Betty White smiled all the way

Betty White: Now that was a career. And that was a pro, adored by millions who appreciated comic skill and the ability to get the last laugh.

The Illinois native, who died Dec. 31 just weeks before her 100th birthday, was the daughter of a homemaker and a lighting company executive. She became a Californian when she was just a year old, after the family’s move to Alhambra, a few miles from downtown Los Angeles. She worked in radio — first in 1930, at age 8! — and would seek out radio gigs as she grew older, having already been dismissed as “unphotogenic” by Hollywood casting agents.

Over the next half-century and more, White avenged that idiotic mischaracterization by wielding one of the greatest, most recognized smiles in American television. She did so across a remarkable spectrum of vivacious sincerity and subtly wicked parody, supported by timing and presence and craft that came together as a natural force as it has for precious few others.

We know her for so much long-running situation comedy: As Rose Nylund on “The Golden Girls,” as Elka Ostrosky on “Hot in Cleveland,” and as Sue Ann Nivens, star of “The Happy Homemaker” on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

Casting the peerless “MTM” ensemble, Moore and company wanted an “icky sweet” Betty White type, with a twist. The character was like whipped cream concealing knives: a shark one second, a kitten the next. Lo and behold! Betty White turned out to be perfect for it.

In 2021, we lost Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman and Gavin MacLeod before White. For countless Americans, the ritual of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” followed by “The Bob Newhart Show” Saturdays on CBS was like going to comedy school once a week, learning from geniuses.

In 1949, White and L.A. disc jockey Al Jarvis began co-hosting a daily five-and-a-half-hour talk show, “Hollywood on Television,” live. After a brief stint with a new co-host, Eddie Albert (who left to do “Roman Holiday”), White fronted the show solo. She was, by most accounts, the first female TV talk show host.

She’d do sketches featuring a fictional spinoff character, which led to a domestic sitcom soon afterward, “Life with Elizabeth,” airing from 1953 to 1955. In between scenes, White pitched Geritol (“for tired blood”) and other products of dubious worth nonetheless worth millions in revenue. White, too, was basically a product for sale at that stage, though of increasingly evident value and versatility.

She married her third husband, “Password” host Allen Ludden, in 1963, a year after White appeared in a dramatic role as a Kansas senator in “Advise and Consent.”

What I love about White is the way she gently but firmly turned the tables on her own persona. She came into national familiarity as a sugary paragon of female domesticity. And she complicated and deepened that cliche by sheer will and skill.