by Anne Wellman
Betty and Blanche were able to renew their old friendship once they discovered that each had moved, unbeknownst to the other, to Vashon. They were soon cracking their old jokes and having fun together. Blanche was always amazed and amused by her friend’s verbal quickness. Once she and Blanche were talking about some offbeat people they knew who had rather peculiar sleeping arrangements within the family. Blanche remembered Betty saying, ‘Of course they ’incested’ everything was open and above board.’ On another occasion both were at a PTA meeting at Joan’s school in Vashon where Blanche worked as a teacher. They were sitting together, something Blanche knew was a mistake because Betty’s remarks always cracked her up. Immediately they were giggling at the contrast presented by the very formally dressed, begloved and behatted PTA president and the casually dressed islanders. The president presented a gift to the school’s large and forthright cook: a record of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade Suite. The cook wrinkled her brow and asked, ‘The what suite?’ Betty whispered to Blanche that she’d rather have had Yes! We Have No Bananas and Blanche collapsed. Another time Blanche was buying an item at the Vashon hardware store but, discovering she had left her handbag behind, asked if she could pay for the item the following day. Then she heard a voice from the store entrance – Betty, deliberately dropping consonants as she called out, ‘There’s that deadbeat of a Mrs. Hutchin’s, trying to get out of paying for stuff again. Ha, saying she’s forgotten her purse.’ Blanche got her own back by loudly accusing Betty and Don of hoarding coffee when they turned up to get their ration stamps.
Life on Vashon proved so beguiling that both Betty’s sister Alison and her brother Cleve and their respective families moved to the island. In 1943, one year after Betty and Don had bought their place, Alison and her husband and infant son Darsie bought a big old house with five acres within easy reach of her big sister. Betty and Alison had had very different interests growing up but now they grew closer and became good friends, with Betty giving her sister good childcare advice and often taking care of her small children when Alison was working as a fashion model for a large Seattle department store. Cleve bought a small old house with three acres also within easy reach. Cleve as an adult was tall, rugged and red-haired, and according to Blanche, looked like photographs of his father Darsie. He became very active in civic affairs on Vashon and ran a successful construction business. Eventually, Mary too moved to Vashon, and the family were able to continue all their old traditions. Hosting Christmas was always shared between the sisters: one would hold a gathering on Christmas Eve, with a ham and a turkey and a flaming plum pudding, and after the dinner the assembled mass of excited children would gather to hear Sydney read traditional Christmas tales aloud. At about ten, when any guests in for the evening had taken their departure and the children had been persuaded into bed, the adults in the family would set about opening their Christmas presents. On Christmas Day they would all gather again at the home of another sister.
The remaining years of the war became yet more difficult. In 1943 shoes and meat were rationed; there were new War Loan and paper drives to help the war effort. Army Fighter Command moved onto the island and took charge of the air raid observation posts. Some on the island called for the return of the Japanese American residents now interned in camps on the mainland; others opposed it. Harvesting Vashon’s abundant fruit without sufficient manpower remained a problem: in 1944 Native Americans from the Quinault people were given Victory Farm Worker badges for their work picking cherries, currants and loganberries at $10 – 12 a day.
Finally, in 1945, came victory. The war was over.
For the first few months Don continued the commute by ferry to to his defense work on the mainland. Betty was doing a variety of jobs. Then, without warning, life changed in a way they could never have foreseen.
The Egg and I
In February 1943, Betty was working for a Government contractor in Seattle and making good money. Then, in her account in Anybody Can Do Anything, an old friend of Mary’s arrives in the city and announces that he is a talent scout for a publishing firm. He’s looking for Northwest authors so Mary, of course, says that her sister Betty is a writer but that she doesn’t know how much Betty has done on her book. According to Betty she has so done so little she hasn’t even thought of writing one. Mary then calls her at work in Seattle only a quarter of an hour before an appointment she’s made for her with the scout (although Blanche’s memory was that Betty had her hands in the dishwasher at home on Vashon when Mary’s call came through). Walking to the appointment Betty decides to produce a refutation of the then popular life-is-wonderful books by the wives of men who have forced them to live in the country and draw up all their water from a well. This was a reference to works such as Louise Dickinson Rich’s 1942 book We Took to the Woods, an enthusiastic account of living and raising a family in the backwoods of Maine which Joan remembered her mother reading. The publisher’s representative likes the idea and asks her to write a five-thousand-word outline for the following night.
In fact, of course, there is evidence that Betty had attempted to write about both her life with the chickens and her stay in Firland well before the appearance of any talent scout. She may well have had rough manuscripts in readiness, had perhaps even submitted them already to a publisher. But whatever the genesis of Egg, Betty had some very firm ideas about what she wanted to express. She later wrote to a fan:
The idea in writing the book was to furnish a rebuttal to such books as WE TOOK TO THE WOODS and LIVING HIGH and WILDERNESS WIFE. I enjoyed the books but got damned tired of hearing the pioneer life pictured as the ideal existence for a woman. I have always maintained that those books were actually written as a justification for the husband’s queer choice of occupations. To me, a woman who says that she prefers to live without lights, water, telephone or friends, is on a par with a person who says that he enjoys having athlete’s foot.
Betty has never before written anything like an outline, or a book, her narrative continues in Anybody Can Do Anything (despite the evidence to the contrary). It’s slow going and she needs to stay home from work the next day to finish it. She asks a friend at the office to say she’s sick but for some reason the friend tells her boss the truth and Betty is fired.
The representative, from Doubleday publishers, liked the outline but then did nothing with it. Eventually Betty asked for it to be returned, at which point Mary began hounding Betty to turn it into a book and submit it elsewhere. There then followed a long, long year as she struggled to produce The Egg and I, sometimes putting it away in disgust and getting boring little part-time jobs until Mary pushed her to pick it up again. Funds were low. To make some money while she was doing the writing, Betty started hand-painting greeting cards for a company. The job was to tint tiny little photographs of ‘The Majesty of Mount Rainier’ or ‘Beautiful Lake Washington in the Sunset’, using dabs of cotton dipped in paint (blue for the sky, green for trees, orange for sunsets, and pink for rhododendrons). The company would take back the finished photographs and glue them onto cards bearing appropriate verses. She was paid one-and-a-half cents for Christmas cards and two-and-a-half cents for Easter and Mother’s Day cards, which were a little larger. If she ripped through her housework, did no writing and painted all day as she listened to soap operas on the radio she could make as much as $41.76 a week. Betty really loved painting the cards and would have kept right on doing it, except that Mary was always calling to check if she was getting on with her writing and yelling that Betty was a ‘little-money-thinker’ because she would rather have $41.76 than $50,000 from writing a best-seller. Betty’s reasoning was that $41.76 was a real sum that she could make every week, which was a whole lot better than a mythical sum of $50,000, but usually Mary’s pushing was enough for her to get back to work on the book.
But with money still tight, in February 1944 Betty attempted, yet again, to get some money out of her ex-husband Bob Heskett. Over the past years the $30 a month mandated by the c
ourt had of course failed to materialize, and Bob now owed her the then huge sum of $4260. Through her attorney Betty presented an affidavit for a Writ of Garnishment – meaning a levy on earnings or possessions – against Bob’s very much younger sister Dorothy, whom she believed to be holding some of Bob’s possessions. (It’s unclear how she knew this unless she had been in contact with either Dorothy or Bob.) Dorothy responded to the court that she was not holding any of Bob’s things and that in fact she owed her brother a couple of hundred dollars, which the court then ordered to be paid to Betty. There are no records to show whether Betty ever got either this or the full sum she was owed in support by Bob. By the following year it would hardly matter.
Despite what appears to have been the hard slog of writing it, in later years Betty was to observe that she was fresh and enthusiastic when she created Egg and that therefore it was her best book, even though she believed the writing was much better in Onions in the Stew. But whether it was hard going or written with enthusiasm, there was pain in reawakening memories of her marriage to Bob – she told a fan that in writing it she had relived the experiences ‘to an uncomfortable degree’ – as well as enjoyment in reversing the image of the game pioneer woman and poking fun at herself as the ultimate reluctant homesteader.
When the book is finally almost finished Mary in Anybody suggests Betty write to the literary agents Brandt and Brandt, which Betty does, sending them the outline she had originally written for the publisher’s scout. On Mary’s advice she also mentions her ‘short stories, the children’s stories, and the TB book’, which sounds like Betty has already written plenty. To her amazement, Brandt and Brandt immediately wire that they are delighted with the outline and to send everything she has. When she finally submits the finished manuscript she is fully convinced that she is a failure and that the book is no good and will get rejected after she’s spent all the advance.
But not only was the manuscript accepted by publisher J. B. Lippincott, it was also scheduled for immediate serialization in the respected Atlantic Monthly magazine (and would later be serialized in the equally respected New Yorker). Lippincott’s salesman for the Pacific Coast took Betty to dinner and told her he thought the book was going to be a best-seller. Betty thought he was either trying to cheer her up or had been talking to her mother, who of course believed it was going to be a best-seller because she was convinced everything her children did was always the best. Betty herself didn’t think it was going to be any kind of seller and had actually got in touch with the card-painting company to say the book was finished and that she was again available. The manager of the company was very nice, and genuinely interested in the book, and advised her not to put her own picture on the jacket but to use a picture of a pretty girl in order to sell more copies.
Betty dedicated the book to Mary (later dubbed Betty’s Boswell), ‘who has always believed that I can do anything she puts her mind to.’
Betty and Fame
THE EGG AND I is a very funny, lightly fictionalized account of Betty’s life on the chicken farm with Bob. Although she said she wrote it ‘because it was the last untamed frontier’ she hardly portrays herself as a pioneer woman; instead, she points up the disconnect between the (then) accepted duties of a wife to support her husband’s goals and to learn to love what he does, and the hard realities of isolated farm life. The writing is colorful and immediate, and startlingly frank in parts for the 1940s. A well-known writer and critic of the time, Clifton Fadiman, observed drily that Betty called a spade a spade, and that there were plenty of spades. The reader gets a sense of being right there with Betty as she struggles with the chickens or fights with Stove. There is an undercurrent of sadness towards the end as Betty’s marriage with Bob starts to disintegrate, but Betty’s trademark humor and optimism never falter.
At the same time a real sense of Betty’s feeling for the beautiful Northwest is conveyed through her expressive writing.
...suddenly the windows in the kitchen would begin to lighten a little and I knew it was time for the sunrise. I’d rush outdoors just as the first little rivulets of pale pink began creeping shyly over the mountains. These became bolder and brighter until the colors were leaping and cascading down the mountains and pouring into the pond at the foot of the orchard. Faster and faster they came until there was a terrific explosion of color and the sun stood on the top of the mountains laughing at us.
She mourns the depredations made by the logging companies, the only ugliness she ever saw. Whole mountains were left scarred, she wrote, and lovely lakes turned muddy brown with woody debris and rubbish.
Before The Egg and I was finally published the family would sit around the fire at night in their beach house on Vashon, trying to keep warm and discussing what they would do with the money if ‘The Book’ sold two hundred copies, or maybe even four hundred. Betty wanted a fireplace in every room and a big wide road down to the house so the family would no longer have to walk the slippery narrow trail. Groceries could be delivered instead of having to carry them down the one-and-a-half miles by knapsack. Don wanted a case of imported Scotch, a case of Money’s mushrooms (a high-quality supplier) and big locks for his closets so the girls couldn’t borrow his clothes. But absolutely no road; Don preferred privacy. Like Betty, teenaged Anne and Joan also wanted warmth and to have blast furnaces installed in every room of the big drafty house. They also clamored for a charge account at the Vashon Pharmacy so they could buy lipstick and nail polish when they wanted. And they did want the road.
Then things started to happen. An abridged three-part version of The Egg and I appeared in the June, July, and August 1945 issues of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly. Readers enjoyed it. Egg was then published in book form by J. B. Lippincott on 3 October 1945. Expectations at the publisher’s were low, and little was done in the way of fanfare when the book first came out. But, in the immediate aftermath to World War II, Americans were weary and desperate for a return to happier times and something to laugh about; they greeted the irreverent humor and the absolute freshness of the book with delight. There was great appeal in a comic account of a life lived close to the earth, in not so distant times, when life had been simpler. At the same time the book may also have come as a relief to an increasingly urban population feeling uneasy about their soft life of air-conditioning and huge Frigidaires; they may have welcomed Betty’s message that the simple life was not all it was made out to be. One New York reviewer commented: ‘To city people sitting smug and dry, Mrs. MacDonald’s life in the woods comes as unadulterated fun.’ There were rave reviews and, to the family’s utter amazement, The Egg and I began flying off the shelves. Utterly out of the blue, Betty’s book rose rapidly to become the No. 8 seller of 1945.
Limelight
With the totally unexpected success of her book a dumbfounded Betty found herself sucked into a frenzy of publicizing, speaking engagements, radio, TV and book tours. In fact all of the family became instant celebrities. A Life photographer moved in with them for a week and took hundreds of pictures of Betty and the girls, and publicity-shy Don when he could find him (nearly everyone confused Don with Bob Heskett, Betty’s first husband who had featured so prominently in the book). The multi-page Life magazine spread Life Goes Calling on the Author of The Egg and I appeared in March 1946. The article stated that Egg had sold 250,000 copies to date and had been the number one best-selling non-fiction book for ten weeks running and that Betty had earned $40,000 in less than a year (equivalent to more than $500,000 today). Betty was described as a ‘pretty and ebullient red-head of 37 who looks ten years younger’. Anne and Joan of course loved all this fun and excitement and were having a wonderful time.
That spring Betty and Don set off on their first country-wide promotional tour, spending several months traveling around by car, part of the way with Sydney accompanying. On February 14 Betty wrote Mary from Texas that Sydney was simply wonderful to travel with – never tiring or complaining and always ready to eat and drink something. In t
he same letter Betty said she ‘loathed’ Southern California but loved Texas and found Texans charming, helpful and friendly. At this point so early in her fame Betty was clearly enjoying herself and impressed by some of the fancy places they were staying in. She and Don were in a brand new hotel in Big Springs, she told Mary in a letter written on the hotel’s stationery; the hotel was very large and beautifully decorated and their room had ‘red and white dotted swiss curtains and white chintz draperies with red roses’. They didn’t always have hotels booked en route and sometimes had to find somewhere at dead of night, but Betty assured Mary she was having a wonderful trip, although she would have preferred not to have an itinerary or any set times to get to places. After a grueling schedule taking in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, New Orleans, Atlanta and Baltimore, they finally arrived in New York in late February. The Seattle Times reported on her program:
Mrs. MacDonald will have a busy schedule when she arrives in Manhattan. She will be the guest of honor at the New York Herald Tribune Book and Author luncheon at the Hotel Astor March 5. Her publishers, J. B. Lippincott Co., will present her to New York literary celebrities at a cocktail party Wednesday, March 6 at the Ritz-Carlton. Tuesday, March 12 she will be in Washington, D.C. to be guest speaker at the Washington Post Book and Author luncheon at the Hotel Statler, and later in the month she will speak at the annual banquet of the Women’s Book Association at the Hotel Pennsylvania. She will make four radio appearances.
