Betty: A Glad Awakening

1

There are mountains all around the Betty Ford Center, blue-gray in the distance, massive and enduring. Once in a while even a patient who doesn’t believe in God will admit that if you look at those mountains long enough, you start to suspect there’s something out there greater than you, you’re filled with a sense of wonder.

Wonder is what I was feeling on October 3, 1982, the day we dedicated the Betty Ford Center.

There was the 15th Air Force Band from March Air Force Base, and the U.S. Army Chorale, and a tent for the invited guests. It was a huge tent that held four hundred people. And the sun was shining, and there were buildings waiting for our first patients, and all I could think was, three recovering alcoholics did this. Joe Cruse, Leonard Firestone, and Betty Ford built this out of Joe’s dream, and a patch of desert.

We didn’t do it alone, but we did it.

I took a lot of teasing on Dedication Day.

When Leonard Firestone got up from his seat on the dais to make his little speech, he said, I remember early on she called me about every day. ‘Have you done this? Have you done that? Have you followed up on this?’ And I think it may have been after the second or third call one day, I said, ‘Dammit, Betty, I’m doing the best I can.’ I thought that might get her off me, but it didn’t.

Then Leonard turned to Jerry. Mr. President, he said, you’re damn lucky you’re not an alcoholic!

Vice President George Bush razzed me too. He said my assistant had told him I was a busybody, and that not long ago, when this building was still a skeleton of girders and beams, she saw Betty out here thrashing around wearing a hard hat, and if that day Betty had not only inspected the place, but tightened a few bolts and welded three or four joints, no one would have been the least bit surprised.

I guess it’s okay, as long as he didn’t say smoked a few joints. After all, we’re talking about a rehab center.

Bob Hope stood there in front of the very patrons and benefactors I’d been soliciting for cash and accused me of having had my hands out palms up for the last two years…. She’s extracted so much money from people around here that next year she’s going to be poster girl for the IRS.

In her speech, Dolores Hope, chairman of the board of Eisenhower Medical Center (the Betty Ford Center is a corporate part of Eisenhower), was not respectful either. But she pronounced herself impressed. I did not see this facility until today, Dolores said, and I can’t believe anything this good could have been done without me.

My husband wasn’t funny. My husband—who, when I told him he would be very important in this book, said, No, I’m just a minor character—told the audience that he was speaking for our kids and our grandchildren as well as himself. He said, We’re proud of you, Mom… we want you to know that we love you. And when he talked about my recovery, he broke. He’d only done that in public one other time, after my mastectomy, as he’d faced the press and said I was okay, that I would be okay.

Ask people who were there what they remember best about the Dedication of the Betty Ford Center, and most of them say Jerry.

Your dear little husband cried, Dolores Hope says, ignoring the fact that my dear little husband is over six feet tall. His dear little eyes filled up, and oh, God, it really knocked us out. It was beautiful, and we went to the Dedication dinner and talked about it.

My son Steve says, My strongest memory of the day is how proud Dad was when he got up there. He talked about you, and he fought back tears, and I just saw the love between you.

Steve remembers that I looked loving, John Sinn, president of the Board of Eisenhower Medical Center, remembers that I looked anxious. They are both right. John Schwarzlose, the executive director for the Center, reminds me that I sat on the dais between Dolores Hope and George Bush and everybody was watching you, and twice, President Ford started to choke up when he was talking. I don’t think most people were aware of how much the day meant to him because it meant so much to you.

Joe Pursch (the doctor in charge of Long Beach during my stay there) agrees that many listening to Jerry felt a tug at the throat. Dr. Pursch says he was also touched by the miracle that this thing was really happening. He compares helping alcoholics to delivering babies. A baby is trapped in the mother’s body, very isolated, and an alcoholic who is still drinking is imprisoned in kind of the same way—in the apartment, lights low, phone off the hook, television on, but not watching, cigarette in one hand, drink in the other, and that’s the whole world. In either case, delivering a baby or helping an alcoholic stop drinking, you’re in at the creation of a new life.

Dr. Pursch saw the Dedication as a portent of marvels to come. The media were there, he says. The Vice President of the United States was there, so it was all out in the open, it was laying the foundation for a place that would deliver many babies.

Our friend Ed Johnsen, a builder who’s on our board of directors, says for him, also, Jerry’s speech was the most significant. He just stood there and offered a tribute from the heart.

Meri Bell Sharbutt, my teacher and guide since Long Beach—she is thirty years sober—was experiencing mixed emotions. I saw the first slabs of cement in this thing, she says. I saw the first plans when it had no name, it was just a vision of Joe Cruse. And then you got well, recovered, and you gave your permission to call it the Betty Ford Center. And I sat there at the Dedication wondering: Are you strong enough to withstand the onslaughts of people from every side? People who would be thinking of the Betty Ford Center as an extension of your sobriety? Or as an aggrandizement of your sobriety?

Meri Bell knows the dangers of arrogance. A priest once said, Meri Bell has humility, and she’s proud of it, and Meri Bell says that, for six months, she thought that was a compliment.

It’s even worse when you’re in the public eye. People crowd around you and ask for advice and tell you you’re wonderful, and you can easily build up a false sense of your own importance. Which is why, at Long Beach, Joe Pursch had put me in a room with three other patients, instead of giving me the private room I’d demanded. Right off, he was telling me, hey, lady, you may have been the wife of a President, but in here, you’re nothing special.

My son Jack says the Dedication was less of a high to him than to some of the people there who had been involved with the project. Because to me, the real victory was what had happened with Mother.

For several of my colleagues at the Center, the Dedication wasn’t such a big deal either. Our opening, next morning, was what they were pointed toward.

The staff was geared up, looking forward to Monday, and the first patients arriving, John Schwarzlose says. So for us, it was like, well, it’s an honor to be at the Dedication, but just wait till tomorrow.

Dr. Joseph Cruse, our founding medical director, says he was thinking that "we’d come a long way. The actual floor plans for the Betty Ford Center are from some slides I made in 1966, when I wanted to build a cancer hospital where the families could live with the patient. And I came to California drinking, with this dream.

For somebody who had wandered up and down Wilshire Boulevard with a hip flask in one pocket and a letter from President Eisenhower in the other (the letter said what a good idea a live-in cancer hospital was), trying to raise money and drinking every night, this was quite a culmination.

For me, too.

Good Morning America was there, shooting a special segment, and my assistant, my right arm, Ann Cullen, was standing at the back of the tent with David Hartman’s producer, pointing out notables. That’s so-and-so—you might want to talk to him. Or her. Or them.

Of my children, only Jack and Steve, the California contingent, came to the Dedication. The two from the East didn’t make it, they didn’t want to travel so far just to take part in a packed-with-people weekend. They won’t come when we have a golf tournament either, because we’re too busy running the tournament to talk to them. Susan and Mike said they’d visit when the Dedication was over, and we’d have more time together.

More time. It’s a family joke. Jerry and I used to drive past when they were building the Betty Ford Center, and I’d say, I’ll be so glad when we get it up and open, because then I’ll be free.

I couldn’t imagine how seductive the Center would be for me, how much of my life it would take over.

At the Dedication, I had to speak, and I was scared. George Bush introduced me, and I tried to say a little about how I had felt coming home after treatment to the desert, to the serenity of these mountains that I loved. And I thanked everyone who had given us donations or supported us in any way that had made the Center a reality. And I explained to the audience that one of the problems of alcoholics is that they tend to be perfectionists.

The other day, I said, "I came over here to check, in my perfectionist way, on the last-minute details. Were the windows clean? Was everything in place? And as I walked up the path, I noticed that, thanks to all the water, fertilizer, peat moss, and seed we’d put around, the grass was beginning to come up. You can see a wonderful green haze out there, it sort of looks like the stubble of a new beard, but it’s beautiful. And I couldn’t help but think, This was a pile of sand, and we’ve made it come alive. And it’s going to be even more alive, because people will come here for help; there is going to be a way for them, a new life."

Later, after the music, the speeches, the congratulations were over, people drifted out onto the campus. At one point, Leonard and I were standing there, and we looked out across the still raw landscape. We had been through so much together, traveling the country pleading for money, fighting for new legislation, trying to foist off the presidency of the place—You do it! No, you do it!—on each other, and we had come so far.

The basic buildings were up, the trees were planted, we had assembled what we thought was the finest staff a rehabilitation center had ever put together, and they were all set to go. I said to Leonard, "Can you believe this? and he said, Hell, no, I really can’t." And we laughed, and then we cried. For happiness.

And I thought about a morning four years earlier when I had cried for shame, out of weakness and fear. I was dying, and everyone knew it but me.

2

April 1, 1978. We had been in our new California house just two weeks. I sat on the green-and-white couch in the living room, my husband’s arm around me, and I cried. I didn’t say a word, just listened, and cried.

We were having an intervention, starring me. My husband, my children, two doctors, a nurse, and a couple of friends had gathered to tell me they were concerned about my failing health, and thought I had a problem with alcohol and drugs.

I’d never heard of an intervention, and I would just as soon have kept it that way. I didn’t want to hear any of what my family was telling me.

My makeup wasn’t smeared, I wasn’t disheveled, I behaved politely, and I never finished off a bottle, so how could I be alcoholic? 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?

I had done everything in my power for my husband and our four kids I had loved so much. I had done everything in my power to help my husband’s career. In my own mind, at least, I had always been there for them, and I truly believed I had given a hundred percent. My mother’s voice was always in my ear: If you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all.

And now I was hearing that I had failed. You have to understand that my family was not saying this (there were no pointing fingers, no accusatory remarks), my family was saying I had a disease. They were saying, Mother, you’re sick, we love you and we want to help you. But what I heard was that I had let them down.

My self-esteem was nonexistent. I did not understand how much love it took for them to risk this confrontation with me. For months, I had been withdrawing. As I got sicker, I gradually stopped going to lunch, I wouldn’t see friends, I was putting everyone out of my life.

So far as my family was concerned, a crisis point had been reached a few months before, at Christmas. The children say it was the worst Christmas ever, but I was completely oblivious to their distress. I thought everyone was happy. We were up in Vail, where we’d always come for the holidays, there was a lot of good snow, we were together, and I had my pills.

I did notice that anyone who prepared a drink for me kept it very light, and I would say, Oh, for heaven’s sake, if you’re going to make me a drink, make me a real drink, or else just give me plain tonic. But that was the extent of my awareness that I was being watched.

Our oldest son, Mike, reports that was the week the children went to Jerry. And since I was pretty much hors de combat, I’m going to depend on the fighters who were not disabled to fill in what happened.

Mike Ford: We said something’s wrong here, but we were in the dark about drug dependency and alcoholism. We didn’t know what we were up against, we just knew Mother was manifesting a lot of unhealthy signs, being incoherent, kind of shuffling around, not eating right. And the slurred speech, the not getting dressed until late in the day, had become a lifestyle. You could tell she was a sick woman, but none of us—not even Dad—knew what to do. We all just kind of said, ‘We’ll try to spend more time with her, be more in touch with her.’ And Dad said he wouldn’t travel as much.

Susan Ford Vance: Even earlier, in the desert, I had talked to Dad. He was as frustrated as I was. It was one of those ‘Well, sweetheart, you find the solution and I’m with you,’ but he didn’t know what to do either. It was like there was this disease, and who do you talk to about it?

Jerry Ford: Susan had been talking to me about ‘Mother’s problem,’ but I guess she was somewhat intimidated by me because she never really came out and said, ‘Dad, you’ve got to do something.’

Finally, it was Susan herself who did something. Through the grace of God, I guess, she got involved with helping Joe Cruse—Dr. Joseph Cruse—up at Turnoff, which is a rehabilitation center for chemically dependent kids. Dr. Cruse was our gynecologist, and a recovering alcoholic, and he had hired Susan to take pictures of Turnoff so he could raise some money for it. On their way up there, they discussed my case.

Susan Ford Vance: "I said, ‘Dr. Cruse, I’ve got this friend, and she’s got a problem,’ and he said, ‘Susan, your friend is your mother, isn’t she?’ And I said yeah.

"He said he could help me put an intervention team together, and I said, ‘Well, let me go back to my dad, because I couldn’t okay anything without him.’ I wasn’t married yet, Chuck and I weren’t even engaged then.

"So I went back and talked to Dad, and he said, ‘That sounds great,’ and then he took off on a trip. So I called Clara back in Washington. Clara Powell had worked for our family all the time we kids were growing up, she had been our second mother. And I said, ‘Clara, you’ve got to come out here. Mother is taking pills, and I can’t stand it anymore. The boys keep telephoning and asking how she is, and I don’t know what to tell them. I don’t even want to see her every day because it frustrates me.’

"I was upset when I did see my mother, and my mother was upset when I didn’t see her. I wasn’t living with my parents—I had my own place—and when I’d go over to my dad’s office, Mother would hear I had been there, right next door, and hadn’t stopped by the house, and she’d get hurt.

Clara promised she would come out—ostensibly to help Mother get everything in the new house unpacked and settled—and I talked to Dr. Cruse again, and he said, again, ‘We can do it if your father is willing.’

Dr. Joseph Cruse: "Almost as soon as we got in the car to drive to Turnoff, Susan grabbed my arm and said, ‘Can you help my mother?’ Just blurted it out.

"I said yes, and about a week later, I got a call from Bob Barrett, who had been President Ford’s Army aide in the White House, and who, as a civilian, still worked with the family. He asked who I was and why I was involving myself in the Fords’ personal affairs. He really raked me over the coals, and I thought, Who needs this? But I explained what Susan and I had been talking about, and the next night, Barrett had me come over and explain to the President what an intervention was."

Before Jerry could make up his mind one way or another about the wisdom of a full-scale intervention, Susan and Joe Cruse attempted a mini-intervention of their own.

I was in the study when they arrived, and they brought with them Clara and Caroline Coventry, who was my secretary. And Joe started sharing with me the history of his drinking problems, and I thought, What a bunch of pips they are to have dreamt this up. It seemed so underhanded for Susan and Clara and Caroline to gang up on me, and bring in a stranger. Of course, I knew Joe Cruse as a gynecologist, but I already had an internist I saw every Tuesday at twelve noon, and nobody had sent for him. Now suddenly this Dr. Cruse comes out of the woodwork, and the only thing in my mind was, Let me get rid of him.

Joe Cruse: "I had put on a tie, which you don’t normally do in the desert, in order to go and see Mrs. Ford. I went over and spent an hour and a half telling her my story, and just as I was getting to the point I thought might sell her, she fell asleep. I woke her up and told her the rest of it, and I said I thought she too had a chemical dependency problem. She was very gracious, and thanked me for my interest.

Then Susan and Caroline and I went out on the driveway, and I said to Susan, ‘You better go back in there and hug your mother, I just threw a big bunch of stuff at her.’ So Susan went tearing in, and came tearing out again, and she said, ‘She’s hugging Clara, she doesn’t want to hug me, and she wants you off this property and don’t you ever come back!’

Susan’s recollection diverges from Joe’s in at least one respect. It doesn’t include an iota of graciousness on my part. According to her, our meeting was a disaster.

Susan Ford Vance: "We told Mother she had to stop, and she said, ‘Well, I am stopping, I’ve cut out this pill, I’ve cut out that pill,’ and she got so mad at us, and she was already so high anyway—we didn’t catch her early enough in the morning—that she looked at me and Caroline and Dr. Cruse and she said, ‘You are all a bunch of monsters. Get out of here and never come back.’

"She kicked us out.

"I was devastated. Here Dr. Cruse had promised me that we were going to help my mother, and all we’d done was fall flat on our faces, and my mother had kicked me out of her house.

I went home and later that night I called Clara, because at that point, Clara was the only person Mother would talk to. And boy, was I glad she was there. She said, ‘Don’t worry, Mother’s fine. I’ve got her settled down.’

They had me settled down and settled up and settled. Two days later, they did the intervention. The real thing. Thursday to Saturday was all it took for them to put it together.

Bob Barrett: "Everybody had been trying to figure out the best time to have the intervention, but they were also sort of avoiding it. We were in Rochester, where President Ford had been speaking, when we got the call. Mrs. Ford had to go into treatment right away. It was very late Friday, but the President phoned Mike and Gayle and asked them to fly to Palm Springs right away. President Ford was supposed to speak in Virginia the next day, and in New York City the day after that, but he got