Betty White was America’s naughty sweetheart.
With a wholesome smile and a filthy joke she charmed millions of audiences years after decade, rising from $50-a-week to ageless superstar who encouraged her fans, “Don’t try to be young. Just open your mind.”
Even in her 90s, in defiance of time and expectations, she still enjoyed a mixed drink prior to supper, a weekly poker night and wide-eyed interest in the world around her. “There are numerous things I will not live long enough to learn about, but I’m still curious about them,” she declared.
It helped that she just needed 4 hours of sleep each night.
White, who died Friday at 99 simply weeks prior to her birthday, introduced her TV career when the medium was still in its infancy and never lost touch.
Her saucy, up-for-anything appeal certified her as a television essential. Her combination of sweetness and spice gave life to a lineup of eccentric characters in programs from the sitcom “Life With Elizabeth” in the early 1950s to man-crazy television hostess Sue Ann on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in the 1970s, from loopy housemate Rose Nylund in “The Golden Girls” in the ’80s to courtroom drama “Boston Legal,” which ranged from 2004 to 2008.
But all that proved to be only a warmup for even greater fame in the brand-new millennium when White’s stardom erupted, by public need, as it never ever had previously.
In a Snickers commercial that premiered throughout the 2010 Super Bowl telecast, she impersonated an energy-sapped dude getting tackled during a backlot football video game.
“Mike, you’re playing like Betty White out there,” sneered among his chums. White, knocked flat on the ground and covered in mud, fired back, “That’s not what your sweetheart stated!”
The instantly-viral video assisted spark a Facebook campaign called “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!,” whose half-million fans resulted in her co-hosting “Saturday Night Live” in a much-watched, much-hailed edition on Mother’s Day weekend. The look won her a seventh Emmy award.
A month later on, the TV Land cable television network premiered “Hot In Cleveland,” its very first original scripted series, which starred Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick as three show-biz veterans who relocate to Cleveland to get away the youth fixation of Hollywood. They move into a house being cared for by an elderly Polish widow– a character, played by White, who was implied to appear only in the pilot episode.
But once again, White worked her magic. The salty Elka Ostrovsky became an essential part of the series, which ended up being an instantaneous hit.
Then she was voted the Entertainer of the Year by members of The Associated Press. “It’s outrageous,” scoffed White, self-deprecating, at the honor.
“They haven’t gotten me, and I hope they never do.”
Such was her popularity that even White’s birthday became a nationwide occasion: In 2012, NBC aired “Betty White’s 90th Birthday Party” as a star-studded prime-time special. She was still working well into her 90s, including functioning as one of the voices for the toys, “Bitey White,” in “Toy Story 4.”
One thing that made White seem permanently young was her skill at playing bawdy or naughty while still radiating niceness.
The scary spoof “Lake Placid” and the comedy “The Proposal” were marked by her characters’ remarkably salted language. Her character Catherine Piper eliminated a man with a frying pan on “Boston Legal.”
However she almost wasn’t cast as “Happy Housewife” Take Legal Action Against Ann Nivens in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in 1973. She and her other half, Allen Ludden, were friends of Moore and Moore’s then-husband, producer Grant Tinker. It was feared that if White failed on the show, which already was a substantial hit, it would be embarrassing for all four.
However CBS casting head Ethel Winant declared White the rational choice. Initially prepared as a one-shot look, the function of Sue Ann lasted up until Moore ended the series in 1977.
White made comic hay as Sue Ann, for instance with a line explaining that she planned to invest Christmas with a sibling in Florida: “She’s kind of a creep,” Sue Ann noted sweetly, “but she’s got a swimming pool.”
The role brought her 2 Emmys as supporting actress in a funny series.
In 1985, White starred on NBC with Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty in “The Golden Girls.” Its cast of fully grown starlets, playing single females in Miami retirement, provided a gamble in a youth-obsessed industry, but it showed a solid hit and lasted up until 1992.
White played Rose, a mild, dim-bulb widow who managed to misinterpret most scenarios. She drove her housemates insane with off-the-wall tales of her childhood in the imaginary backwoods town of St. Olaf, Minnesota
For example, Rose’s description of the annual talent program, which was highlighted by a herring juggling act:
“Someone actually juggled herring?” her friends asked skeptically.
“No!” Rose fixed them. “It was the herring that did the juggling: tiny little Ginseng knives.”
That role won her another Emmy, and she reprised it in a brief spinoff, “The Golden Palace.”
White’s other TV series included “Mother’s Family,” as Vicki Lawrence’s irascible mom; “Simply Guy,” a game program in which women attempted to anticipate responses to concerns directed to male celebrities; and “Ladies Man,” as the catty mother of Alfred Molina.
“Just Guys” brought her a daytime Emmy, while she won a fourth prime-time Emmy in 1996 for a visitor shot on “The John Larroquette Show.”
She likewise appeared in various miniseries and television movies and made her film debut as a U.S. senator in Otto Preminger’s 1962 Capitol Hill drama “Recommend and Consent.”
She was born Betty Marion White in 1922 in Oak Park, Illinois, and relocated to Los Angeles when she was a young child.
“I’m an only child, and I had a mom and daddy who never drew a straight line: They just thought funny,” she informed The Associated Press in 2015. “We ‘d relax the breakfast table and then we ‘d start kicking it around. My dad was a salesperson and he would come home with jokes. He ‘d say, ‘Sweetheart, you can take that a person to school. However I wouldn’t take THIS one. ′ We had such a wonderful time.”
Her early aspiration was to be a writer, and she wrote her grade school graduation play, giving herself the leading role.
At Beverly Hills High School, her ambition relied on acting, and she appeared in a number of school plays. Her parents hoped she ‘d go to college, however instead she took roles in a little theater company and played bit parts in radio dramas.
Then in 1949, she was worked with for a regional daytime television program starring Al Jarvis, the best-known disc jockey in Los Angeles.
It was then that she got an idea to begin lying about her age.
“We are so age-conscious in this nation,” she stated in a 2011 interview with The Associated Press. “It’s ridiculous, but that’s the method we are. So I was told, ‘Knock four years off right now. You’ll be true blessing yourself down the roadway.’ “I was born in 1922. So I believed, ‘I must constantly bear in mind that I was born in 1926.’ However then I would have to do the mathematics. Lastly, I decided to heck with it.”
White showed to be a natural for the new medium. She was brilliant, pretty and likable, with a dimpled, eye-crinkling smile. A 1951 Los Angeles Times heading stated: “Betty White Hailed as TV’s Busiest Gal.”
“I did that reveal 5 1/2 hours a day, six days a week, for 4 1/2 years,” she recalled in 1975. Jarvis was changed by star Eddie Albert, and when he went to Europe for the film “Roman Vacation,” she headed the program.
A sketch she had actually done with Jarvis turned into a syndicated series, “Life With Elizabeth,” which won White her first Emmy. For a time, she did interviews on “The Betty White Program” in the daytime, recorded the series at night and frequently turned up on a late-night talk program. She also appeared on commercials and narrated New Year’s Pasadena Rose Parade.
With the glib tongue and quick actions supported in the Jarvis years, she was a welcome visitor on “I’ve Got a Secret,” “To Tell the Reality,” “What’s My Line” and other video game shows– all the method approximately the 2008 “Million Dollar Password,” which revived the game once hosted by Ludden, whom she had actually fulfilled as an entrant on the original “Password.”
That remained in 1961, and the next year, while exploring in summertime theater throughout tv’s off-season, she starred with Ludden– already a widower with 3 kids– in the funny “Critic’s Choice.”
White, who had declared to be “militantly single” considering that a marital relationship in the late 1940s, damaged in her resolve.
“I had always stated on ‘The Tonight Show’ and all over else that I would never ever get married again,” she told a press reporter in 1963. “But Allen surpassed me. He started in and even the children got in the act. And I gave up– willingly.”
The marriage lasted from 1963 till his death from cancer in 1981.
Off-screen, White relentlessly raised money for animal causes such as the Morris Animal Foundation and the Los Angeles Zoo. In 1970-1971, she composed, produced and hosted a syndicated television program, “The Animal Set,” to which stars brought their canines and cats. She wrote a 1983 book titled “Betty White’s Animal Love: How Pets Look After Us,” and, in 2011, released “Betty & Pals: My Life at the Zoo.”
Her devotion to animals was such that she decreased a plum role in the hit 1997 motion picture “As Great As It Gets.” She objected to a scene in which Jack Nicholson drops a lap dog down a laundry chute.
In her 2011 book “If You Ask Me (And Naturally You Will Not),” White discussed the origins of her love for dogs. Throughout the Anxiety, her daddy made radios to offer to make money. However since no one had money to purchase the radios, he voluntarily traded them for pets, which, housed in kennels in the backyard, sometimes numbered as lots of as 15 and made White’s delighted childhood even happier.
Are there any critters she doesn’t like?
“No,” White told the AP in 2011. “Anything with a leg on each corner.”
Then what about snakes?
“Ohhh, I enjoy snakes!”
And when asked how she had actually handled to be widely beloved by human beings throughout her life, not simply by animals, she summed up with a dimpled smile, “I just make it my business to get along with individuals so I can have a good time. It’s that basic.”