Betty Ford: First Lady

by Lisa McCubbin

  Indeed, she wasn’t feeling courageous at all. Three weeks into the treatment, her nerves were raw. “People don’t understand the mood swings of a recovering alcoholic,” Betty explained. She went to the hospital beauty parlor, and when the stylist had cut one side of her hair very short, she looked in the mirror in horror and asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Caroline told me you wanted it short so you could swim in the pool,” the hairdresser said.

  Betty was furious. As soon as she saw Caroline, she screamed, “I could kill you for doing this to me!”

  “She was so angry,” Caroline recalled. “She was frustrated and angry, and she couldn’t take it out on the doctors or Pat, because they’d say, ‘Uh-uh-uh.’ ” There were times it got very ugly, and Caroline received the brunt of her anger.

  “Her words hurt,” Caroline acknowledged. “I was under so much pressure to make sure everything was going well, but while President Ford, Susan, and Steve came and went, I was there the whole time.” At night, Caroline would return to her motel room across the street from the hospital and fall into bed, exhausted, and, many times, crying her eyes out. “I was a mess,” she said.

  Mike and Gayle Ford came out for a weekend to attend the family sessions. “Part of it was this is a family disease,” Mike said. “And we all had to take responsibility and learn about what are the trigger points and how do you address that as a family. So, we were learning all that. New language, new responsibilities, and how to help Mom.”

  Then came another crisis. Betty’s autobiography was in galleys, ready to go to print, and the publisher called and said it wanted her to write another chapter—a chapter about her drug and alcohol addiction, and the treatment at Long Beach.

  “No, I won’t do it,” Betty said. “It has nothing to do with the book.”

  “It was a crisis,” Jerry said. “The publishers were uptight, and we had to very delicately convince Betty that it was a proper conclusion to The Times of My Life. There was no other responsible way to end the book. I felt the request of the publishers was legitimate, and the problem was to prevail on Betty, make her believe that she could, in her early recovery, be forthright and go public.”

  Chris Chase, the writer, flew out from New York. She attended sessions with Betty to understand how the treatment worked, and Betty had to relive the intervention all over again.

  After twenty-eight days in treatment, Betty was released from the hospital. More than three dozen reporters and photographers were waiting outside the front door behind a rope line along with a group of spectators.

  “Mrs. Ford, how do you feel?” a reporter called out.

  Betty smiled and said, “Just fine.” When the crowd began clapping in a show of support, she turned and gave a wave and then got into the back seat of the car.

  “I know that she felt so vulnerable,” Caroline recalled. “I wasn’t even the person in rehab, and I felt like this virgin going out into the world. You know, you live in this protective bubble for four weeks, and you don’t talk to anyone for four weeks. And I remember driving out of there, and experiencing this feeling of being so scared because now you have to do it all yourself. And that was me. Just imagine what she felt like.”

  President Ford greeted his wife with a long hug and a tender kiss when she arrived back at their home in Rancho Mirage. He was so proud of her. But then he broke the news that a group of Republicans were having a reception at the house, and she was expected to greet them. Not only that, but NBC was coming to do an interview.

  Betty broke down and cried. She begged not to have to do it, but the television crew had already arrived from New York.

  “Nobody had consulted me, nobody had consulted my doctors,” Betty said. It had been on the schedule, and no one had realized how fragile she would be, still going through drug withdrawal, which would take at least a full year. It was as if everyone thought that after four weeks in rehab she’d be completely well and able to uphold whatever duties were expected of her—just like she’d done at the White House. Feeling like she had no choice in the matter, Betty finally agreed to do it.

  She sat next to President Ford in the television room and, gritting her teeth behind the forced smile, said she was “just fine.”

  “It was a cruel intrusion,” she said later. “There was no way I should have been put under such pressure. I was upset with my husband, with politics, with everything and everybody.”

  What she was feeling inside was not apparent to the public. Across the country, people were lauding her courage.

  “What she has done is the most significant advance in the history of alcohol treatment,” said Dr. Luther Cloud, president of the National Council on Alcoholism, in New York. “This might well mark the end of the stigma.”

  At Alcoholics Anonymous, there was hope that Betty Ford’s courage would increase the recognition that “alcohol addiction is a physical disease, not a moral sin.”

  President Carter had invited President and Mrs. Ford to the White House for the unveiling of their official White House portraits, and on May 24, 1978, barely two weeks after her release from Long Beach, Betty was back at the White House—the first time she’d been there since Inauguration Day the year before.

  During the ceremony, President Carter said, “Betty Ford has earned the admiration of our nation for her courage and complete candor. She is the most popular person in our country today.”

  24

  * * *

  Recovery

  Letters started arriving by the thousands. “When we got back from Long Beach, there were two huge garbage bags full of letters,” Caroline Coventry remembered. The letters came from people whom she had helped, people who understood her situation, people who were looking at friends and family who had problems. “They were the most unbelievable letters you can even imagine,” Caroline said.

  Caroline would open and read the letters, and while she knew Betty couldn’t possibly read each and every one, Caroline would take the most poignant letters to her.

  “I always made sure she had the letters that were really interesting and really hit the point, whether it was about alcoholism and drugs or whether it was a really nice letter written to her about people she had helped in general.”

  Betty wanted Caroline to type personal responses to every letter, but it was an impossible task. Finally, they agreed to order cards with standard responses to send as acknowledgments.

  “I ordered Crane stationery with the initials EBF on it like it was water,” Caroline recalled.

  “I was on a high because my life was all coming together,” Betty recalled. “Everybody was happy with me, I’d gone and done something about my alcoholism and drug dependency, I was the apple of everyone’s eye.”

  Betty was beginning to eat healthy, and she’d learned that exercise needed to be a key component of each day. At first, she had the feeling that after her twenty-eight-day crash course and treatment, she didn’t need to attend AA meetings every day. But the first months of recovery were not easy. Staying sober was hard work. Those who had been in recovery far longer knew how easily one could relapse. Dr. Cruse had introduced Betty to another female recovering alcoholic named Meri Bell Sharbutt, who took Betty under her wing. A former big band singer, Meri Bell made sure to call Betty daily and accompanied her to AA meetings every single evening. At the meetings, people inevitably came up to Betty and introduced themselves, and it was Betty’s habit to be gracious to anyone who approached her. That always got a reprimand from Meri Bell.

  “You’re not here to play former first lady,” Meri Bell would scold. “You’re here for the same reason the rest of us are here. To stay sober and work the program to the best of your ability.”

  “Once in a while, during the first year of my sobriety, I felt like a Martian,” Betty wrote. As she sat in those AA meetings and listened to stories of young women prostituting themselves to get drugs or alcohol, using four-letter words Betty had never uttered in her life, she could not see any refl
ection of herself. But over time she began to understand that she did indeed share the same disease as those women, and also their hopes for a drug- and alcohol-free future.

  Betty still had arthritis and debilitating pain in her neck, but now she had to rely on massage, hot packs, and hot showers for relief. Her emotions were fragile too.

  When they first got to Vail that summer, she was in her bedroom one day, lying on hot packs, and she saw a mouse running along the floorboards. It wasn’t unusual—the house was in a wooded area—but when she saw two mice one day, she mentioned it to Jerry and Jon, the house caretaker.

  “Do you realize we’ve got mice?” she asked. “They come out of the closet, run across the room, behind the television, over the draperies, and then go back into the closet.”

  Jerry turned to Jon and said with a smile, “She must be drinking again.”

  He was kidding, and had no idea how what he thought was a flippant joke would make her feel. She held her tongue in front of Jon, but later, when they were alone, she said, “I know you were kidding, but you have no idea how raw my wounds are. So please don’t ever say anything like that to me again, particularly in front of someone else. Because it hurts.”

  And although she had openly admitted being alcoholic—and had been praised for it—there was still a measure of denial that was easily fed by seemingly innocent comments. Friends would say, “Oh, Betty, you just can’t be alcoholic. I never saw you when you were out of it.”

  And Jerry would pipe in, “Well, you know she never had any trouble with alcohol until she got tangled up with those pills.”

  “This was dangerous stuff for me to hear,” Betty admitted. “I had to turn it off and go back to my support groups. Because the voice of the siren, murmuring, ‘You were never an alcoholic,’ fed my own denial.”

  It was truly one day at a time. There were plenty of times when she was tempted. During a trip to New York City a few months into her recovery, she and Jerry were hosting a dinner party in their hotel suite at the exclusive Pierre for some of the NBC executives. The hotel staff knew that during past stays, President and Mrs. Ford typically liked to have a martini in their suite at a certain time each night. No one had directed otherwise—and Jerry still enjoyed his martini—so a pitcher of martinis was delivered to their room prior to the party.

  Betty looked at the pitcher and thought how nice it would be to have a small drink—it would help her be calm and cool when the guests arrived. If she took a small amount and poured it in a bathroom glass, no one would ever know. She wrestled with the decision, like the cartoon of an angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, each trying to persuade her what to do.

  She didn’t drink the martini. “The evening went beautifully,” she recalled, “and I realized I could do it without my old crutch.” She was learning that sobriety was progressive, just like alcoholism was progressive. Betty Ford would reflect often on that one decision—so small to some, but enormous to the recovering alcoholic—which would give her the strength she needed to face many other challenges and events.

  Throughout that summer of 1978, Betty had been thinking about something she’d long wanted to do that would give her even more confidence and make her feel good about herself: she wanted to have a face-lift.

  “The president was very supportive,” Caroline Coventry remembered. “Whatever she wanted.” Doctors were interviewed, and Betty finally decided on an Iranian doctor in Palm Springs. There was some concern because she needed to go under general anesthesia, but Dr. Cruse and Dr. Pursch closely supervised the procedure at Eisenhower Medical Center to ensure that only minimal medication was used.

  As with everything she did, Betty was open about her face-lift. And while there was plenty of criticism, Betty lifted the veil of secrecy on the procedure, giving many women the feeling that it was not only all right, but perfectly acceptable. Once again it was “the Betty Ford effect.”

  Surgeons’ offices across the nation were suddenly besieged by callers who had seen the results of Mrs. Ford’s cosmetic surgery and wanted to do the same for themselves.

  “There’s been such a precipitous increase in face-lifts that I have a four-month delay,” one plastic surgeon in Chicago said.

  Betty’s memoir, The Times of My Life, had been delayed to allow for the addition of the chapter about her stay in Long Beach, and in early November, it was finally published. On November 9, Reader’s Digest magazine threw a star-studded party at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel for two hundred Ford family friends and former members of President Ford’s administration to celebrate the launch of the book and the remarkable woman herself.

  Betty looked stunning in a flowing chiffon gown in varying shades of peach and coral, her hair styled and makeup applied professionally to enhance her “new” face, which was being revealed in public for the first time. Barely six months into her recovery, it was a huge event, putting Betty into the spotlight—not something the professionals at Long Beach would have advised—but Betty loved it.

  Henry Kissinger was master of ceremonies, and his monologue, delivered in his thick German accent, had the crowd roaring with laughter. In response to rumors circulating that Jerry Ford was considering running for president again in 1980, Kissinger said, “Betty is supposed to be opposed to another campaign in 1980, so I asked her if she had changed her mind, and she said, ‘No,’ she still doesn’t want to be president.” After all the jokes, he got serious and said, “Betty has done more for women than anyone. She is irrepressible, joyful, and she gave class to the White House.”

  Entertainer Pearl Bailey moved around the room, singing cabaret style, and, at one point, she pulled Betty out of her seat for an impromptu soft-shoe dance. “My sister,” Pearl said, “you wrote a book of courage.”

  When Tony Orlando began singing a moving rendition of “You Are So Beautiful,” President Ford took Betty’s hand, and together they danced in front of the crowd, holding each other close.

  There were so many special moments, but the most poignant one came at the end of the evening, when President Ford made his remarks at the podium. After everything he’d seen his wife go through the past six months, he had a difficult time keeping his emotions in check. Tears glistened in his eyes as he told Betty how much she meant to him and the rest of the family.

  “Thank you for putting up with us, for understanding us, for trying to help us. We cannot express adequately our gratitude, our pride, and our love for thirty years of a wonderful relationship, and we thank you so much, Betty,” he said.

  It was so moving, so evident the love between the two of them. As people in the audience wiped away tears, Betty stepped up to the microphone, grabbed her husband’s hand, and said, “This is where my strength is.” Looking around the room filled with friends representing each phase of her life—Grand Rapids, Alexandria, the White House, Palm Springs—all gathered there in her honor, she spoke from the heart, confiding in the group the surprising reflections she’d had while writing the book. “It was marvelous when we were all there in the White House,” she said. “It was one of the happiest times of my life.

  “I feel as though I have to pinch myself to realize it is all true,” she said of the evening. “I am thrilled to be here, and I thank you, everyone, for coming.”

  The Washington Post noted: “Her manner and voice bore no resemblance to the halting, stilted tone that sometimes surfaced in the days when she was overly sedated.”

  Betty was indeed riding high, and everything seemed to be going her way. Then Susan dropped a bombshell.

  For the past year or so, the Fords’ daughter had been in an on-again, off-again relationship with Chuck Vance, one of the Secret Service agents on her father’s protective detail. “It was a very rocky relationship from the beginning,” Susan said, “because he was afraid he was going to lose his job.” She argued that she wasn’t the protectee—she no longer had Secret Service protection—just the daughter of a protectee, and that shouldn’t matter. They tried to keep thei
r relationship quiet, but eventually things became so serious, Susan decided she had to tell her parents.

  “My mother was beside herself,” she recalled. Susan had just turned twenty-one, and Chuck was sixteen years older, divorced, and had two adopted children. The Secret Service immediately transferred Chuck to the field office in Riverside, California.

  “It was a surprise for everybody,” Agent Bob Alberi said. No one in the Secret Service had seen it coming. “It was a shocker; completely out of left field.”

  A few months later, Chuck was transferred to Los Angeles, and when that happened, Susan told her parents she was moving with him, and they were going to live together.

  Neither Betty nor Jerry supported the decision, and they didn’t hide their feelings.

  “I hope you’ve thought about this,” Betty said to Susan. “And I really wish you were engaged before you go and live with him.”

  That infuriated Susan. “I was throwing things back at her that she’d said,” Susan recalled. “Remember what you said on 60 Minutes?” she argued. Ironically, those words about what she would do if her daughter had “an affair” came to the forefront, but Betty and Jerry were mostly concerned about the age difference.

  “Susan was our youngest child, our only girl, and we didn’t think anybody was good enough for her,” Betty wrote.

  “There was no fondness there between my mother and Chuck,” Susan said. When the two got engaged and made plans for a February 1979 wedding, it was one of many challenges that tested Betty’s sobriety that first year.

  She admitted she had temptations. “I liked alcohol,” she said frankly. “It made me feel warm. And I loved pills; they took away my tension and pain.” Through her daily support groups, she realized that she hadn’t “got this problem licked. To the day I die,” she said, “I’ll be recovering.”

  In January 1979, President Ford was invited to the Middle East to meet with the leaders of Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel, and Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia had personally extended an invitation to Betty as well. She was just beginning to get into a routine, feeling comfortable in her home, and to go on such a long trip at this stage of her recovery, she felt, was just too soon. “I didn’t want to go out and test the waters,” she said. “This would be a semiofficial visit to the Middle East, and I wasn’t ready for a lot of responsibility.”