by Betty White
The other two members of our wedding adventure, Tess and Horace White, were undaunted by any minor glitches in the overall plan. Their own wedding, forty-two years prior, hadn’t won any prizes.
Their two sets of parents were less than thrilled at the idea of them getting married, as both were major breadwinners in their respective families. Reluctant approval was finally obtained, calling for a wedding much later in the year.
Horace had a better idea.
On February 17, accompanied by another couple, they all left work and . . . in the pouring rain . . . proceeded to a justice of the peace and were married. The foursome celebrated over a Chinese dinner, then, at eleven o’clock, Horace took his bride back to her house, kissed her goodnight, and left her, promising to keep their marriage a secret for a while. In this case, she was the one who put her wedding ring on a chain and dropped it down her neck out of sight . . . where she could swear it kept growing like Pinocchio’s nose. This went on for two weeks, until the desperate bridegroom chickened out and told his folks . . . without warning Tess. His mother called her mother, who naturally told her husband, Tess’s peppery Greek father. His reaction . . . “If you are married, you must live together!” . . . was no doubt what Horace had had in mind all along.
The newlyweds had just one short year . . . eleven months, to be exact . . . to enjoy being a twosome. I muscled in on them the following January 17. The family joke through the years was, I was born in January, and they were married in February. Today that wouldn’t be considered unusual . . . let alone funny.
To their credit . . . intruder or not . . . they made me most welcome.
On Marriage
After all the wedding dust has settled comes the marriage . . . But somewhere in between is the inevitable period of adjustment . . . to each other . . . to life together.
We hear, from time to time, an expression that is one of the nicest compliments a husband or wife can pay one another . . . “This is my best friend.”
If a marriage works, it means that two people have found a way to make most, if not all, ingredients blend. The list of things to cope with is longer than it seemed at first blush, when you entered into the contract . . . love, children, in-laws, sex, money, job pressures, habits, moods, basic differences, and so on, ad infinitum. Whether it is some or all of the above . . . to handle any of it, you had jolly well better be best friends, or forget it. It doesn’t happen right away . . . it’s something to grow into . . . otherwise, the whole arrangement comes apart at the seams. I learned the difference through experience. I am not proud of the fact that, years ago, I didn’t stick around long enough to reach that point.
Everyone is a self-styled expert on why “Those two will never make it!” . . . or “They were made for each other!” . . . “What does he (she) see in her (him)?” is another good one.
In truth, not a soul, outside of the two people involved . . . not children, parents, or friends . . . no one has the foggiest notion of what goes on between a husband and a wife.
Even with close friends you think you know so well, there are some surprises. Two people, both of whom I love very deeply, seemed to be the ultimate match. Both are intelligent, beautiful, and brilliant in their own fields . . . Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker. Such perfect casting must work . . . and it did for seventeen years. Today they are still intelligent, beautiful, and successful, and have fully established lives . . . but with two other people. Nice ones, I might add.
In a breakup like that, too often, one or the other of your beloved friends is lost to you. Typically of both Grant and Mary, however . . . no situation was ever allowed to develop that would make taking sides, or choosing between them, necessary. As it turns out, I now have four friends . . . and though Mary and Grant’s marriage is no longer . . . the friendship between them is intact.
The judge who performed the wedding ceremony for Mary and Grant in 1962 did the same for Allen and me a year later. The knot he tied for the Tinkers may have slipped, but the one for the Luddens kept getting tighter. It took cancer to pull it apart.
By now you may have gathered that I was a rather reluctant bride . . . fool that I was. Consequently, the settling in process may have taken me somewhat longer than is the norm.
When we returned to New York from our abbreviated honeymoon, we went directly from the airport to the CBS studio to tape “Password.” Playing it a little close, wouldn’t you say?
With the bridegroom moderating, of course . . . Jack Paar was booked on the show to play the game opposite the bride . . . me. It was his wedding gift to us, as he would never do game shows as a rule.
And then, at long last, the time came to go home . . . to Briarcliff Manor up in Westchester County. We didn’t find our Chappaqua house until two weeks later.
When we arrived, we walked in, to find the house filled with posters and streamers and balloons . . . all proclaiming welcome home! and congratulations! All three kids were home, and there was a lot of shrieking and hugging and kissing and giggling . . . as well as much barking from Willie and Emma, who were quick to get into the spirit of the thing. I shall never forget how much that warm welcome from everybody meant, and how it helped me over the first hurdle . . . I will be ever-grateful.
That first hurdle was . . . the fact that this was the house Allen and Margaret had moved into, just before she went to the hospital for the last time. He had, subsequently, had it all redecorated . . . but the beautiful new kitchen had been started before she had gone.
I had known all this, going in . . . and had convinced myself that I could handle it. We even walked through the house that first week, with a builder friend, talking about some further remodeling.
Fate stepped in, on cue, to help solve what I was beginning to realize could become a very real private problem. Our friends the O’Briens stopped by one morning, all excited, to tell us about a lovely old farmhouse on five and a half acres that had just come up for sale in Chappaqua . . . which was only a couple of villages to the north.
We went to look at it that very afternoon. By evening, it was ours. It really was beautiful, and . . . thank God . . . everyone in the family loved it.
With all the adjustments I knew I was making, I never kidded myself into believing that the other members of the family weren’t making even bigger ones. I kept wondering if they were thinking of Margaret . . . Well, of course they were thinking of Margaret . . . I guess I meant comparing. I felt a little like Mrs. DeWinter in Rebecca, except that Margaret had been a wonderful lady. And I knew she would forever remain that wonderful forty-seven-year-old lady . . . no matter how the world moved on for the rest of us.
I made dumb mistakes.
I carved a pumpkin to surprise everybody for Halloween . . . and was puzzled by the lack of enthusiasm it received . . . from a normally exuberant family. Allen had to explain that it was on Halloween that Margaret died.
Beautiful as our new home was, I was bombarded by private attacks of homesickness that would strike with such a vengeance, it was actual physical pain. Impossible to explain to anybody . . . even now. I had the world on a string . . . what more could I ask?
My folks came to visit the first of November . . . and they fell in love with the whole area. They were already in love with Allen.
At the end of the visit, when we drove them to the airport, Dad was showing signs of a slight cold. The doctor popped him into the hospital for a few days when he got back to California. Not to worry . . . they sent him home again the following Saturday morning. That afternoon his heart stopped.
I flew out on one plane, Allen followed on another as soon as he got off the air. Allen had to go back right after the funeral, but insisted that I stay on for a couple of days, to pack Mom up and bring her home to us for a little while.
It was when I called the Los Angeles Times the following Friday morning, to cancel her paper, that a shaking voice on the phone informed me that John Kennedy had just been shot!
Mom and I arrived back in C
happaqua . . . where for the entire weekend we all clung to each other . . . locked to the television set, mourning with the rest of the nation, as we watched the presidential funeral ceremonies. President Kennedy’s death, and my father’s are forever inseparable in my mind.
At some point during that timeless weekend, I came to realize how much it meant to have Allen there . . . beside me, sharing the grief we felt for both men . . . and from that moment I began to think of us as a unit, rather than two separate entities.
For the rest of our time together, once I finally saw the light, all of our problems came from the outside . . . never between the two of us. And we handled those problems together. I’m not for one minute saying it was smooth sailing from then on in . . . but I no longer had my foot out the door. I finally began to know what marriage was really about.
Close as I was to my mother and dad . . . I could never really understand how . . . or why . . . their marriage seemed to work.
In all those years, they never seemed to settle into that placid, taking-each-other-for-granted existence that I saw in other families. (Keep in mind, Betty, you were seeing those families from the outside. What did we say about “No one ever knows”?)
My parents were terribly in love . . . and, on occasion, it would be just that . . . terribly in love. An “I can’t live with you, can’t live without you” relationship.
They actually did split up . . . briefly . . . twice. But I wasn’t the first in our family to marry a dynamite salesman . . . there was no way Dad was going to lose her.
Both Tess and Horace adored their only child . . . yet, at no time, did I ever get an inkling that they were staying together because of me. They couldn’t stay apart.
They would try so hard not to quarrel where I could hear . . . but it’s difficult in a small tuned-in family not to know when something is going on. Mom would flare, Dad’s lip would tighten . . . maybe even stay that way for a day or two . . . during which they would be elaborately polite to each other. Sooner or later, the sun would come back out, and the fun would return.
At this late date, there is no reason to bother you with trying to figure out two people you don’t even know. Personally, however, I find it fascinating to realize that the two people I loved so well, and believed I knew completely . . . had a side, together, that I really didn’t know at all.
That’s a facet of marriage as well. To be sure.
On Widowhood
What happens afterward? When a marriage has been terminated . . . not by anyone’s decision, but by something even more irrevocable . . . where do you go from here?
It varies from individual to individual, as with anything else . . . but there are certain areas of common ground. Like the recurring question . . . from personal friends, newly widowed, or in letters from viewers, or, now and then, in talking to myself . . . “Does it ever get any better?”
Sure it does. If not better . . . let’s say it gets different.
At times, one gets the feeling that the whole world is full of nothing but widows. The actuarial tables are way ahead of me, I know . . . there are a lot of us around. But let’s look at it this way . . . at least we have more going for us today, perhaps, than at any other point in time. There are some fairly viable alternative choices, if we are forced to go it alone. Small comfort, I know, if you are in terrible pain at this moment . . . but something to keep in the back of your mind when strength begins to seep back in.
To draw differences in situations, once again I have to resort to the personal. I have no other yardstick.
It is obvious that the small White family was pretty sufficient unto itself . . . to a fault. There were friends around the perimeter, but social activity was minimal. My father’s daily work furnished him with all the outside people contact he really wanted. I had school friends, early on, then entered a work situation that was nothing but people. This meant that my mother was left with the at home challenge of keeping our rather parochial lifestyle interesting. She did a bang-up job.
Our pets have always been dealt in as equal members of our household . . . which should come as no surprise. Prior to the time I made my big decision to move east with Allen, I had been back living at home with my folks for quite some time. Able to come and go on my frequent trips out of town, it was not only a pleasant situation, but it meant the dogs could all stay together . . . cared for by the world’s best baby-sitters.
So it was, then, that in early 1963, Mom’s family consisted of Dad, Betty, Bandit (my fifteen year-old Pekingese who died shortly before I left), Dancer (a twelve-year-old poodle), and Stormy, (a St. Bernard, ten). Within less than a year, I had left and Dad had died, as had all three of the dogs.
All Mom had in the way of close friends or family in California were her brother Tom (my pal) and his wife Dale. We didn’t know it then, but he only had two years left, himself.
We brought Mom back to us when Dad died in November . . . but right after Christmas, she felt she had to get on with her life, and returned to California.
But where to begin?
She sold the house and moved into an apartment . . . which at first only served to accentuate the aloneness.
One day, when I had said, once too often, that I wished she had friends to help, she said, “What do I do? Do I walk up on the street and say, ‘Be my friend!’?” It was a cry from the heart . . . and we reminded her of it many times, later on.
My mother had worked as a bookkeeper before she was married, but not since. She was one of the fortunate ones who had been left enough money to live on. Determined not to sit and vegetate, she began to do volunteer work . . . first at the hospital at U.C.L.A. She did a little bit of everything, and everything she did won her new and lasting friends. Her first close pal was head of volunteers at the hospital at that time, Ruth Murch. It was not too long after that that Mom was helping Rufus through her own challenge of losing her husband. For me, Ruth is still my Udder Mudder.
She was invited . . . no, commandeered into the Motion Picture Mothers, a hard-working group of ladies whose kids happen to be in show biz . . . and through their efforts they raise a lot of money for the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital. Together, Mom and DeDe Ball, Lucy’s mother, joined the group, although both were anything but “joiners.” It was sort of on an “I will if you will” basis. Mom always said it was the best move she ever made . . . how she loved working, and laughing, with that gang.
Before our astonished eyes, it wasn’t too long before our “nonjoiner” was elected recording secretary . . . and saying no thank you when they talked about her as president. My friendless little mother had blossomed into a mistress of revels, and her calendar was full!
We noticed that her circle of friends consisted primarily of other women . . . widows mostly, and a few couples . . . she was not interested in finding another man. In fact, she got downright testy when someone would try and set up something. For the record, with a face and legs like hers . . . that choice was her own.
Allen was as proud of her as I was . . . he’d tease her with, “What have you been doing, Tess . . . stopping people on the street again to make friends?”
As close as Tess and I were . . . and there were those who thought we were the same person . . . our lives as widows differ entirely. Understandably.
My line of work has always meant dealing with people on all sides, constantly. Dear friends have been around, and still are today . . . the problem was lack of time to do them justice. This was not only because of work commitments, much of it was my own doing. I enjoyed spending a lot of the time I had with my mother. She was still more fun than most . . . interesting and interested . . . a great buddy with whom I could talk in shorthand, without having to explain.
When I used to hear myself going on about how I enjoyed being alone . . . I always secretly wondered if that would still be the case when the day came when I really was alone. I am most grateful to say . . . it is. To all of those who worried that my “mother complex” would resu
lt in emotional disaster when I lost her, be of good cheer. I miss her at every turn, certainly . . . but we had such quality time together that I don’t have to use up the strength she left me with, on any guilts or “if onlys.” I still enjoy her.
As a widow . . . unlike Tess, suddenly cut adrift and having to build a busy schedule from scratch . . . my situation has been just the opposite. Believe me, I never take that for granted. I appreciate how fortunate I am! But I still fight for and treasure those times when I can close the door and be all by myself, to recharge the battery . . . (pets, of course, are exempt) . . . and I find myself saying no to things, perhaps more than I should. Except work. So while there is a lot of Tess in me . . . there is more Horace than I’d ever imagined.
It is fascinating to see how our lives manage to sort themselves out and regenerate, if we let them. My mother had another completely different life for the twenty-two years after Dad died . . . and a full and happy one, despite the dismal beginning.
Allen had another whole unit of his life after he lost Margaret . . . yet, at the time, he would never have believed such a thing possible. His love for me in no way encroached on what he had had with her.