HOLLYWOOD -- Gosh, Betty White just can't stop apologizing. She's so sorry she had to say all of those four-letter words up there on the big screen in that "Lake Placid" movie she had so much fun making in British Columbia. It's just that, well, she's "old-fashioned enough to believe certain things should be kind of private" and certain words definitely left unsaid.
Yet say them she does, making the most of her short but decidedly unsweet moments as Delores Bickerman, a batty old woman who doesn't report a 30-foot crocodile who ate her husband because, after all, she wouldn't want anyone to kill the poor beast. The writer of those lines that might make the "South Park" kids blush, David E. Kelley, who also produced the half-scary, half-satirical sendup of "Jaws"'-like movies, called her after he saw the dailies."He said, 'I'm not sure the crocodile stuff will work, but to hear that language come out of Betty White just cracked me up,' " White recalls. "Well, I said, 'Do me no favors.' I tried to sell him on the idea of using words that sound close. My question to David E. Kelley was: 'How did this little old lady who lived way up in the woods all this time learn to talk like she was in the 'hood?' "
Guess who won? She admits that when she saw the finished 20th Century Fox film, which opened last Friday, the comic side of the cursing was easier to see. Steve Miner, who directed "Lake Placid," says White was chosen to play the wacky widow because "'she is the funniest comedic actress in the business."
"She could read the phone book and be funny," he says.
"Well, the whole picture is satire," White says as another way of apologizing. "Still, I was a little amazed at my dialogue."
Amazement is a constant in White's world. She's amazed that she's marking her 50th year in television. Amazed that the film and television work keeps finding her. That she's starred in four TV shows with her name as the title. That she has yet another TV series, "Ladies Man," starring Alfred Molina, debuting this fall on CBS.
After working on "Lake Placid," she's looking forward to the faster yet still manageable pace of making a new sitcom for TV. "Don't let anybody doing a situation comedy say they work hard," she says. "We had to get up at the crack of 10 o'clock, and the first three days, we go home early. Then on camera-blocking day, we're there till maybe 6 o'clock," she says, her voice dripping with that gentle brand of gee-whiz, yet surprisingly edgy sarcasm she is so well-known for. "It's just terrible. . . . It's stealing is what it is."
An attitude like that can get you places and help keep you there. Ed Asner, who worked with White from 1973-77 on the "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" (she played sex-crazed cooking-show host Sue Ann Nivens), says that she thrives as a comic actress because "she has a wicked sense of humor and will go to great lengths to be sure and get the humor in the simplest of statements."