by Betty White
To get some specifics, I went to someone who has an ongoing romance with the theater . . . Estelle Getty. Lucky as we are to have her as Sophia, her first love is the Broadway stage . . . and the feeling is mutual. It was there that she won the Helen Hayes Award for Torch Song Trilogy.
Estelle says there are innumerable trivial theatrical superstitions . . . but here are the heavy numbers:
Never wear green. (My favorite color seems to get very bad press. Obviously, Mother Nature was never in the theater.)
Never whistle. I had always understood that you shouldn’t whistle in the dressing room . . . Estelle says NEVER! If you do whistle, you must walk outside, spit, turn around three times, then ask to be allowed back in . . . “Please, may I come in?” Boy, am I glad I didn’t know about that one, all the times I sang “Whistle a Happy Tune” during The King and I. Maybe they just mean don’t whistle onstage. I can’t whistle anyway . . . the hell with it.
Never speak the name MacBeth backstage. As Estelle puts it, “Don’t ever say the name of that Shakespearian King aloud!” As Gene Rayburn of “The Match Game” would put it . . . “King Blank.”
So far, I have not heard of any superstitions specifically pertaining to television. Come to think of it, I spent my first five years in TV on Lucky Channel Thirteen. Maybe I’m exempt.
Knock wood.
On the Cosmic View
Use the word “cosmic” in casual conversation and watch people’s eyes begin to glaze. It can have a somewhat pretentious flavor . . . especially coming out of someone who makes corny jokes . . . yet it is a word I use a lot in trying to explain my personal philosophy. (Talk about pretentious!)
“Cosmic view” is simply less of a mouthful than “keeping the overall picture in mind” . . . and it best describes an inner attitude I strive to maintain. Sometimes with more success than others. Describing an ephemeral outlook is next to impossible, maybe not even desirable . . . but, hey! . . . we’ve come this far together . . . let’s have a go at it.
Day by day, we work our way through whatever is happening around us. I think of that as being at ground level . . . that’s now. With the passage of time . . . a week, a month, a year . . . we begin to gain a little more perspective on this moment, and think of it as then. It’s as though the camera is pulling back, ever so gradually. Finite details may begin to blur, but the picture keeps enlarging, taking in more and more. As the light changes, we see now in relationship with what has gone before. It begins to take on a pattern and, with any luck, even begins to make sense.
This overview is indispensable, it seems to me, to achieve any kind of objectivity. With practice, I find I can keep pulling that camera back just fine . . . unless I am personally involved. Then, of course, everything goes to hell in a handbasket.
A trivial, but typical, example of this overview concept is the fashion industry. Something is all the rage one minute, out the next, disappears momentarily, surfaces briefly as “high camp” in a comedy sketch, vanishes again, then sweeps back in as the height of today’s “look.” Joan Crawford’s shoulder pads of the forties swept back in so far that we’ve started putting them in our underwear. No doubt they will be long gone before we go to press.
Now, when you have lived as long as I have, a pattern in these cycles begins to emerge. You’d think it would be possible to learn to predict them . . . unfortunately, my hindsight is much better than my foresight, which needs work.
Staying with fashion, but moving the camera back just a little more, it’s interesting to watch clothes come on and off. Cave people didn’t wear any at all until it turned chilly. (We might forgive them for wearing fur, don’t you think?) And from then on the fun started.
Now, fast forward through history . . . more clothes, less clothes, more, less, more . . . breasts are covered, uncovered, covered . . . they’re in, they’re out . . . sometimes they had to be out to be “in.”
At this present moment in time, we keep showing a little more skin each year, as the shock waves grow smaller. At last, they cry, we are freeing ourselves from the inhibitions of the past, and letting it all hang out. Well, it’s going to make me giggle when the big coverup begins. We are about due for our friendly pendulum to swing completely back the other way. We might even be in for a spell of “demure.” One can only hope they don’t resurrect the hoopskirt, designed to cover a Queen’s pregnancy. That could make a drastic change in “the campus look.”
To be sure, the cosmic view has its less frivolous side. Keep in mind, there is no limit on how far back you can pull the camera.
It has always fascinated me to realize that my mother, born in 1899, saw the advent of so many things that we take for granted as commonplace. So much more took place in her eighty-seven years than did in her mother’s lifetime, or her mother’s before her . . . automobiles, planes, frozen foods, television, computers, a walk on the moon, and space travel beyond!
The rate of forward movement, for better or worse, continues to accelerate . . . more advances in less time. A baby born this week has a considerably longer life expectancy, all things being equal, than Mom’s eighty-seven years. Say he lives to be a hundred . . . he will see the resolution of some of the problems with which we are so preoccupied right now . . . he will have a progress report on our other ongoing concerns . . . plus, he’ll see the beginnings of things you and I can’t even imagine. Today’s state-of-the-art hard-and software will be archaic before he starts school!
All this can be an engrossing spectator sport, but as I mentioned, one’s objectivity is in direct proportion to his degree of involvement. With all my efforts to keep my perspective, there are certain issues on which my cosmic approach goes out the window, and I’m right back at ground level, joining the battle.
In my own lifetime (kid that I am!), it is easy to remember when we, the general public, thought of our planet in terms of perpetuity. “Mother Earth” was indestructible. Oceans were not considered, by the majority, to have a fragile ecology . . . they had always been there, always would be. Good air and pure water were taken for granted as forever. Commercial foods were judged on their flavor and convenience . . . their purity was seldom questioned. Certain animal species and plant forms went out of existence . . . completely and unnoticed.
In the last couple of decades, it has begun to dawn on us that very real problems do exist in these areas . . . that’s a step in the right direction, at least, whether we as individuals choose to do anything about them or not.
Looking ahead or looking back . . . I find them both equally intriguing. It is not an either/or situation.
My father died twenty-five years ago, and just think of what has come to pass since then . . . good and bad. Horace White was a delightful free spirit, but I think that if he were to come back today, and go to what would be considered an average movie . . . even PG-rated . . . he would be, shall we say . . . surprised. An ordinary afternoon soap opera might blow his mind!
Allen has been gone only six years, but he, too, would be in for a major culture shock . . . just at some of the punchlines on “The Golden Girls” alone! To say nothing of seeing condoms advertised on television!
As our advances accelerate, so, too, do our problems . . . and we have some corkers. Terrorism, world hunger, crime, nuclear accidents, child abuse, the drug problem, AIDS, water and air pollution, overpopulation . . . to name a few, in no particular order.
The doomsayers continue to throw up their hands and proclaim that we are on our last hurrah as a human species. “What does it all matter!” “The world is in such a mess, anything goes!” They use this dogma to cover a multitude of sins . . . and too many of these same individuals spend their lives on dead center.
I am not an ostrich. I read the papers . . . listen to the news. Even little Pollyanna here is forced to admit that it all does have an apocalyptic flavor. But dammit . . . I am going to continue to work as hard as I can in areas where I think I can help, and get on with my life! Otherwise . . . suppose I blow it all
now, then, down the road, I look up to discover the sky hasn’t fallen after all!
The doomsayers might be right, and my point of view, hopelessly naive. Only time will tell . . . of which we may have a little or a lot. In the meantime, it does seem to me that theirs is a rather unrewarding philosophy, while we’re waiting to find out.
No . . . I’m not an ostrich. Merely a cockeyed optimist.
On fear
There are almost as many kinds of fear as there are varieties of love. Some are easy to understand, others are completely unreasonable. You start mentioning what you think of as your big fear . . . suddenly you find you have shaken the tree, and lots of little scary things come running out.
Introduce the word “fear,” and I immediately think “fire.” But what about spiders . . . most bugs, for that matter . . . stage fright, high places without hand railings, embarrassment? . . . I’d go on, but I’m afraid to.
Embarrassment is not unrelated to stage fright, come to think of it. Waiting to make an entrance onstage, your mouth dries up, you can’t get your upper lip down off your front teeth, your heart is around your knees. Why? For fear of going out there and embarrassing yourself . . . and everyone else . . . by doing something really dumb. To be sure, this is not one of the more groundless fears . . . it has happened to me too often.
Does everybody get jittery before a show? Some admit it, others try to ignore it so it will go away, but I would bet that no one is completely immune. It also doesn’t seem to matter how long you have been performing . . . while you may have a little more technique to fall back on, the panic is still there. Even lovely Helen Hayes told me one time that she gets physically ill before a show.
Someone should put a camera on the four Golden Girls before showtime some Friday night. We gather in a tiny area offstage by the living room set, waiting to be introduced to the studio audience. Rue McClanahan, “Blanche,” will look you in the eye and swear she never gets stage fright. She is excited before a show, she says, but not nervous. Well . . . then I guess I’ve seen her when she’s been pretty excited! Bea, “Dorothy,” gets very quiet, and about four inches taller . . . when she grabs your hand, you can hear the bones crack. Estelle Getty, “Sophia,” talks about retiring to her sister’s condominium in Florida and getting out of show business . . . she doesn’t mean later in life, she’s talking about right then! As far as “Rose” is concerned, I feel myself getting aggressively cheerful, whipping up the spirits of the troops. Unable to stop myself, all I need is a letter sweater and pompoms . . . one night all three of those ladies are going to deck me.
Stage fright is not a show business exclusive . . . we just abuse the privilege. It is there for everyone who walks into a new job, a new date, new in-laws . . . even walking into a party can be agony for someone who is not socially oriented. Butterflies, as beautiful as they are, should stay in the garden where they belong.
Wonder who first described that awful feeling of terror as “having butterflies”? It’s such a misnomer . . . butterflies make you feel good just looking at them, even if they can’t fly without staggering.
It’s difficult to equate butterflies with bugs . . . they are the privileged class of the insect family.
Other insects don’t really make me feel warm all over. Spiders, in particular, were a basic phobia for most of my life . . . I couldn’t look at them without that cold chill running all through my body. I really worked at overcoming this nonsense, and tried to concentrate on all the good they do . . . but I would still turn to Jell-O when one would drop in front of me. They know this! Let there be one spider in a room full of people, and he’ll find me. Whether he is poisonous or not is of no consequence . . . even a poor old daddy longlegs could get to me . . . until a very few years ago . . . a friend gave me a copy of Charlotte’s Web, and I began to shape up. Today I can even coax a spider into a jar to take him outside to release him. Once that is accomplished . . . then I have my shuddering fit. I’m getting better.
It is short-sighted to badmouth the world of insects . . . I even feel they might resent being called “bugs.” They are truly remarkable when you think about it. Three fourths of all known animal species are insects. They have inhabited the world for three hundred and seventy-five million years . . . there are over one million species . . . and only one tenth of one percent of the whole gang can be termed pests.
That’s not the half of it. The average insect weighs one ten-thousandth of an ounce . . . yet all the insects on earth put together weigh twelve times as much as the human population! Most of all, I would like to meet the fellow who figured all that up.
These could be a few of the reasons that so many of us are intimidated by these creatures. Plus the fact that long after humans have disappeared . . . they will still be around.
My good friend Beatrice Arthur has a weak spot or two herself. Bea loves animals and gives a tremendous amount on their behalf. However one day on “The Golden Girls” our script revolved around a piano-playing chicken. Naturally, I for one was delighted that we were getting to work with a live creature. For the first two days we rehearsed with a toy . . . the star chicken wasn’t called in until Wednesday. Came the big day, and when “Count Bessie” arrived on the set, Bea turned pale as a ghost . . . and split! Poor darling, she hadn’t said anything, but she has a terrible phobia about live chickens . . . all live chickens, not just ones that play the piano. Since we had several scenes to play together, they had to be staged so that Bea was on one side of the room, and “Bessie” and Betty were as far from her as possible.
Bea is not alone in this phobia . . . Alfred Hitchcock made a very lucrative film about it called The Birds. It just came as a surprise to us to see what it did to Bea, who always seems to be in control of any situation. We were all very understanding and sympathetic. Of course, Rue and Estelle and I will never tease her about it. Nor will we make a lot of ongoing chicken jokes from here on out. Of course we won’t. Certainly not.
As I said in the beginning, my real bête noir is fire. Not the cozy kind in a stone fireplace, when you’re cuddled up with a cold drink and a warm friend . . . or at least a good book. That is civilized domesticated fire. I’m talking about the wild variety . . . Fire! It scares everyone, or at least it should, but I’m talking sheer paralyzing panic.
Living in California almost all my life, and seeing what havoc a brushfire can wreak, probably accounts for a good part of my terror. Or it may have stemmed from one of my earliest recollections . . . being camped out in the High Sierras with my folks, and seeing a forest fire creeping over the ridge just beyond us. I shall never forget the terrified animals crashing through the brush ahead of the fire . . . deer, squirrels, snakes, chipmunks . . . even a porcupine. Dad broke camp in short order, and he and Mom got us packed up and out. I can still remember running with a can of evaporated milk, thinking I was helping. To this day, when I see a pall of smoke in the sky indicating a brushfire, I revert right back to the little kid with the tin can.
Seeing someone toss a burning cigarette out of a car is enough to make me absolutely paranoid.
I don’t even want to think about what happens to Bea if she passes a poultry truck.
On Other Fears
My list of fears keeps growing until I begin to wonder if I have always been chicken. (Sorry, Bea!)
Although something of a tomboy, I managed to get through growing up without any broken bones. I worked hard at capture the flag, king of the mountain, and kick the can, logged a lot of hours on the rings and horizontal bars, and skated thousands of miles dreaming of joining the Ice Follies . . . but I lacked the fearlessness that must be in every true competitor. I would practice a back somersault off the high bar . . . sometimes it even worked . . . but it always hurt. Not giving it that extra push was probably what got me through relatively unscathed . . . Mary Lou Retton I wasn’t.
As I grew a little older, I also managed to get through without any broken hearts, during the years when that is usually par for the course.
Again, it was because I was afraid of pain, I guess. I would do one of two things . . . either worship someone from a nice safe anonymous distance (Arnie Ballantyne, who was our high school student body president, is a good for instance) . . . or, if I was going out with someone, be prepared to run if I so much as imagined he showed a flicker of interest elsewhere.
Fortunately, I learned you can’t live your whole life that way. Through the intervening years I haven’t always kept my guard up, and I have the bruises to prove it.
Today, with Allen gone, every interview includes the question “Do you think you will ever marry again?” and my honest answer is a firm “No!” The main and really only reason for this is because Allen and I had such a great time, it would be tough . . . no, impossible . . . ever to make a complete commitment again.
Way in the back of my mind, however, a nagging little question pops up . . . could it also be fear? Fear that, at this late date, someone might want me today, but lose interest down the road a piece? (So to speak.) Fear that having adjusted to living alone . . . and really treasuring the privacy . . . that I would find myself unable to fully share my life on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis again? Fear that involuntary comparisons . . . (not only my memories of Allen, but my new partner would have ghosts of his own) . . . would prove more than we could handle?
Mind you, I don’t lose sleep wondering about any of these things. But since we were talking about my being somewhat chicken as a kid, it occurred to me . . . wouldn’t it be funny if I was now reverting to childhood, and playing it safe once again? Funny peculiar, that is . . . not funny ha-ha.