BETTY: The Story of Betty MacDonald, Author of The Egg and I

by Anne Wellman

  BETTY

  The Story of Betty MacDonald, Author of

  The Egg and I

  Anne Wellman

  Copyright © 2016 Anne Wellman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission.

  First Printing March 2016

  ISBN-13: 978-1493662425

  Table of Contents

  Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula

  Introduction

  Betty and Bob

  Beginnings

  Betty and the Chickens

  Betty and the Great Depression

  Betty and the Plague

  Betty and the Island

  Betty and Fame

  Betty and the Law

  Bob Heskett

  Betty and California

  Legacy

  Afterword

  Bibliography and References

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to Jill Andrews for kind permission to quote from her mother Blanche Caffiere’s book Much Laughter, A Few Tears. I am grateful also to Professor Beth Kraig for her assistance in providing access to her work on Betty MacDonald.

  Every effort has been made to trace the holders of photography copyright. Any inadvertent omissions of acknowledgment or permission can be rectified in future editions.

  Seattle and the Olympic Peninsula

  Introduction

  WELL EDUCATED and raised as a lady, Betty Bard in 1927 married a man she barely knew. The newlyweds immediately started a chicken ranch in the remote American Northwest. Here Betty had to contend with a difficult husband, loneliness, pregnancy, primitive neighbors, and thousands of chickens. This was the stuff of her first book and the beginnings of a unique writer: in 1945 she published The Egg and I, a lightly fictionalized account of her life as a chicken farmer. The book was an immediate success, selling a million copies in less than a year, and was eventually translated into over thirty languages. A Hollywood movie of the book appeared two years later and at least eight further movies based on the popular Egg and I characters Ma and Pa Kettle were to follow.

  In the decade following, Betty wrote a number of highly popular children’s books and three more semi-autobiographical works: The Plague and I, about her confinement in a tuberculosis sanatorium, Anybody Can Do Anything, about her family’s struggles in the Depression, and Onions in the Stew, about living on an island in Puget Sound. These four comic memoirs of a life in the West and Northwest range from a rough mining community in Montana to the lush Olympic Peninsula and the bright lights of big city Seattle. Her life may even be viewed as a paradigm of early twentieth century American experience: pioneering, homesteading, the Great Depression, war, and finally prosperity.

  To a great degree Betty’s life is in her work, even allowing for its fictional elements and humorous exaggeration, and her writing is used as a source in this book when any other information is lacking. Sometimes, though, it’s an unreliable voice – she was writing to amuse – and questions remain for every fan of Betty’s books. What really happened? What happened to Betty in the end? What became of Betty’s family? Many of these questions are answered here.

  The hard core of older fans continue to read and re-read Betty’s work with a deep devotion but she is becoming less well known. Her sharp, sometimes malicious wit, her universally recognizable descriptions of the warmth and quarrels of family life, and the pictures she painted of a more innocent time in the Pacific Northwest are in danger of being lost to future generations of readers.

  Some Saturday mornings, as soon as the mountains had bottled up the last cheerful sound of Bob and the truck, I, feeling like a cross between a boll weevil and a slut, took a large cup of hot coffee, a hot-water bottle, a cigarette and a magazine and WENT BACK TO BED. Then, from six-thirty until nine or so, I luxuriated in breaking the old mountain tradition that a decent woman is in bed only between the hours of seven pm and four am unless she is in labor or dead.

  (The Egg and I)

  Betty and Bob

  ANNE ELIZABETH CAMPBELL BARD was working on the family farm on the Olympic Peninsula, across from the city of Seattle in America’s Pacific Northwest, when one day her younger brother brought home an old acquaintance. Bob Heskett was a former US Marine who had served in the First World War, very tall and very handsome, and Betty was immediately attracted. She had few hopes, however. Betty was plump and unsure of herself and much overshadowed by her manic and wildly popular older sister Mary, a flame-haired siren who attracted all the attention. What Betty did have was a wickedly sharp sense of humor, a great relish for life and a brilliant, wide-spreading smile. To her utter amazement and delight, the seemingly suave Bob appeared to prefer her to Mary.

  Mary and her friends were struck dumb by Bob Heskett’s dark good looks and white teeth, Betty was to write later in The Egg and I, and she was simply bowled over that he liked her and not her older sister. Bob was twelve years older than Betty, and no doubt appeared very sophisticated. He took her out to dinner and the movies and the affair gathered momentum; Betty later confided to a friend that Bob ‘seduced’ her in the strawberry patch (probably a more innocent episode than we might think it to be today). But even before the strawberry patch incident Bob had already proposed and Betty had tremulously accepted. In 1927 she and Bob were married in a quiet family ceremony at the house of a friend and then departed for a honeymoon in the quaint Canadian city of Victoria, only a short ferry ride from Seattle.

  Bob seemed morose and preoccupied on the honeymoon, Betty wrote in Egg. If so, he was certainly thinking about one thing in particular: raising chickens.

  Beginnings

  BETTY’S MOTHER was fair-haired, brown-eyed Elsie Sanderson, an elegant young dress designer from a prosperous New York family. In 1900 the Sandersons were temporarily living in Boston for their children’s education and lodging in exclusive Newbury St, a very desirable area then eclipsing even Beacon Hill as a place to live. Many of the big, classically-styled row houses lining the street had all the latest amenities like indoor plumbing and coal-burning furnaces. Some time in those early years of the new century, Elsie happened to be alone at home one day when a student arrived in answer to the family’s advertisement for a mathematics tutor to her younger brother Jim, who had already entered Yale while still in his teens. The applicant was a young Harvard man, exactly the same age as Elsie. Unruffled, Elsie proceeded to conduct the interview with the tall handsome student herself. Darsie Bard got the job. He also reeled home to tell his room-mate that he had met the girl he intended to marry.

  Darsie Campbell Bard was from Hannibal, Missouri, born in 1878 and the only child of insurance salesman James Fletcher Bard and his wife Anne Elizabeth. Darsie’s mother’s family, the Campbells, had originally emigrated to Virginia from Ireland (not Scotland, as Betty wrote in her books); the unusual first name of Darsie appears to have come from George Darsie, the minister husband of Anne Elizabeth’s sister Coranelle. Little is known about Darsie’s Kentucky-born father James, portrayed by Betty as a rakish gambler who played cards with his own and everyone else’s money before eventually disappearing.

  In 1900, when his father was still in evidence and the Bards were living in Portland, Oregon, the young Darsie defied his family’s wishes by going East to study. His pioneer parents had wanted him to remain in the West and go to the University of Oregon, but Darsie was determined to study geology at Harvard and so obstinately headed in the opposite direction. He was sporty and adventurous as well as academically gifted, and when at Harvard won several prizes in the Metropolitan Regatta
and other river races. His only problem was lack of money. To earn enough to attend his classes he worked all night in the Harvard College Observatory, which meant that getting enough sleep became a pressing problem. Tutoring rich boys might solve the difficulty, he thought, and hence his appearance on the Sandersons’ doorstep.

  When well-brought-up Elsie first laid eyes on Darsie she could have had no idea she was about to embark on a life of adventure. Elsie was an artist. She had loved to draw and paint all her life and at thirteen, when her younger brother Jim was ill and seeing frightening animals in his dreams, Elsie had helped him overcome his terrors by making funny drawings of the animals – elephants with fringed backs and leopards with warts instead of spots. She later decided to illustrate the English writer Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical Jabberwocky poems for her brother in the same way and then, daringly, sent them to Carroll himself. The writer never received them. He had died while coincidentally en route to America, but Carroll’s brother wrote Elsie a note thanking her for the drawings and assuring her that Lewis would have liked them. He also sent them on to a well-known artist friend in Boston. This was Eric Pape, who was impressed enough by Elsie’s talent to contact her and encourage her to continue with her art. When he opened the Eric Pape School of Art in Boston in 1898, Elsie studied illustrative technique and fashion design there as one of his first students. (Fellow artists at the school included the famous painters N.C. Wyeth and Gordon Grant.) Eventually she was offered her dress-designing job by a professional couturier after he happened to see some paper doll costumes she had made for young friends. Now this artistic and talented young woman had met an adventurous young man from a very different background.

  Darsie and Elsie fell in love and announced their engagement – utterly to the Sandersons’ horror, their daughter Betty later wrote in The Egg and I. Elsie’s patrician mother Mary was descended from Dutch ancestors, the Ten Eycks, who had settled in New York in the seventeenth century and who had later married into the Thalimer family. In Betty’s account Elsie’s family are shocked that Elsie would consider a penniless Westerner who was having to work his way through Harvard. Betty describes Elsie’s mother as a consciously refined woman, proud of her beautiful figure and erect bearing, who throws fits and tantrums about the proposed match. Her equally strong-willed daughter Elsie ignores the histrionics and holds firm. Plans were finally made for a grand wedding but on 15 December 1902, Elsie Thalimer Sanderson and Darsie Campbell Bard, after a year’s engagement, were married very quietly in St. Andrew’s Church in Boston. Both were twenty-four.

  Elsie’s own account was that this ‘sort of elopement’ was a way of avoiding the fuss of a big society wedding with hundreds of guests, which would not have been to the young couple’s tastes. The marriage was not made public until March the following year, when Elsie’s mother, now living back in New York on Madison Avenue, inserted a notice in the New York Herald. She told an interviewer from the paper that Darsie, although still a senior at Harvard, had obtained a good position in Butte, Montana, and in December had learned that he must take it up on the first of the year; he and Elsie therefore decided to marry quietly. The new bride had then immediately departed to visit relatives in Auburn, New York (probably Elsie’s maternal grandparents, the Coxes) and the Sandersons themselves only learned of their daughter’s marriage when Elsie announced in March 1903 that she was off to join her husband out West. There was a ‘period of tears’, but all ended happily. ‘She is the happiest girl I ever saw,’ Mrs Sanderson trilled to the paper, ‘and I suppose their little caprice must be forgiven.’ She appears to have talked Darsie up somewhat as the article describes him as being ‘from an old and aristocratic Kentucky family.’ Darsie’s home state of Oregon then picked up the story. The Oregonian newspaper declared that the undergraduate body at Harvard had been ‘surprised today at the announcement of the secret marriage last December’. Darsie was described as quiet and retiring, and a brilliant scholar.

  After the marriage ceremony Darsie immediately left for Butte to start work in a diamond mine. Once settled with somewhere to live, he sent for Elsie, and the young bride departed her cultured surroundings to start married life in what was then a rough mining town. To mark this new beginning she decided to change her name to Sydney, the name of her father and grandfather, although altering the original spelling from ‘i’ to ‘y’. She had never liked her own name, and Darsie didn’t much like it either. She was known as Sydney for the rest of her life, although always signed her paintings E. S. Bard, for Elsie Sydney. She also made another decision: never to worry about house-cleaning. Her mother was an immaculate housekeeper, to the point of fetish, and Sydney vowed she would never make it a priority. A very free and easy atmosphere was the result for the future Bard family.

  From that point on Sydney’s life with Darsie was a succession of sudden moves and transplantings all over the United States, including Alaska, and even to Canada (neither mentioned in Betty’s writing about her peripatetic childhood). None of the moves found Sydney unwilling or unready. She merely rounded up however many babies she happened to have at the time, packed hurriedly, and set off into the unknown with her restless husband.

  Butte was brash but Sydney found she loved living in the West, Betty was to write later. The color and adventure of life there appealed to her, even though according to Betty she was shocked to find that the ladies of the town painted their faces like harlots. When she discovered she was pregnant she was delighted, even though it meant staying at home while Darsie went off alone. She refused to go back East to be delivered, but as a sop to her distraught family chose a woman doctor to look after her who had trained in Philadelphia (and who turned out to practice homeopathy, which Sydney subsequently adopted).

  The first of the Bards’ six children, Mary, was born in Butte in 1904 or 1905. For a middle name she was given the family name of Ten Eyck and so of course, Betty said, she was taunted throughout early schooldays as Mary Tin Neck. When Mary was still a baby Darsie was sent down to the Nevada desert to examine gold deposits and once again Sydney gamely accompanied him, living in a shack and riding a horse with the infant Mary held on the saddle in front of her. The young family next moved to Boulder, Colorado, and here Sydney gave birth to her second child, Betty, after a labor of only two hours.

  Darsie’s eccentric mother Anne Elizabeth, known to the little ones as Gammy, was now living with the family and was the only one to attend Sydney during the birth because the doctor had been delayed. Betty recounted the family legend that because her grandmother had been ‘delicately reared’ she thought the umbilical cord had to be tied in a knot, and attempted to do so by looping the newborn under and over before eventually Sydney just sat up and tied it off herself.

  Births were not routinely recorded in the area at that time but later census and educational records show Betty’s birth to have been on 26 March 1907. The new baby, whose hair was white but later turned red, was named Anne Elizabeth Campbell after Gammy.

  When Betty was only a few months old a wire came asking if the family could be ready to move to Mexico for two years by the following week. They were and they did, together with Gammy. Here little red-haired Mary was much admired by the Mexicans and learned to speak fluent Spanish. Sydney found life in Mexico fairly peaceful in the main, apart from the odd earthquake, but Darsie was again off on prospecting trips much of the time and there were many problems for the two lone women living in a strange country with very young children. Tiny Betty on one occasion suffered a dangerous case of hives, a kind of skin rash, due to what Sydney suspected was too much formaldehyde in the milk. The unflappable Sydney took it in her stride. If she couldn’t find a remedy for the children’s ailments in her well-worn home doctoring book she would dose them with calomel (a purgative), milk of magnesia, or the homeopathic medicine aconite. If nothing could be found to treat an illness she would either leave it to nature or, on rare occasions, resort to a simple technique: she would call up a hospital and ask for a
list of physicians who treated the condition and then pick the last on the list of names. Her theory was that he would be young and struggling, wouldn’t charge too much, and would have the time and patience to make night calls.

  After a year or so the family moved yet again, to the mining camp of Placerville near Boise in Idaho. Betty wrote in Egg that the camp was in the mountains and that heavy snows fell in the winter; Sydney had to make sure she always had plenty of food supplies. Sydney did what she could to make their flimsy house livable and in November 1908, after another quick, three-hour labor, she gave birth alone to Betty’s red-headed little brother Sydney Cleveland Bard, or just Cleve as he became known. (Sydney’s father’s middle name was Cleveland and there was another Cleveland in Sydney’s mother’s family.) According to Betty there was a certain amount of comment in Placerville about all the red hair, given that Sydney was blonde and brown-eyed and Darsie was black-haired and gray-eyed, but unbeknownst to others Darsie had a bright red beard if he let it grow. ‘I trust you won’t feel called upon to have a child in every state in the union’, Sydney’s father reportedly wired.

  The growing family moved back to Butte when Darsie was appointed Professor of Geology and Mineralogy at the Montana State School of Mines. Here they remained from about 1912 to about 1917, living at 1039 West Granite St. At that time Butte was still one of the largest cities west of the Mississippi, a notorious copper boom town with hundreds of saloons and a famous red-light district variously called ‘The Line’ or ‘The Copper Block’, where the hordes of young miners looking for entertainment were sure to find it. At one end of the scale was the famous Dumas Brothel, one of a number of elegant bordellos in bustling Mercury Street, while at the other was the somewhat less elegant Venus Alley where the women plied their trade in small cubicles called ‘cribs’.