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

by Anne Wellman

  ...we spent the afternoon trying on hats so we could see who could look the most horrible. Then we went home to Mother’s to dinner. It was heavenly to be home with the family. They boiled around, cooking, telling what stinkers their various bosses were, sympathizing with me for having a doctor for a husband and generally being warm and comforting. Anne and Joan, Betty’s small children, stuck to me, greedily asking for more stories about the ‘knives and the bleed’...

  Mary too felt Sydney’s gravitational pull, the impulse to turn in times of trouble to a wise and loving mother and a happy home. The description, and some of the language, is very similar to many scenes in Betty’s Anybody Can Do Anything, published a year later.

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  At the depth of the Depression, in 1933, one in four Americans was out of work but in Washington State it was higher than the national average at one in three. In Seattle and other cities where the jobless congregated it was even higher. The Coroner reported that fifty-eight out of the 190 suicides in Seattle’s King County in 1932, the third highest suicide rate in the US, had been prompted by ‘business reverses or unemployment’. Times were getting desperate.

  For Betty, though, the year had started wonderfully with the publication of a two-part short story in Seattle’s Town Crier magazine. The magazine’s Associate Editor was Seattle writer and journalist Margaret Bundy Callahan, a friend of the Bard family who may well have been instrumental in getting Betty’s story into print.

  The tale concerns beautiful coppery-haired Judith, twenty-five, who has had a series of failed engagements because of objections to her unconventional family. She meets and falls in love with Peter and happily discovers that he has a family equally unconventional; all ends well, with a slight twist as both confess that they are not as unconventional as they make out.

  The writing is not Betty MacDonald as we know it; the style is romantic and frothy, pretentious even, with only occasional touches of Betty’s usual wit (an aunt appears with a noise like ‘surf breaking on the beach’). However, it’s interesting for the material used from Betty’s real life: already her subject was herself and her family, even in a work of fiction. Judith, who is probably modeled on the much engaged Mary, is given Betty’s mother’s ancestral name of Ten Eyck. The family consists of six brothers and sisters and a mother called Sydney who has a ‘lovely, languid voice’ and lounges around on sofas reading and smoking, forgetful that she has run out of money for food. The father is dead; one sister is divorced and has two little girls aged two and four who run around the house naked. Judith hides a gin stain on her dress under a sash; they have no money but set an elegant table; they read good literature aloud in the evenings; they are mutually supportive and fiercely loyal to each other. They even use Bardisms like ‘body-thinko’. All of the family are intellectual and creative but also more than a touch superior, looking down on those who are happy with suburban life – though secretly Judith rather yearns for simplicity. She confesses to Peter that she wants to have children and bake cookies on rainy Saturdays; he confesses to her that he rather enjoys his job as freight manager for a bus line. Overjoyed because neither is as unconventional as the rest of their families, they fall into each other’s arms happily envisaging the suburban life ahead of them. Their Families may not be quite on a par with Betty’s other work, but the story is fascinating as a piece of juvenilia indicative of what was to come.

  Not long after this Sydney, too, was suddenly earning money by her pen and making a unique contribution to the Bard finances, even though she was already fully occupied with the family’s cooking, shopping and housekeeping, and looking after Anne and Joan (who called their grandmother ‘Margar’ and their mother ‘Betty’). The account in Anybody Can Do Anything is that Mary is working in radio advertising and one day sells a large department store on the idea of a daily radio serial, to be cast from the store’s employees and to be directed by Mary herself. She states boldly that it’s already written (a lie) and that she has left the script at the office. Rushing out to the nearest telephone, Mary begs Sydney to come up with a story which is both funny and suspenseful. Sydney, who was an avid listener to radio soaps, or ‘daily droolers’, as Betty called them, dutifully sits down to try and write a compelling 15-minute drama – and succeeds. Schuyler Square was launched in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s ‘What’s What on the Air’ column on 15 May 1933 as Mrs. D.C. Bard’s ‘thrilling new mystery serial’, about six families living on a square. Betty in Anybody wrote that thereafter Sydney sat late every night in the breakfast nook, drinking coffee, smoking millions of cigarettes, coughing, and churning out the charming and funny story. In the book the show runs daily for the next year (and in reality probably for longer, according to Betty in other writing), and brings Sydney in twenty-five dollars a week, which makes a huge difference to the family income. Sydney was good at writing slogans, too: Betty wrote in an article that once she and Sydney each won a $50 prize in a slogan-writing contest, money which fortuitously arrived during a very bleak period when nobody in the house had a job.

  Betty was only twenty-six when Their Families came out. It was her first ever published work, as far as is known, and she must have been thrilled. Town Crier probably didn’t pay much, however; it was a literary magazine which folded only a few years later. There is no mention of the story’s publication in Anybody; money remains tight and by February Betty is out of work and doing the rounds of the employment offices. She hates the hot, desperate smell of these places and can never conquer her fear of personnel managers, whose piercing glances and drilling questions crush Betty’s fragile ego like an eggshell and in her own eyes expose her as completely unqualified to work anywhere. At least she now had a couple of years’ experience, Betty thinks, when she applies for new jobs – only to be told that she is too old in her mid twenties. For general office work most companies wanted girls of eighteen.

  Trying to sell advertising office to office like the super-confident Mary is a humiliating failure. Betty is too timid to ask to see the boss and is completely unconvincing in her sales spiel. She is scared to death all the time and doesn’t really understand what she is selling. In the end even Mary acknowledges that her sister is not the salesperson type and should give up on the idea, so Betty goes back to pounding the streets for work along with the hordes of other unemployed and desperate people. Sometimes these so-called jobs are even dangerous: on one occasion she sees an advertisement for office workers and goes along for interview only to find the business is clearly a front for prostitution.

  Slipping from one futureless job to another, Betty in Anybody is only just managing to make enough money to keep her and the girls afloat. To make matters worse she owes money on a number of charge accounts opened the previous Christmas in the knowledge that the bills would not come in until February. Then comes February, and she can’t pay. Betty lies awake at night in the bed she shares with Mary, tossing and turning and asking herself why she did it – she must have been crazy – what is she to do? She hates everything about living in the city and berates herself for ever leaving the farm.

  After losing twelve pounds in weight, becoming very nervous and getting dark circles under her eyes, a solution suddenly seems to present itself. She borrows money from a loan company, at a very high rate of interest and with hefty charges, and distributes it among the charge accounts with rash promises of more to come. But her usually temporary jobs, often paid in cash, do not make it easy to pay off large debts, and collectors on each of the charge accounts begin to harass her at her place of work. They appear in person or call her up, despite Betty trying to keep them from finding out where she is. She is desperately ashamed of owing money, and very scared. Then she gets behind on the payments to the loan company, and the company’s own collectors start shouting at her in the streetcar or when she’s going into a theater with a date. By mid 1933 Betty is at rock bottom: out of work, unable to pay her debts and publicly hounded.

  Then, in July, her fortunes turned.
When President Roosevelt succeeded Hoover in office in March 1933 the economy had nearly ground to a halt. Congress quickly passed a series of emergency measures to shore up the banking system and send urgently needed aid to the states. Huge public works projects were launched to create new jobs, and a new agency, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), was established to eliminate the existing cut-throat competition between industries. By a fluke, Betty suddenly landed a clerical job with the agency. The job was a government post which, for the first time, meant real security for Betty and the girls. She would get accumulated annual and sick leave and retirement funding. Not only that, but her debt problems were solved. In Anybody, Betty writes that the first week on the job so many debt collectors call her on the phone or come blustering into the office that she expects to be fired, but instead her new boss takes her down to the Federal Employees Union. They loan her the money to pay all her debts, and pay the bills on her behalf. She is free (apart, of course, from the little matter of needing to pay back the loan from the Union).

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  The aim of the National Recovery Administration was to bring industry, labor and government together to create fair practices and prices so as to reduce destructive competition, and to help workers by setting minimum wages and maximum weekly hours. The agency, symbolized by a blue eagle, was popular with workers; businesses that supported the NRA put the symbol in their shop windows and on their products. Membership was voluntary, but businesses that did not display the eagle were very often boycotted and only businesses with stickers could be awarded government contracts. Take-up was strong.

  The NRA in Seattle was housed in the city’s art deco Federal Office Building, which took up a whole block and to poverty-stricken Betty in Anybody looks like a very solid and respectable employer, unlike some of the dumps she has previously worked in. Here Betty starts as a temporary $4-a-day typist, feeling that at last she’s working on the right side of the tracks. At first the work is boring and tiring, even though Betty thinks she will like a dull and monotonous job suited to what she assumes are her natural abilities. Then she begins to find the work intensely interesting and the period exciting. Her talents are recognized, despite her low opinion of herself. She quickly rises to a $120-a-month secretary, then to a clerk at $135 a month, then finally to labor adjuster at $1800 a year with her own secretary. In fact some reports suggest that Betty became the first female labor inspector in the whole of the US: an impressive career trajectory, if so, and evidence of Betty’s sharp intelligence. Having a secretary was Betty’s own criterion of success. At last, someone else taking down her thoughts; she was finally on the other end of the gun, she wrote.

  Betty’s success at the NRA must have done wonders for her confidence and self-esteem. Always shy and unsure of herself, and all her life in Mary’s flamboyant shadow, she at last came into her own. It’s likely that her sharp intellect finally fastened onto a type of work demanding strategic thinking and an appreciation of the wider picture, and for the first time had a chance to flourish.

  Blanche’s new husband, Jock, was working in the same building as the NRA and when Blanche was there helping him out Betty would drop by to pick up her friend for coffee. Jock was always amused when Betty addressed him as Simon Legree to imply he was working Blanche like the slave-driver in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The two old friends would swap their usual stories about work and friends and people they each knew. Betty was always fascinated by other people, no matter how dull, and deeply interested in how they lived their lives. She did distinguish between being interested, and actually liking. She never liked just anybody and needed people to be fascinating and witty enough to amuse her, or so boring as to be different; they needed to distinguish themselves enough to get her attention. It was the minutiae that so intrigued her. Blanche recalled how Betty would always surprise her by remembering tiny details from Blanche’s stories about other people, no matter how long the interval between their meetings. They would be chatting and Betty would suddenly ask, ‘And how is poor little Patched Coat?’ This was a reference to an acquaintance of Blanche’s who had been bragging about being taken to fabulous places by her terrific boyfriend, until someone in the boyfriend’s office had revealed that the man was married and that his wife came to the office in a shabby old patched coat. Blanche had also told Betty about a friend who had met a new man she hoped to marry because they had so much in common, such as liking to fold towels into thirds on the rack. Some time later Betty asked if ‘those towel-folders’ had ever married, adding that if they ever had a quarrel they could always make it up with a towel-folding session.

  When Blanche began teaching, one of her fellow teachers always hiked her skirt far above her knees when sitting opposite the handsome headmaster at the teachers’ meeting, and Blanche would occasionally point it out to her. The woman would pull it down a quarter-inch and say ‘Thanks, Blanche.’ Having heard the story, Betty would sometimes ask, ‘Is ’Thanks, Blanche’ still riding her skirts high?’ (When Betty’s sister Alison heard about this years later, she suddenly understood where the phrase had come from. The whole family had been saying ‘Thanks, Blanche’ to each other for years without knowing its origin.) Then there was the time Blanche demonstrated to Betty the way she made sure she always hung her husband Jock’s suits with the sleeves sharply creased and all lined up, because he’d once complained that Blanche left them askew. Betty joked that he sounded like Father Bear asking who had been eating his porridge, and thereafter asked Blanche at intervals if she was keeping Father Bear’s creases smooth.

  Betty in her turn told Blanche of a co-worker who was attempting to get a man to marry her. Betty happened to overhear the friend talking dreamily to the man about their possible future, which the woman envisaged with three stalwart sons and a Dalmatian at the man’s feet. From then on Betty kept Blanche posted on the romance of ‘Three Stalwart Sons’, Betty’s new nickname for the friend.

  All of this of course was just tiny detail in the scheme of things but as Blanche commented, Betty thrived on observing people and their foibles. In her opinion Betty’s memory for small detail lent the commonplace a measure of significance. It was the ordinariness of everyday life that Betty loved and that drew the two together during their long friendship.

  Mike

  By this time of course Betty was making her own friends and not just inheriting Mary’s. In Anybody she sometimes meets a man she likes, although there is never enough money to go anywhere and get any privacy. Love affairs have to be conducted in front of the fire, reading poetry and listening to music on the radio, or walking up to view the lights of the city reflected in the reservoir. Little came of these romances in the early years of Betty’s return from the ranch. Mary once confided to Blanche that Betty would have a hard time finding a man as smart as she was. When Betty was going out with one of Seattle’s most brilliant electrical engineers, Mary worried that Betty would have him thinking that he couldn’t put two wires together – she was just not the type to hide her intelligence.

  If not exactly a grand passion, one of Betty’s more memorable men friends around this time was Mike Gordon, a man of over seventy. They met in 1934 and Betty later wrote an article about Mike for the Reader’s Digest series ‘The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met.’ According to this account Mike is at least a foot shorter than Betty, looks like a little troll, and speaks with an odd accent combining traces of Swedish, Scots and Greek. With such a disparity in their ages it doesn’t occur to Betty that Mike could consider himself as a possible date, but Mike immediately sets about wooing her with extravagant but strange gifts. Instead of flowers or candy, Mike sends her a side of beef or several hundred cans of pea soup or four dozen pairs of nylons, all slightly irregular in size and shade. He’s also extremely generous to Betty’s family.

  As always with Betty it’s tempting to assume that at least some of this is exaggerated for comic effect but her old friend Blanche attested to the reality of Mike and his strange wooing. A phot
ograph in Blanche’s memoir shows Mike and Betty against a backdrop of Eastern Washington hills, Betty towering over Mike with her arm around his diminutive shoulders. Visiting the Bards’ house the first Christmas after Betty had met her eccentric suitor, Blanche could barely step into the living room for all the presents under the tree, and they even spilled into the dining room and half way up the stairs to the bedrooms. Betty waved her hand over it all and simply said, ‘Mike.’ Towering above the beautifully wrapped packages were two shiny bicycles for Anne and Joan.

  Blanche once asked Betty if she felt at all obligated to Mike for all he did for her. Betty answered that all she had to do was reach down and pat him on the cheek and make him laugh a lot.

  In the article about him Betty writes that all Mike’s friends had to be either wealty or prrrrrrrominent, as he puts it. People who are not his friends are damn appleknockers, the term used for the transient workers who came to harvest apples in Eastern Washington where Mike lived and conducted his successful lumber business. All of Mike’s friends suffer from his excessive gift-giving, which Betty eventually finds irritating – although not Anne and Joan, strangely enough. Mike would deliver a ton of whatever item a friend had inadvertently let slip he or she liked, although always it’s the wrong sort or a different type that Mike himself is fond of. He throws extravagant parties and picnics that are tightly scripted and have to be followed to the letter or he complains bitterly. For Betty this bossiness is almost unbearable. Nevertheless, Mike’s strange courtship continues for another eight years and during all that time Betty keeps trying to think of things to do for Mike and ways to repay his generosity. She makes him sketches and sends him pictures, and is always on the lookout for something she can afford that Mike doesn’t already have sixty of.

  Betty later wrote in the front of Blanche’s copy of The Egg and I :