Betty Ford: First Lady

by Lisa McCubbin

  To have that kind of presence—to be able to twist your body effortlessly into unnatural positions—required a tremendous amount of discipline, and Martha demanded it. If you weren’t sitting up straight enough during an exercise, you’d feel the sharp punch of Martha’s bony knee in your back. It required discipline not only of the body but also of the mind. It was a life-changing experience for Betty, and when the six weeks came to an end, she had a renewed sense of who she was and what she needed to do to become the dancer she wanted to be.

  Back in Grand Rapids, Betty felt like she was simply biding her time until she could return to Bennington the following summer. She became an official member of the faculty at the Miss Calla Travis School of Dancing as the director of modern dance, teaching students the techniques she’d learned at Bennington and designing costumes for the annual spring production. In addition, she earned extra money modeling for Herpolsheimer’s, appearing in its newspaper and magazine advertisements. Still, Betty made time to work with the children at the Mary Free Bed Guild and joined her mother in the Junior League.

  When she returned to Bennington the summer of 1937, she was better prepared for the rigorous training and had progressed to the next level. Once again it was Martha Graham who captivated her, and by the end of the session, Betty was more determined than ever to go to New York City, with the ultimate goal of dancing in Martha’s company.

  The opportunity would come in late March the following year, when Martha and her traveling troupe held a performance in Ann Arbor. The program was presented by the University of Michigan Department of Physical Education for Women, as dance still wasn’t viewed as an art form but more as an appropriate physical activity for women. No matter what you called it, Betty knew she had to seize this opportunity. After the performance, she ran backstage, “grabbed Martha’s hand, and blurted out, ‘If I come to New York, can I be at your school?’ ”

  When Martha said yes, Betty was ecstatic. With her twentieth birthday less than two weeks away, Hortense gave her blessing, and soon Betty was on her way.

  Betty had contacted Natalie Harris, her former roommate from Bennington, and the two agreed to rent an apartment together as they pursued their dreams of dancing with Martha Graham. Naturally, Hortense was concerned about her only daughter setting out on her own, and insisted on driving her to New York and helping her get settled. She was very suspicious of New York men and warned Betty about what could happen if she wasn’t careful.

  The girls wanted to live in artsy Greenwich Village, but Hortense vetoed that idea after observing some “colorful” activity in the area; she preferred they live on the Upper East Side. They finally compromised on a one-bedroom apartment on Sixth Avenue, near Washington Square, which was within walking distance of Graham’s studio at 66 Fifth Avenue.

  Hortense returned to Grand Rapids, and suddenly Betty was on her own. It was her first taste of real independence, and she thrived on it. Her first session at the studio ran for four weeks, and it was intense. The schedule was Monday through Saturday: first, a ninety-minute class in dance technique with Martha every morning, followed by an hour practice class with Martha’s assistant. Then, each afternoon, a ninety-minute class in technique of dance composition with Louis Horst, followed by an hour practice with his assistant.

  Her mother was helping financially, but Betty had to find a way to earn a living if she wanted to continue taking dance classes. The only real work experience she had, other than teaching at Calla Travis’s studio, was modeling at Herpolsheimer’s, so she decided to try to get signed on with a modeling agency. She traipsed into a few agencies dressed in a long, slinky gown and a silver fox cape, thinking she looked chic, but when she was turned away, she looked around at what the other girls were wearing and realized they could probably tell she was “straight from the sticks.”

  Her confidence had taken a blow, but Betty persisted—the next time with a whole different look. She walked into the John Robert Powers Agency, one of the leading agencies at the time, wearing a tailored Chesterfield coat with a brown velvet collar and a large-brimmed brown felt hat that she’d placed at an angle on her head, pulled down over one eye. The waiting room was filled with beautiful girls, and she thought immediately, “This is a waste of time, I’m not going to make it.”

  She was about to leave, when a man came in and walked around, looking each girl up and down. He stopped in front of Betty.

  “I’ll see you,” he said. “Come into my office.”

  It was John Robert Powers himself, and although he told her that her muscular dancing legs were “pretty heavy,” he signed her on.

  The few modeling assignments Betty got didn’t provide steady income, though, so she had to settle for a job working in the showroom of a clothing manufacturer to make ends meet. Working, dancing, riding the subway, going out with friends, and dinner dates with attractive young men—Betty thrived on the energy of New York City. Every Sunday, she’d buy a copy of the New York Times and flip immediately to the Arts section to dance critic John Martin’s column “The Dance,” which reported everything going on in the world of dance. Mr. Martin had been her Dance History and Criticism instructor at Bennington, and what a thrill it was to see his name in print in the Times! She cut out all his columns and carefully pasted them in a big, square leather scrapbook, along with programs and other mementoes. She didn’t care about movie stars—in one clipping, there were photos of Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and Vivien Leigh, the actresses being considered to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind—but Betty had saved it only because on the same page was an article about Martha Graham.

  At the dance school, Graham was impressed by how hard Betty worked. “You’ve got ability,” she once told her, “a nice animal-like movement that’s appealing.” But the competition was fierce, and there were others who were even more committed.

  One day Martha confronted her. “Betty,” she said, “to have a future, you’ve got to give up everything else.”

  Martha knew—like a mother with eyes in the back of her head—that Betty liked to go out on dates and have fun with her friends. But serious dancing and a social life didn’t mix. “You can’t carouse and be a dancer too,” Martha told her.

  It was a reality check for Betty. Ultimately, her roommate, Nat, got picked to be one of Martha’s main dancers, and Betty wound up in the auxiliary group. She would appear in Graham’s New York performances, but she wouldn’t have the opportunity to be part of the main group that traveled. Still, it was an accomplishment, one for which she had worked very hard, and just a few months after arriving in New York, Betty was dancing on the stage in Carnegie Hall. It was a Sunday evening performance, on October 9, and the iconic theater was packed. For a twenty-year-old from Grand Rapids, Michigan, it was a tremendous thrill, and Betty felt like she “had arrived.”

  She performed with the group in a special Christmas evening concert at the Alvin Theatre, but then, in the first few months of 1939, it must have been bittersweet as she watched her roommate pack a suitcase and head off with Martha to Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Philadelphia.

  Meanwhile, back in Grand Rapids, Betty’s widowed mother had gone on with her life, too, and had fallen in love. It had been nearly five years since William Bloomer’s sudden death, and Betty was thrilled to learn that Hortense was planning to marry Arthur Meigs Godwin, a longtime family friend whose wife had died years earlier in a tragic car accident. Betty adored Mr. Godwin and was tickled to hear her mother acting like a “sixteen-year-old girl with her first beau.” But with each letter or phone call, Hortense was also subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, pressuring Betty to come home.

  After more than a year had gone by, Hortense came for a visit, and that’s when she really applied the pressure. She talked endlessly about Betty’s friends back in Grand Rapids—who was getting married; all the parties she was missing—hoping to make her daughter homesick. Betty didn’t want to hear any of it. She loved the fast pace of New York and dancing with
Martha Graham. She had no intentions of returning to Michigan. Finally, at the end of her two-week visit, Hortense made one last impassioned appeal.

  “Betty, darling, come home for six months, just to humor me,” she pleaded. “At the end of that six months, if you find you still want to come back here and go on with your dancing, I will never say another word against it.”

  Betty was torn. It was the most difficult decision she had ever had to make, but in the end, she couldn’t turn down her mother. Harder still was telling Martha Graham.

  Martha stressed consistently to the young girls in her troupe that “part of a training of a dancer is to meet a situation with courage and the necessity of complete honesty,” and Betty knew she had to tell her mentor face-to-face.

  One day before practice, Betty went in to see Martha. “I’m going home for six months,” she said. Six months to appease her mother, and then she’d be back. She was trying to sound confident, and yet, as the words came out of her mouth, she felt utterly sick.

  Martha listened, nodded, and said finally, “I think it’s a wise thing for you to do.” More than ten years into her own career, she knew this life wasn’t for everyone, and she’d seen enough girls come and go to know that Betty probably wasn’t going to return.

  With the prestigious credentials of having been a professional dancer in New York City, Calla Travis immediately hired Betty back at the dance school, and just as Hortense had hoped, it wasn’t long before her daughter slipped right back into life in Grand Rapids.

  Kay DeFreest was an associate director for Calla Travis and for the previous several summers had been the dance instructor at Camp Bryn Afon, an exclusive girls’ camp in Wisconsin. She’d been looking for someone to take over and offered Betty the job.

  Always ready for a new adventure, Betty accepted eagerly, packed up a summer’s worth of clothing in a large steamer trunk, and headed up to northern Wisconsin. A newspaper article about the many camps in Oneida County touted them as “Where Fortunate Children Spend Summer at Play.” Located in Rhinelander, on the banks of Snowden Lake, Camp Bryn Afon offered “a happy and safe out-of-doors vacation for the growing girl.” Girls came from all over the Midwest to “gain the glowing health that comes from exercise in the pure outdoor air,” to learn “poise and calmness of spirit,” and “the meaning of real friendship of a sort that a girl can never know under the artificial conditions of conventional society.”

  Ann Lewis was one of the young girls from Grand Rapids who attended the camp when Betty was a counselor and dance instructor. “You took the train, picked it up in Kalamazoo, transferred in Chicago, and then up to Rhinelander,” she recalled. “Your parents would put you on the train, wave goodbye, and off you went for seven or eight weeks.”

  The summer of 1941, Betty and another girl named Nancy Keeler, from Atlanta, oversaw the dance program. Working as a counselor to the young girls at Camp Bryn Afon brought back fond memories for Betty of her summers at Whitefish Lake. Photos from her scrapbook show her playing tennis, swimming, and sailing, and often wearing the same “Skipper” cap she’d worn at Bennington.

  Ann Lewis remembered what a thrill it was as a thirteen-year-old who loved to dance to have Betty Bloomer as her instructor. “She was fun. She strongly believed in dance and loved it so much. We looked up to her and wanted to emulate her. You couldn’t help but like her.”

  There was a boys’ camp on the other side of the lake, and every couple of weeks there’d be a coed mixer or recital, to which the boys would be invited. Betty would dance with a partner, and she was so lovely on the dance floor that all the boys—even the ones that were five or six years younger than she was—wanted to go see her dance.

  Once the eight-week summer camp finished, Betty returned to Grand Rapids and, along with Kay DeFreest, started the Grand Rapids Concert Dance Group, which performed for charities and fund-raising galas. Betty did all the choreography and also designed the costumes. She’d get an idea and sketch out the designs on scrap paper, and then search for reasonably priced fabric so the dresses would be affordable. The group became so popular that it had to hold auditions and turn away some dancers. As it turned out, while she hadn’t made the first string in New York, Betty Bloomer became known as the “Martha Graham of Grand Rapids.”

  At twenty-three, she was of the age when all her friends were getting married, or were already married with a baby or two, and her mother had begun making comments, wondering when Betty was going to find a suitable mate. A couple of years earlier, Betty’s brother Bill had gotten married—to a woman also named Betty, which caused some confusion with two Betty Bloomers around—and was living a few hours away in Petoskey, Michigan. Betty became godmother to their firstborn daughter, Bonnie, and on one trip when she went up to visit, Bill and Betty introduced her to a lawyer friend of theirs. Like many of the men who dated Betty, this one fell head over heels. Before Betty knew what was happening, he had bought an engagement ring, and she’d accepted.

  It didn’t last long. The fellow came to visit her in Grand Rapids one weekend, and Betty took him out with a group of her “wild friends.” When they got home, after partying until four in the morning, it was clear her fiancé did not approve of this kind of behavior.

  “I won’t talk to you now,” he said. “I’ll talk to you in the morning.”

  Betty may have had a few drinks during the evening, but her head was clear enough to realize that she didn’t like his tone or attitude. She knew he was going to tell her she had to change her ways, and she wasn’t about to change who she was. There was no need to wait until the morning.

  “That’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to talk to me.” She pulled the ring off her finger and handed it to him. “Here’s your ring.”

  It was terribly embarrassing—he was a good friend of her brother’s—but it was the right thing to do. Betty wasn’t in love with him. She realized she’d agreed to marry him only because that’s what everyone else was doing. She swore to herself she wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  On September 23, 1940, Hortense married Arthur Godwin, and Betty was thrilled to have a stepfather. She adored him so much, she asked if she could call him Dad, and, of course, that delighted him. Arthur had always loved to travel, and having retired as a successful banker, he had the means to take his new wife on a yearlong honeymoon around the world.

  Hortense would be moving into Arthur’s house after the trip, so while they were gone, she put Betty in charge of selling the house at 717 Fountain Street and getting rid of everything in it. It was a cleansing of sorts, as Betty packed up the remnants of her childhood, sold off the china, the crystal, the furniture, and the rugs. Once the house sold, she said goodbye to the home where she’d gone from girl to woman and took one last look at the garage in the backyard.

  She lived temporarily in a one-bedroom apartment until her mother and stepfather came home, and then joined them in Arthur’s house, just one block down, at 636 Fountain Street. For as much as Betty liked her independence, she wasn’t much of a cook and wasn’t keen on housework.

  She’d gone back to Herpolsheimer’s and got a job as assistant to the fashion coordinator, training models to show clothes. She still taught dance in the evenings, including one night a week at an all-black school in a district where there weren’t any other dance teachers. It was a new experience for her, and she loved it. The kids were talented and enthusiastic, but it caused a few problems for Betty at home. Her stepfather didn’t approve, and while Betty described him as “typically a generous-natured man,” every Tuesday night, when Arthur knew she was heading over to the other side of town, it was always very quiet at the dinner table.

  At twenty-three, Betty had matured into a beautiful woman, and her brother Bill would recall that “there were always boys lined up for her.” She enjoyed being “wined and dined by the local bachelors,” and ultimately, she began falling for one she’d dated in high school: the curly blond fellow she’d slapped and told never to cal
l again.

  Bill Warren had matured and was now working with his father in the insurance business. While many other young men Betty’s age had been drafted to serve in World War II, Bill was exempt because he was diabetic. As it turned out, he and Betty had a lot in common. He loved to dance, he was athletic, a good tennis player, and enjoyed going out with other couples. There was something about him, though, that Betty’s mother and stepfather didn’t like, and they made it known. To Betty, that just made Bill even more alluring.

  She continued dating him without their knowledge—going to such lengths as to have another man come to the door to pick her up, and then go out to the car, where Bill would be waiting. The relationship grew more and more serious, and after a few months, they were talking marriage. Bill was so different from that stuffy lawyer to whom she’d previously been engaged—he enjoyed a good party as much as Betty did—so when he eventually proposed, she said yes.

  She fully expected a blowup when she told her parents, but they were smart enough to know that Betty was going to do what she wanted to do, with or without their approval, and they gave their blessing.

  And so it was that Elizabeth Ann Bloomer married William Cornelius Warren on the twenty-third of May 1942. It was a small family wedding held at four o’clock on a Saturday in the living room at 636 Fountain Street. Betty’s brothers had come—Bill from Petoskey and Bob from Detroit—with their wives, as well as the groom’s immediate relatives. The living room was decorated with white peonies and snapdragons, and as Betty glided down the stairs, dressed in an elegant off-the-shoulder white satin gown, a pianist played the traditional wedding march.

  As Betty vowed to have and to hold, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, she could not have imagined how those words would hang heavy just a few years later. For she had just begun what she would refer to later as “the five-year misunderstanding.”