If You Ask Me (8 page)

As Sue Ann Nivens on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
.

CBS PHOTO ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

And Sue Ann Nivens really did change my career. That sickly sweet image I’d grown up with expanded to another context. She was the Happy Homemaker who could fix anything, cook anything, clean anything, and sleep with anyone who would stand still. Another character, Phyllis (played by Cloris Leachman), became suspicious that her husband was having an affair with Sue Ann, because he’d come home with his clothes cleaner than they’d been when he left.

People would invariably ask Allen, “How close to Sue Ann is Betty?”

He’d say, “They’re really the same character—except Betty can’t cook.”

Recently I had a similar role switch. I did a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie called
The Lost Valentine
, which is a very poignant and emotional film.

I have been doing comedy for so long that people were surprised to see me play a dramatic part. I kept getting calls afterward, saying, “Hey, I’ve never seen you do anything like this!”

But it’s good to mix things up as an actor. Or else you can grow too accustomed to a character. On
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, I played alongside Gavin MacLeod (as Murray Slaughter). When she was near, Sue Ann always petted Murray’s bald head.

In a poignant, emotional role
—
with Jennifer Love Hewitt in
The Lost Valentine.

HALLMARK/THE KOBAL COLLECTION

Gavin went on after
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
to his own hit series,
The Love Boat
. I did a guest role on his show, and in one scene I’m standing behind Gavin, as Captain Stubing, and it was so hard not to stroke that bald head!

So for me, Sue Ann was a huge career mood change.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
aired for seven years altogether. I came on in the fourth season, in what was to have been a one-shot appearance. The most episodes I ever did during one season was twelve of twenty-two—the other seasons, I did only five or six episodes. But people still remember Sue Ann. She was such a mess!

And such fun to play.

PHOTO BY GABI RONA/MPTVIMAGES.COM

TV LAND/PHOTOFEST

O
n
Hot in Cleveland,
when we’d all been cast and come together for our first table read, we all simply fell in love.

It was that instant rapport. We all knew one another from other shows. Everyone in the cast is a pro. Valerie Bertinelli from her career work, Wendie Malick from
Just Shoot Me
, Jane Leeves from
Frasier
, and I from
The Golden Girls
. We’d all seen one another work, so we were looking forward to getting to know one another better. But you can’t manufacture chemistry—it’s either there or it isn’t. And boy, was it there!

When we’re on the set, we’re holding one another’s hands, or someone will come by and ruffle the back of your hair. And we laugh inordinately.

Back in my second book,
Betty White in Person
, at one point I was writing about
The Golden Girls
and the team relationship we had. Well, I reread it recently and laughed out loud. It described the exact same rapport I was just talking about on
Hot in Cleveland
.

Let me quote:

It’s as though I wrote that about Valerie and Wendie and Jane! How can you get that lucky again, twenty-five years later?

We all just love to laugh. One night we went off the air in hysterics—we couldn’t tell anyone what the joke was. We still can’t. Valerie came in, early in the season, with this not-nice joke and we all found it so funny that before each show we put our arms around one another and say, “One for all and all for one”—and then we add the punch line. And it works every time.

I feel so fortunate to be on another show with the rare chemistry and goodwill that I experienced on
The Golden Girls
. It feels a little bit like lightning striking twice.

But I’ll take it.

With the Golden Girls
—
Bea Arthur, me, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty.

ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES/ABC VIA GETTY IMAGES

On
The Late Late Show
with Craig Ferguson.

FRANCIS SPECKER/LANDOV

P
eople often mistake me for a comedienne and ask me to do stand-up routines for charity. But that’s not my skill set. I’m an actor, not a comedienne. Doing stand-up is an entirely different beast.

Witnessing good stand-up makes you appreciate what people like Craig Ferguson and David Letterman and Jay Leno do every single night, night after night. Sure, they have writers, but they have to put their stamp on it, too. Night after night. Did I mention that?

I asked Craig once, “Are you getting a little roadweary?”

And he said, “Not all the time.”

When you’re a guest on one of these shows, you’re successful when there’s great repartee. Now, we know the hosts are accomplished comedians, so the question is, can guest and host play well together?

The producer has some assistant call you for a preinterview, which I hate. The assistant calls, and then you end up giving your whole interview to them, and you don’t want to repeat it when you’re on the air! It’s obviously a safety net for the host, so he has something to fall back on.

But when I’m on Craig’s show, we never go near those notes. He’s got them all there on his desk, but we just start talking.

Usually when I appear on his show, I’m doing a sketch involving some kind of costume, and I’m always short of cash. That’s a running theme. But recently I was on and we didn’t have any idea where we were going.

And Craig, like Tim Conway, is one of those people you have trouble making eye contact with for fear of cracking up. He has these eyes that just dance. So when I’m on his show, on the couch, I talk to him looking down at the floor, and he talks to me peering intently into my eyes.

So we sat down and just started having this easy conversation, and we didn’t know where we were going or how we were going to end, but somewhere along the line it just got funny. I can’t tell you how or when, but it did. And then it just came to its natural end. So at the end, the crowd was clapping and laughing, and he hugged me and whispered in my ear, “We did it! What did we do?”

It goes back to that repartee and comedic timing both. You have to listen and play off what someone else says. You can’t be thinking of what you’re going to say next or it dies right there. If you listen to people, it triggers something in you to which you can respond. It’s about both really listening and hearing that funny track that you can pick up and deliver back.

I can’t tell you it’s innate. I don’t think it is. But I think you have a propensity for it. And after that, practice helps a lot.

But this is not stand-up comedy.

With comedy, as opposed to drama, you get an instant review. With a dramatic performance you act up a storm and hope it works.

Doing comedy—if you don’t get the laugh, you know you bombed.

It’s a tough business.

NBCU PHOTO BANK

W
hen a script comes to me, I read through the whole thing so I know what the story is about, who the other people are, and where they’re coming from. It gives me an overview.