She’s owned the medium—in multiple ways—for its entire history.
Betty White in 1957. Photo: ABC Photo Archives/Disney via Getty Images Betty White, the most durable television star of all time and one of the most beloved and groundbreaking, died just short of her hundredth birthday. She was preceded in death by TV broadcasting as millions knew it, and then outlived it, adapting to a transformed entertainment landscape more gracefully than the medium that she embodied. White is thought to be the first woman to host a talk show solo.
The first crude test of television technology occurred in Paris in 1909. Twelve years later, in August 1921, Édouard Belin sent still images through the air using radio waves. The following January, Betty White was born in Oak Park, Illinois. A year after that, her family relocated to Alhambra, California.
In 1954, White produced and hosted another talk show, The Betty White Show, for NBC, hiring a female director and making an African-American performer, Arthur Duncan, a regular cast member. NBC told her that local affiliates in the Jim Crow south were threatening to stop airing the program unless White fired Duncan. She refused and increased his airtime. The show was canceled within the year.
Once White started acting on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, in a role that amplified those tendencies and shaped them into a comic persona for the ages, she began amping up the wicked wit on her talk and game show appearances, so that one aspect fed the other, elevating her stardom to new heights at a time when Hollywood is ordinarily inclined to begin shoehorning women into grandmother or dowager or murderous socialite parts.
To quote Armstrong: “As Sue Ann developed, she’d become a sly reversal of the sweet ‘Betty White type.’ Or, as White told the Los Angeles Times, ‘She’s not only a bitch, but a nympho. She can’t keep her hands off any man … I’ve been waiting all my life for a part like this.” White’s performance was nominated for three Emmys, in 1975, ‘76, and ‘77, with her winning the first.
White was quick to correct people who dismissed The Golden Girls as frivolous. She saw it as a cheerfully defiant statement against ageism. “You don’t fall off the planet once you reach a given age,” she told Today. Arthur, McClanahan, Getty and White all sounded variations of this note during and after the show’s run . White also pointed out that, if the actresses’ mail constituted a reliable sample, the majority of the show’s viewership consisted not of retirees, but viewers under 25.
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