Betty White was “inclusive and respected everyone,” Jane Leeves said on the June 18 episode of Dropping Names With Brent and Johnny. The comment comes from someone who worked beside White through all six seasons of Hot in Cleveland, giving the line the kind of on-set weight that retrospective tributes usually lack.
Leeves on White’s set behavior
“You always think of elderly people as not being that way, but she was inclusive and, you know, she respected everyone,” Leeves said during the podcast conversation with Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes. That is a specific account from a co-star, not a distant recollection, and it lands differently because Leeves was part of the cast from 2010 to 2015.
On Hot in Cleveland, White worked alongside Leeves, Valerie Bertinelli and Wendie Malick in a series built around four women navigating life and friendship after relocating to Ohio. The set description matters here because White’s behavior was being measured against the everyday dynamics of a multi-person ensemble, where inclusion is not a slogan but a working condition.
Arthur Duncan and resistance
Brent Spiner added a sharper edge to the discussion with a separate recollection: “She was also very good about inclusion on her show... and just refused to cave.” The reference points back to the 1950s, when White reportedly resisted pressure to remove Arthur Duncan from her variety series after some viewers objected to his appearances.
White continued featuring Arthur Duncan rather than shrinking his role, and Duncan later became the first Black regular on a variety show when he was hired on The Lawrence Welk Show. He stayed there for 20 years. The sequence gives Leeves’s praise more than nostalgia; it connects White’s reputation on Hot in Cleveland to an older pattern of choosing inclusion when it carried friction.
White’s seven-decade run
White’s career stretched more than seven decades, with major association points including The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Golden Girls and Hot in Cleveland. She died at 99 on Dec. 31, 2021, less than a month before what would have been her 100th birthday.
Leeves’s remarks do what good industry memory should do: they move White out of generic legend territory and back onto a working set, where respect had to be practiced every day. The clearest takeaway is not that White was admired, but that a co-star who spent six seasons with her says the conduct matched the reputation.
