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

by Anne Wellman

  This is a lie, of course, and they know it. What I really want is a million dollars so I won’t ever have to write another word.

  Betty answered and dealt kindly with even the most bizarre fan letters, which were often long, dull, boring missives giving or pleading for advice on all kinds of subjects. Some fans were rude, telling Betty they hadn’t realized she was ‘so huge’ (Betty was 5’ 6 ¾”) or ‘soooo fat’. Some fans requested financial aid, or collaboration or help in getting their funnier and better books published; some wanted to visit or to know where to buy a ranch, how to cook chicken, how to ride horses, care for cows, or raise children. One woman wanted advice on writing about her trip to Holland, to be called The Hague and I. Many were just fan letters from both children and adults thanking her for the enormous pleasure her books gave them. She carefully answered each letter, sometimes diplomatically telling those asking her to write their books for them that her agents did not allow any collaborative work. In one of her very earliest replies to a fan Betty encourages the fan’s idea of a work to be called The Cows and Us, describes her own doings and her family at length and invites the fan to visit, giving out her phone number. In time she presumably became a little less open-armed to her fans but she always distinguished between the sometimes very proper, stiff fan letters she received and the kind written on cheap paper, perhaps a little smudged, but with warm and sincere expressions of love for her books. These she cherished.

  The Plague and I, about her time at Firland, was Betty’s next adult book to be published, coming out in 1948. Talking about Plague before its appearance, Betty warned that too few people recognized the symptoms of tuberculosis early enough. When they did, she continued, you then had to hold a hammer to TB patients’ heads in order to get them to do anything about it. In the book she endeavored to include up-to-date information and yet keep it bright enough so that people would read it; her editors had congratulated her, commenting that in anyone else’s hands it would have been a very dull subject. But the book had been an uphill climb for Betty, despite having engaged a former room-mate at Firland, Gwen, to type out the manuscript. Lippincott’s had had to telegraph her about meeting her deadline, which she appears to have missed, and then started sending people out to see her. With the editors hanging around she was forced to finish it. (Though even more pressing than editors, she told a meeting of the Seattle Free Lances writing club at the time, was a $93,000 income tax payment hanging over her head.)

  Plague is just as funny as The Egg and I although more somber, and interesting in its own right as a historic first-hand account of the rest cure in a TB sanatorium before the disease became curable by antibiotics. A New York Times review at the time praised the artistry of her style and the ‘infectious gaiety of her perspective’ but also her sensitive understanding. The book sold well although not to the extent of The Egg and I; today the book is possibly the least known of Betty’s works, although it is just as witty and enjoyable and, like all her books, bears repeated reading.

  There was a less happy ending for Betty’s assistant Gwen, who in 1953 had to return to Firland after twelve years of near-normal life. In 1956 she married a former patient and was granted a seventy-two-hour pass from the sanatorium for her honeymoon; sadly she was then obliged to return to Firland, still in ill-health. Betty was the lucky one.

  §

  The girls, meanwhile, were growing up. Although very bright, Anne had never liked school but she agreed to graduate and then make up her own mind about college. After graduation she got a job in the advertising department of a large department store, living in Seattle in an apartment shared with another girl. On 22 January 1949, at the age of twenty, she married Donald John Strunk in Blessed Sacrament Church in Seattle. The bride was resplendent in an ivory silk brocade dress and an illusion veil fixed to a brocaded headdress with stephanotis flowers. Don gave Anne away and Joan was one of the bridesmaids, who all wore Anne’s favorite color blue. Even the wedding cake at the breakfast hosted by Mary had blue frosting, and blue was the color of the car the young couple received from Betty and Don as a wedding present. Almost immediately Anne set about having children and Betty became a very young grandmother. Naturally she loved having a grandchild and the little family were frequent visitors on Vashon.

  Later that spring Betty and Don decided to lease out the Seattle house they had poured so much money into and retreat back to Vashon. Betty had been finding it more and more difficult to meet her writing deadlines among all the distractions of the city. She was trying to finish another Mrs Piggle-Wiggle book for Lippincott in March and also had an article due for a national monthly magazine. By April 1949 they were back on the island and Betty started writing from 6am to 6pm, a rigorous schedule she had never been able to keep to in Seattle. The joint cookbook with Mary was due out in May, although for whatever reason the project appears to have fizzled out and the cookbook never appeared. Despite the twelve-hour writing schedule there was still a stream of visitors and Betty joked about running a small hotel. By July, though, she had completed the second Mrs Piggle-Wiggle, plus four articles for national magazines, and was making good progress on her third book for adults, Anybody Can Do Anything.

  As ever, she interspersed the writing with enthusiastic gardening and animal-raising. She told the audience at a luncheon given in her honor at Frederick and Nelson’s department store in October that she and Don now had 5000 chickens, three cows, twelve pigs, two lambs, and some ducks and turkeys. Don had built a house for their two helpers back of their own. Their hibiscus, gardenias and bougainvillea, sent up from California, were flourishing despite the climate and Betty was looking forward to having an avocado patch. (By now Betty was an acknowledged gardener as well as writer: the previous year she had been asked to open the Rose Society Show at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle.)

  The writing was also going well and Betty was extremely gratified when she learned that the new Mrs Piggle-Wiggle had been made a textbook at the University of Georgia’s creative writing classes as an example of writing for juveniles. She had nearly finished Anybody Can Do Anything, which was due out in spring the following year (although she was anticipating reviews along the lines of ‘No, anybody can’t’). Her publishers had also asked her to write a novel, so she was doing some plotting when she wasn’t writing. Before she started on it in earnest, though, she and Don went to visit a dude ranch – not just for fun, but because a national magazine had asked her to write an article on dude ranching. The visit may also have been part of early planning for their eventual move to California.

  One of the articles Betty mentioned writing for magazines may or may not have been a piece in the October 1949 issue of Pageant, entitled Take a Lesson From Betty MacDonald. In this, Betty seemingly told the magazine’s interviewers a story for their series on lessons learned by well-known Americans from a memorable experience. Written by the journalists themselves, the story concerns a visit by Betty to a poverty-stricken spinster aunt in South Carolina who has known better times. The aunt treasures all the belongings she has inherited from her ancestors and, although very poor, wouldn’t dream of selling any. When told that the Metropolitan Museum in New York has bought the duplicate vase of one in the aunt’s possession for $3,000, the aunt confirms that hers was one of a pair – but rather than wanting to sell hers to the Museum too, she responds simply that she can’t afford to buy the missing one back. The story seems rather pat and without any flavor of Betty; it may be that Pageant – a rather racy magazine for Betty to have written for – just made it up, but at this distance in time it is impossible to tell. Betty did of course have well-to-do relatives who went a long way back, although not in South Carolina.

  Meanwhile, the retreat to Vashon in early 1949 had had an unexpected consequence. That summer Betty and Don leased out the Capitol Hill home to five young FBI agents whom they also invited out to Vashon for weekends. One of the agents was Girard (Jerry) Keil, and Joan on one of her own visits home promptly fell in love with him. A
fter graduating from Seattle’s Garfield High School Joan attended the University of Washington, living in a sorority house but coming home frequently to Vashon to get some home cooking. Joan and Jerry married on 21 January 1950, again with the wedding breakfast held at Mary’s. The ceremony was held in candlelight and this time the theme was pink: there were blush-pink tapers, camellias, carnations and stocks and beautiful Joan carried pale pink orchids. Her gown was brocaded silk with a portrait neckline and tiny covered buttons to the waist; her illusion veil was caught to a cloche of the same brocaded silk, with clusters of pearl orange blossoms on each side. Anne was matron of honor. Mother of the bride Betty was smart in a beige suit with beaver accessories and a brown and green orchard corsage. Just like Anne and Don, the young couple soon set about starting a family.

  Joan and Jerry initially lived in Los Angeles and Betty and Don would visit them there and introduced them to their old Hollywood contacts from the days of filming The Egg and I. One night the four visited the home of Ray Stark, Betty’s agent in Hollywood, to meet the comedienne Fanny Brice. Ray was married to Fanny Brice’s daughter and because Betty loved Fanny Brice so much she wanted Joan and Jerry to meet her. They had dinner, met yet more stars and then, in typical Hollywood style, watched a movie shown on a large pull-down screen.

  §

  In 1950 Betty finally published Anybody Can Do Anything, her work about her family’s struggle during the Depression years. She was conscious, after the success of her earlier books, that its reception had ‘an awful precedent’ hanging over it. Again, the writing had been a long struggle with much revision needed. Her agent had helped keep her equilibrium.

  She’s absolutely honest and never spares me. I was afraid when she called about this latest book. I had sent her twelve chapters and she sent all but two back and said, ‘This isn’t you.’ So I wrote them over.

  The Saturday Evening Post serialized the book in four installments under the title It All Happened to Me. The magazine’s photographer came to Vashon Island and, just as in the early days of Betty’s fame, he lived with the MacDonalds for a week while following Betty and the family around, shooting enough pictures to illustrate the story. Anybody is a truly funny description of the various jobs Betty was pushed into by Mary and the Bards’ stratagems for staying afloat during the Depression, but pulls no punches about the realities of being poor during the 1930s. As always in Betty’s books, though, there is a thread of hope and optimism that relieves the touches of gloom and Betty’s writing is as witty and evocative as ever. Anybody was eventually made into a Broadway play, in the contract for which Anne and Joan were promised first row center seats for each performance, but the play was never produced.

  ‘My natural inclination when I finish writing a book is to pull a cover over my head and forget it,’ Betty said in August. At this point Anybody was being bid for by more than one Hollywood producer, although nothing seems to have come of it. Betty carried on writing, trying to do as much as she could in the mornings. The stream of guests still continued – the MacDonalds consumed a case of coffee every two weeks and there had been comments about hoarding when people saw Don buying the case at the grocery store. The constant influx of guests made writing difficult.

  My downfall is coming downstairs to breakfast. We have a great big kitchen with a fireplace, and it is always jammed with people. You work hard under conditions like that, but difficulties really are an asset to a writer. You can feel awfully sorry for yourself, but on the other hand I have to be fresh and stimulated, and people do that to me.

  She was planning her next project, which was to be two new children’s books. Her previous ones were still extremely successful; Mrs Piggle-Wiggle was now being used at the famous Menninger psychiatric clinic as part of its treatment for children. She just about had time to get something new out – Anne was now expecting her second baby and Joan was expecting her first, but there was a little space before Betty was swamped by serious grandmother duty.

  ‘My agent has my writing time all figured out,’ she explained to an interviewer from the Seattle Times. ‘With Anne having a baby in December and Joan in March, that gives me September, October and November to write this next one. It probably will be ready for spring of ’51. It may be the Nancy and Plum stories I used to tell to Anne and Joan. I’d get so fascinated with them I couldn’t stop and they went on and on.’ At this point Betty still hadn’t decided whether to write up Nancy and Plum, which in fact dated right back to her childhood when she used tell the stories to Mary in bed at night. She also had something in rough manuscript form called Cocoanut and Gingersnap, about a fairy and a brownie, yet another of a series she used to tell Anne and Joan when they were little.

  As well as her writing she was still kept busy answering the usual 10 – 25 fan letters a day, often from children. Plague had brought her much correspondence from sanatoriums and even a letter from a doctor in Japan. But Anybody had brought the best fan letters yet.

  People say it’s an inspiration because I’ve been able to weather all kinds of storms. I’ve had only one crank letter on it so far – from the biggest I-hate-men-if-I’d-ever-had-any who said all men ever wanted out of women on jobs was work and more work. The Post editors asked if I wanted to answer it. I said that as far as I was concerned the typing was nice.

  Betty was making a very successful life for herself as a writer, and was clearly happy doing so, despite the exigencies of being famous. But a shadow was falling over Betty’s achievements and her delight in her new grandchildren. As early as 1947 the Bishop family, the originals for the feckless Kettles in The Egg and I, had sued for libel. The case came to court in 1951 and once again Betty was in the spotlight.

  Betty and the Law

  Courtesy Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry

  BETTY tensely faced her interrogator, plaintiffs’ attorney George H. Crandell. It was the afternoon of 15 February 1951 in King County Superior Court in Seattle.

  Betty’s defense against the charge of libel was to maintain that she had made up the whole of The Egg and I and that it had no basis in reality. Crandell’s tack was of course to prove the exact opposite: that Betty had based her book on the people and places she knew around the area of Chimacum where she had lived with Bob Heskett.

  He began by asking Betty if her book’s description of the ‘Kettle place’ did not fit the Albert Bishop farm which adjoined the ranch where she had lived from 1927 to 1931.

  ‘No,’ Betty replied. ‘I wrote the book and I wasn’t writing about it.’

  Pressed about other details regarding the Bishop farm, Betty responded: ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. I haven’t been there for twenty years.’

  Twenty minutes of stiff cross-examination followed, question after question, until suddenly Betty was overcome. Breaking down in tears, she ran from the stand. Betty MacDonald Flees Courtroom While Under Cross-Examination screamed the headlines in the local press.

  The following morning Betty’s torment resumed as Crandell drove on with his questioning.

  She insisted that ‘it would have to be a coincidence’ if her descriptions in Egg of Paw Kettle, the Kettles’ farm and the Kettle farmhouse parlor in any way resembled Albert Bishop, his farm and the Bishops’ parlor.

  ‘You’ve been in the Bishops’ parlor?’ Crandell asked.

  ‘No, I never was,’ Betty answered.

  ‘Do you remember Mrs Bishop?’

  ‘No, I do not. I just remember her as a nice woman.’

  Betty did not have ‘the faintest idea’ as to when she first met Albert Bishop or ‘the faintest recollection’ of what he looked like. When Crandell asked Betty if, before she was married and while living with her mother near the Bishop farm, she had ever attended a dance with Albert Bishop’s son Walter, Betty replied: ‘One dance which my brother made me go to.’ Asked by Crandell to elaborate, Betty explained that her brother had said that ‘if I didn’t go people would think I was snooty.’ She stated that she had been a goo
d friend of Janet Bishop, the wife of Albert’s son Herbert, but denied (‘at the risk of being unkind’) that Janet was the model for the beautiful, dancing-eyed Jeanie Kettle in Egg.

  She insisted to the court that she did not describe Port Ludlow as ‘Docktown,’ Chimacum as ‘Crossroads’ or Port Townsend as ‘Town’. ‘In all my descriptions of towns I tried to picture a typical town,’ she maintained. She was writing about ‘an imaginary place in an imaginary country’.

  During this second day under cross-examination Betty remained calm as she parried Crandell’s questions. There were no further breakdowns, and the ordeal finally came to an end. The lawyers’ summing up and the verdict of the jury were still to come.

  §

  Following the success of The Egg and I, both book and film, two lawsuits were filed by residents from Chimacum. In both, the family of Albert and Suzanne Bishop claimed that the Kettle and other characters in the book had been based on them and that they had been identified in their community as the real-life versions of those characters and therefore subjected to ridicule and humiliation.

  The first lawsuit was filed in March 1947 by the Bishops’ eldest son Edward and his wife Ilah, whose property had abutted Betty’s mother’s farm. Alleging that they were Betty’s models for her characters Mr. and Mrs. Hicks, another set of neighbors in the book, the Bishops asked $100,000 in damages. The book was libelous and an invasion of their right to privacy, they claimed, and as a result of its publication they had been exposed to ridicule, hatred, and contempt.

  On September 27, 1947, the case was ordered to trial when King County Superior Judge Hugh Todd issued a memorandum opinion denying Betty’s demurrer, or motion to dismiss. The judge ruled that certain statements in the book, if true, were libelous. He pointed out that although truth is a defense in actions of this kind, the publication of such facts or conversation can be an invasion of the rights of privacy. He continued, ‘The alleged causes of action in that respect in this case are not based only upon the point that the statements are untrue, but if certain statements made in the publication be true, nevertheless, they should not have been published for the reason that the knowledge of any such things could only have been gained in visits to the plaintiffs’ home, and that the publication of the same invades the right of privacy for which the plaintiffs are entitled to recover damages, regardless of the truth or untruth of any such statement.’