BETTY: The Story of Betty MacDonald, Author of The Egg and I

by Anne Wellman

  The young Betty of course was oblivious to all this, probably because Gammy made the children avert their eyes whenever they walked past a saloon, but she did write about the biting cold in winter, the huge icicles which hung outside the windows, and having her frozen cheek thawed with snow by Sydney. She also recalled the lack of grass in their yard. All the topsoil had been washed away during the mining for gold and gems and other minerals which had taken place right in the midst of Butte’s residential districts. There was just one handkerchief-sized patch of green in the front yard, Betty wrote, and here she would sit playing with her dolls and trying not to damage the grass.

  As a toddler Betty was slow to talk, a wonder to Sydney as the child showed great intelligence in every other way, but when she did finally begin at almost three it was in complete sentences with every word pronounced exactly right. Children who talk late are often extremely bright, and certainly Betty would fit this profile (although with characteristic modesty she referred to herself as an ‘outstanding dullard’ for this delay in speech). At ages five and four she and Cleve attended a local kindergarten while Mary went to the McKinley School; when Betty turned six, she too started in the first grade at McKinley but was moved to second when it was discovered that she could already read and write. She was paralyzingly shy and never spoke above a whisper, Betty wrote later, and it had taken several months for the teachers to realize her capabilities.

  Mary and Betty wore white stockings to school every day and shoes with patent leather bottoms and white kid tops. After school, if the weather was nice, she remembered going outside with an apron over her dress – insisted upon by Gammy – to play on the dump at Darsie’s place of work, the Montana School of Mines. Here the children would find lots of the little clay retort cups which had been used for assaying gold. Their games were usually masterminded by Mary, who from a very early age was very inventive, Betty said, and had tremendous enthusiasm, especially for her own juicy big ideas which her younger siblings were usually forced to implement. Betty and Cleve were Mary’s natural guinea pigs; the younger children proved to be more dubious. Betty described Mary inventing perpetual motion by getting Betty to hold out a long pole in front of a descending sled with the idea that the pole would then rebound off the wall of their house and push the sled back up the hill again, and so on ad infinitum (the experiment knocks out Betty’s front teeth); Mary convincing Cleve to walk across a plank suspended over the cellar stairs (he falls off onto the stairs and injures his back); and Mary talking Betty into sliding down an old mining flume in the mountains or jumping from a hayloft onto a pile of straw in which an upturned rake proves to lie hidden.

  In Betty’s writing about her childhood Mary looms pretty large: where Mary leads, Betty follows, and this continues throughout their adolescence and early adulthood. Even when Betty is a young woman Mary is still persuading her into things she doesn’t want to do, whether it’s going out with short, dandruffy men for whom Mary has promised to find a date or getting her to interview for a dubious job which combines typing with modeling fur coats. She even harangues Betty into writing her first book, at least the way Betty described it. In Betty’s eyes Mary was always the talented one of the family and the wittiest; her friends remembered her repeating Mary’s anecdotes and bon mots and Mary’s spirited opinions and tirades are peppered throughout Betty’s books.

  A baby sister, Sylvia Remsen Bard, was born in 1913 but died at four months. (The unusual name Remsen probably derived from Sydney’s grandmother Mary Remsen Ten Eyck, born in 1821.) Betty never mentioned this sister and her sad death in her writing. Another little sister, Dorothea Darsie, a dark-haired baby this time, was born in 1915 when Betty was in the second grade at McKinley. The new baby thrived and was nicknamed Dede. At some point during all this fecundity the ever-creative Sydney had invented a sort of sling for the later stages of pregnancy: made out of heavy unbleached muslin, it was a hammock with tabs that tied around the bump, little darts up the front which made a strong nest for the stomach, and straps over the shoulders to carry some of the weight. In later life she made one for Betty’s best friend Blanche, who said it made a big difference and should have been patented.

  Betty wrote in Egg that the family spent their summers camping in the mountains, accompanying Darsie as he went about examining mines, and that she dated her ‘still smoldering’ hatred of wild animals from these trips. They would come across bears and lions on their walks and at night the coyotes and timber wolves would howl dismally outside the tents. If Gammy was along on the trip to look after them the children refused to go anywhere with Sydney and Darsie, who were forever walking logs over dangerous ravines or descending into deep dark mine tunnels or fording furious streams. Gammy, on the other hand, had an instinct for danger and carefully avoided it. The children, and especially Betty, much preferred cowering inside a cabin with their grandmother, where they were out of the reach of groping fangs. They loved Gammy, an eccentric and pessimistic woman who kept her money in her Bible where she thought it would be safe from burglars, and wore her corsets upside down with the bust part fitting over the hips. She hated all men (except her own son) and was a terrible cook, but she read to her grandchildren indefatigably and let them into her cozy rumpled bed whenever they were lonely or frightened.

  Seattle

  When Betty was about nine Darsie went on a mining trip to Mount Baker in Washington State, and fell in love at first sight with nearby Puget Sound and the city of Seattle. Here, he decided, was the place to live. Seattle, green and hilly and overlooking the Sound, was a boom-and-bust city: first lumber, then the Klondyke Gold Rush when the city became a hub for the miners in Alaska and the Yukon, and then shipbuilding during World War I. This last boom was still in progress when in 1917 or 1918 Sydney and Darsie and the children, consisting now of Mary, Betty, Cleve and Dede, moved into number 2212 on what has since become Everett Avenue East on Capitol Hill. Darsie started well-paid work at the Ladysmith Smelting Company of Vancouver Island. In 1918, at the age of forty, he also registered for the draft, although apparently was never called up; perhaps he had a yen for the military, having previously done a brief stint in the Signal Corps of the Oregon National Guard.

  The Bards’ new house had been owned by the Vice-Consul of Denmark and was fairly grand, with a ballroom in the basement which health-obsessed Darsie turned into a gymnasium. His ideas about health had already been a torment for the children back in Butte. He would make them run round the block each morning before breakfast, even when it was bitterly cold, and now they were made to do the same in Seattle. Salt was not allowed, nor the drinking of water at meals, and each mouthful had to be chewed one hundred times. He bought carloads of apples, made them eat brick-hard toast and raw vegetables, and read aloud long dull articles on natural foods. The older children were also enrolled in the YWCA and YMCA gym and swimming classes, which Betty blamed for her lifelong hatred of exercise. The teachers were always ‘big mannish women with short hair and sadistic tendencies’, she wrote. And, to keep their minds healthy, Darsie did not allow them to read comics or go to the movies. Naturally the children didn’t want to be healthy and wanted to go to the movies and read comics like everyone else, so as soon as Darsie left on one of his prolonged mining trips they stopped running around the block and got out the funny papers. Sydney did nothing, as neither she nor Gammy wanted to get up at five in the morning for cold baths and exercises any more than the children did.

  Pioneering was at an end, wrote Betty. In addition to their school lessons she and Mary were embarked upon a program of cultural instruction, perhaps at the instigation of cultivated Sydney: music and dancing lessons, French and drama. Betty claimed that she wasn’t very good at piano, despite having long thin hands, and thought she was completely outshone by Mary who couldn’t read music and never practiced but in Betty’s estimation still managed to play a hundred times better. The girls also received cookery instruction from Sydney herself, who was an accomplished cook. This incl
uded the finer aspects of cuisine such as making your own mayonnaise and lighting candles at the dinner table.

  In 1919, after a year on Capitol Hill, the family moved yet again. Their new house in affluent Laurelhurst, 5120 E 42nd Avenue, was perched high on a bluff above 20-mile-long Lake Washington. The house, old and run-down, was a big, white Victorian, complete with an orchard, tennis courts and a vegetable garden, and the family immediately bought a large collection of animals including a cow.

  The house at Laurelhurst

  Courtesy Puget Sound Regional Archives

  The house was constantly filled with pets and friends, Betty wrote in Egg. There were seven in the family, except when Darsie was away, but the table was usually set for twelve and sometimes forty – guests of Darsie’s, Sydney’s, or Gammy’s, plus the children’s friends as well. The younger members of the family were spaced around the table to discourage fighting and were allowed to join in the conversation, but only if they kept to topics of general interest. Whether there were guests or not, every night Sydney set the table with candles, silver, glassware and flowers. The Bards were doing well, and judging by Betty’s account lived in some style, with maids and a nurse for the younger children.

  For the older children there were private schools. Betty and Mary attended the all-girl nonsectarian St. Nicholas School in the wealthy area of Capitol Hill. The school at that time was an imposing structure of classical design on the Hill’s main Broadway thoroughfare. There were several expensive changes of uniform required from the upscale Frederick and Nelson department store, including, for gym classes, black serge bloomers, a white middy blouse and a black tie and stockings. Girls from many of Seattle’s leading families were students there; the school prepared them to pursue higher education (many were accepted into prestigious women’s colleges such as Wellesley, Vassar, Smith, and Bryn Mawr) but also to take their places in the upper echelons of Seattle society. Emphasis was on academics but also on proper behavior, charitable service, cultural activities and the creation of a gracious home. Betty’s parents – perhaps Sydney more so than Darsie – clearly wanted their daughters to be educated as young ladies.

  Sydney herself was involved in charitable work such as acting as hostess at dances to raise money for Seattle’s Children’s Orthopedic Hospital and Mary and Betty were now joining in. In August 1919, for example, they were both members of a girls’ dancing troupe performing an interpretative dance at a fête in aid of the Seattle Day Nursery Association.

  That same year Darsie launched a business with a colleague, a geological engineering consultancy under the title of Bard & Johnson, and was soon acting as consulting engineer and geologist for the Milwaukee Railroad in addition to his work for the Ladysmith Smelting Company. Money appears to have been flowing in, although at a price, as Darsie was still often absent on mining trips for as much as six months in the year. Nevertheless, life seemed very settled for the family in their lively big home above the lake.

  Darsie

  It was a Sunday afternoon in January 1920; Betty was twelve. Her father was away from home, testifying as an expert witness in a lawsuit back in Butte. The children were all involved on various projects around the house and artistic Sydney, pregnant again with her sixth child, was quietly painting a picture.

  Suddenly the peace was interrupted by the arrival of an urgent telegram. Darsie was desperately ill with streptococcal pneumonia and Sydney was to come at once. She left for Butte immediately.

  But in those days, when treatment options were limited, there was little that could be done. Darsie died a few days after Sydney’s arrival. He was cremated in Butte and Sydney made what must have been a terrible, heartbroken train journey home from Montana with her husband’s ashes. She was completely devastated. The younger children were bewildered, although fully aware that something had gone tragically wrong with their happy existence.

  Sydney’s aristocratic mother, Mary Sanderson, came to comfort her daughter and to look after the children. They all hated her snobbish ways and condescending attitude, although Betty wrote that the visit from ‘Deargrandmother’, as she made them call her, did help to take their minds off the tragedy. Eventually she departed and for the most part life continued for the children much as before, used as they were to Darsie’s frequent absences. For Sydney, of course, it was much harder. At some point during the months after Darsie’s death Sydney one morning refused to get out of bed. Mary, the eldest, went to her bedside and pleaded with her, telling her that the family needed her and that she just had to get up. Sydney forced herself to rise and get dressed – there was no choice. She had four children to care for and another about to come into the world. In June her last child, red-haired baby Alison, was born.

  Family life resumed, although much changed, and in time Sydney even took up her previous charitable and social activities. In April she was among the patronesses of an event held by the Wellesley Club of Western Washington to raise funds for scholarships, and in later years she would be mentioned in the Seattle Times as giving a tea for an old friend from Butte (assisted by ‘the Misses Mary and Betsy Bard’), or with her daughters helping at a Laurelhurst Guild tea in aid of the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital. She never remarried. In the years to come people would sense the great love and admiration with which she always spoke of handsome, adventurous Darsie.

  In her books Betty doesn’t dwell on her father’s death. She wrote only that the year following his death was a very sad one. Their father had often been absent, sometimes for months on end, and when he was at home he had put his reluctant offspring through rigid diets, enforced calisthenics and cold baths at five in the morning. His scientific mind had also led him to administer tests to the children for color blindness and other conditions when they were only babies, and to give them intelligence tests as soon as they could talk, but perhaps all of this came from love and concern as much as scientific inquiry. Darsie’s dreadful obsession with health, for instance, was because Betty in particular was a frail child who caught every illness going, although she only learned this later in life. And despite his mania for health and experiments in child-rearing Darsie had been an outgoing, sociable man – often inviting people to stay with the family for months on end – who had a good sense of humor.

  He was certainly amused in the face of his children’s unwillingness to adopt his various regimes. When he instituted the early-morning cold baths for the children, for instance, Betty wrote that he had at first put them on their honor; they cheated, of course, and Darsie gave them a week as he listened to their pretend screams in the bathroom before buying some horribly coarse towels and personally drying them off after full immersion in the freezing water. When he taught them good sportsmanship as part of their Saturday tennis lessons, insisting they jump the net after the game and shake hands, Betty could see that he took their accompanying stuck-out tongues and pretend vomiting in good part. The children may have hated the early baths and the exercises but Darsie was also a father to be loved.

  Now this larger-than-life parent was gone. His death changed their lives in one other important respect. Money became tight, and got tighter, as eventually Sydney lost most of what money remained both through poor investments made on the bad advice of well-meaning friends, and because of mismanagement on the part of some of Darsie’s former business associates. More immediately, all the extracurricular lessons except piano and ballet ceased, and the older children were switched to public schools from the fall of 1920. Once again the children had to adjust to a new environment. As an adult Mary had a theory that all the moving around as children meant that the Bard offspring were continually having to adapt to new places, new climates, new friends and new schools, and that this was never hard for the Bards because they all had plenty of vitality and excellent health and liked to adjust. This sounds more like Mary just describing Mary. After Darsie’s death the sudden change of schools, loss of friends, and straitened circumstances are likely to have affected shy and sensitive Betty
far more profoundly.

  Darsie’s disciplined ways were also swept aside and Betty wrote that the children began to do exactly what they wanted, including staying with friends for weeks on end without telling their mother. Sydney’s only stipulation for the behavior of her brood, apart from good manners and not sulking, was never to tell a lie.

  Growing up

  Betty described herself at about age twelve as extremely thin and with braces on her teeth. She was completely overshadowed by the highly popular Mary, who went off to parties and brought hordes of boys to the house. Betty stayed home playing with the younger children and washing the dishes with a sore heart. She later wrote that in the school yearbook Mary was labeled Torchy, ‘the girl who put the pep in pepper’, while under poor Betty’s picture was ‘An honor roll student – a true friend’. When Mary started winning elocution contests with her high-drama performances she offered to coach Betty, who was delirious with happiness because she thought Mary’s stomping renditions were simply marvelous. Despite Betty’s thinness and braces Mary decided she was the ‘cute’ type, which Betty realized in later years was either kindness or wishful thinking, but in any case it gave her more confidence. Taught by Mary, she wrote that she too attempted some recitals, sticking out her lips in a pout and waggling her finger and lisping her way through the pieces. The family were completely nauseated, but some of her schoolfriends liked it and Betty was tempted to take up elocution herself but was (perhaps luckily) unable to do so because of the family finances.

  Then came adolescence. Suddenly Betty was no longer thin but rosily plump, with a curvy figure:

  I grew a large, firm bust and a large, firm stomach and that was not the style. The style was my best friend, who was five feet ten inches tall and weighed ninety-two pounds. She had a small head and narrow shoulders and probably looked like a thermometer, but I thought she was simply exquisite. I bought my dresses so tight I had to ease into them like bolster covers and I took up smoking and drinking black coffee...