ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (10)

By: Mimi Lipson
August 6, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite sympathetic villains. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

SUE ANN NIVENS

Long before The Mary Tyler Moore Show, there was The Betty White Show. 1950s Betty White was all wholesome, deep-dimpled congeniality — “Icky-sweet” was how she later summed up her image. She would sing a number or two between Geritol ads, interview guests, and perform anodyne skits. You can see her on YouTube in a 1954 episode reading jokes off postcards sent in from viewers. “Wife: The couple next door seems to be very devoted. He kisses her every time they meet. Why don’t you do that? Husband: I say, do you think she’d let me?” The mask slips just a bit; there’s a lewd wink in her voice, a devilish gleam in her eye.

Flash forward twenty years to White’s first appearance as Sue Ann Nivens, the host of WJM’s Happy Homemaker show. We meet Sue Ann as a guest at one of Mary’s lame parties. She overhears Mary saying, “Somebody spilled coffee all over my brand-new tablecloth,” and swoops in with the first of what would become many bizarrely specific household hints. “Oh, don’t worry, dear, that will come up with no trouble at all. You simply stretch the fabric over a bowl and then pour boiling water through the stain from a height of two feet.”

“I love her dimples,” Rhoda says when Sue Ann flounces away. “I wonder if she made them herself.”

Sue Ann Nivens is Betty White but riper, plusher, raunchier, bitchier. Basically, she’s Betty White in drag. As the episode progresses, we learn she’s having an affair with Phyllis’s husband, Lars. The Mary Tyler Moore Show had some great unattractive characters. Ted Baxter was dim and vain, Phyllis was pretentious. Still, if it had been a pro-wrestling show instead of a sitcom, only Sue Ann, with her double entendres and obscenely frilly aprons, would have been a heel.

Part of the show’s brilliance was in the way it treated its assholes. None of them were excluded from Mary’s dinner parties, or the WJM table at the annual Teddy Awards for local broadcast television — a creative choice that was both generous and generative. Some of Sue Ann’s best appearances are the ones in which she’s laid low and then uplifted, usually by the long-suffering Mary. A favorite of mine is an episode in which Sue Ann’s new boyfriend makes a pass at Mary, who pulls her aside and tells her in the ladies’ room at the Teddies. Sue Ann, her façade crumbling, weeps on Mary’s shoulder. “I think we’re doing wonderfully for two people who don’t like each other,” she says. “By the way, for those mascara stains on your dress, try a dab of petroleum jelly before placing them in warm suds with just a little bit of baking soda” — the last word dissolving into a sob.

Back at the table, the sobbing continues as her category is announced. “Why?” she pleads. “Why did have to happen to me? I haven’t anything else to live for.”

(“And the winner is … Sue Ann Nivens!”)

Still in tears, she approaches the podium — head down, shoulders sagging — then turns around cradling her Teddy and flashes the room a dimpled smile. “Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen.”

White brought to Sue Ann all the comic timing of a Jack Benny or an Eve Arden. She had the kind of chops that seemed to set apart those who made the jump from radio to television. And then she subverted that into glorious self-satire. As happy as I am that she lived to be adored and celebrated into her eighth working decade, I wish it had been for her performance as Sue Ann Nivens rather than as the naïve, slow-witted Rose Nylund of The Golden Girls — a role that encouraged later generations to adopt her as a harmless pet. Her latter-day fandom always seemed condescending to me. Long live Sue Ann!

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