Betty White at Home: 15 Images of the Golden Girl’s Life Off-Screen
The sly First Lady of Television would like to see you out on the lanai
Betty White’s career spanned more than seven decades and began just as television was becoming a major form of entertainment in American homes; it’s no wonder she was hailed as the First Lady of Television (a decades-long nickname immortalized in a 2018 documentary). A defining figure of the medium who broke so many glass ceilings, White held a string of extraordinary firsts, according to PBS: She was the first female to produce a nationally broadcast TV show, the first to star in a sitcom, the first to receive an Emmy nomination, and the first to host a game show. And the groundbreaking actress adored being in front of the camera. “I just love to work,” she told Parade magazine. “So I’ll keep working until they stop asking.” Yet for all her visibility on screen, White led a quiet life when the cameras were off.
Born in 1922, White married for the first time in 1945, although the marriage would only last six months. She wed second husband Lane Allan in 1947, and, following their 1949 divorce, returned to her parents’ Brentwood home, where she lived for years before marrying Allen Ludden in 1963. Ludden, the beloved host of the überpopular gameshow Password, would become her great love and lifelong partner. Even as White’s career reached new heights when she began playing the unforgettable Sue Ann Nivens in 1970s sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rose Nylund in the classic ’80s sitcom The Golden Girls, the star remained rooted in the couple’s two-story New England–style cottage in Brentwood, California. White stayed there long after Ludden’s death in 1981, living in the home until her own passing in 2023, just weeks before what would have been her 100th birthday on January 17th.
Though Ludden enjoyed entertaining, White was famously uninterested in cocktail parties, preferring informal gatherings and the familiar comforts of rooms she rarely felt compelled to leave. A devoted animal advocate, lifelong reader, and enthusiastic board games player, she shaped her interiors around ease and companionship rather than formality. Across her homes, she cultivated spaces that felt lived-in and personal—filled with books and surrounded by pets and objects that reflected her enduring love of animals. We’ll take a look below at the domestic life of a woman whose warmth, wit, and generosity extended well beyond the screen.
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Full house
By 1954, when this snap was taken, White was enjoying success with her weekly sitcom, Life With Elizabeth, while also hosting a daily variety program called The Betty White Show. Following her divorce from Lane Allan, the television pioneer found comfort moving back in with her parents in their Brentwood home, bringing along her dogs Bandy (Bandit) and Stormy. Dancer, the gray poodle, belonged to her parents. The happy group is captured here, sitting in the cozy living room furnished with a bold pink sofa, green carpet, and matching drapes.
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Fireside chats
In this 1954 photograph, White relaxes at home with one of her dogs, seated on the hearth of a semicircular fireplace. Fireplaces would become a defining feature across her residences. At the Carmel, California, dream house she and Ludden completed shortly before his death, a dramatic floor-to-ceiling white-stone fireplace surround anchored the living room and framed sweeping ocean views. In the couple’s main home in Brentwood, a red-brick fireplace set within a wood-paneled alcove warmed the space and, quite literally, was the last remaining element after the house was demolished in 2022.
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Thank you for being a friend…to animals
Betty and Stormy strike a cheerful pose in their backyard in this 1954 image. Animals were a constant presence in the comic’s home life, so much so that she never lived without one. White often credited her parents, whom she considered her closest companions as a child, with instilling her lifelong devotion to animals. In her 1995 autobiography, Here We Go Again, White recalls: “I’ll bet I was the only kid on the block whose parents would come home with a dog and say, ‘Betty, he followed us home. Please, can we keep him?’”
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Longevity diet
Though the Hot in Cleveland star appears to be putting the finishing touches on a cake in this photo shoot at the home she shared with her parents in 1957, she once confessed to Bon Appétit that she’s “not a big cook. I only go in the kitchen to feed my dog.” And, true to this 1957 image, the junk-food devotee admitted: “I don’t eat a proper diet. Lunch is usually a hot dog and french fries, or something equally devilish. Red Whips (licorice) are my curse.” For White, it was a recipe for success, keeping her healthy and happy for almost a century.
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The extroverted introverted
As funny, chatty, and outgoing as audiences knew White to be, the veteran television gameshow participant was, at heart, a devoted homebody—far more comfortable in her living room than amid the crush of bodies and conversation at a dinner party. “Betty just doesn’t like crowds,” Ludden once told a publication. “Everyone thinks of her as Miss Personality, but underneath it all, she is really very shy,” he concluded. Here she is in 1957, lounging at home with two of her favorite companions—a pet and a book.
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Living doll
White fervently collected dolls and figurines throughout her lifetime. This image captured the sitcom actor surrounded by her collection of Japanese Hakata figurines, clay statuettes depicting scenarios of real life in Japan’s Hakata region. Archival photographs show the delicate works displayed along her fireplace mantels and on shelving throughout her home. These figurines later fetched more than $3,000 at White’s estate sale.
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Avid collector
Hakata dolls weren’t the only kind of ceramics White used to decorate: The avid animal lover also amassed an array of porcelain and glass figurines, which appeared throughout every residence she occupied. This 1957 image shows the television producer lounging on her living room couch with her Pekingese pup, Bandit, while a porcelain rooster stands prominently behind them. The comedian also owned several other ceramic birds, cats, bears, horses, and dogs, including a life-size replica of Bandit.
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A perfect perch
When White landed her first television role on the variety program Hollywood on Television in 1949, she and then husband Lane Allan didn’t yet own a TV. Her parents, she later recalled in Here We Go Again, “bought a little 10-inch Hoffman set so they could watch their daughter.” By 1957, the family had upgraded considerably, and in this snap, White, along with Dancer, makes herself at home atop the hulking set.
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Paper trail
In this 1957 photograph, White sits at a pared-back desk outfitted with little more than her Emmy and the essentials. In later years, however, she admitted that order gave way to chaos. In her second memoir, If You Ask Me, White recalled that the spare bedroom she once used as an office became overrun with papers and unfinished projects, forcing her to decamp to the dining room, where the table soon met the same fate. “What about my potential dinner guests?” she writes. “With no place to serve them, we wind up with cocktails and hors d’oeuvres in the den, then we go out to eat.”
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Home sweet home
The Luddens are the picture-perfect couple in this 1972 snap taken at the Brentwood home they moved into in 1968. Built in 1952, the five-bedroom house spanned 3,000 square feet and sat on three quarters of an acre. In addition to the two-story dwelling containing a sunroom, the property held a guesthouse, a three-car garage, a pool, gardens, and a generous backyard— in which the couple is seen here—with views of the Getty Museum.
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Sunshiney days
In this photo, taken on Valentine's Day, 1972, the couple horse around by the pool, with their home visible in the background. Their Cape Cod–style house came complete with a shingle roof and shutters. White painted the shutters and her front door in a bright yellow, one of her favorite colors with which to decorate, according to a 1978 article in Home Buyers Guide. The door, along with a brass knocker in the form of a cat’s face, sold for $10,000 at White’s estate sale following her death.
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A sentimental investment
The Luddens’ Brentwood purchase was a quick sentimental buy, for reasons connected to their former Chappaqua, New York, abode. “We were hoping to find a home reminiscent of the remodeled farmhouse we owned in the East,” Ludden told Home Buyers Guide. "When we walked into the house and saw the pegged wood floors and massive fireplace, we felt as if we had come home.” Allen collected brass candlesticks as a hobby and this 1972 image shows the Emmy winners putting the finishing touches on their dining room table using flowers from their garden and a few candlesticks from Allen’s collection.
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Flowers all year round
Taken in the garden of their Brentwood home in 1972, this image shows the couple posing in front of yellow lilies. An even more enthusiastic gardener than his wife, Ludden also grew marigolds and roses, among other flowers in the yard. Unsurprisingly, their homegrown flowers were a major part of the couple’s interior decorations. Ludden once told the Daytime TV magazine: “We have flowers blooming 12 months of the year.”
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The couple that plays together…
The veteran gameshow hosts are seen here spending quality time together, participating in one of their favorite pastimes: playing board games. “I come from a family of compulsive game players,” White once told the Associated Press in 1965. The couple sit at a table with matching wicker chairs, all painted in yellow, Betty’s favorite decorating color.
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Bound by books
Games weren’t the Luddens’ only point of connection; they were also avid readers and collectors. The couple owned numerous editions of classic literature, along with signed volumes by figures such as Charles Schulz and Fred Astaire. Their shared love of books even forged a friendship with the Astaire family: as White recalls in Here We Go Again, a chance dinner party conversation about The Wizard of Oz led the couple to invite Astaire’s son-in-law to their home to view their complete collection of the series, sparking a relationship with the family that would endure for years. The bibliophile pair is shown here in 1972.
