As more vivid details emerge about Betty White’s death, including how she suffered a stroke six days prior to dying on December 31, 2021, among the most standout is the rumor of her final word: Allen. As in: Ludden, her husband of eighteen years before he died of stomach cancer in 1981.
After meeting each other on the game show he hosted, Password, on which White served as a celebrity contestant, Ludden tried to get her to marry him for about a year–complete with two rebuffed proposals–before she finally surrendered. While this is the part of the love story that so many find swoon-worthy, it’s actually yet another testament to how women only seem to “go for” men when they’re pushed enough to do it. Rarely asking themselves: “Is this actually what I want? Or am I just into it because he’s expressed an interest?” White was also averse to living in New York (as any sane person should be), where Ludden filmed the show. Yet, in the end, she capitulated. Not to living in New York, but to marrying Ludden.
White was forty-one at the time of their wedding and had already been married twice, relationships she would call “rehearsals.” Ludden was also married a previous time, but his wife, Margaret McGloin, left him by making him a widower rather than through the channel of divorce. Also unlike White, Ludden brought to the marriage three children. The closest White would get to having her own apart from her coterie of pets as life went on. For Betty, indeed, the third time was a charm, which is why, when Larry King asked her during one interview how come she never remarried, she responded, “Once you’ve had the best, who needs the rest?” Would that all men could be as romantic as Betty, and one definitely wonders if Allen would have said the same if Betty died before him, especially considering that he did remarry Betty after his first wife dipped out of this realm. But anyway, let’s not detract from the love story at hand.
It was long-time friend and Mama’s Family co-star Vicki Lawrence who outed White’s alleged “Rosebud” of a last word. She claimed it was Carol Burnett who told her over the phone: “I talked to Carol yesterday, and we agreed it is so fucking hard to watch the people you love go away. She said she spoke to Betty’s assistant, who was with her when she passed, and she said the last word out of her mouth was ‘Allen.’ That’s so lovingly sweet. I hope that is true.” And we all do. White and Ludden’s kind of love is of the fairy tale variety that people still dream about and romanticize (especially women). So all-consuming and deeply ingrained within the mind and body that to even think of being with someone else would be unfathomable. But again, we have to wonder what Allen would have done if the shoe were on the other foot, and Betty had gone first.
White’s abstinence from much in the way of “male camaraderie” (save for her playful jokes directed at Ryan Reynolds) as the decades rolled on, however, might have been the very thing that ultimately gave her such longevity. After all, studies show that most women are decidedly better off (read: happier) staying unmarried and child-free, as White did for a vast majority of her time here on this planet. And yet, regardless, the thing that many women will still focus on is the “sweetness” of her supposed final word. How it indicates that true love really can stand the test of so many years gone by. How absence can make the heart grow fonder rather than make the mind forget and the genitals move on.
Like the flying saucer poster that says, “I Want to Believe,” so it goes for the concept of a love that actually lasts and endures. Something men appear to give much less of a shit about in the comportment they display via the gradual waning of their ardor. Thus, Betty White’s final utterance is something we try to cling to in order to ignore that, if Allen had lived, their marriage probably would have ended in divorce.
