The BETTY WHITE Only We Knew Her Best Friends Tell All!

WITH GRIT, GOOD HUMOR AND A BRILLIANT SMILE, THE BELOVED TV ICON MADE THE MOST OF LIFE  

- LOUISE A. BARILE

On the set of Hot in Cleveland, someone walked up to Betty White with a complaint. “She said, ‘You know what I hate?’ And Betty said, ‘No, I really don’t care to know.’ Not in a mean way,” explains series alum Wendie Malick to Closer. “But in a way to let you know, ‘Don’t come and dump your dark[ness] on me.’”

Throughout her life and career, Betty always tried to walk on the sunny side of the street — and it was not an act. “She never had high or low days, she always had Betty White days,” says Dan Watt, a former personal assistant to her Golden Girls costar Bea Arthur. “She was always a sweetheart.”

The beloved showbiz veteran’s cheerful, outgoing disposition rarely wavered, even in the most difficult of times. And Betty, who died in 2021 at age 99, quietly survived quite a few heartbreaks. “Betty was private with her private life,” her close friend Patty Sullivan, author of Betty White’s Pearls of Wisdom, explains.

WILD TIMES

Born in Oak Park, Ill., in 1922 and raised in California, Betty was an only child who had a close relationship with her parents, Tess and Horace. The family took vacations together in the Sierra Nevada mountains every summer. “They camped for a month or two at a time. It wasn’t a first-class experience; they went on horses,” says Patty. But these early adventures in nature would make Betty a lifelong animal lover and a passionate conservationist.