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

  LOOKING FOR

  BETTY MacDONALD

  LOOKING FOR

  Betty

  MacDonald

  THE EGG, THE PLAGUE,

  MRS. PIGGLE-WIGGLE, AND I

  Paula Becker

  © 2016 by Paula Becker

  Printed and bound in the USA

  Design by Thomas Eykemans

  Composed in Electra, typeface designed by William Addison Dwiggins in 1935

  Display type set in Futura, designed by Paul Renner in 1927

  20 19 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

  www.washington.edu/uwpress

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Becker, Paula, author.

  Title: Looking for Betty MacDonald : the egg, the plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I / Paula Becker.

  Description: Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2016. |

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016007016 | ISBN 9780295999364 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: MacDonald, Betty Bard. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography. | Children’s literature—Authorship.

  Classification: LCC PS3525. A1946 Z434 2016 | DDC 813/.54 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016007016

  The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984. ∞

  The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald.

  Copyright © 1945 by Betty MacDonald.

  Copyright © renewed 1973 by Donald C. MacDonald, Anne Elizabeth Evans, and Joan Keil.

  The Plague and I by Betty MacDonald.

  Copyright © 1948 by Betty MacDonald.

  Renewed 1976 by Anne Elizabeth Evans & Joan Keil.

  Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty MacDonald. Copyright © 1950 by Betty MacDonald. Renewed 1978 by Anne Elizabeth Evans & Joan Keil.

  Onions in the Stew by Betty MacDonald.

  Copyright © 1955 by Betty MacDonald.

  Renewed 1983 by Anne Elizabeth Evans & Joan Keil.

  Letters written by Betty MacDonald are protected by copyright and used courtesy of Anne MacDonald Canham, Heidi Keil Richards, Toby Keil, Kallyn Keil, and Jerrica Keil.

  For

  Betty and Mary, and for

  Blanche Hamilton Hutchings Caffiere

  (1906–2006),

  with whom we all were friends

  CONTENTS

  Note to Readers

  PROLOGUE

  The House and I

  ONE

  The Richest Hill on Earth

  TWO

  Fate Alters the Plot

  THREE

  Child Bride

  FOUR

  Especially Betty

  FIVE

  Egged On

  SIX

  Smelling Like Sugar Cookies

  SEVEN

  Betty in Hollywoodland

  EIGHT

  Authing

  NINE

  The Name’s Kettle

  TEN

  Family Matters

  ELEVEN

  Anybody Can Write Books

  TWELVE

  Goodbye, Goodbye to Everything

  EPILOGUE

  Looking for Betty MacDonald

  The Bard/MacDonald Family

  Betty’s Houses: Place as Witness

  Bardisms

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Image Credits

  Text Permissions

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Plates follow pages 66 and 126

  NOTE TO READERS

  Portions of the material in this book appear on HistoryLink.org, the free online encyclopedia of Washington State history. All letters not cited to an archive were in a private collection at the time I was granted access to them. Quotations from such letters are cited by writer, recipient, and date only. I have opted to cite recipient family members and close friends exactly as Betty MacDonald addressed them in the letters in addition to identifying them by their full names, in the hope that if these materials become part of a public collection, future researchers will be better able to locate specific letters despite my current inability to give archival citations. All quotations from Betty MacDonald’s books are taken from the original J. B. Lippincott editions.

  Regarding the published and unpublished recollections of Bard family friends Blanche Hamilton and Margaret Bundy, this book refers to them as Blanche Hamilton and Margaret Bundy Callahan throughout. Both women changed their names on marriage during their long friendships with the Bards. Blanche Hamilton became Blanche Hutchings and then Blanche Caffiere. Under the name Caffiere, she published a book about the Bards, Much Laughter, a Few Tears. Margaret Bundy married the painter Kenneth Callahan in 1930.

  PROLOGUE

  The House and I

  WAS it the house I fell for first? Or was it Betty Bard MacDonald, who wrote The Egg and I and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and who described the house with such affection?

  According to real estate standards, Mother’s eight-room brown-shingled house in the University district was just a modest dwelling in a respectable neighborhood, near good schools and adequate for an ordinary family. To me that night, and always, that shabby house with its broad welcoming porch, dark woodwork, cluttered dining-room plate rail, large fragrant kitchen, easy book-filled firelit living room, four elastic bedrooms—one of them always ice-cold—roomy old-fashioned bathrooms and huge cluttered basement, represents the ultimate in charm, warmth, and luxury.1

  The house that Betty wrote about was in Seattle, but it could have been anywhere. For her millions of readers, it was anywhere, or rather it was our own place, a memory we had—or wished we’d had. It evoked that place of shelter and acceptance we spend our lives trying to find our way back to, a home both actual and iconic.

  I knew about the house because I’d recently stumbled on Betty MacDonald again after a whirlwind acquaintance with her books in childhood. I was beginning to learn about Betty’s world, to slip into her books, thinking and daydreaming about her life, about her family, and especially about her houses. Betty MacDonald’s books describe almost all of her homes and what those places meant to her. This house, in Seattle’s Roosevelt neighborhood, sheltered her family during the 1930s, the period described in her books The Plague and I and Anybody Can Do Anything. More than any of Betty’s houses, I’d tried to picture this one. Perusing old Seattle city directories—those dusty volumes languishing in libraries and historical archives that record who lived where, year by year—I came upon the listing for “Bard” with a jolt: 6317 15th Avenue Northeast, Seattle. I knew that house. It was six blocks from my own address, on a busy arterial street I drove down many times each day. Betty MacDonald was almost a stranger to me that day in the library—not yet a nearly constant focus, not yet a calling.

  It was a hunch, but I thought this house might have been Betty’s inspiration for the upside-down cottage where her beloved character Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle lived. I could imagine it from Betty’s description: “The most remarkable thing about Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is her house, which is upside down. It is a little brown house, and
sitting there in its tangly garden it looks like a small brown puppy lying on its back with its feet in the air.”2

  The house on 15th Avenue Northeast was right side up. But it was comfortably slouchy, faded and worn in a favorite-sweater kind of way. It looked like someone had once cared for it, and maybe still did. Children who clattered across the broad wooden front porch would not be damaging anything. The house just felt Piggle-Wiggly. So did the neighborhood, full of old Craftsman-style houses set far enough back from the sidewalks to showcase those tangly gardens, full of tall hollyhocks, overgrown and deeply scented rose bushes, snapdragons like the ones my cousins and I played with in my grandma’s backyard, pinching and releasing the blossoms’ bases to make them “talk” to one another.

  It was in El Paso, Texas, in 1971, that I first encountered Betty Bard MacDonald, on the dust jacket of a Piggle-Wiggle book. I was eight years old. The book was from my classroom’s tiny library, and I had carried it in my turquoise-flowered suitcase to Grandma’s house.

  I had been trying and failing to learn to ride my big new red bicycle, finally giving up for the day. I opened the book in Grandma’s shady guest room. The book was cheering. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle seemed to understand that children had complicated feelings, that doing new things well sometimes took time. She was so wise and kind that even the parents in the book sought her advice. I felt almost as if I knew her—as if we would be friends if I could visit her. I read all four of the Piggle-Wiggle books as quickly as I could find them and longed for more.

  Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s last page told me that its author, Betty MacDonald, had been born in Boulder, Colorado, and had grown up in Butte, Montana, and Seattle, Washington. It was the first I’d heard of any of those places, but the names stayed with me. Washington was the state that put stickers on my sack-lunch apples: “Grown in Washington.” When I moved to Seattle twenty-two years later, I thought about those stickers, and I remembered that long-ago author description. Betty MacDonald lived here, I thought idly sometimes. I wondered where she might have lived, and what became of her.

  People in Seattle knew Betty’s name, but many of them knew her best for writing a different book—a best seller whose catchy title I recognized, although I’d never read it: The Egg and I. I found the book easily and started reading.

  “Critics are cackling over The Egg and I,” proclaimed a blurb on the cover. “She has a hilarious sense of the ridiculous. If you’ve forgotten how to laugh, this book is what the doctor ordered!”

  The Egg and I was published on October 3, 1945, and American readers—parched for laughter after enduring World War II—instantly embraced its tart, self-deprecatory humor. The publisher, J. B. Lippincott, took note of the book’s early popularity and ramped up its publicity, dedicating much of their precious war-rationed paper to feeding the presses that churned out Egg, impression after impression, barely keeping up with the rising tide of national and then international demand. Before a year was up, The Egg and I had sold more than a million copies and was topping nonfiction best-seller lists, showing no sign at all of slowing down.

  The book was Betty’s story, or a version of her story: a childhood in a warm, rowdily eccentric family and her marriage in the 1920s to an insurance salesman turned chicken rancher named Bob, who whisked her off into the boondocks of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. There she endured the ceaseless rain and learned “to hate even baby chickens.”3 She was forced to rely on the dubious assistance of her nearest neighbors, a slapdash couple with a brood of a dozen-plus children. Betty dubbed the pair Ma and Pa Kettle. Hundreds of chickens, one burst water tower, a baby, and several years later, Betty and Bob decamped to a more modern farm, one with electric power rather than kerosene lanterns, closer to Seattle. Or so the story went in The Egg and I.

  I found The Egg and I hilarious and bracing, but kind of mean. I learned there was another book, The Plague and I, about Betty’s yearlong battle with tuberculosis nearly a decade after leaving the egg farm. The Plague and I intrigued me, both with the story Betty told and with the way she told it. What kind of person wrote about tuberculosis with such twist, such quirkiness, that the fear of death was beaten down with laughter? By the time I read Betty’s next book, Anybody Can Do Anything, I was hers. Betty MacDonald not only made me laugh, she transported me. I didn’t know it yet, but those dual qualities were Betty’s special magic, part of the reason so many readers treasured her books and frequently reread them.

  Anybody vividly describes a 1930s Seattle. It recounts Betty’s hardscrabble years as a single mother during the Great Depression, frequently desperate but buoyed by the support and companionship of her mother and siblings and by her own dark sense of humor. Betty’s descriptions of her terrors and frustrations, and the way her idiosyncratic family’s sense of humor and hyperbole shaped every situation—in short, their ways of being Bard—hung in the air as if Betty had just left the room.

  Betty’s final autobiographical book, Onions in the Stew, tells of her second marriage and of the pratfalls and pitfalls she encountered while raising teenagers on Vashon Island, a mostly rural outpost a short ferry ride from Seattle. This book was different from its predecessors: slicker, more restrained and constricted, as if molded by one of those 1950s girdles. The voice was clearly still Betty’s, but it was less spontaneous, as if she’d sensed a laugh track and tailored her story to sync with it. For me, though, that was a minor point. Through Betty’s words, I was starting to see the past—her life, lived decades ago in many of the places where I was living my present. I was beginning to catch glimpses of Betty’s 1930s, ’40s, ’50s—shimmering through my 1990s and 2000s. It was literary time travel, seductive, satisfying.

  Betty’s quick wit and acid humor laced through her four works of autobiography. She produced these books in rapid succession, interspersed with four sparkling Piggle-Wiggle books for children and the fairytale-like Nancy and Plum. Betty—her fresh, smiling face made globally famous by its presence on all but the very earliest editions of Egg’s front cover—was a celebrity. When Universal-International Pictures released the film version of Egg in 1947, Betty’s character was played by the glamorous movie star Claudette Colbert, who swanned pluckily through her scenes on the tidy chicken-ranch set costumed with great chic by the designer Adrian.

  Betty’s books transformed her and those around her into characters, skewering friends, neighbors, and adversaries alike. Her books all magnify the Bard motto “Don’t be a saddo.” Life is hard. All we can control is our response to it, and laughing beats crying. This sentiment cheered and encouraged readers worldwide. Her books—Egg overwhelmingly—were all best sellers in their time. Her Piggle-Wiggle books are children’s classics. Betty’s Ma and Pa Kettle characters quickly became iconic.

  During the thirteen years following Egg’s publication, Betty churned out books, conducted hundreds of print interviews, made scores of radio appearances, waded through mountains of fan mail, battled two libel lawsuits brought by former neighbors who saw themselves in Betty’s characters, hobnobbed with movie stars, cashed royalty checks, endured family crises, and moved from an idyllic rustic home on Vashon Island near Seattle to an equally idyllic property in Carmel Valley, California.

  Four decades after Betty MacDonald moved to California, in my Seattle, I read her books and was entranced by her rendering of our shared metropolis. I read the books again and again, as if hoping that reaching back into Betty’s stories would let me somehow graze fingertips with her. I wanted more and more to really know, in whatever way it might be possible, the woman behind the books.

  There must be a biography of Betty MacDonald, I thought. People still read her books. But I couldn’t find one. How could it be that The Egg and I has never been out of print, and yet there was no biography of its author? I imagined adults whose mothers had introduced them to that book wondering whatever happened to Betty MacDonald. I pictured all the children who’d ever read a Piggle-Wiggle book standing in line, with me at the head, asking their thi
rd-grade teachers for more details about the woman who’d invented that delightful character.

  To satisfy my own curiosity, I started looking for Betty MacDonald, beginning with the houses that her books described. It was a treasure hunt through Betty’s past, and through Seattle’s.

  I wanted to understand more about the physical place we shared and how Betty’s world compared to mine. Old city directories led me to most of the addresses where Betty lived and to the homes of her older sister, Mary Bard Jensen, who also wrote autobiographical books and a children’s series (Best Friends). With my three children in their booster seats behind me, I drove my red Volvo station wagon from house to house, gazing at the doors to which the Bard sisters once held keys, imagining the lives they might have led.

  My kids took these field trips in stride. As I discovered more about Betty’s world, I shared the details with them. “Is that a Betty house?” they’d ask me sometimes as we drove through quiet Seattle neighborhoods. They were on first-name terms with the Bards, as if they were family friends, albeit friends who never actually came to visit: “My mom is really into Betty and Mary,” four-year-old Sawyer told his friend Sam.

  I often sat in traffic in front of the house on 15th Avenue Northeast (which my kids and I started calling the Anybody house), wondering about Betty’s family. I felt I knew them from reading her books. Thinking about that, though, as I waited for the light to change, I realized it wasn’t true. Like Betty’s other readers, I knew only a clutch of tantalizing details.

  Betty’s books painted her family broadly as eccentric but added finely detailed touches about each individual. Her paternal grandmother, Gammy, wore her corsets upside down and baked her grandchildren frugal cookies that combined every ingredient lurking in the corners of the icebox. These inedible rocks were slipped to unsuspecting neighbors when Gammy’s head was turned. Betty’s mother, Elsie Bard, was known to everyone—even her children—as Sydney. In Betty’s books, Sydney is silent, implacable, a cipher, like the ghost light left burning overnight at every theater to keep stagehands and others from the peril of total darkness. And what of Darsie Bard, Betty’s father, a professional mining engineer to whose premature death she allocated but a single line, as if to further probe the story might precipitate hemorrhage?