Betty Ford: First Lady Page 5

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  The Five-Year Misunderstanding

  Shortly after they got married, Bill Warren left his father’s insurance company and took a position as an agent with the Northwestern National Insurance Company. The job required them to move to Maumee, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo, which meant Betty had to give up her job and the dance company she’d developed. She hated to leave her mother, stepfather, and her dancing, but she was married now, and her husband’s career came first.

  In Maumee, she and Bill rented an apartment in a house right along the river, and Betty quickly found a job as a “demonstrator” at LaSalle’s department store. Much like what she’d done at Herpolsheimer’s, she modeled, worked in the fashion office, and sold merchandise. Bill would often go up to LaSalle’s during his lunch hour with a friend or some workmates to watch Betty model in the dining room. “She was spectacular looking,” recalled a friend.

  After just ten months, Bill decided he didn’t want to be in the insurance business any longer, so they left and moved back to Grand Rapids until he found another job. That became the story of their marriage. “We moved around, pillar to post,” Betty wrote.

  The next move was to Syracuse, New York, where Bill took a sales job with the Continental Can Company. The commissions didn’t start right away, so Betty found a job on the production line at the Birds Eye frozen food processing plant in nearby Fulton to supplement their income. She worked four-hour shifts at a conveyor belt, sorting various vegetables and putting them into boxes. One time, while picking through some spinach, she found a worm, and from that day forward, whenever she ate spinach, she checked it very carefully.

  Betty liked living in New York State, but Bill lost his job with Continental Can, and they again moved back to Grand Rapids, where his next venture was as a salesman for the Widdicomb Furniture Company. With a territory that covered the entire East Coast, from Maine to Florida, Bill began traveling constantly.

  Betty’s friend Kay DeFreest sensed that there was trouble in the marriage. “Bill Warren was very ambitious, and the sky was the limit as far as he was concerned,” she said. “But not having the sky left Betty a great deal to do in order to support this ambition of his.”

  Betty wanted a family, but without a steady paycheck coming, it was up to her to make ends meet. She went back to Herpolsheimer’s Department Store and got hired as the head fashion coordinator—working with buyers, dealing with the advertising department, training models, and directing monthly fashion shows. It was a great boost to her confidence, and she loved it.

  In addition to her full-time job, she remained devoted to the Mary Free Bed Guild, working with crippled children, and several mornings a week, she taught modern dance classes at the YWCA. Many of her old friends already had a child or two, so she’d put out mats where the toddlers could play while she conducted the classes for the young mothers.

  Betty became very active in the Junior League, and the seriousness with which she took her involvement is evident in the detailed notes she kept. She wrote pages and pages about the way the Junior League operated: the proper protocol at meetings, the various welfare organizations the group helped, and the difference between public and private agencies. Publicly, Betty was known for her role with the musical productions and dinner dances that raised money for the Junior League, but behind the scenes, with no fanfare, she worked with counselors and her church to provide emotional assistance to children who were living in abusive or otherwise dysfunctional households.

  By age twenty-seven, Betty was ready for a house and children of her own, but Bill was not the staid, dependable husband she thought he would be. Ironically, she’d married someone just like her father.

  Betty tried her best to be a supportive wife, emulating what she’d learned from her mother. When Bill was in town, she’d rush home from work to prepare a nice dinner for the two of them, but more often than not, the meal would get cold as Betty waited for him to come home. It might be ten o’clock before he’d call—from a bar where he’d been drinking with the guys from the showroom—and say, “Why don’t you come down here, and we’ll go somewhere to eat?”

  There were indeed difficulties, and a few times, she asked her friend Kay DeFreest to be present for “a little backup” when she confronted Bill about his behavior, seemingly concerned about what his reaction might be.

  In her memoir, Betty stops short of saying that Bill Warren had a drinking problem or was abusive, but she acknowledged that “the things that made our dating so amusing, made the marriage difficult,” and “even when Bill was home, I wasn’t happy.”

  Three years into the marriage, Betty had finally had enough. “He can do what he wants with his life,” she thought, “but, damn it all, this is not for me.”

  It was a difficult decision to make. In the 1940s, divorce was uncommon and highly frowned upon. She knew that to be a divorcée was akin to wearing a scarlet letter, but the marriage was so bad, Betty was willing to walk that path. One evening, she was sitting home alone while Bill was on yet another business trip, when she decided to write him a letter telling him she didn’t want him to come back. “I’m sending your things to your family’s house,” she wrote. She hadn’t quite finished the letter, when the phone rang.

  It was Bill’s boss, calling from Boston.

  “Betty,” he said, “Bill has taken ill. He’s in a diabetic coma. It’s very serious.” So serious, the doctors didn’t think he would live.

  Betty got on the next available flight to Boston. Bill was alive, but one side of his face was paralyzed, he was unable to move on his own, and he required round-the-clock care. Her intention had been to leave him, but now, how could she leave under these circumstances? For six weeks, she stayed with friends in Boston, spending her days at the hospital learning how to give insulin shots and provide Bill the care he would need upon release from the hospital.

  What am I doing here when I no longer love this man? she kept thinking. But to divorce him at that point was, in her mind, unconscionable.

  Eventually Bill was able to be transported back to Grand Rapids by train, on a stretcher. But now, since he was unable to work, earning a living was solely up to Betty. At twenty-seven, she felt like her life was over. It was devastating. This must be my cross, she thought. Her dreams of having a family were gone, as her life turned into a blur of days that went from work to the hospital, and returning to her apartment to sleep. Then she’d wake up and start the whole cycle over again.

  Two years went by, and then, miraculously, Bill began to recover. Had God heard her prayers? She waited until he was well enough to return to work, and then she went straight to a lawyer and filed for divorce. Now twenty-nine years old, on her way to becoming free from her disastrous marriage, Betty Bloomer Warren was ready to spread her wings. As she waited for the divorce proceedings to become final, she began envisioning what she’d do next. Perhaps she’d go to Rio de Janeiro and work in the fashion industry. There was a whole world out there, and while thus far not much in her life had gone as planned, she wasn’t one to look back.

  To divorce her husband was an incredibly difficult decision, and one she didn’t take lightly. For a while, her whole demeanor changed. The models she worked with at Herpolsheimer’s could tell how upsetting it was for her. The five-year marriage to Bill Warren had so shattered her image of “happily ever after” that Betty made a commitment to herself that she’d never consider marrying again.

  And that’s when Jerry Ford showed up.

  Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. was well known in Grand Rapids. He’d been a star football player at South High, and then had gone on to play for the University of Michigan Wolverines. He had garnered the attention of some professional football scouts, and upon graduation from Michigan in 1935, he was offered positions with both the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions of the National Football League. But Ford declined the offers. He had his sights set on law school, and playing pro football was not going to get him there.r />
  Throughout school, he was registered and known as Gerald R. Ford Jr., the son of Dorothy and Gerald R. Ford. The truth was a bit more complicated. In those days, especially in a conservative city such as Grand Rapids, if your family didn’t conform to societal norms, some things were better left vague. The reality—which Jerry wouldn’t learn until he was a teenager—was that his mother had been married before, to a man named Leslie Lynch King. On July 14, 1913, in Omaha, Nebraska, Dorothy gave birth to a son, and the name on his birth certificate was Leslie Lynch King Jr.

  Dorothy was just twenty-one years old and had been married less than a year to Leslie King, who was ten years her senior. They’d had a whirlwind courtship, but weeks into the marriage, Dorothy discovered her husband had a violent side. He was physically and emotionally abusive to her, to the point that when she was still in the hospital after having given birth, a nurse called the police. Leslie King had shown up with a butcher knife threatening to kill his wife and son.

  When her newborn baby was just sixteen days old, Dorothy fled Omaha with her son and returned to her parents in Harvard, Illinois, where she filed for divorce. It took great courage and determination, because to be a divorced single mother in 1913 often elicited whispers of scandal. To avoid embarrassment in her hometown, Dorothy’s parents helped their daughter and her baby son relocate to Grand Rapids, where the young woman’s father had some business interests. She began a new life, determined to put the past behind her and raise her son as best she could in a positive environment. Her fifteen-month marriage had been painful, and Dorothy couldn’t bear to call her son by her ex-husband’s name, so instead she called him Junior, or Junie.

  She was in no hurry to marry again, but just a few months after moving to Grand Rapids, she met a ruggedly handsome bachelor named Gerald R. Ford at an Episcopal church social. Ford was everything Leslie Lynch King was not—kind, thoughtful, and devoted—both to Dorothy and her infant son. He was hardworking, scrupulously honest, and well respected in the community. They dated for a year, and on February 1, 1916, Dorothy and Gerald Ford got married in the church where they’d met.

  Junior was just eighteen months old, and from that point on, he was called Jerry and grew up believing Gerald R. Ford was his father. Gerald and Dorothy would have three more children together—all boys—providing Jerry with three younger brothers: Thomas, Richard, and James. There were times they barely had enough money to get by, moving from one rented house to another, but they had a strong faith and were active in both church and community. Gerald would take the boys camping and fishing, and he spent many a summer evening tossing baseballs and footballs. He was a man of impeccable integrity, and while he drilled into his sons the importance of honesty, Dorothy instilled in them the importance of helping others who were less fortunate. Both parents were strict disciplinarians and didn’t tolerate any backtalk. There were three house rules: tell the truth, work hard, come to dinner on time—and woe unto any who violated those rules.

  At twelve, Jerry joined the Boy Scouts, and within three years earned the rank of Eagle Scout. On top of scouting, school, and sports, he worked several part-time jobs. When he was sixteen, he was working the lunch counter at a restaurant directly across the street from school. One day a man came in, and, after standing around for about fifteen minutes, he approached Jerry and said, “I’m Leslie King, your father.”

  A few years earlier, Jerry’s mother had told him that she had been married once before, and that he was born before she married Gerald Ford. It hadn’t really registered with him, but now, to have his real father show up, unannounced, was a tremendous shock. King had arrived with his wife in a brand-new Lincoln, and he wanted to take Jerry out to lunch. Jerry got approval from his boss, and off they went to a nearby restaurant. The conversation was mostly superficial, but Jerry quickly surmised that Leslie King was much more well off financially than his stepfather and mother were. In the fifteen years of his life, his birth father had never sought to find him, until now, and had never contributed a dime for his upbringing. After lunch, King dropped off Jerry back at work and handed him $25.

  “Now, you buy yourself something—something you want that you can’t afford otherwise,” he said. With that, he turned, waved, and drove away.

  That evening, after his younger brothers had gone to bed, Jerry told his parents what had happened. It was so deeply emotional for him that years later—after experiencing war, witnessing death, and the loss of a presidential election—he would still recall it as one of the most difficult nights of his life. His mother and stepfather consoled him as he struggled to come to terms with what had happened that day. He didn’t doubt that his stepfather loved him as much as he loved his three biological sons. What hurt, he wrote in his memoir, was the indelible image he now had of his birth father: “a carefree, well-to-do man who didn’t really give a damn about the hopes and dreams of his firstborn son.”

  That night, Jerry lay in bed, sobbing, turning to prayer for comfort and guidance. Over and over, he repeated his mother’s favorite prayer from Proverbs:

  Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.

  In all thy ways acknowledge Him; and He shall direct thy paths.

  Even though Jerry Ford and Betty Bloomer grew up in Grand Rapids at the same time, albeit on different sides of the city, their lives took such separate and diverse routes, it is somewhat surprising they ever managed to get together. But there were times their paths may have crossed; when they may have been in the same place at the same time and never realized it. It seemed that no matter which way they turned, no matter the choices they made, they were destined to be together.

  When Betty was modeling and dancing in New York City, Jerry Ford was attending law school at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. A friend from Grand Rapids introduced him to a beautiful young woman named Phyllis Brown, who was attending Connecticut College, in New London, less than fifty miles away, and the two fell in love.

  Jerry’s family owned a small cottage at Ottawa Beach on the western shore of Lake Michigan, where he’d grown up swimming and boating with his brothers each summer. In August 1938 Jerry brought Phyllis there for a few weeks to get to know his family and to share his love of Michigan with her.

  Phyllis introduced Jerry to downhill skiing, and in the winter of 1939, they were on a slope in New Hampshire when Phyllis collided with a man who happened to be a magazine cover artist in New York City.

  “Have you ever been a model?” he asked. He gave her his card, and the next time she was in New York City, he sent her to John Robert Powers—the same modeling agency that had signed Betty Bloomer. Blonde, blue eyed, tall, sleek, and slim, Phyllis was striking yet at the same time wholesome looking, and Powers signed her immediately. While Betty had only sporadic work, Brown became one of Powers’s most requested models. She quit college, moved to New York, and, for a while, she was the preferred model for Cosmopolitan magazine, her face painted each month by the artist who had discovered her on the ski slope.

  Jerry Ford would visit Phyllis in New York City, and she introduced him to big-city life: going to the theater, dining in inexpensive neighborhood restaurants with an occasional splurge for dinner and dancing at the Rainbow Room on top of Rockefeller Center.

  The winter of 1939–40, Phyllis received an offer from Look magazine to do a photo shoot for a story about the popularity of weekend trips for twentysomethings by train from New York City to the ski slopes of Stowe, Vermont. She asked Jerry to join her, and the two of them appeared in a six-page spread in the March issue.

  It was a passionate romance, the first for both. “After his mother, I was the first important woman in his life,” Phyllis said. “And he was the first important man in my life, my first love affair, the first man I ever slept with—you never forget that, not ever, ever, ever.”

  A year later, in 1941, Jerry graduated from Yale Law School. He was twenty-eight, and, already with an eye toward politics, he decided
to return home to Grand Rapids to begin his own law practice. He and Phyllis had talked about getting married as soon as he received his law degree, but by this point, her career was going strong, and she wasn’t willing to leave New York City. Reluctantly, the two decided to end their relationship.

  “The end of our relationship caused me real anguish,” Jerry Ford wrote in his autobiography, “and I wondered if I’d ever meet anyone like her again.”

  Upon returning to Grand Rapids, Jerry got together with Phil Buchen, a fraternity brother from the University of Michigan, and each put up $1,000 to open the law partnership of Ford and Buchen. They’d barely gotten the practice off the ground when, just a few months later, on December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Suddenly the United States was at war, and Jerry Ford wanted desperately to be a part of it.

  In April 1942, as Betty Bloomer was making arrangements for her upcoming wedding to Bill Warren, Jerry was commissioned into the US Navy. Originally assigned to be a physical fitness trainer at the navy’s preflight school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he wrote letters to everyone he knew, pleading for a billet on a ship. It worked, and finally, in the spring of 1943, he received orders to report to the USS Monterey, a light aircraft carrier that was about to be commissioned and then head for battle in the Pacific.

  Jerry Ford saw plenty of action aboard the Monterey—“as much action as I’d ever hoped to see,” he recalled. As a gunnery officer, it was his job to direct the crew firing the 40-millimeter antiaircraft gun as Japanese warplanes tried to destroy them. Not only were there months of fierce battles, but one night Ford was nearly swept off the flight deck during a vicious typhoon in the Philippine Sea. The seas were so violent that three destroyers rolled and capsized, drowning everyone aboard. When a fire broke out in the Monterey’s hangar deck during the storm, and three out of the four boilers stopped functioning, it seemed the crew was doomed. They were preparing to abandon ship, but the captain came up with a plan that got the boilers working, allowing the men to extinguish the flames and make it safely to the island of Saipan. It was a lesson in courage, resourcefulness, and leadership that Ford would never forget.