by Anne Wellman
In his 1981 autobiography, Judge Wilkins wrote that ‘attractive, auburn-haired’ Betty had been a very convincing witness.
Perhaps too convincing.
Bob Heskett
BOB HESKETT, Betty’s first husband, had not prospered after their divorce. He never remarried. Not long after Betty left he sold the farm, moved back to Seattle and returned to selling insurance for the Mutual Life Insurance Company. By 1942, when he was forty-six years old, Bob was living in Oakland, California, in a modest neighborhood close to the waterfront and rail yards, working as a carpenter and listed as a member of the local carpenters’ union. He registered for the draft that same year, giving his employer as the Southern Pacific railroad company, but with his medical discharge record Bob was unlikely to have served again. He never benefited from the success of The Egg and I.
In July 1951, when Bob was fifty-five and still living in Oakland, a woman moved in with him. Thelma Blake was twenty years younger than Bob, and her two young daughters, aged five and seven, moved in also. Perhaps there was some draw there for Bob. They may have reminded him of his own lost daughters.
A week after Thelma came to live with Bob, her ex-husband Thomas J. Blake, a bulldozer driver, turned up at about midnight and demanded to see Thelma and his ‘babies’. Bob asked Blake to leave but he refused to go and a fight ensued. As the two grappled in a hallway, Bob suddenly toppled over a banister: he had been fatally stabbed in the heart by Blake. The following day Blake was charged with Bob’s murder, which he claimed had been in self-defense. According to Blake he didn’t wield the knife until Bob swung at him with a hatchet, a claim that was contradicted by Thelma, who had witnessed the fight.
In October Blake pleaded guilty to manslaughter. The District Attorney’s office had agreed to the lesser charge after investigation showed that the two had fought before the stabbing. On 30 October Blake was sentenced to one to ten years.
Bob was buried on 8 August in Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California. Betty’s reaction to the shocking murder of her first husband and the father of her children is not known: newspapers described Betty as ‘unavailable for comment’.
The Hesketts were an unlucky family. There are reports that Bob’s sister Katherine drowned when she was in her twenties; his youngest sister Dorothy’s first husband also drowned. Bob’s father Otis, a witness at Bob and Betty’s wedding, died after a car crash in 1940.
Betty and California
BETTY’S next book for children, Nancy and Plum, was published in 1952. When Betty told Anne and Joan the old stories she used to tell Mary in bed at night when they were little, Joan became Plum and Anne was Nancy. Betty made it up as she went along and each night would ask, ‘Now girls, where did I leave off?’ and the girls would say, ‘Well, it was where Plum put the fish bowl on Marybell Whistle’s head,’ or ‘where Mrs. Monday made Nancy and Plum do all the dishes.’ The story is about two orphan girls whose rich uncle sends them away to a terrible boarding school run by the evil Mrs. Monday. The orphans are fed cold, hard oatmeal and any presents sent to them are taken away and given to Mrs. Monday’s niece Marybell. Finally, Nancy and Plum (short for Pamela) find a way to send a letter out – by chicken – and after many adventures Mrs. Monday is sent to jail, the girls send fabulous presents to all their friends and at last find a wonderful family to live with. Both Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Nancy and Plum were made into very successful plays by the Seattle Children’s Theater and the celebrated children’s author Jacqueline Wilson has said that Nancy and Plum is her favorite children’s book.
That same year Betty and Don bought ranch land in California’s Carmel Valley with the intention of raising cattle. No doubt both wanted a quiet life after so many hectic years of fanfare and public appearances. There was also the attraction of constant sunshine, after all the rainy years in Seattle: when asked if she was moving because she disliked the Pacific Northwest, Betty responded that she loved the Pacific Northwest but that in California there were ten months of sun and only two of rain. And, as she was a writer, ‘new scenes are indicated’. The move started in early 1953 and one of Betty’s last speaking engagements in Seattle was to address her writing club, the Seattle Free Lances, at a farewell dinner on 5 February. Some years of commuting back and forth followed as Betty and Don wound up their affairs in Seattle.
Their new home in Monterey County was a 2,000-acre cattle ranch on top of a hill, a property of rolling hills and huge oaks from which they could see valleys, mountains, eleven towns and even the Pacific Ocean (when it wasn’t foggy, Betty admitted). With the ranch they acquired 222 Hereford cattle and five saddle horses, which Betty intended to learn to ride – a neighbor, a friend of the legendary movie cowboy Will Rogers, promised to teach her in two days. She and Don were looking forward to their new life on the ranch, even if a friend did immediately send them a report predicting a black future for the cattle business.
In early February 1954 Betty wrote her old friend Bertram Lippincott, who by then had retired from publishing, that he would love the ranch. It was beautiful, she told him, although not yet exactly what you would call profitable. Probably writing from Vashon, she said she was chained to her typewriter trying to finish a new book by the end of the month. She had only just started it and was using the title Onions in the Stew but it was another ‘I’ book, as she put it, this time about the island they had lived on for so many years. ‘I think I’m being pretty funny but may be only hysterical – a state not helped by the Republican Party – ‘. Betty continued that Anne and her second husband Bob Evans were expecting a baby and were due to leave for Sun Valley for two weeks. Normally she would have had the children for them, but this time she had said no because she had to write at least one book for Lippincott’s that year. She told her old friend that she no longer felt that she had the rapport with the company that she used to have when he was still there, and asked him and his wife to come for a visit on her birthday in March so they could all ‘get drunk and maudlinly sentimental’.
By 1955 both Anne and Joan’s families were growing apace and Betty and Don sometimes got all the children at once to look after. Betty still managed to write, though (even including work on a TV script some time previously), and Onions in the Stew was published early in the year. The title was taken from the poet Charles Divine’s poem At the Lavender Lantern, about a café in Greenwich Village:
Where hearts were high, and fortunes low, and onions in the stew
This unsentimental account of Betty’s life on Vashon with her family is just as much fun as her other books, although not usually listed as the fans’ favorite. Again, as in Egg, there are lyrical descriptions of the beautiful Northwest. Oval ponds lie in green fields ‘like forgotten handmirrors’, ‘green dance-hall streamers of boysenberry’ loop from post to post and strawberry patches roll up to the edge of the sky, the troughs between each one ‘scalloping the horizon’. And, across the Sound,
...every evening dark red and orange freighters glide toward the Strait; their booms fore and aft, picked out by the late sunshine, look like Tinker Toys. Filmy scarves of gray smoke trail behind them, a heavy wake thunders in to shore after they are out of sight. At night or in the early morning we hear the chunk, chunk, chunk of tugs no bigger than chips, huffing and puffing as they drag huge fantails of logs to the mills.
Onions became the New York Times’ Book-of-the-Month dual choice in June 1955 and was on the newspaper’s list of Outstanding Books of the Year. Newsweek called Betty’s humor in the book ‘tigerish’, and even ‘sadistic’. When it hit the bookstands in London, it sold 64,000 copies in less than a month. In 1956 there was a television show based on the book starring Constance Bennett, and it was also adapted into a stage play which focused on the book’s content about Anne and Joan’s protracted adolescence. The piece became a favorite for high-school performances. (Betty dedicated the book to ‘Joan and Jerry and Anne and Bob – our best friends’.)
Betty returned to Seattle for Lipp
incott’s launch of the book at the Washington Athletic Club on 18 May. In reference to the book’s title, white Bermuda onions had been placed among the flowers at all the tables and Betty, Anne and Joan each held a couple aloft as they posed for the cameras.
Courtesy Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry
The Vashon house was advertised in the Seattle Times as ‘Home of the Year’ in August 1956. ‘Picture yourself owning the (dream) home described in Onions in the Stew,’ the ad urged. Betty’s beloved beach house, on sale for $39,500, was described as a low, rambling sandstone and timber home with 200 ft. of sandy beach and a salt waterfront, within walking distance of Vashon Island ferry. According to the ad about $100,000 had been spent on rebuilding in 1948. The description of the living space mentioned the 40-ft living room with floors of pegged, planked pine and the enormous stone fireplace that Betty had talked about in Onions, but also the new, spacious guest house built by Betty and Don. Instructions for the Open Day viewings included where to drop hook if you came by boat.
Betty, Don and Sydney were now finally settled in Monterey. Sydney would sometimes go off to stay with one of her other children but for the most part she remained on the ranch with Betty. From their new abode Betty wrote to Blanche in January 1956 about the rickety old house they were living in and the constant rain and minor hurricanes which kept them busy repairing damage. She talked about their attempt to get a cattle dog for Don and how she was dying to get a Great Dane and a Boxer from a pet adopting agency but Don said she was always needlessly complicating her life. Nevertheless, they ended up not only with dogs but several big cats and lots of kittens, and Betty said she spent spent hours each week cooking and distributing oatmeal and milk. They had hired a Russian, Alex, who spoke no English, to help Don build some bookcases. Alex had been brought over by the Government to work in a language school but then let go, and Betty clearly felt sorry for him as an exile widowed with four small children and unable to get a job without US citizenship. She reported to Blanche that Don got angry when there were communication difficulties and talked to the Russian in a ‘big loud bossy voice’. To make up for it Betty would play Rachmaninoff records and make Alex big hot lunches.
Their new social life in California included ‘millionaire Republican parties’ which she said bored her to tears. In typical Betty style she described one of her hostesses as
...small and brown and grasping with tiny little darting eyes – she uses lots of little dirty expressions and there is lots of what we in our family call ‘peepee talk’ among them all with much cheap laughter and corny remarks because Don and I have been marooned up here on the ranch – ‘bet you were busy’ they say nudging each other and looking cheap.
Betty’s letter-writing style is idiosyncratic, dashes in place of punctuation, racing on with plenty of jokes and character assassination. Of a cocktail party ‘for about 150 old Admirals and Generals’ she wrote that she hadn’t had her behind stroked or pinched so much in years. There was plenty to stroke and pinch too, she added, as she had been meaning to go on a starvation diet but kept testing out new recipes. Clearly Betty still retained her interest in good food.
After being with all those rich Republicans Betty told Blanche she could hardly wait to get back to their cozy little ranch house and her ‘easy sloppy bright Democratic friends’. The rich Republican crowd traveled in clusters, she wrote: first they all went to Mexico, then they all went to Europe, then Aspen, then the Hawaiian Islands. They all looked alike and dressed alike and she would have added ‘thought alike’, except that in Betty’s opinion they didn’t think. On her own side of the political fence, a Democrat acquaintance had invited them to join the Monterey branch of the London Wine and Food Society – which she knew would be dull but possible material for a good article for the New Yorker – because Betty was Honorary Chairman of the Stevenson for President Committee. (Democrat Adlai Stevenson ran against incumbent president Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1956 US Presidential Election but was defeated.) She told Blanche she hid from Don the fact that drinking cocktails and smoking were not allowed at the Society meetings.
Sydney
Betty and Don were enjoying their new life in California but Betty’s mother Sydney, previously in vigorous health, was starting to fade. In a 1954 article about her mother for Reader’s Digest, Betty wrote that a friend had recently watched Sydney wheel a heavy barrow of chicken manure down the garden at Vashon, dump it out, rake it vigorously around the rose bushes and then take off her gardening gloves and light a cigarette. The friend had sighed how lucky Betty was to have such a young mother and Betty had looked at her in amazement. Sydney was by then seventy-five, an erect, slender woman, gray-haired, but tanned and serene. She had long suffered a constant cough from smoking her Camels and now, in her late seventies, she began to experience heart problems. She had one severe heart attack, and then another when Joan and Jerry were at the ranch on vacation. After the second attack the doctor told Betty that Sydney could not possibly live through the night but that if by some miracle she did, she would undoubtedly live another twenty years. Sydney did survive and later said she felt remarkably well, although driven insane by being unable to do much. This she took with her usual grace. But after another short illness she was taken to a Monterey hospital and died in August 1957 at the age of seventy-nine.
Betty and Don had been to see her in the hospital early that same evening and Sydney had been feeling quite well, so the visit was an enjoyable one. On the way home Betty and Don stopped at a lookout to watch the sun slowly disappear in a magnificent sunset. They both felt it had been a spiritual experience and neither said a word the rest of the way home. As they entered the house the hospital called to say that Sydney had died a few minutes before, just as they were watching the sun go down.
Betty dedicated one of her Mrs Piggle-Wiggle books to her mother and she had provided many loving glimpses of calm, wise Sydney in her other books. Sydney had made her home with Betty and Don for many years, although that only meant that this was where she kept her most precious possessions – her pictures of Darsie, her sewing box and her sketching things. The rest of the time she made regular visits to her brother, Jim Sanderson, or went where she was needed most in the family, often looking after her grandchildren while their parents were away. Each of her other three daughters and her son had a room in the house for Sydney to come and stay, which the grandchildren always enjoyed. She had a calm, commanding presence and the children knew they had to behave well and obey her quietly spoken orders, but she was also greatly loved. She cooked delicious meals, patiently taught them to paint and draw, and listened with real interest to their stories about school and friends. She never scolded or criticized or gave unsolicited advice. Just as she had done in Betty’s childhood, she allowed her grandchildren to play hooky from school if they had what she considered a good enough reason (such as wanting to listen to a soap opera on the radio or finish a good book). She was particular about what constituted a good book, but would make no comment as she made cookies and milk for whomever was staying home to sniffle along to corny dramas like Stella Dallas.
When she was with Betty and Don on Vashon, Sydney would help with Betty’s fan mail, do most of the gardening, take care of the house when Betty was writing, make lovely water-color and pastel sketches of the beautiful Puget Sound country, cook for umpteen people, help babysit Betty’s grandchildren, give Betty moral support when her writing flagged, make exquisite flower arrangements, and read constantly. In summer she and Betty would go swimming at least once a day in the icy waters of the Sound, plowing through the waves down to the end of their sea wall and back, about 400 feet each way. Sydney swam breaststroke, despite Betty’s efforts to teach her the crawl, because she said she liked to see where she was going. Afterwards they might build a bonfire on the beach and bake a salmon, and when the moon came up, sing songs as they cast for silvers in the incoming tide. Sydney would stay up late, even later than Betty, reading and reading. Dicken
s was a favorite, along with her perennial Galsworthys and Angela Thirkells.
Sydney made Christmases special. She would read traditional old stories aloud to the grandchildren: Tiny Tim, The Night Before Christmas, The Little Christmas Tree, The Sugar Plum Tree. She had long ago carefully divided up all the Bards’ ancient Christmas ornaments, probably when she sold the much loved family home on 15th Avenue in 1942. To Mary as the eldest she had given the little Christmas tree that revolved as it played Tannenbaum, while the little birds with the spun-glass tails and all the other ornaments long ago inherited from her own family had been scrupulously allotted so that each of her children would have something. These little baubles, brought out year after year, would prompt memories of Christmases past: to Mary they would bring back Christmas Eves as a little girl in Butte, lying next to Betty in their shared bed. From outside would come the sound of the bells and the creaky runners of the sleighs in the snow, while from the next room came whispering and rustling as Sydney wrapped the children’s presents with her handsome, beloved Darsie.
In Betty’s view Sydney’s serenity came from her refusal to feel sorry for herself. She had never indulged in the ‘debilitating business of self-pity’, Betty wrote in the article for Reader’s Digest. Despite the terrible blow of Darsie’s death, Betty could only remember Sydney expressing gratitude for the wonderful years she and Darsie had had together. When she lost all her money as a widow, through poor investments and bad advice, she didn’t complain or become bitter. As the daughter of a wealthy and cultured family she had been brought up to believe that all nice people had enough money but also that money, like sex, was the man’s responsibility; she had no head for finance herself. Instead of brooding over what was lost she simply worked hard at bringing up her five children and even several adopted ones like Madge Baldwin, who lived with the family for years. She added to the family income with her long-running radio serial Schuyler Square. Saddos are bores, Sydney would insist to her children. Nobody liked saddos. If you started to feel sorry for yourself, do something! Work in the garden, wash the windows, bake a pie, write a letter, anything. You couldn’t be busy and sorry for yourself at the same time. Betty didn’t know where Sydney had learned this secret of serenity but it had made her strenuous life a happy one. In her 1954 article she wrote that Sydney was an enthusiastic and successful gardener, a superb cook, a good artist, a first-rate fly fisherman, an excellent horsewoman. Those visits to her grandchildren were often more in the nature of a nursing service; she would arrive with the small brown suitcase she used exclusively for these trips and dispense calm and cheer in whatever crisis. She actually seemed to emanate a visible aura of peace, Betty observed. Sydney described this as just long practice in the face of disaster, but for Betty it was an inner serenity flowing from selflessness.
