THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 24, 1995 TAG: 9512250047
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ROGER K. MILLER
LENGTH: Long : 111 lines
Fifty years ago a 37-year-old Seattle-area mother and housewife published a book that became one of the most commercially successful first books ever, was made into a hit movie that spawned a spin-off series of movies and coined a phrase that lodged in the national consciousness for years.
The housewife was Betty MacDonald, and the book, of course, was The Egg and I, first published in July 1945 by J.P. Lippincott. By December it had gone into nine more printings and begun climbing The New York Times best-seller list. On Dec. 23 it reached No. 1, where it remained for 43 weeks. Even after dropping out of the top spot, it was among the top five for another five months. Eventually the book sold more than 2 million copies in all editions. It is still in print in paperback today (Harper Perennial, $12).
In 1947 Universal made it into a movie, starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, and paid MacDonald a reported $100,000. From that movie sprang a nine-picture series of popular B movies featuring two central characters from the book and movie, Maw and Paw Kettle, cranked out on the Universal back lot from 1949 to 1957.
And the phrase it coined? Simply the title itself, which was cribbed for everything from jokes (mostly lame) to other book titles (ditto). A seemingly endless string of books - The Dredge and I, The Fish and I and The Cook and I are but three - tried to cash in on the success of The Egg and I.
``I'd rather be copied than the copier,'' MacDonald commented, and in fact she was both, for in 1948, she published The Plague and I, a chronicle of several months she spent in a tuberculosis sanitarium.
The Egg and I ballooned into what today would be called a pop-culture phenomenon.
Though it first was serialized in Atlantic magazine, the book never was expected to attain such heights; even MacDonald family members wondered if it would sell beyond a few hundred copies. After all, it was nothing more than Betty's account of the two years she and her husband spent on a 40-acre chicken ranch in Washington's Olympic Mountains that they bought for $450.
But then, it wasn't so much the account as the way she recounted it. The tyro author succeeded in producing a mix of bucolic sentiment and deadpan sarcasm as irresistible as it was improbable.
At the time she went off into the woods with the chickens, MacDonald was known as Betty Heskett. She was born Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard on March 26, 1908, in Boulder, Colo., and the first 40 pages of her book tell about her family's travels around the western states with her mining engineer father.
When Betty was 9, the family settled in Seattle. There she met, and, at the age of 18, married Bob Heskett, a man 13 years older. Heskett was an insurance salesman, but had a yen to run a chicken ranch. She writes: ``Mother had taught me that a husband must be happy in his work and if Bob wanted to be happy in the chicken business I didn't care.''
Some 250 pages and nearly as many disasters later she comes to care: ``By the end of the second spring I hated everything about the chicken but the egg.''
Indeed, as one travail passes the other, her book becomes a rolling dismissal of her mother's dictum about keeping the hubby happy. This, though subtly and humorously delivered, is nevertheless fairly startling for the time. It is not too much to say that The Egg and I is a book-length example of the psychologist's notion that a joke is a disguised form of aggression.
Yet, as with a joke, so with a comedy: We are meant to overlook the aggression and enjoy the humor. Which is not hard to do, right from the author's first glimpse of her new home, looking ``distressingly forlorn, huddled there in the laps of the great Olympics.''
``It was the little old deserted farm that people point at from car windows, saying, `Look at that picturesque old place!' then quickly drive by toward something not quite so picturesque, but warmer and nearer to civilization.''
Try as hard as she might - from 4 in the morning till 8 at night - to whip herself and the place into shape, she never really succeeds. The loneliness, endless work and primitive living conditions - name an amenity, and they didn't have it - prove all but overwhelming. Only two things unreservedly leave her awestruck: the beauty of nature and its bounty.
The Kettles, in a different way, also leave her awestruck. If you have only seen the movies, you have a distorted image of this Dogpatch-style clan, for the movies clean them up considerably. In MacDonald's book, they are vulgar, stupid, dirty and foul-mouthed. The one thing they have in common with their movie selves is that they are also perversely fetching. Paw's laziness is so intense that it was said he once set fire to the lawn to save himself the effort of mowing it.
Those who do remember the movies will find it impossible to read Paw's dialogue in The Egg and I without the voice of actor Percy Kilbride creeping into their heads, though in the book Paw speakth with a lithp.
By the end of the book's 287 pages, the author and Heskett have decided to move on to a new ranch, one with some modern conveniences. In real life, they moved on to separation and, in 1935, divorce.
With her two daughters, MacDonald returned to Seattle and took a succession of jobs, both in private industry and with the U.S. government. She spent several months in a tuberculosis sanitarium in 1938 and 1939.
In 1942 she married Donald Chauncey MacDonald, a real estate agent, and they lived on Vashon Island in Puget Sound, where she wrote The Egg and I. Their life on Vashon Island was turned into another high-spirited autobiographical work, Onions in the Stew, published in 1955. Another segment of her personal story, Anybody Can Do Anything (1950), chronicled the late Depression and early war years. She also wrote several children's books.
In 1956 the MacDonalds moved to a cattle ranch in Carmel Valley, Calif. Two years later, again ill, she went back to Seattle for medical treatment. On Feb. 7, 1958, Betty MacDonald, whose writings over and over told how pluck and a sense of humor will make the good times outweigh the bad, succumbed to cancer, a few weeks short of her 50th birthday. MEMO: Roger K. Miller, former book editor of The Milwaukee Journal, is a
free-lance writer in Grafton, Wis. ILLUSTRATION: JOHN EARLE/The Virginian-Pilot
by CNB