Playing Games With My Heart

Ever since I was a child and would watch The Price is Right, The Hollywood Squares, The $25,000 Pyramid, To Tell the Truth and (to me at the time, at least) more adult and risque programs like Tattletales and especially Match Game, I've had an affinity for game shows. By the way, can you believe that this photo is from a real game of Wheel of Fortune that aired last season?! What are the chances... I knew I had to hold onto it and use it for a post in The Underworld. I have been to this well before here, but I'm in the mood to dip into it again!

I can't be sure exactly when it first developed, but I've always had a fascination with the process of elimination. That is, taking a given number of people and whittling them down to a sole winner. This explains part of the reasons why I enjoy game shows, pageants, disaster movies and even NFL football (a more recent addition to my life) in which 32 teams compete until only one is declared the winner at The Super Bowl. I even, against my better judgement, found myself enjoying Howie Mandel's Deal or No Deal because of the emphasis on the elimination of those dwindling suitcases during the course of the show.

Of course, I also have an obsession with celebrities, primarily actors and actresses, too, and always relish the chance to see them working on a game show where, with little to no prepared script, they have hardly any choice but to be themselves, especially when the heat is on. So game shows that feature celebrity guests are a particular favorite of mine. There were so many during the '70s, too, some of which are close to forgotten except in the hearts of those who watched them. (These sometimes would be aired on GSN - The Game Show Network - before their programming went straight into the toilet.)

There was Liar's Club, hosted for the bulk of its '70s run by Allen Ludden. A quartet of stars would take an unusual object and describe to a set of players what its intended use was. Only one of the stars knew its true use and the other three would lie as best as they could to throw the players off. Players would then bet part of their winnings on the celeb they felt was telling the truth. Ludden's wife, the game-loving Betty White was a frequent guest. Here, we see her on one episode with Burt Reynolds and on another nestled between Dick Gautier and a newly-minted comedian named David Letterman.

Do take note of Gautier's shirt, which is unbuttoned nearly to the waist! He even has a gold chain around his neck to make certain that we don't miss the fact that this was the mid-'70s. I don't care how tacky, tawdry or cheesy he seems here, when I was a youngin', I looked upon him with slack-jawed awe and thought he was the sexiest thing I had ever laid eyes on! LOL I went into the stratosphere (keeping it all inside, however) every time a game show started and he was one of the guests. To my pre-teen mind, he was sex on a stick (whatever sex even was to me at that tender age...)

Speaking of childhood crushes, my other one in the game show arena was the host of Wheel of Fortune. No, silly, not Pat Sajak. I'm speaking of Chuck Woolery! From 1975 to 1981, the hosting duties of the show fell to Woolery, a Kentucky-born country/folk singer and sometime actor. My childhood pea-brain could never tell the difference between Woolery and Elvis Presley and for a brief time, I thought Elvis hosted the show! Ha! In truth, he probably had more in common, looks-wise and in demeanor to Kentucky-raised Lee Majors. Something about the firm jaw and crooked smile.

I just thought he was gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous! I should be ashamed to admit this, but I'm not.  I once dated a girl in high school (just a time or two) primarily because I knew her mother had gone to prom with Chuck Woolery when she was a young girl and I wanted to try to find our more about it! (I got to see a picture at least!) I guess my fascination with stars was in place even then.

After hosting the popular show for seven years (along with then-letter-turner Susan Stafford), Woolery asked for a significant pay hike, having been receiving peanuts for the show which garnered an amazing 44 share in the ratings. Though producer Merv Griffin did agree to most of the raise Woolery was requesting (with NBC willing to kick in the difference), things fell apart when Griffin was toying with moving the show to CBS instead. Woolery was fired and the lesser-known weatherman Pat Sajak was brought in. Christmas Day of 1981, Woolery bid farewell and Stafford departed within a year as well. He went on to terrific success with Love Connection, which lasted from 1983 to 1994, and other games including the GSN show Lingo.

One celebrity show that I liked to watch as a kid was Tattletales. Hosted by Bert Convy, it featured three couples testing their knowledge about each other, with the winnings split between the audience, who sat in color coded sections, one for each of the couples. Some of the couples had only one celeb in the family, sometimes both parties were famous. Sometimes, a couple might just be two platonic, but reasonably close, friends, which allowed folks like Charles Nelson Reilly, Dick Sargent and Fannie Flagg to be a part of it.

In this shot below, we see Eight is Enough's Grant Goodeve and his wife, Bill Daly of I Dream of Jeannie and The Bob Newhart Show with his wife and Lynn Redgrave on her husband's lap.

Here, we see Let's Make a Deal's Monty Hall (backstage on headphones so that he can't hear the questions) and his wife Marilyn. Not everyone is aware that one of the couple's three children grew up to be Broadway star (and Tony winner for Into the Woods) Joanna Gleason.

And where else are you likely to see Barbi Benton and Joan Collins sitting next to one another? (Though it must be said that they both posed for Playboy, so perhaps they could have met before at Hef's mansion.)

You were never sure who might pop up from Patty Duke (Astin) to the aforementioned Dick Gautier to James Brolin (then married to Josh's mother Jane) to the omnipresent Miss Betty White.

Another celebrity-enhanced show, one that was short-lived having run under two years from mid-1984 to early-1986, was Body Language. A charades-based game that also included fill-in-the-blank word puzzles, a male and a female celebrity paired up with a contestant each. The credit sequence would show the celebs in mid-game, flailing and emoting wildly, while animated bodies below would morph into the show's title. (Here, we see Kim Fields – Tootie of The Facts of Life – and a young Jason Bateman, who even at this age was cutting the improvisational and comedic skills that would secure him an adult career in the movies.)

This is Scarecrow and Mrs. King's supporting actress Martha Smith playing opposite Ed Begley Jr, who was then a costar on St. Elsewhere.

Too Close for Comfort star JM J Bullock surely must have been happy to get paired up with this humpy contestant, Sam, for a couple of days. Sam had what we used to call “cocksucker lips,” if you'll excuse my crudeness! LOL

JM was caught in the era, just as I was for a time, of wearing pins and other décor on one's jackets and shirts, though I sure never wore anything as garish as the ensemble he has on here! Gotta love the '80s...

It wasn't until I was all grown up that I so much as even heard of two of the most classic, and classy, game shows ever to have hit the airwaves. One of them, What's My Line? not only had a four-person line-up of notable people playing the game, but also ended each half-hour broadcast with a mystery round that featured a famous celebrity. Shown below Vincent Price is the legendary Miss Bette Davis.

The regular panelists (most often Bennett Cerf, Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis, usually along with another gentleman) would be blindfolded and have to guess who it was in the studio with them. The blindfolds began as tie-backs, but then graduated to large, fabric-covered glasses in order to avoid mussing the ladies' hairstyles! For a time, the blindfolds were decorated with fake eyeglasses or large false eyelashes, but ultimately became more tasteful, streamlined things.

The celeb often tried to disguise his or her voice to throw the guessers off. This meant that the celebrity present often had a lot of fun during his or her visit. As the original version of the show ran from 1950 to 1967 (with a revival in 1968 that ran until 1975), seemingly every person of interest imaginable turned up as a mystery guest. Even Eleanor Roosevelt appeared on the program. The stars shown here are all named at the bottom of their pictures except for Sean Connery and cute little Rick Nelson.

As overseen by legitimate news man John Daly, What's My Line? was a fun, but elegant and very tasteful sort of game show. The panelists were dressed to the hilt and the mystery guests also took pains to make a glamorous impression. If you enjoy stars of the '50s and '60s, you owe it to yourself to go to youtube.com and search for What's My Line? mystery guests and enjoy the parade of personalities that have been placed there for your entertainment.

The second classic and classy game show that evaded me until I was an adult is Password. I did a mini-tribute to the show in the earliest days of The Underworld . Again, this show brought out some of Hollywood's heavy hitters and afforded viewers the opportunity to see them as themselves, but also under pressure as they tried to win money for their contestant partners.

Perry Mason fans got to see Raymond Burr cutting up and sitting behind something other than a court room desk, comic legend Jack Benny was pressed into trying to score some points for his teammate, Lauren Bacall had fun with some of the clues and can you even imagine sitting down to play a game with Joan Crawford as your partner?!  (Joan, by the way, was surprisingly meek and rather petrified through much of the show.)

Host Allen Ludden always made sure that the program ran smoothly and tastefully. I've thrown around the word tasteful, which sounds a little snooty. It's really not. It's just amusement minus a lot of the outrageousness and noise we've (sort of) become used to. You'd be surprised how funny and engrossing an old show like the ones I'm describing here can be without a lot of screaming, whooping and whatever other antics can be found on what passes for a game show today.

This photo features two of my very favorite Password celebs, Betty White (who was simply in a class by herself when it came to game-playing) and Frank Giffored (who was just the most handsome, well-mannered, yet adept, player imaginable.)  On this given day, White was playing with three pro-football players while Gifford had as his partners three female ice-skating performers.  It was all for charity, of course.  I have a tribute to the wonders of Frank Gifford right here.

Password went through several permutations, often coming back to the airwaves a year or two after cancellations in a revamped format. Ludden was the host for three versions, but died during the run of Password Plus (in 1981.) Half the fun of Password and Password Plus was seeing which celebrities were being put together on a given episode.

Even though Robert Foxworth and Elizabeth Montgomery were romantically involved ever since they worked on the 1974 TV-movie Mrs. Sundance (after which he divorced his then-wife), they didn't act together on-screen again until the early 1990s prior to her death, so it was interesting to see them together as a couple on Password Plus. Incidentally, no matter whether she appeared with Foxworth or someone else (Wesley Eure, for example), Miss Montgomery was always reluctant to bow upon entering to throes of applause. Her male counterpart would bow and then she'd skip it and race to the podium to play.

Betty White never guest-starred on Mission: Impossible, but she got to work with that series' costar Greg Morris on Password Plus. Longstanding couple Bill and Susan Seaforth Hayes (of Days of Our Lives) showed up, with he in a quasi-western get-up!

In what was a remarkable moment (that I'm surprised went on the air!), guest star Debralee Scott got so excited as the game progressed that she proceeded to burst the snap-buttons on her blouse, with each gyration showing more and more of her braless cleavage. Hilarious!

By the time of Super Password in 1984, Bert Convy was the host and the game only resembled its original format in the most basic way. It had been souped up considerably from the days when players strove to win between $350 and $500 (depending on whether it was the daytime or nighttime version!) Now, players did a bonus round that was at least $5,000 and, depending on the accumulation of un-won rounds, could reach over $50,000! A belated 2008-2009 version called Million Dollar Password gave players a shot at winning $1 million, but no one took home more than $100,000 (which is certainly nothing to sneeze at!) The indefatigable Betty White, then in her late-eighties, turned up twice on this rendition, having appeared on every prior version of the show.

You know, most, if not all, of the five day per week games shows were filmed in one day. So celebrity guests and the contestants would have to pretend that each new half hour of filming was actually a day past the episode they'd just filmed! So the host might say that it was the fourth day of the week, but it was actually just the fourth half-hour taping out of one long day! Savvy guest actresses would make changes to their hair along with the obligatory clothing changes so that the whole thing wouldn't be so obvious. For example, for a 1985 run on Super Password, Leann Hunley showed up on “Monday” with her long hair free, then as the week went on added barrettes, then ended up with it in a French twist!

Hunley was a wonderful Password player, capable of some amazing clues and, thus, wins for her contestant. At this point in her career, she was working on Days of Our Lives (a part which won her an Emmy in 1986.) Little did she know when playing Super Password that one of the answers in the game would be Alexis. Ironically, she would later join the cast of Dynasty from 1986 to 1988 and be pitted head to head against the character, played by Joan Collins! Hunley returned to Super Password a couple of times after she'd been cast in Dynasty as well.

Appres po of nothing, I recall the day I found out she was to join the cast of Dynasty and how thrilled I was because I always liked her and she reminded me of my best friend (who remains such to this day.) Her character Dana became part of a major storyline through her involvement with Carrington son Adam (played by Gordon Thomson) and as a result she received lots of publicity. Sadly, she departed after two seasons. Following a wealth of subsequent TV appearances, she returned to Days of Our Lives again, where she recurrently portrayed her earlier character from about 2007 to 2010.

In that post on game shows I did back in 2010, I referred to the amusing program Now You See It (1974-1975), which settled on parading five contestants out onto a set of rust-orange, shag-covered steps, their eye-scorching get-ups instantly bringing a grin to the face of anyone who happens upon it now. The brief window of time that the show was on happened to fall within that “perfect storm” time period of immense fugliness in dress and, often, hair. The fun, swingy theme song which plays as the people awkwardly trundle out from the wings and down the stairs only adds to the hilarity. I could sit and watch a continuous loop of these people trotting out upon the inordinately complicated set, dress in their polyester finery.

Game shows of yore can really cough up some amusingly strange birds; people who make for arresting personalities on a half-hour broadcast, but who might be annoying or wearing in real life. The clothes and hair of anything from, say, twenty years or more – give or take- past also provides a decent chuckle.

No matter how many stars appear on a game show, its ultimate success often winds up relying on the caliber of its contestants. The spontaneous answers, reactions and expressions of everyday folks can also provide some terrific entertainment. The best hosts were the ones who could build upon and exploit the instances of amusing humanity that came along through the course of the games. They don't build them anymore like Allen Ludden, Bob Barker, Bill Cullen, Bob Eubanks and others I've failed to mention. It's all I can do to endure ten minutes of Drew Carey (who I have nothing against personally) stumblefucking his way through The Price is Right. It's an art and, despite moderate improvement, he doesn't have the tools for it.

I really didn't mean to do a post about game shows and all the celebs that show up on them directly on the heels of a post on TV guest stars, but that's just the way it panned out. I still wish to dig further into Match Game and The Price is Right and so will probably revisit this arena at least once more still.

White Supremacy

There’s a bit of a frenzy going on these days with our featured actress Miss Betty White. Despite the fact that she’s pushing 90, she is every bit as popular as she ever was and, as a result, the public basically cried out that she MUST be a guest host on Saturday Night Live. The producers took heed of this grassroots movement and she will do the honors on May 8th. It will be the first time I will have bothered to tune into the program in years.

Betty White was born just that, Betty Marion White, not Elizabeth, in Oak Park, Illinois in 1922 to doting parents. They didn’t have a tremendous amount of money, but they had affection, humor and always a collection of dogs in and around their home. Eventually, they moved to Los Angeles and Betty was raised in the shadow of the major Hollywood Studios. However, after briefly considering opera, she had goals of being a writer rather than an actress until she wrote a play for school, cast herself in the lead and was bit by the bug.

Shortly after high school, she took part in an early television broadcast, one that, according to her was like “science fiction” as the signal was delivered all the way from the 6th floor of a building to the ground! During WWII, Betty served in a volunteer organization, complete with uniform, displaying the type of sacrifice and dedication to home and flag that is all but extinct amongst a great many of the people who live in the US now.

Not long after the war was over, Betty was married twice briefly, both times unsuccessfully, knowing in her heart that a career was what she really craved more than housework or children. These failures, in her eyes, would put her off the notion of marriage for a long time.

Now single, Miss White started working in television on a local (L.A.) level, often logging 33 hours a week as a live TV hostess! Think about that… She practically lived on TV and this doesn’t count any of the prep time beforehand or even the additional variety show that she worked on every weeknight for a time! Always a multi-tasker, she continued to do informational programming (including the production end, in which she was a female pioneer) even as she was granted her own sitcom Life With Elizabeth.

Life With Elizabeth ran from 1952 – 1955 and was eventually syndicated nationally, giving her a far broader audience than she had enjoyed while working endlessly on the Los Angeles station. It’s almost impossible to count how many hours of TV White delivered while appearing as a sitcom actress, a variety and talk show hostess, a game show panelist and even the commentator for the Tournament of Roses Parade.
Not one to pigeonhole herself, she even won a role in formidable director Otto Preminger’s 1962 film Advise and Consent, as a female senator. Still, during the bulk of the 60s, White was a game show staple, appearing on To Tell the Truth, What’s My Line? and, most importantly, Password. Betty has appeared on every incarnation of Password right up to the crappy recent one with Regis Philbin in which she helped a contestant win $100,000! Through Password, she would connect with the man who became the great partner of her life, the original host of the show Allen Ludden.

Due to her two previous divorces, it took a lot of needling to get Betty to take the plunge again, but she did and it resulted in almost 18 blissful years of marriage for her. She and Allen forged a family with his three children from a deceased wife and a home full of various dogs, which Betty has never been without. Soon, she converted Allen into an animal lover as well and they appeared together on her 1971 series The Pet Set and, later, on The Liar's Club. The couple also worked together in stage productions around the US, notably Critic’s Choice and Guys and Dolls.

Betty became a frequent guest on Match Game as well and could always be counted on for clever answers, often with a sly double meaning. She was never, ever vulgar, but very knowing, amusing, vivacious and sharp. Occasionally, her well-known adoration of animals would become the brunt of a joke and she would feign (or maybe not feign!) horror. One episode had her playfully doing the start of a striptease while bump ‘n grind music played. She traded barbs with pal Brett Somers and almost became a sort of honorary fourth regular on the six-person celebrity panel.

Ludden and White had a strong friendship with network executive Grant Tinker and his wife, TV superstar Mary Tyler Moore. They regularly dined together, played games and so on. When some of Moore’s costars from The Mary Tyler Moore Show were preparing to spin-off into their own successful series, there would a void left on the program, so they decided to integrate another character. Producers decided to go for a “Betty White type,” but one in which the effervescent, cheery outward persona actually hid a devious, egocentric and sexually voracious inner self. Finally, when casting such a role became more of a trial than the powers that be anticipated, Moore asked them why they didn’t just ask BETTY WHITE!
Betty appeared on the show, sporting hair much lighter than she’d worn it in the previous couple of decades, and was an instant smash. She played Sue Ann Nivens, a happy homemaker personality who did on air demonstrations of cooking and crafts while delighting in cheerily deriding Mary’s character, emasculating Murray (played by Gavin MacLeod) and flirting heavily with boss Lou Grant (Ed Asner.) One memorable episode had MacLeod playing dress dummy for a wedding gown, enduring everything he could until finally he plopped White ass-first into the wedding cake meant for the segment. White, as only she could, took it like a trooper, licking her finger and stating that it could have used more vanilla.

This series went out on a very high note and could have continued for years longer, but Moore wished to stop it before the success was bled dry and the creative juices had a chance to grow stagnant. The final episode involved the primary cast, including White tearfully hugging one another goodbye while shuffling across the floor en masse to the box of Kleenexes that was nearby. White was sad to see such a plum role end, but she was nominated for an Emmy three times and won twice!

Like most of the other people from that series, she was quickly given her own show with the wildly creative title The Betty White Show. She played the unlikely part of a TV actress starring on a police series called “Undercover Woman.” Her costar was John Hillerman, who would later go on to success as the employer of Magnum P.I. Her Moore costar Georgia Engel appeared in this series as well. Though Betty always gave (and gives!) 110% to any project, this cheap-looking, unfunny show died a pretty quick death.

On the subject of death, Betty’s soul mate Allen Ludden died of cancer in 1981, robbing the couple of a lot of fun years ahead. White has scarcely had a slow moment in her career, but for a little while did limit her projects before diving back in to the work she adored, work she knew would keep her sane during this unhappy time.

In 1983, White became the first woman to win an Emmy for hosting a game show, the short-lived series Just Men! It featured two female contestants being asked to guess details about seven male celebrities who were present on the set with correct answers providing keys, one of which would open a new car!

White had been a frequent guest star on the wildly popular The Carol Burnett Show, sometimes appearing in the “Family” sketches as Eunice’s uppity sister Ellen. Later, when Vicki Lawrence began the series Mama’s Family (without the character of Eunice), White appeared quite a few times as Ellen, even working a little bit with Rue McClanahan, who played Lawrence’s sister Aunt Fran for one season. These two actresses would soon be reunited in a far greener pasture.

Susan Harris, who had written the popular series Soap and had contributed episodes to such acclaimed series as All in the Family and Maude, came up with a pilot script for an unusual series focusing on four older women, all either widowed or divorced, who cohabitate in a house in Miami, Florida. Called The Golden Girls, White was brought in to read for the sassy, sexy, southern belle Blanche, a character well within the range she had shown previously, in fact almost a combination of Sue Ann and Ellen. McClanahan, likewise, was cast in the role of Rose, a variation on the ditz Vivian she had portrayed on Maude.

She won the part, but right before the pilot was filmed, the director suggested that White and McClanahan switch roles in order to play against type and mix things up. This thrilled McClanahan who was dying to play Blanche, but confused White who felt she didn’t “get” Rose at all. Harris explained the part to her, giving her key information on how to play the role and from then on she soared. Her endearing naiveté and loony St. Olaf stories kept audiences screaming. In the attached photo, do we think Blanche could get the dang kitchen cabinets fixed a little better??

The Golden Girls ran for seven seasons and White was nominated for an Emmy every one of them. She won the first time she was nominated and though eventually all four of the stars received an Emmy apiece, the fact that she won before top-billed Bea Arthur seemed to cast a pall over things according to White’s autobiography. Rumors have persisted to this day of a feud between the two ladies with hearty evidence on both sides (that there was or wasn’t one.) Their styles of acting and interacting with the studio audience were vastly different, causing some degree of tension. As the show progressed, they had less and less interaction onscreen and, later, White and Arthur frequently declined to participate in videographies of one another or mention each other beyond a brief sentence. (Don’t let the crafty editors of Intimate Portrait fool you. Betty’s clips in Bea’s portrait were lifted from her own and have no mention of Bea at all in them.) Yet Arthur always refused to leave for lunch unless White was ready to come as well and insisted that she sit with her.

For my part, I think they were just too different to fully get along and also had incompatible feelings regarding their work. Bea always had to be lured into things, often preferring to stay home, and was quick to move on while Betty was a trooper and a workhorse, always ready to keep things going forever. They seem to have buried whatever hatchet may have been present when they, with Rue, accepted an award from TVLand in 2008, though perhaps they just grinned and bore it for the fans’ sake. It’s sad to think of these two disliking one another because I adore them both.

The show was a stunning success, spending five of its seven seasons in the top ten and gaining legions of fans, even after cancellation, due to the endless, multitudinous reruns, primarily on Lifetime TV (and later on Women’s Entertainment and Hallmark, in increasingly butchered versions.) When, like Mary Tyler Moore, Arthur decided to depart the series while it was still a reasonable success (and it, like Moore, went out with a memorable tear-filled hugfest), White, McClanahan and Estelle Getty made the unwise decision to try to continue in the utterly horrendous The Golden Palace. Not only was the dynamic destroyed by the absence of Arthur’s dry character, but also the setting was entirely new (and inane.) It was cancelled after limping along for most of a season.

In the wake of this memorable role, White stayed busier than ever before. Not only did she continue volunteering at The Los Angeles Zoo, but tirelessly helped with other animal welfare organizations as well. Career-wise, she sought all sorts of roles that would help shake off the looniness and less-than-bright qualities that she displayed so well as Rose. She turned up in the Morgan Freeman-Christian Slater action flick Hard Rain. She and Red Buttons worked as a couple in the Bruce Willis-Michelle Pfeiffer film The Story of Us.

Then she blew the lid off of her image as a foul-mouthed, cranky farmwoman in the giant crocodile thriller Lake Placid. This was followed a few years later by her portrayal of a snooty, racist neighbor in the Steve Martin-Queen Latifah comedy Bringing Down the House. Along the way have been countless guest appearances on popular series, comedic dramatic, talk and even stints on daytime soap operas such as The Bold and the Beautiful, on which she played Susan Flannery’s troublesome mother. She’s been nominated for five more Emmy’s since the end of Girls, winning once more for a flamboyant role on The John Larroquette Show.

Miss White was always noted for her comic gifts and her effortlessly accessible persona. Her quick wit (aided by a lifetime of games and a mastery of words) was hard to top. Besides this, however, she possesses an unheralded gift for drama as well. During Girls, for example, she was called upon occasionally to illustrate some sensitive social situation or issue and was always top-notch, able to elicit emotion, even tears, from viewers.

Her career has been a startling, stunning success, but she is STILL on the go! She had a featured role in Sandra Bullock’s popular film The Proposal, still making audiences howl as she searched her old wedding dress, with Bullock in it, for the breasts, comparing the task to an “Easter Egg Hunt!” Bullock had the honor of presenting Miss White with a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award earlier this year and White was, again, sharp as a tack, hilarious, humble, mischievous, witty and somehow poignant.
Now comes the announcement that not only will she be hosting SNL, but she’s also about to costar in yet another sitcom! She will be playing the snappy, combative housekeeper to a threesome of L.A. transplants living in Cleveland. The TVLand series Hot in Cleveland (of which ten episodes have been ordered) stars Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendie Malick and, while it may not look entirely promising, one thing is positive. Betty White will make every moment of hers count.

Miss Betty White IS television. She’s literally been there from the start and taken part in virtually every type of production possible. What’s really amazing is that she was already 28 years old when she started to really get going. Had she not taken time off for civic duty and marriage, she could have (and surely would have) accomplished even more, though what she did do was more than any other human could dream of.

Do yourself a favor when you find you have the time and watch her Archive of American Television interview (presented in several sections on youtube.com.) Part one is linked below. This lady, my friends, is a national treasure!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QqbgF1DtEw