Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I

by Paula Becker

  Judge Wilkins also instructed the members of the jury to consider the book in its entirety. The jury accordingly read the entire book aloud as part of their deliberations. This took them twenty-four hours. They then took a vote, which was unanimously for the defendants. Betty, Don, and Lippincott were free and clear.

  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran a banner headline: “BETTY MACDONALD WINS ‘EGG’ LIBEL SUIT.” Betty was not in court to hear the verdict, but Don was present and thanked the jury. Betty told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that she had spent the anxious day drinking cup after cup of coffee and “going crazy.” She continued, “If the decision had been adverse, it might be possible for anyone to squeeze themselves into any book. . . . I have had letters from people from all over the world—from England to Bavaria—telling me that the Kettles lived next door to them. I even had a letter from a woman who said Mrs. Kettle was her mother-in-law. She lived in Florida.”40

  In his 1981 autobiography, Judge Wilkins wrote, “Betty, an attractive auburn-haired woman, was a very convincing witness. Throughout the two-weeks’ trial the courtroom was crowded with people who were reading the book, following the exploits of the Kettles, and seeking Betty’s autograph. It was really quite an ordeal for her.”41

  In the giddy, caffeine-fueled aftermath of the jury’s decision, Betty told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that she wished she’d been asked to testify as to why she wrote a book about the Olympic Peninsula. “It wasn’t because I lived there. It was because it was the last untamed frontier.” But, she added, if Lippincott had wanted a book about Alaska, “I’d have written about Alaska with nothing but Eskimos for characters.”42 Given that she’d never set foot in Alaska, that book would presumably have been marketed as fiction.

  Betty wrote letters to every juror, thanking them from the bottom of her heart for returning the favorable verdict. “I certainly felt for you during those two weeks when you had to sit there on those very hard seats and hear those same bits of The Egg and I read over and over. Let’s hope if I am ever sued again it will at least be on a different book.”43

  In reality, however, who else could Betty’s Kettles be but the Bishops? Herself a Bard to the core, Betty had crafted an exaggerated version of her neighbors, not from a neutral perspective but from a merciless seat of judgment. Because she was a Bard telling a story, bending the truth was perfectly fine. And then, caught in the truth in court, Betty had lied. More than one relative of Betty’s laughed at questions that tried to parse the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. “Nobody in this family ever let the truth get in the way of a good story!” they explained.

  After enjoying years of public approval and increasing personal fame, having her book and its motives dissected in court and in the press was difficult for Betty. She felt a shift—real or imagined—in how Seattleites perceived her. But Betty’s reading public didn’t care. For those millions, liking the story she’d told was the same as liking Betty.

  On March 16, 1951, Judge Wilkins issued an order denying the Albert Bishop case plaintiffs’ motion for a new trial. For Betty, the Bishop lawsuit ended in victory. Unexpectedly, the Bishop family also saw it that way.

  Bud Bishop’s widow, Aldena Bishop, never knew Betty. When she first read The Egg and I, she thought it was funny and never guessed that Betty was describing her in-laws. She’d heard an earful from them when she praised the book. Aldena told the same story that Bud recounted in his oral history: no one did more for Betty and her family than Ed, Ilah, Albert, and Susanna Bishop. And the lawsuits—both lawsuits—were victories for them because Betty admitted she’d made up the mean things she said. Aldena also wondered why Betty made Mr. and Mrs. Hicks—whom she clearly identified as her mother- and father-in-law, Ed and Ilah—childless, when Ed and Ilah had one son, her Bud.44

  “She got in trouble over it to start with,” Bud Bishop said in his oral history, “because, see, her first edition was non-fiction. Well, then her second edition came out, and she stated it was fiction. So, she got in trouble over the first edition.”

  What was the difference between the first and second edition? the interviewer asked Bud. Were they called the same thing? “It was the same book, but, see, non-fiction is supposed to be the truth and fiction is just a story,” Bud replied. “That’s why she got in so much trouble because she belittled everybody. She wrote a good book—it was interesting to read—but the way she put people down it wasn’t the truth at all. She just wrote a book that sounded good—and it did sound good.”45

  There was no second edition of The Egg and I and no evidence to suggest that it was ever marketed as fiction.46 In Chimacum, however, this was the truth that brought the Bishop family peace.

  PLATE 17. Betty MacDonald’s literary agent Bernice Baumgarten, New York, no date. Betty trusted Baumgarten utterly. Courtesy Princeton University Library.

  PLATE 18. Original cover of The Egg and I, featuring woodcut by Richard Bennett, 1945. Author’s collection.

  PLATE 19. Noting book buyers’ positive response to Betty MacDonald’s back-cover author photo, the publisher, Lippincott, moved it to the front cover just months after the book came out, 1945. Author’s collection.

  PLATE 20. Joan (left), Betty (center), and Anne MacDonald, Vashon, ca. 1946. Courtesy Museum of History and Industry, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection.

  PLATE 21. Betty MacDonald riding the ferry Illahee between Seattle and Vashon Island, 1946. The Egg and I’s success brought global attention to Washington and the Pacific Northwest. Private collection.

  PLATE 22. Betty MacDonald signs Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle with nieces Heidi (left with checkered bow), Mari, and Salli Jensen (center and right with bows), nephew Darsie Sugia (far right), and other children, Seattle, 1947. Courtesy Museum of History and Industry, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection.

  PLATE 23. Howe Street house, 905 East Howe Street, Seattle, 1937. Betty and Don MacDonald purchased the house in 1947, to spare Betty the ferry commute to Vashon. Courtesy Puget Sound Regional Branch, Washington State Archives.

  PLATE 24. Betty and Don MacDonald on steep stairs near their Howe Street house, Seattle, 1947. Courtesy Museum of History and Industry, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection.

  PLATE 25. Press agent Jim Moran incubates an ostrich egg to publicize Universal-International Pictures’ acquisition of film rights to Betty’s book, Hollywood, 1946. Author’s collection.

  PLATE 26. Betty MacDonald (left) and Claudette Colbert on set, Hollywood, 1946. Betty’s photograph on the cover of her best-selling book made her as familiar to the public as Colbert, who portrayed Betty in the film version of The Egg and I. Copyright 1946, Universal-International Pictures. Author’s collection.

  PLATE 27. Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert as glamorous film versions of Bob and Betty, Hollywood, 1947. Copyright Universal-International Pictures, 1947. Private collection.

  PLATE 28. Betty’s family shared the excitement of her new-found fame. Joan MacDonald (front row center), Mary Bard Jensen (front row right), Betty, Don MacDonald (center), and Anne MacDonald (far left), the Trocadero, Hollywood, 1946. Private collection.

  PLATE 29. Don and Betty MacDonald, Alison Bard Sugia, and Frank Sugia (left to right), New York, 1947. Born five months after their father’s death, Alison had mother, grandmother, and four older siblings to raise her. Private collection.

  PLATE 30. Betty MacDonald publicizes the National Tuberculosis Association’s Christmas Seals campaign, New York, 1948. Private collection.

  PLATE 31. Betty MacDonald (seated, with corsage) signs The Plague and I, University Book Store, Seattle, 1948. Mary Bard Jensen, back row left. Don MacDonald, back row second from right. Courtesy University Book Store.

  PLATE 32. Betty MacDonald, Mary Bard Jensen, and Sydney Bard (left to right), Seattle, ca. 1949. Betty credited her sister Mary with encouraging her literary efforts. Private collection.

  PLATE 33. Susannah and Albert Bishop (second row, third and fourth from right) and family, Chimacum, Was
hington, ca. 1935. Believing they had been libelously depicted as the Kettle family, members of the Bishop family sued Betty and her publishers. Courtesy Aldena Bishop.

  PLATE 34. Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride (center) as Ma and Pa Kettle, with family. Copyright Universal-International Pictures, 1947. Private collection.

  PLATE 35. Betty and Don MacDonald in King County Courthouse during the Bishop/ Kettle lawsuit, Seattle, February 1951. Courtesy Museum of History and Industry, Seattle Post-Intelligencer Collection.

  PLATE 36. Betty MacDonald posing for Anybody Can Do Anything publicity photo, Vashon, 1950. Private collection.

  PLATE 37. Betty MacDonald, Anne MacDonald Evans, and Joan MacDonald Keil (left to right), 1955. As Betty published, her daughters rapidly grew up. Private collection.

  PLATE 38. Betty MacDonald with grandchildren (from left) Darsie Evans, Tim Keil (wearing shorts), Johnny Evans, Betsy Evans, Heidi Keil, and Rebecca Keil, 1955. Private collection.

  PLATE 39. Betty MacDonald autographing Onions in the Stew, Portland, Oregon, 1955. Private collection.

  PLATE 40. Don and Betty MacDonald at their ranch, 907 Los Laureles Grade, Carmel Valley, California, ca. 1955. Purchased in 1952, the ranch was beautiful but quickly became a financial burden. Private collection.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Family Matters

  AS Betty battled with the Bishops and as her fame and literary output increased, her daughters grew up. In January 1949, Anne married Donald Strunk, a University of Washington student who aspired to a career in professional baseball. Don MacDonald walked his stepdaughter down the aisle of Blessed Sacrament Church, the sanctuary “fragrant and colorful with blue hyacinths, pink camellias and gladiolas and gardenias.”1 Anne wore a gown of imported ivory silk brocade, her bridesmaids varying shades of blue.

  Almost exactly one year later, Joan married Girard Keil in a candlelight ceremony at the Church of the Epiphany. Joan’s imported silk brocade gown was full-skirted with a court train; on her attendants, frocks of pink satin with copper or cinnamon overskirts added luminous warmth to the flickering glow.2 Girard (Jerry) Keil had been one of a group of FBI agents who leased Don and Betty’s Howe Street house in 1949. Betty had invited the agents to relax on Vashon at weekends, and Joan had met Jerry during these visits.

  Joan and Jerry moved to Los Angeles immediately after their marriage. Joan was homesick, and Betty missed her daughter. Don and Betty drove down to visit the newlyweds, and during the trip they discussed purchasing property in California. The Keils’ move to California did not turn out to be permanent—Joan and Jerry returned to the Seattle area within the year—but it planted a seed in the minds of Betty and Don.

  In August 1949, Betty became a grandmother at the age of forty-two. She wrote gushing letters to family members describing Anne’s baby, Johnny, born when Anne was twenty-one. Joan’s first child, Heidi, was born in January 1951, when Joan was twenty-one, and Anne’s second, Betsy, arrived that October. Two months after that, Joan gave birth to Rebecca. Betty reveled in her role as grandmother, and Anne and Joan leaned heavily on their mother for help with childcare.

  Coronet magazine ran Betty’s picture in a feature about glamorous grandmothers, alongside those of the movie stars Joan Bennett, Gloria Swanson, and Marlene Dietrich. Betty had, the story said, “the vivacity of a teenager and the wit of a sage.”3 With grandchildren in the house, Betty often described her need to dodge swarming hordes of sticky (but adored) little people in order to write. “You really should come out here, Bernice, you’ll never really know what bedlam is until you do,” Betty wrote in a letter explaining that family duties had kept her from meeting a writing deadline.4

  When Betty’s family members became her material, she was less caustic and more careful and constrained than when describing friends, neighbors, or others. In Betty’s books, the Bards and MacDonalds are idiosyncratic but crafted affectionately. Betty loved her family deeply, faults and frustrations and all. Although she sometimes feuded with her siblings, especially with Cleve and (despite their close friendship) Alison, she had no impulse to burn bridges or to hurt them by what she wrote about them. Even Mary, who still reflexively attempted to strong-arm Betty, was carefully and lovingly presented in Betty’s books.

  Beginning in at least 1947, Betty kept daily reminder books. These attest to the fact that during most of her writing career, she entertained almost constantly, sometimes cooking for company—eight guests here, seventeen there—three times a day. Many days, Betty’s reminder book contained the admonition “Write.”

  The ongoing struggle to carve out writing time and cajole her family into acknowledging that need is evident in Betty’s letters. Perhaps she exaggerated this problem or used her family’s large and small needs as an excuse to procrastinate when inspiration lagged. She acquiesced in the expectation of her family and her era that she be a caregiver. This was a choice, but Betty does not seem to have seen it that way.

  Betty exemplified the difficulty that the feminist writer Tillie Olsen described many—most—female writers battling from time immemorial: that the gendered demands placed on women effectively silence them as makers of literature. Nearly three decades after Betty struggled to carve out writing time, Olsen pointed out that the vast majority of published literature has historically been written by men, many of whom had what she called “wives, mothers, enablers” to meet their practical needs and safeguard space in which they had the freedom and focus to write.5

  Betty could have used a “wife” who would ensure that she was happy in her work. Sydney played this role brilliantly for Darsie but doesn’t appear to have facilitated Betty’s writing, although she lived with Betty. Neither does Don, although he eschewed the mid- twentieth-century male gender role of family breadwinner. Margaret Bundy Callahan’s son Tobey, who knew Betty and Don well when he was a child and a teenager, remembered Don as “Hollywood handsome” but noted that he had no paying job and that his many schemes often turned out poorly.6

  Betty was smitten with Don from the beginning, but after years of complete responsibility for their financial support, her patience sometimes frayed. “Tomorrow I’m going to town to arrange to take swimming and driving lessons and then next time I get mad at Don I can either swim or drive away from here,” she wrote to Joan and Jerry in 1950.7 Despite her frustrations, Betty accepted the role of wife, placing Don’s and her daughters’ happiness above her own needs, while also shouldering the traditionally male role of the breadwinner. This double burden set her on a rocky path.

  Betty addressed her lack of a literary helpmate in notes for an article that was apparently never published: “In my large family, being an author or ‘authing’ as we say, rates about the same as gilding cattails or pressing wildflowers. First comes wifing, viz. cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, smiling when angry, and using a pretty voice when I want to shriek. Then comes mothering or complete sublimation of my hurts and slights and insomnia and highstrungness and delicate condition due to my former bout with t.b.”8 Ignoring her creative and financial compulsions to write, Betty continued, she dealt with Anne’s and Joan’s domestic crises, absorbed her grandchildren, nieces, and nephews into her household at her family’s will, and steadily produced gourmet meals for everyone who made their way to her door.

  Betty could have forced this point about writing time, perhaps, but doing so would have required that she upend her agreement—probably unspoken—with Don: he was the boss—the Laird, as she frequently referred to him in letters. Betty liked being married to Don: she relished the role of wife, the emotional security, and his company. Whatever private negotiations shaped the couple’s relationship, Betty demonstrated repeatedly that she was willing to compromise her writing time in order to maintain this marriage. For most women of the era, such compromises were implicit in the marriage contract.

  Because Bernice Baumgarten, more than anyone, pressed Betty to write, many of Betty’s letters to her dwelt on the struggle for uninterrupted time. “I stil
l cannot get them to mention the shameful word ‘writing,’ ” Betty lamented to Baumgarten. “If someone calls and Don answers the phone, he holds the telephone two inches from his mouth and yells to ask if I want to speak to Mrs. Shannon. I tell him, in a very dignified way, to tell her I am writing and will be through at 2:00. Don turns back to the telephone and says, ‘she’s not home.’ ”9

  After a weeklong disagreement with Don, Betty told Mary that she decided to apologize, but “before I got down on my knees I stood up very tall and called him every kind of a spoiled, disagreeable, disorganized, money spending but not earning, disloyal bastard that there is—I am hoping that, as he wipes my lipstick off his ear he will think of a few of those things—said in anger, of course, not really meant, but said.”10

  On the other side of the arrangement, being Mr. Betty MacDonald wasn’t all cashmere sweaters and cashing checks. From the moment The Egg and I was published, Don had to endure the public confusion between himself and Bob Heskett. When Betty promoted The Egg and I, with Don at her side, many reporters and readers assumed that Betty had been married only once and that she and Don had experienced the Egg events together.

  Betty was not publicly associated with the name Heskett; she had not used it since about 1930. Bob’s first mention in the press (other than as a presence in The Egg and I) came when he signed releases before the making of the film of Egg. Robert Heskett next attracted public attention in July 1951, when he was murdered.