Betty Ford: First Lady

by Lisa McCubbin

  But Jerry urged her to join him. “I wasn’t comfortable leaving her alone for two weeks,” he admitted. Plus, after all he’d learned during the therapy sessions at Long Beach, he’d realized how important it was for their marriage for them to do things together.

  Betty felt like she was abandoning Susan at a critical time, just before the wedding, but reluctantly agreed to go.

  It turned out to be a fascinating trip at a historic time. The Shah of Iran and his wife, the Empress Farah Diba Pahlavi, whom the Fords had entertained at the White House, had just fled their home country in the midst of an uprising against the Shah’s regime, arriving in Egypt at the same time as President and Mrs. Ford. The six of them visited the city of Aswan together. In Israel, they walked the streets that Jesus had walked, and were hosted by Prime Minister Menachem Begin. In Saudi Arabia, Betty sat between Crown Prince Fahd and the Saudi oil minister, Sheikh Zaki Yamani—a very unusual occurrence in a country where men and women were always segregated at public events. In Jordan, King Hussein piloted a plane and flew Betty and Jerry over the desert to the seaside resort of Aqaba, followed by a visit to the spectacular, ancient city of Petra, where Betty and Jerry followed the trail of bedouins on camel. “I went through the two weeks, sober, clear eyed, and able to appreciate everything,” Betty recalled. “I thought about other times when my schedule had been heavy, and I’d leaned on drugs and alcohol to keep me going, and I could not remember half of what had happened.”

  One year earlier, there was no way she could have made that trip. “Now I was physically well,” she said. “I had some stamina, and I had been relieved of the obligation to keep up with whatever social drinking was being done by my companions. And I thought to myself, Hey, I’m doing all right.”

  The Fords had barely unpacked from the Middle East trip when out-of-town guests started arriving in Palm Springs for Susan and Chuck’s wedding. Clara Powell came, of course, but most of the guests, including many of the celebrities with whom they’d become friends, were people Betty had not seen since the intervention. She knew that even though Susan was the bride, many eyes would be on her, too.

  “The wedding, I think, was very hard on her,” Susan said, looking back. “She didn’t even have a year of sobriety . . . and she told some friends of mine that until the moment I walked down the aisle, she never expected me to do it.”

  They were a handsome couple: Susan, blonde and fair, in a long-sleeved white lace gown with matching veil, and Chuck, the dark-haired, Secret Service agent with a thick moustache and charming smile, dressed in a suit and striped tie. Once the vows were said, the music commenced, and the drinks started flowing.

  Betty made it through the reception, greeting their guests and family members with a smile, posing for photos, as waiters came by with trays of champagne. At times, she would go into the house, and Steve would follow her. It would be so easy for her to slip. He’d sit with her, holding her hand until she was ready to go out and mingle again. The day was all about Susan and Chuck, but at one point, Tony Orlando grabbed Betty and went up to the microphone. As he sang his famous “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” Betty laughed and danced right alongside him, just as she’d done at the 1976 convention.

  The wedding was a milestone, and although she’d made it through without a hitch, there were times over the next few months when Betty would slip into periods of depression. She couldn’t figure out why she was feeling so blue. Everything seemed to be going great in her life. What was missing?

  “That first year of recovery, I just wanted to get my own life turned around,” Betty said. “But always there was the mail.” Those first two garbage bags full of mail that came when she was at Long Beach were only the beginning. Every day, there were more letters: “I need help.” “Please help, how did you do it? Tell me the formula.”

  Ever since she first left Long Beach, the former first lady had balked at suggestions to share her story of recovery with others. She didn’t want to preach. She didn’t want to go around talking about herself. That’s just not who she was.

  On her sixty-first birthday, one year and a week after the family intervention, she received a call from her next-door neighbor and close friend, Nicky Firestone, that would change everything.

  25

  * * *

  The Betty Ford Center

  It was to be a birthday dinner for Betty—a special celebration of not only her birthday but also one year of sobriety. The Fords had invited Pat Benedict to stay for a few days at the house, to help celebrate the momentous occasion.

  The afternoon of Betty’s birthday party, Nicky Firestone called and said, regrettably, she and her husband would not be able to attend. “Leonard is in terrible shape,” Nicky confided.

  Leonard Firestone had struggled with alcoholism for years, and although he’d been sober for nearly a decade, the disease had struck back with a vengeance. The former ambassador was one of Betty and Jerry’s closest friends, and on this night, which meant so much to Betty, he was too drunk to attend the party next door.

  Pat went over to evaluate him. She found that he had been drinking for three or four days and was in perilous condition, with abnormally high blood pressure. A doctor was called, and between Pat and the doctor, they started giving him medication, beginning a detox process. Within forty-eight hours, an intervention was arranged with Dr. Pursch (who was now retired from the navy and had started his own rehabilitation center), Nicky, Leonard’s son Brooks, Pat Benedict, and Jerry and Betty Ford.

  Leonard was lying on the couch, as Pat Benedict rubbed his feet. “I loved that,” Leonard recalled. “I thought she was doing it to be nice.” The truth was, Pat was doing it to hold him on the couch so that he couldn’t get up and get a drink, and so he’d be there when the others walked in to begin the intervention.

  “He knew the minute we walked in what was going on,” Nicky Firestone said, “because Betty had had her intervention the year before.”

  It was terribly emotional for all of them, but no one backed down. “It’s relentless, but it’s kind,” Nicky said. “You don’t scream at each other, but you don’t give up. You keep hammering until the alcoholic gives in.”

  Once Leonard heard everyone tell him how his drinking had hurt each of them, he agreed he had a problem and said he’d be willing to go to AA. But Betty knew AA alone wouldn’t be enough. She understood the denial that was going through his mind; she’d been in the same place just one year earlier.

  “No, no, no, Leonard,” Betty said. “You’re going to go to treatment.”

  President Ford stood strong too. “You’re my best friend, Leonard,” he said, “and I’m not going to let you lie over here and die.”

  Finally, realizing he had no choice, Leonard agreed to be admitted to Dr. Pursch’s treatment center and spend four weeks in rehab.

  “It was really beautiful how it all came together,” Caroline Coventry reflected. “Mrs. Ford had come full circle. She had recovered enough to acknowledge things in this way, and she and President Ford were working as a team.”

  But what was also occurring, in the year since Betty’s intervention, was the way people were beginning to view alcoholism.

  At first, Leonard Firestone was ashamed that he hadn’t been able to control his drinking. “It was my second go after nine years of sobriety,” he said. But when he got to Pursch’s treatment center and had to cancel some business appointments and a golf match, he told everyone, “I’m at rehab. I’m doing the same thing Betty Ford did.”

  Around the time that Firestone went into treatment, President Ford went to his doctor and said he felt like he needed to lose about ten pounds. The doctor said, “That’s easy. Either give up your nightly martini or give up your butter pecan ice cream.” That was a no-brainer for Jerry Ford. He loved his ice cream. He had never been much of a drinker, and now, with his best friend and his wife not drinking, he realized he didn’t need it either. He stopped drinking and from that day forward, never touched alcohol again.

>   When Leonard Firestone came out of treatment, people noticed something different about him: he seemed to exude an inner peace that hadn’t been there before. Walter Annenberg, a former ambassador to Britain, billionaire publisher, and philanthropist, was a close friend to the Fords as well as the Firestones. Annenberg found the change in Leonard so striking and so positive, he asked him bluntly, “What did they give you in treatment? What is it that you have found?”

  “I found I was allergic to alcohol,” Leonard said. “You might say I’ve got a busted filter. I used to be able to drink, but I can’t drink anymore, so I’ve learned to let go.” But beyond the physical enlightenment, he’d found there was a spiritual factor as well. “I’ve learned I needed love and understanding and help from counseling and a higher power.”

  Walter Annenberg had seen the change in their mutual friend Betty, and now, seeing the dramatic change in Leonard, he had an idea. “You and Betty should put your heads together to come up with a plan for starting an alcoholic treatment center.”

  As soon as Leonard hung up the phone, he called Betty, filled with excitement.

  “You know,” he said, “we’ve got this disease—it’s almost killed us both—and yet we have the means and the influence to help turn this around. We could help a lot more people to address addiction in their lives. Let’s talk about starting a treatment center.”

  At first, Betty wasn’t so sure about being involved—she was only a year sober herself. What did she know about starting a treatment center?

  “Mom was a bit reluctant to jump right into that so soon,” Mike Ford recalled, but Leonard wouldn’t give up.

  One of the things they’d both learned in treatment was that you have to give it away to keep it. In other words, you have to help others—by giving them your knowledge, your emotion, your compassion—in order to keep it for yourself.

  You have to give it away to keep it.

  Betty couldn’t forget how being honest and forthright about her breast cancer and mastectomy had helped thousands of women and had undoubtedly saved thousands of lives. She realized that perhaps her personal battle with alcoholism and addiction could do the same thing.

  It was as if the stars had aligned, and every challenge, every success she’d had in her life had brought her to this moment. “With my recovery, and Leonard’s recovery, and Walter Annenberg’s awed response to Leonard’s serenity,” she recalled, “everything changed.”

  And then, Mike Ford recalled, “She got fired up! I mean, really, she got really fired up!”

  “That was a huge moment,” observed Caroline Coventry. “Mr. Firestone was such a gentle, wonderful man, and he and Mrs. Ford had this special bond; I think they kept each other sober. And when they decided to join forces, it was a beautiful thing.”

  Both Leonard and Betty served on the board of the Eisenhower Medical Center, and their vision was to have a stand-alone facility on the same property. In fact, Dr. Joe Cruse had been trying to start a treatment center in the Palm Springs–Rancho Mirage area known as the Coachella Valley for years, but he hadn’t had much luck. Sixteen years earlier, he had seen golf course communities with little cottages around them, with a central pod, and he had a vision for a treatment center based upon that configuration. He had even put together slides of how it would look, but he couldn’t get the financial backing for it.

  As a successful businessman, Leonard Firestone knew they’d need to prove the necessity for such a facility, so the first step was to develop a Chemical Dependency Recovery Hospital (CDRH) Task Force, on which Betty and Leonard were cochairs.

  Bob Hope’s wife, Dolores, had also witnessed Betty’s remarkable transformation, and as a board member of the hospital, she knew the issue well.

  “We were having a problem at Eisenhower because we were getting alcoholic patients, and under the provisions of an acute-care hospital, we weren’t really supposed to take them in,” Mrs. Hope explained. Nationwide, the common practice was that alcoholics were given four or five days’ inpatient treatment in an acute-care facility and then released. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to stay sober for a few weeks and then start drinking again. Hospitals weren’t equipped to deal with this revolving door of alcoholics, and often they wouldn’t admit them unless they had some other illness or symptoms such as chest pain or a stomach disorder that the physicians knew how to treat.

  Betty and Leonard traveled around the country gathering information from other treatment centers and took the best ideas from each. Hazelden, in Center City, Minnesota, was the most well-known and respected treatment center, known for its “Minnesota Method” for treating addiction. It had started in 1949 in an old white farmhouse on the banks of a lake, where “gentlemen” could get away to address their “problem” of alcoholism by attending daily lectures based on the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, and sharing their stories with other men. Originally known as Hazel’s Den for a former owner of the farm, its reputation grew and its mission expanded, eventually accepting women patients as well.

  One thing that concerned Betty was that every place they went had far fewer female patients than male. She knew women were just as likely to become alcoholic as men, so why weren’t more women coming forward?

  Betty and Leonard developed a proposal for a residential facility that would “provide low-cost, comprehensive alcoholism services on the campus of the Eisenhower Medical Center, Rancho Mirage, California.” The proposal noted that “alcoholism is our number one public health problem,” and that ignorance about it needed to be addressed and managed as the “family and societal disease it is.”

  Leonard and Nicky Firestone immediately offered $500,000, which was matched by another $500,000 courtesy of friends Leon and Barbara Parma via their charitable trust, the McCallum Desert Foundation. With $1 million in pocket, Leonard and Betty set out to raise several million dollars more to turn their dream into a reality.

  Caroline Coventry had been Betty’s assistant for nearly two years—two years in which she’d been at Mrs. Ford’s side almost constantly, through her downward spiral after leaving the White House, the trauma of the intervention and detox, the reckoning at Long Beach, and the stressful, tenuous first year of recovery. Emotionally, the experience had taken its toll on Caroline, and now it was time for her to move on.

  “I don’t think I realized until much later that I was there for a reason,” Caroline said. “I was there for that transition in her life, and then when she began to get well, it had to be time for me to leave.”

  Caroline realized that Betty needed someone to come in fresh. Someone who didn’t know the past. Hadn’t experienced the trauma.

  “If people could just see in hindsight, they’d say, ‘Oh, that was a cinch, if I could have just seen it,’ ” Caroline reflected. “But you can’t. You have to go through the pain before you can get to the beauty. You can’t appreciate what you get in the end without going through the pain.”

  Shortly after Caroline left, Betty received an invitation to attend a party in New York at which Martha Graham was going to be presenting fashion designer Roy Halston Frowick—known simply as Halston—with an award. Betty had yet to replace Caroline, so she asked Penny Circle, a young secretary on President Ford’s staff, to join her.

  “Have you ever been to New York City?” Mrs. Ford asked Penny.

  “No,” she said. “I spent the first ten years of my life in North Dakota, and then I’ve been in California ever since.”

  Betty was excited to show Penny everything she loved about New York, and for Penny, it would be a jaw-dropping experience. They stayed at the Waldorf, one of the Big Apple’s iconic hotels, and the party was to be held at Studio 54—the hottest nightclub in the city.

  The evening began with a private dinner at Halston’s contemporary townhouse at 101 East Sixty-Third Street. It was an intimate group that included Betty and Martha Graham, and two of Halston’s favorite, and most famous, clients: Liza Minnelli and Elizabeth Taylor. The ladies were all dressed
in exquisite Halston designs: Taylor in a sapphire dress that matched her eyes and Minnelli in a purple gown with a skin-bearing cutout from her throat to her ribs—but Betty stood out, looking positively regal in a pale-apricot gown adorned with swirling patterns of sequins. After dinner, the group headed over to Studio 54, and that’s where the party really began.

  “It was wall-to-wall celebrities,” Penny recalled. The nightclub had become a magnet for New York’s fashion designers, socialites, and celebrities from all over the world. Mick Jagger, Olivia Newton-John, Andy Warhol, and Michael Jackson all frequented the club, and in this era between the advent of the birth control pill and the ominous dawning of the AIDS epidemic, Studio 54 had become notorious for its hedonistic atmosphere of casual sex, booze, and open drug use. It was not the kind of place you’d expect to see the former first lady a year after she’d come out of rehab.

  As soon as they arrived, Halston and his group were scuttled downstairs to a private room that was exclusively for very, very important persons: the VVIPs. It was a testament to Betty’s strength and commitment to her sobriety that she was even able to be in a place like that, where all around her, people were drinking and using drugs. But, having just gone through the intervention with Leonard Firestone, she was more determined than ever not to backslide. She danced and mingled, savoring the experience, completely sober.

  Chris Chase, the writer who had helped Betty with her book, was there that night, too, and at one point, she and Penny went into the ladies’ room together. There was a row of sinks, and all along the counter were rows and rows of white powder, arranged very delicately and precisely into straight lines.