In 1949, Betty White was about to get her first big break on television. A disc jockey by the name of Al Jarvis called her in hopes she'd want to be cast on his talk show "Hollywood on Television." "I thought, 'Sure! Gee, another job? Maybe I'll make another 10 bucks,'" she told the Archive of American Television. It turned out that the series would be airing live each weekday for five hours, so the pay was a bit higher than that. Jarvis offered the young actress $50, and at the time, she couldn't even believe it. "$50 a week!" she reminisced. "I was in heaven."
Each week, White would appear alongside Jarvis, and the two would ad-lib as music played around them. It was an important gig, and one that taught White a lot about what it meant to be on television — and it also ended up becoming super successful. "After three weeks, they extended it to also a show on Saturday," she said. "And stretched it from five hours a day to five and a half hours a day."
After four years of hard work, White's co-host decided to leave the popular series. Luckily, the crew had the perfect replacement in mind. "I inherited the show," White said, and the rest is history.
