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Betty White must have a secret.
The actress is 87, an age when most people usually start pumping the brakes on life. Yet here she is, America’s Senior Sweetheart, a bundle of twinkly-eyed, grandmotherly energy who still appears in movies, advocates for animal health, cracks jokes on late-night talk shows, drops F-bombs in viral Web videos and loves every single, hectic minute of her jampacked days.
So what does this irrepressible woman know about staying vital that we don’t? Betty White, are you eating something the rest of us should be?
“French fries. Hamburgers. Hot dogs,” she confesses by phone while promoting her new comedy, “The Proposal,” co-starring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. “I’m not a health nut. I weigh every morning, and if I put on a pound, tomorrow I just take that pound off by cutting something I indulged in the day before. My weight has stayed the same for decades.”
“I really don’t get tired,” the former “Golden Girl” says. “I am enjoying life very much at this point. I’m so lucky. Don’t think I take it for granted.”
Actually, it’s impossible to believe White takes anything for granted. In a 20-minute conversation, the multiple Emmy-winner uses “lucky” five times to describe herself and gushes about what she calls her “marvelous” experience working on “The Proposal,” a romantic comedy in which she assumes a role that suits her perfectly: doting, lovable grandmother. Seriously, toward the end of a conversation with this relentlessly upbeat woman – a lady who punctuates some sentences by calling a reporter “dear” – one is sorely tempted to ask, “Won’t you be my Nana?”
Even if White is all warm and fuzzy in this onscreen venture, anyone who has seen her foul-mouthed turn in the thriller “Lake Placid” or her regular wacky appearances on “The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson” (including one last year in which she called Sarah Palin a “crazy (female dog)”) knows White’s other side, the one that’s wickedly naughty.
That mischievous alter ego is also on view on the humor Web site Funny or Die via a video that claims to capture a “real” argument on the “Proposal” set. Because of the content (Bullock, White and Reynolds blurt out a series of bleeped profanities and, at one point, White flips Reynolds the bird), the actress initially resisted doing it.
“(The studio) sent me the script, and my little speeches were, every second word was the F-word,” she remembers. “And I said, ‘I don’t want to do that. What does that have to do with our nice little romantic comedy?’ ”
But she relented. Even though she thinks the bawdy Betty routine has gotten a little stale (“David E. Kelley started it with ‘Lake Placid,’ and pretty soon it got to be kind of cliché,” she says), the sitcom veteran is savvy enough to get the joke.
Which also may explain why, during her recent “Proposal” late-night talk show tour, she played beer pong on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” and told Ferguson she once slept with all of the Marx Brothers.
After 61 years in the entertainment industry, White accepts both the joy and the pain her profession brings.
“I’m the luckiest old broad on two feet,” she says.
