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

by Paula Becker

  Just months before, Betty MacDonald had been unknown. Now, as her fame spread, every day brought her excitement. In the Southwest, she was thrilled that she and Don could stay in a real adobe house in Las Cruces and buy turquoise jewelry for Anne and Joan at an Apache trading post near El Paso. In Dallas, Betty wrote to her family, “they simply turned the city inside out for me. I had orchids to wear every minute—I had lunch and tea and in between drinks with the owners of every single store in Dallas.”33

  Stop by triumphant stop, signing Egg in bookstores as she went, Betty made her way to New York. Even sophisticated Manhattan had embraced Egg. A newspaper photograph of Betty at Brentano’s at Fifth Avenue and 47th Street, at the time the city’s largest bookstore, captured her wearing a perky hat and three strands of pearls, her manicured fingers cradling a real egg that she was carefully autographing. It was a far cry from gathering eggs in Chimacum.

  Betty was the guest of honor at the New York Herald Tribune’s book and author luncheon. Lippincott threw her a party at the Ritz-Carlton. Betty was reportedly the first woman ever asked to speak at the Dutch Treat Club, a private social club for New York literati, where she shared billing with Winston Churchill. In Washington, DC, Betty was guest speaker at the Washington Post’s book and author luncheon. For the first time, she appeared on national radio broadcasts.

  Lippincott took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times Book Review to crow about the book’s overwhelming success. The ad featured the familiar dust-jacket photo of Betty, surrounded by cartoon depictions of Egg-crazed readers unable to put their copies down: a dancing couple reading the book over one another’s shoulders; a symphony conductor clutching his baton while his eyes stray down to Egg on the music stand; a bride at the altar, engrossed in her book, ignoring minister and groom; curvy female beauty contestants parading past male judges who ignore them completely to chuckle at The Egg and I. A banner across the ad read, “Everything Else Is a Substitute.”34

  The millionth copy of The Egg and I rolled off the press in Cornwall, New York, at 11 a.m. on August 15, 1946. Publisher’s Weekly reported that Lippincott executives were there to watch. Lippincott issued statistics about the book to date: printing had required more than 207 tons of paper, which would cover 580 acres or make a one-inch tape that would reach twice around the world. If all existing copies were piled on top of one another, the tower would be more than sixteen miles high, or six times as high as Mount Rainier.35 Betty’s editor, Bertram Lippincott, told the Seattle Times, “Although The Egg is not the first book to reach the millionth mark, it is the first to have reached it in less than a year, and the first to have taken so firm a grip on the national imagination.”36 During its first year in print, The Egg and I was selling at the astonishing rate of one book every twenty-two seconds.37

  Back in Seattle, Lippincott hosted a luncheon at the Washington Athletic Club to celebrate Egg’s overwhelming success and also the intense public focus the book was bringing to Washington State and the Pacific Northwest. Betty’s vivid descriptions of the region’s physical grandeur intrigued people who had never been there and made them want to see it for themselves. The influx of Egg pilgrims jump-started the state’s postwar tourism industry. In gratitude, the governor of Washington, Monrad Wallgren, presented Betty with the one-millionth copy of The Egg and I, which had been specially bound. Betty then presented Wallgren with his own commemorative copy, number 1,000,002. (The intervening copy had quietly gone to Betty’s literary agent Bernice Baumgarten, at Baumgarten’s request.) Betty and Wallgren were photographed grinning widely and balancing an egg on Wallgren’s open copy of the book. When Wallgren handed her the book, Betty quipped, “Thanks a million.”38

  The Egg and I remains one of the most successful first books of all time. Betty’s story touched something visceral in readers, whether because of timing or her writing style or fate. The book’s success set a high standard for books that came after it, especially Betty’s books. Having stumbled onto the magic formula for a best seller, Betty MacDonald would spend the rest of her life trying to re-create that alchemy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Smelling Like Sugar Cookies

  AS sales of The Egg and I soared, Lippincott eagerly sought to capitalize on Betty’s success. Accordingly, fifteen months after Egg made its debut, the publisher introduced Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. The book was a collection of children’s stories about a wise, kind, magical woman who gently but firmly assisted errant children and their beleaguered parents. Betty dedicated Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle to her daughters, nieces, and nephews, “who are perfect angels and couldn’t possibly have been the inspiration for any of these stories.”1

  Lippincott nearly missed staking its claim in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s publishing empire. While Betty was revising Egg, she had sent the children’s manuscript to her literary agent, Bernice Baumgarten, and Baumgarten had struggled without success to place it. The children’s book editors who read the stories didn’t understand Betty’s mixture of naturalism and fantasy. The publishers Bobbs-Merrill, Farrar & Rinehart, McBride’s, Messner, and Lippincott all turned the manuscript down. Once Egg began to rocket up the best-seller lists, Lippincott frantically reversed their rejection, and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle was rushed into print.

  As with The Egg and I, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s appearance was well timed. Children’s book sales had risen sharply during World War II, partly because toys were unavailable or in short supply, their materials being needed for wartime production. The War Production Board restrictions that affected the publishing industry most severely had been lifted by the time Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle launched. Paper and cloth were in readier supply, and children still had a keen appetite for books.

  Betty’s youthful storytelling, begun at the insistent prompting of Mary’s icy feet, continued when she was a teenager spinning tales to occupy Dede and Alison. When she had children of her own, making up stories was her natural reflex, and she invented Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle for Anne and Joan. “I have told Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories to children, hundreds of them, from two to twelve. Children like them because they think they are written about a sister, brother, friends, cousins, anyone but them,” Betty wrote to Lippincott’s Mac McKaughan. “I’m sure that one reason I have always loved to tell stories to children is because they are such enthusiastic audiences—they laugh loudly at anything the least bit witty, are terribly sad in the sad parts and grind their teeth with hatred for the wicked characters.”2

  Unlike book editors, children had no trouble whatsoever accepting Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle or her world. “Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle has brown sparkly eyes and brown hair which she keeps very long, almost to her knees, so the children can comb it. . . . [Her] skin is a goldy brown and she has a warm, spicy, sugar-cookie smell that is very comforting to children who are sad about something. . . . [S]he wears felt hats which the children poke and twist into witches’ and pirates’ hats and she does not mind at all. . . . [S]he wears very high heels all the time and is glad to let the little girls borrow her shoes,” the book explained.3 Among the many attractions of the book were the late Mr. Piggle-Wiggle’s hidden pirate’s treasure; the pets, Wag and Lightfoot (whose offspring were periodically divvied up among the neighborhood children); and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s willingness to allow little boys and girls to use her house as a cozy club while they baked cookies and enjoyed cambric tea.

  Betty’s newspaper interviews frequently mentioned the important role that children played in her busy life. She told the Seattle Times that Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, like The Egg and I, was written while her house “crawled with children. . . . I had so much help that I almost never got it finished. Most of my best writing has been done to the accompaniment of heavy breathing, sniffing, and fat hands poking the wrong key of the typewriter. I hope this book sells. If it doesn’t, it will prove that all these years I’ve been boring children instead of amusing them.”4 It did sell, and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle was to become one of Betty MacDonald’s most enduring creations, appearing in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggl
e’s Magic (1949), Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Farm (1954), and Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle (1957).

  Like Uncle Remus, Mary Poppins, and Nurse Matilda, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is an adult who helps children to learn the wisdom of good behavior.5 She believes that misguided children truly want to behave well once their veil of ignorance is stripped away. Children liked the books’ honestly depicted child characters and guileless acceptance of everyday magic. Parents appreciated Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s breezy ways of presenting moral lessons and her effective solutions for behavior that was worrisome, trying, or just plain naughty. The Piggle-Wiggle books make both children and parents feel they are “in” on something. Children recognize behaviors that they themselves would never, ever exhibit (wink, wink), and feel superior, even as they identify with the child characters. Betty tosses inside jokes about parental behavior to the adults reading the books aloud. Unlike many books written in the same era, the Piggle-Wiggle books represent boys and girls equally: both are endowed with characteristics that worry or annoy their parents, and both are equally amenable to Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s peculiar training methods.

  Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle has Sydney’s unflappability and Mary’s confident, prescriptive authority, but her exciting sparkle mirrors that of her creator. Family members who spent time with Betty when they were young recall her gift for inspiring their intense, creative play. Like Betty, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is highly imaginative, and she encourages the children around her to use their own imaginations. Both promise and threat are present in the Piggle-Wiggle stories—as they were for the children in Betty’s life, who recalled occasional erratic responses from her that could startle and dismay them. Child characters who alter their behavior are always rewarded, but those who hesitate to do so risk consequences ranging from missing a circus show to enraging an evil queen to literally drowning in their own tears.

  Children’s names in the Piggle-Wiggle books include both the commonplace (Anne, Joan, Mary) and the unusual: Hubert Egbert Prentiss, Calliope Ragbag, Paraphernalia Grotto, Cormorant Broomrack, and Pergola Wingsproggle, among many wonderful others. Adults answer to such names as Mrs. Moohead, Mrs. Grapple, and Mrs. Crankminor. In addition to helping parents overcome children’s behavior problems like selfishness, sibling quarrels, and answering back, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle offers solutions like the Radish Cure, which calls for radish seeds to be sprinkled by night over the grimy skin of a reluctant washer, resulting in a healthy but alarming crop of the vegetable. This and other rather extreme cures—such as the Slow-Eaters-Tiny-Bite-Taker cure, which involves gradually reducing the size of cups and plates on which a slowpoke eater is served until they hold only drops of milk and grains of toast—have their own logic.

  Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle was instantly adopted by parents and teachers for reading aloud and devoured by children old enough to take up the book themselves. After its publication, Betty’s mailbags bulged with fan letters from children. Blanche Hamilton, who’d heard Betty tell Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories to Anne and Joan on a few occasions and who later read the books aloud to students in her elementary school classroom, remembered, “I watched children smile knowingly when they heard about the ‘Never-want-to-go-to-bed’ers and ‘Don’t-touch-it’s-mine’ kids.”6

  Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s original illustrator was Richard Bennett, who had created the farm scene used for The Egg and I’s first dust jacket as well as the rooster silhouette on the book’s cloth cover. When Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle was published, Bennett’s illustrations were appearing regularly in The Horn Book, a magazine celebrating literature written for children. In his illustrations, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle looks sincere and completely engaged in play. The feathered headdress and pirate hat she wears in various drawings are as believable on her as they would have been on the head of any child playing make-believe. Betty found Bennett’s illustrations charming.

  She felt otherwise about the work of Kurt Wiese, the German-born illustrator of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Magic. Weise’s career began in 1929, when he illustrated Felix Salten’s Bambi, and he was prolific, writing and illustrating his own books and illustrating almost four hundred books by others. But Betty loathed Weise’s illustrations, she wrote a friend, and suspected children would feel the same.7

  For the illustrations for Mrs. Wiggle-Wiggle’s Farm, Eunice Blake, the Lippincott children’s book editor, tapped the young Maurice Sendak. Blake found Piggle-Wigglish humor in Sendak’s illustrations for Ruth Krauss’s 1952 picture book, A Hole Is to Dig. Betty told Blake that she would prefer Garth Williams, the illustrator of E. B. White’s Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web and of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series. Williams’s animal illustrations were softer and more realistic than Sendak’s, and at the time he was better known. Blake held firm against Betty’s resistance, telling Betty that Lippincott had already given Sendak a contract. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Farm was Sendak’s thirteenth volume as an illustrator and his first project for Lippincott.

  Lippincott liked Sendak’s illustrations so much that they asked him to redo the first two Piggle-Wiggle books and agree to illustrate all future volumes. “Unfortunately he cannot do this for us,” Eunice Blake wrote to Betty, “but we have been able to get Hilary Knight, the illustrator of Eloise, to agree to do the new book and redo the old ones except Sendak. I think he has very much the feeling of Sendak and the same kind of humor your stories have.”8

  Knight’s first book-length effort, the illustrations for Kay Thompson’s Eloise, was published in 1955, to immediate success. The impish-faced figures in Knight’s illustrations seem to be in constant motion. Knight’s work illustrated Hello, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and replaced the Bennett and Wiese illustrations in the first two books but did not replace Maurice Sendak’s contribution to Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s Farm. Sendak’s reputation was growing, and Lippincott—mindful of possible future joint projects—would not have wanted to risk offending him. All three Knight-illustrated Piggle-Wiggle books came out in 1957.

  Knight’s daffy, charming illustrations suited Betty’s prose perfectly. His brand of cleverness was Betty’s brand, too. His Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle virtually twinkled as she cast a knowing glance from the cover directly at the reader, and his illustrations of child characters—cowlicks every which way, shirttails untucked, hair ribbons askew—matched Betty’s descriptions hijink by hijink.

  Betty adored Knight’s illustrations, calling them “just like children but old fashioned too.”9 “I think the new Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is the most adorable thing yet—especially Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle herself,” Betty wrote Bernice Baumgarten. “All the other Piggle-Wiggle illustrations seem so wooden compared to his.”10 Betty wrote to Hilary Knight expressing her satisfaction with his work. Knight replied that he’d long been a fan of hers, and that working on the books had been great fun.11

  Early print advertisements for the original edition of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle featured Richard Bennett’s illustration of the title character juxtaposed with a mirror image of the drawing in which Betty’s laughing photo replaced Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s head. “If you haven’t met the most popular lady in town—you’d better get a wiggle on!” the copy read.12

  As Betty’s first follow-up to her still-best-selling Egg, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle had the advantage of an eager audience. And, as with Egg, Betty never anticipated that this character would so thoroughly capture readers’ hearts. She wrote the stories with little struggle. Their gentle absurdity and offbeat humor were another happy product of the way Betty MacDonald saw the world, another—and a less caustic—benefit of being Bard.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Betty in Hollywoodland

  THE EGG AND I was a literary phenomenon, and Hollywood smelled a hit. In April 1946, just seven months after Egg’s publication and less than a year before Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle appeared, International Pictures (soon to become Universal-International Pictures) bought the film rights to The Egg and I.1 Promoting the book from coast to coast had polished Betty’s public persona and built her confidence. Back in Seattle after the book tour, Bet
ty understood that she was popular. In Hollywood just weeks later, she would realize she was famous.

  With the ink from Betty’s signature on the contract for the movie rights practically still wet, the wacky independent press agent Jim Moran jump-started the film’s prepublicity. Moran had made headlines in the past for stunts that included putting a bull in a china shop, finding a needle in a haystack, and changing horses in midstream. Just as Egg’s film rights sold, Moran learned that a bird at the Hollywood Ostrich Farm, a tourist attraction, had abandoned her egg. Moran volunteered to hatch the egg himself, starting on Father’s Day. Life, Liberty, and other national magazines produced photo layouts of Moran reading The Egg and I while “incubating.” Every major newspaper in the country ran stories.2

  This stunt was a publicity bonanza. Hoping to keep the ball rolling, Universal-International Pictures summoned The Egg and I’s photogenic author to Hollywood. In response to an inquiry from the company about her preferences for “interviews, stunts, radio etc,” Betty responded, “Have no objections as far as radio or interviews are concerned but shudder at the word stunts. Would suggest that you clear any radio or other commitments with Brandt and Brandt as I inhale and exhale according to their directions.”3

  The trip was a group adventure. In late June 1946, Betty, Don, Anne, Joan, and Mary drove south to Hollywood. Mary, loath to be left out of this glamorous escapade, was along to give Betty moral support. Newspapers reported that Anne and Joan were hoping for screen tests.

  From Hollywood, Betty appeared on numerous nationally broadcast programs, her voice filling the radio airwaves. She was the guest of honor at a huge celebrity cocktail party held at Beverly Hills Club. Universal-International filled her Beverly Hills Hotel suite with fresh flowers and sent Betty a limousine to use during her stay. She and her family were whisked from sight to sight, trailed by reporters. If Anne and Joan had thus far taken their mother’s literary success for granted, the Hollywood treatment the family received now dazzled them. They sat beside Betty at parties and night clubs, surrounded by movie stars, happily stunned.