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

by Anne Wellman

  There was, of course, much more to the failure of the marriage than these musings for public consumption. In her subsequent divorce submission Betty claimed that Bob had been a brutal and abusive husband during the whole of their married life; she had clearly had experiences on the farm that never made it into The Egg and I.

  The 1931 application to the Superior Court of the State of Washington for King County stated that Bob failed to do his part on the farm and left everything to Betty. The greater part of raising the chickens had fallen to Betty’s lot, and the living and returns from this labor were very meager. She had had to work ‘beyond her strength’ in carrying water and gathering wood to keep herself and the babies from cold. Bob had neglected and refused to make provision for his family, now and during the marriage. He was an alcoholic and was frequently drunken and abusive. On one occasion he had poured coal-oil on the side of the house and set it on fire, and it was only a timely discovery by Betty and her younger sister that destruction of the house and injury to the family were averted, the statement declared. (Some sources suggest that Bob was running a moonshine operation, and certainly there are plenty of references to moonshine in Egg, including Bob drinking it with his Native American friends. A chapter on the local moonshiner was reportedly excised from the book by lawyers before publication.)

  Betty’s divorce application also claimed physical abuse. Bob had been guilty of cruel treatment and of heaping ‘personal indignities’ upon her, Betty claimed. He had ‘struck and kicked plaintiff on a number of occasions’, including when she was heavily pregnant with her first child, and had threatened to shoot both her and the children. He had called Betty vile names, and threatened to disfigure her so that no-one would ever care for her again.

  This list of of Bob’s misdemeanors was ‘greatly abbreviated’, Betty stated later in the divorce process. For her part, Betty claimed to have done her utmost to make the marriage work. There had been many promises from Bob to do better and because of these promises Betty had stayed in the marriage, but her life had been miserable and unhappy from the very start. She had lost all affection for Bob and it would be impossible for her ever to live with him again.

  Privately, Betty told her old friend Blanche that Bob had no sense of humor, hung around with crummy friends, and dramatized himself too much. She said that her grandmother had helped them buy a new car but that Bob had wrecked it the first day they owned it, and since the accident was his fault they were unable to collect any insurance. She told Blanche how she and Bob had once been invited to a party by one of his undesirable friends. Betty refused to go, but Bob, even though he knew how she felt about these particular people, nevertheless insisted. His method of persuasion was to pour a cup of kerosene onto the back porch and then hold a lighted match about ten inches above and threaten to drop it (seemingly the same or a similar incident to that in the divorce application). Knowing Bob, Betty told Blanche she thought she’d better agree to go to the party. Laughing, she said she’d had a terrible time there – Betty never acted the martyr.

  Bob seems to have made Betty’s life more of a hell on earth than the amusing rural existence she later conjured up in Egg. Given all this it’s surprising how generous Betty is to Bob in the book. She praises his scientific chicken farming, carpentry, and marksmanship skills, more than once. The worst she delivers is calling him repellently cheerful, and callously impervious to the loneliness she herself felt. No doubt Betty had some knowledge of his inner demons. It seems likely that whatever happened during his period in the military may have caused some damage to the young soldier. Bob left the US Marines with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and there are reports that he suffered with night terrors; perhaps Betty was being as forgiving as she could be, and Bob was of course the father of her children, who by the time she wrote Egg were old enough to read and understand the book.

  In Anybody Can Do Anything Betty describes her flight from the farm as a lonely, rain-sodden walk through dripping brush as she leads three-year-old Anne by one hand and carries both a suitcase and year-and-a-half-old Joan in the other. Thus encumbered, and entirely on her own, she takes a bus, a ferry and another bus to reach Seattle. The reality of Betty’s escape may have been rather different. According to Blanche’s memoir, Mary went to the farm to rescue her sister. She told Blanche that she had made the rescue trip to Chimacum when she knew Bob would not be there. She helped Betty pack her things and those of the girls and they left hurriedly, leaving no word behind. Whatever the precise circumstances of Betty’s flight, she went, taking the girls with her and then filing for the divorce on grounds of cruelty. The only other alternatives at that time were adultery or desertion.

  Divorce was granted in 1935 and Betty was awarded custody of the children. After the divorce, contact between the ex-spouses was virtually non-existent. It seems likely that Anne and Joan never saw their father again.

  Betty and the Great Depression

  AFTER THEIR FLIGHT from the farm Betty and the little girls moved in with her mother Sydney, brother Cleve, and sisters Mary, Alison and Dede, who were now all living in their new home close to Seattle’s University District. The area got its name, not surprisingly, from the presence there of the University of Washington campus. Then as now the university set the tone for the neighborhood, with its famous University Bookstore, crowds of students and lively fraternity and sorority houses. Noisy streetcars clattered up University Way, still known as the ‘Ave’ from when it used to be 14th Avenue; young people in cars cruised up and down, occasionally stopping at one of the inexpensive coffee shops catering to impecunious students. The arts were flourishing: throughout the 1930s the Repertory Playhouse in its refurbished brick storehouse at 41st and University Way was to attract large audiences with productions of the classics.

  The Bards’ modest house at 6317 15th Avenue NE had been built in 1910, when local property development had burgeoned following the previous year’s Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition on the university campus. Initially held to be part of the University District proper, the neighborhood gradually assumed the title of the Roosevelt District after the opening of Betty’s old school, Roosevelt High, in 1922. Number 6317, just north of Cowen Park, was a four-bedroom, brown shingled family home. Somehow the already large family made room for Betty and the children, and never had home been more welcoming.

  Courtesy Puget Sound Regional Archives

  It’s a wonderful thing to know that you can come home any time from anywhere and just open the door and belong. That everybody will shift until you fit and that from that day on it’s a matter of sharing everything...when you share unhappiness, loneliness, and anxiety about the future with a mother, a brother, and three sisters, there isn’t much left for you.

  After their isolated existence little Anne and Joan were excited by the unexpected chaos and laughter of a large household, and it was exhilarating for Betty to be home after her experiences on the farm and her troubles with Bob. She and the girls could stare in wonder at the large department stores downtown, the Bon Marché at Third and Pine and the more upscale Frederick and Nelson, two blocks away, where the famous chocolate Frango mints were newly on sale; or the store on Second Avenue recently opened by two brothers who had given it their own last name of Nordstrom. In the toy departments that Christmas Betty could have bought the girls the latest in playthings, the Fisher-Price duck on a string which quacked when pulled, or a Raggedy Ann doll. The world had changed since Betty had been away. She wrote that on her return she was amazed by the city’s dazzling new multicolored neon lights, swooping as they spelled out the names of shops and restaurants. In New York the Empire State Building, the world’s tallest skyscraper, had just been completed. A new era had begun.

  But, at the age of twenty-four, Betty was a single parent and jobless. She needed to support herself and her tiny daughters and it was the worst possible time to be looking for a job. The Depression was beginning to bite. The Wall Street crash of 1929 had undermined business investment an
d consumer confidence and there had been a sharp economic decline. Initially the residents of Washington State, so far from Wall Street, had failed to react to the reverses of October 1929. Even as the stock market plummeted the Seattle Times declared ‘No Depression’, and indeed for the first year job losses were minimal. But hopes faded towards the end of the following year as the banks began to fail, stores everywhere put up their shutters and unemployment escalated. By late 1931, some months after Betty’s return, wages in America had fallen by about a third and in Seattle as many as 20,000 were out of work. Shipping and shipbuilding in the area had ground to a halt, forty Northwest lumber mills had closed, and a few blocks south of the city’s PioneerSquare hundreds of unemployed men lived in a shantytown known ironically as ‘Hooverville’, after President Herbert Hoover’s ineffective relief policies. There was no unemployment insurance and lost work quickly translated into lost homes and extreme poverty. Soup kitchens and breadlines were serving ever greater numbers of people, the tattered men and women lining up for hours before the doors opened. In the midst of this desperation Betty now had to find a job. She knew very quickly that she wasn’t going to be able to rely on any financial support from Bob.

  By Betty’s own admission she had no marketable skills. She did have one thing on her side, though: the redoubtable red-haired Mary, who in Betty’s famous phrase believed that anybody could do anything, especially Betty. Mary, of course, had plenty of confidence. In Anybody Can Do Anything, Betty’s book about trying to earn a living in the Depression, Mary breezes into offices and manages to secure jobs or orders for advertising by taking a close personal interest in the life and loves of everyone in the company and cheering them up with total lies. She makes friends all over Seattle, is a favorite client at the employment agencies, and never has any trouble getting new jobs. Mary buoys Betty up, telling her that the world is crawling with cowed employees, ‘white-faced creeps’ who can take down someone else’s ideas at two hundred words a minute but that the Bards have ideas of their own and should use their brains. Naturally, Mary’s ideas about Betty’s talents don’t fit with Betty’s own very modest estimation: she feels she’s fit for only a very undemanding job involving filing, slow typing and keeping the office clean.

  Despite these misgivings Betty starts to feel that life is suddenly full of promise and that soon she, too, will be one of the morning commuters swaying on the streetcar on her way to a wonderful new job. The only problem is that, after her lonely sojourn in the mountains rearing chickens and never seeing anybody, Betty is severely lacking in self-confidence. Starting at the first of the many jobs Mary arranges for her she describes herself at this point as very thin, and pale with fright. In Anybody, with her then long red hair parted in the middle and pulled tightly back into a knot, she feels she looks like one of those white-faced creeps Mary is always talking about. She also feels she has very little to offer prospective employers. She can’t do shorthand and goes to pieces the moment an employer asks her to take a letter; unable to read her own hieroglyphics, she brings them home at night for Mary to decipher. She can’t type more than twenty words a minute. She strives to look efficient because she is so afraid of being fired and pretends to know how a filing system works because she is too diffident to admit she doesn’t, and then makes howling errors as she haphazardly files documents which can never be found again. When first working as a secretary she makes terrible mistakes, using up reams of paper and leaving little holes in her typed letters from deeply gouged erasures. Scared and anxious, she is simply unable to apply some of her very sharp intelligence to the various problems which confront her. Over time she does get better, although she finds office work pretty dull. In Anybody Mary first gets Betty jobs working as secretary to a mining engineer and to a lumberman, and then eventually Betty works for a rabbit-grower, a lawyer, a credit bureau, a florist, a public stenographer, a dentist, a laboratory of clinical medicine, a gangster, and a pyramid scheme. She also hand-tints photographs and sells advertising (very badly). Maybe these jobs don’t last, but she is rarely out of work, mostly thanks to Mary. These many and varied jobs of course eventually provided a rich seam of comic material for Anybody Can Do Anything.

  §

  Soon after her return Betty filed for divorce from Bob, the first step in what was to be a long-drawn-out process. She desperately needed money. The 40-acre farm, and its stock and equipment, had been bought with the help of a $1500 legacy bequeathed to Betty. Some of the legacy had also gone into maintenance of the farm and support for the family, including hospital bills for both Bob and herself. Of this legacy nothing now remained. In Egg Betty describes buying the farm for cash but in fact it had been bought on a real-estate contract for $560, of which more than $450 was still owing. Perhaps because of their clearly failing marriage, Bob in the summer and fall of 1930 had transferred to Betty both the equity in the farm and the proceeds from the sale of all its stock and property, although they had remained on the farm until well into 1931. However, the equity that Bob deeded to Betty was only $50, and according to Betty’s divorce filing he had only contributed about $300 of his own money during their entire time on the farm. The sale of the farm would bring her nothing. There were other debts, too: there was $55 in hospital bills still owing for Anne’s birth and $35 for Joan’s, to doctors in Port Townsend and Seattle. Betty was also personally liable for other bills and, according to her divorce application, had already been threatened with legal action.

  Betty’s attorney requested divorce and custody of the children, subject to visitation; that Bob pay in installments a sum of $1500, the amount of Betty’s long-gone legacy, into a suitable saving fund for Anne and Joan’s education; that Bob repay Betty for the wrongful removal from the ranch of Betty’s longed-for water system and tank, the money from which he had kept for his own use; that Bob pay all outstanding bills and that Bob’s employer, the insurance company to which he had returned after leaving the farm, be restrained from any further payments to Bob pending the further orders of the court. The attorney also requested that Bob pay $150 per month for the care, support and education of the girls, that he pay the costs of the divorce, and that Betty be allowed further financial relief from Bob as required. According to the attorney Betty was unskilled and unable to earn sufficient for the care of herself and her two daughters and was currently having to rely on the charity of her family. He asked for temporary alimony of $40 a week and the sum of $75 towards the cost of her suit.

  In July 1931 there was a response from Bob’s lawyers. In an affidavit Bob claimed that he had always attempted to provide for his family to the best of his ability, and that he had no funds or property to meet his expenses beyond about $50 pocket money. He was having to borrow money to live until his sales commissions became due and payable by his company. It was his belief that Betty was now gainfully employed at a lumber company in Seattle, earning $100 a month and living with her family, and was therefore well provided for.

  Battle had commenced. Betty for her part responded through her attorney that she was earning less than $100 a month and had to attend night-school, at a cost to her for meals downtown and incidentals in connection with the course and tuition, of about $15 a month. Her father was dead and her mother a widow without means of support, her statement continued, and the seven members of her mother’s household – her mother, her two younger sisters, her elder sister Mary, herself and the children (no mention of Cleve) – were totally dependent on Betty and her sister Mary’s earnings. It would be impossible for her to support herself and her daughters without help.

  Bob’s employers, the Mutual Life Insurance Company, had meanwhile denied that any money was due to Bob and had sworn on oath that in fact he owed them money. On 27 July the court ordered Bob to pay Betty $20 a month. Up until this bad news from Bob’s employer, Betty had been under the impression that he was earning about $400 a month and had $900 coming to him; prior to the break-up Bob had deliberately misled her by showing her old sales slips for
thousands of dollars’ worth of insurance which he claimed to be getting commission on at renewal.

  Bob’s next move was to demand custody of Anne and Joan – probably just a feint to frighten Betty – and to claim that he had only quit the insurance business to go into chicken farming at the ‘express insistence and desire’ of Betty and her mother and brother. He did admit that Betty had worked very hard to make the business succeed. Betty argued back that Bob was not a fit and proper person to have charge of the children, and absolutely denied the claims that he had been pressured into the chicken business by her family. The $20 a month in support ordered by the court was not paid and Bob was duly threatened with a contempt of court charge possibly leading to prison. And so it went on.

  §

  There was to be little support from Bob and even with fairly regular, if temporary, work, the reality of being a single parent with two small children to feed during the Depression was no joke. Food was often short in the Bard household, and even fuel. The family kept their lights turned off much of the time and one winter even had to burn books in their furnace to keep warm. In Anybody, Mary successfully threatens to sue the president of the telephone company when they are about to disconnect the family’s telephone and then tries the same thing with the power and light company, but the electricity is disconnected anyway and the family is left burning old Christmas candles to light the house. When they run out of firewood, Mary unearths an old bucksaw and marches them all down to the city park to saw up fallen logs. Two park gardeners come up and ask them what the hell they think they are doing, so Mary tells them, and to the family’s surprise and relief the gardeners offer to help them with the sawing and to carry the wood back to the house. Thereafter the gardeners save the logs and bark for them.