Betty White in Person
Page 1
BETTY WHITE
IN PERSON
Revised 2012 Edition
BETTY WHITE
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Connecticut ● New York ● Colorado
Table of Contents
BETTY WHITE IN PERSON
Revised 2012 Edition
Copyright Notices
Author’s Note
Other Books by Betty White
Dedication
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD
I - OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD
On Titles
On Names
On People Watching
On Awareness
On Animals . . . Naturally
On Measured Honesty
On Saving Things
II - ALL WORK AND SOME PLAY
On Name-dropping
On Fans in General
On Fan Mail
On Professional Jealousy
On Competition
On Laughter
III - OUT OF MY MIND
On Imagination
On Habits and Superstition
On the Cosmic View
On fear
On Other Fears
On Moods
On Aging
On Aging . . . PS.
IV - OFF MY CHEST
On Things I Hate
On Being Only
On Writing It Down
On Anger
On Jealousy
On Guilt
On Sex
On Enthusiasm
V - HEART OF THE MATTER
On Memory
On Memories
On Friendship
On Decisions
On Weddings
On Marriage
On Widowhood
On Love
On Grief . . . and Hope
VI - BRINGING UP THE REAR
On Forward
AFTERWORD
Copyright Notices
BETTY WHITE
Betty White In Person
Revised 2012 Edition
Copyright © 1987, 2012 by Betty White
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
White, Betty, 1924-
Betty White in person.
1. White, Betty, 1924-
2. Television actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.W4577A3 1987 814’.54 87-13265
Int’l ISBN: 978-1-62071-043-2
ISBN: 162071043-9
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Author’s Note
This book was first published in 1987 and was intended to reflect my thoughts on a random group of trivial subjects. When they decided to bring it out again I was curious to see how my thinking may have changed in the intervening twenty-five years.
Betty and friends hanging out recently at the National Zoo in Washington DC.
I opened the book at random and, wouldn’t you know, the first thing my eye fell on was in regard to my busy work schedule. I was explaining to some close friends that “things would let up as soon as I finished this present project... or that one… and that one…”
My friends didn’t buy it then any more than they do today: “Sure, until you start working on the next thing.”
Hate to admit it but nothing has changed in that department.
Flipping through some more pages I came across the subject of aging. To quote: “I don’t want to fight old age but I am not going to invite it to live in either. I want a nice symbiotic relationship with it where we are totally unaware of each other.”
Well, I still feel exactly the same – the only difference being that I was sixty-five then. Today I am ninety. Maybe we don’t keep updating our feelings as much as we like to think we do.
Other Books by
Betty White
Betty White’s Pet Love
Here We Go Again: My Life in Television
If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t)
Betty & Friends: My Life at the Zoo
With Tom Sullivan:
The Leading Lady: Dinah’s Story
Alive Day: A Story of Love and Loyalty
Together: A Story of Shared Vision
Dedication
For Tess, Superfriend I
Acknowledgments
To Bart Andrews and Sherry Robb, my agents, for making me say yes to the project in the beginning; To Loretta Barrett, my editor, for all her help . . . especially her invaluable positive response, each time I needed it most; To Gail Clark, without whom I couldn’t keep my life in working order, let alone write a book; To Rudy Behlmer for his patience, understanding, and encouragement; To Kay Daly and to Lee Moorer for their unfailing love and support and “being there” through all the years . . . upon which I depend so much; To Aimée Friedman for her unmeasured honesty and enthusiasm; To Mary Ellen and Ed Hicks for picking up the pieces; To all the friends and Superfriends, past and present, who have made weaving the tapestry such an interesting game for me.
As well as to Timothy, Cricket, and T.K. for their constant presence and comfort throughout this adventure;
My deepest thanks
FOREWORD
This book turned into something completely different from what was originally intended . . . not better . . . just different. I don’t really know at just what point I lost control.
There was a meeting . . . I remember that . . . and I went in fully intending to say a polite but definite no to writing another book. I recall someone explaining, gently, that all it would be was a series of short essays on a variety of subjects from my frame of reference.
Oh! Well! That was different! It didn’t really matter that I hadn’t the foggiest as to what that meant . . . it sounded great in the meeting. It was not five minutes after I arrived before I was nodding like a Christmas tiger . . . “Oh, yes! That sounds like it would be fun to do!”
The backbone of an earthworm.
Having been a dedicated closet writer . . . we are legion . . . I have been jotting down thoughts and ideas for as long as I can remember. Not for anyone to see . . . it was my own private little exercise. It also helped remind me of things that might otherwise be erased from the mental tape recorder.
So that is what I assumed I would be working on . . . random observations . . . nothing personal.
What I soon discovered in the course of this adventure is that there is no way to report on your feelings and opinions without getting personal. It is impossible to avoid the “I, me, and my” syndrome. This immediately steers you off course, away from any objectivity whatsoever . . . and you find yourself smack in the middle of the Sea of Subjection.
That is how this whole thing got away from me, and took on a life of its own.
As a result, you are going to hear a great deal about the people who have been closest to me . . . Allen Ludden . . . my mother and father . . . the people I work with . . . my friends . . . and Superfriends.
You will hear about what makes me laugh . . . and what makes me cry . . . what I love . . . and what I hate.
What you will not hear is “a series of short essays on a variety of subjects from my frame of reference.”
Sorry. It just didn’t come out
that way.
I
OFF THE TOP
OF MY HEAD
On Titles
Choosing a name for anything is difficult. Yet, it is so important to choose the one that fits . . . whether it’s a baby . . . or a pet . . . or even a book. There are so many choices . . .
At first, they wanted to call this book Betty White’s Golden Rules.
Is that not the worst title you ever heard? Talk about a turnoff. Believe me, it wasn’t my idea. It was probably a committee decision . . . putting the quote celebrity unquote name in the title, plus throwing in the word “golden” as a subtle reminder of a certain television show, in case the quote celebrity unquote name doesn’t ring a bell.
In any event, I wasn’t about to tell anybody I hated the title. That would be impolite . . . and besides, they might take back their suggestion for me to do a book. So I said, “Swell.”
Titles have always given me a problem. There are so many good ones, I was never able to narrow it down to one.
This was not a major problem until I was about eight, and started my first book. It was a compilation of short . . . very . . . pieces about animals I had known . . . or seen. A half page on a moose glimpsed in a meadow as we drove by . . . two pages on several bears in Yellowstone National Park . . . and another three pages on my own pets, past and present. Of course, I wrote bigger then, so the page count is unreliable. Unfortunately, the book struck a snag when I couldn’t decide between two great titles . . . My Petography . . . or My Animalography. For this reason, plus a rather weak plot, the project just never got off the ground.
When I was eleven, I wrote my first serious piece of any length . . . 107 pages, handwritten . . . in ink! I found it recently in an old suitcase. It was a Western story, about a girl and her dying brother. After his death (page 4), our heroine moved to Wyoming, to a “vast ranch” that her uncle had conveniently left her at some time or other. There, she had numerous adventures with horse thieves, a hero named Montana (not necessarily in that order) . . . and the inevitable puppy, Rustie.
This opus, I suspect, might have run on longer than the 107 pages . . . but there must have been a deadline involved in some way . . . because on page 106, our girl suddenly woke up . . . found her brother, not only alive, but recovering . . . and the whole Wyoming experience had been . . . what else? . . . a dream.
With a grabber like that, the right title is mandatory.
I had two that were equally powerful . . . I wound up using both of them.
SOCIETY OR COWGIRL?
or
FROM DEBUT TO ROUNDUP
I mean, what would you have done?
My father and my uncle really liked it . . . not so much the plot as the writing. You see, I had just learned the parts of speech at school and, not wanting to be redundant, I never had anyone just say anything. They queried, or retorted . . . “Oh, that’s not true!” she interjected. “Oh, yes, it is!” he ejaculated.
It wasn’t until years later that I learned why my father and my uncle liked it so much.
That could account for my excessive use of exclamation marks!
Once we got past the Golden Rules business . . . (if you want those, you’ve picked up the wrong book) . . . I suggested Betty White: On and On. That, it seemed, had a nice double intent . . . Betty has been around a long time in television . . . plus the fact that all the pieces herein start with “on.” Not bad, I thought. Some wiser head pointed out that that could be an open invitation to a critic . . . “She certainly does . . . Betty White does go ———”
How about Betty White’s Short Pieces? No, no . . . So I said, “Let them work out the title. I wash my hands of it.”
No sooner said than they did just that . . . they came up with a title I liked a lot. For indeed, this is Betty White . . . in person.
On Names
Having such a problem with titles . . . what if I had had to choose a “stage name”?! My career would have been over before I could have made up my mind what to call myself!
My folks solved that for me. I was christened Betty Marion White. Not Elizabeth . . . Betty. They didn’t want any of the derivatives to sneak in . . . Liz, Lizzie, Liza, Beth. So, to leave no room for doubt, it was Betty.
Twice on stage, I was Elizabeth. Once, when we did Pride and Prejudice as our senior play at Beverly Hills High School. I played Elizabeth . . . we figured Jane Austen would have taken a dim view if we’d called the character Betty. Then again, in 1950, with my first television series . . . on live in Los Angeles until we syndicated in 1953. The creator of that series, George Tibbies, called it “Life with Elizabeth.” Except for those two lapses, it’s been plain old Betty . . . (in those days, the old was figurative.)
Even as simple a name as Betty soon developed a nickname, and, ironically, it was my mother who started calling me Bets. For years it stuck among my friends . . . with some, even today. But the men in my life . . . romantically . . . never called me that. Perhaps because my mother did.
When I married years ago, my husband’s name was Lane Allan . . . however, that was his professional name. Legally, he was Albert Wooten, so I wound up with three names to remember . . . Mrs. Lane Allan, Mrs. Albert Wooten, and/or Betty White. At the time of our divorce, I took my own name back, and isn’t it a good thing I did? When I married Allen, I could have wound up Betty Allan Ludden!
Lane was a casting director for Universal Studios, and years later . . . long after Allen and I were married . . . Lane cast me in a role in “Lucas Tanner,” a series David Hartman was doing at the time. Lane and I were friends as well as exes, so one day Allen Ludden, Lane Allan, and Betty White Wooten Allan Ludden all had lunch together in the commissary at Universal. It was a good time, and I was very proud of both these fine men. I would love to be very sophisticated and say, “Why not! That’s the way things are done!” It is . . . I guess, or should be . . . but I will admit, way deep down, it felt a little strange. I wonder if it did for them?
Every once in a while on “The Golden Girls,” Blanche rattles off a slew of Southern double and triple names . . . Billy Bob . . . Bobby Jo Sue . . . whatever. Sometimes they come right out of her Oklahoma background . . . and how I love it when she starts reminiscing about back home. Not on camera . . . in real life!
On rehearsal days, periodically we will have a short break, and often the four of us just stay in the set and chat until we start up again. Well . . . every so often, we stop short, look at each other, and break up. Somebody . . . usually Bea . . . will say, “My God, we sound just like ‘The Golden Girls’!”
Rue was christened Eddie Rue McClanahan . . . which came from a combination of Rhue-Nell, her mother’s name, and her dad’s, William Edwin. That’s a pretty good fistful for an autograph . . . Rue McClanahan.
Because Betty White was such a simple name (no cracks) the obvious question was always “Is that your real name?” My stock answer was always “Wouldn’t I have made up something a little more exciting?”
In truth, not really . . . not at that point in time. When I started out, ordinary names with ordinary spelling were par for the course. Lucille Fay Le Sueur became Joan Crawford. Frances Gumm turned into Judy Garland . . . The same was true of the men . . . Spangler Arlington Brugh distilled down to Robert Taylor, and, of course, Archie Leach was immediately changed to Cary Grant.
Not too long after that, we went through a period where the fellows were given macho-sounding one-syllable names . . . Rock! Tab! Touch!
Okay, now fast forward up to the present. Almost anything works. Cher. No fat on that name! If you’d like something a bit longer, try Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Ask her for an autograph and you could be going steady before she finished signing her name. She’ll never have a racehorse named after her . . . I think they’re only allowed seventeen letters.
Some of today’s star names are not only long, but unusual . . . often triple or hyphenated, or both, and the spelling is exotic, to say the least.
Let’s take �
��The Cosby Show,” just as a for instance:
Aside from the star, himself, we have Phylicia Rashad, who, when the show started, was Phylicia Ayers-Allen. Keshia Knight Pulliam. Tempestt Bledsoe. Lisa Bonet. Malcolm-Jamal Warner.
Obviously, that show will never work . . . with names like that no one will ever be able to remember who’s in it!!
It goes to show that no matter what you call it, if you’ve got it, you’ve got it. Their signed cast picture must be poster size.
On thinking it over, signing Rue McClanahan is a snap.
But, Betty Wooten-Allan White-Ludden still sounds a little much.
On People Watching
Ever looked up into a clear blue sky and followed a contrail to its source . . . a tiny speck that you know is a jetliner?
It never fails to intrigue me . . . realizing that inside that tiny speck there are people eating, drinking, working, dozing. For a few hours that speck is their world.
It is true that the same principle applies to a drop of water, or a grain of sand . . . but this is different. We know those people. We’ve been those people. As a rule, of course, when we are up there we are all so variously occupied, only rarely do we take time to throw a curious glance out the window at those on the ground.
Traveling alone affords a wonderful opportunity to observe people from a completely detached point of view, and can be a great learning experience.
How people look is the least of it . . . the behavior patterns are what you recognize. Those attached as pairs or groups can quickly be sorted into the ones who like each other, as opposed to those who are merely resigned. Lone passengers also fall into two main categories . . . the talkers, and the ones who yearn to be left to their own devices.