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

by Paula Becker

  Betty must have sighed with relief. But three months later, out from Chimacum trooped the patriarch Albert Bishop and ten others, looking for justice. On September 17, 1949, Albert Bishop and six of his sons, two daughters, and one daughter-in-law filed individual libel suits alleging their depiction as members of the Kettle family in The Egg and I.13 Another Chimacum resident, Raymond Johnson, alleged his depiction as Crowbar, a Native American. All claimed that their depictions subjected them to shame and humiliation. Betty, Don, Lippincott, Pocket Books (which had issued a twenty-five-cent paperback edition of Egg), and the Bon Marché department store were named as codefendants in the suit. The suits were consolidated and tried together.14

  As Betty’s fan mail bore out, the Kettle characters had helped her book appeal to a tremendously wide audience, and Marjorie Main’s and Percy Kilbride’s well-crafted personifications did the same for the film and its sequels. The Kettles fall within the tradition of buffoon characters in Shakespeare or commedia dell’arte, roles designed to appeal to the groundlings, the masses. None of Betty’s other books has such outrageous—or universal—characters. Kilbride and Main were now reprising their vivid interpretations of the slapdash couple in the wildly popular Ma and Pa Kettle film series. The Kettles were always good for a laugh, and their public popularity endured.

  But who would want to be one? Betty described her 1920s neighbors using details that made them instantly recognizable to anyone who knew them. To most of Betty’s readers, Chimacum residents were familiar comic types. To the neighbors, Betty’s book was evidence of unconscionable hubris. She had believed that she could say whatever she wanted to about them and tell the world that her stories were true.

  Albert Bishop was born on his Swiss immigrant father’s farm in Provo, Utah. The family were converts to Mormonism, although Albert’s father later recanted his faith and moved his family to Portland, Oregon, and then to Port Townsend. In 1891, Albert married Susanna Ammeter, who had been born in Switzerland and had immigrated to Jefferson County with her family. Albert and Susanna moved to Portland, where Albert worked in railroading and where Edward, the first of their thirteen children, was born. In 1895, the family moved to Port Townsend and then to Chimacum, where they lived on the Percy Wright property later mixed up in Sydney Bard’s real-estate debacle. The Bishops eventually purchased a 160-acre farm and a fourteen-room farmhouse down the road from the Heskett property.15

  “Here is how Betty collects without scratching a pen to paper,” a front-page article in the Seattle Times reported. “Every time Universal-International puts Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride into another rollicking ‘Ma and Pa Kettle’ adventure, a check wings its way to the writer. That’s because she originated that fabulous couple with the 18 children. Two sequels to the original ‘The Egg and I’ have been made and with exhibitors reporting that they’re one of the hottest bets at the box office today, it would appear Miss MacDonald is going to collect for a long time.”16 To those who felt caricatured and ridiculed by the book, Betty’s windfall from the films must have rankled.

  Marjorie Main’s and Percy Kilbride’s skillful use of physical comedy dovetailed with Betty’s descriptions in Egg:

  Mrs. Kettle had pretty light brown hair, only faintly streaked with gray and skinned back into a tight knot, clear blue eyes, a creamy skin which flushed exquisitely with the heat, a straight delicate nose, fine even white teeth, and a small rounded chin. From this dainty pretty head cascaded a series of busts and stomachs which made her look like a cooky jar shaped like a woman. Her whole front was dirty and spotted and she wiped her hands continually on one or the other of her stomachs. She also had a disconcerting habit of reaching up under her dress and adjusting something in the vicinity of her navel and of reaching down the front of her dress and adjusting her large breasts. These adjustments were not, I learned later, confined to either the privacy of the house or a female gathering—they were made anywhere—any time. “I itch—so I scratch—so what!” was Mrs. Kettle’s motto.17

  Betty’s description of Pa Kettle was just as vivid:

  He had a thick thatch of stiff gray hair quite obviously cut at home with a bowl, perched on top of which he wore a black derby hat. His eyebrows grew together over his large red nose and spurted out threateningly over his deepset bright blue eyes. He had a tremendous flowing mustache generously dotted with crumbs, a neckline featuring several layers of dirty underwear and sweaters, and bib overalls tucked into the black rubber hip boots. Drawing deeply on the cigar butt Mr. Kettle said, “Nithe little plathe you got here. Putty far up in the woodth though. Latht feller to live here went crazy and they put him away.”18

  Albert and Susanna’s grandson Bud offered this physical description of his grandparents in a 1993 oral history interview: “My grandmother wasn’t overly tall, but she was quite heavy. And my granddad was a little man. He was probably five-foot-seven, probably weighed about a hundred and forty or fifty pounds.”19 Bud Bishop told the interviewer that the strongest values his grandparents had taught him were to be honest and to treat other people as he would like to be treated. Family members remembered Susanna Bishop as an industrious and deeply religious woman of very clean habits. Susanna Bishop died in 1937, about a year and a half after the drowning death of her youngest child, Kenneth, an event from which her family felt she never recovered.

  Almost from the moment Egg was published, carloads of tourists began arriving in Jefferson County via the Port Ludlow ferry. “Where is the farm Betty MacDonald wrote about in The Egg and I?” the tourists asked. The property was now owned by Anita and Alfred Larson, relatives of the Bishops by marriage, who used Betty and Bob’s dwelling for a chicken house. Locals pointed the way to the Larson home, where Anita accommodated visitors’ requests to see the house, the barn, the stove—anything Betty MacDonald had mentioned in the book. The Larson family posted a sign near the ferry dock pointing the way to the farm, and the Larson children showed tourists around. Anita Larson charged these curious fans a dollar a carload, a welcome windfall for the family, and kept a guest book that visitors could sign. This volume eventually documented signatures from residents of more than sixty countries.20

  The Bishop family had claimed affinity with the Kettles since the book had first come out. Anita Larson’s tours of the Heskett farm were covered in the Pt. Townsend Leader, as was the fact that the Bishops referred to the former Albert and Susanna Bishop home (by the time of the trial, occupied by their son Arthur) as the Kettle home.21 But at some point, their excitement at being part of the Egg juggernaut turned to resentment.

  Almost a year before the case came to trial, someone—most likely Guttormsen—met with Betty to discuss it.22 According to the notes taken at this meeting, Betty—grasping at straws—acknowledged that there was a family on Vashon who were very like the Kettles, and that the father in that family was as close to being Pa Kettle as Albert Bishop was. She supposed, she said, that perhaps 90 percent of what she wrote about Pa Kettle stemmed from information she’d heard about Albert Bishop, whom she remembered as a principal topic of conversation on the Olympic Peninsula. It was true, she conceded, that Albert Bishop had a lisp and the same vocal tic (his voice rose at the end of his sentences) with which she’d endowed Pa Kettle.

  Her description of the route Betty and Bob took to get from Seattle to their farm in Egg, she said, actually led to a community near Mount Walker in the heart of the Olympic Mountains.23 She had deliberately avoided describing the route to Chimacum so that the people who lived in the Chimacum Valley would not think she was writing about them.

  Betty told Guttormsen that Ed Bishop had turned Bob in to federal agents for making moonshine. When the agents searched Betty and Bob’s property, she said, they found nothing because Bob—on the advice of another moonshiner—had built the still in the front yard, hidden in plain sight. Asked if she’d ever admitted that Albert Bishop was Pa Kettle, Betty said she’d been asked that question one billion times at least and had never admitted to anyo
ne that a living person was being characterized, directly contradicting the earliest information on this point she’d given Lippincott. People she knew, she added, naturally crept into her writing.

  The trial began on February 5, 1951. Albert Bishop, age eighty-seven, was too ill to appear in court. George Crandell and Frank Trunk represented the plaintiffs. Each Bishop asked for damages of one hundred thousand dollars. (Husband and wife Herbert and Janet Bishop asked for one hundred thousand dollars jointly.) Johnson sought seventy-five thousand. The case was tried in front of a civil jury in King County Superior Court, with Judge William Wilkins presiding. George Guttormsen again represented Betty.24 J. Paul Coie represented Lippincott. Bon Marché, Inc., was dismissed as a defendant.25 Pocket Books apparently was never served with legal papers and was not represented in court.

  Newspaper accounts of the two-week trial mention that Judge Wilkins had a copy of The Egg and I in court so that he could follow passages during questioning, and that many spectators brought copies, With defendant Betty’s smile plastered across the dust jackets, the scene in the courtroom recalled Lippincott’s full-page advertisements depicting people in all walks of life unable to put the book down.

  The question of whether Egg presented a libelous portrayal of the Bishops, an actual Jefferson County family, or merely offered a fictional account of a family of characters created by Betty MacDonald and nestled within an otherwise largely nonfictional autobiography seemed to rest on whether incidents that happened to the Kettles in the book had also happened to the Bishops in real life. Members of the Bishop family were questioned repeatedly along these lines.

  The Seattle Times reported, “Under questioning by his own attorney, George H. Crandell, (Wilbur) Bishop . . . said the ‘home place’ of the Albert Bishop family between Chimacum and Port Ludlow, Jefferson County, was about a mile from the place where Mrs. MacDonald lived about 20 years ago. Crandell read a passage from the book describing an incident in which Pa Kettle set out to burn some trash in the backyard and burned down the barn. Crandell asked Bishop if his father, Albert Bishop, had done this. Bishop said he had.”26

  The courtroom was filled to capacity with witnesses and a curious public. Many more people waited in the corridor outside, hoping for a vacancy.27 Seattle newspapers were giving the story copious daily coverage, and local residents wanted to see the circus.

  Raymond Johnson, whom the Seattle Post-Intelligencer described as “a quarter-blood Indian,” testified that he recognized himself as the character called Crowbar, and that the characters named Clamface and Geoduck were real people who went by the same names.28 Johnson testified that he had gone on several cougar hunts with Robert Heskett, as Bob and Crowbar are described as doing in The Egg and I.

  A number of other Jefferson County residents testified that the Kettle family was clearly recognizable as the Bishop clan. Annie McGuire, the seventy-five-year-old widow of a former Jefferson County sheriff, testified that on reading the book she not only immediately recognized the Kettles as the Bishops but thought she saw herself in the character of Mary McGregor, who worked her farm in such an inebriated state that she had to be tied to the plow. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer quoted McGuire’s stated feelings about Betty MacDonald on reading The Egg and I: “If I could have got her at the time I’d have beat her up.”29

  Several male plaintiffs testified to being asked frequently if they were Kettle boys. One, Herbert Bishop, said he was ashamed of it. “They knew I was a Bishop—I had to be a Kettle.”30 But how ashamed? According to the Seattle Times, “Francis Risher, Port Orchard, said Walter Bishop approached him in July or August of 1949 to go in on the building of a dance hall at Port Townsend and a tour of ‘the Kettles.’ ‘He said, Frank, there’s a million bucks in it,’ Risher testified.”

  The defense strategy seemed to be that if the Bishops had in the past acted proud of their resemblance to the Kettles, they could not now legitimately claim libel. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported the same day that the defense witness Dorothy Baird testified that at a 1947 barn dance, in front of five hundred people, the plaintiff Walter Bishop had introduced his father, Albert Bishop, as Pa Kettle. “ ‘What if anything did he (Albert Bishop) have with him?’ [defense attorney] Guttormsen inquired. ‘A chicken,’ Mrs. Baird answered. ‘And what did he do with the chicken?’ ‘He jiggled it from one arm to another and sort of jumped up and down,’ Mrs. Baird replied.”31

  Betty was in court every day, her lips set in a tight line. Newspaper photographs showed Don, his jaw clenched, by her side. Old friends offered Betty emotional aid. Blanche Hamilton, who was teaching school in Portland, Oregon, and following news of the suit in the Portland papers, wrote to Betty offering herself as a character witness: “I know the trial is in progress and am wondering if I could be of any help to you. I’ve known you a long time; enough to know you love people who do not fit into a set pattern and who are not seeking higher social strata. The very fact that they are unusual and uninhibited endears them to you. A little brown wren of a teacher from Portland might add the somber sober touch just needed.”32

  Testifying in her own defense, Betty told the court that she was not writing about the Albert Bishop farm when she described the Kettles’ home; that she had not kept a diary, letters, or records of her years on the Olympic Peninsula; and that she hadn’t visited the area for twenty years. She told the court that the only living people depicted in her book were herself and members of her family, and that her intention in writing the book was to make fun of her own incompetence as a farm wife. She said she had not known the Bishops well and had never seen some of the plaintiffs until they appeared in court.

  When Guttormsen asked her to state whether she’d described the Albert Bishop family as the Kettles, Betty replied, “I did not.” Asked if she’d been aware that there were real people named Crowbar, Geoduck, and Clamface when she assigned those names to characters in her book, Betty testified that she had not. The Seattle Times reported, “Mrs. MacDonald testified that she had lived on a farm with her mother near the Albert Bishop farm for more than a year before she married Robert Heskett and moved to the farm adjoining the Bishop place . . . under stiff cross-examination . . . Mrs. MacDonald broke into tears and fled the courtroom.”33

  Betty, calmer, took the stand again the following morning. She didn’t remember her first meeting with Albert Bishop and did not have “the faintest recollection” of what he looked like. Under examination by the Bishops’ attorney, Betty admitted that before her marriage to Bob, she had attended a dance with Walter Bishop.34

  Port Ludlow, she continued, was not Docktown, Chimacum was not Crossroads, and Port Townsend was not Town. “In all my descriptions of towns I tried to picture a typical town,” she testified, emphasizing that she’d done considerable research for the book at the Seattle Public Library. “I was writing about an imaginary place in an imaginary country.”35

  George Guttormsen’s paramount act was a maneuver to block evidence of Betty’s earlier settlement agreement with Edward and Ilah Bishop from being presented to the jury. “The prejudicial effect of allowing evidence of a compromise of a similar type of case to come in this case is obvious,” Guttormsen argued in a memorandum.36 In his closing arguments, Guttormsen mentioned the highway signs Anita Larson had posted on Swansonville Road to direct visitors to the farm, where Larson charged money to view the home, and the fact that Larson was a sister-in-law of one of the Bishop family. He told the courtroom, “There could not possibly have been a connection between the book and the Bishops if these people had not deliberately come out and made that connection themselves. . . . Is that Betty MacDonald’s fault?”37

  Judge Wilkins instructed the jury that a plaintiff could not recover damages solely on account of humiliation, chagrin, or mental suffering resulting from the alleged libelous statements themselves: to be libelous, statements needed to be published. “I have heretofore instructed you that the libelous statements were to be deemed published only to readers w
ho understood the defamatory meaning thereof and understood them as being applicable to the plaintiff,” Wilkins stated. In other words, libelous statements were only deemed published to readers who knew the plaintiffs personally and so could explicitly connect the Kettles to the Bishops. To the vast majority of worldwide readers, a Kettle was only a Kettle.38

  The mere existence of The Egg and I, Wilkins went on, did not entitle plaintiffs to collect damages. The laws of Washington allowed neither punitive nor exemplary damages. Furthermore, damages, if any, had to have been sustained by the mental suffering or damaged reputation of the plaintiff himself, not a member of his family. In the eyes of the law, no family member could be compensated for empathic suffering.

  “A great deal of evidence has been admitted solely for the purpose of permitting a plaintiff to establish his identification as one of the characters in the book. . . . [Y]ou are instructed to completely disregard such evidence in your deliberations concerning the amount, if any of damages which such plaintiff is entitled to recover,” Wilkins stated. This covered nearly all of the testimony the jurors had heard during the trial. Further, any plaintiff who had in the past acknowledged or inferred that he or she was a character, or tried to profit from the possible Bishop/Kettle connection, was out of luck when it came to recovering damages. That knocked out anyone who had expressed the desire to take the Kettles on the road as paid entertainment.

  In a spectacular gaffe by the plaintiffs’ lawyers, the book that was entered into evidence was the Pocket Books edition of The Egg and I, not the hardcover Lippincott best seller or the Book of the Month Club best seller. Jurors were therefore instructed that damages, if any, could result only from the publication and sales of the Pocket Books edition. The potential golden egg shrank from ostrich- to quail-sized with this directive.39