Betty Ford: First Lady

by Lisa McCubbin

  During the day, it wasn’t alcohol, it was medication. “She was not a daytime drinker,” Susan said. “Occasionally, I saw her have a glass of wine at lunch, but that was not a regular occurrence.”

  “We wanted to carry on as if everything was fine,” Mike Ford said, “but no one really wanted to admit that we were seeing our mother really change and become withdrawn and emotional and really sick. We were in denial.”

  When Betty returned from Moscow, Caroline didn’t dare mention what she’d done, and things carried on as they had before. When they’d first arrived in Rancho Mirage, Betty had frequent invitations to lunch with friends such as Dolores Hope and Nicky Firestone, but those invitations began dropping off. And it was easy to see why.

  “Eating with her was torturous,” Caroline recalled. She’d pick up the fork, take a bite, and then chew the mouthful so slowly. Everything was in slow motion. Minutes would go by before she’d pick up the fork again. She didn’t eat in front of the television. The radio wasn’t on. No animation in her discussions. Just slow, deliberate, and quiet. After a few bites, she might comment to the chef, “Oh, Odie . . . this is so good!”

  When there were no invitations or outings on the schedule, Betty would stay in her robe all day. The pink robe. “She wore the same robe every day,” Caroline said. “Quilted silk. Every morning. If we weren’t in it at four in the afternoon, we were doing pretty well. She was struggling every single day to find some sense of order in her life.”

  From October to December, Caroline accompanied Betty on numerous trips throughout the country, including the National Women’s Conference in Houston with First Lady Rosalynn Carter, and a trip to Grand Rapids, where Betty was an honorary patron of a new art exhibit. Caroline remembered it as a blur. “There was lots of traveling and trying so hard to be on time, to be alert. Just trying to make it.”

  In mid-December Betty flew to New York City for an interview with Tom Brokaw on NBC’s Today show to promote the airing of the Bolshoi Ballet’s Nutcracker that she had attended and narrated in September. Of the countless interviews Brokaw conducted during his decades-long broadcasting career, this one with the former first lady would remain vivid in his mind.

  “She was not in good shape when she arrived,” Brokaw remembered. “She was sleepy, her eyes were drooping, and she could barely articulate why she was there.” Under the glare of the lights, the cameras rolling, Betty stumbled over her words, with a forced smile pasted across her face. Brokaw did his best to carry her through the interview, trying to prevent her from completely humiliating herself. Meanwhile, standing nearby, Betty’s staff watched, frozen in place.

  “I remember having this wide-eyed exchange with her staff,” Brokaw said. “It was a full realization of what she was going through at that point. We were all astonished.”

  This was not the same woman he had seen just two years earlier when he attended a white-tie state dinner at the White House. “President Ford had this down-home, Main Street charm, and Betty elevated him with her style and grace. At that dinner, I really thought she had found her place.” Brokaw had never seen any indication of a problem during Ford’s presidency, but now it was unmistakable.

  After the interview, Betty flew back to California. President Ford was gone, so Caroline offered to stay and watch The Nutcracker on TV with her. After all the buildup, they were both excited to see how it turned out.

  “We sat in the bedroom,” Caroline recalled. “Two chairs in front of the TV.”

  An announcer came on and said, “The Wonderful World of Disney will not be presented this evening but will return next week at its regularly scheduled time.”

  Then there was Betty Ford, a close-up shot of her filling the whole screen. Dressed in a dark-brown fur coat with a collar, an apricot turtleneck, and dangling earrings encrusted with green and pink jewels, Betty looked elegant and warm.

  “Good evening,” she began. “I’m speaking to you from the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.”

  Oh dear, Caroline thought. This is not good. She was smiling, and she looked beautiful, her hair perfectly styled, her makeup expertly applied, but the words came out of her mouth like she was, well, drugged.

  The shot zoomed out, and another woman appeared on the right of the screen.

  “During my visit to the Soviet Union, my interpreter and guide has been Katya . . . uh . . .” She hesitated, clearly struggling with the last name, and turned toward the woman.

  “Chakovskaya,” interjected the woman.

  “Ah, thank you, Katya,” Betty said with a smile.

  Okay, Caroline thought, that wasn’t too bad. That’s a hard name to pronounce.

  “Tonight we’re going to attend a gala performance of a favorite Christmas fantasy: The Nutcracker by the world-famous Bolshoi Ballet. Now, won’t you join us, please? We’ll have a lovely time. It will be delightful.”

  The next scene showed Betty and Katya walking up the stairs of the Bolshoi Theatre. They had removed their coats, and you could see Betty’s floor-length gown. High necked, with draping sleeves, in a beautiful shade of apricot.

  Titles appeared on the screen:

  NBC presents The Nutcracker by Peter Tchaikovsky

  Story Teller Mrs. Betty Ford

  With Katya Chakovskaya

  The orchestra began playing, and there was Betty again. She had on a permanent smile as she spoke, but her eyelids were heavy. It looked like she was reading from a teleprompter, but the words were slurred. “Tonight we are seeing a slightly different version of The Nutcracker, but in many ways, it is the same. The story about a little girl who has a dream. I’ve always known her as Clara, but here in Moscow, she is known as Mascha.”

  The camera cut to the conductor and the orchestra, with the music playing as Betty continued her narrative.

  “There’s a Christmas party, a beautiful tree, marvelous toys, a mysterious magician . . . to entertain the children, and dolls that come to life and a special gift for Mascha: a toy nutcracker that turns into a prince.”

  The curtain is drawn, and the ballet begins with Tchaikovsky’s exciting theme in the background. Bum bada-da-da dum dum dum dum. Betty disappears, and the dancers take over.

  Thank God, Caroline thought.

  The ballet itself was magnificent. The costumes, stunning; the dancers, absolute perfection. But every ten minutes or so, the camera would return to Betty, reading from the teleprompter explaining what was happening in the ballet, her words slurred and devoid of feeling or emotion.

  Betty explained that, during intermission, the audience had been informed that the dancer performing as the prince had injured his leg and could not continue. After an hour delay, two other Bolshoi stars took over the principal role.

  She struggled to pronounce things properly—and not just the Russian names, but simple words like “enduring popularity.”

  She came on again before the last scene, and by this time, her eyes were nearly closed. You could see her false eyelashes moving, and it looked like it was all she could do to keep her eyes open as she stumbled through the words. It was painful to watch.

  When it was all over, Betty turned to Caroline and said, “That was pretty bad, wasn’t it?”

  Caroline didn’t know what to say other than to be perfectly honest. She simply looked at Betty and said, “Yeah, it was.”

  “There wasn’t much discussion after that,” Caroline recalled, “because she was destroyed. She knew that she had really blown it.”

  The next day, the press reviewed the program as “something of a disaster,” and called her “sloe-eyed and sleepy tongued.”

  “And they were right,” Betty would acknowledge, years later. “I was so overmedicated.”

  But nobody said anything. The pills were prescribed by doctors, and everyone thought she needed them.

  “So I went on having pain and taking pills. And feeling guiltless,” Betty said.

  “Christmas vacation in Vail that year was utter hell,” Caroline recalled. Betty was
in a constant daze, and she rarely got out of her bathrobe the entire vacation. “For the first time, the kids came to me.”

  Mike, who hadn’t been around his mother in several months, noticed that she was manifesting a lot of unhealthy signs. “She was incoherent, kind of shuffling around, not eating right. And the slurred speech, the not getting dressed until late in the day, had become a lifestyle.”

  The kids were so frustrated, and at one point, Steve turned to Caroline and said, “Caroline, can’t you just get Mom dressed in the morning?”

  “Yeah, I’ll try,” Caroline said. As if that would solve everything, Caroline thought. She wished it were that easy. It seemed such a small thing to ask, but it was such a huge task. Although Steve was sincere in his request, he didn’t realize what a constant daily struggle it had been for Caroline since the day she started the job. Everyone realized something had to be done about “Mother’s problem,” but no one knew what to do.

  The children would remember it as the worst Christmas ever, while Betty was completely oblivious. “We were up in Vail, there was a lot of good snow, we were together, and I had my pills.”

  After Christmas, back in California, Caroline tried her hardest to get Mrs. Ford dressed in the morning. No luck. Every day was such a chore to get the smallest things done. President Ford would recall that it seemed like Betty was “in second gear,” and it became “increasingly difficult to lead a normal life.” It was easier for him to travel. He couldn’t stand to watch his wife get up in the morning and take a handful of pills, and then another handful at night, on top of a couple of drinks.

  The master bath in the rented house was floor-to-ceiling pink marble, and one night, while the president was away, Betty took a bad fall in the bathroom. No one was there, so it was never clear exactly what happened, but she managed to get herself up and back into bed. The next morning, she realized she’d chipped a tooth.

  “She was scared to death for fear anyone would find out,” Caroline Coventry recalled. An appointment was made with the dentist, and the agents whisked her away to have the tooth fixed. Caroline realized it could have been worse. What if she’d hit her head?

  The new house in Rancho Mirage next door to the Firestones was nearly complete, and everyone seemed to think that perhaps once the Fords moved into their permanent home, Betty would be better.

  Caroline always opened the mail and sorted through it, and one day a long letter came from someone in Germany. It was written completely in German, so Caroline asked one of the Secret Service agents if he could find someone to translate it. A few days later, the agent came back with the translation. The letter was from a woman who had seen Betty on the Bolshoi Nutcracker TV special and recognized that she had a problem. “I understand what’s wrong with you. I’ve been there.” She wanted Betty to know that there was someone out there who had been through the same thing and to let her know where she could go to find help.

  “The agents warned me not to get involved,” Caroline remembered. They reminded her that she was not a friend, not a family member—she worked for Mrs. Ford, just as they did. It was not their place to judge or advise the family or Mrs. Ford on how she was living her own life.

  “Stay out of it,” they said.

  But Caroline decided that if she showed the letter to Mrs. Ford, perhaps she’d see herself in it and indeed seek help.

  “On February 20, I tried my lonely intervention,” Caroline recalled. She took the letter into the living room, where Betty was sitting, her hands trembling. In her soft voice, Caroline tried to be as delicate and tactful as possible.

  “You know, Mrs. Ford, I got a letter from someone that understands that you’re taking these pills. She understands how bad you feel, and she’s very considerate in how she wrote this letter.”

  Betty appeared to be in a dazed state. But suddenly she came undone.

  “I am so mad!” she yelled.

  “She just came unglued,” Caroline recalled. “Yelling and screaming at me.”

  “I’ve already tried to take myself off some of these medications!” Betty cried. “I’ve already tried to do that.” It was true, she had tried. But when she stopped taking one medication or another, she would begin to go through withdrawal, so then she’d compensate for the withdrawal with something else.

  Betty flew into a rage, and, as tears streamed down her face, she stormed into the bedroom. Caroline felt terrible. After a few minutes, Caroline walked quietly into the bedroom, where Betty was lying on the bed, convulsing with sobs.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ford. I’m sorry. I was just trying to help.”

  “Get out of here!” Betty screamed. “You don’t need to try to make me feel good. You don’t need to soothe me.”

  Caroline left the room, shaking. She’d never seen Mrs. Ford like this before, and she was deeply concerned.

  Caroline went to the Secret Service command post and told them what had happened.

  “You’ve got to have somebody posted at various points throughout the house,” she said. “Just be there in case she falls. I’m worried because she’s all alone in the house, and she’s just so upset.” Normally, the agents wouldn’t be inside the house, but Caroline knew that oftentimes an alcoholic will die of something unrelated to the disease, such as a fall. The image of Betty lying on the floor of the pink-marble bathroom when she’d chipped her tooth haunted Caroline.

  The agents chastised her for going against their advice. “We told you not to get involved,” they said. They’d been right. Now look what had happened.

  She went home to the condo and poured out everything to Susan. She was just trying to help. Trying to do something.

  “Susan understood,” Caroline said. “She knew what it was like. She had lived through all of that as a child.”

  Indeed, for most of Susan’s childhood, Betty had been self-medicating in varying degrees, and Susan’s coping mechanism was to try to fix whatever problems arose. There would be times when things seemed normal, but then there’d be another episode, another incident. Looking back, Susan came to realize that she was often the parent in the relationship, trying to protect her mother. There was no question that Betty’s condition was far worse than ever, but even Susan was out of answers. What could you do?

  Caroline didn’t blame Mrs. Ford. “That was a rude awakening. And that’s why they don’t do interventions like that. But I didn’t know that. Nobody knew that.”

  The next morning, hesitant to greet Mrs. Ford after the previous night’s incident, Caroline stayed in the office and answered mail. Her nerves were on edge, and one day that week—the days were all a blur—Dr. Cruse’s office called, wondering why Caroline had missed her personal appointment that had been scheduled.

  Caroline, too, was seeing Dr. Cruse as her gynecologist, and with her “mind in the clouds,” she’d completely forgotten. She made another appointment. When Dr. Cruse came into the examination room, he could tell by the look on her face that she wasn’t well.

  “What’s wrong, Caroline?” he asked.

  She started sobbing and just let everything out. “I was so strung out,” Caroline recalled. “I basically had a nervous breakdown right there in his office. It wasn’t pretty.”

  Dr. Cruse, a recovering alcoholic who had seen how loved ones of alcoholics were affected, knew exactly what was going on. “Don’t worry about it,” he said soothingly. “I’ll talk to Susan.”

  A few weeks later, Susan, who was working as a freelance photographer, got an assignment that would finally open the door to a solution. Dr. Cruse was an outspoken advocate for sobriety in the community. He was working with a treatment center for chemically dependent kids called Turnoff, in the high desert, and asked Susan if she’d take some photos for them.

  “I didn’t know anything about Alcoholics Anonymous or Al-Anon at that time,” Susan recalled. She was just twenty years old, and it wasn’t commonly talked about. Dr. Cruse drove her up to the facility, and as she took the photos, she learned about the p
rogram and was struck by the wonderful things the center was doing to help the kids turn around their lives. On the drive back to Palm Springs, Susan told Dr. Cruse about a friend she had, who had a problem. She was taking too many pills, and she’d changed so much, Susan didn’t know what to do.

  “You’re talking about your mother, aren’t you?” Dr. Cruse asked.

  Tears filled Susan’s eyes as she nodded. “Yes. I just don’t know what to do. It’s tearing our family apart.”

  Dr. Cruse told her there was a fairly new technique called an “intervention,” in which the person was confronted in a loving way and convinced he or she needed treatment. It worked best if the whole family was involved.

  The intervention technique had been developed in the 1970s by an Episcopal priest named Vernon Johnson, who had made it his life’s goal to help addicts achieve sobriety. In a study of two hundred recovering alcoholics, his main question was: “What made you want to stop drinking?”

  Johnson saw the value in having family and loved ones confront the addict—not ganging up and blaming her or him—but showing they cared. The family members would write letters to the addict providing detailed evidence of past events in which the addict had hurt them and how it had made them feel, focusing on caring rather than condemnation.

  As a team, the end result of the intervention must be the agreed-upon goal that the addict seek treatment—not as punishment, but to improve the addict’s life.

  Susan knew this was what had to be done. She called her father and told him what Dr. Cruse had said. But Jerry wasn’t sure this was the right thing to do. It sounded so hurtful. Besides, it was going to be difficult to get Jack, Steve, Mike, and Gayle there all at the same time. And Clara Powell. Susan knew they needed Clara there. But everyone was spread across the country, living his or her own life.

  Dr. Cruse convinced President Ford to meet with him at his office after hours one evening. “I knew she had a problem,” Cruse said. “It was clear she was under the influence of prescription drugs.” When the president arrived with two Secret Service agents, Cruse explained how the intervention needed to work. It had to consist of the family, and each would give a personal experience. Then they had to present her with consequences if she didn’t agree.