Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I

by Paula Becker

  A Brandt & Brandt literary agent, Bernice Baumgarten, asked to see The Egg and I manuscript, which Betty quickly mailed to her. Baumgarten read and liked it and told Betty that she felt it “almost, but not quite, lives up to the promise of the outline.”9 She asked Betty to rework the material in narrative form rather than the diary format she’d used. She also told Betty that at fifty thousand words, the manuscript was too short: publishers wanted no fewer than eighty-five thousand words. Baumgarten suggested that Betty augment the manuscript with some biographical information to introduce readers to the narrator and her family. The details Betty added about her childhood in Butte and in Seattle, her grandmother Gammy’s outspoken eccentricities, her boisterous siblings, and her adventurous parents accentuated her loneliness when—in the book’s version of her life—her marriage separated her from her family. Betty’s funny family stories gave her readers a sense of intimacy with her and made those readers feel as though she welcomed them as family friends.

  Betty’s original manuscript had one other problem: Baumgarten felt that it ended too bitterly. “I am truly sorry about the bitterness and the fact that you believed I almost hated my husband at one point,” Betty replied. “Actually he was the most concentrate bastard that ever lived but I thought—I hoped it was not apparent. He was very handsome, very very attractive but I was definitely not the one to bring out the best in him. I tried, when writing about him, to keep my present husband, who is six feet two and very handsome and a lamb, before me but apparently I slipped. That I will fix because I am not writing a True Confession although I could and it would be a dilly.”10

  Betty’s final draft was leached of bitterness, her portrait of Bob smudged until he was only demanding, not cruel. The character became a kind of two-dimensional golem, a composite of Bob and Don. Betty’s contemporary readers did not balk at what now seems glaringly obvious about the book: there is no love or intimacy between the Betty and Bob characters.

  At the end of Egg, Bob and Betty leave their rural ranch together, bound for a modern ranch nearer to Seattle with the benefits of electricity, linoleum floors, and indoor toilets. By slanting the truth of her first marriage, Betty reinvented herself as less vulnerable, less bruised, and more in control of her own narrative. It was this new Betty who beguiled readers, a Betty who was closer to the woman Betty Heskett had become by the time Betty MacDonald wrote The Egg and I.

  Brandt & Brandt was New York’s premier literary agency during the mid-twentieth century. Literary agent Bernice Baumgarten had begun working there in 1923, first as a secretary and from 1926 as head of the book department. Baumgarten’s clients included many of the best known and most respected writers of the era, such as Raymond Chandler, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos, Shirley Jackson, Thomas Mann, Ford Madox Ford, Mary McCarthy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Clifford Odets.

  Bernice Baumgarten and Betty MacDonald were close in age and seemingly allied in temperament. Both had married in 1927: Baumgarten’s husband was the writer James Gould Cozzens, one of her first clients at Brandt & Brandt. The Baumgarten-Cozzens’s lives in Jazz Age Manhattan differed in every way from the Hesketts’ Chimacum experiences, and Baumgarten’s earnings as a successful literary agent, combined with Cozzens’s royalties, ensured more comfort than chicken farming (or perhaps moonshine) ever could. In 1929, when Betty was struggling with chickens, the rain, and infant Anne, Baumgarten and Cozzens sailed to Europe, where they spent the spring touring the continent. In 1933, when Betty failed to earn commissions selling direct mail advertising, Baumgarten and Cozzens purchased and restored an 1818 stone farmhouse in Lambertsville, New Jersey, from which Baumgarten commuted by train to New York each day. She guarded her private life completely, creating with Cozzens an almost monastic existence in order to facilitate his work.11 Bernice Baumgarten was formidable, but she found Betty MacDonald disarming. Their relationship warmed from strictly professional to cordial almost immediately.

  In October 1944, while Betty was rewriting the manuscript, Baumgarten sold The Egg and I to the publisher J. B. Lippincott on the basis of Betty’s detailed outline. Founded during George Washington’s administration, Lippincott was a gentlemanly family business with headquarters in Philadelphia and an office in New York. Betty mailed her revised manuscript to Baumgarten in February 1945. Both literary agent and publisher were delighted with Betty’s book, and Lippincott placed The Egg and I on their fall 1945 list.

  Before the book appeared, however, the story was published in serial form in the Atlantic Monthly. Launching new books via serializations in periodicals was popular during the 1940s: prepublication serialization rights were lucrative, and feeding the work to magazine readers in installments built interest and provided word-of-mouth promotion. Betty’s book appeared in the June, July, and August 1945 issues, meaning that the last issue was on the newsstand when the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing about Japan’s surrender and the end of the war in the Pacific.12

  At the last minute, Lippincott balked at the book’s title. Their suggestion: Fine Feathered Friends. Betty was appalled. “I would like to call the book The Yolk’s on Me,” she shot back to Bernice Baumgarten, “but don’t tell Lippincott, they’d probably use it.”13 Lippincott opted to keep the original title after seeing the Atlantic Monthly’s press release announcing the serialization as The Egg and I.

  The dedication of The Egg and I reads: “To my sister Mary who has always believed that I can do anything she puts her mind to.” Although the book’s official publication date was October 3, Lippincott printed the first copies in July 1945. The book was produced under the War Production Board’s austere standards, using lighter-weight paper to reduce bulk and smaller margins to yield more words per page. These measures saved paper, printing-plate metal, and labor. Because chlorine was rationed, the paper had a brown tinge. These standards began to be relaxed during Egg’s first months in print, and successive early printings show a marked improvement in paper quality.14

  From the very beginning, reader response and bookseller enthusiasm were the firepower behind Egg. Buyers ordering for bookstores and department stores liked Lippincott’s advance advertising to the trade and placed healthy orders. When advance copies arrived and they actually read the book, they increased their existing orders several fold before the book even went on sale. Lippincott increased their advertising in direct response to these buyers’ increased orders.

  The book’s explosive popularity necessitated many reprintings. Because Lippincott had trouble securing materials such as paper and cloth for binding the book, print runs were insufficient to meet the demand. Lippincott was forced to let other titles on their fall 1945 list languish, wallflowers at the party.

  Timing was crucial to Egg’s success. General nonfiction and technical books outsold fiction during the war years, when readers’ attention was focused on themes of battle. In the years before Egg’s publication, the nonfiction best-seller list included Richard Tregaskis’s Guadalcanal Diary, Gordon Seagrave’s Burma Surgeon, and Ernie Pyle’s Here Is Your War and Brave Men, among other titles. Some—like Marion Hargrove’s See Here, Private Hargrove, the Publisher’s Weekly best seller for 1942—were humorous, but most ranged from serious to grim.

  The Egg and I took the same themes of battle (with baby chicks), conflict (with uncouth rural neighbors), and endurance (Betty’s lot as a young farm wife in a physically challenging locale) and made them domestic. In Betty’s book, these wartime themes were spun into a tartly funny tale in which the true life-and-death stakes were low. Egg’s bucolic setting reminded victorious Americans of what they’d fought for. The Egg and I hit the war-numbed public as a comforting tale of survival: one woman’s successful effort to just keep getting up each morning in spite of challenges and discomfort.

  When interviewers asked what inspired her to write Egg, Betty credited it to her own frustration with the genre exemplified by Louise Dickinson Rich’s popular memoir We Took to the Woods, published by Lippincott
in 1942, in which an enthusiastic wife follows an idealistic husband back to the land and loves it. Rich’s rhapsodic account of life with her husband in rural Maine may well have set Betty’s book in motion. “No, poor Riches, we don’t have plays and music and contact with sophisticated minds, and a round of social engagements,” Dickinson Rich warbled. “All we have are sun and wind and rain, and space in which to move and breathe. All we have are the forests, and the calm expanses of lakes, and time to call our own. All we have are the hunting and fishing and the swimming, and each other.”15 In her first query to Brandt & Brandt, Betty had noted that she called her manuscript The Egg and I, but it should probably be called We Don’t Take to the Woods. “It still irritates me when women say they prefer to live without running water or electric lights. I know it’s a damn lie,” Betty said.16

  In spite of this professed disregard for the rural life, Betty’s lyrical descriptions of the Olympic Peninsula moved her readers. She wrote of mountains “so imminent they gave me a feeling of someone reading over my shoulder”; “giant virgin forests, black and remote against the sky”; the woods, “deep and cool and fragrant and treacherous with underbrush, sudden swamps and roots.” In spring, the sun appeared “a bold-faced, full-blooded little wench, obviously no kin to the sallow creature who simpered in and out occasionally during the winter.” It was country “describable only by superlatives. Most rugged, most westerly, greatest, deepest, largest, wildest, gamiest, richest, most fertile, loneliest, most desolate.”17

  The Egg and I revealed Betty’s fundamental irreverence, a Bard family quality. For the Bards, it was fine to be mean as long as you were also funny. Exaggeration was encouraged and expected. Telling a good story outranked following the Golden Rule. They had an arsenal of family slang used to convey sharp jabs: a Black Future Charlie always foresaw gloom and doom, a Hootey-Poo was snooty, a Body Thinko was oversexed.

  The Seattle painter William Cumming, who was Betty’s assistant when she worked for the National Youth Administration, remembered, “We screamed in helpless mirth . . . as Betty recounted stories that would eventually reach the world as The Egg and I. . . . Betty’s humor wasn’t kindly, nor homey, nor gentle, nor friendly. It had the malicious edge of a scalpel, and it could cut. Betty saw the flaws of the race as vicious. The fact that these flaws generally ended in hilarious pratfalls didn’t make them any less lethal in her eyes.”18

  This severe judgment of the personal flaws of others—what Margaret Bundy Callahan described as the Bard women’s particular kind of snobbery—was part of being Bard. In The Egg and I and in real life, people’s peculiarities were what Betty noticed first. They defined the person utterly, and she used them to whittle clever and easily understood portraits. If the whittling sometimes drew blood, so be it. When, with The Egg and I, she turned to “authing”—a Bard word encompassing everything that being an author entailed—Betty combined her family’s particular snobbery with her highly developed storytelling muscle.

  Describing a place where she felt she had no allies, Betty allied herself with her readers. Together, Betty and her readers explored the land and learned about (and judged) its colorful inhabitants, including the slovenly but good-natured Kettle family, her near neighbors. Betty’s Kettles are earthy. They use a doorless outhouse clearly visible from their manure-speckled kitchen, in which animals run underfoot and countless children crowd around the table.

  Betty rallies her readers against her adversaries: the often-dreary Pacific Northwest weather; the chicks, whose care requires Betty’s round-the-clock attention; and Stove, the anthropomorphized woodstove who takes Betty’s desire to use him to prepare food as a personal insult and responds accordingly. Readers laugh with Betty at the foibles of others but also at Betty’s wry descriptions of her own attempts to cope with the absurd demands of her situation.

  Betty’s snarkiness surprised and delighted her original readers, and it makes her tone seem contemporary today. One aspect of The Egg and I, however, feels decidedly dated, and that is the book’s treatment of Northwest Coastal Native Americans. “The Pacific Coast Indians whom I saw were as unlike the pictures on the Great Northern Railroad calendars as slugs are unlike dragonflies,” Betty wrote. “The coast Indian is squat, bowlegged, swarthy, flat-faced, broad-nosed, dirty, diseased, ignorant and tricky. . . . There were few exceptions among the many we knew.”19

  A modern reader flinches, but it is likely that few of her original readers even noticed these slurs. Theirs was an era rife with derogatory treatment of nearly everyone. Betty’s eventual handling of racial issues in The Plague and I three years later was different from her treatment of the Native Americans in Egg.20

  Descriptions of the Indians are not the only discordant notes for modern readers. Betty’s account of leaving baby Anne alone in a parked car, held in place by a baby blanket pinned to the upholstery and covered with a mosquito net, while she visited the canning and fancywork exhibits at the Jefferson County Fair would bring down child protective services if recounted today. But in 1945, Betty MacDonald’s book struck a cultural sweet spot, and readers rewarded her. Royalty checks soon brought in far more than the book’s five-hundred-dollar advance. Her first splurge was to install a cesspool on the Vashon property. Her second was to purchase a beaver coat and hat. “I look simply exquisite in same but as it has been a long long time since I have bought myself anything and as I never expected to have anything in fur unless I trapped and skinned it myself I am quite shaky,” she wrote Bernice Baumgarten.21

  Being suddenly flush with cash was a dizzying sensation. Immediately after the book was published, Lippincott told Betty that over six days, she had earned twenty-five-thousand dollars in royalties. “Imagine, $25,000 in six days,” Betty wrote Norah Flannery, one of her Firland roommates. “Bests [a Seattle department store] who wouldn’t even let me pay cash in their store last Christmas are imploring me to open an account and Frederick & Nelson instead of holding a conference of the entire store every time I charge a handkerchief, o.k. anything. I don’t give a damn for the fame—it is the freedom from flinching when the phone rings—the ability to stare rudely at credit managers which thrills me.”22

  Lippincott threw its publicity budget behind the book, which continued to prosper.23 The Egg and I reached the number 1 position on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list on December 23, 1945, and remained there for forty-three weeks. It remained in the top five for seven more months. Although published late in the year, The Egg and I was eighth on the Publisher’s Weekly nonfiction best-seller list for 1945. In 1946, it topped the list. The next year, Betty’s book made the list again, this time at number 7. This three-year domination was as remarkable then as it would be today.24

  In the original publication, the front of the dust jacket featured a woodcut of a farm scene by Richard Bennett, with Betty’s smiling photograph on the back.25 In all its advertising, however, Lippincott was using Betty’s face to promote the book, a strategy MacMillan Publishing had implemented with its 1944 best-selling novel Forever Amber, which featured a glamorous head shot of its attractive author, Kathleen Winsor, on the back cover. “You must admit that you look like you’re having fun,” Lippincott’s advertising director, J. A. “Mac” McKaughan, wrote to Betty about her expression in the photo. “Heavens knows these last few years have been bare enough of laughs, and it’s about time someone like you came through with an antidote to the general depression of the war period.”26 The Egg and I used humor and nostalgia as tools for moving on; and like her book, something about Betty’s photograph gave readers permission to laugh again.

  After only a few months, Lippincott moved Betty’s appealing head shot from the back cover to the front, ditching Bennett’s art.27 For her readers, the merry pinup-girl author and the yarn she spun were indivisible.28 From this point on, Egg branded Betty, and Betty branded Egg.

  On January 22, 1946, The Egg and I sold eight thousand copies in a single day. Noting this, Life magazine decided to send a phot
ographer and reporter to visit the MacDonalds. “Good God, men, don’t you realize that I haven’t done any housework since the book came out?” Betty wrote to Lippincott when she heard about the plan. “That is alright for MacDonalds who are used to hoeing our way in and out but to have Life here taking pictures of us slogging around in this fox’s den is something else again unless of course you got them to come out here by promising them the Washington Grapes of Wrath.”29

  The Life story brought national media attention to Anne, Joan, Don, and Vashon Island and gave Betty’s readers a candid view of the vivacious author. The story, “Life Goes Calling On the Author of ‘The Egg and I,’ ” appeared in the March 18, 1946, issue. The photographs gave readers more glimpses of the vivacious book-jacket Betty: reading fan mail with Anne and Joan, contemplating an egg balanced on end, visiting with friends, typing while surrounded by children, and buying eggs in a Vashon grocery.

  Eastern reporters were clamoring to meet Betty, and Lippincott pressed her to plan a book tour. Bernice Baumgarten suggested she stay home and work on a sequel to Egg, but Lippincott’s insistence and Betty’s enthusiasm for the adventure won out. Other than her childhood train trip to Auburn, New York, to meet her maternal grandparents, Betty had never traveled east.

  Betty, Don, and Sydney drove to Los Angeles and then to New York, promoting The Egg and I along the way.30 The first stop was Portland, Oregon, where their enormous suite at the Multnomah Hotel had three bathrooms: she, Sydney, and Don all took baths at once “just to be rich,” Betty wrote to her family.31 In San Francisco they enjoyed a deluxe tourists’ experience, staying at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, sipping cocktails at the Top of the Mark on Nob Hill, and touring the San Francisco Zoo and Japanese Tea Garden. Betty had never been to California. “Oh, Joanie, you and Anne would just love San Francisco—everyone here is dressed so beautifully that I felt just like I was from Alaska,” she gushed.32 They had lunch with friends in Carmel en route to Los Angeles, where Betty was feted with a cocktail party at the Beverly Wilshire.