Throughout the month of December, I obtained a bunch of textual content messages from a telephone quantity I didn’t acknowledge saying, “HEAVEN HAS A NEW ANGEL! BETTY WHITE DEAD AT 100. CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS.” I knew that clicking would lead me right into a hellscape of some kind, so I resisted, however I did Google Betty White anyway, and located to my aid that she was nonetheless ticking. Still, the phishers or spammers or no matter they had been had received one factor proper: all of us knew that White, clocking in at ninety-nine, was a short-timer, and someplace within the collective unconscious we knew, with sorrowful anticipation, that Heaven, all the time crowded on the finish of the yr, was in all probability going to be welcoming her into the fold within the not so distant future. This was completely constructed clickbait, hooking onto an current uneasiness. On the flip aspect of such cynicism, you had People journal brightly dedicating its January 10th cowl to a portrait of White and a “Betty White Turns 100! ‘Funny Never Gets Old’ ” headline. It was already on newsstands when White died, on New Year’s Eve. The subject is at present going for as a lot as thirty-nine ninety-nine on eBay, greater than six occasions its newsstand worth.

White would have possible discovered this all fairly humorous, as a result of she had a comic book coronary heart and an ironist’s urge for food for bizarre reversals. There was one thing about her that all the time made it appear as if she was in on the joke, whether or not she was enjoying a dim-bulb sexpot or a sassy elder or just declaring her precise affection for vodka on the rocks and sizzling canine. (There is a sizzling canine named for her at Pink’s Hot Dogs, in Los Angeles. “The Betty White Naked Dog” is a wiener on a bun, no condiments, per her choice.) Having somebody actually previous host “Saturday Night Live,” as she did when she was eighty-eight, would have been cringey if it had been making enjoyable of the thought, however White certainly knew what she was doing. She was a humorous particular person on a humorous present who occurred to be older than the same old hosts, and he or she was gleeful about it.

There is a basic Hollywood joke, which is manner too near the reality and too painful to be purely a joke, that tracks the arc of an leisure profession. It goes: “Who the hell is Joe Blow?” “We need Joe Blow!” “Get me the next Joe Blow!” And, lastly, “Who the hell is Joe Blow?” White herself lived a little bit of that arc: when “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was casting somebody for the a part of Sue Ann Nivens, the producers referred to as for a “Betty White type”—that’s, the following Betty White. Instead, they employed Betty White.

She employed a Black faucet dancer, Arthur Duncan, for “The Betty White Show” in 1954, a full three years earlier than the primary federal civil-rights laws since Reconstruction was handed, making him one of many first Black performers to seem usually on a nationally televised selection present. White famously confronted down criticism of his hiring by saying, “I’m sorry, but he stays. . . . Live with it!” The extra objections had been raised, the extra airtime White (who was the present’s host and producer, nearly extraordinary for a girl at the moment) gave to Duncan. After requires a boycott and issue attracting sponsors, NBC cancelled the present.

She had an everyday poker sport with buddies. It was seller’s selection, and White normally selected Screw Thy Neighbor, a model of the sport wherein the target is to not find yourself with the lowest-ranking card on the finish of the spherical however, as an alternative, to commerce it to your unwitting neighbor. The winner of the night time took dwelling the group’s engraved brass cup. If the winner forgot to carry the cup again the following time the group performed, it was decreed, she or he would both be fined two thousand {dollars} or be killed.

Isn’t it wonderful to be taught that White and her third husband, Allen Ludden, the host of the sport present “Password,” had been good buddies with John Steinbeck? Doesn’t that make you admire how fantastic she was at appearing ditzy, since Steinbeck’s starch and rigor recommend that he wouldn’t have abided anybody who didn’t have lots of substance? They had been adequate buddies that Steinbeck even gave them the primary draft of the acceptance speech that he wrote for his Nobel Prize in Literature (signed, after all), and allowed his well-known canine, Charley, to drool on a elaborate black skirt of hers. (She saved it in its slimed state, as a memento.)

She beloved canine. At one time, she reportedly had twenty-six of them. She was additionally a fan of gorillas, and he or she loved stuffed animals a lot that she had a whole room in her home put aside for them. She instructed Katie Couric that she was “a little strange” when it got here to her stuffed animals and, for that matter, “a little strange for any kind of animals.” When she visited President Obama on the White House, in 2012—she was personal about her politics, however she brazenly endorsed Obama—she held his Portuguese water canine, Bo, on her lap. She instructed the Wall Street Journal, about Bo, together with her standard zest, “He’s a kissing fool.”

She was as soon as requested if there was something she hadn’t achieved in Hollywood, and he or she replied, “Robert Redford.” Goodbye, Betty.