Betty Ford: First Lady, Women's Advocate, Survivor, Trailblazer

by Lisa McCubbin

  Clara put her arm around Susan and stroked her, just like she had so many times when Susan was a little girl. Through her tears, Susan began to speak. She realized she had to say what had been building up inside her for so long.

  “Mom, when I was little, and even as I grew up, I always admired you for being a dancer. I wanted to be just like you. But now . . .”

  She began sobbing, and everyone was starting to lose it. They’d all held their composure up to this point, but now, Susan was killing them.

  “These days,” Susan continued, “you’re falling and clumsy. You’re just not the same person. And I’ve talked to you about things—things that were important to me, and the next day, you didn’t even remember.”

  Seeing her daughter fall apart was what finally cut through Betty’s iron will. She had been blindsided, and now, all these stories. They were mean and cruel. And true.

  What had happened? How did she go from being that woman in the painting on the wall, so regal and proud, to the woman her family was describing? And what was going to happen next?

  It was all a blur. Dr. Pursch was talking about treatment and detox, and Betty was sobbing, and Jerry was holding her hand and saying over and over and over, “We love you, Betty. We’re doing this because we love you.”

  Sitting there, in her pink robe, all Betty could think was, This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.

  PART ONE

  BETTY FORD, DANCER

  In 1974, in the most extraordinary and unpredictable of circumstances, Betty Ford went from being a housewife in Alexandria, Virginia, to first lady of the United States in the span of ten months. She was thrust onto the world stage, and while the position was not one she had ever desired or expected—and most certainly wasn’t one she was happy about—she slipped into the role as if she’d been preparing for it her entire life.

  Betty’s poise, grace, and indomitable spirit can all be traced back to her childhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was there she developed a toughness as the younger sister of two brothers and the only daughter of a strong-willed mother; it was there she fell in love with dancing; and ultimately, it was there she met the man whose own journey would intertwine with hers.

  As much as Betty Ford’s story is that of an ordinary girl who would become one of the most admired and influential women of the twentieth century, it is also one of the great love stories of all time.

  1

  * * *

  The Bloomer Girl

  “Mother always said I’d popped out of a bottle of champagne,” Betty was fond of telling people. She would break into one of her contagious smiles, and with a glint of mischief in her eyes, she’d add, “I think I was an accident; the result of an unplanned party.”

  Actually, Elizabeth Anne Bloomer came into the world at Lake View Hospital in Chicago on April 8, 1918, the third child born to Hortense Neahr Bloomer and William Stephenson Bloomer. Her two brothers, Bill and Bob, were seven and five, respectively, at the time of her birth, and it was that five-year spread, along with the fact that her mother was in her early thirties, that had her wondering whether she was a surprise addition to the family. Whatever the circumstances of her conception, the round-faced baby girl with sparkling blue eyes made the family complete.

  Elizabeth was her given name, but perhaps it was just too formal for the bubbly personality that developed—or perhaps her mother always intended to shorten it to match the B names of her brothers—but as far back as she could remember, everyone called her “Betty” or “Bets.”

  A few months after Betty was born, the Bloomers moved from Chicago to Denver, Colorado, where William Bloomer had accepted a job as district sales manager for the Republic Rubber Corporation. After more than twenty years in the rubber industry, William had earned a good reputation selling conveyor belts—previously for the B. F. Goodrich Company—and by this point, he was earning a comfortable living.

  The Bloomers rented a large house in the prestigious Capitol Heights neighborhood and hired a live-in maid, a German woman, to help Hortense manage the household. The house at 1410 Josephine Street was nestled in a row of similarly grand homes owned or rented by families of comparable status, all with sprawling front porches facing a tree-lined sidewalk.

  While Hortense appeared to enjoy life in Denver, just before Betty turned two, William switched jobs again, this time taking a position at the Quaker City Rubber Company, which was based in Chicago. This would be the fourth move in less than four years—they’d been in Seattle prior to the short stint in Chicago when Betty was born—and since William would be traveling all over the Midwest, a decision was made to settle in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Hortense had a cousin. This would be the last move, and for Betty, Grand Rapids would be where her childhood memories began.

  The city of Grand Rapids lies along the Grand River, some thirty miles east of Lake Michigan, and by the time the Bloomers arrived in the winter of 1920, the city was home to a booming furniture industry, with a variety of immigrants making up the population. Known as “Furniture City,” Grand Rapids was one of the country’s major manufacturing hubs: a bustling midsize city with a state-of-the-art electric trolley system. For a nickel, you could ride the electric streetcars throughout the downtown area or out to Ramona Park—an amusement park on Reeds Lake that was famous for its double-track wooden roller coaster and outdoor entertainment pavilion.

  The Grand River flowed from north to south, dividing Grand Rapids in half, and in the 1920s, it segregated the city by income levels and, to some extent, ethnicity. The furniture factories stood along the river, and the men who worked in them tended to live in the small homes that had been built in residential neighborhoods on the west side, while the mill owners and businessmen lived on the east side in grand neighborhoods with ornate mansions. The citizens of Grand Rapids held tight to traditional values, were largely churchgoers—in 1920 there were 134 churches in the city—and had overwhelmingly embraced prohibition of alcohol, banning all bars, saloons, and taverns nearly two years before it was required by the Eighteenth Amendment.

  The Bloomers moved into a two-story wood-frame house at 717 Fountain Street in an affluent, predominantly Dutch east-side neighborhood where people took pride in their homes and yards. It wasn’t a large house—not nearly as big as the one in Denver—but it had enough bedrooms and a separate one-car garage in back that was accessible by an alleyway. Betty would remember the house as being “filled with light” and that she was happy there.

  Hortense’s cousin Charlotte Neahr Irwin and her husband, Earle, lived nearby with their two children: a son named Bill and a daughter named Charlotte, whom everyone called “Shine.” With William Bloomer traveling so much, it was nice for Hortense to have family close by and for her children to grow up around cousins.

  Because the Grand Rapids winters were so long and cold, by the time spring came around, many well-to-do families flocked to the lakes, eager to make the most of the few months of warmth and sunshine. The Bloomers found a place called Hartt’s Resort on Whitefish Lake, in Pierson, Michigan, about thirty miles due north of Grand Rapids, where you could rent a lakeside cottage for $10 a week. It was a tight-knit community in which the same families came back year after year, the kind of place where children made lifelong friends with shared memories of carefree days. The day after school let out, the Bloomers would pack up the family’s Cole Eight touring car, and Hortense and the children would stay for the entire summer, with William joining them when he could take time off.

  Betty had a Dutch-boy bob haircut that was popular at the time and a happy personality that attracted people to her. The first summer at the lake, she realized she could wander around the picnic grounds, and if she stopped at each table, someone would invariably offer a cookie or piece of cake. It became such a habit that she was growing chubbier by the week, prompting Hortense to hang a sign on her back that said “Please do not feed this child.”

  The resort had a safe bathing beach with a long L-shaped doc
k down the middle, and cool, clear water that was shallow enough so even the younger children could wade in up to their knees for a good distance before it got too deep. Boys and girls of varying ages romped around together, spending hours and hours in and out of the water, making up games and competitions—swimming, sailing, canoeing, and fishing from the dock with bamboo poles—their fair skin turning browner and browner as the summer days seemingly went on forever.

  When Betty’s father joined the family at the lake, he would take out a rowboat and fish for hours. “He was a great fisherman,” she recalled. “He spent his entire vacation fishing, and we were served fish and fish and fish until I hoped I would never see fish again.”

  It was a simpler time, when children would leave the house in the morning and run around the neighborhood inventing games and finding ways to entertain themselves. Betty adored her two older brothers, and she trailed after them, constantly trying to be part of whatever activity they were doing. By her own admission, she was a “terrible tomboy,” and it was thanks to her brothers that she learned how to properly throw a football and play ice hockey. When the two of them would get into fights—as brothers do—she’d get right down on the floor with them, trying to pull off the one who was on top. It didn’t make any difference which one was on top, she was always rooting for the guy on the bottom, and she had no qualms about getting right there in the thick of things.

  As soon as she was old enough, Betty walked with her brothers to Fountain Street Elementary School. On one of her first days in kindergarten, someone noticed a blemish on her left hand and began teasing her about it. It was a birthmark that she’d never paid any attention to, but soon a whole group of kids were making fun of her. She was mortified to be made to feel such an outcast, and when she got home and saw her mother, she burst into tears.

  Through the sobs, Betty explained how the other children had been so cruel and how embarrassed she was to have this mark on her hand.

  “Oh, dear Betty,” Hortense said, as she swept her daughter into her arms, “don’t you realize? You are the only little girl in the world with a birthmark like that. It makes you special, and most importantly, because of that mark, no matter where you go, I will never lose you.” The next day, Betty returned to school filled with pride and a newfound sense of confidence.

  Even though Betty loved sports and could hold her own with her brothers, Hortense was determined to make a young lady out of her. From the time Betty could walk, her mother insisted she wear a hat and gloves whenever they went downtown, and she was a stickler for proper manners. She was particular about table manners: napkin in the lap, using the proper utensils, and chewing with your mouth closed. “You sound just like a horse,” she’d say if Betty was chomping on an apple. “Go into the kitchen or go to your room. I don’t want to hear it.”

  As a traveling salesman, William Bloomer would be gone weeks at a time, but Hortense kept him apprised of what was going on in the family through daily letters. Every evening, Betty would come downstairs after finishing her homework and see her mother sitting at the desk writing to her father. When he came home after a long trip, he’d always bring something for Betty, and over the years of her childhood, she amassed a cornucopia of stuffed animals. Her favorite was a teddy bear that she dragged everywhere as a little girl, but the gifts didn’t make up for her dad being gone so often, and she vowed to herself that she’d never marry a man who traveled.

  With William gone so much of the time, Hortense basically raised Betty and her brothers as a single mother. She was warm and loving, but she taught her children to know right from wrong, tending to teach through humor rather than pressure. Spankings in the household were rare, but the threat of a hairbrush on the bottom was always there.

  When Betty was eight years old, her mother enrolled her in dance lessons.

  About five blocks away from the Bloomer house, an unmarried woman named Calla Travis had transformed her home at 220 Fulton Street into the Miss Calla Travis School of Dancing. It was a big Victorian house with high ceilings, beautiful wood floors, and large rooms that were empty except for dozens of wood-slat folding chairs backed up against the walls. Miss Travis held classes upstairs and downstairs for “every phase of dance art”—ballroom, ballet, tap, Latin dancing, and even acrobatic—and while she taught many of the lessons herself, she also used previous graduates as instructors. Betty’s first class was social ballroom dancing, with the boys, in jackets and ties, sitting on one side of the room, and the girls, in white socks, black patent leather Mary Janes, and white gloves, sitting on the other.

  “Ladies!” Calla Travis would call out as she clapped her hands, “You sit with your legs crossed!”

  The boys would stride across the room to ask a girl to be their partner, and they’d dance the waltz and fox-trot in time to Calla’s clattering castanets. Betty loved it so much, she persuaded her mother to send her to Calla’s studio for more classes.

  “I signed up for everything,” Betty wrote in her memoir. “I adored it all. Dance was my happiness.”

  It was on her very first day at Miss Calla’s that she met Lilian Fisher, another eight-year-old, who lived a few miles out of town. Their birthdays were just two months apart, and the girls became instant friends. It was a friendship that would last their entire lives.

  “She was pretty,” Lilian said. “Just pretty . . . and she wasn’t too tall, and she could kick. She could pirouette and do all these crazy things.”

  Each spring, Miss Calla put on a show featuring all her students. It was an impressive production with elaborate sets, props, and costumes, held in the St. Cecilia’s Society building, which had a big stage and plenty of auditorium seating for the parents and families of the aspiring young dancers. In her debut performance, Betty was skipping around the stage with a group of girls, each of them holding tin buckets meant to look like flower baskets. Betty lost her grip, the bucket went rattling down toward the footlights, making a terrible racket, and the audience roared with laughter. For someone with less confidence, such an incident might have put them off performing for good, but not Betty. She loved being onstage. More important, she just loved to dance.

  Every afternoon, right after school, Betty would head straight to the dance studio. Her report cards from middle school and high school show that she struggled to get average grades in the standard subjects, but when it came to dance, she was a perfectionist. She never tired of practicing and read voraciously about different methods and prominent dancers from around the world. She took every class Miss Travis offered, with the goal of becoming a dance instructor herself.

  “There was no kind of dance that didn’t fascinate me,” Betty wrote. “I’d hear about some boy who’d been out west among the Indians and learned a rain dance, and I’d go to him and make him teach it to me. I was insatiable.”

  Calla Travis had developed a rigorous and specific “Graded System of Dance Instruction,” and you had to be able to perform every move perfectly to progress to the next level. At first, it was ballet that Betty adored most of all, and she dreamt of going to New York City to become a ballerina. But the movements and positions were so precise, and she couldn’t seem to get her knees straight enough to appease Miss Travis. To pass the ballet course, Betty cleverly realized that if she designed her own costume, she could wear a flowy skirt made with scarves hanging down to camouflage whether her knees were straight or bent.

  A few years into Betty’s dance instruction, Miss Calla returned from a visit to the University of Wisconsin, where she had learned about something new called the Dalcroze method. This method taught concepts of rhythm, structure, and musical expression using movement, which came to be known as eurythmics. It was Betty’s first introduction to modern dance, and she loved the idea of experiencing music through the body as a means of self-expression. Gone were her dreams of being a prima ballerina—her new passion was modern dance.

  Hortense encouraged Betty’s interest in dance, but she also strived to teach her d
aughter humility and charity. Mrs. Bloomer had become active in the Grand Rapids community, joining Junior League—the educational and charitable women’s group; and volunteering with the Mary Free Bed Guild—a women’s organization that raised money to provide facilities and care for handicapped and crippled children. From a young age, Betty accompanied her mother to the Mary Free Bed convalescent home, where she’d see children her own age who were confined to wheelchairs, or had legs in braces, their disabilities due to polio or malnutrition.

  By the time Betty was a teenager, Hortense was guild president, and Betty realized that she could entertain the children by creating a dance party. She would bring in a phonograph, and with the children all gathered together in a big room, she taught them how to move their bodies to the beats and rhythm of the music, using the methods she’d learned in modern dance. It delighted her to see wheelchair-bound children, with both legs in casts, clapping with their free hands and moving their upper body, while those whose arms were crippled tapped their feet in time to the music. With Betty’s encouragement, the children escaped their confinement for a short while, laughing and feeling the joy of music and the pleasure of moving their bodies in whatever way they could. This sense of compassion and connection to children with disabilities or illnesses, or those who were victims of unfortunate circumstances, became ingrained in her.

  There were few shadows over Betty’s childhood, but when the stock market crashed in October 1929, it affected everyone. In Grand Rapids, the furniture business collapsed. Fathers lost their jobs. Some committed suicide. Betty was just eleven years old, and suddenly things changed. It’s unclear whether William Bloomer lost his job, but Betty knew he lost a lot of money, and as a traveling salesman whose livelihood depended on a strong economy, his wages undoubtedly took a dramatic decline. There would be no more household help, no more summers at Whitefish Lake, and no more store-bought dresses. For the next several years, almost all of Betty’s clothing was sewn by her mother.