Nine of the ten women profiled in this book came to television after first establishing themselves in film or radio (often both). And then there’s Betty White, who entered the entertainment industry in television’s infancy, and became its first homegrown female sitcom star. Although today’s audiences know her best for her later roles as Sue Ann Nivens on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–77) and Rose Nylund on The Golden Girls (1985–92), White was also a pioneer in the early days of TV with her syndicated sitcom Life with Elizabeth, a show in which she not only starred, but also served as co-producer. Since then, she has gone on to have an amazing career in the medium that has now passed the fifty-year mark.
Of her early work with television, White has said, “When I started in television in 1949, television was ... just getting off the ground, and we had no idea that it would change the world as it has, and it really has. We just thought it was a wonderful new toy that everybody had....”1
Born January 17, 1922, in Oak Park, Illinois, Betty Marion White, an only child, relocated to Los Angeles with parents Horace and Tess when she was a toddler. From them she inherited what would become a life-long passion for animals. Despite the financial restrictions imposed by the Depression, the White family at one point gave food and shelter to more than two dozen dogs. She also credits “a mother and father with a great sense of humor”2 for influencing her later career choices.
Instilled in the young White from the beginning was an enthusiasm for trying whatever life had to offer. “The one really dirty word in our house was ‘bored,’” she later said. “If anyone ever said ‘bored,’ they would catch it, ’cause there were too many things that you’ll never get time to do.”3 She would later bristle at the stereotypical assumptions made about those who were only children. “The idea that because a child grows up without sibling support and/or rivalry, he is inevitably doomed to be either a lonely little waif, a selfish spoiled brat, or both is absolutely specious.”4
An aspiring performer from the time she starred in a grammar school play, White for a time thought that her singing talent would be her entree into the business. According to an article attributed to the star’s mother, Tess White, in a mid–1950s fan magazine, that career path initially looked promising.
“Rather than go on to college when she finished high school,” Mrs. White wrote, “she decided to continue her study of music, concentrating on her singing career. She had every reason to do so. She did have the raw material of a good voice; it was developing well; and she had the encouragement of her teacher, Felix Hughes, the brother of the writer, Rupert Hughes, and himself once a well-known opera singer. So, with all this behind her, Betty looked forward to a lifetime dream come true: a successful career on the opera stage.”5
Unfortunately, a bout with strep throat left White bedridden for several weeks, and, according to her mother, took its toll on her voice. Mrs. White later credited this disappointment with helping to build her daughter’s character, teaching her that most worthwhile things in life didn’t come easily.
While still a teenager, White made her television debut, at a time when TV was still considered a pipe dream by many. In 1939, shortly after her high school graduation, she was asked to participate in an experimental television broadcast. Along with a classmate, she sang excerpts from the operetta The Merry Widow, performed in a makeshift studio on the top floor of a downtown office building. The experiment was successful, and a picture of sorts was in fact transmitted, though only to a lower floor in the same building. However, fascinated as White was by the experience, the real start of broadcast television was still several years away, as was White’s professional debut in the medium.
During World War II, while volunteering with the American Women’s Voluntary Services (AWVS), White met and married a pilot, but the union was a brief one, dissolved in 1945. At loose ends, she found her way to the little theater run by theatrical agents Lela Bliss and Harry Hayden (also the parents of My Little Margie’s Don Hayden). The training and exposure she received there led to her radio debut, saying exactly one word (“Parkay!”) in an episode of The Great Gildersleeve that, thanks to a kindly producer, earned White her first union card. She was called back to play other small roles on Gildersleeve, giving her valuable professional experience though not a major breakthrough.
Had White been making the rounds a few years earlier, she probably would have tried to continue her radio career, or break into the movies. But in the late 1940s, the medium most accessible to inexperienced performers in Hollywood was television. Most established stars wouldn’t go near it, and salaries were notoriously tiny. But for White, the brand-new KLAC-TV became her training ground—“my alma mater,”6 as she later called it—with her first regular gig being a “phone girl” on a primitive viewer call-in game show called Grab Your Phone.
In 1949, White was offered a job as sidekick to radio disc jockey Al Jarvis, a fixture on KLAC’s radio lineup who was launching the new TV station’s first daytime show, to be called Hollywood on Television. Initially not much more than a televised version of Jarvis’ radio show, the new venture would run for five hours daily, from 12:30 to 5:30 p.m., sometimes filling the time by allowing viewers to watch Jarvis and company play records, instead of just listening.
Within weeks, Jarvis, White, and their staff realized that TV was a vastly different medium from radio, and the show’s format changed. On camera for hours on end every day, White’s job was to play along with whatever conversational gambits Jarvis brought up, and to deliver a boatload of live commercials. She loved it. By the late 1940s, White was serious about her career, so much so that her second marriage, to agent Lane Allan, ended over her husband’s discomfort with a working wife.
Starved for programming, KLAC tapped White for more work. Soon she and Jarvis also had a Saturday night live variety show on the station. The hour-long program consisted of an amateur contest spotlighting aspiring singers, and also featured musical numbers by White herself. That show would, unexpectedly, lead to Life with Elizabeth.
White and Jarvis began to perform brief comedy sketches tied to into her musical numbers, in which, as she explains, “the joke payoff was the title of the song.” What began as casual, largely ad-libbed bits grew into something more, and one of them soon became a recurring skit—the adventures of a husband and wife named Alvin and Elizabeth. George Tibbles, originally her accompanist, showed a flair for the funny, and egged her on.
As her mother told it, “Betty started doing a little three-minute spot at night. It was Betty’s brainchild, called ‘Alvin and Elizabeth,’ and it ... soon grew to five minutes—then more. There were no written sketches, just some things that Betty had dreamed up. She finally ran out of ideas and hired George Tibbles to write material for it—but, by then, it was a weekly one-hour show. It was later chopped down to a half-hour of just plain Life with Elizabeth.”7
White’s star was on the rise. When Al Jarvis departed KLAC, he was initially replaced as host of Hollywood on Television by movie and TV actor Eddie Albert (whose own sitcom, Leave it to Larry, ran only a few weeks on CBS in the fall of 1952). Then, when Albert accepted another job several months later, Hollywood on Television was turned over to White. “You’ve attracted a large following, and I think you’re a good enough risk,” said station manager Don Fedderson in awarding her the host’s seat. “From now on, you get top billing.”8
Not long afterwards, another opportunity was presented to White. Fedderson invited White to put together a half-hour comedy series, based on the husband-and-wife skits she and Jarvis had performed on their Saturday night program. Thus White’s pioneering sitcom was born. The half-hour comedy, initially broadcast live on KLAC-TV Saturday nights at 8:30 p.m., cast White as Elizabeth, a slightly flaky young newlywed, with actor Del Moore replacing Jarvis as her befuddled husband Alvin. The new venture was a co-production of White, station manager Fedderson, and writer Tibbles, doing business as Bandy Productions (named after the star’s pet dog, who would be seen on-camera occasionally).
Sitcoms were still in their formative years when White’s show was assembled. Although I Love Lucy was taking the country by storm, and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show was airing in biweekly, live broadcasts, there were few other models to draw upon when Elizabeth was being assembled. (Nor did White, still doing dozens of hours of live television on KLAC-TV each week, have much time to check out the competition). This left the actress and her producing partners free to experiment with format, not being bound by any particular expectations other than to make it funny.
Like Burns and Allen, Life with Elizabeth had an on-screen announcer, Jack Narz, who would introduce the show and provide some narrative continuity. Each 30-minute episode was divided into three brief sketches, running less than 10 minutes each.
As a reporter later put it, “They decided to stay away from the mean, the quarrelsome or the embittered husband and wife often depicted on TV and in the movies. There would be no ridiculing of either the wife or the husband in these skits. They would be neither stupid, nor idiotic geniuses. They’d simply be normal, wholesome, bright-eyed—and sometimes starry-eyed—persons. Normal Americans, with conventional dithers, getting into conventional messes and laughing their way out of them.”9
According to White, each Elizabeth vignette was designed to have the feel of “a little anecdote that you would tell somebody,” fleshed out and perhaps exaggerated slightly for the sake of humor. Since telling such a story in real life would take nowhere near 30 minutes, she and her production partners came up with the format of three brief sketches per episode. She and writer George Tibbles often car-pooled to work, and would trade ideas for skits as they rode. “On the drive home,” she says, “we’d talk about what we could do next week.”
Was that a mouse? Betty White clowns with Life with Elizabeth co-star Del Moore.
A review of the live, local program’s premiere, in May 1952, called it a “neat bundle of entertainment,” but noted that some technical problems remained to be ironed out. “Production was on the loose side Saturday night,” Variety reported, “with sound boom visible in a couple of shots, and dialogue by Miss White was cut off entirely by sound man, but show will undoubtedly acquire necessary polish since it has all the components and ingredients of a top package.”10
In the early 1950s, it was common practice for the TV networks to look to their local stations in markets such as Chicago and Los Angeles, which created and developed far more original programming than they do today, to generate shows that could graduate to the network schedule. Elizabeth, seen in one of the nation’s biggest markets, was being noticed, even more so when White was given an Emmy Award as Best Female Personality in 1953.
While Life with Elizabeth didn’t attract a network spot, White’s live show did capture the attention of Guild Films president Reuben Kaufman, who was in the early stages of launching a business syndicating television shows. In an article written for Variety, Kaufman later explained that Guild had been set up initially solely for the purposes of distribution, but “reluctantly decided to produce our own shows”11 when those already being done were either thought unsatisfactory, or could not be acquired on mutually acceptable financial terms.
Kaufman’s most successful show was a musical program that introduced Liberace to audiences nationwide. With that show firmly established, he was on the lookout for new properties when he watched one of the local broadcasts of Life with Elizabeth. Calling for a meeting with White and her partners, Kaufman told the young actress, “You’re wasting your talent on the California climate. You belong to the nation. I’ll put you on film as I did Liberace.”12
Kaufman was able to make a satisfactory deal with Bandy Productions to launch White’s show nationwide. Life with Elizabeth would be produced as a filmed sitcom for first-run syndication, to be launched in the fall of 1953.
The filmed episodes would not be done for a live audience, but captured through the one-camera process used for shows like My Little Margie. White later confessed that she regretted the loss of audience reaction. “It was a little like doing comedy in a mortuary,” she said, “and it threw our timing all off.”13 The finished episodes were shown to an audience, “so we would get their genuine laughs,” but sometimes it was difficult to match the editing of the show to the unpredictable audience response.
Although network executives viewed syndicators as the enemy, and discouraged their affiliate stations from buying the shows, stations across the country were hungry for programming, and Guild Films had little trouble signing up Elizabeth in markets across the country. Within two weeks, the company had placed its new sitcom in 27 markets around the U.S. The flexibility of film allowed some stations the option of broadcasting each Elizabeth episode twice, filling two slots in their weekly programming schedules.
The first filmed episode of Life with Elizabeth, distributed nationwide in the fall of 1953, began with announcer Narz addressing the audience:
“Incident #1 in the life of Elizabeth occurred on one of her ‘bad days,’” he says cheerfully. “Oh, yes, indeed, once in a while, she gets into a vile temper! But strangely enough, Alvin seems to understand. Let’s go over to the house—maybe she’s calmed down a little bit by now.”
That introduction carries us into the first vignette, titled “Tree on the Freeway.” It’s a dialogue between White and her co-star about how she spotted a downed tree blocking the road, and her vain and frustrating attempts to report this safety hazard—to the police, the Department of Sanitation, and so on until she’s spent most the money in her purse at a pay phone. Getting angrier (in a purely comedic way) as she relates the story, she’s working up a head of steam that she defuses intermittently by smashing walnuts with a small mallet. The kicker? After spending all her money on phone calls, she doesn’t have enough left to pay the attendant who filled her car with gas while she was using the phone, so he “kept the car for collateral,” she explains tearfully. That’s why she had to use her last nickel to take the bus home, where the last straw was—naturally—the bus crashing into the tree!
Following that first skit, which runs less than five minutes, announcer Narz leads us back in time to see Alvin and Elizabeth’s first kiss, which takes place outside her parents’ house at the conclusion of their seventh date. The third, and final skit, which runs the longest (almost ten minutes), concerns a dinner guest, Elizabeth’s old flame, Jack (played by the ubiquitous comedic actor Hal March, whom White remembers today as keeping everyone laughing even when no cameras were rolling).
In what would what become another of the fledgling show’s staples, the final skit concludes with the three actors all excitedly talking at once, until Narz’ off-screen voice interrupts to say, “Hey! Say goodbye to the people!” White, Moore, and March look briefly into the camera, say “Goodbye, everybody!,” and resume their argument.
It’s clear watching early episodes of Elizabeth that the show was produced on a modest budget. Aside from its two stars, and announcer Narz, guest actors are few, rarely more than one per episode, and the sets are far from elaborate. There’s little action, and anything that would have cost much to stage takes place off-camera, described rather than seen. “We had about a dollar and a quarter to do a show each week,” White says today, claiming that the show’s credits even gave billing to fictitious writers so as to make it look like a more fully staffed operation than it really was. The mom-and-pop operation, in fact, gave White a broadly-based education into the making of a TV sitcom.
Time has touched Life with Elizabeth more than some of the other shows commemorated in this book, and not all of its humor still works today. Still, the young (and then brunette) White has a charm and vitality that make it easy to understand why viewers took a shine to her, and if she hasn’t yet fully hit the comedic peak that she would reach in the 1970s and 1980s, it’s still interesting to watch her style develop. Variety, reviewing that first episode upon its debut on the DuMont station, WABD, in New York, mostly liked the show, saying it “shapes as an amusing, wacky series based on solid Americana situation material.” As for its stars, the reviewer praised White and Moore as “highly attractive, and with good comedic sense and timing.”14
By late 1953, Life with Elizabeth was being seen in dozens of markets nationwide, and White was rapidly becoming a known entity to TV audiences nationwide. NBC capitalized on her popularity by offering her a daily afternoon program to be called The Betty White Show, which premiered in February 1954. Her NBC show, originally a lunchtime half-hour, offered a pleasant mix of songs and conversation, part of the network’s plan to fill the daytime schedule with a type of programming different from CBS’ popular soap opera lineup.
Throughout the 1953-54 season, Guild Films reported sales of Life with Elizabeth to more and more markets. In early 1954, the company announced that production would begin shortly on a new batch of 34 episodes, with a larger budget allotted to each segment. Guild “has already allocated $1,093,000 for production of 74 half-hour telepix to be completed by April 20,” Variety reported.15
The bigger budget would allow those later episodes to offer some slightly spiffier sets, and a few more actors other than the regulars. Otherwise, the show changed little. Because the vignettes were brief, the plots were simpler than in most sitcoms, usually just the playing out of a single basic idea. Often they seemed to spring from situations that had happened to the writers or performers in real life, such as a sketch about the complications that arise when Alvin’s face has been immobilized by Novocain shots at the dentist, while Elizabeth’s ears are plugged up from an airplane flight. Other vignettes revolved around the complications of operating an early home-movie projector, or the squabbling that a friendly game of Monopoly can produce.
By then, White had a firm grasp on her impish, practical-joking, but basically goodhearted character. Like other female sitcom characters, she was capable of being somewhat manipulative to get what she wanted, as in the segment “Driving Lessons.”
Announcer Narz, in the show’s opening minutes, interacts with White to set up the basic situation, her responses to his off-screen voice done purely through mime. As he explains, Elizabeth wants Alvin to buy a car, but he’s resisting.
Narz: Tell me something. Why won’t Alvin buy a car?
White: (Looks annoyed, points to herself, mimes steering a car).
Narz: Oh, he thinks you’d always be borrowing it (she nods and smiles). You wouldn’t do a thing like that, would you? (She nods more emphatically). How are you going to convince him that he needs a car, and you won’t borrow it?
White: (Makes a ‘moron’ face, sticking out her tongue, while miming the steering wheel again).
Narz: Oh, you’re going to try to make him think you’re too stupid to learn to drive! (She nods). Pretty sneaky, Elizabeth!
White: (Taps her finger to her temple and nods—she’s smart! Then, as she hears Alvin approaching, shushes the announcer).
Throughout the series, the first vignette invariably closed with Narz’ off-screen voice addressing the heroine chidingly with, “Elizabeth! Aren’t you ashamed?” White’s response, then and in every episode to follow, was to look directly into camera and shake her head fiercely no.
So believable as a young wife on TV, White herself remained single in the wake of her second divorce, leery of making another mistake. Fan magazine profiles at the time, playing up her clean-cut and somewhat innocent image, noted that she lived with her parents, and often implied that she had never been married. As to why she remained single, White told an interviewer in 1954, “I’ve seen so many career marriages go wrong and I know how hard it is for a woman like me to be fair to a husband and still keep a career.
“I try not to think just of my work but I guess I’m always carrying it around with me. But what else can I do? Working on my NBC shows and on Life with Elizabeth, I have to concentrate to do any kind of decent job. I can’t just slide through it. And that reminds me—men concentrate a lot on their work so why should they expect a woman to be any less conscientious?”16
She went on to say that, should she marry again, it would probably be to a fellow performer, since he would be more likely to understand the ins and outs of maintaining a show business career. In fact, her prescription for personal happiness would ultimately be fulfilled just as she foresaw, though not until several years later.
Up to her ears in work in 1954, White was nonetheless disappointed when NBC cancelled her daytime Betty White Show in December. Though the show’s initial ratings were promising, NBC programmers jerked The Betty White Show around the schedule three different times between July and September, the frequent changes in time slot losing its initial audience and resulting in the series’ cancellation. Life with Elizabeth, however, would continue—for a time.
By 1955, with 65 episodes of Elizabeth on film, Guild ceased production of the show. The reason was apparently not lack of popularity, but rather, as a Variety article had put it, “How many first run personality telepix can producers make without reaching the point where reruns in secondary markets are being jeopardized?”17 That article reported that popular syndicated shows like Racket Squad were being halted by their production companies while still in demand, so as to earn more profit from continuing to circulate the episodes already made. Guild would continue to syndicate Elizabeth reruns almost until the sprockets wore out on the films.
Now that station executives understood that film shows could be repeated multiple times while still drawing a respectable audience share, the Elizabeth films already in the can would continue to play multiple markets, second only to Liberace’s first musical show as Guild Films’ most successful offering. By 1956, trade ads boasted that Guild had “191 musicals, 143 mysteries, 208 comedies [and] dramas, and 370 cartoons” available for lease, as well as a package of children’s shows and Western films. According to White, once the initial gloss wore off the oft-repeated Elizabeth films, the company tried a different approach, breaking apart the individual vignettes into 195 segments that, with commercials and credits added, could fill odd fifteen-minute slots on a station’s schedule.
As for White herself, in the wake of Elizabeth’s demise, she and partner Don Fedderson pitched a new sitcom, this time for network airing. Wanting to make the show stand out from the many other sitcoms already on TV by the mid–1950s, they bought the rights to the Elmer Rice stage play, “Dream Girl,” which had played to good reviews on Broadway in the mid–1940s as a vehicle for another Betty, film actress Betty Field. The basic concept, about a young woman who imagines her life as she wishes it were, was developed into a show White and her partner proposed to call Date with the Angels.
The new show again cast its star as a young housewife, this time named Vickie Angel (the pop single “I’ve Got a Date with an Angel,” a hit for the Skinnay Ennis Orchestra in the late 1930s, would be used as the show’s theme). Wanting to avoid too many similarities to the still widely-distributed Life with Elizabeth, White and her colleagues decided not to re-unite her with her former co-star Del Moore, and instead cast actor Bill Williams, previously the leading man of the syndicated Western series The Adventures of Kit Carson, as her husband Gus.
Date with the Angels would be launched under the sponsorship of Plymouth, whose executives were familiar with White’s work on Life with Elizabeth and The Betty White Show. “They came to us as a sponsor, wanting to buy the whole show,” she says. “They not only bought us, but they did a lot of promotion.” With financial backing in place, a time slot for Date with the Angels was nailed down on ABC.
In an unusual scheduling pattern for the period, White’s new show would make its debut in May, so as to help Plymouth get a jump on advertising its new year’s models arriving in dealerships that summer. Originally slotted at 10 p.m. on Fridays, the show would air its first, abbreviated season of twelve episodes between May and early August, followed by a spate of reruns from late summer through Labor Day.
Producer Fedderson and his colleagues had high hopes for the show. White, he said, “is the most underrated comedienne in Hollywood. Life with Elizabeth never got the big network push it deserved, but this time she is getting the full treatment.” Co-star Williams added, “Betty White should come out of this series as one of the biggest stars in the business.”18
Having disliked the static feeling of filming Life with Elizabeth without a studio audience, White was pleased that her new show would be done three-camera style, with former I Love Lucy director James V. Kern overseeing the action. Unfortunately, despite the success of sitcoms like Topper, Plymouth disliked the fantasy element of the show, and she and Fedderson were unable to resist pressure to phase out what had promised to set the show apart from its competitors.
“Without our dream sequences,” White said, “our show flattened out and became just one more run-of-the-mill domestic comedy, but without Del Moore’s impeccable comedic timing.”19
By the show’s fifth aired episode, “Tree on the Parkway” (6/7/57), Angels was simply a sitcom about a young married couple. The plot of that episode (the name of which may have been an in-joke reference to Life with Elizabeth’s opener, “Tree on the Freeway”) concerns Vickie’s efforts to prevent a tree in her neighborhood from being cut down, which turns into a petition drive that spins so far out of control that she receives a personal visit from the mayor, imploring her to put it to a stop.
Increasingly the new show began to rely on supporting characters to provide the laughs. Although some strong character actors, like Richard Deacon (later Mel Cooley on The Dick Van Dyke Show) were there to lend White support, Date with the Angels was struggling. An early episode called “The Wheel,” which introduced young actor Jimmy Boyd as Vickie’s awkward, innocently troublemaking teenage nephew Wheeler, drew enough laughs that the actor would reprise the role intermittently throughout the show’s run. Unfortunately, White’s own character lacked some of the spirit and sense of mischief that Elizabeth had had, leaving her too often stuck with merely reacting to what was going on around her.
TV Guide’s reviewer thought the show “harmless enough fun,” but regretted that the lead characters did not themselves inspire much laughter. “One wishes Mr. Fedderson would bring his Angels down to earth and show us how funny they are with their halos down.”20
Interviewed by TV Guide that summer, White was still guardedly optimistic. “We’ve already finished the first 13 films,” she said. “Some of them are pretty funny. Others I’m not so sure about. But our big break, I think, is going to come in the fall when we move back to an earlier hour and follow The Frank Sinatra Show. If that doesn’t help build our audience, nothing will.”21
Angels returned to the ABC airwaves with new episodes in September 1957. A few weeks later, The Frank Sinatra Show premiered as White’s Friday night lead-in. Despite its star power, that series was a surprising failure. When it crashed and burned, Date with the Angels, despite only middleweight competition from Schlitz Playhouse on CBS and The Thin Man on NBC, was dead in the water.
In a drastic move, White and Fedderson pulled the plug on their show in January, with three months left to go on their contract with Plymouth and ABC. A schedule change that moved Date with the Angels to Wednesdays at 9:30 p.m. hadn’t much helped the struggling show, and White believed that it had never really taken flight creatively. Relegating Angels to the dustbin after 33 episodes, ABC unveiled The Betty White Show (the third time around for this particular series title), in February 1958.
A half-hour skit comedy show, The Betty White Show allowed the star to play a wider variety of characters and scenes, with a plumped-up supporting cast that included Irene Ryan (later Granny of The Beverly Hillbillies), veteran character actress Reta Shaw, and her Life with Elizabeth co-star Del Moore.
Guests on her February 5 opener included movie actors Cornel Wilde and Charles Coburn. Variety commented that the new show, which was being broadcast live, “smacked of her long-ago show, Life with Elizabeth—a series of folksy skits. In those days, she restricted herself to husband-wife situations. The variation here was very slight—with one marital skit, a boarding house skit and the last, and perhaps the best, about temperamental actors.” Despite the changes, the trade paper’s reviewer found it “extremely difficult to see where the transition ... was going to hike her Nielsens significantly.”22
Indeed, The Betty White Show didn’t catch fire with Wednesday night viewers, and White’s series came to a close upon the completion of her initial one-year contract with Plymouth that spring.
Photograph sent to fans of The Betty White Show. Accompanying the original photo is a note dated April 11, 1958, thanking “Cynthia” for “your thoughtful response to our new show.”
While White has never stopped performing on television since the early 1950s, she entered a relatively quiet period as an actress in the wake of Date with the Angels’ failure. In the years following it, she became a favorite guest of Tonight Show host Jack Paar, logging more than 70 appearances during his tenure. She was also in demand for appearances on game shows like To Tell the Truth and Password, a painless paycheck for someone who had been an inveterate game-player from childhood. In addition, White was frequently tapped as commentator for events like the annual Rose Bowl Parade telecast. In 1962, she made a rare movie appearance, playing a supporting role as a senator in Otto Preminger’s Washington drama Advise and Consent (Columbia, 1962). (Not until the late 1990s, when White was in her eighth decade, would she return to feature films).
Password proved to be far more than a career move for White. While guesting on the game show, she became friendly with host Allen Ludden, who had recently been widowed. Gun-shy after two marriages, White put him off when he proposed to her, but after a year of gentle pressure, she relented. They were married on June 14, 1963, and would remain a devoted couple until she was widowed in 1981.
When not appearing on TV, White kept busy with stage appearances. She relocated from the West Coast to Connecticut after marrying Ludden, since Password was then a New York–based broadcast. White also found work hosting a radio call-in show, Ask Betty White, in the early 1960s, replacing original star Betty Furness.
For most of the 1960s, her sitcom career was regrettably dormant. Not until after she and Ludden relocated to California in 1968, purchasing a home in Brentwood where she still lives today, did she stick a toe back into sitcom land. Already in her mid-forties, White had an ageless charm that kept her from being sidelined after the age of thirty-five, as so many of her fellow actresses would be.
Going into the 1970s, her most notable recent TV acting credit was a guest appearance as a librarian on the 2/1/69 episode of CBS’ Petticoat Junction, “The Cannonball Bookmobile.” (Meanwhile, her former producing partner Don Fedderson had enjoyed the most successful phase of his career in the 1960s, with My Three Sons and Family Affair becoming long-running favorites that made him a very wealthy man). In 1971, White briefly hosted a syndicated series, The Pet Set, drawing on her lifelong love of animals. Then, in 1973, a guest appearance on her friend Mary Tyler Moore’s popular CBS sitcom unexpectedly kicked her sitcom career into high gear in middle age.
Cast as Sue Ann Nivens, WJM-TV’s “Happy Homemaker” in the show’s fourth-season opener, “The Lars Affair” (9/15/73), White played an outwardly sweet, pre–Martha Stewart “domestic goddess” who hosted a local TV show filled with cooking and housekeeping tips. Off-camera, she was a conniving, sharp-tongued home wrecker who was dallying with the unseen husband of series regular Phyllis (Cloris Leachman).
Latching onto the best role she’d had in years, White threw herself into the juicy character with a verve and skill that made Hollywood sit up and take notice. The Mary Tyler Moore Show quickly wrote in her one-shot character as a semi-regular, and she would continue to appear several times a year until it ended in 1977. Her peers awarded her two Best Supporting Actress Emmy Awards for her work on Mary Tyler Moore.
Her co-stars also admired her. Edward Asner, the often-irascible Lou Grant on-screen, noted White’s moxie during the filming of “What Do You Want to Do When You Produce?” (12/20/75). In the show’s hilarious climactic scene, Murray (Gavin MacLeod) plops Sue Ann down into a giant cake. Since there was only one cake, the gag had never been fully rehearsed before being done in front of the studio audience.
When the moment of truth arrived, White was set down with a force that caught her by surprise. Sinking through the layers of fluffy frosting, she came to rest with a jolt that unexpectedly injured her. Rather than ruining the take, which had the audience in hysterics, White rallied. “She went on with the show, and I knew she had to be hurting,” Asner recalled. “And she had the wherewithal to reach behind her and take a finger and dip it into the icing coating her ass and taste it and say, ‘It needs butter.’ They kept the line.”23
When Mary came to a close, its players, including White, were in demand for shows of their own. Twenty years after she had been tapped for her first network sitcom, Date with the Angels, White, at 55, was again offered her own show. MTM executives easily sold CBS on The Betty White Show, even though no one yet knew what its format would be.
“The first thing we considered, of course,” said writer-producer Ed. Weinberger, “was to transfer Sue Ann, the Happy Homemaker, to some suitable environment and simply let her career continue along her woman-hating, man-hungry, acerbic course. But we had tried something like that with Cloris Leachman in Phyllis and it was becoming more and more apparent in the ratings that it hadn’t been our most brilliant decision.”24 White, reckoning that a full thirty minutes of unrestrained Sue Ann each week would be too much of a good thing, concurred.
Instead, the MTM creative team devised a show-within-a-show format, casting White as actress Joyce Whitman, leading lady of a cheesy TV action drama, Undercover Woman. The obvious allusion to NBC’s then-popular Police Woman (1974–78), starring Angie Dickinson, didn’t escape that star’s notice. TV Guide reported that Dickinson, after taking in a screening of the Betty White Show pilot that spring, told her friend White, “It’s OK, darling. But if I notice your hair getting one whit blonder....”25
Co-starring John Hillerman (later of Magnum, P.I.) as White’s acerbic ex-husband, and director, the series showed promise but wasn’t given time to develop. Impatient with the initially sluggish ratings at a time when literate comedy was becoming an endangered species on TV, CBS rashly pulled the plug on The Betty White Show in early 1978, after only 13 weeks on the air.
Not long after, she suffered a personal crisis, when husband Allen Ludden, then hosting Password Plus, was diagnosed with cancer. Cutting back her work schedule, White spent time with him as they built their dream home in Carmel, realizing now that he might not live long enough to enjoy it. On June 9, 1981, White lost her husband of almost 18 years.
Focusing her energies on her work once again, White, newly acknowledged as one of TV’s funniest actresses, would create an impressive gallery of unforgettable characters over the next decade. As a guest star on The Carol Burnett Show (CBS, 1967–78), she played Ellen Harper, snobbish and condescending sister to Burnett’s pitiable Eunice in the popular “Family” skits. She continued the role when Vicki Lawrence later launched Mama’s Family, which was only mildly successful in its 1983-84 run on NBC, but later enjoyed a long life as one of the highest-rated sitcoms produced originally for syndication.
While still working occasionally on the syndicated version of Mama’s Family, she was sent a script for Susan Harris’ new comedy The Golden Girls, about four older women happily sharing a home in Miami. Because of her association with lusty Sue Ann Nivens, White was originally considered for the role of sexy senior citizen Blanche Deveraux. Instead, after watching her and co-star Rue McClanahan in rehearsal, director Jay Sandrich suggested that the two actresses trade parts, and White became the endearingly loopy Rose Nylund. The result was stunning, a tribute to her versatility, and the show immediately became a critical and popular success.
The Golden Girls was a savvy combination of the classic and the contemporary—the best of both sitcom worlds. Franker than 1950s sitcoms, the show starred two veterans of Norman Lear’s 1970s sitcom Maude, and occasionally had something potent to say about women’s rights, or the health and welfare of senior citizens. Sassy Sophia (Estelle Getty), always ready to call ’em as she saw ’em—“You look like a prostitute!” she exclaims to McClanahan’s Blanche in the pilot—tested the limits of mid–1980s TV censorship.
The Betty White Show, 1977 version: White playing an “Undercover Woman” with a beefy stunt double (Charles Cyphers).
But the show also harkened back to the golden age of TV comedy, and to the rich tradition of funny leading ladies. White, bringing a lifetime of experience in television comedy to the table, likened the experience of co-starring with McClanahan, Getty, and Beatrice Arthur (Dorothy) to a tennis match. “When you threw out a line,” she later said, “you had to brace yourself, because you knew it would be coming right back at you over the net and you’d better be ready.”26
Perhaps the most difficult character to make credible, Rose was a lovable dingdong who cheerfully told wildly improbable stories about the denizens of her hometown of Saint Olaf, Minnesota. Scarcely a trace of the calculating Sue Ann surfaced in Rose, a tribute to White’s talents. The voters of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences took notice, making her the first of the show’s stars to collect a Best Actress Emmy.
The Golden Girls would keep White in the public eye until 1992, when it came to a close after a seven-year run. She and co-stars McClanahan and Estelle Getty continued their characters in a CBS spin-off called The Golden Palace, but that show lacked the magic of its predecessor, and ran for only one season.
Still very much active in her early eighties, White has been one of television’s most valuable players for decades. Not all her series have been hits—some, like Maybe This Time (ABC, 1995-96), which teamed her with Marie Osmond, sank from view quickly. Still, even if a particular project doesn’t work, she is widely acknowledged—and always in demand—for her versatility and ability to draw laughs.
White has also been a favorite with Emmy voters, who have regularly taken notice of her work. Aside from her Mary Tyler Moore and Golden Girls wins, she took home a Daytime Emmy for her work as emcee of the short-lived game show Just Men! (NBC, 1983), a rare instance of a woman at the helm of a game show. She was named Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for a 1996 appearance on The John Larroquette Show (NBC, 1993–96), only one of numerous nominations for TV guest appearances.
Betty White (at far right) with her co-stars from NBC’s hit sitcom The Golden Girls (left to right): Bea Arthur (Dorothy), Rue McClanahan (Blanche), and (seated) Estelle Getty (Sophia).
She is also the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Comedy Awards, and in 1995 was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Television Hall of Fame. (Among the women previously inducted were Lucille Ball and Gracie Allen).
In 1998, White looked back to her television beginnings, participating in a 50th anniversary celebration for Los Angeles’ former KLAC-TV, which had since become KCOP, the city’s UPN affiliate. Resurrecting her 1950s TV character for a two-hour special aired in September 1998, White recreated one of her classic Life with Elizabeth skits for the historic broadcast. Original series announcer Jack Narz was on hand as well. Unfortunately, they could not be reunited with original co-star Del Moore (Alvin), who died in 1970.
In the late 1990s, after spending most of her career in television, White unexpectedly began racking up movie credits, playing featured roles in widely distributed features like Hard Rain (1998) and Lake Placid (1999). The latter role, which marked her first collaboration with writer-producer David E. Kelley (The Practice), startled some longtime fans because it called for White to let loose with a few choice words she’d never uttered on television—to say nothing of the scene in which the longtime animal lover’s character cheerfully fed a cow to a hungry crocodile. Since that particular scene was created through special effects, involving no real animals, and was so clearly unrealistic, she was able to find it funny.
On the other hand, when sought by friend and MTM colleague James L. Brooks for the role of Helen Hunt’s mother in his acclaimed comedy-drama As Good as It Gets (1997), she politely declined. “I turned it down because of little Jill, the adorable little dog, being thrown down the garbage chute. Jim Brooks was kind enough to offer me the role, but I called him and told him that I just couldn’t. He said, ‘but the dog is fine. The dog is safe. The dog is the star of the movie.’ I said, I know that, but there are a lot of kooks out there. They see that and say, oh, how convenient, there’s a dog that barks down the hall that bothers me. I know what I’ll do. And I said they don’t all have happy endings like that. He understood.”27
Attesting to the sincerity of White’s love for animals, should anyone doubt it, is her 1950s sitcom colleague Gale Storm, who became friendly with White after they were teamed in the early 1990s for a Museum of Broadcasting retrospective of women’s roles in television. Storm remembers walking down a Chicago sidewalk with White, who impulsively stopped a passerby holding a cat carrier. White insisted on meeting the stranger’s cat, and soon had it out of the carrier, so that she could hold it and talk to it. White herself, Storm says, lives up to her image as friendly and approachable. “She’s even better than that in person—naturally so funny, and such fun to be with.”28
In the fall of 1999, she returned to weekly television as co-star of the CBS sitcom Ladies’ Man, opposite Alfred Molina and Sharon Lawrence. At the age of 77, White was as enthusiastic about work as ever. “Don’t let anybody doing a situation comedy say they work hard,” she told a journalist. “We had to get up at the crack of 10 o’clock and the first three days, we go home early. Then on camera-blocking day, we’re there till maybe 6 o’clock. It’s just terrible.... It’s stealing is what it is.”29Ladies’ Man struggled in the ratings, and after its first season was unceremoniously yanked from the CBS schedule. Revived briefly a year later, it was ultimately canceled in 2001, her last full-time sitcom venture to date.
In 2003, she was seen in a small role as a cranky, racist neighbor in the popular Steve Martin–Queen Latifah comedy Bringing Down the House. She has also continued her association with writer-producer David E. Kelley (The Practice, Ally McBeal), who cast her in a recurring role as suspected murderess Catherine Piper on The Practice (ABC, 1997–2004). After that show concluded its run, Kelley revived her character on its spin-off, Boston Legal (2004– ), where she served as the outspoken administrative assistant of attorney Alan Shore (played by James Spader). During the 2005-06 season, Piper not only took up robbing convenience stores (armed with a rubber pistol), but also confessed to the murder of a client.
Away from work, White pursues her other lifetime passion throughout her ongoing involvement with the Los Angeles Zoo, the Morris Animal Foundation, and other organizations that promote animal welfare. She is also a published author, having penned Betty White’s Pet Love: How Pets Take Care of Us (1983, co-authored with Thomas Watson), Betty White in Person (1987), The Leading Lady: Dinah’s Story (1991, co-authored with Tom Sullivan), and Here We Go Again: My Life in Television (1995).
Not just a nostalgic figure, Betty White is still a busy working actress at a time when most people would be content to sit back and take life a bit more easily. And if the success and innovation of Life with Elizabeth is today less remembered than her classic roles as a character actress in the oft-repeated Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Golden Girls, her early work has still earned her a place in television history as one of the first—and now, as one of the most enduring, of TV’s funny ladies.
Interviewed a few weeks past her 84th birthday, White exuded enthusiasm for her current TV project—“I’m having a wonderful time on Boston Legal,” she says. Modest about her professional successes, she tends to attribute them to others. She’s quick to praise “the kind of writers that I’ve been blessed with,” citing Kelley as well as the talents behind The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Golden Girls. “Believe me, so much of it is on that page,” she says. As a performer, “you can screw up a good show, but you can’t save a bad one.”
What comes across clearly in all of White’s performances, from Life with Elizabeth to her current endeavors, is her love for what she does. While she admits that she still suffers from stage fright—“you can’t help it, it goes with the territory”—she clearly isn’t ready to retire, and rest on her laurels. Nor is it an accident that, despite her occasional forays into movies and stage work, she has remained primarily a television fixture since 1949.
“I just love the fact that you only play to two or three people at most,” she says of what she readily acknowledges is her favorite medium. “It’s a very personal medium, and a very personal audience.”
Of her fifty-plus years of employment on television, awards too numerous to count, and the demand that still exists for her services today, she says simply, “I’m the luckiest old broad on two feet.”