Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (25 page)

On November 2, 1948, 35-year-old Gerald Ford won his seat representing Michigan's fifth district in the U.S. House of Representatives. The newlyweds whisked themselves off to Washington, where they would live for the next three decades. During that time, Gerald Ford's unexpected career elevated him from congressman to House minority leader to vice president and, finally, to president of the United States. Betty Ford, meanwhile, juggled the ups and downs of political life and the demands of four young children. Despite her charm, ambition, and fortitude, Mrs. Ford would soon find herself reeling from the hurdles of daily life, combined with her own feelings of inadequacy. While her husband gallivanted off to Congress and traveled the country, Betty Ford stayed home, shuttling the kids to Sunday school and Scouts and soothing herself with a pernicious mix: prescription drugs and alcohol.

O
N
J
ULY 6, 1957,
M
RS.
F
ORD WOKE
up “swollen and sweaty” and very pregnant with the couple's fourth and youngest child. She was miserable and cried so hard, she recounted, that she went into labor. Gerald Ford rushed his wife off to the hospital, but didn't stick around. He and their young sons had a critical engagement with Mickey Mantle at Griffith Stadium, the old D.C. ballpark, where the Yankees were playing the Washington Senators. The baby was cooperative, Mrs. Ford recalled, making her debut during the seventh-inning stretch. By the time her husband returned to the hospital later that day (the Yanks won, 10–6), Mrs. Ford was sitting
up and looking smug. Having delivered the couple's first baby girl, “I thought I had accomplished the impossible,” she recalled.

Susan's arrival meant that Betty and Jerry, who was then serving his fifth term in the House, were now the parents of four children under the age of eight. Although they had full-time help at home, Betty Ford was determined to be a hands-on mother. The family home, situated in a tree-lined neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, just over the Potomac River from Washington, was filled with marbles, Tinkertoys, and energetic kids. Mrs. Ford was a den mother, a PTA mom, a Sunday school teacher at the local Episcopal church, and a self-proclaimed “zookeeper,” overseeing a menagerie of gerbils, rabbits, praying mantises, fish, chickens, turtles, and a bird. For a time, there was even an alligator living in the backyard, fed by the Ford kids decked out in boxing gloves. One cold fall day, Mrs. Ford purposely decided to let nature take its course; much to her relief, the reptile froze to death and was buried with a cross over its head.

From the outside, life at the Ford house seemed “like a Norman Rockwell illustration,” Mrs. Ford recalled. But inside, Betty Ford was becoming increasingly dependent on alcohol. Like so many alcoholics, she was unable to pinpoint the moment she morphed from a social drinker into somebody “preoccupied with drinking.” It happened gradually in a town rife with political fund-raisers, lobbyist bashes, and official dinners. “If you go to enough cocktail parties, you start anticipating cocktail parties, and then when you aren't going to a cocktail party, you want the same kind of lift at home,” she later recalled. Alcohol helped smooth the prickly edges of Washington politics both on the Hill and at home, where Mrs. Ford encouraged her husband to have a beer or a martini after work to loosen up. She served guests cocktails before dinner, too, “because it made for more successful parties, or so I thought,” she wrote. And when Jerry was on the road, which was often, Betty
Ford poured a five o'clock drink with a neighbor—or without—and topped it off with a nightcap after the kids went to bed. Alcohol became a soothing elixir, so much so that she would sometimes add a tablespoon of vodka to a hot cup of tea.

People who suffer from low self-esteem are especially vulnerable to substance use. Despite her dexterity in juggling Republican National Conventions with trips to the pediatric ER to fix broken bones, Betty Ford struggled with her self-worth and her rank in the Washington hierarchy. She was the classic 1950s woman sacrificing her own yearnings—and much of her identity—for her husband's high-powered career. Although proud of his political achievements, Mrs. Ford was bitter about his constant travel, and she resented the accolades heaped upon him when she was the one keeping the family afloat back home. “On the one hand, I loved being ‘the wife of'; on the other hand, I was convinced that the more important Jerry became, the less important I became,” she wrote in her memoir. “And the more I allowed myself to be a doormat—I knew I was a doormat to the kids—the more self-pity overwhelmed me. Hadn't I once been somebody in this world?”

Betty Ford's self-pity was fueled by deep insecurities. She was self-conscious about being “uneducated”—she did not have a college degree—and she doubted her own maternal fortitude compared to her indomitable mother, who always managed to bear her problems alone. “She was my strongest role model, so when I couldn't shoulder my problems, I lost respect for myself,” Mrs. Ford later recalled. “No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't measure up to my own expectations.”

Betty Ford's inner fragility would soon be taxed by physical anguish—a noxious mix for somebody vulnerable to addiction. It began around 1964, when she landed in the hospital with a severe pinched nerve, possibly the result of stretching too far over a
kitchen counter to open the window. She endured agonizing pain and excruciating physical therapy to restore full function in her left arm. The bigger problem, however, turned out to be the drugs she received to manage her discomfort. She took the medication consistently and often. It was a different era, her daughter says. “Doctors were God and you did what doctors told you to do.” When she got used to the analgesic effects, her doctors never failed to prescribe more. “I hated feeling crippled, I hated my body's rebellion, I hated that I was hunched over and had to go to bed at night in traction, so I took more pills,” Mrs. Ford recalled.

In the 1990s, a movement to eliminate needless suffering and the advent of powerful new drugs—including super-potent opiate pain killers—spawned a surge in prescription drug addiction and overdoses, which have now reached epidemic proportions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But in Betty Ford's day, the problem was still in its infancy. This was, after all, the 1960s—the era of drugs as remedy for everything from boredom to birth control. While teenagers experimented with marijuana, doctors wrote millions of prescriptions for Librium and Valium, often for women who struggled with the tribulations of marriage and child rearing. (The Rolling Stones 1966 hit “Mother's Little Helper” included the lyrics “Mother needs something today to calm her down / And though she's not really ill, there's a little yellow pill.”) Soon, Mrs. Ford was routinely mixing alcohol with prescription medications—not just painkillers but tranquilizers, too. In 1965, the year her husband became House minority leader, her resentment, frustration, and insecurities came to a head. Betty Ford, in her own words, “snapped” and sought the help of a psychiatrist, whom she saw for about a year and a half.

It was Gerald Ford's unexpected ascension to the White House that bolstered his wife's confidence in a way neither one of them
could have anticipated. In September 1974, less than two months after Ford was sworn in as president to replace Richard Nixon, Betty Ford was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent an immediate mastectomy. From the start, the first lady was forthcoming about her illness at a time when few people talked openly about cancer—especially breast cancer. The public reaction was profound: Within days, women across the country scheduled appointments for mammograms (including Happy Rockefeller, the wife of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, who learned that she, too, had cancer). Betty Ford, the independent, strong-minded woman, had found a public forum as well as an outpouring of support. “It was great for my self-esteem,” she said in a television interview. “I was kind of amazed that I was this important person.”

The first lady's newfound status allowed her to speak out in support of some of the most controversial and critical issues of the day, including the Equal Rights Amendment and the legalization of abortion. Her candor became her greatest asset, even when it shocked her audience. During a legendary
60 Minutes
interview with Morley Safer, the first lady was asked what she would do if she found out that her daughter was having an affair. “Well, I wouldn't be surprised,” she said. Many of her views clashed with her own Republican Party, and she was criticized for being too outspoken—so much so that some party loyalists blamed her for Gerald Ford's loss to Jimmy Carter in 1976. Still, the first lady's honesty, wit, and mettle appealed to a large swath of Americans, and her approval rating climbed as high as 75 percent. Many people were more impressed by Betty Ford than by her husband, and wore campaign buttons touting their allegiance: “Betty's Husband for President,” “Keep Betty in the White House,” and “Betty Ford for President.”

Although Mrs. Ford recovered successfully from breast cancer, her problems with addiction lingered throughout the two and a
half years that she and her husband occupied the White House. By then, she was dependent on painkillers, which she continued to take to combat her neck pain and a painful case of osteoarthritis. She claimed that she “did not drink alcoholically” in the White House—“there was too much at stake,” she wrote in her memoir—but she might have a drink before bed or at Camp David on the weekends. It was the combination of medication and alcohol that caused noticeable unsteadiness, at times even making her visibly woozy and garbling her speech. Sheila Rabb Weidenfeld, Betty Ford's press secretary, recalled watching the first lady mispronounce and slur words during a 1976 speech at a bicentennial event at a Mesa, Arizona, schoolhouse. “Reality” became “relality” and “society,” “sociciety,” Weidenfeld writes in her memoir,
First Lady's Lady
. She even stumbled over the Declaration of Independence. The first lady had ingested a vodka tonic and a pill on the plane, Weidenfeld remembered; “Could that be it?” A reporter asked what was wrong. Weidenfeld's response: “She hates making speeches and the sun is in her eyes and she's tired.”

Denial and enabling are common features of addiction. Betty Ford was able to justify and more readily acknowledge her dependence on prescription drugs, which ultimately included painkillers, tranquilizers, and sleeping medications, because they were given to her by doctors for legitimate reasons. “Pills are infinitely preferable to alcohol if you're trying to convince yourself you're an innocent victim,” she later wrote. “Doctors prescribe pills, you don't have that excuse with alcohol.” Doctors enabled her because of her status. “They didn't say no to her,” says her daughter. “They didn't confront her, because of who she was.” Friends and family enabled her because they didn't realize how dire her situation was, or weren't sure how to help. Gerald Ford later admitted that while he worried about his wife's substance use, he never saw it affect her ability to
carry on her duties, certainly not as first lady. “I was what they call an enabler,” he told Larry King in a 2001 interview. “I really didn't recognize it.”

After her husband's loss to Carter, Betty Ford found herself in a vulnerable place in California, both physically and emotionally—a ripe time for an addiction to intensify. She was upset about the election; she was no longer performing her first lady duties and receiving the adulation that had boosted her self-esteem; she was an empty nester with all four children out of the house; and she was often alone as her “retired” husband traveled around the country lecturing, teaching, and consulting. Pills and alcohol helped console her, and they were readily available. “I had a gourmet collection of drugs—I did a little self-prescribing; if one pill is good, two must be better—and when I added vodka to the mix, I moved into a wonderful fuzzy place where everything was fine, I could cope,” she recalled. At times, she was taking as many as 25 pills a day.

In the fall of 1977, Betty Ford's substance use problem became acute in a very public way. She had been invited to narrate the
Nutcracker
ballet for NBC television in Russia. Anxious about performing on camera, she took pills beforehand, presumably tranquilizers, and appeared sluggish on the air. One journalist called her performance “sloe-eyed and sleepy-tongued.” Later, back home in California, she felt as if she were in a “fog,” and a companion described her as “kind of a zombie” during board meetings at a local hospital. Her friends got frustrated when it took her half an hour to finish half a sandwich. Soon, she began turning down social invitations, and her husband made excuses. “I'd tell people you had the flu,” he later told her.

It was after a tense Christmas that year that the Ford family decided it was time to take action. The intervention took place
just two weeks after the Fords moved into a new home in Rancho Mirage, where Mrs. Ford had been unpacking boxes. She recalled kidding her daughter, Susan, about the timing. “You waited till I got the whole job done, and then you sent me off to the hospital. Don't you have a twinge of guilt?” she asked. Her daughter didn't hesitate: “You needed to go. You were sick.”