by Anne Wellman
At times the judge’s lengthy statement read like a rather strange review of the book. ‘The story is intriguing, the style is original and fascinating, the diction in places perfect and in others not parloresque – (I think I made that word up) – the authoress tells you that here we, too, have the hillbillies of the wilds of Kentucky and of the mountains of Tennessee.’
But the first case never went to court. After two years of legal maneuvering, and just as the suit was moving toward a jury trial, the two sets of attorneys jointly filed a stipulation for dismissal on 4 May 1949. On 28 May the case was dismissed – probably settled out of court.
The second and more extensive lawsuit was filed against Betty, Don, her publisher Lippincott, the Bon Marché (the Seattle department store which had promoted and distributed the book) and Pocket Books, which had issued a 25-cent paperback edition. Bon Marché was later dismissed as a defendant on the basis that another company operated the store, and Pocket Books was apparently never even served with legal papers and so did not appear. This time nine other members of the Bishop family were demanding $100,000 each in damages while Raymond H. Johnson, who claimed he had been portrayed as ‘Crowbar’, the Native American character, demanded $75,000. By the time the jury began deliberating, however, the total amount of damages sought was reported as the lower figure of $500,000, as two causes of action had been ruled out on demurrers.
The case was heard at King County Superior Court in Seattle in early February 1951 before a jury and Judge William J. Wilkins, who had been one of the judges at the Nuremberg Trials. Betty’s attorney George Guttormsen was an old friend of Mary’s and a former football captain at the University of Washington; he had been an usher at Mary’s wedding in 1934 and was presumably a familiar face for Betty in her ordeal. (He had a link with another famous Seattle writer, Mary McCarthy, author of ‘The Group’, the 1963 best-seller about the lives of eight Vassar women. Mary McCarthy revealed in a later memoir that she and George, whom she described as a good-looking intellectual, had had a brief affair in 1931 when George was just out of law school. Betty too had a link with Mary McCarthy: both had attended the Cornish School.)
The plaintiffs were elderly Albert Bishop and his many offspring – sons Herbert, Wilbur, Eugene, Arthur, Charles, and Walter Bishop, and daughters Edith Bishop Stark and Madeline Bishop Holmes – and Raymond Johnson. The Bishop family alleged that they had been depicted by Betty MacDonald as the easy-going, slovenly Kettle family in The Egg And I, and Johnson alleged that he was depicted as Crowbar. As a result, they claimed, they had been subjected to ridicule because readers identified them with those characters.
Suzanne Bishop, the alleged inspiration for Ma Kettle, was now dead. Albert Bishop, who claimed he was the model for Pa Kettle, was aged eighty-seven and too ill to come to court, but the rest of the family attended each day of the trial. Betty and Don were also present, as were Joan and husband Jerry at least some of the time. The jury was made up of three women and nine men. Judge Wilkins had a copy of The Egg and I in court and followed passages as they were read aloud during questioning.
For the book to be found libelous, the jury would have to agree both that the Bishops were the Kettles and that Johnson was Crowbar, and that Betty’s comic depictions of incidents involving Crowbar and the Kettles exceeded actuality. The crux therefore was whether incidents that happened to the Kettles in the book had also happened to the Bishops in real life, and during the opening stages of the trial questioning of the Bishop family focused on this point.
Taking questions from his own attorney, Wilbur Bishop stated that the home of the Albert Bishop family between Chimacum and Port Ludlow, Jefferson County, was about a mile from the place where Betty MacDonald had lived around twenty years before. The attorney read a passage from the book describing an incident in which Pa Kettle set out to burn some trash in the backyard and ended up burning down the barn. He asked his client if his father, Arthur Bishop, had done this. Bishop said he had. A number of other Jefferson County residents testified that the Kettles were clearly recognizable as the Bishops. Annie McGuire, a very lively elderly widow, claimed that upon reading the book she not only immediately recognized the Kettles as the Bishops but thought that she herself was the character Mary MacGregor (described by Betty as having ‘fiery red, dyed hair, a large dairy ranch and a taste for liquor’).
Courtesy Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry
Raymond Johnson testified that he recognized himself as the character called Crowbar, and that the characters Clamface and Geoduck were actual people who used those names. He said that he himself had never been known by any other name and that after the book came out people had teased him by calling him ‘Double Yolk’. Johnson also claimed that he had gone hunting with Betty’s husband Bob just as Betty had described in The Egg And I.
There was more than enough in these various testimonies to give the jurors pause. However, there was also evidence that the Bishops had acknowledged, and tried to profit from, their alleged depiction in The Egg and I. One witness described being approached by Walter Bishop to go into business with him to build a dance hall at Port Townsend and organize a tour of ‘the Kettles’ because there was ‘a million bucks in it’. In addition, the witness claimed, Walter Bishop had his father Albert appear onstage at a barn dance with a chicken under his arm and had introduced him as Paw Kettle. There was more: a deposition from the editor of the Port Townsend Leader explained that he had published a story about the Bishop farm being the ‘Kettle farm’ because the Bishops’ daughter Madeline had given him permission to go ahead and print it. The Bishops, witnesses testified, had definitely promoted the story that they were the real-life Kettles in order to profit. This of course somewhat detracted from their complaints of ridicule and humiliation.
Then came Betty’s turn on the stand. Her attorney George Guttormsen’s strategy was to paint Egg as purely a work of fiction.
‘Our testimony will show she kept no diary while living on the Peninsula,’ he told the jurors. ‘She had no records on which to base The Egg and I, and no file of letters on which to draw as material for the book. Not the smallest source of information was the Seattle Public Library, where she spent long periods of time acquiring historical background of the Olympic Peninsula and history of the Indians which she included in her book. Our testimony will bring out that there is no living character in the book as far as she is concerned. She did not depict anyone she knew.’
To prove his points to the court Guttormsen questioned Betty about the genesis of Egg.
‘I had become very irritated by women who wrote books about living in the country without lights and running water and just loved it,’ Betty replied. ‘I thought I’d write the other side.’
Asked how often she had visited the Albert Bishop family, Betty said:
‘Not very many times. We were friendly, but I didn’t see them often.’
She stated that she had never attended the late Suzanne Bishop’s birthday party, that she had never seen Raymond Johnson before the suit hearing opened and that, as far as she knew, there were no persons named Geoduck, Clamface and Crowbar in real life. They were simply characters in the book.
When Guttormsen asked whether she had described the Bishop family as the Kettles, Betty replied:
‘I did not.’
She stuck to her guns, denying that she had kept a diary, letters, or records of her four years on the Olympic Peninsula and insisting that the only living people depicted in her book were herself and members of her family. She had totally made up the book’s settings and characters. Her sole intention in writing the book was to make fun of her own incompetence as a farm wife.
Press photographs showed Betty looking tired and drawn. The trial was taking place during a period of terrible weather: heavy rains were causing flooding and landslides throughout the area of Puget Sound and there had been particularly heavy damage to Vashon Island. A slide at about 5:30 on the morning of 9 February had prevented Betty�
��s appearance in court during the first half of the day. Although the slide had not actually touched Betty and Don’s home, it had marooned them and others along the beach by blocking the beach trail and the road leading out of their property; stuck in the house with Sydney, and Anne and her husband and their two tiny children, they had been unable to get away until about eleven when the tide had receded. Power and telephone lines had been torn down. A local newspaper reported that Betty and her family were marooned in their beach home beneath a slipping clay cliff which threatened at any time to smash down and engulf them, and that the MacDonalds were in sight of a neighbor’s summer cottage which had been completely ruined by the pre-dawn avalanche. Another paper reported that Betty’s own home had itself been damaged by a slide, and although this was not the case Betty’s brother Cleve did report on 10 February that his sister’s property, valued at between $50,000 and $60,000, was in grave danger. The bad weather had retreated by the time Betty was on the stand but the worry must have greatly added to the pressure.
Closing arguments were presented on 19 February.
Plaintiff attorney Crandell argued that the immutable law of chance had been violated if it were just coincidence that Betty gave her book what he said were accurate descriptions of the Bishops and their home. The book’s only recommendation was ‘filth and slime’ and it had cast a bad reflection on the Bishops as a ‘wholesome pioneer family’.
Betty’s attorney Guttormsen, who had carefully referred to the book as a ‘novel’ throughout, argued that locals had actually profited from The Egg and I rather than the reverse. He stated that there were highway signs posted near the farm where Betty had lived during the years she described. These signs had been posted by the sister-in-law of one of the Bishop family, Anita Larsen, who was living there when the book was published; her signs directed visitors to the farm where she charged money to curious tourists to view the home. Additionally, in 1946 a real estate notice in a local newspaper had advertised that ‘The Egg and I farm’ was up for sale by the Larsens; the notice stated that along with the property came the opportunity to charge tourists an entrance fee of one dollar per car, and that this had already netted the Larsens over $500.
Guttormsen insisted that there could not possibly have been a connection between the book and the Bishops if these people had not deliberately come out and made that connection themselves. ‘Is that Betty MacDonald’s fault? The problems of the Bishop family spring from the things they’ve done, not what Betty has done.’ His client had not begun writing her book until long after she had left her residence near the Bishop home. ‘Can you tell me that she’d remember conversations so well as to characterize the Bishop family?’ He also made the point that testimony during the trial brought out by the plaintiffs themselves made Johnson too young to be the Crowbar of the book.
Judge Wilkins’ instructions to the jury took forty minutes; the court was full of spectators and a line of people were even waiting in the corridor in hopes of admittance. The judge told the jury that each of the ten cases was to be decided separately. If the jury found the plaintiffs had been libeled they were to recover only ‘nominal damages’ which he said could be one dollar or under, unless it had been established that they had ‘suffered actual and substantial damage by the publication of the book’. However, actual and substantial damages were not to be inferred from the publication of libel.
He also instructed the members of the jury to consider the book in its entirety. In a literal interpretation of these instructions the jury accordingly read the entire book aloud as they considered their verdict, which altogether took them twenty-four hours. Jurors were then polled individually on each of the ten cases, Bishops plus Johnson, and each agreed that none of the plaintiffs could be identified as a character in the book. The decision was therefore unanimously in favor of the defendants. Betty had won.
She was not in court as she had not expected the verdict to come so quickly; she was at Mary’s where she had been staying since the slides the previous week. Don was present, however, and thanked the jury. Betty’s stated reaction was that she was very, very happy. BETTY WINS ran the blazing headline in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She told the newspaper that she had spent the day anxiously drinking cup after cup of coffee and ‘going crazy’. As regards the verdict, her comment was that
If the decision had been adverse, it might be possible for anyone to squeeze themselves into any book – I have had letters from people from all over the world – from England to Bavaria – telling me that the Kettles lived next door to them. I even had a letter from a woman who said Mrs. Kettle was her mother-in-law. She lived in Florida.
Her only comfort during the two-week trial, she continued, had been realizing that she could be a good enough writer to have people identify themselves with her books.
§
Given the hundreds of thousands in damages sought by the plaintiffs, the suit had certainly represented a serious threat to Betty and her publishers. Nevertheless, from the start the trial had assumed a comical tone, and Seattle newspapers had happily milked the comic aspects with daily coverage. The plaintiffs, the supporting witnesses and their statements were colorful. The elderly widow Annie McGuire, looking like a lumberjack in a black and red checked shirt, could not contain her own laughter when passages from the book were read to her but still insisted that she would have ‘beat up’ Betty at the time of the book’s publication had she been able to find her. Forty-year old mechanic Wilbur Bishop, who claimed to be the model for the teenaged Elwin Kettle, thrust his face towards each juror to let them judge whether or not he had the blue eyes ascribed to Elwin in the book (he did). This performance provoked ‘appreciative laughter’ in the courtroom. More amusement was derived from the discrepancy between the number of children in the Bishop family, thirteen, and the fact that there were fifteen in the Kettle clan.
Some witnesses also misunderstood that the requirement was to show how similar the Bishops were to the Kettles, and instead pointed to the differences between certain upstanding Bishops and the ramshackle Kettle characters. The Bishops’ daughter Madeline said that her late mother Suzanne Bishop was clearly Ma Kettle but then went on that her mother had never used profanity, unlike Ma Kettle, whose speech was liberally laced with obscenities. Suzanne’s brother said that Suzanne didn’t have time to be ‘primping herself up’ but that she was generally neat in appearance and not a slattern like Ma. Albert Bishop himself, the brother said, was ‘clean, in every way that I know of’. One witness carefully explained that Betty’s description of Pa Kettle’s business as ‘begging’ did not really fit Albert Bishop, who in the opinion of the witness was ‘not lazy, perhaps a bit impractical’. Other witnesses failed to understand that the Bishops were claiming they had suffered as a result of Egg: some former neighbors testified that their regard for the Bishops was unchanged, despite the book. Testimony like this actually bolstered Betty’s defense.
Comic as the trial may have been in parts, and despite acquittal, the question remains as to Betty’s credibility in arguing that The Egg and I was nothing but make-believe or composites. Her use of ‘Docktown’ and ‘Town’ as names could not obscure the striking similarities between her descriptions and the actual towns of Port Ludlow and Port Townsend. The book’s vivid descriptions of Docktown’s sawmill and company store, and of Town’s red stone courthouse, Victorian houses, army post, and long sweeping hill curving down to the harbor can hardly be coincidental. A woman witness who formerly lived near Port Ludlow had insisted that ‘Docktown’ was ‘a perfect description of Port Ludlow’. Of ‘Town’ in the book she said, ‘It’s Port Townsend.’ The Kettles may not have been exclusively based on the Bishops but the similar size of the real and fictional families, the way they lived their lives, and incidents like the burning down of the barn indicate definite parallels. Betty’s daughter Joan later stated that the lawsuit was one of the biggest challenges Betty ever had to face. Her mother had wanted to make a statement that authors cou
ld write stories using composite characters without being sued by people claiming to be those characters – although Joan herself conceded that some of the people that testified really did look and act like Ma and Pa Kettle. During her cross-examination Betty did admit, ‘Every book is based to some extent on facts, or else how could you write?’
She certainly appears to have misled the jury about one very important, indeed crucial fact. In a 1949 essay on Betty’s mother Sydney, the Seattle writer Margaret Bundy Callahan included Sydney’s innocent comment that Betty was in the habit of keeping a diary while on the farm. If so, Betty is very likely to have kept it and to have referred to it in writing Egg. Betty also wrote in a letter to a fan in 1945 – again, years before any thought of a lawsuit – that Port Townsend was indeed the ‘Town’ referred to. Did Betty flee the courtroom because she knew she wasn’t being entirely truthful? At the very least she was naive in creating characters so similar to actual people.
The judge had the last word. When the trial was over, the plaintiffs immediately launched an appeal to have the the jury’s verdict overruled. Judge Wilkins denied their motion for a new trial but accompanied that decision with some interesting comments. He declared that if the lawsuit had been tried before him without a jury he ‘might have allowed nominal damages to several of the plaintiffs and perhaps, in some cases, even more’. However, the difference between the interpretation that he made of the evidence and that made by the jury was not so overwhelming that he could justify overruling the verdict. Had he himself been on the jury, Judge Wilkins continued, he might have at least concluded that the author had the individuals and their traits in mind when writing the book, though it could be said that elements of the descriptions were fictional. ‘The jury, however, found otherwise.’ The case was over.
