I was in the Flower Factory yesterday when I heard the news of Betty White's passing. I gasped, then stood incredulous at that gasp. "You were a fan?" I was asked sympathetically, and I had to admit that I was not so much a fan but an interested party curious to see how she would be feted. Much of the news cycle this week had been taken up with her January 17th birthday, when she was scheduled to turn 100. But now that she's passed, how will she be remembered?
My Betty White, if I can put it that way, was the character she played on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), the host of the station's Happy Homemaker program. Yes, "Sue Ann Nivens" performed the cardboard cut-out homemaker role we inherited from the 1950s, but the "real life" host of this show-within-a-show was an unbridled "sex maniac" who made her male and female colleagues uncomfortable. Even as a kid I saw this ability to make people uncomfortable with what most of them think and feel, but never express, as an example of her power, her feminism.
White's character on The Golden Girls (1985-1992) was almost the complete opposite. Gone was the woman who was upfront with her desires, who knew what she wanted and set out to get it (a role taken up by the cast's Rue "Blanche Devereaux" McClanahan), and in her place, a "simple-minded" and/or "spaced-out" retiree by the name of "Rose Nyland". Was this shift NBC's Reagan-era revenge on CBS's Steinem-era liberated woman? Or was it a case of an actor stretching out, proving that she could perform at varying ends of the human behavioural spectrum? Actors used to think like that, while there are actors today who only take on roles that are closest to who they think they are, as human beings. I am sure Betty White was among those actors who ask, Where is the art in that?
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