by Anne Wellman
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Life for the whole family had changed utterly, especially for Anne and Joan. These first few years of money and fame had been wonderful for them. On their visit to Hollywood the family had been given a private suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel and their own driver. Anne and Joan, used to country life on Vashon and not having much money, were thrilled with the suite and being able to order anything they liked, and doubly thrilled when they met the stars of the movie and the likes of Mickey Rooney, Elizabeth Taylor, and Clark Gable. In New York the four had stayed at the Algonquin Hotel and had gone to the Stork Club for Betty to be interviewed by legendary newsman Walter Winchell. This lasted three or four hours until the girls finally fell asleep at three-thirty in the morning. They had been taken to Broadway shows and famous restaurants and sophisticated nightclubs like ‘21’ and been introduced to many famous people. Sometimes they had worn their mother’s brand new designer clothes pinned and rolled up while they joined in the autograph signings and radio interviews. As far as Anne and Joan were concerned the period of Betty’s fame was one long glorious holiday.
The lugubrious Don, of course, appears to have been very unenthused by Betty’s celebrity. In 1948 a journalist from the New York Times described a silent Don gazing stolidly at his wife’s veiled hat throughout an interview (Betty, meanwhile, was ‘nattier than the average ex-egg farmer’ in a chic dress with rows of buttons and curvy black lapels). He was never too sure about the road they eventually did build to the house, feeling his privacy would be threatened. Betty accused him of being a ‘Big Black Future’, but Don was proved right one day early in Betty’s fame when a family of trippers appeared outside their kitchen window and asked Betty to pose for them taking a bite of egg.
As for Betty, her daughters as adults maintained that success did not alter her. She was characteristically modest about her achievement. In a letter Betty advised a fan to go ahead with a planned article as writers were few and far between and it was comparatively easy to get things published, as her family frequently pointed out to her. She told an interviewer:
There are some other things that had to do with the book selling a million copies. In the first place, Lippincott brought it out at a wonderful time – everyone was depressed by the war and they wanted to read something light, and that was very lucky for me. Also, the war ended just before the book came out, which was very fortunate, and then right afterwards they took the restrictions off the paper, which helped a great deal. (It’s not) that I think that I’m such a wonderful writer that my next book will also sell a million copies because I know that there were too many things that had to do with God sitting on my shoulder that made this book a great seller.
She stayed the same Betty, despite the change in circumstances: she still wore sweatshirts and jeans and fed the chickens and did the ironing and continued to love having company and doing things for her family and friends, although there were limits: Joan remembered once coming home and asking her mother to bake several dozen cookies for some event at school – Betty’s response was to ask Joan whether she wanted her to stay home and bake apple pies and smell like BO or make a million dollars. But even with the royalties rolling in she kept her own and the family’s feet on the ground: she insisted on the girls doing baby-sitting as usual and taking summer and after-school jobs to earn their own money.
Nevertheless, Betty was now a very rich woman. She told the press in 1947 that an agent like her own literary agency, Brandt & Brandt, made money for writers not just through the books but through other undreamed of channels, and that the whole success was as if she’d won the Irish sweepstakes. Betty, poor, shy and obscure for most of her life, was now very, very famous, and very wealthy.
Just before the money started rolling in, Betty, Don and Sydney went to have dinner with Blanche in her home on Vashon. Mary had insisted Betty buy a new dress to be famous in, although for Betty clothes were never a priority. Just give me a nice raincoat, some sweaters, pants, and a couple of skirts, and I’m all set, she would say. However, now she had bought a soft, black, sheer wool dress trimmed in leopard fur. The color suited her reddish-brown hair and gold-toned complexion perfectly, and Blanche thought she looked lovely. Mary had had to loan her the money, though, because at this particular point the little money Betty had was going on telephone bills to pay for the long-distance calls to her agent. Penny-pinching was soon to be a thing of the past, of course. The greatest change for Betty was money. When the first check for $10,000 finally arrived from her publisher, Betty and her sister Alison went immediately to Kimmel’s, the Vashon grocery store, to buy food for a celebration dinner. Eating good food was always the way the Bards celebrated any happy event. For the first time Betty paid no attention to prices as they chose the best wine the store had to offer, a beautiful, fresh king salmon and three bags of expensive wild rice; Alison remembered the bill as being more than she usually paid for food in a month. Anne and Joan spent the celebration dinner making out lists of the clothes they wanted to buy and the outfits they had always longed for.
Betty was outstandingly generous with her new wealth. She was never one to spend money on herself but she loved giving presents, and she now gave each member of the family an exquisite gift and took several of them on paid trips to New York, Hollywood and Chicago. Betty was amused by her own affluence and the way the money kept pouring in. When her sister Alison’s two-year-old son Bard drew a truck on the back of a slip of paper he had found, Betty howled with laughter – the slip of paper was a check for $8000. Betty hugged him close.
‘Bardo, now we know you’re one of us,’ she crowed.
The generosity extended beyond her immediate family. Even the cleaning lady Mrs Hanson and her husband were given a free trip to Norway to see Mrs Hanson’s parents, who had hidden in the mountains during the war. Mrs Hanson was overwhelmed with gratitude, the more so because her parents died shortly after the visit. In Holland, when The Egg and I was translated into Dutch and 10,000 copies printed, Betty donated her royalties. Transferring money out of the country was not allowed because of all the rebuilding necessary after Holland’s extensive war damage, and Betty requested that all royalties be used to help take care of Holland’s cemeteries for American soldiers. A Betty MacDonald Foundation was established and in Opijnen, a quiet farming village where eight American airman had lost their lives, the fund not only helped toward the upkeep of the American graves but also financed excursions and equipment for the village schoolchildren. The Betty MacDonald Foundation likewise contributed to a memorial plaque honoring the fallen American airmen and is mentioned on the plaque.
Betty also used her new-found fame in a more political way. In 1948 the local ferry line owner, Alexander Peabody, wanted to raise his rates and docked all the boats in Puget Sound for twenty-two days when local regulators refused to approve the increases. More than 115,000 commuters were unable to get to work. Making use of her celebrity, Betty tore into Peabody in a radio broadcast entitled The Bad Egg and I. Later in the year she and Don were photographed at a lively meeting of Vashon Islanders seeking to buy a couple of ferries to improve the service between Vashon and the southwest corner of Seattle. Betty’s brother Cleve, by then a member of the Vashon Island Chamber of Commerce, was one of the speakers at the meeting.
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Being famous was nevertheless to take its toll.
Throughout all the drama and publicity, the genuinely shy and modest Betty could not understand why anyone would want to meet her, let alone hear her make a speech. She would always say that she was nervous and unfunny and sounded just like Donald Duck. She was not comfortable being a celebrity.
If there’s one thing I’d like, it would be to go back to the life before all this happened. It’s all been fine and a wonderful experience, but the only good thing I can say about fame is that you can cash a check anywhere – the rest of it people can have.
Betty had achieved immense success – but at a price. The Mayor of Seattle may well have announ
ced that he was ‘reveling in the reflected glory and light of our great Betty MacDonald’ but Betty as the focus of this attention was not happy. In an article she described the jealousy and criticism provoked by her achievement. She could understand that her ‘outrageous’ success had been very galling to some writers who believed their own books were far better than hers, and couldn’t see why theirs sold only a few thousand copies instead of Betty’s million. She herself had never expected anything like it. The most she had hoped for was to get the ‘damned thing’ finished and published so that she wouldn’t have to move off the island after telling everyone on the ferry that she was writing a book. A friend had warned her that if she made a great deal of money and spent it freely she would be called a show off, a ‘try-to-be-grand’. If she made a great deal of money and saved it, she would be called stingy and a miser.
He said that I would encounter envy and jealousy where I least expect it and instead of getting my feelings hurt I should learn to brace my feet and let the blows glance off. I have tried and tried but...I still cannot understand why people will crawl for miles over broken glass just to tell me how hideous I look.
The effort to lead a normal life, entertain her guests on Vashon and yet be famous and keep writing was exhausting. In a letter she wrote tiredly,
...in spite of myself I seem to be running an establishment which is a cross between a rest home and Grand Central Station. All my family and friends are as brown as nuts and ruddy with health, while I am dead tired and as white as a grub because I have not been out of the kitchen since April. ‘I’m a genius,’ I keep screaming and my family says, ‘Just get on with the cooking and let’s not be temperamental’.
Betty received numerous invitations to speak at women’s clubs and she told Blanche that women who up until then scarcely knew she existed suddenly become her best friends and would insist she come to give a talk. Other women were very critical. Needing a pair of stockings one day, she asked Don to stop the car at a department store while she ran in. She wasn’t very dressed up and in the short time it took to buy the stockings she heard a woman say to her friend, ‘There’s Betty MacDonald. Look at the awful clothes she has on.’ Betty complained to Blanche that her privacy was out of the window.
Fame was not for Betty, but for the rest of her life she was never to escape it.
I think fame is the most appalling thing that can happen to you. I certainly think the old saying is true – ‘Get your head above the masses and you’ll get stones thrown at you.’ You have to be thick-skinned to take it.
As for the money, she professed herself indifferent. Writing about her attitude to money for Cosmopolitan in June 1949 she declared that if she had to choose between being rich or poor, she would choose poor – and pointed out that she spoke from experience. At times in her life she had had plenty of money and at other times none, and the times with none were by far the happiest. She wrote that she always spoke with such nostalgia about the Depression that Anne and Joan would ask if there was likely to be another Depression in their own lifetime so that they, too, could have some fun. For Betty, having money could never compensate for lack of charm; rich people who were rude or dull or brutal were still rude or dull or brutal. She was just as happy in a flattering $1.89 Sears Roebuck housedress as she would be in $750 Schiaparelli, she wrote. In fact expensive clothes made her nervous because they made her feel guilty when the money could have been put to better use, such as for a down payment on a home. She didn’t feel the need for security that Americans seemed to feel at that time, and believed that financially secure people were the most miserable, always worrying about what they were spending when they might be saving. In the past few years she and the family had cheerfully spent, eaten, drunk, and traveled away the interest on about ten million dollars, and thoroughly enjoyed doing it, she said. If you did have money, it was for spending and enjoying yourself, not saving. None of her family had ever had any sense with money and nobody had more fun.
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Money had at least enabled Betty to improve the house on Vashon as they had once dreamed. With the proceeds from book and film they purchased the blast furnace, a farm of ten acres adjoining their own land on the hill above, and the desperately wanted driveway to replace the one-and-a-half mile trail to the main road. Don himself bought a small bulldozer and carved the switchback road into the hillside. The property remained quite private, despite Don’s misgivings. They put in a $180 septic tank under one terrace but eventually rebuilt the terraces anyway, replacing the existing rounds of cedar with bluestone. A new bathroom was installed for $800. Betty got her fireplaces and the girls got radiant heat under the floors, plus the yearned-for charge account at the Vashon drug store. The account was kept to under $25 a month, although at that time to Anne and Joan this seemed like $2500. Don got his case of very old, very expensive imported Scotch, his case of mushrooms and the big locks for his closet (which for some reason came without keys, an omission of course discovered just too late).
On the ten-acre farm the family started to raise their own pigs, lambs, turkeys, geese, cows, chickens, and mallard ducks, producing and selling milk, eggs, peaches and cherries.
Later, in 1948, the MacDonalds built a huge, 1900s-style barn looking out to Puget Sound. In a chicken house adjoining the barn Betty went back to looking after thousands of chickens, despite damning them in Egg as dumb and smelly boneheads. This time, of course, she was farming with the more amenable Don. To prevent the chickens from attacking each other, there were stories that Don rather creatively fitted them all with eyeglasses designed to keep their attention focused on their food. He marketed the eggs on the island and at Pike Place Market in Seattle, no doubt capitalizing just a little on Betty’s egg fame.
Courtesy Puget Sound Regional Archives
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Success changed her life in many ways, but perhaps most importantly The Egg and I turned Betty into a professional writer. She had lost her job in order to write it, and now her career path was obvious. She had to keep writing, and also to improve at it. She had a poor opinion of her own writing ability, which in her estimation consisted of taking some small incident and padding it out with lies and descriptions. There had been a lot of revision work necessary on Egg, for instance. ‘I had to rewrite the entire book – I had written it in journal style,’ she told the Seattle Times in 1950.
To start with she wrote frantically against advances, trying to keep up with the bills. She knew she was a procrastinator and said that the hardest thing she had to do as a writer was force herself to sit at her typewriter and get to work. She always felt under pressure, forever fending off domestic disaster, housework, gardening, guests, children, relatives, grandchildren – all the things that gave her the life she loved to write about. Her old friend Blanche was with her one day when Betty was playing with children rather than working on her next book as she should have been. The telephone rang. It was Betty’s agent, asking for the expected chapters. Betty came clean about what she was actually doing and the agent asked her if she wanted to be a one-book author spending the rest of her life over a sink and an ironing board, or whether she wanted to be known for other works as well. She got the message.
In later years, after she and Don had moved to a ranch in California, a male writer once told her that every day after he got up out of bed he immediately sat down and wrote for four hours. Betty’s retort:
I get right out of bed and make coffee, squeeze oranges, fix breakfast, wash dishes, make beds, sort laundry, make a grocery list, decide what to have for dinner, answer the phone, feed cats, talk to feed salesmen, make more coffee for road crew, talk to cowboys, get lunch, do dishes, answer four letters from people who want me to speak, then write...it is now 4:30 and almost time to start dinner.
Her advice to writers: be born a man.
Her real advice to aspiring writers was to read, read, read, and Betty’s daughters remembered their home always overflowing with books. When Betty disciplined the girls fo
r some misdemeanor she made them sit on their big front deck on Vashon and read books that she thought would be good for them to get to know. She made sure they read as much as they could, and they had to make reports on what was read. Betty considered Kipling one of the best authors for the very young and also liked Doctor Doolittle for small children. She numbered among her own favorites Dickens, the Brontës, Sinclair Lewis, the early works of John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, Truman Capote, Elizabeth Enright, Angela Thirkell, and Katherine Anne Porter. She liked Baudelaire, Huxley, and Dostoyevsky. A particular favorite was children’s writer E. B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, who also wrote for adults and whom Betty adored.
Despite the difficulty of getting down to it Betty did love being a writer, and took it seriously. She hated ‘trite and shop-worn phrases’ – they nauseated her, she once said. She joined Seattle’s oldest writing club, the Seattle Free Lances, and went to writers’ conferences. At the Northwest Writers’ Conference of September 1947 Betty asked the famous Southern writer Eudora Welty – who like Betty had once done work for Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration during the Depression – to autograph her copy of Eudora’s Delta Wedding. Eudora obliged with ‘From the Delta to the Egg’.
Betty never had a special place to work and often bemoaned the fact. Even after becoming a famous author she didn’t have even a tiny corner to call her own in the house on Vashon. She wrote in the basement, at the kitchen table, at the dining room table, or on a tiny rackety typewriter table in her bedroom. After moving to California she wrote in the teeming bunk house of their ranch. All I ask, she told her family, is one quiet spot where I can write: