If You Ask Me - Betty White [6]
They have been doing this long enough to have it all down to a system, so the only thing one can do to help is to do absolutely nothing. As a sketch ends, someone grabs your hand and drags you offstage into a very small closet nearby. You are literally attacked as someone strips off your clothes and stuffs you into new ones while someone else is touching up your makeup and yet someone else is removing your wig and pinning on a new one. (Ouch!) Your hand is grabbed again to drag you back onstage, too frazzled to remember what the next sketch is until you get back to those blessed cue cards.
Jeff, who was standing just offstage, says all I did was glare at him as I flew by. “I didn’t know you could look that fierce,” he told me.
The day after the show aired, on the flight back to Los Angeles, I had to admit it had been an exciting and incomparable experience.
“Thank you, Jeff. It wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for you,” I said.
Jeff replied, “Well, it’s about time!!!”
And as chance would have it, Saturday Night Live brought me my seventh Emmy Award. The day it was announced, Jeff called, wanting to know, Didn’t I think he deserved the Emmy?
Truth be told, he absolutely should have accepted the award.
With my castmates from The Mary Tyler Moore Show—
Ed Asner, Mary Tyler Moore, and Ted Knight.
The show won twenty-nine Emmys.
© BETTMANN/CORBIS
AWARDS
I know it sounds like a cliché, and I’ve discussed it in my interviews and other books, but it’s the truth—I truly believe a nomination in and of itself is the greatest honor one can receive for one’s work.
When you’re nominated, you get it all sorted out in your mind—not who’s going to win, but that you yourself are not. And that’s not being coy—that’s being realistic.
At the Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2011, I was nominated for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series, and the actors with whom I was nominated were simply extraordinary—Tina Fey of 30 Rock, Jane Lynch of Glee, Edie Falco of Nurse Jackie, Sofía Vergara of Modern Family, and me for Hot in Cleveland. When I saw the competition, it took all the nervousness away. I thought, This is great, but I’m never going to win!
So when my name was announced, I was simply stunned. I’d nearly forgotten I was nominated. And if you think I was in shock, you should have seen Jeff Witjas. He looked at me, and the color just drained from his face. Meanwhile, the girls from Hot in Cleveland were jumping up and down with excitement—they were, if possible, more delighted than I was!
As with the instances when I’ve won previous awards, it all happened so fast. There’s always a striking and sudden contrast: one minute, you’re sitting at the table, wherever that may be, and the next you’re onstage. You’ve been sitting in the audience long enough that you know your environment around your table, you know who’s seated nearby, but you get up those steps and turn around, and suddenly you see the whole overview of the audience. And that’s overwhelming, because you haven’t thought of all those people in that great big auditorium. You’ve thought only about the tables nearby.
When you turn around, the impact of what you see scares anything out of your head that was ever there!
I’ve never, in all the instances I’ve been nominated for an award, prepared a speech. I’ve known whom I would thank, but I’ve never actually written a speech. And this occasion was no different. And as in times past, I opened my mouth and words came, and God knows what they were. But it is such an exciting feeling.
When I picked up the SAG statue itself, which presenter Jon Hamm had left on the podium for me, it felt like it weighed twenty-five pounds. All I could think about was that it was the heaviest award I’d ever held.
Allen’s always there when I win an award, or when anything special happens, because nobody would celebrate it like he did. So he was right up there with me.
Ever wonder what happens to an actor after they accept an award and leave the stage?
After you win, someone escorts you backstage to a room