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Kenyan fossil hunter
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Richard Leakey
Page 42The oft-used description of Betty
White as the “first lady of television”
paid homage to her venerable status
and was not far from the literal truth.
The medium was in its infancy on the
west coast of the United States when
White appeared on an experimental
broadcast in 1939, waltzing and per-
forming songs from The Merry Widow
on the sixth level of a Los Angeles office
building for an audience of a few people
gathered on the ground floor.
That was the year she graduated
from high school. Her final acting cred-
its came 80 years later. Not surprisingly,
she held the Guinness World Record
for the longest television career by a
female entertainer.
White starred in beloved television
sitcoms before reaching a new genera-
tion of fans late in life as she sweetly
delivered withering one-liners that
dripped like honey but burnt like acid.
As the years advanced she became
known as “America’s grandmother”, her
kindly demeanour ensuring that bawdy
punchlines landed with singular force.
White had challenged sexist and
ageist conventions in her fifties with her
recurring role on The Mary Tyler Moore
Show as Sue Ann Nivens, an ostensibly
wholesome television presenter with a
salacious streak, winning Emmy
awards in 1975 and 1976. “She’s not only
a bitch, but a nympho. She can’t keep
her hands off any man,” White told the
Los Angeles Times. “I’ve been waiting all
my life for a part like this.”
In the Eighties she took on her most
celebrated character: Rose Nylund in
The Golden Girls, a ditsy widow from
Minnesota conceived as “terminally
naive”. White had been set to play the
contrasting part of the feisty, man-
hungry Blanche Devereaux, with Rue
McClanahan as Rose, but the director
suggested they switch to avoid compari-
sons with White’s portrayal of Sue Ann.
In the series Rose, Dorothy Zbornak
(Bea Arthur) and her mother, Sophia
Petrillo (Estelle Getty), rent rooms in a
Miami home owned by Blanche, a sassy
southern belle. The women, all over 50,
are single and determined to have fun.
“Whether 16 or 60, women will share
their joys and sorrows... and their
lusts,” White said. “You don’t fall off
your perch just because you’re 50.”
Affable and self-deprecating, White,
who was the oldest and last surviving
Golden Girl, enjoyed a drink, played
poker and preserved her saucy sense of
humour. An interviewer asked White
when she was 88 if there was anything
left she would really like to do? “Robert
Redford,” she replied. When she was
given the Screen Actors Guild lifetime
achievement award in 2010 she said in
her acceptance speech: “I’ve worked
with quite a few [of you]. Maybe had a
couple. And you know who you are.”
Hollywood casting directors deemed
her insufficiently photogenic for the
movies so she started in radio in the
1940s with a modest part in a sitcom:
her job was to utter the name of the
brand of margarine that sponsored the
show. She was soon promoted, generat-
ing crowd noise and declaiming a two-
line ditty advertising American Air-
lines. More gainful employment
followed and her television career
blossomed in the Fifties.
She hosted Hollywood on Television, a
one series. White then made numerous
guest appearances on various series,
including as a Prozac-pushing doctor
on Ally McBeal.
A self-described workaholic, she
stepped up her duties in her ninth
decade, putting in 12-hour shifts aged- She joined the cast of the long-run-
ning soap opera The Bold and the Beau-
tiful in 2006 and had a recurring role in
Boston Legal, a comedy-drama starring
William Shatner, whom she merciless-
ly mocked in a double entendre-
crammed “roast” show.
White was then cast in the television
sitcom Hot in Cleveland, in which she
played a brazen caretaker. She was only
expected to appear in the pilot but
made such an impact that she featured
in 124 episodes from 2010 to 2015.
Her first award, a regional Emmy for
outstanding personality in Los Angeles,
came in 1952. She won her seventh and
last Emmy for her performance as a
guest host of the sketch and variety
show, Saturday Night Live, aged 88 in - A Facebook group set up to cam-
paign for her to get the gig had attracted
half a million members, many of them
introduced to White’s charms through a
commercial aired during that year’s
Super Bowl in which she was brutally
tackled while playing American football
on a muddy field. “I didn’t know what
Facebook was,” she said. “And now that
I do know what it is, I have to say, it
sounds like a huge waste of time.” She
celebrated at the after-show party with a
vodka and a hot dog.
An only child, Betty Marion White
was born in 1922 in the Chicago suburb
of Oak Park to the former Tess Cachik-
is, a homemaker, and Horace, a lighting
company executive. The family moved
to Los Angeles when Betty was a
toddler. A passion for wildlife and the
outdoors inherited from her parents led
her to dream of working as a forest
ranger, but she decided to become an
actress while writing and performing in
plays at school in Beverly Hills.
White drove a truck for the Amer-
ican Women’s Voluntary Services dur-
ing the Second World War, delivering
supplies to troops stationed in the
Hollywood Hills. She met a fighter
pilot, Dick Barker, in a dance hall and
they married in 1945. However, the
prospect of spending the rest of her life
slaughtering poultry on his family’s
chicken farm in rural Ohio proved less
appealing than pursuing fame and
fortune in Los Angeles. The marriage
lasted six months.
While acting at a small theatre in
Beverly Hills she met Lane Allan, anlive talk and variety show that ran for
five and a half hours a day, six days a
week. This was said to have made her
the first American woman to present a
talk show solo. A character from one of
the show’s sketches was spun into a
sitcom, Life With Elizabeth.
White, who co-founded a production
company, had a degree of creative con-
trol that was then unusual for a woman.
A variety programme, The Betty White
Show, was televised nationally in 1954.She refused racist demands from
station managers in the Deep South to
take a black tap-dancer named Arthur
Duncan off the air, instead inviting him
back for more appearances.
That show was short-lived, but her
sharp and mischievous wit helped her
to thrive as an in-demand celebrity
contestant and a host on television
game shows in subsequent decades.
The Golden Girls ran for seven series
from 1985 until 1992, when Arthur left.
A spin-off without Arthur, The Golden
Palace, flopped and was cancelled afterAsked what else there
was for her to do, she
replied: ‘Robert Redford’
White’s career blossomed in the 1950s. She re-emerged in The Golden Girls (above, far right), which ran for seven seriesagent and actor. They married in 1947
but the relationship soured when she
preferred to focus on her career rather
than start a family, and they separated
after two years.
White’s great love was Allen Ludden,
a widowed game show host. They met
when she was a celebrity guest on his
programme, Password, in 1961. They
married two years later, with White
becoming stepmother to his three
children, and were together until his
death from cancer in 1981. She did not
remarry. “When you’ve had the best,
who needs the rest?” she said. White’s
star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is
next to Ludden’s.
White, an animal rights advocate,
turned down a role in the Academy
Award-winning 1997 film As Good as It
Gets because one scene depicted a dog
being dispatched down a rubbish chute.
She joined the Greater Los Angeles Zoo
Association board of trustees in 1974
and campaigned to raise funds. “At one
time I probably could have sold my
body,” she wrote, “but that market dis-
appeared.” Her involvement in a chim-
panzee enclosure project led to a friend-
ship with Dame Jane Goodall, the Brit-
ish primatologist.
White’s youthful fantasy was realised
when the US Forest Service made her an
honorary forest ranger in 2010. She was
honoured with a bronze plaque near the
gorilla exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo.
One of her last roles was as the voice
of a tiger, Bitey White, in the 2019
animated film, Toy Story 4. Her age and
standing as a national treasure led to
White becoming the subject of several
death hoaxes that swept over social
media. A popular meme pointed out
that White was older than sliced bread.
Her birth preceded the invention of a
commercial slicer by six years.
She died less than three weeks before
her 100th birthday, in the week that
People magazine prematurely celebrat-
ed her centenary with an interview and
cover story headlined, “Betty White
Turns 100! Funny Never Gets Old”. It
was, in the most rueful and regrettable
way, one final example of her
exceptional comic timing.Betty White, comic actress, was born on
January 17, 1922. She died of natural
causes on December 31, 2021, aged 99Obituaries
Betty White
‘First lady’ of US television who wisecracked on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and played the ‘terminally naive’ Rose in The Golden Girls
BETTMANN/GETTYd t Theymarriedin 1947