If You Ask Me (2 page)

© SARA DE BOER/RETNA LTD./CORBIS

A
s the years add up, I am so grateful for the good health I have been blessed with, and I don’t ever take it for granted for a second. I make it a point to never let my weight vary more than five pounds in either direction; I wear glasses to read or to drive; I have a two-story house and a bad memory, so all those trips up and down the stairs take care of my exercise.

I had my eyes done in 1976 and have let nature take its course ever since. As for my hair, I have no idea what color it really is, and I never intend to find out. My mother’s hair never went gray, it just went mousy. So when mine started going that way, I just started tinting it and haven’t stopped. And I never will!

In terms of my weight, I weigh myself every morning. And if I go up one pound, I take it off the next day. It’s easy to take a pound off, you just skip something. But if it goes to three pounds, it becomes more difficult and one of them usually just stays there. Or five pounds—even worse—sometimes those just stay. I watched it happen with my mother. So I figure it’s easy to just take them off immediately, and it’s not too much of a sacrifice.

I don’t have a sweet tooth, but I do have a cocktail before dinner. I also love french fries and hot dogs. The famous Pink’s hot dog company in California actually named a hot dog after me, and since I eat mine plain with no condiments, it’s the Betty White “Naked” Dog. So if my weight goes up a pound or so, it’s easy to find something to cut out to bring it back down.

My obsessive addiction to crossword puzzles I chalk off as mental gymnastics. I love games and puzzles. On the set of
The Lost Valentine
, a Hallmark movie, Jennifer Love Hewitt and her boyfriend, Alex Beh, and I played Scrabble during every lunch break. And I always have a book of crosswords or acrostics in my purse wherever I go. Whenever I’ve had a puppy, I’ve put newspaper down for him, but if I put down a piece of the paper and there’s a crossword in there, I’ll snatch it right up and say, “No, you can’t go on that!”

I subscribe to the Crosswords Club and the Puzzle Club and get a new set of puzzles every month. They were given to me as a gift, and I renew them all the time. I have stacks piling up. I won’t
live
long enough to do all these puzzles, but it’s a comfort zone for me.

And no, you can’t use a dictionary or an encyclopedia—that’s a cheat.

I’m not a big pill-taker, and almost never have a headache. But I once read an article about Dr. Linus Pauling, who took vitamin C every day to stave off colds. I thought, If it’s good enough for Linus Pauling, it’s good enough for me—why not? I asked my doctor, and my doctor said that’s rubbish, vitamin C has nothing to do with the common cold. But I wasn’t taking any other vitamins, so I started taking vitamin C every morning. I haven’t had a cold in twenty years.

I attribute my generous supply of energy to DNA—my father was so filled with energy, my mom used to call him “Horace the Hummingbird.” She’d say, “Honey, could you light long enough to sit down?”

I’m grateful to have inherited that gene. But in the end, the energy is also very much due to enjoying what I am so lucky to do for a living. Show business. If all this sounds too “Little Mary Sunshine,” please put up with me while I celebrate it.

Human nature being what it is, I’m ashamed to say that even with all the good stuff, there are still days when the misgivings move in. Maybe when I’m overtired or overloaded—or over
something
. In spite of myself, I find it harder to roll with the punches. I get irritated inside and begin to feel that I’ll never catch up. When this happens, I try desperately to resist indulging those ungrateful moods, and I try to attack any one of the many things that need doing, but it just doesn’t work and I don’t accomplish a damned thing. It might take a little while to shake those doldrums.

It’s been widely reported that I prefer the company of animals to humans. As a matter of fact, Barbara Walters asked me that direct question in an interview at one point. With Barbara, you don’t hedge.

I said, “Yes, that’s true!” Now, here with you I want to be on the level: It
is
true.

Can you blame me? Animals don’t lie. Animals don’t criticize. If animals have moody days, they handle them better than humans do.

Next time I’m feeling overwhelmed, I think I’m going to start channeling my dog Ponti.

ASSOCIATED PRESS/BOB WANDS

S
ooner or later, some of our senses lose a little of their efficiency. (What do I mean “some”?! What do I mean “a little”?!) Eyesight, for example.

It sneaks up on you.

Reading and needlepoint have been passions for me since I was a child, and as middle age approached, I tried not to notice the fact that my eyes were gradually changing—things weren’t quite as sharp. I’m not sure how long I could have gotten away with ignoring it if it weren’t for my husband, Allen Ludden.

Since we first met, my romantic fella had always had a delicious habit of leaving little love notes for me in unexpected places (I still have them all), so I wasn’t surprised one night when I turned the bed down to find a greeting card under my pillow. It said, “If you can’t see I love you ...” I opened the card to find “... SQUINT!” I laughed hard, but the next day I headed for the eye doctor.

Okay, so you get your glasses and everyone is extremely supportive. “Oh, those are very pretty.” “Those glasses look great on you!” Et cetera, et cetera.

Somehow it’s a different story when your hearing starts to go. People can even seem a little annoyed when you say “What?” too many times. They’ll repeat themselves, but frequently without making it one jot clearer or louder. You find you need to see faces. If someone turns away while still talking, you realize how much lip-reading you’d been doing without realizing it.

I can remember accusing my dad of selective hearing—hearing only what he wanted to hear. Shame on me. That was before I learned how isolated one can feel when she misses a key remark and loses track of the conversation but is loath to admit it.

My father never enjoyed parties and avoided them whenever possible. He always said he couldn’t hear anybody in a crowd. I always thought it was because he just didn’t like parties. But now I understand. Cocktail-party small talk may not be much worth hearing, but it’s tough when you can’t hear it at all.

Sorry, Daddy, for this late apology—now I understand.

BETTY WHITE PRIVATE COLLECTION

A scene from
Bringing Down the House
with Steve Martin.

TOUCHSTONE/SAM EMERSON/THE KOBAL COLLECTION

A
t the Screen Actors Guild Awards, my agent, Jeff Witjas, and I got there a little early, because I was presenting an award with Alec Baldwin (and, lucky me, this meant I didn’t have to walk the red carpet!). So we arrived and went straight to the greenroom to wait.

We’re sitting on the couch when Tim Conway walks in.

Now, I am such a pigeon for Tim Conway. I look at him and I can get hysterical.

So Tim walks in, and he looks at Jeff and says, “Don’t get up,” and he looks at me without changing his inflection at all and says, “And I know you can’t.”

Jeff and I just broke up laughing (not Tim, he plays it straight).

Some people think they have a tremendous sense of humor. They make a remark and look at you and say, “Did you get it? Did you hear what I just said?” And it just kills the humor altogether.

For me, humor is about rhythm. It’s like an ear for music. It’s hard to explain.

For instance, at the table reads each morning for
Hot in Cleveland
, you listen to learn the timing. You hear the other characters, and you know where they’re coming from, and it helps you map out the show—it puts you way ahead of the game for rehearsal. It’s listening for that beat, like with music.

You go through the table read, and you just feel,
Wait one beat
. Or,
No, less time, don’t wait that long beat—say it quickly
. If you think about it too much, you screw up the timing completely.

I think what helped my comedic timing most were those breakfasts and dinners growing up—I was raised with such funny parents who told marvelous stories. I’d be sitting there as a kid, wanting to add to the conversation, wanting to jump right in with an idea, but if I blurted something out it might ruin the moment. It taught me a lot about the power of waiting.

Still, sometimes something hits my brain and my mental editor falls asleep and it comes right out and it’s simply less funny than it would have been had I waited a beat.

I remember being on set with Allen and trying to explain it to him once, listening to him deliver lines and thinking,
Oh, he should wait a beat.

But he kept doing the scene the same way, kind of rushing through it. I was cringing.

When I finally mustered the courage to mention it to him, he did not take it well. That’s an example of when a wife and husband shouldn’t work together! I kept my mouth shut after that.

Another good example of the importance of your mental editor!

© BETTMANN/CORBIS

I
think everybody needs a passion.

Whether it’s one passion or a hundred, that’s what keeps life interesting.

If you live without passion, you can go through life without leaving any footprints. You might leave behind pleasant memories in the minds of friends and acquaintances, but those dissipate quickly.

You often hear about people who can’t wait to retire. When they’re sixty-five years old—
that’s
when they’ll start to live. And I think it’s so sad! My father was a workaholic who just could not stop
working
. He would talk about all the things he was going to do when he retired at sixty-five, and you knew he was whistling in the dark. And sure enough, he died at sixty-four and a half. He just couldn’t face it.