Who doesn’t love Betty White?
And what’s wrong with them? PBS celebrates her.
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – If you’ve set the record for the longest career in television, you must be a pro. And one of Betty White’s co-stars provided a great example during a Television Critics Association panel focusing on the PBS documentary “Betty White: First Lady of Television” (Aug. 21, check local listings).
“Betty White,” filmed over five years by the team behind the public broadcaster’s series “Pioneers of Television,” looks at the 80-year entertainment career of White, 96, whose many credits include “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Golden Girls” and “Hot in Cleveland.” It includes interviews with friends and colleagues such as Ryan Reynolds, Valerie Bertinelli, Valerie Harper, Tina Fey, Carl Reiner and Mary Tyler Moore, in one of her final interviews before her death.
White wasn’t there for the panel. (“We gave her the day off,” co-director and producer Steve Boettcher said.) But two of her “Mary Tyler Moore” co-stars, Gavin MacLeod and Georgia Engel, and Arthur Duncan, a dancer who appeared on “The Betty White Show” in the 1950s, discussed her life and career.
MacLeod, whose Murray Slaughter was a foil to White’s happy homemaker Sue Ann Nivens, remembered an episode in which Murray, needing extra money, is forced to take demeaning work on Sue Ann’s show.
Sue Ann “did everything in that show to emasculate him. She was going to do a wedding show, and she put him in a wedding gown,” he said. “The poor guy, it was one thing after another. (His anger) was building until the final scene, where they had a cake on the table. She did something and he picked her up, put her on the cake and she rode the cake right down to the floor. Only Betty could ride a cake the way she rode that cake, like she had a bucking bronco between her legs.”
They had to get it right, MacLeod said. “We only had one take, because we only had one cake. But we did it, and people loved it.”
White pulled it off perfectly, MacLeod said. But he was even more impressed when he spoke to her after the scene.
“She said: ‘I’m so glad it (worked). I really hurt my back when you lifted me up.’ But you never would have known,” he said. “That’s what I mean about her professionalism. She knew there was only one cake.”