Betty Ford: First Lady

by Lisa McCubbin

  As soon as the curtain fell, the entire audience rose to its feet with applause.

  “Bravo! Bravo!” Betty was clapping with all her might. “Wasn’t it wonderful, Jerry?” Her entire being was sparkling.

  “It was, Betty. It was perfect!” the president replied with a huge smile.

  Suddenly Betty had an idea. She turned to Greg Willard. “Do you think we could go backstage?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Greg said. He’d been on their staff long enough to know exactly what she wanted and how to make it happen. “I’ll take care of it.”

  They made their way backstage, and Betty was in heaven. She was beaming with joy as she grasped the hands of the dancers and told them how wonderful they were, how much she and the president had enjoyed the performance.

  “The choreography was marvelous!” she exclaimed. “Now show me, how did you do that one move?”

  And then the dancers were moving their arms and counting “five, six, seven, eight,” and Betty was moving right along with them. This was her language, and she was just so happy. It was the happiest she’d been in months, and she didn’t want the evening to end.

  Meanwhile, several of their Secret Service agents were waiting outside with the motorcade, wondering what was going on to delay the scheduled departure. Agent Marty Venker got on the radio.

  “Follow-up—Venker. Passkey’s ready to go, but Pinafore is definitely not.”

  Everyone knew what that meant. No one was leaving until Betty was ready to go.

  Several days later, back in Rancho Mirage, a bulky package was delivered to the DeWare house gate. The Secret Service agents carefully examined the package and its contents. Inside was a VCR tape, along with a handwritten note from a seventh-grade boy in Pennsylvania.

  The agents brought the package to the staff to decide whether the Fords should see it—you never knew what kind of crazy stuff people might send. Greg Willard examined the package and was intrigued by the young boy’s heartfelt note. He went into the living room, inserted the video into the VCR player, and pressed Play.

  The boy had created a tribute to President and Mrs. Ford, splicing together video clips of them from a network television broadcast during President Carter’s inauguration. Included were Marine One, the presidential helicopter, lifting off from the Capitol with the Fords aboard, followed by a series of clips of the two of them at Andrews Air Force Base, and finally, Air Force One taking off to deliver them to California. In place of the network audio commentary, the boy had dubbed a different soundtrack: it was “What I Did for Love,” the song from the musical they’d just seen in New York.

  Greg was gobsmacked. That song! What are the odds?! It was a short video, just long enough for the entire song to play, just long enough to tug at your heartstrings.

  Betty was outside on the patio reading, and when she came in, Greg said quietly, “Mrs. Ford, if you have a minute, I think you want to look at this.”

  “What is it?”

  He handed her the note and said, “You won’t believe this, but the video’s background music is that wonderful song from A Chorus Line—the one you and the president loved so much.”

  Mrs. Ford looked at him in disbelief. “ ‘What I Did for Love’?”

  “Yes,” Greg said. “It’s really quite moving.”

  “Well, yes, I’d like to see it.”

  They sat down together on the sofa and watched the video. Neither of them spoke, as the cascade of emotions welled up inside.

  When the president returned later that afternoon, Betty said, “Jerry, you’ve got to see this . . .”

  From that point on, “What I Did for Love” was their song.

  The first week in April 1977, President Ford had a five-day stint as a visiting professor of political science at his alma mater, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, so he and Betty used it as an opportunity to spend the following Easter weekend with friends and family in Grand Rapids. They were both looking forward to a relaxing weekend surrounded by people who knew them from way back—and hosting a dinner party for those who had helped raise money for the White House swimming pool—but out of the blue, as happened so frequently, Betty’s pinched nerve flared up, leaving her in severe pain the entire weekend. Sunday morning, she managed to attend the Easter service at Grace Episcopal Church—where she and Jerry had been married—but by the end of the service, she was in such excruciating pain, she could barely move.

  Jerry was scheduled to give a speech in Louisville, Kentucky, a couple of days later, but they decided to return first to Rancho Mirage. The Fords were traveling on a military jet, which stopped in Oklahoma City to refuel. During the stop, everyone got off the plane to stretch, but Betty didn’t move from her seat. One of the agents stayed with her, and no one asked why she remained on the aircraft. Finally, they took off for the last leg back to the West Coast.

  As the aircraft prepared to land, two staff members took seats near Betty in the front cabin, where she had been sitting the entire flight. They couldn’t help but notice that she had her right hand clasped tightly over her left hand. As the plane came to a stop, Betty pulled away her right hand, and they could see a huge welt next to her wedding ring, where she had been squeezing her left hand. They didn’t say anything—it wasn’t their place—but their antennae were up. What is going on?

  It had been a long day of travel, and it was late, so the staff members returned to their apartment, while the agents took President and Mrs. Ford back to the DeWare house. Greg Willard had just unpacked and was ready to plow into a backlog of paperwork, when the phone rang. It was the president.

  “Greg, can you come down here to the house. Mother and I need to talk to you.”

  He could tell by his boss’s tone of voice that it involved something very urgent.

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ll be right there, Mr. President.” When Greg walked in, Jerry and Betty were sitting in the living room, Betty in a nightgown and robe. She was wincing in pain, her eyes weary, and it was obvious she was in agony.

  “As you can see, Mother is in terrible pain,” Jerry said. “We want to talk about surgery.”

  Betty looked up, her voice a whisper. “I can’t live like this. I can’t do it. I know the risks of surgery; I’ve considered them before. I want to proceed down the surgery path.”

  “Can you look into it, Greg?” the president asked. “Find out what we need to do?”

  “I’ll call Dr. Lukash, sir,” Greg replied. “He’ll be the best one to guide us and get the process started quickly. I’ll call him at the White House now.”

  Dr. Lukash had stayed on with President Carter as the White House physician, and within thirty minutes, he was aware of Betty’s situation and her desire to consider surgery. Lukash immediately contacted the medical staff at the Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage.

  The next day, Greg Willard and the Secret Service agents met privately with administrators at the hospital to make the necessary arrangements. The medical team decided that Betty first needed to have a myelogram: a diagnostic procedure in which contrast dye would be injected into her spinal column, followed by multiple CT scans of her spinal region to try to determine what was causing her severe pain. The procedure was scheduled for the following morning.

  Betty arrived at the hospital bright and early and was prepped for what was expected to be a routine, hour-long procedure. President Ford remained at their residence, expecting that his wife would be back home for lunch. The procedure itself was uneventful, and when it was over, the doctors told Betty everything went fine.

  “We’ll examine the results and keep you under observation for a few hours,” they told her. “You should be able to go home by early afternoon.”

  By early afternoon, however, it was clear that Betty Ford wasn’t going anywhere. She’d become very ill. Greg Willard recalled somberly, “By late afternoon, she was clearly not well; she was struggling.”

  President Ford was summoned to the hospital and was rushed
immediately to Eisenhower by his Secret Service agents. Something was very wrong. Betty had become noncommunicative, extremely nauseous, and was experiencing tremors throughout her body.

  The doctors huddled together, studying her charts, and concluded finally, “We have to admit her. She’s having a very bad reaction to the myelogram dye. It happens in about five percent of people, and the dye just needs to work its way through the system.” According to the lead physician, “She probably won’t be able to go home this evening. Out of an abundance of caution, we’ll admit her and keep her here overnight.”

  President Ford had never seen his wife in such bad shape, and everyone was very concerned. This was supposed to have been a routine diagnostic procedure meant to determine whether she could have the surgery that she hoped would ease her constant pain.

  She was taken to a hospital room that had a small connected anteroom with a sofa. That evening, a very worried Greg Willard slept there, in what would turn out to be his first of several overnight stays. The president returned home but called repeatedly during the night to get the latest reports.

  Betty slept some that night and seemed to be a little more comfortable; nevertheless, she remained noncommunicative, and the tremors continued.

  The medical team continued to administer IV fluids, still convinced that once the dye was flushed from her system, it was just a matter of time before the adverse reaction would pass. President Ford’s visits to Eisenhower continued with increasing urgency. His appearance was grim; he felt helpless. As he would leave the house for Eisenhower, the agents would call ahead to the anteroom to report that he was on his way. As soon as he reached the hospital, he would receive the latest medical update before proceeding into Betty’s room. The doctors kept assuring him it was just a bad reaction, but that still didn’t address the obvious question: When was it going to stop?

  So far, the president’s staff had managed to keep the hospitalization quiet; no press had gotten wind of it. But they knew it was just a matter of time before something leaked. By the second night, a new fear surfaced that Betty’s breast cancer may have metastasized to her brain. The medical team decided she should undergo a brain scan to see if that horrific possibility might explain her symptoms. To make certain the scan and her movements within the hospital remained totally private, the procedure was performed in the middle of the night, with just medical personnel, Secret Service agents, and staff huddled in the cramped radiology control room.

  As the scans got under way, one of the group quietly asked the radiologists, “Tell us what you’re not looking for? What is it we all hope not to see?” The response was stark: “It just doesn’t make sense that she’s having this prolonged reaction to a myelogram. What we do not want to see are differentiated shades within areas of the brain scans. The concern is that there might be lesions—metastatic tumors or a benign mass—that have developed on her brain that could be causing this.”

  The results of the scans turned out to be a relief—no lesions, no metastatic breast cancer, no brain tumors. Thank God. But what, then, was causing her to suffer so? The doctors still couldn’t explain it. However, by the third day, Betty began to rebound. She was more alert, and her tremors had receded. But she remained extremely weak. Finally, on the fourth day, Betty was allowed to go home.

  Ironically, everyone had become so consumed about her horrible reaction to the myelogram, they’d forgotten the reason she’d come to Eisenhower in the first place: When could she have surgery?

  The answer she received was not what she had hoped to hear. The source of her pain could not be remedied by surgery. The situation was inoperable. Betty was devastated. Despite all she had been through the past several days, to know that she had no choice but to live with her debilitating pain for the rest of her life was crushing.

  What no one recognized at the time—including some of the top medical professionals in the country who’d been consulted—was that the wretched reactions Betty had suffered in the hospital had absolutely nothing to do with the myelogram dye: they were classic symptoms of drug withdrawal.

  Once she came home, everyone around the Fords, including Jerry, sensed that “something was not right.” They just didn’t know what. Over the course of the next several weeks, Betty’s strength was slow to return. She persevered just to have an occasional lunch at the house with a friend or with Annie Grier and Joy Chiles. Afterward, she inevitably needed to rest. In the meantime, Jerry maintained his frenetic travel schedule, jetting around the country from one speaking event to another. Lady Bird Johnson had invited the Fords to the LBJ Ranch, in central Texas, in early May, and Betty had been looking forward to the visit. But when the time came for the trip, she just didn’t have the strength to go, so Jerry went alone.

  Looking back, it’s clear what was happening. Mired in pain, all alone there in the desert, seemingly a million miles away from the pinnacle of the White House and her friends, it’s not at all surprising that Betty Ford began spiraling down. Armed with a cabinet full of pills—all prescribed by her doctors—she’d mix and match depending on the aches or stresses of the day. No one around her knew exactly what she was taking or in what combinations, but they blindly assumed that the doctors knew best. She saw her internist every week for vitamin B shots and refills for any of the vials that were getting low. Around five or six o’clock each evening, she’d ask Benjy, the former White House navy steward who had stayed on to work for the Fords, to make her a drink—usually a vodka tonic. And while she might have a second drink, none of the staff perceived her alcohol consumption as anything outside of the parameters one would have considered, in the ’70s, as moderate social drinking.

  To those around Betty, there was no indication she had a problem with alcohol or prescription drugs. But in retrospect, it’s clear that by this point, the mix of pills, depression, pain, and booze had already begun its stealthy and relentless takeover.

  21

  * * *

  A Downward Spiral

  With Betty’s health issues, one of the first orders of business was to find new doctors. No longer could she simply call downstairs to Dr. Lukash for a sleeping pill or a pain pill; no longer did the doctors come to her.

  Dr. Joseph Cruse came highly recommended as an ob-gyn—he had worked at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, and was now affiliated with the nearby Eisenhower Medical Center—so Betty and Susan both began going to see him.

  Dr. Cruse, himself a recovering alcoholic, realized Betty had a problem the first time he met her. “I had a long hallway from my reception desk to the consultation room. She had to hold on to the wall all the way down. And then she came in and sat down and kind of blinked at me.”

  Susan would accompany her mother to the appointments, and when Dr. Cruse asked Mrs. Ford questions, Susan usually answered. Cruse found himself in a difficult position—just like Betty’s internist and cardiologist. Because Mrs. Ford had come to him as a gynecology patient, he felt it was out of line for him to suggest that the former first lady had an addiction problem.

  The summer of 1977, the Fords flew to Vail, as had become their typical routine. Betty loved the clear, crisp mountain air and the small-town feel. Friends there such as Sheika Gramshammer knew her before she was first lady, and she could just be herself.

  Still, there were so many obligations, even as the wife of a former president. The mail had declined somewhat, but invitations and requests for appearances still came in daily. There was no way Betty could go back to handling it herself, as she had when Jerry was a congressman, but unlike the funds that were provided to the outgoing president for an office and staff, there was nothing for the outgoing first lady. Betty needed an assistant, and one who was willing to move back and forth between Rancho Mirage and Vail.

  Twenty-six-year-old Caroline Coventry was working at Pepi Sports when she heard that Betty Ford was looking for a new personal aide. She followed up with President Ford’s assistant, Bob Barrett, who promptly set up an intervi
ew at Dick Bass’s house.

  “I introduced myself, and Bob Barrett talked for thirty minutes straight,” Caroline recalled. “He never asked me a question. And I thought, Will this guy ever stop?”

  Barrett knew that Caroline had worked at Pepi Sports, and, apparently, she had all the skills he thought Mrs. Ford would need in an assistant. Finally, Barrett said, “Would you like to meet Mrs. Ford?”

  Caroline was caught off guard. She hadn’t expected to meet the former first lady at this initial meeting. But what could she say? “Of course,” she said. “I’d love to meet Mrs. Ford.”

  “Great,” Barrett said. “I’ll call and let her know we’re coming.”

  Caroline was even more surprised when Bob Barrett brought her into President and Mrs. Ford’s bedroom, and there was Mrs. Ford, sitting up in bed.

  “She was wearing a beautiful bright-pink quilted silk bathrobe,” Caroline recalled. It stuck out in her mind because she’d never imagined meeting the former first lady in her bedroom, let alone in a bathrobe.

  “Mrs. Ford,” Barrett said, “I’d like to introduce you to Caroline Coventry. We’ve been talking about the job as your assistant.”

  Betty smiled. “It was a genuine smile,” Caroline recalled, “and then she said, ‘Hello, Caroline. Would you like to come here and work?’ ”

  Mrs. Ford’s speech was slurred, but other than that, Caroline remembered, she was as happy and as nice as could be. What do you say when you are facing the former president’s wife, and she asks if you want to work for her?

  “Oh, of course,” Caroline answered with a smile. And that was it. “It happened very fast,” she remembered. “It was done before you realized it.”

  Her duties were loosely defined, but, basically, Caroline would assist with anything and everything, from sorting mail and handling correspondence, to running errands and helping with packing for trips. She was eager to please, and with her warm, bubbly personality, she fit in from the start. Susan was there all summer, and she and Caroline became friends.