Happy Birthday, Betty Ford

She turns 92 today, a reminder of days in Washington when an honest, caring human being could command universal respect without the malice and spite that now infect everything.

Isolated in infirmity since the death in 2006 of her husband, Gerald Ford, who was president for only two and a half years, Elizabeth Anne Bloomer is a woman for all time who made her mark in American culture by showing a human face in the White House.

Betty Ford came there unexpectedly and never stopped being herself, unlike those who could have passed for inflatable life-sized dolls permanently positioned to stare adoringly at their husbands.

She spoke openly about everything, from equal rights for women to abortion to what she would do if her 18-year-old daughter were sexually active. But by example, she went beyond politics and set new standards for openness about her own life.

Undergoing a mastectomy for breast cancer, Betty Ford spoke about it in public and wrote an article for me in McCalls to encourage women to go for early screening. When she later had to seek treatment for addiction to alcohol and painkillers, the magazine ran an article blaming years of neglect by a clueless husband. Instead of complaining about it, Mrs. Ford "sent copies to every politician's wife I know" and then spent years founding and promoting the Betty Ford Center for substance abuse sufferers.

She will undoubtedly get birthday greetings from today's First Lady, Michelle Obama, who has reason to be grateful to the woman who made staying human in the White House a bipartisan issue.

From the rest of us watching from the sidelines as well: Happy Birthday, Betty Ford.

The Betty Ford I Knew

She came to the White House unexpectedly and never stopped being herself, unlike those before her who could have passed for inflatable life-sized dolls permanently positioned to stare adoringly at their husbands.

Betty Ford spoke openly about everything, from equal rights for women to abortion to what she would do if her 18-year-old daughter were sexually active. Even more, by example, she went beyond politics and set new standards for openness about her own life.

After a mastectomy for breast cancer, she spoke about it in public and wrote an article for me in McCalls to encourage women to go for early screening.

Then, in July 1978, I published a piece, “Betty Ford: Her Long Struggle with a Lonely Marriage.” Mrs. Ford had just been hospitalized for addiction to alcohol and tranquilizers after years of suffering with a pinched nerve in her neck.

Knowing that pinched nerves often result from emotional stress, I asked Myra MacPherson, who knew Mrs. Ford well, to interview her friends, family and physicians about that possible explanation.

They told of her distress that, after looking forward to retirement togetherness after his Presidency, her husband was still away from home politicking 200 nights a year.

Our conclusion: “Like other wives of ambitious men, she had to raise her children with little emotional support from her husband. After 30 years, the price she has paid for a life of loneliness and stress is painfully clear to everyone—with the possible exception of the one person she needs most.”

The aftermath has stayed in my mind ever since.

Several years later, although anxious that Mrs. Ford might have been upset by our piece, I asked Myra MacPherson to interview her again.

“The reason I’m seeing you,” Mrs. Ford told her, “is that 1978 article. I sent copies of it to every politician’s wife I know.”

Betty Ford, who died today at 93, was one of the most honest and caring people ever to live in the White House

A Betty Ford Story

In July 1978, as editor of McCalls, I published a piece, “Betty Ford: Her Long Struggle with a Lonely Marriage.”

Mrs. Ford had just been hospitalized for addiction to alcohol and tranquilizers after years of suffering with a pinched nerve in her neck.

Knowing that pinched nerves often result from emotional stress, I asked Myra MacPherson, who knew Mrs. Ford well, to interview her friends, family and physicians about that possible explanation.

They told of her distress that, after looking forward to retirement togetherness after his Presidency, her husband was still away from home politicking 200 nights a year.

Our conclusion: “Like other wives of ambitious men, she had to raise her children with little emotional support from her husband. After 30 years, the price she has paid for a life of loneliness and stress is painfully clear to everyone—with the possible exception of the one person she needs most.”

The aftermath has stayed in my mind ever since.

Several years later, although anxious that Mrs. Ford might have been upset by our piece, I asked Myra MacPherson to interview her again.

“The reason I’m seeing you,” Mrs. Ford told her, “is that 1978 article. I sent copies of it to every politician’s wife I know.”

Betty Ford was, and is, one of the most honest and caring women ever to live in the White House

Michelle Obama Channels Betty Ford

But in the era of gender and racial correctness, not quite...

On "The View" today, according to the Times' Jodi Kantor, "She got to explain her 'proud' comment at length, in a friendly setting; she talked about her husband and children in approachable terms; she stressed her humble roots (she just said her mother has a slight gambling habit, and has won $17,000 with what sound like quarter slots). That said, it looks like Mrs. Obama is having the appearance of fun, rather than actual fun. This is not the loosest I’ve seen her, and she is surely watching every word."

No wonder. "Unlike her husband, who wrote in his memoir that he had learned at a young age to smile and charm and disarm whites of the notion that he might be a bristly black militant," Maureen Dowd observes, "Michelle has not always hidden her jangly opinions so well."

Over three decades ago, Americans fell in love with an outspoken First Lady, who didn't hesitate to talk about birth control, her addiction to alcohol or anything else she was asked. But Betty Ford came to the White House without running an election campaign gauntlet--behaving naturally unlike others who could pass for inflatable life-sized dolls permanently positioned to stare adoringly at their husbands.

Michelle Obama has a lot of that outspokenness in her, but in this election year, a rare combination of racism and sexism will be waiting to twist everything she says. It will take a delicate balance to channel her inner Betty Ford while preventing haters from picturing her, in Dowd's words, as "a female version of Jeremiah Wright, an angry black woman."

It might help to keep in mind that Mrs. Ford deflected criticism by keeping her sense of humor. Telling a reporter that the media was asking all kinds of personal questions, except how often she slept with her husband, she volunteered to answer that, too.

"As often as I can," Betty Ford said.

Happy Birthday, Betty Ford

In California it's still Sunday so there is time to send heartfelt good wishes on her 89th birthday to Betty Ford, hospitalized after surgery and undoubtedly still grieving for her husband who died the day after last Christmas.

Mrs Ford, unlike other First Ladies, came to the White House unexpectedly and never stopped being herself, behaving naturally unlike some of the others who could have passed for inflatable life-sized dolls permanently positioned to stare adoringly at their husbands.

Among the memories I cherish is of her telling a reporter that the media was asking all kinds of personal questions, except how often she slept with her husband, and she might as well answer that, too.

"As often as I can," she said.

Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson, who is 95 and very frail now, would not have been out of place in America's pioneer days. I don't know if they make them like that any more, but they should.

Clinton-Bashing Below the Belt

Should there be an expiration date on White House gossip? The question is raised by "revelations" this weekend by the New York Daily News and Tim Russert on Meet the Press.

"Ford saw Clinton as a sex 'addict'" was the News headline yesterday based on a new book by one of its own, Washington Bureau Chief Thomas M. DeFrank, author of "Write It When I'm Gone: Remarkable Off-the-Record Conversations with Gerald R. Ford" and Russert had him on MTP to discuss it.

The timing of Ford's posthumous distaste for Bill Clinton's "skirt-chasing" and Hillary Clinton's "iron will" may seem a tad suspicious and, to eliminate any doubt, the News follows it with Mr. DeFrank's "Giuliani is GOP's best shot against Hillary, said Ford."

Just before he died, DeFrank reveals, the former President described America's mayor as the best candidate to beat Hillary Clinton in "08. "He's really good," Mr. Ford is quoted as saying, "he's articulate--he's just a leader." Nothing about Giuliani's "skirt-chasing."

Aside from dragging a 93-year-old man who died soon afterward into today's electoral mudslinging, there is a sad irony in bringing Gerald Ford forward as a character witness about the Clintons' dysfunctional marriage.

By Betty Ford's own testimony, her husband's being away from home politicking most nights of the year before and after their White House years brought on her addiction to alcohol and pain killers.

With Mrs. Ford in ill health in her ninetieth year, DeFrank might have well waited until she too was "gone" before involving the Fords in a public dissection of the shortcomings in the Clintons' marriage.

Cheneyworld: Robot Gone Wild

Watching the VP interview by Jim Lehrer on PBS last night recalled the movie "Westworld" about a theme park in which lifelike robots run amok and start killing. It came out at the time that an automaton named Dick Cheney, codenamed Backseat by the Secret Service, was serving in the White House, getting toilet leaks fixed and installing a headrest for Betty Ford on the presidential helicopter.

More than three decades later, asked whether 4500 American and more than a hundred thousand Iraqi deaths were "worth" what happened there, the now glorified robot answers, "I think so...Because I believed at the time that what Saddam Hussein represented was, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, was a terror-sponsoring state--so designated by the State Department. He was making payments to the families of suicide bombers; he provided a safe haven and sanctuary for Abu Nidal and other terrorist operations. He had produced and used weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological agents.

"He'd had a nuclear program in the past. He killed hundreds of thousands of his own people and he did have a relationship with al-Qaida...That's not to say that Saddam was responsible for 9/11; it is to say, as George Tenet, CIA director testified in open session in the Senate, that there was a relationship there that went back 10 years."

In Cheneyworld, ask a question and the pre-recorded tape spools out the automatic answer. In that hermetically sealed space, the response about mistakes in Iraq, illegal torture, the economic meltdown, whatever is same robotic "I don't buy that."

In his insightful book, "Rise of the Vulcans," James Mann reported that "Cheney's ascent in the Ford White House served as an illustration of how an individual can rise to the top by virtue of his willingness to take care of the mundane chores that persons with larger egos avoid, thereby establishing reliability and learning all the inner workings of an organization.

"Cheney was akin to the clerk who becomes chief executive, the copy editor who rises to become editor in chief, the accountant who takes over the film studio."

But just as the Yul Brenner gunslinger robot in Westworld turned murderous without blinking an eye, we now have the 2009 model Cheney, with real blood on his hands after an eight-year rampage, still spouting the programmed answers to what he was doing all that time.

Playing Politics with Women's Bodies

An ugly uproar can turn positive if you go back far enough to remember when things were worse, much worse.

For a women’s magazine editor of that time, the Planned Parenthood-Komen Foundation furor recalls half a century from introduction of the Pill when women, no matter what their circumstances, were without safe, reliable birth control and, before Roe v. Wade, had the choice of bearing unwanted children or being butchered by back-alley abortions.

From the start, those new alternatives, sanctioned by both science and government, were fiercely opposed by those of strong religious beliefs, who were not above using scare tactics to discourage their use. Ever since, women’s bodies have been a political battleground

By 1965, with five million women on the Pill after five years on the market, there was no reliable research about side effects and possible long-term dangers. As editor of McCalls, I put up $15,000 to find out what members of the American Academy of Obstetricians and Gynecologists were seeing in their practices. They distributed a detailed questionnaire and analyzed the results.

Almost 7,000 gynecologists answered, and the overwhelming majority found oral contraceptives safe and effective. There were a few doubts that would become subjects of later study, but the clear result was to allay women’s fears about the Pill that were being spread by whispers.

In the early 1970s, Betty Ford was in the White House. Undergoing a mastectomy for breast cancer, she spoke about it in public and wrote an article for me to encourage women to go for early screening.

Back then, a generalized fear of the unknown bound both surgeons and patients into accepting radical breast removal as the only acceptable choice. But Dr. William Nolen, a surgeon who wrote a monthly column for the magazine, reported on the effectiveness of less drastic lumpectomies, combined with radiation and chemotherapy.

This was followed by the account of a writer who tracked down the surgeon pioneering the treatment: “I said 'No' to a group of doctors who told me, 'You must sign this paper, you don't have to know what it's all about'" Her article brought an overwhelming response, although it took decades to turn around the medical profession to where it is now, saving untold numbers of women from automatic loss of parts of their bodies.

This week’s flurry of outrage, which has resulted in a rapid reversal, will leave behind not only bruised feelings but a spike in awareness of the need for cancer screening, contributions to both organizations involved and a heightened sensitivity about keeping zealots out of potential life-and-death decisions.

For someone who has seen it all, that’s some progress, although it does not answer the underlying question of how people who claim to be pro-life can be so fierce in protecting fetuses, while giving their support to politicians who “don’t care about the poor” and rail against a “a food-stamp president” in stigmatizing the needs of those children after they are born.

The Gore Divorce

A decade ago, who would have thought Hillary and Bill would still be together as Tipper and Al end their forty-year marriage?

In announcing their breakup, the Gores requested "respect for our privacy," but that hasn't stopped speculation about what happened to the man who might have been president if Bill Clinton had kept his pants zipped.

The Gore news comes right after the premiere of an awful HBO movie titled "Special Relationship" that explores Tony Blair's bond with Clinton as his presidency was being damaged by the Monica Lewinsky scandal and succeeds only in underscoring how messy the interplay between public and private lives can be.

The HBO take on the Clinton marriage, incidental to its portrait of Blair as a devout toady, portrays the 42nd president as a devious glutton, whose "sex with that woman" comes as a surprise to his wife.

Not likely. Nobody has ever accused the deceived First Lady who parlayed her experience into Senator, almost President and then Secretary of State of being clueless. The more plausible explanation is that the Clinton marriage had long ago morphed into an arrangement between two ambitious Baby Boomers with separate agendas in life.

The Gores, on the other hand, his wooden public persona and that theatrical convention kiss notwithstanding, seemed genuinely connected and Tipper Gore, in a way that recalls the forthrightness and public honesty of Betty Ford, spoke openly about the damage politics can do to a marriage and her own bouts with depression.

Serious people, unlike the John Edwardses et al, have a hard time preserving their private lives while living on a public stage.

Whatever gabble there is now about long-marriage breakups, the Gores deserve as much privacy as they can get in this media-drenched age. At least, there is the consolation that HBO won't be making any movies about their life together.

Tony Curtis

As he morphed from Bernie Schwartz, a Depression kid of my generation who believed in the immigrant dream and lived it, Tony Curtis, who died this week, never lost the exuberance that came from growing up in a time when everything seemed possible because life couldn't possibly get worse.

Unlike most of us, who counted on our brains to escape Bronx squalor, Bernie was also blessed with a pretty face and he made the most of it, graduating from Universal's good-looks can't-act mill, along with Rock Hudson and others, to make a star of himself by working hard and choosing his mentors wisely.

He shone as "a cookie laced with arsenic" in Burt Lancaster's "Sweet Smell of Success;" chained to Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer's "The Defiant Ones;" and, most of all, in drag and doing a Cary Grant impression to woo Marilyn Monroe in Billy Wilder's 1959 classic, "Some Like It Hot."

That year, on my first trip to Hollywood as a magazine editor, he was married to the lovely Janet Leigh, who had chided me when we met in New York for titling a piece about Tony, "I Grew Up Stealing," but relented and invited my family to visit.

My wife, new baby and I arrived at their Beverly Hills home with a circular driveway full of antique cars. Inside, we met the children, a sweet little girl named Kelly and a baby sister, Jamie Lee. As Janet took my wife on a tour of the house, Tony took me aside.

He gave me an abashed Bernie Schwartz smile and admitted he didn't know to make the martini my wife had asked for. I gave him a demonstration of the fine art of handling gin, vermouth and lemon peel, a social skill he would put to good use in the following decades as a suave international movie star.

He never stopped learning, as an actor and as a painter with enough skill to impress the Museum of Modern Art, even through a life filled with failed marriages, bad movies and a stay at the Betty Ford Center for drug and alcohol abuse.

That baby back then, Jamie Lee Curtis, now a movie star herself, estranged from him after her parents' divorce, now sums up Tony Curtis:

"My father leaves behind a legacy of great performances in movies and in his paintings and assemblages. He leaves behind children and their families who loved him and respected him and a wife and in-laws who were devoted to him. He also leaves behind fans all over the world."

R.I.P., Bernie.

Angelina Jolie's Preemptive Cancer Strike

The newest name in the annals of breast cancer brings back one from four decades ago that helped change how women—-and doctors-—viewed and treated the affliction. Angelina Jolie, meet Babette Rosmund.

Before 1970, mastectomy was the unquestioned answer for women diagnosed with the disease. Then a 50-year-old writer who had read a magazine article challenged the conventional wisdom.

In McCalls Rosmund learned from a column by Dr. William Nolen about the pioneering work of a Cleveland surgeon who performed lumpectomies, removing only the affected tissue and treating surrounding areas with radiation and chemotherapy.

When she refused to have her breasts removed, Rosmund’s doctor told her she would be “dead within three weeks.” She went to Cleveland, wrote an article about her experience and then a book. Rosmund died in 1997 at the age of 75; her breast cancer never recurred and the treatment she publicized became the standard for women.

Now in the age of advanced genetics, Jolie at 37 tells the world about her decision to undergo a preemptive double mastectomy after being told that she had “an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer” to avert the fate of her mother who died at 56.

Jolie’s choice and her openness about it are in the brave tradition of Betty Ford, who underwent surgery as First Lady and related all the details to encourage other women to seek detection and treatment.

But now the actress’ OpEd about her experience in the New York Times elicits concerns in the newspaper the following day:

“But some doctors also expressed worry that her disclosure could be misinterpreted by other women, fueling the trend toward mastectomies that are not medically necessary for many early-stage breast cancers. In recent years, doctors have reported a virtual epidemic of preventive mastectomies among women who have cancer in one breast and decide to remove the healthy one as well, even though they do not have genetic mutations that increase their risk and their odds of a second breast cancer are very low.”

On a subject affecting so many lives and families, it’s crucial to go beyond the headlines and make fully informed choices. Browsing the news is not enough.

First Lady Firsts

Joe Scarborough’s verbal leer at Mrs. Fred Thompson on Imus’ old show not only upholds its tradition of moronic macho but raises broader questions about candidates’ wives in this curious, crowded campaign.

Hillary Clinton is not only the first woman with a chance of being elected President, she is also the first former First Lady. Her qualifications include sleeping in the White House with one of the men she hopes to succeed before embarking on her own political career.

In that light, the traditional First Lady who pours tea, stares admiringly and says little (as Laura Bush does) is not the only model for that role and, in fact, hasn’t been for some time, going back to Edith Wilson, who during her husband’s illness was called “the Secret President,” to Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan.

None of the other potential ’08 spouses could have inspired a stripper-club question like Scarborough’s “Do you think she works the pole?”--with the possible exception of the young and beautiful Mrs. Denis Kucinich. But in various ways, some have already been drawn into the campaign.

The recurrence of Elizabeth Edwards’ cancer and the couple’s response to it made news in March.

Then America’s Mayor told Barbara Walters he was “very comfortable” with the idea of having the third Mrs. Giuliani attend cabinet meetings and then a day later reversed himself to say maybe not.

Last month, Michelle Obama quit her executive position to help with her husband’s campaign, a natural move that, for some reason, was considered big news.

On 60 Minutes, the ever-lucid Mitt Romney, asked if he and his wife, as Mormons, had had pre-marital sex, answered, "No, I'm sorry. We don’t get into those things. The answer is no."

Even Imus would have hesitated to ask that question, but Mike Wallace did. So who knows what’s next for the candidates’ wives and, if Hillary makes it, what will they be asking about Bill?