Betty Ford's Renaissance: The Best Time of Her Life (original) (raw)
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- Nov. 10, 1978
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November 10, 1978
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Betty Ford still looks like Betty Ford, even after her recent face lift.
“I told the doctors not to change my appearance.” she said this week.
- And the doctors followed her orders, merely smoothing out a few wrinkles, tightening up the chin and neck and erasing puffiness around her eyes.
But the real change in Betty Ford is not in her face. It is in her speech, which no longer lapses into slurred words. It is in her mqnner, which reflects a self-confidence that was lacking only a year or so ago.
Betty Ford says that, for her, life has begun at CO.
It was shortly before her 60th birthday last spring that she had a traumatic confrontation with her family. They had become increasingly worried about her heavy use of tranquilizers, her drinking, her lapses of memory, her occasional stumbling.
At first, she was shocked at what they said. She was hurt. And she cried.
But days later she voluntarily entered Long Beach Naval Hospital and announced publicly that she was addicted to both alcohol and prescription drugs.
She spent a month in the hospital's drug and alcoholic rehabilitation center. When she no longer felt a dependency on drugs and alcohol, she had her face lifted. She was in the hospital for five days after the operation but says she was never in pain and needed no painkillers. A month after the operation, she made her first public appearance.
This week, accompanied by her husband, former President Gerald R. Ford, she came to New York to publicize her first book, “The Times of My Life,” the current Book-of-the-Month Club selection, published by Harper and Row and the Reader's Digest Association and condensed in recent issues of the Ladies’ Home Journal.
She and her husband were honored last night by her publishers at a cocktail party and dinner at the Waldorf‐Astoria Hotel, attended by many people from the arts, fashion and politics.
Mrs. Ford avoided alcoholic beverages, sipping instead on a glass of plain tonic. She says she no longer has any desire for alcohol.
“I'm very lucky,” she said this week as she relaxed in the living room of the sunny Presidential suite at the Waldorf. “The doctors told me not to drink and I said, ‘O.K., if you don't want me to drink, that's fine.’ “
There is still the evening cocktail hour in the Ford home in Palm Springs, Calif., or when they are traveling together. Mr. Ford still has his pre‐dinner martinis.
“Actually, I don't miss it,” Mrs. Ford said. “In fact, I'm quite relieved not to have to be bothered with it. I've completely lost any taste or desire for liquor.”
She has not quit smoking, although she has never been a heavy smoker.
“I still enjoy smoking,” she said. “One has to have some vices.”
She is quite thin (109 pounds) and wears the same size 8 she has been wearing for years. But she says she feels well and has had no recurrence of cancer since the removal of her right breast more than four years ago.
“Actually, I've never felt better, certainly not within the last 15 years,” she said.
Massages and Exercise
She is still plagued by arthritic spasms in her neck and upper back. But now, no longer allowed to take tranquilizers or other forms of relaxants, she has to rely on massages, moist heat, rest and exercises. She usually walks one or two miles every morning on the golf course that bounds their Palm Springs home. She covers a mile in just under 14 minutes.
If she feels any bitterness about her experience, it is over the free dispensing of tranquilizers by some doctors.
“I think that women tend to run to doctors more often than men,” she said. “And that's why we get into this situation more easily than men.”
Too often, she said, doctors find that prescribing a relaxant or other kind of drug is easier than sitting and listening to a woman's complaints.
“It's easier for them to say, ‘Here, get this prescription filled and take the pills and you'll feel better,’ “ she said. “And, of course, the woman did feel better. know.”
She also feels that her dependency on drugs and alcohol was heightened by what she calls the “somewhat traumatic” experience of seeing her husband lose the Presidential race two years ago and their subsequent move to California.
“We wanted to move, but it meant pulling up roots we had sunk more than 25 years before,” she said. “It was a difficult time for all of us. But we are terribly happy now.”
Mr. Ford has been away from home much of the time since they left the White House that cold, snowy day in January 1977. He has traveled more than 600,000 miles in less than two years, campaigning for Republicans, making speeches, conducting college seminars, playing in golf tournaments.
But Betty Ford says that she has had little time to be truly lonely. She spent more than a year and a half working on her book, with the help of a professional writer, Chris Chase. Her mail is heavy, with more than 6,000 letters flowing in since her public admission of a dependency on drugs and alcohol. She had the new house to put in order. And she is active as a trustee of the Eisenhower Hospital in Palm Springs, the hospital where she had her face lifted.
“I'd go crazy if Jerry were home all the time,” she said, laughing.
She and her husband began writing books about the same time after they left the White House. His is not due out until next summer.
When Mr. Ford's book does come out, they will settle a wager made last year on his birthday when she gave him a T‐shirt that said “I bet my book outsells yours.”
She still thinks so.
“The price is right on mine,” she said with a big smile.
In her book, Betty Ford wrote that she did not think that their daughter, Susan, was old enough to get married and have children. Now, she has changed her mind.
A few weeks ago, 21-year-old Susan announced her engagement to Charles Frederick Vance, a 37-year-old Secret Service agerit who was once assigned to the Ford protection detail. He is now stationed in Los Angeles.
“Jerry and I are terribly pleased,” Mrs. Ford said. “I think Susan was bound to marry an older man. Older men appeal to Susan.”
Jack Manning
Reflecting on her previous drug dependency, the former First
Lady said: ‘I think that women tend to run to doctors more often than men. And that's why we get into this situation’
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