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

by Anne Wellman

  The family can’t afford entertainment and so read books rather than going to the movies and play Chinese checkers instead of going to concerts. With so little money and with so many females in the family the older Bard women all wear each other’s clothes (the first one up was the best dressed, Betty wrote), and also have to endure teenage Alison and her high-school friends wearing their clothes behind their backs so that nothing they own ever really cools down. The Bard categories for clothes are ‘clean’, ‘dirty’, ‘work’, ‘date’ and ‘terrible’, which is for wearing around the house. Mary is clever and courageous enough to alter old clothes for herself and come up with something wonderful by grafting the bodice of one old dress onto the skirt of another, but Betty doesn’t have the talent. Buying something new was not an option. A Frederick and Nelson lingerie advertisement in 1932 offered lacy crepe slips at $2.95 and satin and lace panties at $1.95 (‘It isn’t the cost that counts – look what a lot of loveliness you can buy here for very little money’). Dresses were available from $10, and hosiery cost 75c. But at that point a stenographer’s monthly wages could be as low as $50. With food prices having risen 30% in the early years of the Depression, and with two small children to feed and clothe, Betty would simply not have had the money to buy new.

  Shoes are another problem in Anybody. Anne and Joan keep growing out of theirs and must have proper replacements, but for themselves the adults in the family buy cheap imitations of good brands which generally work as long as they can stand the pain and don’t go out in the rain. There’s a little shoemaker in the neighborhood who works wonders with his repairs for just a few cents, and Mary and Betty wait at home in their stockinged feet while one of the younger ones runs up to the store with shoes in hand.

  15th Avenue NW, 1934

  Seattle Municipal Archives, licensed under CC by 2.0

  The struggle with Bob continued. He paid nothing to Betty in December 1931 and January 1932 and was ordered to appear before the judge. Betty requested that the temporary alimony and support money he was supposed to be paying be raised to $50 a month. The $20 a month she was meant to be getting, but wasn’t, was not enough. In February she had the unpleasant experience of being in court with Bob in an attempt to recover the money; Bob promised to pay the $40 he owed but failed to do so, even though he had been earning $100 a month in commissions since June the previous year. By the 24th of the month he had been ordered to pay the $60 now due or be committed to the King County Stockade for contempt of court. He was arrested, but found to be ‘temporarily incapacitated’ by a physical injury, and given till March to pay. Finally, in March, the money appeared, which must have been extremely welcome.

  Both parties were in court again in April when it was decreed that after the expiration of six months Betty was entitled to a full divorce on the grounds she had presented. She was given custody of the children, subject to reasonable visitation at times of her choosing, and Bob was to pay $30 support each month plus the costs of Betty’s attorney, the costs of the action, and the judgment fee.

  Inevitably, Bob did not always pay up, and Betty was left for the most part without financial support. Betty’s old school friend Blanche sometimes visited Sydney when the rest of the family were out and could see that the Bards were suffering. Sydney would be baking or gardening or sitting in a corner of the sofa with a coffee on the table in front of her, a tome from Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga or an Angela Thirkell in one hand and a Camel cigarette in the other (all the older Bards continued smoking during the Depression, even though they sometimes had to flip a quarter to decide whether to buy bread or cigarettes). A couple of dogs would be at her feet. As warm and welcoming as ever, Sydney always made Blanche feel as though she had been sitting there just waiting for her to come by. During these visits it was evident to Blanche that the Bards were feeling the pinch. The furniture was getting old and the carpeting a bit threadbare. Only Mary and Betty were working and every so often Betty would have to go to court to get the support money that Bob was supposed to be providing. This and Mary and Betty’s pay was the only income for the whole family, and it was pooled and distributed to the best of Mary, Betty and Sydney’s ability but it was a losing battle. Betty wrote in Anybody that it was like climbing a hill: they would just be getting to the top when something would break, or need replacing, or Christmas would come, and down they would plummet again.

  Mary, of course, was still inviting everybody she felt sorry for to stay for dinner or all night or even to move in. Dinner would only be cheap dishes which could be stretched, like barley and oxtails or meatloaf, and Blanche remembered that sometimes it was even just lima beans or rice. Sydney would season the food well, bring it in on her lovely marigold Wedgwood platters, and serve it using her ornate serving set. The atmosphere was that of an elegant dinner party and Sydney never apologized for the menu.

  In Anybody, Mary and Betty make their own sandwiches to take for lunch at work and often eat them in the upstairs dining-room at Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where they can enjoy the spectacular view of the waterfront. Mary and their mutual friends carry their sandwiches boldly in paper bags; others, less audacious, slip their food out of their briefcases or pockets as furtively as if they are smuggling drugs. Betty too is ashamed, especially when it’s Mary’s turn to make the sandwiches. She slaps them together and then stuffs them into anything that comes to hand – old bread wrapping and even newspaper and string. Mary, born with absolutely no false pride, merely laughs at Betty’s sensitivity.

  One day a young man came to to the door while Blanche was visiting and Sydney welcomed him in for coffee, asking about his new baby and if he had finished painting the baby’s room. Blanche assumed they were old friends but after two cups of coffee and several cigarettes, the young man tentatively asked for payment for the wood he’d delivered to Sydney a couple of weeks ago. Sydney answered kindly that she hadn’t a cent in the house but that if he dropped back in the evening she would get the money off Mary, who was getting paid that day. The young man must have been one of Sydney’s large collection of ‘at the doors’, itinerant and often desperate people running small businesses door to door as described by Betty in Anybody Can Do Anything. Sydney can never be persuaded to drop any of them because she feels so sorry for them. (Mary and Betty didn’t forget those worse off than themselves either; in 1932 they were both manning booths at a Red Cross drive.)

  Betty once told Blanche that she and Mary had gone to the bank to see about procuring a mortgage on the house. The two were shown in to see the vice-president, who was very stiff in a three-piece suit, thick glasses and highly polished shoes. Betty was a little overwhelmed when invited into the plush office, which had heavy green carpets and green leather chairs studded with shiny brass upholstery tacks. Even bold Mary was uncomfortable and nervous in this august presence and when the banker touched upon the subject of collateral she suddenly interrupted him and said facetiously, ‘All we have are our two white bodies to offer for that.’ The banker coughed a dry cough, bit his lower lip, and forced a weak little smile. Betty told Blanche this story but did not relate whether or not they got the mortgage and Blanche deemed this the essence of the Bards: they flung convention to the winds and made finance, even in those hard times, seem mundane and secondary to getting some fun out of life.

  They certainly did have fun (at least in retrospect), despite the sad state of their finances. During the 1930s Mary became involved with the Seattle Repertory Playhouse run by Florence and Burton James, who were producing plays in their converted old storehouse in the University District. She, and Betty, may first have met the Jameses at the Cornish School they attended as young girls when Florence and Burton were heading the drama department there. Certainly the Bards must have known the Jameses well, as Florence was with Betty and Blanche on a trip to nearby Victoria, British Columbia, some time around 1936. The Bard household would often play host to impromptu cast parties and there are hints that Mary herself may have acted, although her name d
oes not appear on cast lists.

  The 1930s was a period of intense artistic experimentation and creativity, due in part to the social unrest heightening political content, but also because of extra money available from government funding. As part of public relief programs artists in all spheres were employed by the federal government in an array of projects designed to create jobs, although program leaders were interested also in nurturing regional talent and national culture. In Washington State the Depression became an exciting period for the arts, if not for other aspects of life, and Mary made the most of it. Home became a place where Betty met not only Mary’s acting friends from the Playhouse but also many others from Mary’s artistic circle: painters, writers and musicians. With all these males milling about, Mary began to take her sister’s love life in hand as well as her business career. In Anybody she finds dates for Betty, or at least uses her as a try-out for her own dates. Betty, of course, although the mother of two children, was still only in her twenties.

  Soon after Betty’s return from the farm Mary invited Betty and Blanche along on a date with someone who claimed to be a German baron. Betty and Blanche were to bring their own dates so that Mary could feel safer with the baron, who was what the family called a body-thinko. This was a Bard word for someone oversexed or who talked excessively about his ailments. Other Bardisms were a smell-badall for an obnoxious person of either sex; a saddo for someone consumed with self-pity; a get-in-good-with-the-company for a toady; and a my-husband-saider for a woman who quoted her husband constantly and had few ideas of her own. A pee-pee talker used barnyard talk and four-letter words, and a be-happy was a person not sincerely happy but merely pretending to be. Sydney had no time for people who told off-color jokes or used vulgar words. The family also preferred the scientific name for parts of the body.

  Blanche’s date was initially reluctant to go along on the outing with the baron because he said the Bards were all screwy, but was eventually persuaded. Mary decided they should all have new dresses and picked up some material from a friend’s wholesale outlet. Blanche thought at first that it was awning material: black-and-white stripes, two inches wide, for Mary, yellow-and-white stripes of the same width for Betty, which Mary said would go perfectly with Betty’s reddish-brown hair, and blue-and-white stripes for Blanche with her blue eyes. The pattern was simple: strapless, with a tight bodice and long, billowy skirt. Blanche, smaller than the other two, wondered if two-inch stripes would be right for her but as usual both she and Betty followed right along with anything Mary said.

  The sewing-machine hummed all afternoon and well into the night. As they tried the dresses on in the living room the next day, other members of the family would occasionally walk through. Betty’s brother Cleve did a double-take.

  ‘My God, where’s the circus? Sydney, I wouldn’t let them out of the house in those tents.’

  Mary riposted that stripes were very much the mode and Sydney, ever the peace-maker, told the girls they all looked charming and unique and that she was sure the baron had never dated German girls dressed quite so strikingly.

  When the special evening finally came, Sydney sat in her favorite spot at the end of the sofa, her dogs at her feet. The three girls were grouped together like zebras waiting for their prey, as Blanche put it. Mary answered the knock at the door.

  ‘Ah, the baron!’ she greeted him, dramatically. The self-styled baron presented Mary with a floral box.

  ‘An orchid,’ she screamed, ‘and yellow – my favorite!’

  Running over to Sydney she asked her mother to pin it on her. Against the black-and-white stripes it gave the effect of an orchid peeking through an iron fence, Blanche recalled, but Mary’s enthusiasm for the occasion trumped any incongruity. Sydney, after pinning the orchid in place, sat silently, smoking her cigarette with a smile on her face. She was highly amused.

  After introductions to Betty and Blanche and their dates the group headed for Willard’s Roadhouse. By 1930 most people owned cars, and more roadhouses had sprung up along the main highways. The buildings were attractive by night but usually a little tacky-looking by day, Blanche remembered. The atmosphere inside Willard’s was seductive, with little rose-shaded electric lamps that simulated candlelight on all the tables and window sills. The orchestra was playing a fox-trot as the party was ushered into a private room reserved by the baron, and seated at a round table for six. They ordered chicken and steak dinners with French fries and peas, and although Prohibition was in full swing there was plenty of liquor to go with it. Betty enjoyed herself because this was her first big night out since she’d returned to Seattle from the chicken ranch, although, still licking her wounds from her broken marriage, she was reserved with her date. This was Jock Hutchings, an old boyfriend of Mary’s who ended up marrying Blanche.

  When Mary returned from a dance with Blanche’s partner she joked that he’d been trying to do the ‘rape gavotte’ with her. Blanche was taken aback, just as she had been when Mary announced she had been kissed back in the days of their girlhood. Most of her contemporaries hardly knew what the word ‘rape’ meant, and in those days if you did know the word you whispered it behind your hand. But Mary was always so open about everything and so uniquely funny Blanche never thought of being shocked, only amused.

  When Blanche eventually became engaged to Mary’s former boyfriend Jock, the Bard sisters made some of the food for her engagement party. Betty and Mary turned white sandwich bread, green peppers, asparagus spears, shrimp, cucumbers and stuffed olives into works of art. A week before the event, Mary again took Betty and Blanche to pick out dresses at a wholesale house. Mary chose soft green, Betty, yellow, and Blanche, blue. The dresses were made of filmy chiffon with scoop necks, big three-quarter sleeves, and flowing long skirts with attached slips underneath. At the party Betty sat back as she quietly sized up people and situations to be hashed over later and enjoyed again, while Mary with her usual vivacity kept the event going with funny remarks. When Mary had herself been dating Jock she had not got on well with Jock’s overbearing mother, but at the party the two were perfectly friendly. The ever observant Betty quietly commented that it was because Mary no longer posed a threat.

  Blanche went to the Bards’ the next day to give the girls perfume as a thankyou present, and Sydney told Blanche she wanted to give her a wedding gift. She knew how Blanche had always admired her Wedgwood platters, one of which was at that point on the floor for the dog. Times being what they were and unable to afford a present, Sydney reached down to the floor, picked up the platter, and went to the sink to run hot water over it.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind the dog’s having used it; he just finished the left-over meatloaf,’ she said.

  Blanche had always loved the way Sydney treated her dogs as just another member of the family, and as far as she was concerned this was a perfect way to be presented with a wedding gift.

  Mary

  Then Mary too became engaged. In Anybody Betty commented that Mary had been serially engaged, first to a Christian Scientist, then to a Jewish boy, and then to an actor. Now she had fallen properly for a doctor called Clyde Jensen. It was through Betty that they met. Mary, very ill with a chest infection, was struggling to cope with her busy radio promotion job at an advertising agency; Betty was working for an insurance company and therefore a self-declared authority on physical examinations. She insisted that Mary have a complete physical. Sydney phoned the hospital and was given Dr. Jensen’s name, and the rest was history. Mary told Blanche that she had enticed her intended by allowing her wonderful curly auburn hair to lose its pins and fall flowingly down her back as they sat in a field of purple lupines after a picnic; her plan was for Clyde to find the color of her hair against the flowers irresistible, and clearly it succeeded. The Seattle Times in May 1934 reported the engagement of Miss Mary Ten Eyck Bard to Dr. Clyde Reynolds Jensen, describing Mary as a graduate of St. Nicholas School (somewhat overstating the case, as of course Mary had been switched to a public school after
Darsie’s death) and as ‘one of the city’s prominent advertising women’. According to the report Mary had also been on the acting staff of the Seattle Repertory Playhouse. Blanche remembered that when Mary’s friends threw parties for her engagement they didn’t bother organizing any party games but simply relied on Betty to keep people amused with her witty stories about life on the chicken ranch.

  Mary and Clyde were married early in the morning on 1 July 1934 in a chapel in St. Mark’s Cathedral. Mary, given away by her brother Cleve, wore a sand-beige dress and a cape trimmed with sand-colored Russian wolf; she carried a bouquet of Talisman roses. Betty as matron-of-honor wore a linen suit with brown lapels and a brown hat, and carried yellow roses; Sydney was in a dark blue and white print dress with dark blue accessories. Anne and Joan were bridesmaids in matching red English lawn dresses and carried red and blue garden bouquets. The early ceremony had been in order to catch a boat to the city of Victoria in Canada (the same location as Betty’s honeymoon with Bob) and then on to the north end of Vancouver Island; immediately thereafter Mary became a very busy doctor’s wife and, eventually, the mother of three daughters.

  Courtesy Junior League of Seattle,

  Puget Soundings

  Mary too eventually became a writer and in her 1949 book The Doctor Wears Three Faces Mary describes a visit to Sydney and the family after Clyde has been operated on for appendicitis. She and Betty spend the afternoon in the shops before retreating to the love and comfort of home: