Hearing that familiar voice, your heart can’t help but get ten degrees warmer. On the other end of the phone is Betty White, America’s sweet old grandmother, whose charm and affable demeanor will mark its sixtieth year in entertainment next month. Since breaking through in 1970 as the man-hungry Sue Ann Nivens on Mary Tyler Moore, White’s tender voice and buoyant eyes have graced a collection of shows that read like a television viewer’s list of dear friends: The Odd Couple, The Love Boat, Fame, Who’s the Boss?, Matlock, Ally McBeal, The Simpsons and many more.
After decades of game shows and talk shows and guest appearances, the supporting actress finally took center stage in 1985 with the unconventional sitcom The Golden Girls, one of Brandon Tartikoff’s many triumphs. A ratings bonanza from week one, the adventures of White’s dim Rose, along with oversexed southern belle Blanche (Rue McLanahan), wet blanket Dorothy (Bea Arthur) and her quick-witted mother Sophia (Estelle Getty) delighted audiences of all ages for seven seasons. The life of a funny granny delivered White to a new level of demand that has since brought her scene-stealing appearances in everything from Lake Placid to Bringing Down the House to The Practice. Now, some twenty years later, the world’s funniest senior citizens have returned with a Season 1 DVD release that reminds us that these girls were worth their weight in gold.
“After being in re-runs as long as we have, sometimes I think the audience knows the lines better than we do,” the 82-year-old actress laughs. “But people wanted the DVD – I get a lot of mail about it.”
White marvels that she still receives fan mail for her work as Rose, and is even more amazed at the broad demographics that write in: old, young, gay, straight, all races and creeds. “Isn’t that remarkable? When we were on Saturday nights during our first run, the gay bars around Los Angeles would shut down the music when Golden Girls would come on, then when it was over, they’d start the music back up and everyone would be dancing again. I think the gay community likes old ladies.”
White credits the continuing success of the show to its razor-sharp writing and the fact that everybody, no matter what their background, has at one time loved a grandmother. “People remember growing up watching our show with their mothers or their grandmothers. I think we seem like their grandmothers.”
With the first season being released on DVD, upcoming discs being planned and the show running continuously on cable channels like Lifetime, a generation of fans that weren’t even born in the Eighties are discovering the Girls for the first time. “It’s still fun to walk through a market or something like that and some little kid will tug on my slacks and say, ‘Wose, it’s Wose!” She chuckles. “They can’t even pronounce it yet, but they know from the reruns that it’s Rose.”
Unceasingly polite (thank her for the show and she elatedly replies “Thank you for laughing!”) and blessed with a knack for naiveté that masks the shrewd mind of an actress able to sidestep the perils of Hollywood, White was perfect for the part of Rose. Shockingly, she almost didn’t get it.
“Originally, they wrote the show with me in mind for Blanche,” she remembers. “But [director Jay Sandrich] said, ‘If Betty plays another man-hungry person they’re going to equate it with Sue Ann and think it’s just a continuation of that. Why don’t we give her Rose and give Blanche to Rue?’ I didn’t know what to do with Rose.”
“Jay said, ‘She takes every word for its absolute meaning,” White continues. “‘No sarcasm, no nothing.’ If somebody said they could eat a horse, she’d call the SPCA.’ Rue took Blanche out into an orbit where I would never have dared to go. It worked out so beautifully, and I thank Jay Sandrich every day of my life.”
With the cast set, the show was an immediate success. “Bill Cosby was on at the time, and he had a hold of the television business,” the actress recalls. “We beat him out the first week on the air, we were number one and he was number two and we thought, ‘Whoops, we’re on to something!’
“Thank you for being a friend…” the show’s classic theme song intoned every week. According to White, the stars knew as they read the first script who their best friends were going to be: a diverse writing team that included Marc Cherry (creator of Desperate Housewives), Susan Harris (Benson, Soap), and Mort Nathan (writer of the Farrelly Bros.’ Kingpin) It almost makes you wonder if Cherry’s current hit show came in part from his imaginings of quartet of golden girls as younger suburban gals.
“Let me just say with all my heart that we were so blessed with good writing,” she insists. “And the writers were so ahead of the game, and they had our characters so beautifully sorted out that we were like four points on a compass: each one distinct from each other but so well blended. We didn’t have to stray from the script. We could just relax and enjoy that delicious writing.”
White recalls that it started the first day of the first read-through for the pilot. “We had all received this really great script from Susan Harris,” she recalls. “You get so many bad scripts, that to get a good one gets your attention. We had all read the script for ourselves, but then we sat down around that table, it was like hitting a tennis ball over the net – you’d better be ready because you were going to get it right back over the net.”
Those great Golden Girls scripts may be best remembered for balancing the girls’ snappy, often brutal, put-downs with their shared affections. The program was never one to shy away from serious societal concerns, however. “We did a show where they thought Rose had AIDS,” White remembers proudly. “We did menopause, we did pregnancy, all kinds of stuff. I don’t know of any ideas that were discarded.”
Topics like those, along with hot buttons like Sophia’s mouth and Blanche’s libido, would almost certainly have been reeled in had younger actresses been delivering the lines. “I think that’s the secret that allowed us to do what we did,” says White. “Had we been four young women, it might have gotten a little salacious. Being four older women, Blanche had the sex life that everyone would be shocked at but she got away with it.”
Laughing, she adds: “If I had half that sex life, I’d be dead from exhaustion!” And with that, America’s favorite grandmother brings my heart’s temperature up another ten degrees.
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