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

by Anne Wellman

  This is a copy that I autographed during the flurry – I’m not trying to to be prrrrrrrominent – but I am wealty – from your oldest school chum – Betty.

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  On 8 March 1935, when Betty’s divorce finally came through, she was once again a free woman. But Bob had not paid support for the previous two years and had never paid the costs of the divorce as mandated. Betty had to go on fighting to get her money, even after the final decree. In September Bob was ordered back before the judge, found guilty of contempt of court and given a suspended sentence of thirty days in the County Jail. By this time he owed his employer money and was borrowing from friends and relatives, including his father.

  Betty was again in need of money: she knew she was just about to lose her steady government job at the NRA. The US Supreme Court had declared that the law providing for the NRA was unconstitutional, as it infringed the separation of powers under the United States Constitution. The organization was to close down on 31 December and Betty would be out of work yet again. On Christmas Eve both she and Bob were in court once more as she fought on for her money. Bob offered just $15, a meager sum loaned by his father Otis (a witness at Bob and Betty’s wedding in 1927), who was urging him to support his children. The court asked Betty to accept the payment and arranged a further hearing for January 1936. Bob’s sentence continued to be suspended.

  Come January and they were both back in court. Clearly losing patience, the judge observed that Bob appeared to be ‘in need of a stimulus’ and ordered him to serve ten days of his suspended sentence, although this was then modified and Bob was ordered to pay $10 instead. The judge’s unusual phrasing made it into the local press. ‘Ex-Husband Pays Family $10.00 Under ’Added Stimulus’,’ declared a small item in the Seattle Times. Misreporting or misunderstanding the sequence of events, the newspaper summed it up as insurance salesman Robert Heskett being forced to choose between ten days in prison or paying $10 in support of his ex-wife Mrs. Elizabeth Heskett and her two daughters, aged seven and eight. Bob paid up. The case would be heard again in February.

  Meanwhile Betty as a government worker had luckily been able to transfer to the US Treasury Department, although she didn’t start her new post until mid February. However, despite the seniority she had attained at the NRA, she had to start all over again from the bottom at a lower salary. To make matters worse she had broken her leg or ankle while skiing, which she had never liked in the first place, and had to spend her first days on the new job with her leg in a cast. This meant she was unable to attend the February hearing, but then neither did Bob. He had run through two attorneys by now and was on his third, and a female friend (from whom he was in the habit of borrowing money) explained to this last attorney that he would not be appearing because he had left the jurisdiction of the court. Another warrant for Bob’s arrest was issued, again for contempt of court.

  In Anybody Betty’s first post at the Treasury is in a department which deals with supplies and contracts for another part of President Roosevelt’s recovery program, the Works Progress Administration or WPA (later to become the Works Projects Administration). This was a nationwide program of building bridges, roads, public buildings, public parks, airports, and swimming pools to provide employment for needy workers; new projects were identified by local government and the federal government footed the bill. Jobs with the WPA were only open to the unemployed and, in order to spread the work around, individual families could only have one member at at a time working for the program. Times were still hard and applications in Seattle had flooded in; the WPA was soon employing thousands of people in the area. Betty’s job as described in Anybody is dealing with bids for the various WPA projects, which she initially finds difficult. From this section she progresses very slowly to contracts, which is frustratingly bureaucratic and even busier. In the end she just resigns herself to the infinitesimally slow ways of government and begins to relax enough to feel happy in the job.

  The WPA carried out publicity on its own behalf, such as employing photographers to document conditions in the Depression; one of these was the young Eudora Welty, later to win fame as a great writer of the American South. As Eudora traveled throughout Mississippi taking her hundreds of photographs, many of which were only published after several decades, she also gathered material for her highly acclaimed stories of the Deep South. Years later, when Betty herself was a writer, these two old WPA hands were to meet.

  A photograph taken some time in 1936 by the Bards’ theater artist friend Florence James shows a smiling Betty and Blanche enjoying themselves on a trip to Victoria. (Both are dressed rather formally but the look is enlivened by big Minnie Mouse shoes – clearly in fashion at the time as each is wearing a similar pair.) Despite the lack of support from Bob, life for Betty was definitely getting easier as the Depression receded and she made her way up in government service.

  Then, suddenly, calamity struck.

  Betty and the Plague

  BY 1937 both Mary and Cleve had married and left the family home. The Bards’ dearly loved grandmother Gammy had died in 1936 in Boulder, Colorado, where she had gone to live with a niece several years previously. Betty, ten- and nine-year old Anne and Joan, her mother Sydney, younger sisters Dede and Alison, and family friend and honorary sister Madge were all still living in the brown shingled house in the University District. Betty was gainfully employed in government service and happy in her work. Money, although tight, was no longer such a problem.

  Then, gradually, Betty realized she was feeling ill. In her account in The Plague and I she has a series of coughs and colds, vague pains in her back and lungs and absolutely no energy. She wakes up tired, feeds herself coffee and cigarettes to get started and then snatches lie-downs on a hard bench in the restroom at work just to keep going. Each successive cold leaves her thinner and more tired. She can’t understand it. Although Betty as a child was delicate and had contracted a number of childhood diseases, as an adolescent she had turned plump and healthy just like the rest of the family, despite Gammy’s dire warnings about catarrh, consumption and leprosy lurking just around the corner. In fact Gammy would caution against catching consumption, or tuberculosis, with a special relish. When the children were little she would read aloud the account of Beth’s fatal illness in Little Women and tell them how Robert Louis Stevenson had died of the disease; she would warn the children’s father that his insistence on cold baths at five in the morning would drive the children straight into consumption, and advise the teenaged Betty that trying to lose weight would end in the same way. Despite these ominous warnings the children had all grown up hale and hearty. The Bards generally paid no attention to minor ailments and disliked talk of illness; they thought people who went on about their operations were big bores. The family would label any of their number who complained about their health, if the condition was not actually accompanied by a serious temperature, as a ‘big sicko’ or ‘big saddo’. Now Betty was rapidly becoming both.

  Despite Gammy’s early warnings it never occurred to Betty that she had tuberculosis. She was nearly thirty years old, had been married and divorced and had two children and knew plenty about life, but she just knew nothing about tuberculosis or its symptoms. She wrote that she was operating under the family assumption that she had her health, and in any case she thought the only symptoms of tuberculosis were a dry hacking cough and having a clean white handkerchief delicately touched to the lips come away flecked with blood.

  In Plague she embarks on a series of consultations with various specialists but never tells each one the entire array of her apparently unrelated symptoms, because she feels ashamed of the long list of little things wrong with her. Each of the doctors pats her shoulder and sends her away without a diagnosis. She even has a physical for insurance purposes and is pronounced fit and healthy enough for several thousand dollars’ worth. In September she begins to suffer with hemorrhoids so she calls Mary, who sends her to her pathologist husband Clyde Jensen. Believing that pa
thology related to the entire human body, this time Betty relays all of her symptoms, including even her nervousness and insomnia. Clyde listens carefully, examines her, tests her sputum (coughed-up phlegm or mucus), has her lungs x-rayed and passes her to a chest specialist. The specialist diagnoses pulmonary tuberculosis. He tells Betty she needs complete bed rest at a sanatorium, probably for at least a year, and that she is contagious.

  Betty is struck with fear. Having read The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann’s novel about patients in a tuberculosis sanatorium, she knows that these are places in the Swiss Alps where people go to die. Not only that, but everyone she’s ever heard of with the disease has died of it. She will undoubtedly be in excellent company, she writes in Plague, but she doesn’t want to die.

  She asks about the cost of a sanatorium. If she’s in a hospital and not working, she can’t pay for treatment. Mary’s husband offers to write a letter to an endowed sanatorium in Seattle that is free to anyone with the illness and unable to pay. There’s a waiting list, but Clyde tells the shaken Betty that mothers with small children are usually admitted without delay.

  As soon as she gets home Betty is put to bed in Sydney’s room where there’s a fire blazing in the fireplace and infinite love and sympathy from the family. She feels almost happy to know, finally, what is wrong with her: that she really is ill, not just lazy and without ambition, and that her terrible lassitude and pointless fatigue are due to disease. She can legitimately be a big, no-sense-of-humor saddo. She coughs all night and enjoys doing it.

  What a pity Gammy wasn’t still alive to hear the diagnosis, Betty wrote. It would have given her such satisfaction.

  Firland

  Tuberculosis (TB) is a highly contagious disease caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis typically attacks the lungs, but can also affect other parts of the body. It is spread through the air when people with an active TB infection cough or sneeze and transmit respiratory fluids through the air to others. The most common form is pulmonary tuberculosis, the type Betty had, but the bacteria can also infect the kidneys, bones, and intestines, as well as the lymph nodes. The classic symptoms of active TB infection are a chronic cough with blood-tinged sputum, fever, night sweats, and weight loss (the latter giving rise to the old name of ‘consumption’ for TB). Before a cure became possible, tuberculosis was usually fatal and was nicknamed the White Plague.

  Firland sanatorium, Seattle’s municipal tuberculosis hospital, had opened in 1911 to treat what was then Seattle’s leading cause of death. It was located north of Seattle, on thirty-four acres of land in the Richmond Highlands area. The Medical Director of the sanatorium was a Dr. Robert Stith, whose own mother had died of tuberculosis. In downtown Seattle a Health Department Free Clinic screened people for the disease. Patients with financial means were directed towards private sanatoria while poorer patients were admitted to Firland, usually after being placed on a lengthy waiting list, as only 250 patients could be treated at any one time.

  The sanatorium gave priority to those who actually seemed curable and would only admit sufferers who had lived in Seattle for at least a year. As Mary’s husband Dr. Jensen had indicated, tubercular women who had dependent children were often admitted immediately without having to wait their turn, and their children could also be admitted and given preventive treatment. Dr. Stith had absolute authority to decide who would be admitted; he tried to use available funds and limited beds wisely and to admit only those who were ‘worth saving’, as he put it. Medical expenses for patients admitted to Firland were paid by the Seattle Department of Health and the State of Washington.

  Firland, 1927

  Courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives, item number 2655

  Treatment was still extremely limited in the 1930s when Betty was stricken with the disease and consisted chiefly of bed rest. Firland’s dictum for its patients was absolute rest: ‘Rest – more rest – and still more rest. Rest is the keynote. Rest for the body, rest for the mind. Rest from involuntary as well as voluntary activity forms the basis on which the cure is built.’ Today TB can mostly be cured with antibiotics over a period of just months but at that time the only possibility was complete rest, often for years, to allow tubercular lesions to heal by themselves. Some patients were also treated surgically using techniques designed to keep the lungs more still; as tubercular lungs could not be subjected to general anesthesia, this thoracic surgery had to be performed under local anesthesia only. But even with total rest and surgery there were no guarantees.

  Firland’s strict rules were constantly reiterated by the medical staff, and patients were continually warned that the many tubercular patients on the waiting list were anxious to take their places if they could not comply. Instructional pamphlets or little slips containing uplifting thoughts (‘If you must be blue, be a bright blue’) arrived on the patients’ dinner trays. The nurses also trained their patients in hygiene, as many unhygienic practices were still common in Seattle at the time. People did not necessarily hold their hands over their mouths when coughing or sneezing and some were still spitting on the floor, despite legislation against spitting in public since 1898. Deadly bacilli in saliva and sputum then spread tuberculosis, just as Betty claims in Plague: she believes she has been infected by a contagious co-worker who repeatedly coughed in her face. As for the nurses themselves, the nursing was decidedly unpleasant. There was the infectious sputum, the lung hemorrhaging and the frequent vomiting, especially during mealtimes. Despite precautions many nurses became infected, and, like the patients, some died.

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  In The Plague and I Betty takes us through her long months of incarceration at Firland (called ‘The Pines’ in the book). First comes the unsympathetic, impersonal assessment at the downtown clinic in Seattle, a depressing place which shares a building with the police station, the city jail, an emergency hospital and a venereal disease clinic. On the way up to the clinic Betty is convinced that everyone else in the elevator is a crook or a prostitute but they all file out, looking sad, at the TB clinic just like her. The nurses’ manner at the clinic is cold and unpleasant, which comes as a surprise to Betty after her experience of kind and motherly nursing when in hospital having her children. It’s later explained to her that as the Firland nurses needed to enforce the strict regime at the sanatorium they were trained to remain completely impersonal, which Betty fully understands and finds helpful to know when she is eventually a patient.

  Before going in Betty was naturally worried about how long she would have to remain. The chest specialist had guessed at a year’s stay but had also added ‘or longer’, which could mean anything from another month to ten years. This was not comforting, but Sydney quickly told her this was nonsense; Betty came from a long line of healthy people and if she did what she was told and stayed cheerful she’d be home before she knew it. Dr Stith had also apparently told her that with her red hair, energy and impatience, the discipline at the sanatorium would be extra hard. ‘Prognosis – doubtful’ was written on her notes.

  The day of departure for the sanatorium dawned. In Plague Betty tries to play it down for the children’s sake; people who packed up their troubles in their old kit-bag and remained inanely cheerful through adversity made the Bards want to be sick, Betty wrote, but equally the family didn’t want to be too tragic about the whole thing. Nevertheless, she is devastated as she watches Anne and Joan waving her goodbye. She is driven to ‘The Pines’ by the family and is given a bleak reception. Another impersonal nurse – or just plain thoroughly disagreeable, in Betty’s view – takes her details and gives her several papers to sign. The nurse also hands over a book of sanatorium rules and the visiting regulations, which include the warning that if her visitors come too early, stay too late, are noisy, break rules or exceed the allotted three in number, then her visiting privileges will be removed for an indefinite period of time. A maximum of three adult visitors were allowed on Thursday and Sunday afternoons for two hours; children were allowed t
o visit only once a month, for ten minutes. After this warm welcome Florence Nightingale directs Betty and the family to a silent waiting-room, whence Betty is eventually removed in a wheelchair after emotional farewells. ‘I can’t bear to say goodbye to you, Betsy,’ her mother sighs.

  Before entering the ward she is subjected to a bath in boiling water and disinfectant and a further recitation of the rules: patients must not read, write, talk, laugh, sing, or reach; patients must lie still and relax. As she lies in the bath another of the grim nurses examines the contents of Betty’s suitcases and explodes with righteous indignation when she comes across some innocent bottles of cough medicine and aspirin.

  ‘Patients must never take medicines without the Doctor’s permission. No patient of the sanatorium ever has medicine of any kind whatsoever in his possession. Patients are never allowed to choose own medicines. These,’ she held up the cough medicine and aspirin as if they were Home Cure for Syphilis and Quick Aborto, ‘will have to be sent home or destroyed. These extra sweaters, these bed jackets, all your clothes, books, writing materials and handkerchiefs (her disdain of this last filthy habit-forming article was tremendous) will have to go through fumigation and be sent home.’

  After this processing Betty is finally placed in a clammy bed in a square ward with four beds, one in each corner, and large, curtainless windows opened wide to the elements. She is not allowed a hot water bottle, as they are only given out from 1 October (this is the very end of September). Her life as a TB patient has begun.

  Newly admitted patients began their time at Firland lying motionless in the Bedrest Hospital and, just as Betty wrote in Plague, reading, writing, and talking were not allowed. Except to produce a morning sputum sample, patients had to suppress their coughs for fear of sparking a coughing mania among other patients and to avoid aggravating their fragile healing lungs. Even reaching for nearby items was prohibited. Other activities considered harmful included ‘letter writing, reading, dolling up; for example, curling the hair, painting the face, etc., letting the mind dwell on any subject which hurries circulation’. Fresh air was considered crucial to the cure and screened windows were kept wide open all year round. Plenty of nourishing food was on offer and patients were expected to eat well to build their strength up.