If You Ask Me (7 page)

GLOBE PHOTOS

ASSOCIATED PRESS/CLIFF OWEN

O
ne of the first questions in every interview since I started in television more than sixty years ago has always been, “When you were growing up, did you always want to be in show business?”

My answer has never changed. As a kid, show business wasn’t even in the mix. As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be either a forest ranger or a zookeeper. The problem was, back then a girl wasn’t allowed to be either one.

That was a real problem for a girl who grew up the way I did. Even
today
, my earliest, fondest memories are of the pack trips in the High Sierras on horseback I took every summer with my mom and dad. Mules carried our camping equipment and food supplies. The first time we went, I was just four years old and rode in front of Daddy on his horse. The following year I graduated to a mount of my own.

It was a two-day trip to our destination, Rae Lakes. (Today, you may be able to drive there—I don’t want to know.) Once there, we pitched camp, put bells on the horses and mules, and turned them loose. Pros that they were, they all hung out together nearby.

I can still hear those bells.

The next day, the guide would leave us and corral the animals to take them back to the ranch. Three weeks later, he’d bring them back in to pick us up. In those days, we would never see another human during the whole three weeks—it was true wilderness. Heaven.

After those earliest years, we moved our campsite to a remote area of Yellowstone National Park. In the way a lot of kids look forward to Christmas all year, I used to count the days from one June to the next, until we could take off again.

On the last half-day of school for the summer, my folks would pick me up at Beverly Hills High School, and we were on our way. Dad always wore a forest ranger hat on vacation, and when I’d spot that hat, I would know the day had finally arrived.

So it’s no surprise that I developed a love of animals and the outdoors, but as a child I could only dream of becoming a zookeeper or a forest ranger. Today, after forty-seven years of working with the Los Angeles Zoo, I am satisfying the zookeeper part. Now, let me tell you the clincher.

Not long ago I received a letter from the United States Forest Service that thrilled me to my toes. It seems someone there must have read one of those interviews about those early dreams, because there was an invitation to Washington, D.C., where, in a special program at the Kennedy Center, the Forest Service would make me an Honorary Forest Ranger! It was all very official, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.

Of course
, I went back for the ceremony, and it was a beautiful program. Thomas Tidwell, the Forest Service chief, made the presentation with a huge Smokey Bear standing behind him. As I stepped to the podium to accept, I got a big hug from Smokey, which almost got me, but I didn’t actually lose it until—after receiving the certificate and the badge—they presented me with an official ranger’s hat.

He’s been gone all these years, but as the memories washed over me, I would swear my dad was standing right there. It is a moment I continue to replay in my mind.

My eternal thanks to the Forest Service for this honor, which is so deeply appreciated. It truly was one of the greatest moments of my life.

I shall continue to work my hardest to spread the word that not only must we protect our wilderness areas—we must appreciate them. They are an endangered species.

ASSOCIATED PRESS/CLIFF OWEN

I
can remember my first attack of stage fright. I was in grammar school, in the third grade. And I had to get up in front of the class and recite a poem.

“Little Machi met a cameraman on a Chinatown Street one day....”

That’s how it started, and I was panic-stricken. I don’t remember if I made it through the poem at all, but I can remember what it felt like.

Still, I somehow managed to continue as a young girl, participating in plays throughout grammar school and high school. In fact, I wrote the play commemorating graduation from Horace Mann Grammar School—which was called
Land of the Rising Sun
. We were studying Japan at the time, and like any good red-blooded American girl, I wrote myself into the lead! I also wrote a prologue for the show, explaining that it was traditional Japanese theater and props were held by non-actors. The play opened with the princess talking to a nightingale. Since one of the football players was going to be onstage holding a birdcage, clearly this all had to be explained in the prologue.

Guess who spoke the prologue?

So I was the star
and
the interlocutor. And anything else I could be. Remember who wrote it!

But I never outgrew the stage fright.

To this day, it still happens—every single time I go onstage.

 

 

Jay Leno and I are good friends, and I appear on his show all the time. We greet each other before the show and have a catch-up in the makeup room. Suddenly it’s showtime. I’m in the wings and those butterflies appear. Ballplayers have rituals. They may touch each corner of the plate with the bat to calm themselves down. I have no ritual. I have—butterflies.

BETTY WHITE PRIVATE COLLECTION

So you work your way through it.

Let me be clear:
You are never calm
. But your job is to deliver.

In the case of Jay Leno, or Craig Ferguson or David Letterman or Jimmy Fallon, suddenly the conversation gets interesting and it carries you along.

Just hope the audience comes with you.

At the 2011 SAG Awards, when my name was announced, I was so shocked—it was so unexpected that I would win the award, given the other nominees, that my first thought was,
They read the wrong name.
Then I got up to the podium and thought,
Oh, no, I’m going to have to say something!
On air, I might look calm, but if you knew what was going on in my head, your own head would spin.

None of the tricks I try work. I’m lucky if I can breathe.

It’s amazingly common for actors to have some form of stage fright. It just manifests itself in different ways.

I remember Rue McClanahan used to say, “That’s one thing I never get! I never get stage fright!”

I think she was lying through her teeth.

NBCU PHOTO BANK

You’re taking a chance every time you step in front of an audience.

So is the stage fright due to fear of forgetting lines? Fear of drawing a blank on what to say? Fear of making a fool of oneself?

All of the above.

REUTERS/FRED PROUSER/LANDOV

A
fter more than thirty hours a week on live television for four years, there were those who thought of me as sickeningly sweet. They’d say, “She’ll make your teeth fall out!” But if we met at a party, they would tell me, “Oh, you’re not as bad as I thought you were!”

I was certainly typecast as icky sweet on
Life with Elizabeth
and even
Hollywood on Television
. But then Sue Ann Nivens came along and changed the whole picture. The neighborhood nymphomaniac on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
was a surprise to everyone (including me)!

The character was written as “an icky-sweet Betty White type.”

The casting director, Ethel Winant, said, “Why not get Betty White?” But the executives said they couldn’t have me read for the role because Mary and I were best friends, and it might make it awkward for Mary if it didn’t work out.

 

 

As an actor, you don’t get every role you try out for, so it wouldn’t have bothered our friendship at all, but they didn’t know that.

Well, I guess they couldn’t find anybody sickeningly sweet enough, so they finally called me one Saturday morning and explained the part of the Happy Homemaker and asked, “Would you do it?”

Of course I said I’d be thrilled!

So I called Mary and said, “Guess who’s doing your show next week?”

She said, “Who?”

I said, “Me.”

She said, “Oh, no, you’re not! I have veto power!”

She was kidding, of course.