Betty Ford: First Lady

by Lisa McCubbin

  There was a joke in the Alexandria emergency room that if Mrs. Ford wasn’t there with one of the boys at least once a week, there was something wrong at the Ford household. Whether it was stitches or cuts or a broken bone, “Mom was able to deal with the blood,” Steve recalled. “She was not squeamish. Probably because she grew up with two older brothers.”

  All three boys played football, baseball, and basketball, wrestled, and did crew. And back before you could buy a skateboard, the boys made their own. “They’d take my roller skates,” Susan remembered, “and strap them to a board. That was their skateboard.”

  Betty took on the role of Cub Scout den mother, guiding a pack of ten little boys working on their merit badges. “I put in three years’ hard time,” she quipped. They’d meet once a week at the Ford house, tiling ashtrays, making leather belts, and concocting crafts from milk cartons and a messy mixture of flour and water. When the weather was good, Betty would herd them outside and try to teach them how to do cartwheels.

  “I got a modicum of respect for this minor talent,” she recalled.

  And while the three boys were, well, doing boy things, Betty could hardly wait until Susan was old enough for dance lessons. Modern dance lessons, of course. For most little girls, their first introduction to dance was ballet, but Betty was firmly against it for her daughter.

  “Their bodies aren’t made to do that at that age,” she’d explain. She had nothing against ballet, it was just that she firmly believed children needed free form.

  “Be a giraffe or be an elephant,” she’d encourage Susan as they danced together around the living room. There was no “point your toe” and “straighten your knee.”

  Susan loved to dance, and happily took lessons year after year. She idolized her mother, and knowing that her mother had been a dancer in New York City, Susan wanted to be just like her.

  The year Susan turned five, and the boys were twelve, ten, and six, the Fords had a twenty-by-forty-foot swimming pool built in the backyard. It was sixteen feet deep at one end—deep enough so the kids could jump and dive off the diving board without fear of hitting bottom—and long enough for Jerry to swim laps. Betty had handpicked some Japanese-style fish-shaped tiles in two shades of blue that wrapped around the top of the water line, which made the water sparkle an inviting turquoise color, and they’d added a cement patio between the pool and the house, just big enough for an outdoor dining table and a couple of lounge chairs. The pool was heated, so Jerry could use it practically year-round, and from May to October, it was the gathering point for the neighborhood.

  “When you have a pool in your backyard, all the kids end up in your backyard,” Susan noted. Betty loved having all the children around, but she also didn’t want to be roped into sitting out there all summer long as a lifeguard. If a child was going to swim in their pool, Jerry and Betty required the child’s parents to sign a release that stated: “We are not lifeguards. If your son or daughter is coming to swim, they need to be able to swim, and you will not hold us liable if anything happens to your child.”

  Of course, there were incidents. There was the time Jerry and Betty had gone to the Greenbrier—a favorite resort for members of Congress, just four hours from Washington in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia—for a weekend getaway and came home to find Susan’s face bandaged from chin to ears. She’d slipped into the pool—most likely while being chased—and her chin had caught the edge as she slipped underwater. Another time, a neighbor girl, who was babysitting the Ford kids, tried to jump from one corner to the other, fell and scraped her shins, and wound up in the emergency room.

  Despite the minor injuries over the years, the pool provided endless hours of fun for the family, and created a beautiful backyard setting in which Betty and Jerry could entertain their friends.

  Every so often, however, they’d find things in the pool that weren’t supposed to be there.

  “One of my strongest memories,” Steve Ford recalled with a laugh, “is of Mother dealing with all the childhood pets we brought home.” There were fish tanks and aquariums for snakes, chameleons, and turtles.

  “We had rabbits, hamsters, gerbils—you name it, we had it,” Susan added. And one day Steve convinced his mother to let him get an alligator.

  “At the time, I guess it was legal,” he said. “You could go down to the pet store and get a small alligator.” It started out being just a few inches in length, like a gecko, but it grew and grew until it got to be a couple of feet long. The boys would catch live crickets, and an occasional mouse for it to eat, but mostly they’d feed it store-bought ground beef. As the gator got bigger, it required a lot of ground beef. On top of that, “It would bite you every time you got near it,” Steve recalled.

  Finally, the pet alligator grew so large, Betty insisted it had to be kept outside, so the boys built a box for it in the backyard. One day it got out and decided to take a swim.

  “I’ll never forget; Mom and Dad were just beside themselves,” Steve remembered. “The alligator had gotten loose and was swimming in the pool.” It was his pet and his responsibility to get it out. So he piled on layers of clothes in case it bit him, jumped in the pool, and roped him out. It was just a question of time. Something had to be done about the alligator.

  As the nights started getting colder, Steve would bring the alligator into a pen in the basement each night. “But Mother ended up doing it most of the time,” Susan recalled, “like most mothers do.” And one night, Betty decided to let nature take its course.

  The next morning, Steve realized he’d forgotten to bring his reptile inside the night before, and when he went to check on it, the alligator was stiff as could be. There had been a frost overnight, and the poor creature had succumbed to the cold. Betty wrote, “Clara helped dig the grave in the backyard, and the horrid pet was buried with all due ceremony, a cross planted over its head.” There would be many more pets in the Ford household, but never another alligator.

  When Jerry was traveling, he made it a point to call home every night after dinner. Betty would line up the four children, and each one would spend about five minutes talking to Dad, telling him about his or her day.

  “He called to say that he was sorry he was gone; he missed us,” Mike Ford recalled. “Checking how the football was going or the schoolwork. And then he’d say, ‘Take care of Mom. Do what Mom says. Be good for Mom.’ He counted on us to be as helpful as we could.” Once the kids were all in bed, Jerry would call again and talk to Betty. That time was just for the two of them. By then, Betty would have poured herself a nightcap—her way to unwind after catering to everyone else’s needs all day long.

  When he returned home on the weekends, Jerry would inevitably need to go to his office at the US Capitol to catch up on mail and other issues that had accumulated in his absence. To give Betty a break from being with the kids all week, he’d bring them up to the Capitol with him.

  “The first thing he would make us do was sit down and type a note to our mother,” the Ford children recalled. One by one, they’d sit on Dad’s leather chair behind the desk, sitting up on their knees when they were too small to reach, and slip a blank sheet of paper behind the roller of the black Royal typewriter. They’d hunt and peck for the letters and tap away a short note that told their mother how much they appreciated her, and often, at their father’s suggestion, adding a line about how hard Dad was working.

  “Dear Mom, you’re the greatest Mom. We love you, stuff like that,” Steve remembered.

  Jerry would proofread the letters, offering suggestions, and then they’d sign them, fold them up, and put them in an envelope to take home to Mother. Once that task was finished, Jerry would say, “Okay. You’re free to go. Be back by three o’clock.”

  For the next couple of hours, the hallowed halls of the US Capitol became their playground. They’d play hide-and-seek in Statuary Hall, sneaking behind the towering figures of Daniel Webster, Ethan Allen, and Jefferson Davis. They’d run up and down the endless
marble staircases and find their way to the underground subways with the wicker carts that led to the office buildings. “We’d ride them back and forth,” Susan recalled with a smile, her eyes twinkling with the memory. “But we’d always get lost, and we’d have to ask a Capitol policeman. ‘I’m Jerry Ford’s daughter, and I can’t find my way back to his office, and I don’t know what dome I’m under.’ ” The Capitol policemen were always kind and helpful, happy to guide them back to Congressman Ford’s office.

  Jerry’s staff would always know when the kids had been there.

  “They would take all the things off the top of our desks and hide them, or exchange names,” Jerry’s longtime assistant Anne Holkeboer recalled. “We had name plates on each desk, so my name might be in somebody else’s desk, and all the little items that you just kind of keep on your desk—they were gone.” Eventually the staff learned to clear their desks on Friday afternoons, just in case.

  Later, when Jerry and the children returned home and presented Betty with the letters, she’d open them one by one, always as if it were the first time and she was getting some great surprise. She’d read the letters aloud with a big smile on her face.

  “How grown up you are to have typed such a letter,” she’d say. “I’ll treasure this beautiful note from you.”

  And she did. Betty tucked them away in a drawer and kept every single one. Of course, she knew Jerry had put them up to it, and after reading the letters, she’d always give him that look—that special look they had between each other when no words were necessary. Even though the letters were from the kids, it was Jerry’s way of telling her how much he appreciated and loved her. He knew she carried the load of raising the children—managing the day-to-day activities, being the disciplinarian—and he knew it wasn’t easy.

  “She ran our house because Dad was gone so much,” Susan said. “She was strict about things like homework and bedtime and respect. Respect your elders.” If someone got out of line, she’d send them to their room or take away television privileges. Betty wasn’t any easier on Susan just because she was the only girl and the youngest. If Susan started a fight with the boys, and it turned into a wrestling match on the floor—which happened a lot—Susan would cry out, “Mom! Mom! Mom!”

  Betty wouldn’t fall for it. “Don’t expect me to bail you out of this,” she’d say to Susan. “You picked your fight, now fight your fight.”

  “They were not rescuers,” Susan said of her parents’ disciplinary style. They were intent on making sure their children understood there were consequences for what they did—whether it was lying or stealing or not being on time. “With three boys and a girl, and with Dad gone so much of the time, Mom had no choice but to be strict,” Susan said. “It was the only way she could survive.”

  There was no “Wait until your father gets home” for a decision about discipline. “When they misbehaved, I made the decision right then and there,” Betty recalled.

  When Jerry wasn’t traveling, he tried to spend as much time as possible with the kids. Once they started playing Little League baseball and youth football, Betty would drive the boys out to the field, but Jerry would show up as soon as he could get away from work. At home, everyone in the family, including Betty, fought to have time alone with him.

  “Dad would always come home and take a swim,” Susan remembered. “That was his way of unwinding.” He’d swim for fifteen or twenty minutes, go upstairs and change clothes, and when he came downstairs, Betty would have a martini waiting for him.

  “They would go sit in the den, or sometimes it was out on the patio if it was a nice evening, and we pretty much knew we were not to be there. That was their time.”

  Nothing had to be said: there’d be a look, and the kids knew that meant they needed to be upstairs doing homework or feeding the dogs, taking care of other things. It was a special time for Betty and Jerry to relax together before dinner.

  Most of the time, though, Jerry wasn’t there.

  “It put a strain on the marriage,” Jerry admitted. Even though he called every night, he was all over the country, sometimes overseas, and “with four active children,” he acknowledged, “Betty had a tough obligation. She had to be not only the mother but the father.”

  At times, it was overwhelming. As the children grew, and as Jerry became more powerful in Congress, Betty began to feel like the more important her husband became, the less important she was. As he was getting all the headlines and applause, she would think: But what about me? Who do they think is making it possible for him to travel all over the United States giving speeches? And yet, for a woman who appeared on the outside to have everything, she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t perfectly happy. Like so many women, not only at that time but still today, Betty tried to find ways to cope.

  “I’d have my five o’clock drink at a neighbor’s house,” Betty wrote in her memoir. “Or even by myself, while talking on the phone with a neighbor. I’d have another while I was fixing dinner, and then, after the kids were in bed, I’d build myself a nightcap and unwind by watching television.”

  Mike, the oldest of the Ford children, didn’t think anything of it at the time. “Dad and Mom would always have an evening drink together. And they would go to cocktail parties a lot,” he recalled.

  Jerry could have a drink or two and have no problem. Meanwhile, Betty’s addiction to alcohol was in its sly infancy, its insidious effects already taking hold. Through it all, there was one member of the household who saw what was happening. She was the keeper of all their secrets and was the glue that held them all together: Clara Powell.

  7

  * * *

  A Second Mother

  Years later, when asked about Clara, Susan Ford’s voice cracked, and tears welled in her eyes. “She was my mom when my mom wasn’t home,” she reflected.

  Indeed, all four of the Ford children regarded Clara as their second mother. “We embraced her that way,” Steve said. The kids didn’t know a time when Clara wasn’t part of their household, since she had started working for the family just before Mike’s birth.

  As a young girl, growing up in Arlington, Virginia, Clara had dreamt of becoming a nurse. But like so many black girls who grew up during segregation and came from broken homes, dreams rarely turned into reality. Raised by her grandmother, Clara dropped out of high school to go to work and married Raymond at seventeen. “I really didn’t have a chance to nurse,” she said, in Betty’s 1978 memoir, “but I’ve been nursin’ ever since.”

  Whether it was the flu or chickenpox, being sick meant you got one-on-one time with Clara. “You loved it,” Susan said, “because Clara wouldn’t clean the house. She stopped. She’d make chicken soup and then cuddle up with a book and read to you. She made you feel special.”

  Every weekday morning at nine o’clock prompt, Clara would arrive at 514 Crown View Drive. For many years, she didn’t have a driver’s license, so Raymond would drive her from their home in Bailey’s Crossroads, drop her off, and return to pick her up at five.

  Betty and Clara worked together to keep the busy household running as smoothly as possible, and over the years, the two women developed a close bond.

  “She and I used to laugh about everything and nothing,” Betty recalled. At times, they’d be working alongside each other, Clara scrubbing the floor in one room, and Betty on her hands and knees in another. Betty would put on a record, and they’d be singing at the tops of their lungs. One time, they were both literally on their hands and knees singing along to the spiritual “Get Down on Your Knees and Pray.” They looked at each other and doubled over with laughter.

  “She was wonderful,” Mike Ford recalled. But she was also a disciplinarian. “My parents gave Clara permission to actually use her slipper on us, and she did when it was justified. She had to use it only once or twice, and from then on she would just grab her slipper, and we would comply.”

  With four kids in the house, there were always meals to make, dishes to wash, and
endless loads of laundry. Every morning there’d be a fresh pile of dirty clothes at the bottom of the chute in the basement, and by afternoon, they’d be cleaned, pressed, folded, and back in the drawers upstairs. Most afternoons, you could find Clara in the basement doing the ironing. When Steve was beginning to outgrow his naps, he would sneak out of his room and slide down the two flights of stairs on his behind, trying to be as quiet as possible so Clara wouldn’t notice him.

  But you couldn’t put anything past her. Like all mothers, she had eyes in the back of her head.

  “Now, Steve Ford,” Clara would say—“She always called me Steve Ford,” Steve recalled with a laugh—“Now, Steve Ford, if you’re not going to take a nap, you’re going to go to work.”

  “She taught me how to iron,” he said. “She started me on Dad’s handkerchiefs, and eventually I moved up to other things.”

  Ironing the handkerchiefs was a rite of passage for all the Ford children, but Clara made each one of them feel like it was his or her special thing.

  When the kids got home from school, Clara was always there, often pulling a freshly baked batch of cookies out of the oven or prepping dinner so that all Betty had to do when she got home after driving kids from practice or dance class or the orthodontist was heat and serve.

  “My mom made the best meatloaf,” Susan said, “but because Mother was always at luncheons and stuff all the time, Clara was the one who taught me how to cook and keep a house.”

  “Clara was a mainstay in raising the children,” Jerry Ford wrote in his memoir. He often said, “If Clara leaves us, I’ll have to quit Congress.”

  On the occasions when Betty would join Jerry on a trip somewhere, Clara would stay with the children at Crown View Drive. At night, the Ford kids recalled, “we’d all pile into Mom and Dad’s bed because everyone wanted to sleep with Clara.”

  They’d sit in bed watching Cassius Clay boxing matches—back before he was Muhammad Ali—and “wrasslin’ ” on television. “It was ‘wrasslin’,” Susan recalled with a laugh, “not wrestling.’ ” When it was time to go to sleep, Clara would get them calmed down, and as they all cuddled up together, she’d begin to sing: