“Sickeningly optimistic.” That’s how Betty White described herself during a recent telephone interview. And why shouldn’t she be? She’s been spreading White Fever for 89 years now, and the bout she reignited in 2009 with a blockbuster movie (The Proposal), a smash Super Bowl ad and an Emmy win (her sixth, for hosting Saturday Night Live) shows no signs of abating.
Her hit TV show, Hot in Cleveland, netted her a Screen Actors Guild Award in January, and was recently renewed for a third season. Her latest book – her fifth – entitled If You Ask Me (And of Course You Won’t), debuted this week at No. 4 on The New York Times hardcover non-fiction bestseller list, right behind books by Tina Fey, Steven Tyler and Rob Lowe. And this fall she’ll host a new show on NBC, Betty White’s Off Their Rockers, in which the elderly punk the young.
“I’m the luckiest old broad on two feet,” White said. “I don’t have the foggiest notion why it’s happening. I’m just tasting it and enjoying it.”
She sure works for it. She wrote her book, in longhand (she has beautiful penmanship), in snatches over nine months. Her publisher, Putnam, was eager to capitalize on White Fever, and she agreed because the deal included a second book about the importance of zoos, one of her passions. If You Ask Me is more a collection of musings than a linear memoir, but the picture that emerges is of a sincere, indefatigable woman who calls everyone (including me) “honey” or “darling,” and who makes her own luck by saying yes way more often than no.
White has an authenticity born of professionalism that is rarely seen any more. Her first TV job was co-hosting one of TV’s first shows, Hollywood on Television, a local Los Angeles variety program that ran five and a half hours a day, six days a week – live. The medium was so new that during the first week, White’s co-host, who had come from radio, played records on the air while he and White talked in the background. People kept calling in wanting to know what they were saying, so they made it a talk show.
“It was like going to college,” White said. “You had to think on your feet. I’m very grateful for it. You get to know how people accept things.”
She quickly learned what worked for her, and stuck with it: a style of comedy I’ll call the Candy-Coated Chili Pepper, because it starts out sweet and then zaps you with a zinger. All three of her characters on her beloved ensemble series – The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Golden Girls and now Hot in Cleveland – have a veneer of chirpiness that cracks, with exquisite timing, to reveal an underside of sarcasm, randiness or both. It allows her to have bite without meanness, while still getting off the best lines.
You can see it in the way her kindly grandma character in The Proposal spends a long time commenting on the smallness of Sandra Bullock’s breasts, and you can really see it in the mock behind-the-scenes video that White, Bullock and their co-star Ryan Reynolds made. Feeble and sweet when Bullock is around, White terrorizes Reynolds when they’re alone.
“I’m not good with the f-word,” White said. “Sandra and Ryan can rattle it off, but I don’t enjoy that language.” Beat. “So I wound up just giving him the finger.”
While a new generation discovers her on DVD and YouTube, White also knows how to play to the Viagra set, understanding the inherent comedy of a senior citizen with a sex drive. Receiving a lifetime-achievement award at the 2010 Screen Actors Guild Awards, she gushed sincerely about how lucky she’s been to work with so many in the room, and then seamlessly added, “And I may have had some of you, too.” Back on that podium again in 2011, she stroked the statuette’s bare bottom and smiled lewdly.
