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

by Paula Becker

  Although Seattle had celebrated her success in Egg’s early days, by the time Nancy and Plum was published in 1952, Betty felt underappreciated. Local readers looked forward to her new books, but Betty was no longer news. Coupled with the lingering taint from the Bishop/ Kettle trial and the long hours she was spending writing, this dimming of the spotlight left Betty feeling isolated and taken for granted.

  She had phoned Mary, Betty wrote to her daughter Joan, to talk about how sad she felt. “[Mary] told me that people like Lucille MacDonald [sic] (reporter on the [Seattle] Times) write articles like ‘Slip earwigs in your biscuit dough and watch your guests surprised faces’ and everybody in Seattle says ‘grrrrrreat wrrrrriting’ but I write a book that sells a million copies and they all say ‘Oh, her.’ ”17

  In June 1952, partially because she felt underappreciated in Seattle, Betty and Don purchased a two-thousand-acre ranch property in Carmel Valley, California. The Corral de Tierra Ranch was sited at the top of the steep Los Laureles Grade, originally a stagecoach route and cattle-drive trail connecting Carmel Valley with Salinas. It offered views of the Sierra de Salinas Mountains and the Salinas Valley, the Santa Lucia range, Mount Toro, the Pacific Ocean, and the Corral de Tierra, a natural corral formed by landforms in the valley below.

  The ranch possessed a small house and a larger barn and came with ranching equipment, horses, and livestock.18 The seller agreed to carry the mortgage and to forgo a down payment. Betty and Don planned to run cattle, and Don was ready to cowboy. Their arrival was big news in Monterey County, both because of Betty’s fame and because the property was so large. The Carmel Valley purchase provided Don with an alternative role to Mr. Betty MacDonald.

  The ranch was not bought on impulse: Betty and Don wanted to leave Washington and had been looking at property for months by the time they found it. The way they bought it, however, was rash. They had no money saved. Betty and Don convinced themselves that they could dash back to Seattle and immediately unload the Howe Street town home and the Vashon house, along with the barn property, and use the proceeds to make their mortgage payments on the ranch. They listed the Vashon house nationally, making much of its provenance as Betty’s home. Promotional brochures replete with photographs enticed potential buyers: smiling Betty fished, carried frosty glasses across the patio, and dug clams on the beach with Don. Some people looked, but no one purchased.

  Don now spent most of his time in California. Betty, in Washington, chipped away at her writing, helped Anne and Joan with child care, and tried to sell the properties. Anne’s marriage to Donald Strunk had ended in June 1952, and in the fall of 1953 she married Robert Evans. Betty added Anne’s children Johnny and Betsy into her collection of resident children while Anne prepared for the wedding, honeymooned, and then was rushed to surgery to remove her ruptured appendix.

  After the Howe Street house sold, Betty and Sydney made Vashon their home base, keeping the property ready for showings. Betty told Bernice Baumgarten that she was writing, cleaning house, painting furniture, and trying to keep twenty-seven acres mowed, weeded, and pruned. It had been raining continually, and there were no prospects for the house. Joan was nearing the end of her third pregnancy, and Betty was relieved to be available to help her, as she also helped out during Anne’s pregnancies.

  Although Betty missed Don fearfully at times, his absence eased some demands on her. “Don is leaving for the ranch tomorrow,” she wrote Baumgarten during a time when she was struggling to meet a writing deadline. “Though I adore him I get a hell of a lot more done when he is not here. . . . Anne is swelling and swelling and so I am really writing against my usual deadline—another baby.”19

  Betty visited the ranch regularly, and Don traveled back to Vashon to see her, but it was not the same as living together. Because Betty didn’t drive and the town of Vashon was beyond reasonable walking distance, she was stranded at the Vashon house. She began taking driving lessons and apparently passed her driving test in late 1953, but it would be years before she felt confident enough to drive at night.

  Betty had children in the house almost constantly during this period. Caring for them energized her, Betty claimed. But when Sydney invited Dede’s family over, refocusing Betty’s attention on entertaining when she really needed to be writing, or Alison dropped her children off without warning, assuming Betty would stop her work to babysit, Betty pictured Don relaxing in the California sunshine. The image rankled. “I sometimes wonder how you would feel if I really did stop writing, right this minute, which God knows is what I would like to do—how many people would suddenly have to take care of themselves. I honestly think, Don, that that ranch has ruined any chances we might have had for happiness because it showed me how you really feel about me—actions do speak louder than words, you know,” she wrote darkly.20

  With the Vashon house and farm properties still on the market, Betty and Don juggled renters, mortgages, and contracts, trying to find a way to afford the Carmel Valley property. By spring of 1954, Betty was feeling desperate. Don was in Carmel Valley but not living on the ranch. The calf crop was only 70 percent of what they had hoped for, curtailing their profits. Betty was on Vashon, struggling to sell the house, staying up at night to watch the McCarthy committee hearings on television, and feeling panicked about money.

  Because the Piggle-Wiggle books were less taxing to write than the autobiographical books, Betty came to see them as a sort of piggy bank. “My problem always seems to be money,” she wrote Bernice Baumgarten. “If I send you an outline of another Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle how much can I get on it—I want all I can get.”21 Inspiration, after all, was close at hand: caring for grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, taxing as it might be, stimulated ideas for new Piggle-Wiggle-worthy cures. While looking after all five of her grandchildren in June 1954, Betty wrote to Baumgarten, “If you could see me right now you would not believe it—I am in the living room with my typewriter on the top of the record player—the only safe place—and the beach party has returned—Becky is up from her nap—and they are all milling around my feet with enormous plastic alligators, ducks and boats and peanut butter sandwiches—I promised them they could help me set out zinnias and they are all ready.”22

  Children’s books were steady work and relatively simple to write, but their immediate financial payoff paled in comparison with the potential earnings of another successful adult title. Betty’s next autobiographical book was Onions in the Stew. It is different from her other books: sunnier, less prickly, more domestic, centered on her activities as wife and mother. As such, it is in keeping with many American women’s experiences during the 1950s and with other autobiographical accounts by women during that era, such as Jean Kerr’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and Shirley Jackson’s Life among the Savages and Raising Demons. Unlike her other autobiographical books, Onions contains almost no mention of Betty’s mother and siblings, and it is the first book that mentions Don.

  Egg was about catharsis and exorcising the demons of her first marriage. Plague was inspired by gratitude at surviving tuberculosis and by Betty’s desire to raise public awareness about the disease. Anybody was born from Betty’s love for her family, especially Mary. But what was finally published as Onions in the Stew sprang from one impulse only: the need to fulfill a contractual commitment Betty had made to Lippincott and earn out the advance payment she’d received, which was long spent.

  She had originally wanted to write a novel, the kind of book she herself liked to read. In December 1951, Betty and Lippincott signed a contract for this venture, to be called Onions in the Stew. Writing fiction was one of her long-held dreams. She had been trying for years. Her first attempts at writing had been short stories: her debut in the Town Crier with “Their Families” and the stories Brandt & Brandt had rejected in the 1930s.23 After three autobiographical books and her successful children’s fiction, Betty wanted to try fiction again. She was tired of mining her own life for story. She wanted to tell a different tale, to create chara
cters rather than be one.

  Betty’s novel featured wittily drawn characters marooned in a roadside motel in a remote coastal community during a fierce storm. Betty worked on the manuscript for two years while she struggled to sell the Vashon properties. Finally pleased with her efforts, she sent the completed manuscript to Bernice Baumgarten. Baumgarten liked Betty’s heroine (a blowsy, gold-digging sweetheart named Blanche) but felt the book lacked dramatic action. She thought it needed more work, although she offered to show it to Lippincott if Betty wanted her to.

  Betty trusted Baumgarten’s opinion, but this was a painful blow. If she had been less pressed financially, she could have taken the time to revise the novel until Baumgarten deemed it ready for Lippincott. But Betty had no time for revisions: she needed money.

  Baumgarten gently reminded Betty that if she chose not to revise the novel, she would need to substitute a project that was acceptable to Lippincott in order to make good on the ten-thousand-dollar advance, which she knew Betty couldn’t afford to repay. “I don’t know what to say about Onions in the Stew—I haven’t looked at it yet,” Betty told Baumgarten. “In case I find it too impossible how would you feel about a cook book and then a gardening book—I can be pretty funny about cooking . . . if necessary I could call it Onions in the Stew although I had thought of Stove and I—not that I like that, it makes me retch, but I think most people expect it. I will try to think of a killing name for a gardening book.”24

  Baumgarten discouraged Betty from trying gardening books or cookbooks, instead asking Lippincott to accept another autobiographical book. Lippincott readily agreed. Betty had made a devil’s bargain. The Egg and I had proved she could spin her own story into gold. Now she was a captive, chained to the spinning wheel.

  Betty retained her discarded novel’s title for the autobiographical book. In outline, the autobiographical Onions included recipes, and if those had made it into the published book, the title would have made more literal sense. In the end, Betty included only two: clam chowder and clam fritters. In the book that finally bore the title, the stew was Betty’s Vashon life. The onions were its savor.

  For this book, Betty reached back to the last years before fame changed her circumstances. After three autobiographical books, Betty had written most of her story. Faced with a similar situation, a modern memoirist might drill down into one of the experiences success had brought. A book about her time in Hollywood could have been hilarious. But Lippincott would never have let Betty name names, and while she’d scraped her way out of a libel action by disavowing that the Bishops were the Kettles, nobody would have failed to recognized a renamed Claudette Colbert.

  The events recounted in Onions occurred mainly between 1942 and 1945, immediately before The Egg and I propelled Betty into the public’s consciousness. Betty spends the first chapters introducing readers to her Vashon Island world, taking them there and, with them, watching the ferry leave. She eases readers into the loose theme of living with teenagers on island time. It was, as one chapter title explained, “Life as usual in a very unusual setting.”25

  Onions presents a Betty with no real foe to battle, other than her daughters’ adolescence, which she and her readers both understand is finite and has relatively low stakes. In keeping with the conservative decade in which it was published, Onions smoothed ruffled feathers and presented a traditional patriarchal household not glimpsed in Betty’s other books.26 Set during the period when in real life Betty’s new marriage was fresh and passionate and she was creating the book that would remake her destiny, Onions presents Betty as a Claudette Colbert version of herself.

  Homogenizing her life to fit the times, Onions embeds Betty in the tight family unit consisting of Anne, Joan, and Don. Her role as wife and mother is depicted as satisfying, if mildly frustrating. Her neighbors’ foibles are minor, compared to those of the Kettles or her fellow patients at The Pines. Betty copes with mild household crises: not enough dry wood for the giant fireplace; plugged drains when guests are expected; a too-tall Christmas tree; a snowstorm that blocks the roads and forces Don to mush his way to town to buy nail polish and candy for Anne and Joan and restock the parental whiskey and cigarette supply. As her visitors rejoice in visiting her restful island paradise, she, as hostess, gets no rest. Her daughters fight with each other and refuse to go to school but unite when they are angling to do something Betty and Don would rather they didn’t. The worst her Vashon neighbors dish out is a little surreptitious flirting with Don.

  Only when Betty briefly describes her employment outside the house—the job she lost when she called in sick so that she could outline Egg—does she let her bitterness gleam through: “I was paid $47.50 a week which was never enough but was considered marvelous pay for a woman in those days in Seattle where it is still the prevailing idea that all female employees (bless their little hearts) would really rather be home baking Toll House cookies and any male not down on all fours (this does not include the government where you can be even farther down if political affiliations are okay) is automatically paid twice as much as the brightest female.”27 This protofeminist outburst is out of character for Onions, and that suited her publisher just fine.

  The Lippincott editor George Stevens outlined his concerns about Betty’s Onions manuscript in a letter to Baumgarten prior to revisions:

  Public taste has pretty radically changed in the nine years since The Egg and I was published. A sort of Puritanism has made great progress, and some things that would go without question in the late 1940s will now tend to alienate a large segment of the reading public. This situation is particularly important in the case of Onions in the Stew, because it is—as I have written Betty—in many ways her most attractive book. Funny as the book is—hilarious in many episodes—I think its main quality is the likeability of the family and the feeling of identification the reader will get with them. The more the identification, the more some readers will be put off by the Goddamns, the Jesuses and the passage towards the end about adolescent discovery of sex.28

  Stevens was worried not just about readers’ disapproval but also about legal liability. He included a list of every character in the book other than Betty’s family members, asking for assurance that names had been changed and identifying features altered. Lippincott wanted no further libel lawsuits. How true to life Betty’s nonfiction book really was seems to have mattered little. Betty responded that many of the characters were made up, and most of the others were composites. Of the character called Lesley Arnold, with whom Don in the book is described as having a flirtation, Betty wrote, “Pretty good description of summer with Irene Norwood—description of Lesley Arnold is not at all like Irene—she should be flattered.” Of several other characters: “The alcoholic guest—the Madonna model—the woman from Arizona—I have had many alcoholic guests—All Anne’s friends were models—most models are alike—there was no woman from Arizona—she was from New York—Montana—Texas and California.”29 Without complaint, she toned down all the language that had worried Stevens in the earlier draft.

  Onions in the Stew was published in May 1955, returning Betty’s smiling face to bookstore shelves. Clearly spooked by Anybody’s lagging sales, Lippincott placed their photogenic author on both the front and the back of the book’s bright orange dust jacket. Betty’s head, so tightly cropped as to be disembodied, floated in the upper right-hand corner near her name. The o’s in Onions were whimsical renderings of the vegetable. The back cover featured a full-page shot of Betty pushing a lawnmower.

  Reviewers noted that Onions skated into the category of housewife humor, its tone and subject matter more conventional than Betty’s previous books. None of them minded. “Flip with a quip, as ever,” reported the Chicago Daily Tribune reviewer Marge Lyon, “but with a new maturity that on her looks good. That is Betty MacDonald in ‘Onions In The Stew.’ ”30

  To Betty’s immense relief, Onions sold twenty-six thousand copies during its first month in print. A New York Times book reviewer pr
aised Betty as a humorist in “one of our lustiest traditions, that created by Mark Twain. . . . In person Betty MacDonald is a sophisticated individual. Indeed, I have met her a number of times and I would match her attractiveness against the girls she inevitably describes as her successful rivals. But this worldly and frequently city dwelling young woman has managed to capture some of those lusty and informal situations which have given both humor and a certain sadness to rural America.” Despite Lippincott’s categorizing Onions in the Stew—like all Betty’s adult titles—as nonfiction, this reviewer advised, “The way to enjoy ‘Onions in the Stew,’ a dual Book-of-the-Month choice for June, is to regard it as predominantly fiction. This way, the reader’s credulity will never be taxed.”31

  Anybody’s disappointing sales had proved to Betty that she had to promote her books in person. Her Seattle autographing events drew crowds, and booksellers were thrilled that she agreed to travel to Seattle from Carmel Valley—where she was finally living full-time with Don when Onions came out—to sign books. The bookshop manager at Seattle’s Frederick & Nelson department store told Betty that they’d sold 340 copies of Onions during her appearance—the most successful autograph party the store had ever hosted.

  Thanks to her books, Betty and her family members, Vashon Island, and Puget Sound became household names in America and beyond. Betty was the Pacific Northwest’s best ambassador since Paul Bunyan: darling, clever, tongue-in-cheek, and very Western.32 It was work she wrung out of herself, as evidenced by a notation in her daily planner: “March 26, 1952: My birthday—wrote on books all day.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Goodbye, Goodbye

  to Everything

  THE view from Betty and Don’s Carmel Valley property was gorgeous: sagebrush, rolling rose and golden hills, a periwinkle sky dotted with fluffy clouds that shaded the valley floor like a diaphanous tent. In early 1955, Betty moved the last of their belongings from wet, green Vashon to this compellingly dry, burnished pocket of paradise. The place held energy, but in a way that felt somehow final. The Corral de Tierra ranch would hold the ends to many threads of her story.