Betty Ford lived a rich life prior to becoming First Lady of the United States.
When her husband became president, however, Ford's private struggles
burst out into the public. This is the tragic real-life story of Betty Ford.
Elizabeth Anne Bloomer was born in 1918 to William Bloomer and Hortense Neahr.
She was the couple's third child and only daughter. The Bloomers were wealthy.
Betty's mother's family owned a thriving furniture business, and her father worked for the Royal
Rubber Company in Grand Rapids. He was also likely an undiagnosed alcoholic for most of his life.
In 1934, Betty turned 16. It was the height of the Great Depression, and her father had recently lost
his job, which likely worsened his drinking problem. On the day before his 60th birthday,
William Bloomer went out to the garage to work on the family car. Betty came home
to find their garage door open, and her father dead. The keys to the car were in the ignition,
and the gas tank was empty, implying the car had been left to run until it ran out of gas.
The official cause of death was listed as carbon monoxide poisoning despite the garage door being
open, but Betty acknowledged later in her life that her father very likely died by his own hand.
She recalled that the first time she heard someone call her father an alcoholic was at his funeral.
Betty's mother Hortense was a woman who valued "social graces." She wanted to raise Betty to
be a traditional society wife, and began training her daughter in the role at a very young age. When
Betty was just 8-years-old, her mother enrolled her in dance classes at a studio in Grand Rapids.
What was supposed to be part of Betty's charm school training, however, quickly developed into
a passion. By 14, Betty was helping to teach the next generation of dancers ballet, tap,
and even modern dance. When she graduated, she went to Vermont to attend the Bennington School of
Dance for two years, paying her own tuition with money she earned working in a department store.
In 1940, when Betty was 22, she moved to New York City to pursue a professional dancing career.
Her mother was horrified and convinced Betty to move back to Michigan in 1941.
Betty took a full-time job at a local department store and excelled at it,
earning several promotions. She gave up on a dance career, but not on dance itself. Betty
continued giving dance lessons, and even danced for herself throughout her life.
Betty Bloomer returned to Grand Rapids from New York in 1941
and immediately became a hot commodity on the marriage circuit. She began dating a
childhood friend named William Warren, who she had known since the age of 12.
However, Betty's mother and new stepfather didn't approve of Warren, who drank heavily
and was known as a "free spirit." They didn't say anything explicitly to Betty,
though, and in 1942 the young couple announced their engagement. They were married soon after.
Bill worked as a traveling salesman, and he changed jobs frequently. Every time he took
on a new territory, the couple would move, and Betty would find work at a local department store.
But Bill often stayed out late, and his health deteriorated due to diabetes and his drinking.
Betty became increasingly unhappy because she wanted a more stable life, with a permanent
home and kids. After a few years she decided she wanted a divorce. However, just as Betty
was writing Bill a letter asking for one, he fell into a diabetic coma. Betty spent several
months dutifully caring for her ailing husband, but when he was healthy again, she divorced him.
After extricating herself from her first marriage to Bill Warren, Betty didn't stay
single for very long. Being a divorced woman in 1948 carried a bit of a stigma, but that
didn't deter an ambitious young politician named Gerald Ford. Jerry, as she called him,
was a hotshot lawyer and a former college football star. By all accounts, their romance quickly
became an enduring, lifelong passion — but it was also marred by politics from the very beginning.
Jerry asked Betty to marry him in 1948, but immediately delayed their wedding ceremony
because he was running for Congress and had to concentrate on his campaign.
This was more than just making schedules work, though. Jerry was worried about
the reaction of his conservative Republican supporters if he married a divorced ex-dancer,
and thought delaying their marriage would be the prudent decision.
The trend continued. Jerry showed up late to their wedding because
he attended a campaign event earlier in the day.
Somehow, Betty overlooked these offenses and the Fords remained married for the next 58 years.
Jerry Ford became Vice President of the United States in 1973, when Richard Nixon's running
mate Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace. Less than a year later, Nixon himself
resigned when the mounting Watergate Scandal seemed to guarantee his imminent impeachment.
"Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow."
Gerald Ford subsequently became President of the United States,
which meant Betty Ford suddenly found herself the First Lady.
This should have been a moment of triumph for the Fords, but it was almost immediately
undermined by a health crisis. It happened when Betty accompanied a friend to a breast exam.
While waiting at the doctor's office, Betty's friend encouraged her to have a breast exam
as well. Betty agreed. As it turns out, that impulsive decision saved her life. The doctor
found a marble-sized lump in her breast, and two days later she underwent a radical mastectomy.
Doctors removed her right breast entirely, along with some pectoral muscle and the lymph nodes.
"Dr. Lou Kasha assured me that she came through the operation all right."
Betty Ford reacted to this setback in what would become known as typical fashion for
this First Lady. Instead of keeping her health struggles secret as would be expected,
she made them public, and used her position as First Lady to drive
awareness of breast cancer and the power of self-examination for women. Today,
Ford is credited with normalizing discussions of cancer and women performing their own breast
exams. She is also considered one of the early leaders of the women's breast cancer movement.
When Betty Ford became First Lady in 1974, it was a time of rapid change in America when it came to
women's roles. The President's wife had long been expected to silently support her husband,
and to engage mostly in social and charitable work. However,
Betty had little patience for these expectations.
In fact, one of her first official acts was to hold a press conference,
which was the first press conference held by a First Lady since 1953.
That set the tone. Ford became one of the most outspoken and opinionated First Ladies in history.
She broke so many taboos it's difficult to list them all. As People notes,
Ford spoke about the Equal Rights Amendment, speculated about her children's drug use,
and shocked the country by discussing the sleeping arrangements with her husband.
But her most shocking deviation from tradition was her vocal support for abortion rights.
This support not only put her in opposition to most of her fellow Republicans, it was also the
opposite of her husband's views. This led to the incredible situation where a First
Lady openly disagreed with the President on a huge issue. Republican leaders eventually began
referring to her as "No Lady" and even furiously demanded Ford's "resignation" as First Lady.
Gerald Ford became President of the United States without ever having run for the office.
He would go on to serve 895 days as president, and his key achievement
was restoring some sense of dignity to the office. He finally ran for president in 1976,
but couldn't shed the Watergate baggage and lost to Jimmy Carter.
As The New York Times notes, Ford had campaigned himself hoarse in the days
before the election. So when the time came to admit defeat, it fell to Betty to get up in
front of the cameras and concede the election she and Jerry had worked so hard towards.
"It has been the greatest honor of my husband's life to have served his fellow Americans."
Betty Ford was an icon for many. She was a passionate champion of women's
rights and an outspoken supporter of women's health. But what most people
think of when they think of Betty Ford is her struggle with addiction and alcoholism.
As noted by the National First Ladies' Library, Ford's family had a history of alcoholism.
But for much of her early life, Betty Ford's drinking wasn't terribly problematic,
especially during a time in the 20th century when heavy drinking was more socially acceptable than
it is today and the concept of alcoholism as a disease hadn't yet become commonly understood.
But as biographer Jeffrey S. Ashley writes, everything changed when Ford pinched a nerve
in her neck in 1964. The pain was excruciating and never went away, and Ford dealt with it by
taking a lot of prescription painkillers and drinking even more. Her drug abuse
receded somewhat when she was First Lady — but then got worse when she left the White House.
Ford's concerned family staged an intervention in 1978 and convinced her that her painkiller
addiction needed to be treated. Ford ultimately agreed to enter a rehabilitation facility.
However, she was initially only willing to admit that she'd only become addicted to pain pills,
and refused to even consider that she might have a drinking problem.
The pain medications had been prescribed, so she was able to rationalize her addiction as
something normal. An addiction to prescribed medications didn't have the same stigma that
alcoholism still had in the 1970s. Alcoholics were sometimes perceived as morally weak,
and drinking problems were still thought of as primarily willpower problems.
Ford had an epiphany while in treatment, however. She observed another patient
denying that her obvious alcoholism had caused anyone any pain — and realized this
was exactly what she was doing. At the age of 60, Betty Ford finally admitted
she was an alcoholic as well as a pain pill addict. Her experience in recovery
inspired her to speak out about addiction issues and to found the Betty Ford Center.
Having beat back her alcoholism and addiction to pain pills,
Betty Ford assumed her serious health battles were over. However,
less than 10 years later, a blockage was detected in her right carotid artery.
As a result, Ford had to enter the hospital at the age of 69 to undergo quadruple bypass surgery.
Although the initial procedure went well and she returned home,
the Los Angeles Times reports that she endured a series of complications over
a five-month period that required four more surgeries to correct.
After the surgeries, Betty Ford went on to live another 24 years in relatively good health.
The marriages of some politicians are more about appearances and connections than love and passion.
However, Betty and Gerald Ford were the exception. Jerry spent nearly three decades
in Congress before becoming first Vice President and then President, and, as MLive reports,
Betty routinely took their four children to visit him at work on the weekends. Once together, Betty
and Jerry would spend their time reading while the children played. According to The Saturday
Evening Post, Betty often read the Bible with Jerry, and then prayed with him in the evenings.
The Fords were also extremely affectionate with one another. Betty once answered a question about
how often they slept together by saying, quote, "As often as possible!" After the presidency,
the Fords remained devoted to each other. When Jerry grew ill in 2006,
Betty oversaw the transformation of their home into a hospital ward to care for him.
When Jerry Ford died in 2006 at the age of 93, Betty Ford was heartbroken. Although not
in the best of health herself, Betty insisted on participating in the state ceremonies to
honor her husband, traveling from California to Washington, D.C. and then to Grand Rapids in order
to take part. Five years later, on July 8, 2011, Betty Ford also passed away at the age of 93.
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