If You Ask Me by Betty White Read Free Book Online Page A

lot.
    Sometimes it’s not all laughs—even on a comedy set. On The Golden Girls just a couple of weeks into the show the first season, both my mom and Bea Arthur’s mother became seriously ill. Ironically, the script we were doing at the time happened to be heavily mother-daughter-oriented—just by coincidence. Two weeks later, both our mothers were gone. Not an easy time.
    Line readings are always a challenge. When the line falls right, you feel it in your gut. That’s how you intend to do it from then on. But just try to repeat it—you can’t get it back to save your soul from perdition. Now and then, that “good line reading” doesn’t happen until you’re driving home after the show. But, of course, the party’s over by then.
    I’ve heard some of the best actors say the same.
    It’s a strange craft!

    With James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio .
    BRAVO/PHOTOFEST

TELEVISION
    O ver time, I’ve turned down three Broadway shows. I love summer stock. But with summer stock, there’s a beginning and an end to the production. Maybe a week’s rehearsal and three or four weeks playing the show, then you’re free.
    If you get into a Broadway show and it doesn’t work, you’re a failure. And if it does work, you may be stuck for who knows how long. It just doesn’t sound great to me!
    My theatrical friends think I’m a Neanderthal.
    “It’s THEATER ,” they protest.
    “I know,” I say, “but I’m television !”
    I was there when television first started. We grew up together.
    When I graduated from high school, television had just begun in New York, but it hadn’t yet started in California.
    I had done our senior play and was asked to do an experimental television show downtown. Our senior class president and I did a scene from The Merry Widow up on the fifth floor of the Packard Automobile building. And it was broadcast all the way to the bottom floor. My parents had to stand in front of a tiny little monitor on the first floor to see me! But it was the beginning of television in Los Angeles.
    Then I actually got paid (a little) to do a role as the girl behind the hotel desk on a show called Tom, Dick, and Harry . Never do a show with three comics who have a broom. But it was fun.
    Al Jarvis had seen me on that, and he called and asked if I would be his Girl Friday on a TV show he was going to do. Al had had a marathon radio show, and now he was going to be on for five hours, five days a week. They soon upped it to five and a half hours a day and added Saturday. That was Hollywood on Television . I’d been getting paid $5 by the local station.
    When Al called, I thought, Maybe I’ll get another $5!
    Instead, Al offered me $50 a week! I was shocked. Even more so when they gave me $200 per week when they extended the airtime.
    For two and a half years we worked together on that program. And then, Al went over to ABC, and I inherited H.O.T .
    You talk about experience—it was like going to television college.
    One of the things I realized from the first time I ever did television was the intimacy of the audience. There are never more than two or three people watching a television program—if there are more than three people in a room, they’re usually talking among themselves, not listening to you! So as a television actress, I knew my audience was always very narrow. Later, when I did movie roles, however, it was for this great big audience. And I didn’t know that audience’s content at all. You don’t have that feeling of reaching an individual. And you don’t look at the camera!
    No matter how television has grown, you’re still really just talking to those two or three people.
    People greet me on the street as a friend, not a celebrity. “Hi, Betty!”
    I was walking down the street the last time I was in New York, and a guy drove by and rolled down his window and hollered, “I love Hot in Cleveland , Betty!” Had I been a film star, he wouldn’t have done that.
    There’s a