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

by Paula Becker

  Except during Betty’s first marriage, she and her mother had lived in the same house almost continually. Sydney was a gourmet cook, a dedicated reader, a gardener, provider of child care to her children’s children, a source of love and frustration, and a link with the past—and with Darsie.

  On August 21, 1957, Betty’s engagement book noted an afternoon doctor’s appointment. “The doctor said I was in fine condition—in fact he had never seen anyone look better—which info will make my trip to Seattle much pleasanter,” Betty wrote Bernice Baumgarten.21 This is the final entry in the volume. A few days later, Betty and Don left Carmel Valley and drove up the coast.

  When Betty’s Seattle doctors examined her, they found that her carcinoma had recurred. She underwent further radiation, and complications forced her to be in and out of Maynard Hospital, a private hospital in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood.

  Her cancer and its treatment quickly narrowed Betty’s world to a tight circuit between the hospital and Mary’s house. Having faced death in Firland, Betty now slowly admitted to herself that she was facing death again.22 Lying in Mary’s guest-room bed, she redirected her terror toward the ranch, a huge expense, despite its loveliness—should she sell it at once and shrug off the terrible debt? Or should she go right back there, work hard, write anything she could to earn the funds to save it? She thought about Don, whom she loved to distraction but whose extravagance seemed ruinous. Perhaps they’d find oil on the ranch, and she would live to travel. And she thought about Sydney, whom she missed dreadfully.23

  Bernice Baumgarten seems not to have known Betty’s prognosis. As late as fall 1957, when Betty was receiving radiation and alternating between Maynard Hospital and Mary’s house, Baumgarten was still encouraging Betty to continue writing. In December, she wrote to Betty that she was leaving regular employment with Brandt & Brandt, but that whatever happened, she would take care of Betty and Mary.

  Women diagnosed with ovarian cancer in the 1950s generally had two options: surgery or radiation. Betty took both, and both failed her. Chemotherapy was in its infancy, and although researchers in Seattle were experimenting with using nitrogen mustard, Betty was apparently not a candidate for this treatment or was perhaps advised against it.24

  Betty stayed with Mary and Jens as long as her care could be managed at home. Margaret Bundy Callahan visited and reflected that Betty’s certain fate “haunts me to the point of nightmares. . . . The Bards are pretty thrown by it but keeping up in the same way, not allowing it to depress them. Betty herself is truly wonderful, and aside from wiping her eyes a few times, completely the same as usual. She is thin and showing the results of the surgery and the bad news.”25

  Betty’s fans found her even in the hospital. Blanche Hamilton recalled that during one of her visits with Betty, a Chilean fan who had managed to locate Betty asked for and was granted permission for a bedside visit. Betty once phoned Blanche from the hospital and asked her friend to bring her a bologna sandwich, which Blanche happily did. But such light moments—a fan, a friend, a sated appetite—were the last glimmers of normalcy.

  “I’ve had a really gruesome time these past few months—in fact the worst in my entire life,” Betty wrote the Lippincott editor Tay Hohoff in early December. “I am as thin as a thread and expect to be much thinner as I am nauseated all the time—the only reason I am finally writing this letter is that I discovered yesterday that by taking two codeine, waiting 20 minutes for it to take effect and then hurrying like mad I can write 1½ letters before beginning to gag—this of course without any pause for thought, wit or clever phrasing.”26 A few weeks later, Betty’s doctors decided she could tolerate no further radiation.

  Just before Christmas, Betty reentered Maynard Hospital for the what would be the final time.27 She had a private room and palliative care but no hope of recovery. With her world further narrowed to her creaking hospital bed, Betty’s fear surged. Mary, who understood her so well and who had so many times during their fifty years of sisterhood been able to help, encourage, prod, or protect her, felt helpless.28

  Don wrote to Bernice Baumgarten on February 3 that Betty was weaker, but he still thought improvement was possible, despite her doctors’ attempt to extinguish his hope. He had asked Betty to hold on, he said, and she was trying. Betty, he added, was the bravest person that ever lived. With Don unable to release his wife, other family members—primarily Anne and Mary—had to step forward and accept the certainty of Betty’s imminent demise, deal with the necessary wrenching details, and make difficult decisions. Her husband begged her to hold on, but Betty, in excruciating pain, could not.

  Numbed by drugs, consumed by disease, and tended by nurses, Betty’s spirit and her voice fell silent. On February 6, the New York Times carried a brief article drawn from the Associated Press wire service. Under the headline “Betty MacDonald Critically Ill,” the story bore the news that Betty had lapsed into a coma. Since the publicity surrounding the launch of Onions in the Stew launch almost three years earlier, Betty had seldom been in the news. Because her cancer diagnosis was not public knowledge, this abrupt wire-service report shocked her readers.

  Betty’s fans around the world responded by mailing her letters expressing concern, gratitude, and prayers. Some of these missives were simply addressed, “Betty MacDonald, The Egg And I author, Seattle hospital.” These people felt they knew her. “I wish you a speedy recovery,” a woman from Johannesburg, South Africa wrote. “With all the courage you have shown in the past, you most certainly will be up and around soon and writing more of your delightful books. I have loved every one of them, and have read them over and over.”

  A fan from Sydney, Australia, offered, “I would like you to know how popular your books are in Aussie. I know you will be cheerful as you’re that type. You may like to know that over here people think of you and wish you a speedy recovery and maybe another book soon.”

  From Dundee, Florida, came a postcard: “May God bless you and take you home to be with Him. I see in Tampa Tribune your picture—such a smile! So that I know you LOVE everyone. John 14: 1–6 is my favorite passage. What is yours? I’ll meet you in Heaven later.”

  In the past, Betty had answered letters from such fans with special glee, touched and amused at the way their concern for her immortal soul revealed their own quirkiness. She’d spotted instantly the cracks where people’s eccentricity showed through. But now it was far too late for Betty to notice the outpouring, to savor its Bardish twist. At eleven o’clock on the night of February 7, 1958, with her family gathered around her hospital bed, Betty died. She was fifty years old. She had requested that there be no funeral, and none was held.29

  Someone—Mary or Anne—would have sent telegrams to Bernice Baumgarten and to Lippincott. Her agent and her publishers had been, like her family, intimates. They joined the Bards and friends—Blanche Hamilton, Margaret Bundy Callahan, and many more—and fans in mourning the loss of Betty.

  For Don, Betty’s death began a process of withdrawing from the world. He had been known publicly only as Betty’s husband. After her death, he returned to a private obscurity. Betty’s family maintained little contact with him, although Anne and Joan periodically prompted their growing children to send him drawings or thank-you notes for holiday gifts.

  Anne and Joan grieved for Betty, but both of them were busy young mothers, their sadness crowded by the minutiae of family life. Anne, who was nearly thirty when Betty died, had four children under the age of nine. Joan, at twenty-eight, had three children under seven and would give birth to her fourth and final baby less than two years later. Anne and her family moved to California a few years after Betty’s death. Joan and her husband, Jerry, and their children lived in Bellevue, across Lake Washington from Seattle.

  Betty was gone, but her books lived on. And, though Baumgarten and Lippincott handled the matter gently in their communications with Betty’s family, so did her contractual obligations. To prevent Betty’s heirs from having to repay Lippinc
ott for the advance she had received for the never-written fifth Piggle-Wiggle book, Tay Hohoff cobbled together a compilation of the episodes from Betty’s books that were about her family.30 The resulting volume, Who, Me? contained no new material and was marketed as Betty’s autobiography.

  Tay Hohoff was one of Lippincott’s most gifted editors, as she was shortly to prove by her work with Harper Lee. But the task of dismantling and reconstructing Betty’s books was daunting. Mary was supposed to have helped Hohoff with the project but could not bring herself to do so. Although Hohoff did her best, the result fell flat. Who, Me? lacked Betty’s singularly witty way of weaving insight, insult, and recollection into a story.

  Baumgarten and Hohoff toyed with a plan to lard Who, Me? with quotes from Betty’s unpublished letters to Lippincott and Brandt & Brandt, but they gave it up. Betty’s irreverent tone was unrestrained in her letters, and her professional correspondence characterizing people she’d worked with in the publishing industry was sometimes vitriolic. It seemed wrong to reveal this side of Betty. Hohoff told Baumgarten she thought Betty’s character had been a collection of contradictory qualities and that Betty was the most complex person she’d ever met.31 Baumgarten returned the heap of letters to Don’s Carmel Valley post office box. He stashed them in the weathered barn at the ranch with all the rest of Betty’s correspondence.

  Shortly after Betty’s death, Mary and Jens moved to Vashon, into their new, low-slung modern home hugging the edge of Colvos Passage. Vashon, which had been Betty’s by virtue of her celebrity and its depiction in Onions, became Mary’s place. It took nearly a year, but Mary gradually began to write again, and finally acquiesced to Lippincott’s urging for another volume of Best Friends.

  For the first time, Mary faced her work—and life—without her sister. The loss was huge. “Our relationship has always been such that Betty furnished our imaginative lives, and I provided the practical,” Mary reflected to Bernice Baumgarten. “Together we were Mother’s husband and managed her children. We had one fault in common—we actually required the praise and faith in one another that we funneled into each other at all times—other than that we were not in the least alike. We loved and admired each other and disagreed on almost everything. We verbalized easily and talked endlessly and at the end of the so-called discussion, we had convinced one another not at all.”32

  The world still took an interest in the Bards. In the absence of a Betty to satisfy it, Lippincott and Baumgarten pressed Mary to write a book about her mother. Betty had painted Sydney as stalwart but, for all her work to make a home in mining camps, mansions, humble houses, and amid her children’s friends and offspring, ultimately passive. Lippincott wanted the bright, foot-stamping, pep-in-pepper Mary of Betty’s childhood stories to yank this mother onto center stage, but Mary ultimately shelved the project. She just didn’t know her mother well enough, she told Tay Hohoff apologetically.33 Mary died in 1970 at sixty-six years old. News stories announcing her death noted that she had been teaching a weekly playwriting class to lower-income children, undaunted by the fact that she had never published a play herself.

  Continued sales of Betty’s books brought a steady flow of new readers. Not knowing she had died, many of these people wrote to Betty at Lippincott. Fan letters arrived for decades. The publishers forwarded the mail to Don, who stored it with her papers, unopened. Don lived on at the ranch, selling off bits of the property when funds grew low, becoming increasingly reclusive. He died in 1975. For years, the many boxes filled with Betty’s correspondence lay undisturbed, wafted gently by the dry Carmel Valley winds. In time, before the ranch property was sold, Anne and Joan placed the boxes in storage.

  Bernice Baumgarten handled Betty’s literary estate until 1970, when she and her husband, James Gould Cozzens, retired to Florida. Baumgarten died of cancer in early 1978, Cozzens later that same year. Baumgarten’s papers, donated to the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana, included letters relating to Baumgarten’s handling of Betty’s literary estate.34 The correspondence illuminated Lippincott and Brandt & Brandt’s frustrations during the years of Don MacDonald’s decline. Licensing Betty’s work required Don, Anne, and Joan to sign documents, a process stymied by Don’s reluctance to attend to correspondence or business matters. In the end, only gently firm directive letters from Baumgarten could coax Don into action, and those not always. One project whose option expired without Don’s signature was a Ma and Pa Kettle television series.

  Publishing houses were eager to find the next Betty MacDonald, and many writers aspired to the role. These hopefuls submitted manuscripts, a self-produced Lippincott history recounted, “in suffocating quantities. The more imitative, the less likely they were to make the grade. But there were a few which fell into the same category without being imitative—we began calling them ‘funny women’ books.”35

  Betty’s humor had stemmed from her ability—her compulsion—to exaggerate. Following Betty’s lead, exaggeration became a particular hallmark of domestic humor. Among the “funny women” who followed in Betty’s footsteps were Jean Kerr, Erma Bombeck, Peg Bracken, Barbara Holland, and Judith Viorst.36 Betty’s brand of humor was unique, however, in hitting its mark without resorting to drollery or whining. Her work came from a deeper well.

  Betty’s friend and former National Youth Administration assistant William Cumming assessed her thus: “Like most people who laugh a lot, she wasn’t a person warmed by humor. She was deadly serious, and her humor was a serious shield against the fears inspired in her by the world. Like Billie Holiday she laughed to keep from throwing up.” Despite its origins, Cumming concluded, Betty’s laughter “ended up joyous. The rasp of its sandpapered abrasiveness never obscured the pure joy that she derived from destruction of pomposity and ignorance.”37 It was that pure joy that Betty’s readers recognized and loved.

  Betty MacDonald was a woman deeply imprinted by her family’s compulsion to create story, a member of a tribe—the Bards—who saw themselves as separate from their peers, superior regardless of fluctuating income or social status. She was the conduit for a particular female experience during the early and mid-twentieth century, crafting versions of the truth that both matched and challenged her era. She was quick to judge, quick to self-deprecate; gifted, flawed, sometimes tormented; instinctively and insistently turning her focus toward the unusual, as plant shoots turn toward the light. She never expected success and was amazed when it came. Like her father, she sensed the presence of buried treasure. Like her mother, she valued home. Betty MacDonald embraced the adventure that her first book miraculously enabled. She was that rare writer privileged to touch millions of readers. For those readers, what Mary had always claimed became true: Betty MacDonald could do anything.

  EPILOGUE

  Looking for

  Betty MacDonald

  OVER the years I gazed at Betty’s 15th Avenue Northeast house, and its decline was clear, even from the street. Paint peeled, and no one patched it. Grass sprouted in the rain gutters. Weeds filled the yard. Eventually the porch was enclosed by plywood. A cheerful mosaic address sign that had been propped against the front steps when Tanya lived there disappeared, as did the big steel mailbox where I’d left The Plague and I and Anybody Can Do Anything to thank Tanya for showing me through the house.

  By late 2011, the house was clearly serving as a squat, sheltering souls more desperate than the Bards had ever been. The plywood covering the doors and windows was pried aside again and again. Neighbors repeatedly phoned police to report babies left crying in strollers on the battered back porch while who knows what illicit activity transpired inside. The house was past the limits of decline.

  The news that Betty’s house would be demolished, along with its neighbor to the north, came on a mid-May afternoon in 2012. Property redevelopment would follow.

  The house was doomed, but I could not let it go. I e-mailed the developer and described Betty’s fame and her tenure in the house. Acknowledging the property’s derelict condit
ion, I asked permission to salvage a few artifacts for Betty’s legacy, and for eventual historical display. Fine, he replied. You should be ready to move quickly.

  One night in late July, the developer e-mailed me to be at the house next morning. “There is nothing of significance left to salvage . . . don’t get your hopes up,” the e-mail warned, but I was hopeful, grateful again to Tanya for my brief glimpse inside the home years ago. I parked a block away amid peaceful bungalows, steeling myself. “I’ll be the last person who ever goes through that house,” I thought.

  Wearing thick boots and gloves, carrying a face mask, headlamp, tools, and a camera, I checked in with the supervisor, Mike, as the backhoe idled. “Let me know when you come out,” Mike said, briefly silencing his chainsaw. “We’re demolishing that shed first, then the house, but we’ll wait until you’re through.” I climbed the rickety back stairs. I stepped through the kitchen, pitch black and stripped of appliances, where Sydney had sat in the (long-gone) built-in nook and written her radio serial, Schuyler Square, smoking cigarettes through the night. My headlamp on, I started for the stairwell.

  But for my tour with Tanya, I would surely have been lost. Walls were pulled apart, their debris blocking my path. Lath was exposed, paneling lay in heaps, wood was burned and scarred. The smell, strongest in the basement, physically repelled me. Flies buzzed. I hoped not to stumble on animal remains, or worse.

  I climbed the stairs, relieved to find the second floor both brighter—no plywood covered the windows here—and slightly less damaged. Still the lath was exposed, still debris lay in heaps, still giant nails protruded at all angles from the walls. I asked myself what I could save.

  I collected doorknobs, mostly, from the upstairs doors, encrusted with paint and certainly original. The bathroom medicine-cabinet door, which I’d hoped to salvage, was gone already. I found one picturesque double-hung window tossed on the floor in the middle of what had been Sydney’s room and pried another from its frame. I marked each doorknob with its provenance, all the while thinking that the Bards had lived here. This place was respite, and it was battleground. All the good and bad parts of being a family, all of life’s harrowing and triumphant moments, all of it happened to them here. This was a place where each Bard in her own way chose over and over again not to give up. Betty slept under this roof for more than four thousand nights and woke again each morning. By the time she left, it had become part of her, as houses do. And, as I felt strongly, she had become part of the house.