Naughty Lady of Shady Lane

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 opens 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.”

She turned a one-shot guest appearance into a four-season, full-time role on the legendary sitcom. Asner remembers one scene that called for White to be dumped on a wedding cake, which accidentally injured her.

“But she went on with the show and stood up, and I knew she had to be hurting,” Asner says. “And she had the wherewithal to reach behind her and take a finger and dip it into the icing coating her ass and taste it and say, ‘It needs butter.’ They kept the line.”

A Career of ‘Incredible Luck’

White is thankful for the MTM years because they reminded a whole new generation that she could do more than banter on game and talk shows, which were her mainstay in the ‘60s.

“To luck into a classic show like that is incredible,” says White, who at 77 doesn’t look that much older than Sue Ann, whom she last played 22 years ago.

Sitting in the cozy den of the comfortable Brentwood home she’s owned since 1968, she repeatedly brings up the “incredible luck” she’s had throughout her career. It is a cheerful home, just like you’d expect her or Mrs. Wilson to inhabit (she played the role in last year’s “Dennis the Menace Strikes Again,” a straight-to-video movie) without pretense and lots of homey touches. Oil paintings of Carmel, where she has a second home, share wall space with countless needlepoint tapestries she worked on during evenings spent with her third husband, Allen Ludden, who died in 1981. They were married for 18 years and raised his three children together.

A collection of dusty Emmys sits unceremoniously atop a hutch in the dining room. Six of them are White’s, the first in 1952 for “Life With Elizabeth,” which began as a radio show and evolved into a nationally syndicated television comedy. She would have to wait 23 more years before winning her second, the first of two for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” The seventh is Ludden’s, for best game-show host for “Password” in 1976.

The worldwide syndication of “The Golden Girls,” the sitcom that ran from 1985-92, has made it harder for her to travel alone. The show is on in 47 countries, and fan mail from lands as disparate as Norway and Sri Lanka arrives all the time, she says.

A glass menagerie of dozens of animals dots tables around the living room, a reminder of her decades of fierce devotion to charity work that benefits animals. The collection of live animals that make up her “family” is surprisingly small--two dogs, a Shih Tzu and a golden retriever, and a foundling cat “who’s positive he’s a dog,” she says.

“I’m better known for my animal work than my career,” White claims. “I spend more time on it. I’m not into animal rights. . . . I’m into animal health and well-being.”

She scours scripts to see how animals are treated and says she has turned down parts when animals are treated cruelly. She refused “As Good As It Gets” because a dog “was thrown down a garbage chute, which is setting a terrible example for people who think they can do that with a dog, a cat, a baby or whatever,” White says.

“Lake Placid” posed no such problems because all of the animals were animatronic, and the one scene that could be viewed as cruel--where a cow is fed to a crocodile--”is pretty abstract,” White says. (The crocodile, however, does inflict a terrifying amount of physical and mental cruelty on humans.)

Another imaginary animal has played a role in her life, Toto and company from the “Wizard of Oz” books. She is an “Oz” freak “to the point of no return,” White says. “I have all the ‘Oz’ books, real early editions, and in my will they have to stay together.”

Her father, a traveling salesman, started giving her the books when she was sick as a child, but as she grew older she realized she loved the stories for their sense of humor and double meanings strewn throughout. Her ability to laugh at life also was cultivated from an early age by her mother and father.

“There wasn’t a straight man in the house,” says White, who moved to Beverly Hills from Oak Park, Ill., when she was in fifth grade.

So what would her mother think about those filthy words flying out of the mouth of Mrs. Bickerman? “My mom would laugh to kill,” White says. “She would take ‘Lake Placid’ as it was intended, totally tongue in cheek.”