Television was Betty White's medium, and her understanding of what it means to live on camera — her ease, her intimacy — was matched by few before or since.
‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ and ‘Golden Girls’ actor died Friday, just weeks before celebrating her 100th birthday.Graced with bright eyes and a wide, dimpled smile, she radiated delight — delight to be working, delight to be alive, delight in conversation, delight in animals, but also delight in wickedness.
Although White appeared in several movies, television was her medium, and her association with it ran back past its commercial beginnings — her first appearance was in 1939, on an experimental Los Angeles channel, as a recent high school graduate, dancing with a classmate to “The Merry Widow Waltz.
This early work gave her a thorough understanding of what it means to live on camera, and the intimacy it creates. Watch any of her many, always rewarding talk show appearances — she will turn from the host to sell a remark straight to the audience, bringing you in, making a bond. Her conversation was casual; her jokes subtle but structured. (Showing Johnny Carson the handwritten manuscript of a novel she had written at 11: “I found something I got a bang out of — [.] Just reminiscing.
Putting risqué remarks or dirty words in the mouths of older people is a cheap ticket to an easy laugh. But one never felt that White, who liked to play, in a deadpan way, off a reputation for sauciness — she was, she said, a person whose mind ran naturally to puns, and she was not above getting a laugh from a “What the hell” or bleeped bit of dialogue or a leering glance — was a pawn in these matters. Indeed, one felt she was always ahead of that game.
As White grew older — “aged” does not seem at all the right word — she began to represent something additional: a dream of what one’s senior years might look like, a standard bearer not for youth but youthfulness, of continued work and undiminished powers. “It’s incredible that I’m still in this business and you are still putting up with me,” she said, being paid tribute at the 2018 Emmy Awards. But the pleasure was all ours.
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