Promise Me (28 page)
Authors: Nancy G. Brinker
Follow the Leader
R
esponse to our soggy maiden voyage event was immediate and astounding, and it grew with every event we did that first year.
Susan Carter, the young reporter I met that rainy day at Willow Bend, worked for a group of community newspapers in the Dallas area, covering local events and human-interest stories. That day, she hurried back to the newspaper office with a raft of hastily scratched notes and a roll of great photos.
“My editor and I sat there trying to figure out how we were going to report this story,” she told me later. “We could call it ‘female cancer’ or ‘a woman’s cancer’ but you made it clear you wanted us to say ‘breast cancer.’ And the name of the organization made it impossible for us to avoid it.”
Susan had graduated with a degree in journalism from Texas Christian University in the late 1970s, part of that forward-thinking
Our Bodies, Ourselves
generation, who grew up in jeans and tie-dye instead of girdles and crinoline. The lexicon was changing, and it was time for genteel Southern sensibilities to catch up. Susan pushed the story through and kept an eye on other SGK events over the next few years, making sure we got our share of column inches and volunteering whenever she could. She landed a job at a top PR firm in Dallas, eventually launched her own PR firm, and became Susan Carter Johns. Her major meat-and-potato accounts included Coors and Strohs, and on the side, she helped us define and refine branding for our events, including Race for the Cure and our annual awards luncheon. (It’s been years since she came to work for us full-time, and we still tease her about the fact that her whole career has been beer and breasts.)
Thanks to the hard work of our volunteers and the generosity of our
donors, in our very first year we were able to award two research grants, totaling $30,000, to M. D. Anderson and Baylor University. There was no question in my mind now; that groundswell I’d been certain of came from an aching need. So many women had been silent for so long, questions unanswered, stories untold. They wanted their voices to be heard and needed to know that someone would listen. Some came to honor a loved one they’d lost, others to fight for the life of a loved one who was still hanging on. Some were fighting for their own lives and were desperate for any kind of handhold. Some had lived with the specter of breast cancer in their family and were hungry for hard information about how to protect themselves and their daughters.
Armed with information and resources, we went to groups of professional women, PTA moms, proactive movers and shakers in churches and synagogues—those lionesses who get so much done—and we went to the media with a simple mandate: Shine a light on this disease. We wanted people to see the faces and know the numbers that summed up the real and alarming scope of emotional, physical, and financial damage being wreaked by breast cancer. During the early years of SGK, this work was tremendously time-consuming—almost like having another child who needed constant nurturing—but during that time, Norman and I were forging our small, ironclad family unit. He felt strongly that success in business was pointless, improbable even, if you weren’t successful as a human being. To Norman, that meant being fully engaged in family life, active in the community, and willing to take a political stand. He did all that, along with ski trips and long afternoon rides, and still managed to fit in his passion for polo.
I have to back up for a moment and talk about Norman and Eric.
The two of them formed a bond all their own. They were the guys. Eric had been through a lot in his short years. Norman was strict but endlessly patient. He had high expectations for Eric, the way my father had for me, and that scared me a little because I’d begun to suspect that Eric saw the same tangled hieroglyphics I’d seen as a child. I couldn’t bear the thought of this bright, motivated little boy growing up feeling like he’d always have his nose pressed to the glass. Early in his school years, we had him tested, and he was diagnosed with dyslexia. It had a name. It was real. And it could be dealt with. We expected no less from
him; there were no excuses, no lowering of the bar. But we were determined to provide him with the tools he needed, not only to deal with this challenge but to turn it into the same backhanded blessing it ultimately was for me.
In the spring of 1983, while my friends and I were putting together our next event, Norman was getting restless with his job at Pillsbury. He’d headed up a restructuring of Burger King, which was a lot of fun for him, but now the chain was firmly on course in its new direction, and he was dealing with the ongoing operations (read “lumbering bureaucracy”) and traveling 150,000 miles a year. He started looking around for something new, something challenging, and got into an interesting conversation with Larry Lavine, the founder of Chili’s, which at that time was just a small burger chain. Norman tried hard to steer Pillsbury toward acquiring it. He wanted to grow the chain by sharpening the concept and incentivizing managers with stock and profit sharing. He called me, as he always did on his way out of a board meeting, and I could hear the disappointment in his voice.
“They decided not to go for it.”
“Oh, Norm, I’m sorry.”
“Oh, well,” he sighed. “Onward and upward. No use dwelling. I just can’t help feeling we’re missing a real opportunity.”
“Norman …” I hated to tell him, but I had to. “He sold it to Saga. It was in the paper today.”
Norman was not a cussing man, but he gritted his teeth and groaned.
“Maybe you can salvage it,” I said. “It couldn’t possibly be a done deal yet. They’re undoubtedly still working it out. You could call Larry Lavine and … Norman, you could do the deal yourself, if you wanted to.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
“Norm, you should do it. Call him right now. I’ll get everything ready for a meeting. Just bring him right here to the living room. No boardroom, just friends sitting around talking.”
“It’s a risk.”
“If it wasn’t a risk,” I said, “what fun would it be?”
Fast-forward past all the horse trading; Norman ended up buying a large share of the company, with plans to take it public. He resigned from Pillsbury. I thought my father was going to have a stroke.
“He did
what?
Nancy, a marriage is a financial partnership. You’re jointly responsible for any …”
“Daddy, calm down.”
He pressed his palms together. “Help me understand. How did he finance this?”
Truthfully, I was cloudy on the finances of the whole thing. All I knew was that Norman would do whatever it took to make it work, and I’d do whatever I could to help him.
“Norman is brilliant,” I said. “I trust him. It’ll be a tremendous success.”
“If something happens to him,” said Daddy, “you and I are in the restaurant business, and I don’t know anything about the restaurant business.”
I waved that aside. “Daddy, relax. Nothing’s going to happen.”
Something promptly happened. My dad was no fool.
Over the Fourth of July weekend, Norm was playing in a polo tournament at Willow Bend. Tuesday was to be the first day of the new era at Chili’s. All the managers were convening for a big meeting so Norm could set them on fire with his bold new strategy for the company. Saturday afternoon, tearing down the polo field, his horse’s leg got nicked by another player’s mount. The poor animal buckled and went down, hurling Norman out of the saddle and onto the hard ground. That night he lay in the hospital with broken ribs and a cracked pelvis.
“I don’t have time for this,” he told me.
“Tell me how I can help. Mom and Daddy are here, so Eric’s covered. What can I do?”
“We need to gather the team together as planned. And I need to helm that. They need to see they can depend on me.”
We decided to bring the mountain to Muhammad, as they say.
Norman called Ducky-Bob’s party supply and ordered chairs while I wheeled the second bed out to the hallway. Mommy, Margaret Valentine, and I rushed around, getting everything we needed to cater the cramped but memorable event, and on Tuesday morning, about three dozen top members of the Chili’s team jammed into Norman’s room at Presbyterian Hospital. Norman didn’t want his people to see him lying down, so I’d helped him get into a jogging suit and robe, and propped him up
on one of those rolling carts they use to distribute meals. He was in unthinkable pain, but he spoke to them from his heart about how much he appreciated them, how committed he was to the success of the organization, and how far they could all go together.
That day was an education for me. I’ll never forget it. Standing in the doorway, watching the reaction of the men and women gathered there, I witnessed the powerful effect of unwavering, uncomplaining, uncompromising leadership. It changed me. It was one of those moments when you say to yourself,
That’s what I want to be when I grow up
. And you know you’ve grown up a little already, simply because you recognize it.
B
y 1984, our humble but proud $200 had become $150,000.
As word got out—what we were doing and what we were about—people came forward both asking for and offering help. News coverage on our research grants brought a flurry of requests from scientists, physicians, facilities, and support programs. The SGK office was in my guest room. We didn’t have the science advisory board we have now; the board members and I spent long hours in marathon meetings, going through the grant requests. Relying on double-blind peer review to keep things impeccably honest, we depended on the expertise of Dr. Blumenschein and Dr. Bill McGuire, founder of the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, as we weighed the possible impact of each proposal and made the difficult choices about where to put our funds. From early on, we were clear in our own minds about our mission: increase awareness, fund research, and improve access to care.
Norman was on the board of directors from the beginning, and we talked a lot about the responsibility we owed our generous patrons. These people had given large amounts of money with complete faith that we’d use it to save women’s lives. We never for a moment took these gifts for granted—we still don’t—so we were committed to keeping costs down and making the most of every dime. I had to be strategic about asking Norman’s friends for money. He was growing a business, and there’s an etiquette to that. Likewise, it wouldn’t have been kosher for him to bankroll SGK at the expense of other good causes he’d always supported.
I was adamant about our organization staying in the black, setting
aside enough for two grant cycles. We set up an endowment, resisting the urge to spend money on operating costs like a facility or staff. When it got to a point where our guest room was bursting at the seams, Norman offered us a small office space at Chili’s corporate headquarters, and we gratefully moved in with borrowed chairs and desks and stacks of cardboard file boxes. We all worked on a volunteer basis, including the administrative assistant, who couldn’t type, which didn’t matter, because the typewriter didn’t work.
Kay Bailey Hutchison was there from the start, a dynamic businesswoman just beginning her career in politics. Margaret Hunt Hill and Ruth Altshuler gave us our first $100,000 checks. (Ruth called me when I was on my way to Fort Worth, and I almost drove right off the road, I was so excited.) Sharon McCutchin, Alinda Wikirt, Margaret McDermott, Diana Strauss, Sydney Huffines—I probably shouldn’t mention names because there were so many in this early band of angels, there’s no way I can begin to acknowledge or introduce each of them. Mom was enthusiastically supportive, of course, and so were Brenda and Cindy and Margaret.
There were still a few people who disapproved and let me know it. Some people couldn’t get past the idea that there was something inherently salacious in the word
breast
, and talking or hearing about breasts made them uncomfortable. I’m sure a lot of people scribbled that check as fast as they could in hopes that I’d just go away. (Nothing wrong with hoping.) I’m embarrassed now when I think about the way I bullied my way into every conversation with statistics, death counts, warning symptoms—tenderness, nipple leakage, nothing was off-limits—and always the earnest pitch for help in the form of time, energy, and money. More than a few times, I felt the gentle touch of Norman’s index finger under the table at a dinner party or on my elbow in the lobby at the symphony. Never did he ever try to muzzle or quash me, but there were moments when I crossed the line, and he tried as gingerly as possible to let me know.
Naturally, a few cynics rolled their eyes at all the pink and the unabashed emotion at our events, but overwhelmingly, we heard from people who believed in what we were doing and wanted to be part of it. We felt our way forward, figuring out each step as we took it. We knew
that in the big picture—the proverbial “30,000-foot view”—we wanted to have an impact on both the clinic and the culture, and we were certain we could do it with a savvy combination of corporate support and grassroots activism.
Norman suggested that I consult Nancy Jeffet, a good friend who’d helped Maureen set up and administer her foundation. I was grateful to have her by my side from the beginning.
“Make an endowment right away,” she told me. “Set that money aside and don’t dip into it unless the world’s coming to an end. Nonprofits should never go into debt by funding ahead. If you don’t have it, don’t commit to it.”
To my mind, this meant we had to have it. And a lot of it. The work we’d set out to do towered in front of us, a mountain to climb. When we started talking about our First Annual Awards Luncheon, I planned to implement everything I’d learned working for Stanley Marcus. Go big or stay home. This was about creating a culture people would want to be part of, that would evoke huge emotion and provoke huge response. And we had something better than a giant orchid elephant.
We had Betty Ford.
E
LIZABETH
A
NN
B
LOOMER
grew up in the rambunctious company of two older brothers who insisted on calling her Betty.
“It was always my dream to be called Elizabeth,” she said, but Betty she was and always will be, from head to toe. As a kid, she played football and ice hockey with the boys. Sitting on the sidelines like a girl simply wasn’t her style. In many ways, she and I were a lot alike. She came from a good family and lived in a pleasant neighborhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her father was a successful businessman who sold conveyor belts for the Royal Rubber Company. Betty’s mother, Hortense, was active in local charities, president of the local hospital for crippled children. Hortense worked hard to make everything about their home perfect.
But there was a dark undercurrent. Betty could never quite grasp what it was until she was sixteen. Her father was found dead under his car in their garage, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide. The coroner ruled it accidental, not a suicide, but there was speculation. This was how Betty learned that her father was an alcoholic and that her mother had made a lifelong industry of concealing it. Betty turned into a bit of a wild child in high school, a founding member of the “Good Cheers,” a sorority that lived up to their name by drinking, smoking, and chasing boys. She spent two summers studying dance with Martha Graham and during the school year modeled for a department store. Through a brief, unhappy first marriage and beyond, she kept working, kept dancing, kept being Betty.
She met her match in Gerald Ford, once a college football hero, now a lawyer with political aspirations. They had to postpone their wedding in 1948 to accommodate his run for Congress, but that was fine with Betty, who maintained a pragmatically balanced view of their personal and political
life together. Their fifty-eight-year marriage was a partnership; she knew exactly what she was getting into, and she was up for it. The president stood by his wife when she felt the need to speak out and was equally outspoken about his love and respect for her. Of all the couples who’ve taken up residence in the West Wing, the Fords were among the most genuinely, demonstratively in love. She brought out the boyish charm in him, and he brought out the dancer in her.
It was naïve of the White House spin doctors to think they could keep a lid on her.
During the summer of 1974, tensions knotted around Watergate built to the August resignation of President Richard Nixon. Gerald Ford had become vice president less than a year earlier, when Spiro Agnew had resigned in disgrace in October 1973. Now Ford was the president, and Betty was First Lady. The country had been torn apart by scandal and distrust, and the Fords’ first order of business was to reassure the nation that we were in good hands. Determined to set a straightforward tone of openness and honesty, they appeared at a joint press conference, during which the First Lady took questions from the White House Press Corps. Not everyone liked what she had to say, but no one could deny that Betty held her own.
Asked what she considered the best role for women in the effort to end future wars, Betty tartly replied, “Well, they can always enlist and make sure.”
Asked if she’d be willing to advance the cause of cancer research in hopes of continuing Nixon’s declared “War on Cancer,” she said, “I’d be glad to. Only too happy.”
Asked how she’d like to be remembered, her answer was appropriately circumspect: “In a very kind way. As a constructive wife to the president.”
She spoke a little about continuing her efforts on behalf of her “profession”—meaning the arts—and on behalf of mentally disabled children. She was inches from a clean getaway. Then someone asked if her views were closer to those of New York senator James Buckley, a conservative calling for a ban on any and all abortions, or the soon-to-be vice president, Nelson Rockefeller, who advocated the liberalization of abortion laws.
“Definitely closer to Governor Rockefeller,” Betty said without hesitation.
Not surprisingly, that was the headline grabber. A White House spokesperson tried to step in the next day with modifiers and mitigation, but Betty refused to back down from her opinion, even though it differed sharply from that of her husband, who’d adamantly spoken out against
Roe v. Wade
. A feeding frenzy of negative press troubled the waters for four days, then erupted into a firestorm when President Ford announced he’d granted Nixon a full pardon. Among the complaints being made about Gerald Ford was his failure—or more accurately, his refusal—to muzzle his wife.
As the brouhaha continued, Betty quietly went about her business. On September 26, she accompanied her friend, Nancy Howe, to an appointment for a scheduled breast exam at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Nancy encouraged Betty to undergo a routine exam as well. The physician discovered a lump the size of a marble in her right breast. Exploratory surgery was scheduled almost immediately. Betty was told a biopsy would be done, and if the tumor was found to be malignant, she’d be kept under general anesthesia, and a standard radical mastectomy would be performed.
“These were the dark ages for breast cancer surgery,” Betty’s daughter, Susan, said later. “When you woke up, you either had a Band-Aid or no breast.”
Betty woke up with no breast. And just one strand left to the pectoral muscle underneath. It never crossed her mind to keep her diagnosis a secret; she was all too familiar with the damage done by secrecy—both personal and political.
“There had been so much cover-up during Watergate that we wanted to be sure there would be no cover-up in the Ford administration. So rather than continue the traditional silence about breast cancer, we felt we had to be very public.”
Betty Ford stepped up to the White House Press Corps and shifted the old lexicon beneath their feet. Graciously but firmly, she informed them that the First Lady of the United States had breast cancer. No, not “cancer” and not “a women’s cancer”:
breast
cancer. What a conundrum! Those words were considered unprintable in print and unspeakable in
polite conversation. Did she honestly expect Walter Cronkite to talk about
breasts
on the evening news?
Yes. She did.
After the surgery, the president and First Lady mugged for cameras outside her hospital room at Bethesda, and Betty gamely tossed him a football, which had been sent to her as a gift from the Washington Redskins. She’s strong and smiling in those photographs. This was the face of a breast cancer survivor. While she was convalescing, Betty received almost fifty thousand letters of support. People applauded her courage. Patients thanked her for inspiring them to press on with treatment. Survivors shared their stories and expressed what a profound relief it was to finally hear the words
breast cancer
spoken out loud.
“It’s never gone underground again, which is great,” Betty said. “I’ve never regretted it.”
That moment was like a glimmer of light shining through a keyhole. And all it takes is a keyhole to reveal that what looked like a wall is in fact a doorway. Time and time again, I’ve seen it happen: Make that leap in language, shake loose the words, information pours out, change rushes in. The next decade brought a sea change in the public perception of breast cancer.
In 1974, Betty Ford was one of over 90,000 American women diagnosed with breast cancer; 33,000 women died.
Mammograms were widely available in the early 1970s, but not routinely done, and a 1973 Gallup poll showed that less than 20 percent of women did regular breast exams, as recommended at that time by the American Cancer Society. The first First Lady to take a stand on an issue of public health, Betty Ford used every possible opportunity to talk about the numbers and instruct women on proper BSE (breast self-exam) technique. Through the turmoil of the coming years, even as she struggled with her own recovery from alcoholism and addiction to painkillers, even as she endured media horsewhippings for her pro-choice and pro–Equal Rights Amendment views, she remained practical, generous, and loving—and outspoken about the deeply personal aspects of her breast cancer experience.
“It isn’t vanity to worry about disfigurement,” she said in a television interview. “It’s an honest concern. I started wearing low-cut dresses as
soon as the scar healed, and my worries about my appearance are now just the normal ones of staying slim and keeping my hair kempt and my makeup in order. When I asked myself whether I would rather lose a right arm or a breast, I decided I would rather have lost a breast.”
The year after Mrs. Ford’s diagnosis, news correspondent Betty Rollin did a report on the effects of the First Lady’s forthright response to her breast cancer experience.
“The terror women feel about breast cancer is not unreasonable,” said Rollin. “What is unreasonable is that women still turn their terror inward. They think if they avoid investigating the possibility that they have the disease, they will avoid the disease. But as cases of such prominent women as Betty Ford become known, other women are turning their fear into the kind of action that can save lives.”
A year later, Betty Rollin was herself diagnosed with breast cancer and took awareness another giant step forward with her groundbreaking memoir,
First, You Cry
. In 1976, the American Cancer Society honored Betty Ford with its Communicator of Hope award, and that’s exactly what she was for my sister, Suzy. Betty was a lighthouse for Suzy at a moment when my sister was utterly out at sea, and as soon as Betty heard what we were attempting to do in Suzy’s name, she was eager to help. She was a great friend to SGK from its early days. I’ll never be able to fully express what she means to me.
That very first year, we were planning a women’s polo tournament at Willow Bend as a fundraiser, and I wanted to put together an extraordinary luncheon as part of the weekend festivities. One of the original benefactors from my trusty shoebox was Norman’s good friend Trammel Crow, a navy man who became a captain of industry. He warmly welcomed me into his office and listened intently as I shared my plans for SGK.
“I was wondering if you’d be willing to reach out to Betty Ford on our behalf,” I said. “She meant a lot to my sister and me. We’d love to have her as our guest of honor.”
Trammel picked up the phone and less than two minutes later was telling the former First Lady about Suzy, SGK, and our upcoming event.
“Will I have to play polo?” asked Betty.
Quite honestly, if I’d said yes, I think she would have given it a try.
