by Paula Becker
Egg was one of the top-earning films of 1947.26 Marjorie Main was nominated for the Academy Award for best supporting actress (losing out to Celeste Holm in Gentleman’s Agreement). At the time, films did not often have extended or open-ended runs. Film prints were expensive and moved from town to town after a week or two at the local movie house. The prints of Egg made their way across the country during the summer and fall of 1947.27 And then the film retired to Universal-International’s vaults.
Betty’s tango with Hollywood completed her transition from private citizen to public personality. Betty was much too cynical and smart to swallow all of Hollywood’s hype about herself, but feeling special and celebrated was still seductive and intoxicating. Having tasted celebrity, Betty noticed the lack of it. After her Hollywood treatment, feeling underappreciated became Betty’s Achilles’ heel, a source of recurrent conflict with her family, friends, and publishers.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Authing
BETTY MacDonald was now a household name, known for her famous book and applauded for her personal vivacity. A Cosmopolitan magazine writer sought Betty out in late 1947:
Mrs. MacDonald has green eyes, auburn hair and . . . an unquenchable energy. Her voice is quick with life, and it warms each sentence. She admires easily and often, without stiffness or self-consciousness. . . . She is an able mimic. In the space of a half hour, while I talked with her, she was a Swedish-American, a Japanese-American, a Hollywood writer giving his all to a vulgar joke, an uppity female expert on foreign affairs and a bubbling Texas girl. Her expression, never placid, shifts readily from amusement to anger. When she mentions someone she doesn’t like, her eyes blaze. . . . “A lot of people are ready to crawl on their knees over broken glass in order to be introduced to me. Then they say, ‘My, you’re much fatter than you look in your pictures, aren’t you?’ or ‘Whoever told you, dear, to wear bangs? They’re hideous.’ It bothered me at first, but now I realize that most of them are just disappointed authors. I’ve been that way myself, so I know how they feel.”1
The Egg and I’s success had brought Betty fame, but in the glare of the public spotlight, she tended to squint and blink rather than bask.
With fame came money, at least in the beginning. Betty’s family members shared in her bounty, enjoying treats, trips, and good food. With Betty’s help, Sydney finally paid off all the mortgages on the 15th Avenue house that the family had barely hung on to through the Great Depression.2 Betty and Don settled their own mortgage and then undertook extensive home improvements, modernizing the existing bathroom and adding a second for Anne and Joan, creating a small suite for Sydney, moving the kitchen, and building a guest cottage. Betty hired Cleve to cut a road from Vashon’s main highway to the house. The family later purchased adjoining land and built a barn, from which they briefly operated an egg business, casting Don—like Bob—as a chicken rancher.
The chicken project was public relations for Egg and make-work for Don, whose wartime employment at Boeing had evaporated right around the time the book was published. It gave reporters an angle for stories and brushed a gloss of truth onto Egg’s false happy ending. The monosyllabic husbands’ names and the new egg operation perpetuated the light smokescreen obscuring Betty’s divorce and second marriage, as did Anne and Joan’s use of Don’s surname and the names used in the film, in which Fred MacMurray’s character was called Bob MacDonald. Betty had not yet announced in print that her Egg marriage was over. She brushed off those who did inquire with a quick “This is a different husband.”
The years 1945–47, when copies of Egg were selling most strongly and the movie rights were sold, were almost certainly Betty’s most lucrative. In 1947, Betty and Don purchased a house at 905 East Howe Street, in Seattle’s North Capitol Hill neighborhood. The house overlooked Lake Union and had a view of the Olympic Mountains. After renovating the property and decorating it with antiques, Betty and Don began spending most of their time there, avoiding the ferry commute to Vashon.
The Egg and I was like a monetary geyser, but if Betty and Don had realized its tax consequences, they probably would not have sprung for the Howe Street house. Betty’s royalty checks from Brandt & Brandt had no taxes withheld. After a blissful year or so of cashing checks, paying off mortgages, and splurging on family, the couple received their 1946 income-tax bill. As part of the struggle to pay this bill, they mortgaged the Howe Street house, then rented it out. For a while, Betty and Don lived in its basement apartment. Lippincott advanced Betty money to cover her taxes, and Bernice Baumgarten and Betty’s attorney, George Guttormsen, strategized to help Betty manage the income. Guttormsen kept Betty’s financial woes out of the public eye, but the threat of disclosure worried Baumgarten and, to a lesser extent, Betty. Although royalties continued rolling in, Betty never felt financially secure again.
Mary blamed Don for her sister’s ongoing money woes. Both Baumgarten and Mary noted that Betty was talented at mathematics and that she could easily look at a set of bookkeeping records and pick out the errors, but Betty deferred to Don on financial matters. That Don’s money management only dug the couple deeper into debt despite Betty’s success did not surprise Mary.3
When deciding to purchase the Howe Street house, the MacDonalds may have assumed that Betty’s income would hold steady, enabling the couple to pay their 1946 taxes and all other expenses using 1947 royalties. But few books, even perennial favorites like Egg, sustain their highest sales for very long. Betty’s financial situation made it imperative for her to write another hit.
Lippincott and Brandt & Brandt were eager for her to do so. Brandt & Brandt got a slice of every dollar she earned, and Egg was a cash cow for Lippincott, continuing to sell long after the firm’s advertising dollars were allocated to other projects. About the same time Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle launched, both agent and publisher were encouraging Betty to begin a sequel to Egg.
If Egg’s readers had been asked what topic Betty MacDonald should tackle next, likely no one would have suggested tuberculosis. The fact that Lippincott agreed to a book on this subject is a testament to how impressed her publishers were by Egg’s sales.
For Betty, however, the topic was compelling. “My stay in Firland was certainly the most remarkable experience of my lifetime and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Betty wrote to a fellow former Firland patient. “I was bitter when I entered, unhappy much of the time and longed to get out all the time, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”4 Being surrounded by death, and personally menaced by it, at Firland had taught Betty to appreciate her life. She’d made real friends in the sanatorium, and—like military combat veterans who share experiences no others can understand—in a large measure she credited these women with her survival. The journal version of her Firland experiences that Betty had worked on just after her release and had submitted, without success, for Atlantic Monthly Press’s Atlantic Prize served as a strong foundation for her second volume of personal narrative, The Plague and I. Betty called this early draft In Bed We Laughed.5
The Plague and I was Betty’s favorite among the books she wrote. Her self-portrait here seems to align more closely with the person she truly was during those years than does her self-depiction in Egg. Plague invites readers to enter into Betty’s confrontation with mortality. Betty considered Plague a public service. She wanted the book to be a banner cry encouraging everyone, even those with no family history of tuberculosis, to get a diagnostic chest X-ray. “After all,” she wrote, “there was no t.b. in my family, never had been, and yet I got it.”6 When she was penniless, Firland’s medical director had admitted her to the facility without charge. With Plague, Betty repaid that debt.
As a personal gesture to Firland’s staff and patients, Betty visited the sanatorium to attend a screening of The Egg and I for ambulatory patients. During the visit, Betty and Don dined with several of the doctors who had treated her. She gave an informal talk in the Josef House auditorium, where she recalled having watched Greta Gar
bo die of tuberculosis in the saddo film classic Camille. Betty signed copies of Egg for patients and told them that her next book would recount her Firland experiences.
As Betty was working on this book, American physicians began gaining access to newly invented antibiotic drugs, such as streptomycin, para-amino salicylic acid (PAS), and isoniazid, that (when used in combination) proved highly effective in treating tuberculosis. Mortality rates at Firland plummeted from 31 percent in 1948 to 6 percent in 1954. Identifying people who carried the disease—Betty’s main reason for writing the book—was paramount because treatment carried more promise than ever before.
Using the same structure Bernice Baumgarten had suggested for The Egg and I, Betty began The Plague and I with childhood stories, then circled back to her main narrative. Plague begins with Betty’s memories of Gammy’s apocryphal belief that “childhood was a very hazardous time of life and if we children weren’t bitten by rattlesnakes, eaten by wild animals, killed by robbers or struck by lightning, catarrh, consumption and leprosy were just around the corner.”7 In finally getting tuberculosis, Betty wrote, she was “achieving the goal Gammy had set for me so early in life.”8
The Plague and I functions as a sort of exotic travel narrative: Betty leaves home and embarks on the experience of illness, meeting the natives (doctors and nurses) and fellow travelers (patients). As all trips do, the journey changes her. Betty is able to survive the fear and boredom of her ordeal only by turning her Bardish lens on those she encounters, noticing both annoying and endearing qualities. Tuberculosis, she finds, is an equalizer, but having a roommate who makes her laugh and appreciates her humor, instead of one who complains constantly or worse, plays the martyr, makes all the difference.
To differentiate characters who could so easily be seen as anonymous medical specimens, she focuses on the aspects of their behavior that make each person unique and interesting. With the exception of Betty’s physicians, virtually all of the characters in the book are female: tuberculosis patients were strictly segregated by gender. At Firland, they were also usually segregated racially as far as was practical. Betty stands out in this environment because she has no problem rooming with women of varying ethnicities. Her favorite roommate is Kimi, a Japanese-American teenager who is hilarious and heroic.
The book is educational. Betty feeds this information about tuberculosis to readers through the device of patient dialogue. Her descriptions of her medical interventions are specific and graphic. She manages to convey the endless tedium of round-the-clock resting without making readers feel that they are enduring tedium themselves. She examines her own reactions to the situations she faces, drawing readers into her personal struggle. When she is discharged, they share her overwhelming awe at being privileged to reclaim ordinary life.
Lippincott stuck with a sure thing for Plague’s cover: Betty MacDonald’s smiling face, the photograph readers knew from the cover of Egg, this time inset into an oval on the book’s lower right corner. The back cover photo featured Betty pruning a rose bush. “I wanted something out-doorsy and healthy looking to prove to my readers, or rather ‘reader,’ that I had not dictated the book from an oxygen tent,” she wrote Mac McKaughan, Lippincott’s director of advertising.9
Betty let Lippincott staffers know that she liked the roses picture—in which her bangs are cut straight across, bowl-like—better than the cover image. McKaughan shot back, “Lady, you are smart enough to know that the picture used on the wrapper of The Egg and I is one of the best-known trade-marks in the United States. You are as famous as the Smith Brothers and I think we would be ‘nuts’ to use any other illustration on the jacket of The Plague and I, or in our first advertising of the new book.”10
Good Housekeeping published a three-part condensation of Plague in August, September, and October 1948. Betty was pleased with the result but told a friend, “As you can probably imagine, it was deleted, sweetened and cleaned up beyond recognition to meet the requirements of the Good Housekeeping advertisers. Son of a bitch has become ‘rather unpleasant’ and Jesus Christ is now ‘dear, dear.’ ”11
Some health professionals were stung by how harshly Betty described her experiences at The Pines, her pseudonym for Firland. Dr. F. B. Trudeau, son of the legendary physician Edward Trudeau—who founded the most famous sanatorium in the nation at Saranac Lake, New York—refused a Lippincott publicity staffer’s request to endorse The Plague and I. He feared, he explained, that the book’s “grim picture of hospital life and the impersonal treatment received might frighten off some patients from going to a sanatorium.”12
Plague was dark, and it was Betty: “There’s one thing to be said in favor of life at The Pines,” she reflected about her first night in the sanatorium. “It’s going to make dying seem like a lot of fun.”13 Food at The Pines was good, she wrote, but the coffee “tasted as if it had been made out of burnt toast crumbs boiled well with ground-up rubber bands.”14 The patients at The Pines “differed in color, nationality, political beliefs, I.Q., age, religion, background and ambition. According to the standards of normal living, the only things that most of us had in common were being alive and speaking English, but as patients in the sanatorium we had everything in common and were firmly cemented together by our ungratefulness, stupidity, uncooperativeness, unworthiness, poverty, tuberculosis and longing for a discharge.”15 In facing disease, as with anything, being Bard required irreverence.
Jean South, a nurse who reviewed the book for the American Journal of Nursing, accepted Betty’s tone: “It would hardly be expected that Mrs. MacDonald, who had such a successful response to The Egg and I, would change her style and treat this subject differently. Her book is written to sell, and much as we might regret that she did not write of the more positive phases of her experience, her book should be read by nurses with an open mind as to its purpose. While she has no doubt exaggerated the behavior of all about her, she has done so with great skill. . . . Her flippancy is refreshing.”16
Reviewers from across the country agreed that only Betty MacDonald—who, several pointed out, was no Pollyanna—could have written this book. “You have to hold a hammer to t.b. patients’ heads in order to get them to do anything about it,” Betty told the Seattle Times. “I tried to have up-to-date information in this book and yet keep it bright so that people would read it.”17 The Saturday Review found Betty more than bright: “She is that even rarer human being—one who sees the funny side of everything that happens to her; that rare author—one who can make her experiences equally funny in writing.”18
Plague’s promotional campaign kicked off with book-signing parties at Seattle’s University Book Store and in three local department stores: Rhodes, Frederick & Nelson, and the Bon Marché, which all had large book departments. Betty then undertook another cross-country promotional trip. In New York, she helped open the 1948 Christmas seals campaign for the National Tuberculosis Association and was photographed selling the New York chapter’s first sheet of Christmas seals to Mayor William O’Dwyer.
Betty received a daunting—and humbling—amount of mail from patients in tuberculosis sanatoria around the world. These readers were grateful for and moved by The Plague and I. They saw Betty as a friend who understood their desperate quiet lives—and they had plenty of time to write. Institutional life had caused some of them to lose track of time: one letter was dated “I’m sure it’s January.” Their letters were detailed and extremely personal. Luckily for her, she had a new assistant who could practically read her mind: Gwen Smith Croxford, one of Betty’s Firland roommates.19 Gwen appeared in The Plague and I as Kate Harte. “[Gwen and I] had a wonderful time doing The Plague and I and deciding what we could put in and what we couldn’t,” Betty wrote to Norah Flannery, another Firland friend. “Miss Hermanson and Miss Rountree [Firland nurses] are both dead but even so my dopey publishers removed all of the sharp edges from my characterizations of them.”20 Gwen ghostwrote answers to many of the tuberculosis letters. “Write one of your best and
most charming letters to this man,” Betty scrawled across the top of a letter she received from a tuberculosis patient in Calcutta.
Not all of the fan mail from “lung-ers” was grim. Eleven tuberculosis patients who had contracted the disease while serving in World War II wrote from the men’s ward at Stony Wold Sanatorium at Saranac Lake, New York, offering to swap stories with her. “You can come up and expectorate in our sputum cups anytime,” they concluded enthusiastically. “Dear Boys,” Betty replied, “If all of you kids behave and do just as you are told, no doubt you’ll get big and fat and rich like me.”21
Betty was at the pinnacle of her success when Plague was published, a household name around the country. As Egg began appearing in foreign editions, her international fame grew. In Seattle, she was homegrown royalty. The city was small enough that nearly everyone could boast of knowing her, or at least knowing someone who did.
After The Plague and I, Betty grew frustrated with the way Lippincott promoted her books. She may not have understood that Lippincott’s Egg publicity expenditures were extraordinary because of that book’s phenomenal early sales numbers and its unflagging performance. They never spent as much to advertise any of Betty’s other books, in part because none of them, including Plague, caught fire before their public release the way Egg did. Lippincott waited fifteen years after Egg for its next huge best seller, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.
Of all the fellow patients described in Plague, none resonated with readers more than Betty’s teenaged Japanese American roommate, Kimi—modeled on Kazuko Monica Itoi (Kazi). Many fans wrote to ask Betty what had happened to Kimi after she left Firland, and even publishers were curious to know more. During World War II, Kazi and her family were interned at Minidoka War Relocation Camp in Hunt, Idaho, as a result of Executive Order 9066. Issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, the order set in motion the expulsion of Japanese immigrants (issei) and their American citizen children (nisei) from the West Coast and their internment in ten inland prison camps, solely on the basis of their ethnicity and heritage.
