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Her unmistakable voice comes on like warm buttered rolls and finishes with a dab of strawberry jam, and now you can’t turn on the TV without hearing it.
Betty White is white hot. The youthful 88-year-old’s sudden appearance in the spotlight in the twilight of her career is unprecedented. Since the Facebook campaign that snagged her hosting duties for Saturday Night Live, new Web campaigns are pushing for her to host next year’s Oscars. This unlikely superstar is everywhere, and may just stay at the top for as long as her golden years allow.
Part of her charm is that she comes off like a grandmother type with a dirty mind. Take her now-infamous “muffin” sketch the night she hosted SNL May 8, in which she plays a guest on a National Public Radio-like call-in show called The Delicious Dish. SNL alums Ana Gasteyer and Molly Shannon returned to reprise their roles as the mousy sweater-vest-wearing hosts. In the double-entendre fest, White’s character reveals that her “muffin” hasn’t had a cherry in it since 1939.
“If there’s one thing I’m known for,” says her character, “it’s my muffin.”
The audience loves this stuff, especially coming from a little old lady, and it erupts in huge laughter and applause.
The puns start flying fast and furious, and the incredibly sharp White rolls right along with them without skipping a beat or pausing to blush as she casually discusses her muffin.
Gasteyer: “Mmm, get a whiff of that.”
White: “Pretty intense, right?”
Shannon: “I can’t wait to taste your muffin.”
Gasteyer: “It’s surprisingly salty.”
Shannon: “Your muffin is remarkably velvety.”
Gasteyer: “I think we both assumed, and I think wrongfully, that a baker of your generation might tend toward a more dry or crusty muffin.”
It just gets raunchier from there.
“I've become something of a diva,
and why not?”
White admits to a “bawdy” sense of humor, which she has said comes from her father, a traveling salesman who would bring jokes home with him that she didn’t always understand.
The muffin sketch was the crowd favorite and centerpiece of the broadcast, which attracted an estimated 12.5 million viewers (SNL averages 9 million per broadcast), the biggest audience the show has pulled in since Tina Fey channeled Sarah Palin 18 months before.
Along with Gasteyer and Shannon, female ex-castmates Fey, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, and Rachel Dratch returned to back up White. White’s dual angelic/potty-humor style was put to use in almost every sketch, livening up the often flat writing.
The night before hosting SNL, after a 16-hour day of rehearsals, the hardy Betty White went back to her hotel and had a cold hot dog and a vodka on the rocks, reported SNL and MacGruber star Will Forte on The Late Show With David Letterman.
“She would just get standing ovations wherever she went,” said Forte. “She deserved it, she’s wonderful. And she has so much stamina. She came in Friday morning at about 8:30, the earliest person in, and worked until 12:30 at night. I was very concerned—this is an 88-and-a-half-year-old woman. The next day I asked her, ‘Are you okay, did you get enough sleep?’”
And then she revealed her hot dog and vodka nightcap.
“If ever there were a recipe for a long life,” retorted Letterman, “I think you’ve got it right there.”
Whatever her secret, this veteran of the small screen has blown up titanically since the Super Bowl, wresting the public’s imagination away from the media’s current darlings, A-listers and train wrecks who have a tiny fraction of her years and experience.
Three years after being accused of airing an anti-gay ad during the game, Snickers again teased the limits of respectability by featuring White and fellow advanced actor Abe Vigoda getting violently tackled in a pickup football game. That led to an explosion of interest in a Facebook campaign launched by Texan David Mathews to get SNL to bring on White to take over for the first time, becoming the show’s oldest host.
Between rehearsals for SNL, White appeared on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, where Fallon asked her if she had ever met Mathews.
“I have not met him, and if I do, I’m going to kill him,” said White. “I’m scared to death.”
Although a subsequent Facebook campaign has been started to generate interest in getting White to host the 2010 Emmys, Fallon is already contracted for that gig, and she congratulated him on it.
White went on to reference the song “99 Problems,” by SNL’s featured musical guest on her episode, telling Fallon, “Jay-Z has 99 problems, but this bitch ain’t one of them.”
Again, audiences eat this stuff up, and roared with approval at the naughty word coming out of the little old lady’s mouth. Things got weirder when White and Fallon had a “beer pong” rematch, during which the actress downed suds like a sailor.
More antics followed on The Tonight Show a few days after SNL, when Leno put together another segment of “Will This Make Betty White Flinch?,” which he’s been doing with her for a few years. The stoic White stands behind Plexiglas while all manner of things smack up against it, testing her ability to not react. The host hurls skateboarders, midgets, tinsel, paintballs, arrows, eggs. The only ones flinching are usually in the audience, worried, perhaps, that this venerable lady might have a heart attack when this stuff strikes within inches of her face.
Commenting on her sudden superstardom, White told Fallon, “I’ve become something of a diva, and why not?”
If anyone deserves the diva treatment, it’s Betty White, who has stumbled into a perfect way to cap off a 70-year career in show business.
White and Rue McClanahan are the only surviving cast members of the popular The Golden Girls, on which they starred with Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty from 1985 to 1992.
Here’s where White perfected her ditzy persona in the character of Rose Nylund, whose innocence and bumbling ignorance always led to her coming out on top at the end of the setup. She won an Emmy for Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series for the first season, and was nominated each year of the show’s run after that.
The Illinois-born comedienne grew up in Los Angeles during the Great Depression. After graduating from Beverly Hills High School in 1939, she landed her first gig on the stage, then wound up on radio in the forties. She debuted on TV in 1949, and cocreated the sitcom Life With Elizabeth, on which she played the title character from 1952 to 1955—a headstrong, feisty female character, unusual for the black-and-white fifties. The show earned her her first Emmy.
White was ubiquitous on evening talk and game shows starting in the 1950s, and became known as the “First Lady of Game Shows.” Her endless TV resume includes a recurring role on The Mary Tyler Moore Show between 1973 and 1977, on which she played the man-hungry, calculating character Sue Ann Nivens, who was all innocence on the outside.
“We need somebody who can play sickeningly sweet, like Betty White,” Moore has been quoted as saying during a production meeting.
White worked with her future Golden Girls costar McClanahan on Mama’s Family from 1983 to 1985, on which she played a character she’d originated on The Carol Burnett Show in the seventies. She’s been a reliable regular surprise guest on not just comedies (Malcolm in the Middle) but also dramas (The Practice, Boston Legal) and even a soap opera (The Bold and the Beautiful).
The Golden Girl has been married three times, but never had kids. Her last husband, Allen Ludden, died in 1981, and she’s been single ever since.
She stole the show at the roast of William Shatner on Comedy Central in 2006 with her subtle blue approach, which may very well have fueled her current superstardom, as it introduced her to a whole new demographic and showed how hip and filthy a sweet old lady could be.
Speaking from the dais about Shatner and George Takai, the openly gay actor who played Sulu on Star Trek, she said, “We all know Shatner’s nuts, but George has actually tasted them.”
The largest Facebook group trying to build interest in White hosting the Oscars has more than 111,000 fans, as of this writing. The SNL group had more than half a million.
It’s refreshing to see people get excited about 80-plus-year-olds who are getting it done in high style. A recent New York Daily News article proclaimed this the age of “eldercool,” citing the current popularity of White and her octogenarian contemporaries, including Elaine Stritch, 85, who plays the cold, calculating mother of Alec Baldwin’s character on 30 Rock; and Angela Lansbury, on Broadway at 84 in A Little Night Music.
It’s not just the 18-to-34 Comedy Central demographic that’s paying attention. She’s inspiring to women her age who have followed her career from the beginning, and are delighted to see her everywhere these days.
White has been busy for decades in one successful TV series after another, not to mention her tireless work with the Los Angeles Zoo, the Morris Animal Foundation and Actors and Others for Animals. Who knows what’s next for her? She’s defied age and how we think of seniors as frail old-timers long past their prime.
Betty White has proved that age is just a number. And as Joan Jedell puts it, “There’s only two kinds of people—young and dead.” And Betty White is living proof of this. [HS]
