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

by Paula Becker

  Kazi and Betty corresponded during Kazi’s imprisonment in Minidoka and afterward, when Kazi was among the young nisei able to secure early release by showing evidence of a job offer or college acceptance outside the restricted West Coast area. Kazi (who also went by her middle name, Monica) found work in Chicago, went on to college, and then earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology. She married Geary Tsuyuki, a nisei veteran from California, in 1947. The following year, the couple legally changed their last name to his mother’s maiden name, Sone. They were expecting their first child, whom Geary refused to subject to a lifetime of hearing the name Tsuyuki mangled by Midwesterners.

  Betty was able to interest Dudley Cloud of the Atlantic Monthly Press (an imprint of Little, Brown and Company) in reading the letters Kazi had sent her from Minidoka. “I raved about you so much while I was in the East and described you so exquisitely in The Plague and I that now all the publishers want you to write a book,” Betty wrote Kazi. “I think you should write about the internment of the Japanese on this Coast, telling just how horrible it was but making it funny. . . . If I could be funny about tuberculosis, you could be killing about internment, now that it’s over.”22

  Monica Sone sent Cloud a book outline in the summer of 1949. Cloud worked with Monica to shape a narrative drawn from her experiences growing up in prewar Seattle and during her internment. He sent Betty occasional reports on Monica’s progress, telling her that Monica was following his advice to address a friendly, interested person as her reader, and that Monica was picturing Betty. Little, Brown published Nisei Daughter under the Atlantic Monthly imprint in 1953.

  Monica’s Firland experiences take up only a few pages of the book, but Betty is portrayed as Chris, one of her sanatorium roommates: “I was determined to be unobtrusive, not to intrude upon Chris’s sense of privacy beyond routine conversation, but it was like trying to ignore a roomful of fireworks. I could not remain untouched by her brilliant humor and her irresistible zest for living. I felt as if I were being lured into bright sunlight, inch by inch, from the pit of self-pity into which I had sunk.”23

  Betty took steps to boost Monica’s book: “I took the liberty of calling all the bookstores and the newspapers in Seattle—not one had received a review copy of course, but all were immensely interested—both papers promised to do a feature story on Monica,” Betty wrote to Bernice Baumgarten, who had taken on Monica as a client.24

  Betty endorsed Nisei Daughter on the book’s back cover, beneath Monica Sone’s photograph: “The internment of the American-born Japanese during the last war is handled with honesty and rare dispassion. It is certainly to Monica Sone’s credit that she still sings ‘God Bless America.’ ”25 Critics hailed the book as an important addition to literature about Japanese Americans and discrimination.

  Monica was not the only one who owed Betty a debt of thanks for publication. When, in Egg’s immediate wake, Lippincott determined that Betty was a gold mine, they were eager to uncover other Bard family writers. Sydney was not interested in writing a cookbook, Dede and Alison were busy with their own lives, and no one asked Cleve. But there was Mary.

  “My success is killing Mary,” Betty told Blanche Hamilton. Accustomed as Mary was to dominating and directing her sister, finding herself on the sideline as Betty soared bedeviled Mary. Perhaps in competition, or simply because she had her own story to tell, but certainly using the opportunity Betty’s success provided, Mary made her literary debut in 1949. For the press, publication of The Doctor Wears Three Faces transformed Betty and Mary into the “writing Bard sisters.” “To my sister Betty, who egged me on,” read the book’s dedication.

  Mary’s decision to write her own books may have been stimulated by the realization that Bernice Baumgarten, not Mary, now prodded Betty’s literary production. It wasn’t that Mary stopped giving Betty suggestions: she was a font of them, including writing schedules, ideas for places where Betty could write undisturbed, prescriptions for handling dry spells, solutions to problems concerning Anne and Joan, critiques of Don’s character. She was, after all, still Mary. But Betty and Baumgarten had developed an excellent working relationship. Betty trusted and respected her agent and wanted to please her. Once Betty was authing, it was Baumgarten’s guidance about her literary efforts that Betty followed, not Mary’s.

  Betty’s published work was forged and polished by her warmly collaborative relationship with Baumgarten. Baumgarten was an editing agent (meaning that she edited her authors’ manuscripts before sending them on to publishing houses), and she was considered by many to be the best literary agent in New York. She and Betty must have met in person only a handful of times—Baumgarten did not come west, and Betty was not in New York often—but author and agent were close. During some periods of Betty’s career, they corresponded almost daily, their letters augmented by occasional long-distance phone calls. Betty mailed drafts of chapters to Baumgarten and reworked, added, or omitted material according to Baumgarten’s suggestions. Only when Betty’s manuscripts were up to Baumgarten’s standard did Baumgarten submit them to Lippincott.26

  Lippincott benefited greatly from Bernice Baumgarten’s ministrations, but some people at the firm felt threatened. “Just how do you feel about Bernice?” Betty reported Joseph Lippincott having asked her. “ ‘I think she’s perfect. Why?’ He said, ‘Do you think it wise to always do exactly as she says?’ and I said, ‘It has certainly worked out so far.’ ”27 “Joe’s tactics amuse me very much,” Baumgarten replied. “They can only mean that Lippincott live in terror that they will lose you.”28

  Betty’s facility as a writer sprang partially from her skill as a correspondent. The Bards set the letter-writing bar high. “In our family when you write a dull letter everyone says, ‘What’s the matter with you, you poor thing? Have you lost your wits?’ Next time you work harder and make it amusing. And not by faking. They’d despise you for that. You have to give them the details that make a situation funny or interesting. In this family you’ve got to talk and write fairly sharply or admit you’re a dope,” Betty told an interviewer.29

  The mail system brought fans from around the world into Betty’s rural Vashon Island mailbox. Many letters to Betty begin, “Dear Mrs. MacDonald, This is my first attempt at writing to an author,” or, “Dear Betty MacDonald, May I call you Betty?” Betty felt familiar to her readers, like a friend. Throughout her career, Betty (or her proxy) responded to every letter. In response to a fan who asked about her writing process, Betty revealed that she tried to work from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon. Sometimes this was productive, she added wryly, and sometimes she passed the hours staring at her typewriter and drinking coffee.30 She praised the practice of outlining a book before beginning to write and preached reading as the only shortcut for aspiring writers.

  The volume of her mail forced Betty to give up on making each response unique. She hired secretaries she trusted and provided them with sample responses that could be lightly personalized. Delayed responses, for example, used the “Dear Fandelay” template, thanking the correspondent for writing and explaining that “life here is very hectic.” Fans who sent praise and appreciation for her books received the “Dear Mrs. Fanilike”: “One of the nicest things about my success has been the letters I have received from people like you who have been kind enough to take the time to tell me that you enjoyed my writing.” “Dear Mrs. Comeandspeak” got a polite brush-off: Betty was too busy writing to accept engagements. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle fans got the “Dear Little Buckaroo” letter, including the praise “You print (write) so well I could hardly believe you are only ___ years old.” Children were thanked for their “darling letter,” and for them, Betty closed her letters with “Love.”31

  Hundreds of the letters Betty received were from aspiring authors looking for the magic formula to literary success. Betty joked that she should answer these with the advice, “First have a big mortgage, then lots of coffee.”32 Instead, Betty’s standard “Dear Mrs. Helpmepu
blishmybooks” response advised them to seek out the creative writing department at their local university and to work with a literary agent.

  In addition, scores of people wanted to collaborate with her. Many sent her their manuscripts or asked permission to do so. Brandt & Brandt forbade her from collaborating and discouraged her from reading the manuscripts, because doing so might expose her to charges of plagiarism if she later wrote anything remotely like one of the suggested projects. Betty sent standard form responses politely turning down projects such as “Leukemia and I,” outlined by a man in Tulsa who told Betty that if she could use his idea to fabricate a story, he’d split the money with her and spend his on pills; a query from a man in Springfield, Massachusetts, who wanted to write about tuberculosis but couldn’t type and hoped he could visit Betty and get her help with that part; a retired pilot who wanted to tell her his life story and have her turn it into “That Bird and I”; and an Idaho woman who wanted Betty to rewrite her book, “From Sheep Camps to Hollywood and Back,” so that it was funny. A woman in Long Beach, California, wrote to Betty for manuscript help because, she explained, her spiritual guides Moonlight and William Penn had directed her to do so.

  Many people felt they had great experiences to recount but needed Betty’s help adding wit, humor, and pathos. Some suggested that if she didn’t want to collaborate with them, maybe she would buy their ideas outright. Many mentioned how easy it was to write to her because her warm, smiling book-jacket portraits put them at ease. Betty filed these letters under the heading “People Who Want Something.”

  All these people were drawn to Betty because she made her own foibles so central to the stories she told. Betty the character is vulnerable but sassy. Nothing ever goes too well for her, but whether the stakes are low or high, she fights on, buoyed by her family. Life never takes the Bards all the way down. And, most important, the writer who uses the first person gives herself to the reader. Betty gave herself to her readers—or at least a version of herself.

  There was quicksilver magic in Betty’s take on life that helped readers recast their own troubles and showed them a way of looking at life that drained some of the venom from adversity. Many of Betty’s fan letters expressed deep gratitude. One reader wrote to Betty describing her own difficulties: a wayward daughter, an invalid husband, and the fact that she had to draw all the household water from a distant well and carry it up a hill to reach her home. She had been nearly despondent, the reader explained, but “then I read your book. I don’t know. I just felt better. As if I’d had a bath, and the hell with carrying the water.”33 In her books, Betty’s readers—strangers—divined a peerless recipe for rising above troubles, and sought this comfort through repeated rereadings. To them, Betty was an irreverent, illimitable guide. To people who actually knew Betty MacDonald, however, she absolutely had limits. And when those who knew Betty personally judged that she had violated society’s accepted boundaries, had overstepped, Betty and everyone associated with her books discovered that there could be hell to pay.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Name’s Kettle

  ON Betty’s first trip to Hollywood, the radio personality George Fisher asked her on the air if she’d ever been back to Chimacum. No, she replied, and with luck she never would. Would her former neighbors be angry, Fisher probed? It wouldn’t make any difference to them, Betty replied, because the characters in the book are largely composites. Only Pa Kettle would be immediately recognizable, and he wouldn’t care.1

  Betty was wrong. On March 25, 1947, her former Chimacum neighbors, Edward and Ilah Bishop, filed a lawsuit against Betty and Don, asking for one hundred thousand dollars in damages.2 They alleged that they were the couple referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Hicks in The Egg and I; that the book was libelous and an invasion of their right to privacy; and that they had been exposed to ridicule, hatred, and contempt because of their alleged portrayal.3

  The Bishops’ suit validated the fears Lippincott’s lawyers had expressed when the book was still in manuscript. At that stage Betty had given the characters she ultimately called the Kettles the name of Basket. Betty blithely told Lippincott that if basing a character on some characteristics of an actual person constituted libel, all of her characters were libelous. She ticked off characters one by one: the real Mrs. Basket was named Bishop, was deceased, and had been profane but also kind to her. Mr. Bishop lisped and borrowed from people. Maxwell Ford Jefferson was a man who’d made whiskey with Bob, but she’d made up that last name. Crowbar, Clamface, and Geoduck were Bob’s good friends Skids, Pume, and Wesel, who were Indians. The Indian picnic was an actual occurrence but had been more obscene. Since her name had been Heskett then, she concluded, the easiest way to dodge libel accusations would be to give The Egg and I’s author’s name as B. B. MacDonald.4

  Betty had been willing to make whatever changes Lippincott suggested, however. “I wanted to show how magnificent the country is in comparison [with] the unsavoriness of its inhabitants,” she wrote to Bernice Baumgarten at the time.

  Now I wonder if perhaps my youth, inexperience, loneliness and upbringing didn’t make me think the people were worse than they were—perhaps if I were able to move out there now I would be as discouraged, as lonely and as cold but would find the people less horrifying, more amusing. Perhaps the book would have a better flavor if I were to forget the truth and make the people less like the ignorant, immoral, amoral, unmoral, foul mouthed group they were, and more folksy and quaint. If depicting the people as they were is libelous, then by all means let’s show them as they weren’t.5

  Lippincott made alterations, which Betty deemed “reasonable tho stuffy.”6 The only change she refused was “jackasses” to “folks.” Asked to rename the Baskets, a name that Lippincott felt was too close to Bishop, Betty suggested the name Kettle.

  When the Atlantic Monthly ran parts of The Egg and I as a serial before the book’s release, they dealt with the libel issue by obscuring all of the place names, a move Lippincott followed right before the book went to print. Port Townsend became Town, Port Ludlow was Docktown, the Olympic Peninsula became the Pacific Coast or simply “the mountains,” and Hood Canal became Canal. Betty responded to this cleansing of her manuscript with her usual acerbic wit: “I am sure that there is now no danger of libel from any source—our only risk now would be that someone might sue me personally for writing such a damn dull book.”7

  If Betty thought none of her former neighbors would read her book, she was mistaken. Residents of the Olympic Peninsula could purchase Egg in at least three locations, to which—by the time Edward and Ilah Bishop filed suit—Lippincott had shipped more than eight hundred copies.8

  Edward and Ilah Bishop and their son Bud had been the Hesketts’ nearest neighbors. Edward worked as a logger and longshoreman until a work accident in 1930 in which he broke his back, necessitating multiple surgeries. Thereafter he and Ilah raised chickens, butchering and selling about thirty thousand each year. Ilah Bishop delivered birds and eggs to inns and resorts throughout the Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas.

  In the book, Betty and Bob’s nearest neighbors are the Hickses and the Kettles. Edward and Ilah Bishop’s suit alleged that they had been portrayed as Mr. and Mrs. Hicks, whom the book introduces as follows: “Mr. Hicks, a large ruddy dullard, walked gingerly through life, being very careful not to get dirt on anything or in any way to irritate Mrs. Hicks, whom he regarded as a cross between Mary Magdalene and the County Agent.”9 Edward and Ilah Bishop’s complaint included every section of the book in which the Hickses were mentioned.

  Had Betty felt as contemptuous of her neighbors when she lived in Chimacum? Her bitterness toward Bob had stewed, along with her other memories of that place, for fifteen years, during which she’d trotted out stories of Bob and her former neighbors for friends to laugh at. Whatever she had observed of these people’s humanity had been stripped away by the time Betty wrote the book, leaving just caricature.

  Betty sought the advice of her attorney,
George Guttormsen. He was a former University of Washington football hero, a family friend who had been one of Clyde Jensen’s groomsmen. “George is a very smart lawyer, an honest man and I’ve known him since I was fourteen but he has many even white teeth and he clenches them a lot and he has no sense of humor,” Betty wrote Bernice Baumgarten.10

  Through Guttormsen, Betty demurred the Bishops’ charges on several grounds, including their legal capacity to sue, court jurisdiction, and the statute of limitations, but a King County Superior Court judge ordered the case to trial. “A publication will be held to be libelous if it tends to render a person odious, ridiculous, or contemptible in the estimation of the public,” the judge’s memorandum concluded, pretty well summing up every character in The Egg and I who was not directly related to Betty.11

  Betty believed that a film company staffer had upset the Bishops when he was scouting filming locations in Jefferson County, a trip Betty had urged him not to take. The studio had asked Betty to accompany Chester Erskine, the director, and a small film crew to the area where her story took place. Betty wired back: “Think trip to Peninsula and attendant publicity very bad idea and likely to stir up trouble. I have never set foot on Peninsula since I left and do not intend to. . . . Am very serious in warning you not to arouse Peninsula people. Results not worth it.”12

  In May 1949, while Betty was working on her third autobiographical book, Anybody Can Do Anything, Edward and Ilah Bishop’s case was moving toward a jury trial after two years of legal maneuvering. Just as the trial was about to start, the two sets of attorneys jointly filed a stipulation for dismissal, which was granted. They settled the case for $1,500. According to a copy of Edward and Ilah Bishop’s signed release in MacDonald family archives, the settlement also stipulated that Edward and Ilah “forever refrain from mentioning or discussing” their claim.