If You Ask Me - Betty White [28]
One day, Henry Pollick, who lives in the Valley, was almost to Ann’s and realized he’d forgotten the cup. He turned around and must have done some creative driving to get home to pick it up and make it back in time for the game.
Just as we were wondering where Henry was, he raced in, breathless. “I can’t afford the penalty!” he said, and we all burst out laughing.
I love to play cards and rarely have anybody to play with anymore.
So these games are precious.
On Match Game—I’ve always loved a great game.
CBS/LANDOV
MODERN TECHNOLOGY
(Thoroughly Modern Betty?)
Every time you begin to think you’re such a contemporary and you don’t feel your age, you realize you don’t own a computer!—and intend to keep it that way.
There are a few reasons for this.
I get a lot of mail, as I’ve mentioned before. Donna does most of the fan mail, but the volume of my personal mail, too, is enormous! I come in with an armful every day and sort it into different stacks. I may push one stack aside, but before I do, I at least have an idea of what’s in that stack. If I had a computer and clicked a button to “store” something, I wouldn’t sleep at night! I’d wonder what was stored in there, did I answer this or that or the other? That scares me. I think of it as the computer equivalent of my upstairs office and dining room table.
And many people use computers to write. They talk about how efficient it is, how fast. But I can’t create with a machine. As I said in “Writer’s Block,” there’s a connection from my brain to the paper through my longhand writing that just works for me.
When my agent and publisher and I got together to work on this book, my publisher worked with an amazing instrument I had never seen—a computerized pen that recorded audio and plugged into the computer. A talking pen? I named it Bruce.
It’s a far cry from that first book I ever wrote when I was a kid, which was one hundred pages in longhand, written with a pen you dipped in ink!
Thank you, Bruce. I don’t deserve you.
ADRIAN SANCHEZ-GONZALES/LANDOV
CHILDREN
When I was a little girl, my mother loved baby dolls. She collected them.
But my toys were always animals.
I would spend all my lunch money on little blown-glass animal families at the toy store, which I later had to spend a lot of time dusting.
Barbara Walters once asked me if I ever had desired to have a child.
The answer is, I never did think about it.
I know there are many career girls today who would disagree, but I’m not a big believer in being able to do both. I think somebody takes the short end of the stick.
I had such a wonderful rapport with my folks, but my mother didn’t work. She was home with me.
It’s an individual choice. I didn’t think I could do justice to both career and motherhood, maybe because I had the mother I did. It’s such an individual choice.
And I’m a stepmother. I have the best stepchildren in the world.
When Allen and I first married, I became the stepmother of teenagers. Never having had children, I was suddenly the mother of teens! But we got along great. So great, they called me “Dragon Lady,” lovingly.
Even after all these years, we love each other dearly, and I am most proud of the children this career girl inherited. A major blessing—yet again.
SINCE YOU ASKED . . .
Holding the 2011 Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series.
KEVIN MAZUR/WIREIMAGE
INTEGRITY
It’s important to maintain as level a head as possible in this exciting business over the years.
The toughest time is when you’re on a roll . . . when everything is going phenomenally well, like it is for me right now.
That’s when you have to remember that image in the mirror and not let success get to you. It is important that you not believe your own publicity. Be grateful for whatever praise you receive,