Betty Ford: First Lady

by Lisa McCubbin

  In a letter to a friend, Caroline wrote, “They treat me just like family. I eat dinner with them, with their whole family. Never have I known such a nice family. They treat you as one of the tribe, and it is a real pleasure. Susan is like a sister, and Mrs. Ford takes a joke just like my mother. Normal dinner conversation is about what’s the latest in the White House.”

  In those first couple of months in Vail, however, Caroline could see that her new boss had a problem: she was relying on too many pills. Caroline’s father was a doctor, but she’d grown up in a household in which nothing stronger than aspirin was ever prescribed. Still, she could easily recognize the signs.

  “There were good days and bad days, and it all depended on how much medication she took,” Caroline recalled. Others noticed it too. While writing an article about the Fords’ post–White House life for New West magazine, reporter Mary Murphy interviewed friends and acquaintances in Vail, including a waitress at Pepi’s Restaurant who told her that Mrs. Ford had been through “a bad summer. She walks slowly, she eats slowly, she smiles slowly, as if it hurts her to move.”

  Indeed, when Murphy first met Betty in Vail, she noted that “Betty Ford looked five years older than she did last November. Her cheeks were puffy, her skin pale, her green eyes dulled and distant, and her words, although quite coherent, were spoken with the uncertainty of someone learning English.”

  Sheika Gramshammer chalked it up to her pain. “Poor darling, we thought, she can’t get through an evening without pain pills. And every once in a while, she might have one bourbon too many, but everybody does that sometimes.”

  The signs were there, but no one spoke about it. Caroline Coventry thought, This is the former first lady. She has the best medical treatment available. Surely someone has spoken to her about this. Surely.

  At the end of the summer, it was time to return to Rancho Mirage. Susan Ford had been attending college in Kansas but decided to leave school, move out to Palm Springs, and try to get a job as a photographer. She’d broken the news to her parents, and they’d said, “Fine, but we’re not going to support you financially.” They’d help her buy a condo, but then she was on her own.

  President and Mrs. Ford had purchased a plot of land on the Thunderbird Country Club golf course in Rancho Mirage, next door to their good friends Leonard and Nicky Firestone, and were in the process of designing and building a house. Betty hired a well-known and much sought-after Beverly Hills interior decorator named Laura Mako to help furnish their new residence.

  “They went from a modest life in a very modest suburban house to the White House, and this was the first time she had ever worked with an interior designer or even had the option of buying new furniture,” Caroline recalled. “It gave Mrs. Ford something to do. Something to concentrate on. She thought it was fun and exciting to be in this position. This was a whole new adventure, and she was enjoying it, especially since there was an additional expendable income they had not experienced before.”

  Indeed, for the first time in their lives, Jerry and Betty had some extra money to spare. There were the presidential and congressional pensions he’d earned, but the bigger money came from the NBC contract and $1 million joint book deal. On top of that, President Ford was in high demand for speaking engagements, and he was as surprised as anyone to realize he could make $10,000 for one speech. He was traveling all over the country, and in May 1977 alone, he was gone twenty-eight out of thirty-one days. Meanwhile, Betty was in Rancho Mirage, still at the rented house. Laura Mako noticed that as they were choosing furniture and fabrics, there were times Betty would take a pill and then drift off. Some days, Laura would have to go over the same things they’d covered the day before. Of course, she couldn’t say anything. This was the former first lady.

  In addition to the decorating, Betty was working with writer Chris Chase on her autobiography. They had a routine in which Chase would come over to the house in the morning, and they’d sit together talking, “Betty going on and on and on,” as Chase recorded it. “She was not a hard person to work with,” Chase said, and everything would be fine until about lunchtime. Chris never saw her take any pills, but Betty might have a drink at lunch, and after that, “we really couldn’t work,” Chase said. “Right after lunch, we’d just give it up.”

  Caroline Coventry didn’t observe Betty’s drinking during the day, but she did notice that her employer was always very thirsty. “She always had iced tea. And she’d carry a glass of water around with her in a highball glass.” Caroline assumed that the mix of medications dehydrated her.

  There were luncheons and meetings Betty would attend, and when she went out, she knew only too well how to put herself together enough to be presentable in public. Caroline loved watching Mrs. Ford put on her makeup. She’d sit down at the vanity in front of the mirror, and was very serious about how she applied her eye shadow, lipstick, rouge. “It was an art that she had perfected,” Caroline recalled. “She had a lot of pride in her looks.”

  Betty didn’t exercise, but Caroline recalled that she was so flexible, “she was like a rubber band. She was amazing. I think she was just built that way.” And she maintained her slim figure simply by not eating much at all. “When you’re on that many drugs, food is not important, you’re so out of it,” Caroline explained.

  There was an immense amount of mail, and it was Caroline’s responsibility to answer every letter within twenty-four hours, along with maintaining Mrs. Ford’s schedule and basically assisting with all levels of her life.

  But every day, Caroline felt like she was wearing a “black hat.”

  “I was the bad news in the morning, because I’d be trying to get her dressed, and it felt like I was constantly hounding her. It wasn’t fun. It was hard.”

  Caroline tried to figure out new ways to get Betty up and moving, and to appointments on time.

  “I would set the clocks ahead by fifteen minutes or make the times on her schedule fifteen minutes earlier,” Caroline said. “But she was too smart for that.”

  “Oh, Caroline, you’re not fooling me,” Betty would say.

  “Sometimes she would surprise you, but basically, she was pretty predictable when she was in that state. In the state of taking all those meds,” Caroline recalled. “Everything moved very slowly. Things couldn’t get addressed because you’d ask her something, and by the time she thought about it for twenty minutes . . . it’s like, okay, do you have a decision? So it was hard to get any business done.”

  As the weeks went by, Mrs. Ford declined more and more invitations, and then the invitations stopped coming. “Her friends all sort of knew what the problem was,” Caroline said. And her friends were very active: playing tennis, golf, attending luncheons. It got to the point they just couldn’t tolerate being around her.

  “Wherever I went that fall, I was in a fog,” Betty acknowledged later. “Sometimes a euphoric fog, sometimes a depressed fog.”

  Bob Hope’s wife, Dolores, invited her to serve on the board of Eisenhower Medical Center, but while she faithfully attended meetings, Betty would sit there without saying a word. Friends began whispering that she was “kind of a zombie.”

  “She was painfully lonely,” Caroline remembered. “Susan couldn’t be there all the time and was totally burnt out with the situation, so I became her friend, her daughter, her confidant—whatever it took. It was difficult to satisfy that position because I wasn’t a very good codependent, and it took a lot of that.”

  Like anyone who lives with someone addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, Caroline felt like she was constantly treading water, trying to keep both herself and Betty from drowning. It was so mentally and physically draining, it couldn’t go on indefinitely without a casualty.

  In September 1977, Betty was scheduled to travel to Moscow as part of her deal with NBC, to narrate the Bolshoi Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker. The show would be taped and then aired in the United States in December, at Christmastime. The president’s assistant, Bob Barrett,
offered to accompany her. It was decided that instead of Caroline Coventry, it would be better for Carolyn Porembka, Betty’s former White House secretary, to go on the trip. She was used to traveling with Mrs. Ford on overseas trips, and as Caroline Coventry put it, she “knew how to take care of her. It was clear it was going to be a juggling act.”

  Even though it was just September, it was already very cold in Moscow. So cold that Betty slept with her fur coat draped over her in bed.

  In addition to Bob Barrett, Carolyn Porembka, and her Secret Service detail, Betty had a translator, and the NBC cameras that accompanied her wherever she went. It wasn’t so bad when she was touring the local sites, or the ballet school, where she interacted with the children, but when it came time to tape The Nutcracker performance, she was filled with anxiety. Sitting in the theater box with cameras on her, she was nervous about how she was coming off.

  “I was not a professional,” she wrote later, “and our three directors—a Russian, a Frenchman, and the NBC guy—spent hours yelling at each other.”

  She was so scared, she could hardly read the cue cards. “I’d sit for ages in that box, and when they excused me,” Betty said, “I’d head for the ladies’ room and take another pill.”

  22

  * * *

  The Turning Point

  While Betty was in Moscow, Caroline Coventry stayed in Rancho Mirage, handling the never-ending correspondence, trying to keep everything organized for Betty so that things would run as smoothly as possible.

  One day President Ford was away, and Caroline was alone in the house. She walked into the master bath—she was always in and out of there, assisting Betty with a zipper she couldn’t reach on a dress, helping style her hair, trying to rush her along when she was late for an appointment, organizing things in the closet—but on this day, she went to the vanity where Betty would sit and do her makeup, and opened one of the drawers.

  Oh, my God. There were dozens of prescription pill bottles, all different kinds of medication—some with dates that had expired, and others that were more recent—and as she started picking them up and reading the labels, Caroline instantly realized what was going on.

  “That was her juggling act, right there,” Caroline said. “She would take different things to compensate for different feelings during the day. She knew her meds well enough to know what she had to take to make herself feel good. She was very much in control of all of them.”

  Her mind spinning, Caroline went into the office, grabbed a notepad, and carefully listed everything in the drawer.

  “I had this legal pad, and I wrote and wrote and wrote,” Caroline said. “The amount of medicine was staggering. It filled three pages.” But then it dawned on her that this wasn’t everything. “I didn’t know half of what was in that drawer because she’d taken the other half to Moscow.”

  Caroline had no idea what the drugs were for or what they did, but she thought if she could figure it all out, she might have some idea which medications were having such a detrimental effect on Mrs. Ford’s personality. She headed straight to the pharmacy.

  “I want all the information on all these drugs and what they do,” Caroline said as she handed the pharmacist the list. The pharmacist gave her a stack of material; Caroline took it back to the house and started reading. Without a medical degree, much of the descriptions and jargon didn’t make sense to her, but she could see that Mrs. Ford had pills for pain, pills for sleep, pills for digestive problems, constipation—you name it, she had it.

  The more she learned, the more terrified she became. If Mrs. Ford was taking these meds, mixing and matching them by her own volition, it was like she was playing Russian roulette. Caroline was so distraught, she made the bold decision to go straight to Mrs. Ford’s doctor in Palm Springs.

  Dr. Williamson, a general physician in his late sixties or early seventies, was “old school,” Caroline recalled. “I felt the need to talk to him. I wanted him to know that his prescribing these meds was having an adverse reaction on Betty Ford that, in turn, was affecting her family, friends, and social environment. It was a matter of ethics.”

  The receptionist led Caroline into Dr. Williamson’s office. He was sitting behind a big wood desk next to a window with a view of the mountains. It was a gray day, and Caroline was struck by the fact that the only light in the room came from the cabinet behind the desk. Framed certificates of the doctor’s medical degrees hung on the walls.

  Caroline’s father was a doctor, and she had a tremendous amount of respect for the medical profession. But after discovering the massive amounts of medication this doctor had prescribed to Mrs. Ford, she could hardly contain the fury that was building inside her.

  She sat down on the edge of the chair as if she wouldn’t be there too long. And she wasn’t.

  “Why are you giving all these drugs to Mrs. Ford?” Caroline implored as she waved the filled legal pages in front of him. And then, looking straight into his eyes, she blurted out, “You’re going to kill her!”

  Dr. Williamson looked away and sighed. “I thought she’d never come back if I didn’t give her what she asked for.”

  Caroline’s stomach was churning. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Give me any kind of answer, but don’t tell me that, she remembered thinking to herself. She was beyond distraught. Now what? she thought as she stormed out of the office. She couldn’t tell President or Mrs. Ford what she’d done. It was a complete betrayal of confidence, and she’d most certainly be fired. But she had to do something.

  Caroline wondered how long this had been going on. Since the White House? Before? A few members of the household staff had come to Rancho Mirage from the White House, and she broached the subject cautiously with one of them.

  “When he told me the routine in the White House, I had this vision of two hands, outstretched with palms up, and someone giving her a handful of pills in one hand and a vodka in the other,” Caroline remembered. She was seething.

  “To this day, that image of the two hands, pills in one and a drink in the other, and knowing how it affected Betty Ford, is a constant reminder to never mix the two.”

  The problem was, however, that in the White House, the staff served at the pleasure of the first lady, and even though they saw what was going on, it would have been extremely difficult not to fulfill her requests. It wasn’t the staff’s position to tell the president’s wife what she should or shouldn’t do. “It was the hardest thing for me to accept,” Caroline said. “That somebody would give her alcohol and medication at the same time.”

  She decided she had to speak to President Ford.

  Up to this point, Caroline had had little interaction with the former president, and when she did, it was very formal. Typically, she would discuss something with Bob Barrett, and then Bob would take it to the president. But Bob was in Moscow with Mrs. Ford, and because this was such a personal issue, she decided to go directly to President Ford.

  She caught him alone in his office one day and said, “President Ford, we have to do something. Mrs. Ford is taking all these drugs, and it’s not working.”

  President Ford looked at her and, with a weariness in his voice, said, “Caroline, we have done everything we can. We’ve sent her to psychiatrists, we’ve sent her to doctors, massage therapists, acupuncture. There’s nothing left to do.”

  He was filled with despair. Within the past eight months, he’d seen his wife deteriorate into someone who barely resembled the vivacious, active woman he had married. He still loved her, deeply, but Caroline got the feeling that he had made peace with the fact that this was the way life was going to be from now on. When he traveled, he didn’t have to deal with it. And golf was his escape.

  “They rarely quarreled,” Caroline said. “He just appeased her. It was the easiest way to deal with it.”

  That fall, Susan bought a condominium in Palm Springs, and Caroline moved in with her to share expenses.

  “Caroline would come home and tell me all the
god-awful things about my mother that day,” Susan recalled. “So the two of us would talk about it. But neither of us knew what to do.”

  “Susan was really there for me as a sounding board,” Caroline said. “She was the only one that really understood what I was seeing, hearing, and thinking.”

  Because Caroline was often alone with Betty day in and day out, she was the target of Betty’s mood swings and unreasonable demands. “She didn’t realize she was hurting me,” Caroline said, her eyes welling with tears as the painful memories returned. “She didn’t know because she was too drugged out. She didn’t know how she affected her children or her husband. It’s not any one moment. It’s the overall hurt that you get. You put up with it. You tried as hard as you could to get beyond it any way you possibly could. It was a daily challenge.”

  Susan, too, found it incredibly difficult to be around her mother at that time. Sometimes she’d visit her father in his office and avoid her mother completely. And there were times when her mother had committed to an event, but then it would come time, and both Susan and her father would realize Betty was in no condition to be in a social situation.

  “She would say her neck hurt, and then she’d take a pill and wouldn’t feel like doing her hair and makeup,” Susan recalled. “I was more the parent in the relationship, and I protected her.”

  So Jerry would tell everyone Betty had the flu, and often Susan would go in her place. “Dad and I covered for her.”

  Betty would often call Susan and say, “Come over, and let’s have lunch and go shopping.”

  “I’d get over to the house at eleven thirty or eleven forty-five, and she was still in her robe,” Susan recalled. “And it was like watching someone in slow motion getting dressed. It was just forever. And we’d maybe barely get out the door by two thirty to go shopping.”