Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (24 page)

It was a stunning turn of events. Not even two years earlier, the 38th president of the United States had been serving out his term in the White House, where First Lady Betty Ford had gained national prominence as an outspoken advocate for women's rights, a warm and lively host (she once danced the hora after a state dinner for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin), and a beacon in the fight against breast cancer after she went public with her own diagnosis in 1974. Now, just as she was trying to adjust to a more ordinary routine outside of the Washington spotlight, her celebrated life was collapsing. For months, the Ford kids had watched as their mother's decades-long habit of mixing prescription drugs and alcohol sabotaged her behavior and her health. It was Susan, then 19, who decided the situation was dire enough to warrant an intervention. “I was scared to death,” reflects Susan Ford Bales, but she knew something had to be done. Her mother was not pleased. “I'd never heard of an intervention, and I would just as soon have kept it that way,” Mrs. Ford recalled in
Betty: A Glad Awakening
, her forthright and revealing 1987 memoir. “I didn't want to hear
any
of what my family was telling me.”

But tell they did. Mike, the eldest, acknowledged the many pressures and demands of political life in Washington, but said that his mother's behavior was now harming relationships with family and friends. Gayle reported that she and Mike were planning to start a family, but they wanted their children to know their grandmother as a healthy and loving person. Jack talked about never wanting to bring friends home: “I was always kind of peeking around the corner into the family room to see what kind of
shape Mother was in.” Steve described his mother turning down a special dinner he had cooked one weekend. “I'd gone to the store, done the shopping, put the silverware on the proper sides of the plates, and she went and got another drink,” he remembered. “I was hurt.” Susan told her mother that she had always admired her as a dancer, but now she was “falling and clumsy, and she just wasn't the same person.” The former president told his wife of 29 years that she'd become slow, as if she was “in second gear,” and it had become “increasingly difficult to lead a normal life.”

Betty Ford's initial reaction was resentment, anger, shock, and denial. “My makeup wasn't smeared, I wasn't disheveled, I behaved politely, and I never finished off a bottle, so how could I be an alcoholic?” she thought. “And I wasn't on heroin or cocaine, the medicines I took—the sleeping pills, the pain pills, the relaxer pills, the pills to counteract the side effects of other pills—had been prescribed by doctors, so how could I be a drug addict?” She collapsed into tears, but she listened. After everyone had spoken, the lead doctor in attendance, Joe Pursch, asked Mrs. Ford if she would be willing to go into treatment. She agreed. That night, the family sat down to a pot roast dinner. One week later, after detoxing at home and celebrating her 60th birthday with friends, the former first lady checked herself into Long Beach Naval Hospital's Alcohol and Drug Rehabilitation Service.

Within a few days, Betty Ford went public with the news that she was battling two substance abuse problems. “I am not only addicted to the medication I have been taking for my arthritis, but also to alcohol,” she said in a statement released at a press conference. Reporters pressed Robert Barrett, a former White House aide and close family friend who was overseeing the announcement, for more details. “We've never had too much success in keeping Mrs. Ford's mouth shut,” Barrett told them, according to the
New York
Times
. “Somewhere along the line she'll be saying what she wants to when she wants to.”

Before long, she did. “Hello, my name's Betty Ford,” she would tell others struggling with addiction, “and I'm an alcoholic and a drug addict.”

W
ELL BEFORE
B
ETTY
F
ORD
took her first drink, swallowed her first pill, or, for that matter, became first lady of the United States, she was a spirited tomboy growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with two older brothers and a German shepherd named Teddy. Elizabeth Ann Bloomer, also known as Betty, or sometimes Bet or Bets, was born on April 8, 1918, the third child and only daughter of Hortense Neahr and William Stephenson Bloomer. By the time Betty came along, Mrs. Bloomer was in her mid-30s, and Betty's brothers, Bill and Bob, were seven and five. Betty Ford always assumed she was an accident; Hortense Bloomer liked to say that her daughter had “popped out of a bottle of champagne.”

Betty Ford's recollections of her youth, recounted in her first autobiography,
The Times of My Life
, are largely witty, lighthearted, and endearing. Every summer, the Bloomers trooped off to their family cottage at Whitefish Lake, about 30 miles north of Grand Rapids, where her father fished (“we were served fish and fish and fish until I hoped I would never see fish again,” Mrs. Ford recalled) and the kids played, swam, and ate. Betty Ford described her mother as attractive, her father as good-looking, and herself as “a fat little kid.” At the summer picnic grounds, she would toddle from table to table collecting cookies, cake, and ice cream. “I just got fatter and fatter until finally my mother hung a sign on my back,” she remembered. “It said, PLEASE DO NOT FEED THIS CHILD.”

Betty's father, a traveling salesman for a rubber company, spent a lot of time on the road; at home, he was an early radio enthusiast who loved tinkering with his simple receiver. “Wow! I got Chicago, I got Chicago, come listen to it,” he'd shout, and the Bloomer kids came running. Mrs. Ford remembered her mother as loving and supportive, but also a perfectionist who insisted on formal manners—young Betty had to wear a hat and white gloves on shopping expeditions. This did not stop her, however, from roughhousing with the boys. Football, ice hockey, wrestling—she was determined to try it all. “When they got to rolling on the floor, I'd be trying to pull off the one who was on top,” Mrs. Ford later recalled. “I was a terrible tomboy and the bane of my big brothers' existence.”

It was an innocent childhood, as she described it, filled with playful antics and goofy mishaps. Young Betty and her friend Mary Adelaide Jones invented a fun game at sleepovers: They would stand in the shower and “stick our bottoms under the hot water, to see who could outlast the other and get her fanny reddest,” Mrs. Ford recalled. There was “garbage night” on Halloween, when the kids tipped over their neighbors' trash pails, whitewashed their porches, and soaped their windows. An avid dancer, Mrs. Ford remembered one disastrous early recital when she dropped a sand bucket while skipping around on stage, much to the delight of the audience. And then there was her first kiss, in fifth grade: John Sears, the culprit, pecked her on the cheek under a blanket on the way to a school picnic.

The earlier a person begins to drink alcohol, the more likely he or she is to develop an addiction problem later in life. Betty Ford's initial experiences were fairly typical. She first tasted liquor when she was 12 or 13 at a girlfriend's house. “Three or four of us kids tried it, said, ‘Oh, how awful,' and went our ways,” she recalled. In
her late teens and early adulthood, she drank to be social and to be accepted by her peers, she wrote, but she suffered toxic reactions on several occasions—episodes that might have served as red flags. When she was 19, her mother found her moaning in the bathroom after drinking a rum and Coke at a hotel in Grand Rapids. At another time, she blacked out after downing a “purple passion” (most likely grain alcohol mixed with grape juice), and she once got sick after having a Manhattan with a cherry on top. “Now, with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, I can see alcohol did not agree with me,” Mrs. Ford later recalled, “but in those days, we didn't even know alcoholism was a disease or that it might be inherited.”

Researchers have demonstrated that addiction is heavily influenced by genes, which account for about 50 percent of a person's risk. Alcoholism, it turned out, had a hold on the Bloomer family, something Betty first discovered when her father died suddenly from carbon monoxide poisoning while working on his car in the garage. It was after his funeral that Betty, then 16, was told he had been an alcoholic. Because her father drank on the road, Betty's mother had been able to shield her children from the effects. She could not, however, protect them from the disease: In her autobiography, Mrs. Ford disclosed that two of the Bloomer kids, she and her brother Bob, would struggle with alcoholism later in life.

After William Bloomer's death, the family soldiered on with classic midwestern grit. Betty, popular with the boys, enjoyed a busy teenage social life with the requisite rounds of spin the bottle. But her true passion was dance. Most transformative were summer classes at the Bennington School of the Dance in Vermont, where she met the legendary dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. “I worshiped her as a goddess,” Mrs. Ford later recalled. “To this day, I feel that shiver of awe and delight when she comes on the scene.” Soon, Betty was studying with Graham in New York City
and performing in New York shows, including
American Document
at Carnegie Hall.

Being a Graham protégé was a formidable accomplishment, but it soon became clear that Betty, who was also modeling and socializing with friends, was too distractible to commit herself to professional dance. “You can't carouse and be a dancer, too,” she remembered Graham telling her. Betty was homesick, as well, and couldn't resist her mother's pleas for her to move back to Michigan. There, she got a job in fashion at Herpolsheimer's, a Grand Rapids department store, and became reacquainted with Bill Warren, an old classmate who had taken Betty to her first school dance when she was 12. Now all grown up and in the insurance business, Warren was a good dancer, a decent tennis player, and, Ford later wrote, “unlike some of the men I dated, he wasn't a bit stuffy.” The two were married in the spring of 1942, when Betty was 24 years old.

It did not take long, however, for Betty to realize that they were ill suited. She wanted a house and a family; Warren was more interested in hanging out with his pals at the local hot spot. “No matter how many somersaults I turned,” Mrs. Ford wrote, “it wasn't enough to keep him home.” Their relationship became enormously strained, especially after Warren, who had diabetes, became severely ill and spent months recovering. As soon as he was better, Betty started divorce proceedings; the marriage was officially over in September 1947, after five tumultuous years.

It was that very same fall that Betty met Gerald Ford, former Eagle Scout, former linebacker for the University of Michigan football team, former lieutenant commander in the Navy. At 29, Betty was more than eager to settle down for good, and Gerald Ford—“good-looking, smart, and from a fine family,” as Mrs. Ford later described him—was a much prized bachelor. In her
memoir, Mrs. Ford makes no mention of how Gerald viewed her divorce, which was relatively uncommon at the time. But his own parents had divorced when Jerry was just a baby, and Betty's status did not appear to impede their relationship at all. (Mrs. Ford later recalled that when a
People
magazine reporter asked her why she had never told anybody about her divorce—which went public after Jerry Ford was named vice president—she responded: “Well, nobody ever asked me.”) The two became fast companions, and within just a few months, he popped the question. “He's a very shy man, and he didn't really tell me he loved me; he just told me he'd like to marry me,” Mrs. Ford wrote. “I took him up on it instantly, before he could change his mind.” The two were married on October 15, 1948, at Grace Episcopal Church. Betty wore a blue satin dress and carried red roses; Jerry sported a gray suit, a carnation in his buttonhole, a handkerchief neatly folded into his breast pocket—and a pair of brown shoes covered in dust.

He had a good excuse. The groom was campaigning for his first seat in Congress and had forgotten to change his shoes after shaking hands at a farm earlier in the day. Against all odds, Ford had won the Republican primary several weeks before the wedding. Now, he was a viable political hopeful, leaving little time for anything other than canvassing for votes. Their “farce of a honeymoon,” as Betty Ford later described it, was marked by an unromantic lineup of activities: one Northwestern–Michigan football game; one freezing Saturday night sitting in football bleachers in Owosso, Michigan, to hear New York governor Tom Dewey campaign against President Harry Truman; one Sunday morning spent traipsing around newsstands to collect the political headlines; and one car ride home to Grand Rapids during which Jerry asked his bride if she could fix him a quick dinner, because he needed to dash
out to a political meeting. “A fantasy of me in a hostess gown, soft music on the radio, icy martinis, the smell of a delicious roast filling the apartment,” Mrs. Ford recalled, “died a-borning.” Instead, she made him a cheese sandwich with a can of tomato soup.