If You Ask Me

by Betty White

  And then there are cats. Cats are not remote. People who think cats are that way may never have lived with a cat. My Bob, for instance. If my knee was bent, he was on my lap or on my shoulder in a flash. He followed me around the house like a dog. In bed at night, I’d reach over to turn the light out and he’d be there. For eleven years I fell asleep with that purr on my shoulder. Cats love you very much—they are just more subtle about it.

  You’re never too old to adopt a pet if you look ahead and make arrangements for their future. Then relax and enjoy each other.

  With another “planted” pet.

  TONY DIMAIO/ABACAUSA. COM/NEWSCOM

  STATE OF AFFAIRS

  NAMES

  Having spent so many years memorizing lines, I am pretty good at remembering names. (“Pretty good” is probably a euphemism.)

  My problem is faces. They just don’t seem to register. I have no memory for faces at all. Consequently, at those gatherings where you are introduced to several people at the same time, I wind up with a bunch of names I can remember but I don’t know where to put them. I try to make silent notes in my head: JohnSmithbluetie. JaneJonespearlearrings. Sometimes those notes can carry you through a whole evening before they evaporate.

  That game may work with total strangers but not with someone you’ve met before and should remember but don’t. You are off to a bad start when you say, “It’s nice meeting you.” And they respond with, “Yes, it’s nice seeing you again.”

  An added hazard in my line of work is when the name you can’t come up with happens to be that of a celebrity. Everyone else in the room knows that name—except you! As the celebrity approaches, it’s too late to ask someone nearby for help. You can’t ask the celeb or you’ll hurt his ego. Just pray you don’t have to make any introductions.

  There are too many examples in real life to mention—that awkward moment when I just don’t know someone’s name happens all the time!

  People approach you out of context—people you’ve not seen in years. Or they approach in groups. Or they’ve aged or changed their hair color or put on weight—making recognition even more difficult. I still will introduce myself in these situations—“Hi, I’m Betty White”—in the hopes they’ll do the same. Invariably, they not only don’t reciprocate, they look at me as if I’m out of my mind.

  The 2011 SAG Awards was a classic example. There I was, in a room filled with actors from popular movies and shows all across television. They’re celebrities. And I don’t know who they are! You feel like you’re on the edge of a cliff the entire night.

  And in this industry, our business makes for an instant familiarity. All night, people approached me and said, “Oh, hello, Betty—I loved you in Saturday Night Live” or “Hot in Cleveland is great,” and so on. And I don’t know the person from Adam—though I most probably should.

  You can’t cover all the bases, but you wish you could cover a few.

  The worst part is, a lot of people don’t take kindly to your not remembering. But you’re fighting as hard as you can. You’ve used up all of the clichéd ways of avoiding the situation, but you still can’t grasp the name in question.

  One time I tried what I thought was a great way to learn that elusive moniker. I asked, “How do you spell your last name?”

  The answer came back, “With an i.”

  Great.

  Whatever memory trick you employ, it is well worth the effort. People are often surprised and pleased when you call them by name—especially in a crowd.

  One more complication is added for me as my hearing dims: I may not hear the name clearly in the initial introduction, and the only thing worse than forgetting a name is calling someone by the wrong one.

  You are probably thinking that if I let a big party be all that work, why don’t I just stay home? Great idea! And I usually do.

  The operative word here is “big.” I thoroughly enjoy a small group of friends—six, or maybe even eight. You can get into stimulating conversation, laugh together, disagree on occasion, and, if you’re not careful, even learn something.

  And you don’t have to bother with all those name games.

  See—I’m not quite as antisocial as I sound. Not quite.

  With George Burns—a face and a name you could never forget.

  BOB NOBLE/GLOBE PHOTOS

  DINING ROOM TABLE

  My desk, and what was originally intended to be my office, is located in a spare bedroom upstairs. The fax machine lives there, as well as my stuffed animals and piles and piles of books people send me in the hopes I’ll take a look at them for endorsement or out of curiosity or for pleasure. I’m too busy to read much of anything lately, but it’s against my religion to throw out a book, so they keep stacking up and stacking up. It’s gotten to the point that whenever Donna needs to fax something, I find myself saying, “No, no, let me do that!” so she doesn’t have to see the messy room.

  As that room filled up, I found that I kept bringing my work downstairs to the dining room table at the end of the living room. It sits by a big window looking out to the garden, and Donna and I find it a most pleasant workplace. Unfortunately, the table keeps getting piled higher and higher with leftover works in progress that have become virtually permanent. The dining room table has become an echo of the upstairs spare bedroom!

  At four a.m., which seems to be my witching hour, I wake up not in a panic about memorizing my lines or what the day on the set might bring. No, I wake up haunted by that mess in that office—and the growing mess on my dining room table!

  I think to myself, Betty, you must clean this mess before you die. God forbid someone else has to rifle through what’s piled on there. I fantasize about bringing in giant garbage bags and just tossing everything out—but I can’t bring myself to do it.

  What about my potential dinner guests? With no place to serve them, we wind up with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres in the den, then we go out to eat. I am not what might be called one of the world’s greatest hostesses.

  One of my New Year’s resolutions will be to finally clear that table.

  But not this year.

  Ironically, I could hear very well back then.

  © BETTMANN / CORBIS

  ENTOURAGE

  So many stars have staff, and I’m often asked about mine.

  I have a wonderful housekeeper, Edna, who’s been with me for almost twenty-five years. She’s been with me so long I couldn’t possibly ask her to retire. But she’s slowing down like we all are. So a few years ago I hired her a cleaning lady named Anita.

  If I have to do anything on the weekend, like attend a poker game, which means driving down to Newport Beach, Anita will come in and feed Ponti and help me out. It’s a very comfortable situation.

  When it’s not comfortable is when something happens like what happened the other morning. I woke up early, as usual, to go to the Hot in Cleveland table read. I made Ponti his dish of food and stepped outside to put it down for him. Just then the wind picked up and slammed the door shut behind me, locking me out. I have an elaborate system of keys hidden to get me back into the house, but when I went to find the final key, it was missing. Luckily, I’d gotten far enough inside that there was a phone in the room. So I had to call Glenn Kaplan, my business manager, who lives nearby. Glenn has an extra set of my house keys, and fortunately he was still home. But his copies of my keys were in his office so he had to drive there to get them and bring them back up to me.

  By the time he got to me, I’d been almost exclusively outside for forty-five minutes in nothing but my bathrobe. And you can imagine how glamorous I looked when he arrived!

  My dear friend Jerry Martin used to have a set of keys to my house, too, and he used to take care to visit Ponti when I was on set. In fact, I’d never have been able to film The Proposal without Jerry’s assistance. When I was first called about the role, I was told the filming was supposed to take ten weeks in Boston. I said I couldn’t possibly leave for that long. But then the schedule w
as cut down to six weeks, and Jerry volunteered to visit Ponti every day. I managed to make it back a couple of times on weekends, so between the two of us, along with Edna and Anita, I felt that Ponti was covered as he adores them all.

  Sadly, we lost Jerry very suddenly a few weeks ago.

  I not only miss him deeply but on a morning like the one when I locked myself out, I start wondering about the wisdom of my staffing situation! Should I have more help? But I so enjoy being alone.

  That said, the other downside to my system is that I slip behind a little all the time. I never finish a day and think, I’m all caught up.

  Then what am I doing writing a book? I needed to write a book at this time in my life like I needed another hole in my head.

  But I couldn’t turn it down, it was such a temptation.

  I told you up front that writing is my favorite thing.

  CLIFF LIPSON/CBS/LANDOV

  POKER

  I’m not a great poker player but I love to play.

  Bob Stewart of Goodson /Todman, who created game shows like Password, $25,000 Pyramid, and more, hosts a poker game that he’s run for more than fifty years. Bob and I have been friends for almost that long, and about fifteen years ago he invited me to deal in. Our group plays at the Newport Beach house of Ann Cullen, whose late husband, Bill Cullen, was also a great game-show host. We all giggle and scratch and have a wonderful time.

  We don’t play for big money, but we play for blood.

  It’s dealer’s choice, and each hand is high/low. We don’t play a lot of wild games. Screw Thy Neighbor (it’s really Screw Your Neighbor, but we call it Screw Thy Neighbor, to class it up) is my favorite. You get a chance to keep a card or pass it along.

  I think the only reason they let me into the game is that I usually leave about $13 on the table. We have a brass cup engraved with “Pico Poker Club,” and whoever comes out ahead at the end of the night takes this cup home. The winner can enjoy the cup until the next game, but God forbid you don’t return it then. The penalty for that offense is $2,000 or death, whichever is most appropriate.

  One day, Henry Pollick, who lives in the Valley, was almost to Ann’s and realized he’d forgotten the cup. He turned around and must have done some creative driving to get home to pick it up and make it back in time for the game.

  Just as we were wondering where Henry was, he raced in, breathless. “I can’t afford the penalty!” he said, and we all burst out laughing.

  I love to play cards and rarely have anybody to play with anymore.

  So these games are precious.

  On Match Game—I’ve always loved a great game.

  CBS/LANDOV

  MODERN TECHNOLOGY

  (Thoroughly Modern Betty?)

  Every time you begin to think you’re such a contemporary and you don’t feel your age, you realize you don’t own a computer!—and intend to keep it that way.

  There are a few reasons for this.

  I get a lot of mail, as I’ve mentioned before. Donna does most of the fan mail, but the volume of my personal mail, too, is enormous! I come in with an armful every day and sort it into different stacks. I may push one stack aside, but before I do, I at least have an idea of what’s in that stack. If I had a computer and clicked a button to “store” something, I wouldn’t sleep at night! I’d wonder what was stored in there, did I answer this or that or the other? That scares me. I think of it as the computer equivalent of my upstairs office and dining room table.

  And many people use computers to write. They talk about how efficient it is, how fast. But I can’t create with a machine. As I said in “Writer’s Block,” there’s a connection from my brain to the paper through my longhand writing that just works for me.

  When my agent and publisher and I got together to work on this book, my publisher worked with an amazing instrument I had never seen—a computerized pen that recorded audio and plugged into the computer. A talking pen? I named it Bruce.

  It’s a far cry from that first book I ever wrote when I was a kid, which was one hundred pages in longhand, written with a pen you dipped in ink!

  Thank you, Bruce. I don’t deserve you.

  ADRIAN SANCHEZ-GONZALES/LANDOV

  CHILDREN

  When I was a little girl, my mother loved baby dolls. She collected them.

  But my toys were always animals.

  I would spend all my lunch money on little blown-glass animal families at the toy store, which I later had to spend a lot of time dusting.

  Barbara Walters once asked me if I ever had desired to have a child.

  The answer is, I never did think about it.

  I know there are many career girls today who would disagree, but I’m not a big believer in being able to do both. I think somebody takes the short end of the stick.

  I had such a wonderful rapport with my folks, but my mother didn’t work. She was home with me.

  It’s an individual choice. I didn’t think I could do justice to both career and motherhood, maybe because I had the mother I did. It’s such an individual choice.

  And I’m a stepmother. I have the best stepchildren in the world.

  When Allen and I first married, I became the stepmother of teenagers. Never having had children, I was suddenly the mother of teens! But we got along great. So great, they called me “Dragon Lady,” lovingly.

  Even after all these years, we love each other dearly, and I am most proud of the children this career girl inherited. A major blessing—yet again.

  SINCE YOU ASKED . . .

  Holding the 2011 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series.

  KEVIN MAZUR/WIREIMAGE

  INTEGRITY

  It’s important to maintain as level a head as possible in this exciting business over the years.

  The toughest time is when you’re on a roll . . . when everything is going phenomenally well, like it is for me right now.

  That’s when you have to remember that image in the mirror and not let success get to you. It is important that you not believe your own publicity. Be grateful for whatever praise you receive, but take it with a grain of salt.

  You have to keep your feet on the ground and remember that this is what you’ve worked for all your life. And now that you’ve achieved it, you don’t want to screw it up. You can’t get carried away with your image, because you know better than anyone else who the real person is.

  You don’t just luck into integrity. You work at it.

  ADVICE COLUMN

  One of the first interview questions always is: What advice would you give young actresses coming into this business?

  The answer is:

  Treat your profession with respect.

  Come in prepared.

  Walk in to every situation with a positive, open mind. Allow yourself time to experience a situation before forming an opinion.

  To abuse our profession by partying or getting into trouble or copping an attitude like some people do is the height of ingratitude, in my opinion.

  To not be grateful for what you’ve been blessed with, knowing how many people in the world would sell their souls to do what you do, or to abuse it is, I think, unconscionable.

  In the acting profession and the sporting world, young people are exposed to more temptation, more everything, because they have a whole bunch more money than do young people in other jobs. They’re getting these phenomenal salaries; sometimes it’s too easy to slip into bad behavior. Bad stuff.

  I hate to sound like I’m pontificating, but it’s hard to write a book without sounding that way from time to time. When you’re blessed to do the thing you love to do and you’re making a lot of money at it so you can benefit your passion, that’s a pretty great formula. Appreciate it—don’t abuse it.

  If you’re not enthusiastic, just lie down and close your eyes and be very quiet.

  With Jennifer Love Hewitt.

  ERIC HEINILA/CBS/NEWSCOM

  On The Late Late Show
with Craig Ferguson.

  FRANCIS SPECKER/LANDOV

  I’M EIGHTY-NINE?

  One thing they don’t tell you about growing old—you don’t feel old, you just feel like yourself. And it’s true. I don’t feel eighty-nine years old. I simply am eighty-nine years old.

  If I didn’t feel so well, I might have a different philosophy altogether.

  But I fall into traps sometimes.

  Let’s say I meet someone I find attractive. I have to keep reminding myself of how old I am, because I don’t feel like I’m that old. I fight the urge to flirt and try to shape up. No fool like an old fool.

  But I don’t get depressed as the number climbs. Perhaps because I don’t fear death. To some it is such a bête noire that it ruins some of the good time they have left.

  Estelle Getty was so afraid of dying that the writers on The Golden Girls couldn’t put a dead joke in the script. This was early on—long before she ever got ill.

  Again, I’m quoting my mother, but her take on the subject I thought was great. She said we know so much and can discover so much more, but what no one knows for sure is what exactly happens when we pass on. When we’d lose someone we would grieve, of course, but she would say, “Now he knows the secret.” Somehow that helped the pain for me.

  And now—she knows the secret.

  If you’ve ever lost a loved one, or witnessed it, you can’t help but see that the body is an envelope for the letter.

  My friends kid me that when it happens to me, Allen’s going to be up there waiting for me and probably my mom and dad. That’s my family. But before I can get to them I’m going to have to wade through Booty and Binky and Bob and Panda and Kitta and all my pets through the years—