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

by Paula Becker

  Heskett was living in Oakland, California, reportedly working as a carpenter. He was stabbed in the heart by Thomas Blake, a bulldozer operator and the estranged (some reports state divorced) husband of Thelma Blake, who, with her five- and seven-year-old daughters, had been living at Heskett’s apartment, reportedly for about a week. “Blake appeared and demanded to see her and ‘his babies,’ ” the Chicago Daily Tribune reported. “Heskett, fifty-five, admitted Blake but a quarrel ensued and he ordered Blake out. Blake pulled a knife and Heskett grabbed a hatchet. As the two struggled in the hallway, Heskett crumpled over a banister. Blake said he acted in self-defense.”11 Blake pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to serve one to ten years in San Quentin prison. Heskett was buried at the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California.

  Heskett’s death freed Don to legally adopt Anne and Joan, who had used his surname since he and Betty married. On December 7, 1951, Judge William Long issued the decree of adoption.12 Joan took the opportunity to change her middle name, Dorothy—honoring Bob Heskett’s sister—to Sydney, becoming Joan Sydney MacDonald Keil. Anne added Campbell as a middle name, becoming Anne Elizabeth Campbell MacDonald Strunk, joining her mother and great-grandmother Gammy in the long family line of Anne Elizabeth Campbells.

  With Don’s adoption of Anne and Joan, the family’s last legal connection with Robert Heskett was severed. Betty never commented publicly about her former husband’s shocking demise, but with The Egg and I, she had given him immortality.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Anybody Can Write Books

  IN August 1950, after the Bishop family had filed their libel suits but before the case came to trial, Betty published her third autobiographical book, Anybody Can Do Anything. Egg and Plague had been seasoned with family anecdotes from Betty’s childhood. In Anybody, covering the Depression years, family members were the main dish. The book was a road map to being Bard, a dark valentine to Seattle, and a tongue-in-cheek thank-you to Mary. “The best thing about the depression was the way it reunited our family and gave my sister Mary a real opportunity to prove that anybody can do anything, especially Betty,” the book began.1 In Anybody, Betty is Mary’s foil and sidekick, struggling half-heartedly to wrest her destiny from her sister’s grasp even as she tumbles into Mary’s escapades.

  Betty and Mary initially wanted to write the book together, but Bernice Baumgarten discouraged them. She told Betty she felt the book would sell better under Betty’s name and that it would be easier for Betty to write about Mary than for Mary to write freely about herself. As it turned out, writing about Mary, to whom she was so close but whose faults she had experienced so personally, exhausted Betty. Recalling her own experiences during the 1930s—a time when Betty’s relief to be free of her troubled marriage was rippled through with economic stress—was also daunting. And Betty found it challenging to cover twelve years of experiences in a lively and engaging way. After Anybody came out, Betty told a fan that there were many times during the writing process when she felt like changing the title to Oh, No, They Can’t.2

  That Baumgarten could keep Betty from losing faith during the difficult gestation of Anybody is a testament to her skill and determination. “Frankly, Bernice, I’m not at all sure I have a book here at all,” Betty wrote. “One chapter I think is amusing—but the point is who gives a Goddamn where I worked and why?”3 And Baumgarten apparently agreed when she saw an early draft. Betty told a Seattle Times reporter that Baumgarten sent all but two chapters back, telling her, “This isn’t you.”4 Betty rewrote it. She responded to Baumgarten’s blend of intelligence, savvy, tact, prodding, and praise with steady trust and deep gratitude, relying on her guidance.

  Anybody’s first chapter invites readers into Betty’s memories of Mary as a child: she is bossy, she likes feeling superior, and she has great enthusiasm for her own ideas. She is dramatic and theatrical. Her plans for Betty tend to end disastrously. Betty’s acquiescence in Mary’s outrageous schemes during their childhood sets the stage for the book’s account of their experiences as young women. Once Anybody has established the childhood dynamic, grown-up Betty enters the story straight from her failed first marriage, bedraggled and destitute. Anybody depicts Mary as the family engine: confident, determined, willing her sister and all the family to survive hard times, sweeping obstacles away with her own unrelenting enthusiasm. Mary soon snaps Betty out of her rut, and Sydney steps in to take Anne and Joan off Betty’s hands. Anybody then follows Betty from job to job in episodic style. She is the stooge, trustingly walking into situations Mary has orchestrated, which often end in pratfalls.

  The Anybody years included Betty’s sobering and transformative encounter with tuberculosis, which she had already described in The Plague and I. Anybody dispenses with her illness in a single sentence late in the book, set within a cascade of anecdotes about Betty’s rumba with bureaucracy during her various government jobs. The book concludes with a brief chapter in which she recounts the genesis of The Egg and I. When Betty finds out her book is going to be published, she phones her sister. For the first time, Mary shows her hand: “You just feel successful,” she tells Betty, “but imagine how I feel. All of a sudden my big lies have started coming true!”5 Many fans wrote to Betty wishing they, too, had a Mary—someone to prod them or a family member to literary action.

  A few of the incidents Betty describes in Anybody made it into the newspapers, and thus into the historical record: the massive Christmas party Mary ropes Betty into helping with, and the “Why I Like Old Gold” cigarette advertising contest in which Betty describes her mother winning a prize.6 But did veracity matter? “How much is fiction, how much is fact—it is incredible that the natural impulse to retouch should have been resisted—has no bearing upon the constant flow of laughter,” the Saturday Review of Literature commented.7 The continuing adventures of the sisters Bard as they careened from one job to the next, battling poverty and championing their own eccentric flavor of family unity, were satisfying enough.

  As Betty had come to expect when her work was serialized, the Saturday Evening Post editors toned down some of her colorful language. She carefully examined the galleys sent for her approval, ready to nix changes that sacrificed her tone. When a Post editor added the word classy to Betty’s existing description of a department store into which Mary was unashamed to carry her home-packed lunch, Betty responded, “I would rather be dead than ever use the word ‘classy.’ Please change it to ‘and went into an everything-imported-from-Paris shop swinging her big brown greasy paper bag.’ ” When the editor substituted hash-slinging for Betty’s original prostitution, Betty wrote, “I would prefer ‘shop-lifting’ as ‘hash-slinging’ is not an expression I would ever use.”8

  Tay Hohoff, a Lippincott editor, wrote to tell Betty that she loved the book so much she wished she, not Bert Lippincott, was Betty’s editor.9 Bert Lippincott also praised the book, which he thought better than Egg or Plague. Anybody “is one of the few great books of humorous Americana ever written. It may take the public a while for this to sink in,” he wrote. “While your method and style are different, your new book reminds me of Mark Twain’s work in the way you capture the American scene. Sinclair Lewis got it in several early books but he was short on humor.”10

  Despite this praise, J. B. Lippincott publicized Anybody considerably less than they had Betty’s previous books. And Betty, who’d taken her show on the road to promote Egg and Plague, had grown weary of crowded author events. For the first time, she chose not to appear at autograph parties, even in Seattle bookstores. She did no national promotion. She was weighed down by the Bishop lawsuit, worried about money, and tired of the grind of producing a book a year.

  Lippincott’s cover design featured boldly stylized typewriter keys spelling out the book’s title. This time, the publisher chose to omit the familiar iconography of their cover girl: Betty’s face, as much a part of her brand as Aunt Jemima or Betty Crocker, did not appear on Anybody’s cover.
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br />   Betty’s timing, impeccable for Egg and fine for Plague, faltered with Anybody. For the first time, American readers failed to fully embrace her effort. Perhaps a newly affluent nation did not warm to Anybody’s recollections of hardship. Lippincott’s Mac McKaughan blamed Anybody’s slow sales on the fact that so many readers had already enjoyed nearly the entire book in its four-part Saturday Evening Post serialization. The magazine’s circulation was four and a half million, and its cover price was ten cents. Readers who’d read it for forty cents were passing up the book and saving their $2.75.

  Despite the hilarious details included in many of Betty’s stories, this book’s humor was thin ice over the abyss. Anybody was nostalgic, but it did not strike its original readers as hilarious (like Egg), informative (like Plague), or reaffirming of cultural norms, as Onions in the Stew would later be perceived to be. “It is a book to read for the enjoyment of the moment and forget,” the Saturday Review of Literature concluded. “If one mulls it over, inevitably the bright, metallic threads of which its sparkling fabric is woven darken and tarnish with dismaying rapidity. Little tawdry and shabby spots eat into the surface shine. For if employers were cheap, licentious and phony, the Bard girls were habitually in the humiliating position of playing faker themselves. . . . Anybody can do anything, but is everyone willing to?”11

  One underlying theme of Anybody was that the Bard women did not need men in order to survive, a dangerous flag to wave as gender roles constricted during the 1950s. In spite of Betty’s ongoing negotiation between caring for her family and carving out writing time, neither Betty MacDonald the writer nor Betty the character conformed to postwar societal prescriptions for selfless female servitude. This attitude worked to her benefit early on, but not in the increasingly conservative climate of the early 1950s. The only male characters in Anybody play minor roles, and most of those are negative: doltish or bad bosses, bad or doltish dates. There are no cougar hunts like the one Bob went on in Egg, no Kettles, no husbands. Although Plague had featured female characters almost exclusively, it also featured a genderless disease, and its success resulted in part from Egg’s popularity.

  Current events may also have influenced Anybody’s reception. The Korean War had begun, focusing attention, and again sending soldiers, far from home. Lippincott felt that the war made the book market volatile: readers’ willingness to open their wallets depended on whether news reports were good or bad.

  In addition, Betty’s description of the Bards’ lively household, bulging with artistic, eccentric friends, may have put some readers off. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt for suspected communists and communist sympathizers was well under way. McCarthy focused keenly on the 1930s activities of those he suspected. The kinds of people who had enlivened the Bards’ house in those years—artists, writers, actors, directors, and musicians—were in McCarthy’s line of fire. By 1950, nonconformity was suspect. Anybody taught Betty how thoroughly public taste could change the tune for even a successful author.

  Lippincott urged Betty to keep on producing autobiographical books, but some reviewers wearied of them. The New York Times book reviewer Samuel Williamson began his ultimately positive review of Anybody with the observation, “When applied to Betty MacDonald, née Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard, the cliché about one’s life being an open book is a threefold understatement.” Like other reviewers, Williamson noted the dark nature of the experiences Betty made light of. “Betty MacDonald is an alchemist,” he concluded. “She transmutes some pretty grim experiences into rollicking reminiscence.”12

  Columbia Pictures wanted to turn Anybody into a film, and Bernice Baumgarten negotiated with them for months. The studio, spooked by the Bishop suit, demanded that everyone mentioned in the book sign a written release. Baumgarten could produce releases from family members, but beyond that, she felt that Columbia’s demand was insurmountable. She told Betty she felt confident that she could sell the project to another studio, but it never happened.

  Although its reception in the United States may have been disappointing, Anybody enjoyed an unexpected success in translation in Iron Curtain countries. Citizens of repressive regimes empathized with the book’s emphasis on the power of family and the curative qualities humor brings to adversity, as well as its message that anybody could do anything and could—must—keep going. During the early 1950s, foreign-language editions of Betty’s books provided a steady income stream. For Betty these editions required little more than signing contracts, finding space on her shelves as the exotic translations arrived in the mail, and depositing royalty checks.

  Judging by fan mail, many Anybody readers lost their hearts to Betty’s portrait of Mary and were eager to know more about this vivacious, domineering sister. Mary’s own book, The Doctor Wears Three Faces, had been widely publicized when it came out the year before and had quickly leapt to the silver screen, with Dorothy McGuire—meltingly beautiful, but not of Claudette Colbert’s star caliber—playing the leading role.

  “Both Mary and I want you to treat her as though she were not my sister,” Betty wrote to Bernice Baumgarten, who had become Mary’s literary agent. “Mary is a very strong, very bright, very witty woman—she has a captivating personality and more friends than anyone in the world.”13 She felt too close to Mary to be a good critic, Betty explained. The sisters spoke on the phone nearly every day and read each other passages of their works in progress. Mary still tried to keep Betty on track, and Betty attempted to make the often-intense Mary laugh.

  The Doctor Wears Three Faces recounts the early years of Mary’s marriage to Clyde Jensen. Mary was twenty-nine years old when she married, leaving a career in advertising sales and subsequently staying home with her three daughters, born in quick succession. During this era, being a doctor entailed significant societal responsibilities as well as status, and social duties were also expected of a doctor’s wife. In the book, Mary navigates her entry into this new arena with the commiserating support of other medical wives, whom she terms the Neglected Ones (because the needs of their husbands’ patients always come first). In an era when physicians were deified, Mary’s books demystified both doctor and doctor’s wife.

  Once Mary stepped onto the literary stage, she embraced the role of author. Like Betty, she traveled to New York and met the Eastern press. She was a guest on several national radio programs and a celebrity in Seattle. Betty, who said speaking in public made her nervous, watched her always self-assured sister swan into the limelight. Mary’s vivacity and willingness to exaggerate if it better served her stories made her a natural public speaker. Even so, Mary’s books made just a small splash compared with the tsunami of The Egg and I.

  The sisters reveal themselves differently in their books. Mary seems unwilling to risk offending the friends and family members on whom she bases her characters. Perhaps it is because Betty, unlike Mary, did not hold a place in Seattle’s social echelon, that her writing was less constrained. Betty was also willing to be sharper—meaner—which made her funnier and ultimately more modern.

  Mary’s second book, Forty Odd, is about perimenopause and her journey toward the understanding that (as she says in the book’s dedication) age is a number, not a disease. The book was published in 1952, when Mary was forty-eight. In 1955, Mary published her first juvenile book, Best Friends. The title characters are Suzie and Co Co, who become best friends and then, when Suzie’s mother marries Co Co’s father, sisters. Their story continues in two sequels. These are gentle, realistic “girl books,” reassuring rather than snappy like Betty’s Piggle- Wiggle books.

  In 1956, with her daughters nearly grown, Mary looked back at her late 1940s experiences as a Brownie leader following the Seattle Girl Scout Council’s advice, which became the book’s title: Just Be Yourself. Mary volunteered herself as a leader when her daughters pleaded to become Brownie scouts and the existing troop in their neighborhood was full. Mary’s troop seems to have been surprisingly ethnically and economically diverse. Her portraits of he
r daughters are loving sketches of three very different personalities: Mari, “surgically clean” and authoritative; Salli, who “radiated the calm, unhurried serenity of her father” even as she dawdled; and Heidi, tender, animal loving, and a young iconoclast.14

  While Mary wrote her books, Betty produced sequels to Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and also wrote Nancy and Plum. A book about orphans, Nancy and Plum is itself an orphan among Betty’s other works, four autobiographical books and four volumes of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. Betty said that the book evolved from stories she told Mary when they were young. Betty’s daughters, Anne and Joan, felt that the Nancy and Plum characters were based on them.

  Nancy and Plum uses a traditional fairytale format, laced with Betty’s Bardish sense of humor. The sisters Nancy and Plum are residents in Mrs. Monday’s Boarding Home for Children, an orphanage. They use their vivid imaginations and their pluck to triumph over difficulties. Hildegarde Hopkins, a commercial artist who lived in Seattle, illustrated the book. “I absolutely adore her illustrations and they are everything I dreamed of having,” Betty wrote Lippincott children’s book editor, Helen Dean Fish.15

  Betty hoped to continue the sisters’ adventures in further volumes, but Lippincott’s enthusiasm for Nancy and Plum was lackluster. “Helen Fish suggested that I close Mrs. Monday’s and dispense in some kind of way with the other inmates of the boarding home, which I do not want to do as there are hundreds more chapters of Nancy and Plum involving Mrs. Monday and the other orphans. Mrs. Monday finally died and her brother took over the house and Mrs. Campbell arranged for most of the other children to board with friends of hers,” Betty explained to Bernice Baumgarten.16 Lippincott promoted the book minimally, and neither Lippincott nor Baumgarten encouraged Betty to continue the series.