Celebrating Betty White

As she approached her nineties, Betty White’s status as a cultural icon saw a remarkable uptick. In 2010, at age 88, she became the oldest-ever guest host of NBC’s venerable Saturday Night Live. The appearance landed the beloved actress her fifth national Primetime Emmy Award. By that point her career had already been going strong for more than 60 years.

The likeness on the Betty White Forever® stamp is based on a photo taken during that epic year for the “first lady of television.”

When USPS art director Greg Breeding and artist Dale Stephanos found the image — in which photographer Kwaku Alston captured White’s joyful outlook — they knew they had the basis for an appropriate stamp portrait.

Although a lot of Betty White fans came to know her as a funny, feisty representative of an older generation, few may realize the extraordinary length and breadth of her career. In 1939, White performed on an early experimental TV broadcast. Her big break came in 1949 with a live, local Los Angeles show; she appeared on air for 30-plus hours per week — singing, improvising comedy, chatting with guests, even performing commercials. In 1952 White became one of the first women to produce a nationally broadcast situation comedy, Life With Elizabeth, also starring in it.

“The happy homemaker”

As for artist Stephanos, he remembers White from a later era: “I grew up in the 1970s so it feels like she was always there, part of the mountain range on the horizon. My first memory of Betty White is her character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Sue Ann Nivens was hilarious, charismatic — and a bit terrifying.”

In 1973, the hit show’s writers had scripted an episode featuring a character described as a “Betty White type” — all sweetness and light. Producers ended up casting White herself, as a saccharine TV homemaker with a man-hungry streak. White was such a hit that Sue Ann became a recurring character on one of TV’s most treasured shows. Her playfully risqué aspect in the role remained part of White’s public persona ever after, adding another dimension to the perpetual twinkle in her eye.

Capturing her golden glow

“It’s always nice to surround yourself with your subject matter,” says Stephanos, who indulged himself with video clips. “For me, it’s essential to see how the person I’m painting carries themselves, interacts with others, and what their eyes do when they laugh or frown. I also loved The Golden Girls,” he says of White’s hilarious seven-season hit that debuted in 1985. She played the sweetly naive Rose Nylund. The show was groundbreaking in its rich, multifaceted depiction of the lives of older women.

Stephanos certainly captured the star’s likeness, warmth, and sparkling sense of fun. “I decided to work all-digital,” he says, “because I worried that changes might be needed. I sent Greg Breeding, my incredible art director, about 20 different iterations of color,” he estimates. “The luminous dots in the background represent those glamorous old-school Hollywood Fresnel lights that were often seen in actors’ headshots. I thought those were a fun compositional tool that communicated the era in which Betty White found her success. And I think that the color palette we ended up with is apt for the Betty White era, from black and white to Technicolor.”

Stephanos shares one slight regret: “In retrospect, I wish I had painted it in oil as I often do, simply because I love the act of painting and having a physical artifact at the end of the process.”

Pet projects

White was a well-known animal welfare advocate, a major aspect of her life that the stamp designer and artist wanted to reflect. From childhood White enjoyed a menagerie of pet cats and dogs, and later became an outspoken advocate for animal welfare, creating and hosting a show called The Pet Set in the early 1970s and serving on the boards of like-minded organizations. “I have to keep doing my acting job,” White declared, “so I can support my animal causes.”

After some artistic experimentation, Stephanos and Breeding agreed that including an animal in White’s stamp portrait was too distracting. “I was doodling at breakfast one morning, trying to solve this problem,” the artist recalls, “when I noticed that my wife was wearing an interestingly shaped earring. I looked down at my sketches and noticed a paw-print shape — and had a serious eureka moment! I drew Betty with a paw-shaped earring and sent it to Greg. The earring signals her love for animals in a nuanced way that will be a fun Easter egg in the stamp.”

When Betty White died peacefully in her sleep on December 31, 2021, days shy of her 100th birthday, she left an irreplaceable legacy: the adoration of critics and generations of fans, and joy and laughter destined to reverberate into the future.

Betty White photograph by Kwaku Alston/Getty Images.