue replied, sounding very unlike Blanche, who always struck me as more self-involved than maternal. “He’s also an artist. He builds, he paints, he draws. And he’s my biggest pride. If I had done nothing else, I’d be satisfied that my life had meant something.”
LESLIE JORDAN
the Actor and Author
REMEMBERS RUE McCLANAHAN
WHAT A BAD queer I am. I don’t know much about The Golden Girls, because I did not get sober until 1997. I was too busy running the streets of West Hollywood to watch the show. I do come across it quite a bit in reruns. The first thing I notice is the sunny, pastel set that is so indicative of retirement complexes in Florida. My sisters worked for the Villages in Lady Lake, Florida, which is one of the largest retirement communities. They have so many stories; it is no wonder the show was able to capitalize on that arena.
And of course, if I had to pick a favorite Golden Girl, it would have to be Blanche. My contribution to this missive will have to be my association with the real Blanche, Miss Rue McClanahan. We worked together on the TV series Sordid Lives, based on the hit movie of the same name by Del Shores. It ran on Logo for one season. We were all dropped off in Shreveport, Louisiana, and had to “make do.” The show was a prequel to the movie and Rue’s character was already dead when the movie began, but her character was certainly alive and well in the TV series.
I could not wait to meet Rue, and just knew we would hit it off. I was right! We met in a casino in the hotel where we were staying. Rue McClanahan was so much like her character Blanche it’s hard to tell where Rue ended and Blanche began. I loved the quote that Del uses about why Miss McClanahan was so eager to be a part of a project where there was not a lot of money involved. She read the script and called Del that night, personally, to say, “I’ll do it. I never thought at my age I’d get an opportunity to play a woman in love again.”
A few years after the TV series was canceled, we all went on the road with a show we called An Evening of Sordid Comedy. It was Rue, Caroline Rhea, Del Shores, and me. Rue was having some back problems, and had to take pills for the pain. They made her a little testy, to say the least. Del would sell tickets to a meet and greet after each of our performances. Rue loved her public, but she just wasn’t feeling up to meeting all those people. She asked me before we went on
in Dallas, “How long are you gonna go?” I said, “The same as you, Rue. We each get twenty minutes.” She looked me straight in the eye. “Do not go over. We’ve got to do this damn meet and greet. I don’t feel well.”
Well, you certainly would not have known she didn’t feel well. She walked onstage, sat down (she did sit-down comedy at her age, not stand-up comedy) and brought the house down with her stories. Trust me, she went way over her allotted twenty minutes. Then, I walked onstage and was killing! Twelve hundred gay Texans! What a response I was getting! But then all of a sudden the crowd really went apeshit. I turned around, and here was Rue marching back onstage. She walked right up to me and ran her fingers over her throat, which I took to mean, “Wrap it up!” The crowd could not get enough of her! I was livid!! But how long can you stay mad at Rue McClanahan? I miss her desperately.
SHARING CHEESECAKE WITH
BEA ARTHUR
(1922–2009)
“I hate cheesecake. I didn’t like the cheesecake scenes, either – I didn’t find them amusing, and thought of them as just a segue. But audiences love it, and to this day they still talk about it. And when I do my one-woman show and talk about this, people will come backstage and say, ‘Do you really love cheesecake? Don’t lie!’”