Inside the Powerful Friendship Between Comedy Legends Lucille Ball and Betty White

It’s fitting that the theme song for Betty White’s hit sitcom The Golden Girls was “Thank You for Being a Friend.”

White had a lot of close friends over her 99 years, but one dearest to her was another TV legend: Lucille Ball.

“We were buddies,” White once recalled, according to The Atlantic. “She was always going to teach me backgammon. So we’d get together and she’d have it all set up. But her idea of teaching was, ‘I’ll take my turn. Now you throw the dice,’ which I would. And then she’d move my pieces here and here, and I’d say, ‘Lucy, how am I going to learn if you’re playing the game with yourself?!’ But we did it a lot and had fun.”

While Ball was 11 years older than White when they met around 1957, the two women found they had a lot in common, and their connection blossomed into a 30-plus-year friendship. Both had worked in radio before graduating to television. Both had their own production companies — a groundbreaking move for women in 1950s Hollywood. And both had the support of strong, devoted mothers. After Ball’s 1961 marriage to comedian Gary Morton and White’s 1963 nuptials to Password host Allen Ludden, the couples grew close.

“Lucy and Betty’s relationship spanned more than just being show business acquaintances,” a pal of the pair told Closer. “They considered each other family.”

Breaking Barriers

White first got to know Ball while working on the 1957 sitcom Date With the Angels, about a young married couple. It taped at Desilu Studios, where Ball was wrapping up the final season of I Love Lucy.

“Betty was still trying to get a foothold in show business when she met Lucy,” the pal explained to us. But White wasn’t a complete newcomer, having already starred in the 1952–55 comedy Life With Elizabeth, produced by her own company, Bandy Productions.

“Their bond was their common accomplishment as businesswomen in a male-dominated industry,” Ann Dusenberry, who appeared on Super Password with the friends and costarred in the 1986 sitcom Life With Lucy, also told Closer. “Betty really looked up to Lucy,” another friend says, “and Lucy saw that she and Betty were cut from the same cloth.”

Ball was well-suited to become White’s mentor. I Love Lucy had been on the air since 1951, and a No. 1 hit for four of its six seasons. It was produced by Desilu, her company with husband Desi Arnaz. “Lucy took Betty under her wing,” the pal noted. “She was already the biggest female star on TV, and in many ways, she paved the way for Betty’s achievements.” The friend adds Lucy also “admired Betty’s spirit in tackling the male-dominated TV business of the 1950s.”

Support System

Adversity strengthened their bond. By 1959, Ball’s 19-year marriage to Arnaz had begun to disintegrate due to his drinking and philandering. Her 1960 divorce marked a turning point in Ball’s life, and White had the experience to offer her friend words of encouragement, because she had been divorced twice before. “Lucy saw Betty’s fighting spirit — they were really feminists of their time, when that wasn’t necessarily the norm in Hollywood,” says the friend. Ball forged ahead, marrying Morton in 1961 and taking over the reins of Desilu.

During hard times, the actresses also relied on each other’s family.

As the pal pointed out, “Betty adored not only Lucy’s sense of humor, but her mother and Lucy’s children,” Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr. (Betty didn’t have children, but after marrying Ludden, she helped raise his three kids from a previous marriage.)

A friendship also blossomed between “our two dynamite mothers, DeDe Ball and Tess White,” White, who was an only child and close to both parents, told Closer. Ball had been raised by DeDe and other relatives after her father died of typhoid when she was 3. A lot of the women’s strength “came from their mothers,” said the pal. DeDe, a former concert pianist, and Tess, a homemaker, taught their daughters how to stand up for themselves. “They were definitely mama’s girls,” noted the pal, “raised by women who told them they didn’t have to take a back seat to any man.”

But they did rely on their female friends. When Ball’s mother was ailing, White recalled being at a party “and [Lucy] dragged me aside and said, ‘What the hell am I going to do if I lose my mother?’ ” DeDe died not long after, in 1977, and “she sort of took my mom over,” White shared. “Every year on DeDe’s birthday, she would send my mom a basket of violets. [She was] some kind of a lady.”

Ball stood by her friend a few years later when Ludden died of stomach cancer. “She was there with a meal and kind words when Betty needed it most,” said their pal. As one of “the friends who set about putting the pieces back together,” White said, Ball “was convinced the sure cure for anything was backgammon. She made me laugh in spite of myself.”

Of course, as women of comedy, laughter was a key ingredient in their connection.

“They were powerfully funny, and ready and willing to be playful, even foolish, if there was a joke in it,” Dusenberry told Closer.

It was while taping a 1986 episode of Super Password that Ball learned Arnaz had died, and White was able to give her buddy a shoulder to cry on.

“Lucy was being real funny on the show, but during a break she said, ‘You know, it’s the damnedest thing. I didn’t think I’d get this upset,’ ” White recalled to People in 1989, according to Fox News Digital. “It was a funny feeling, kind of a lovely, private moment.”

Their bond continued until Ball’s death at 77 in 1989 from an aortic rupture. Says the pal: “Betty has a scrapbook of photos with Lucy and people who are close to her heart.”

“We had such fun!” White told The Atlantic.