by Anne Wellman
Betty had bought a new wardrobe to wow them on the trip but found she hadn’t always got it right. ‘I bought a sheared beaver coat and thought it very elegant,’ she told an interviewer later in the year, ‘and then, when I got to New York, I discovered the only way to be exclusive was to own a cloth coat.’ Nevertheless, normally shy Betty appears to have held her own. During the two-day promotion trip to Washington she talked to a sell-out crowd of 655 at the Book and Author luncheon and, according to the Seattle Times, won prolonged applause with her ‘frank comments, infectious and frequent smiles, easy poise and off-hand wit’.
It was during probably this visit to New York that Betty was asked to speak at the Dutch Treat Club, a prestigious society for illustrators, writers and performers such as Robert Benchley and Ogden Nash. Because of her rapid rise to fame Betty was one of the first women guests to invade this stuffy male sanctum and she was terrified. On this particular day, to make matters worse, the other speaker was actually Winston Churchill, the former wartime Prime Minister of Great Britain. The famous statesman gallantly soothed Betty’s shaking terror, and awe at meeting himself, by offering and sharing a brandy and some words of comfort. They found they agreed on a number of subjects – most notably their enormous dislike of sports.
Finally, in April, Betty and Don returned home, taking in Chicago and Denver on the way. (There was to be another promotional tour in 1948, again with Sydney coming along part of the way.) On her return Betty had to knuckle down to writing pieces she had promised to the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly; she was also collaborating on a cookbook with Mary and working on her account of her time at Firland. Writing had become her new occupation.
Hollywood
The following month a whole new adventure beckoned: Hollywood. After a bidding war Universal-International Pictures had bought the film rights to the book for $100,000 and a percentage of the profits. The press ran a (probably embroidered or even entirely imaginary) story that Chester Erskine, the director, employed an ex-FBI agent to track Bob Heskett down – finding him in a Skid Row joint in San Francisco – and offered him $1000 not to bring a lawsuit for being identified in the movie. The press also reported that Betty had been invited to write the screenplay and to act in an advisory capacity under a contract for twelve weeks at $2,500 a week, although again this may have been just conjecture. However, in June she and Don and the girls set off for Hollywood, picking up Mary and her husband from San Francisco on the way. They arrived in Hollywood at dawn on 4 July, after being held up on the highway in a traffic jam of fishermen who had been out taking advantage of a low tide. According to the famous Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, the film studio ‘tossed an elaborate affair’ for Betty at the Beverley club, attended by hundreds of people including movie stars Joan Bennett, Claudette Colbert, Mickey Rooney, Rosalind Russell and Danny Kaye – but the star of the party, according to Hedda, was Betty, with all the ‘charm and naturalness’ she had expressed in her book.
Betty with film star Claudette Colbert
Newspapers described Betty as an unbelievably pretty mother of two and reported that Anne, now eighteen and ‘red-haired and vivacious’, was being tested for a part in the film. She either didn’t make it through the audition or the media were again playing a little free with their copy. To play Betty, the gossip columns were talking about Claudette Colbert or Joan Fontaine or even Shirley Temple, who was now grown up enough to be convincing as Betty at the age she had married Bob in Egg. Betty told the press she would rather have an older actress to play the part because she had written the book ‘from a sophisticated slant’. In the end Betty herself did not write the script: she is not listed as one of the screenwriters. However, she did make enough of an impression at the studio to be invited back to appear personally in a 1947 trailer for the movie.
§
As the book’s sales continued to mount Lippincott decided to invest in more advertising. The company took out a full-page spread in the 21 July 1946 issue of the New York Times Book Review to illustrate the book’s astonishing progress. The by-then familiar cover showing Betty’s smiling face was circled by cartoon sketches depicting scenes of Egg-crazed readers unable to put their copies down. A dancing couple read the book over one another’s shoulders; a symphony conductor clutches his baton while his eyes stray down to Egg on the music stand; a bride at the altar, engrossed in the book, ignores minister and groom; curvy female beauty contestants parade past male judges who ignore their charms in order to laugh over The Egg And I. A banner across the ad reads ‘Everything Else Is A Substitute’ (referring no doubt to the use of egg substitute during the war).
That year Egg was the No. 1 seller for the whole of 1946 and the September Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It had sold a million copies in less than a year and over the following two years would be reprinted on an almost monthly basis. A gold leather-bound one millionth copy of the book, bearing a picture of a Buff Orpington setting hen, was eventually presented to Betty by the Governor of Washington State on behalf of publisher Lippincott (Betty’s quoted response: ‘Thanks a million’). In the newsreel commemorating the occasion, entitled Egg Brings Home Bacon, Betty is slender and attractive in her dark tailored outfit with fur accents and matching fur-trimmed hat. She gracefully signs the Governor’s own copy of Egg, autographs actual eggs and gamely pins on an egg-and-chicken-feather corsage.
Courtesy Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry
Bertram Lippincott himself, understandably taking a personal interest in a product that had sold to over a million customers, flew out from his Philadelphia publishing office to attend the occasion. It was he who provided the Governor with his own commemorative copy – the 1,000,001st – and he told the Seattle Times that although Egg was not the first book to reach the millionth mark, it was certainly the first to have reached it in less than a year, and the first to have taken so firm a grip on the national imagination. In November 1946, as sales figures continued to rocket, Reader’s Digest also published an abridged version.
Despite the continuing furore surrounding the family, Thanksgiving of 1946 was celebrated in the usual Bard manner: Mary and Betty sharing the cooking, one baking a ham and the other cooking the turkey, and one of the two hosting the entire family of Bards for an additional meal later in the evening. With Betty’s new-found fame things could not remain entirely normal, even so. Some time during the holiday period Betty left for Los Angeles to open an Anti-Tuberculosis Seal sale; she had not forgotten her old troubles, or those who were still suffering. She was still using her fame to aid in the fight against tuberculosis over two years later: a 1948 newspaper photo shows her applying Christmas seals to gifts to promote a drive by the Tuberculosis Association. The dread disease could strike anyone, Betty warned, as she well knew from experience.
1947 rolled around with The Egg and I still hugely popular, and Betty no less so. January saw Betty and Don heading off to Hollywood again to make the planned trailer for the movie of Egg, which was now nearing completion at Universal-International Studios. In the trailer (‘HERE IT IS...the book that shook the world...with Laughter!’) Betty looks very glamorous and her voice is low and mellifluous as she tells us how ‘perfectly wonderful’ and ‘very, very funny’ the movie is, and how one of the characters is that ‘nasty, uncooperative stinker – Stove.’ Returning to her slightly less glamorous housewife/writer existence on Vashon after the shoot, Betty had to knuckle down to finishing her second book. This was to be the first of four in her children’s series Mrs Piggle-Wiggle.
Betty loved children and even when her own two were older she usually chose to surround herself with nieces and nephews, often to the detriment of her writing deadlines. She adored her sister Alison’s sons Darsie and Bard, the first boys born to the Bard sisters, and they loved her in return. Alison wrote that Betty had once even saved the life of Alison’s baby daughter by some timely advice. This love of small children was behind the decision to make her second publication one for the
very young; there are reports that J. B. Lippincott initially refused to print it but capitulated when she threatened to stop work on her books for adults.
Mrs Piggle-Wiggle came out in March. The book was based on some of the stories Betty used to tell Anne and Joan when they were little and then again to her nephews and nieces. She commented that she hoped the book sold, otherwise it would prove that all these years she had been boring children instead of amusing them. It did sell, of course, and became a perennial children’s classic. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is small and brown, with long brown hair, and a magic hump on her back. She lives in an upside-down house, smells like cookies, and used to be married to a pirate who died after burying all his treasure in the back yard. She uses magic and a touch of psychology to ‘cure’ the problems parents have with children, such as refusing to go to bed, not brushing their teeth, picky eating, and never finishing tasks. Some of the children in the book have family names (for instance, a pair of brothers called Darsie and Bard like her sister Alison’s two boys).
The Mrs Piggle-Wiggle series was eventually illustrated by a variety of artists over the years, including Maurice Sendak of Where the Wild Things Are fame, and the books remained extremely popular with children for many decades. In the 1990s there was a TV series with Jean Stapleton from the US hit show All in The Family, and Mrs Piggle-Wiggle herself has been transmuted into several international identities: Fru Pille-Ville in Denmark, Mevrouw Piggle-Wiggle in Holland, Madame Bigote-Gigote in France, Fräulein Pudel-Dudel in Germany, Pigguru Uigguru Obasan in Japan, Tant Mittiprick in Sweden, Tetka Vsevedka in Slovakia, and Paní Láryfáry in the Czech Republic.
Mary, Alison and Dede’s children were, of course, ‘perfect angels and couldn’t possibly have been the inspiration for any of these stories,’ said Betty. Always a willing babysitter, Betty had written the book while the Vashon house crawled with children. ‘I had so much help (from children) that I almost never got it finished,’ she told an interviewer. ‘Most of my best writing has been done to the accompaniment of heavy breathing, sniffling and fat hands reaching up and poking the wrong key of the typewriter...’
§
Continuing an eventful year, The Egg and I movie finally came out in May. For some reason it was set on the East Coast rather than in Washington State. Betty was played by Claudette Colbert and Bob by Fred MacMurray, although Bob was called ‘Bob MacDonald’ in the film to gloss over the fact of Betty’s divorce. The studio also introduced a fictitious rival for Bob’s affections, and appears to have labored under the misapprehension that chicken farmers’ wives spend their working day larded in heavy make-up.
Ma Kettle was played by Marjorie Main, an actress who was reportedly obsessed with cleanliness and who objected to her role as a slatternly mother of thirteen feral children, but at least she received an Academy Award Nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. The movie cleaned the Kettles up considerably – in the book they are vulgar, stupid, dirty and foul-mouthed, even if rather affectionately depicted.
Although Ma and Pa Kettle were only on screen for 21 minutes, Marjorie Main’s gravelly voice and Percy Kilbride as a monosyllabic Pa made an indelible impression on audiences. They were such popular characters that eight more movies were made about them, churned out at Universal between 1949-1957 and taking on average three weeks to make for $400,000 or less. There are reports that the success of these spin-offs, which returned $35 million, saved Universal from bankruptcy. The relatively low-budget Egg and I had already put $5.5 million into Universal’s bank account, a profit of $5.1 million. The critics panned the Kettle films but audiences laughed; Associate Producer Leonard Goldstein remarked sarcastically that nobody liked his pictures except the public. As for Betty, she loved the Ma and Pa Kettle series because each time another movie was made she was of course sent a huge check, much enjoyed by all the family, for $10,000 per film.
The movie was a hit, despite some lukewarm reviews. The New York Times review by Bosley Crowther, for one, did not believe it did justice to Betty’s writing:
For the nearest this watered-down rewrite gets to the solid soil is the dirt on the farm sets constructed on a studio soundstage. And the nearest it comes to realizing any of the diary’s observation and wit is in a few farcified re-creations of some of its milder episodes.
In Crowther’s opinion this was possibly because the film’s authors had been too wary of the censorship imposed by Hollywood’s Motion Picture Production Code to attempt a real reflection of the franker passages in the book – or perhaps because they were simply intent on making a cozy, romantic version for female audiences. A good opportunity had been lost, he felt, to produce a delightful satire upon the back-to-the-farm movement – or, at least, a witty dissertation upon the life bucolic. Instead,
...most of the humor is artlessly derived from sure-fire situations which can be played for conventional farce. These are such things as Claudette Colbert, as a city wife moved to a farm, having her endless troubles with an incredibly perverse trick stove or falling down in the pig pen or dropping into the rain barrel off the barn roof. And most of the complicating interest is provoked in Miss Colbert’s concern not for the welfare of the chickens but for the assurance of her breezy husband’s love.
Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray also starred in a radio version of the film and The Egg and I ran as a CBS TV serial in 1951-52. The book likewise spawned not only the Green Acres TV show starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor but also a high school play and a musical, including one version staged by an all-African American cast.
§
It had become increasingly clear that Betty’s new commitments required a base in Seattle; commuting from Vashon was too strenuous and time-consuming. In about June 1947 Betty and Don bought 905 E. Howe St., an old, solidly built Colonial home in the North Broadway area of Seattle’s Capitol Hill. The house was located on a steep hillside with an expansive view of Lake Union and the Olympic Mountains, and was accessed by a long flight of concrete steps.
With all the money now at their disposal, and with the help of an architect, Betty and Don reshaped the old house and at the same time started some remodeling on their Vashon property. The original intention was just to paint and paper the new house and move in, but inevitably the work became more extensive. With two teenaged girls they decided they really needed three bathrooms instead of two, necessitating a complete overhaul of plumbing and wiring. Having gone that far, Betty decided, they might as well knock out a wall or two and put in steel windows. They turned a sleeping porch with ‘the most beautiful view in the world’ into a study and furnished it with a moss green couch, matching curtains and Chinese blinds. Betty did her writing on a business-like golden oak desk with an ordinary typewriter chair, despite people telling her she ought to have a fancy desk, ‘perhaps something in chartreuse leather’. She was now concentrating on finishing her Firland book, The Plague and I, and was trying to meet a deadline of 1 February the following year.
Courtesy Puget Sound Regional Archives
Despite the new book and fame and all the remodeling, Betty’s old sociable life continued. In August she had a visit from her uncle, Sydney’s younger brother Jim Sanderson and his wife (he for whom Sydney had painted funny animals during a childhood illness). Nor did she neglect her bountiful garden back on Vashon, although Sydney had more or less taken over there. She planned to can the ‘thousands of crates’ of cherries picked from their Vashon orchards and left in cold storage. Then would come the harvesting of their Pacific Golds, a new Vashon Island variety of peach. These she planned to freeze or can using the open-kettle method. Betty also planned to scour the markets for little cucumbers for her family’s famous dill pickles – ‘...the best pickles in the world,’ she told an interviewer. ‘Salt and vinegar, pieces of garlic and dill then pour the brine and vinegar over the pickles. The recipe was given to us by a woman next door, sometime, somewhere.’ Despite Betty’s vitriolic comments about canning in The Egg and I, she certainly did plen
ty of it.
Betty and Don near their Capitol Hill home, August 1947
Courtesy Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry
Life for Betty at this point appears to have settled into a rhythm of writing and domesticity, although enlivened by the continuing demands of her fame. September saw one of Betty’s more famous advertising stunts. Eggs were often included in snapshots of Betty and the family and her new egg-related fame brought offers for product endorsement with a plug for her book usually thrown in. This time, in a promotion for the US Rubber Company, Betty was firmly clasped by Don as she dropped (supposedly) raw eggs from the 12th-story balcony of Seattle’s Northwest Mutual Fire Insurance Building onto the company’s absorbent rubber mats. Two catchers from the Seattle Rainiers baseball team stood by to catch the eggs after they rebounded unbroken. (The crowd of bystanders was then invited into the nearby Bon Marché to watch demonstrations of an exciting new product – television.) Advertising in later years included a spread for a Crosley refrigerator with Betty’s picture appearing under the headline, ‘The Egg and I are ten times happier with our new 1952 Crosley Shelvador!’ Betty also advertised egg shampoo and Parker pens – yet more money rolling in.
Although the first tumult of her fame had lessened somewhat by now, Betty was still a very well-known figure: in 1947 she was listed by the editors of the Associated Press Newspapers as one of the nation’s top ten women in the business and professional field. The Egg and I eventually went on to sell more than three million copies in hardback alone, with editions in thirty-two languages, and has never been out of print. The title, of course, coined a phrase that still remains lodged in the national consciousness of the English-speaking world. A seemingly endless string of books tried to cash in on the success of The Egg and I with titles like The Dredge and I (a dull book about Alaska), The Fish and I, The Cook and I, The Quilt and I, and so on. Betty’s comment was that she would rather be copied than be the copier.
