Betty Ford, on Reflection : It Is the Balance in Her Life, She Says, That Underlies Her New Sense of Peace

Betty Ford looks back with neither nostalgia nor regret.

The former First Lady has come to see her husband’s defeat by Jimmy Carter in 1976 as “a God-given gift. . . . I was given my life.”

She is seated in the large living room of the Fords’ desert home on the Thunderbird Country Club golf course--the room where on April 1, 1978, her husband and four grown children, together with two medical professionals, delivered the ultimatum that changed the course of hundreds of lives: She was an alcoholic and must seek treatment, her family told her.

A week after that crisis intervention, after detoxification, she entered the chemical dependency program at Long Beach Naval Hospital.

‘Unaware of Dependency’

Just 4 1/2 years later, in October, 1982, the Betty Ford Center at Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage was dedicated by Vice President George Bush and the first patients admitted. Today, there are 10,000 “alumni” who have sought the center’s help in conquering chemical dependency.

Had Gerald Ford won election in 1976, she is certain, none of this would have happened. “I believe things come and go in your life as they’re meant to,” she says. “I truly believe that . . . I was allowed to be a communicator, to help other people.”

In the 28 months the Fords occupied the White House--from Aug. 9, 1974, when President Richard M. Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal until the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter on Jan. 20, 1977--”We were unaware of (my) dependency, this disease, the illness that was a part of my life and was progressing on a monthly basis.”

In a second Ford term, she says, “It would have had to surface. I think I would have gotten sicker . . . and it would have been addressed, but maybe in a less public way. In spite of the fact that we had been very open and addressed my mastectomy (in September, 1974), I think there would have been a hesitancy on the part of the people who surrounded us to go public with the alcoholism.”

Could the secret have been kept for four more years? “I doubt it,” she says, given the stress she was under, the pain from a pinched neck nerve that had resulted in an addiction, as well as to what she has called “a gourmet collection of (prescription) drugs”--and the speed at which her alcoholism was progressing.

‘Focusing on Personal Issue’

She recalls an interview as First Lady with a Women’s Wear Daily reporter who had written about her drinking and taking Valium. Mrs. Ford remembers her reaction--that the writer was “focusing too much on a personal issue.”

That resentment was not atypical of what Betty Ford now hears routinely from patients at the Betty Ford Center.

Betty Ford, a one-time fashion model, has remained elegantly slender. She appears tanned and fit despite the trauma of quadruple bypass surgery in November, 1987.

“I had complications,” she says, necessitating four more surgeries, all in a five-month period.

In the aftermath, Mrs. Ford, 70, has cut down on her speaking engagements and acknowledges that travel no longer holds the lure it once did.

If the Betty Ford Center is her passion, it is not an obsession. She has managed to keep what she calls “a certain balance” in her life--”I don’t give 100% of my time to the recovery of others. I give 100% of my time to my own recovery, and my own recovery involves being well and being drug-free in order to help other people as a role model.”

No, she says, she no longer has the urge to drink. “The benefits that I have found from sobriety and being drug-free have been so great

that I just have no desire to return to that other life.” Meditation, nutrition and exercise have largely freed her from the pain that led to her addiction.

President Ford, who was a social drinker, also has given up liquor to help keep his weight down and to encourage her.

Part of the “balance” in her life is the support of a closely knit family, all of whom gather for Christmases at the Fords’ summer home in Beaver Creek, Colo.

Have Five Grandchildren

“Our family unity has always been a good 90%,” she says. “I’d say it goes to 110% when anyone gets into difficulties,” as she did.

The Fords have five grandchildren, all girls. Their eldest son, Michael, 38, associate dean of students at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., and his wife, Gayle, have three daughters: Hannah, Sarah and Rebekah. Heather and Tyne are the daughters of Susan, 31, who is divorced from Charles Vance, a one-time Secret Service agent, and lives in Washington.

Steven Ford, 32, who once played Andy Richards on the daytime soap “The Young and the Restless,” now free-lances as an actor and breeds thoroughbred horses, dividing time between Kentucky and his home in San Luis Obispo.

Cherishes Her Role

Jack Ford, 36, lives in north San Diego County and is with a company that runs California Lottery kiosks at shopping centers.

Despite her other activities, Betty Ford insists, “My most important role is the role of wife, mother and grandmother, and I treasure that above all else.

“I try to put consideration of my husband’s needs first, although I don’t think he always thinks that. But after 40 years (of marriage) we have the best years of our lives right now.”

Today, Betty Ford seems to be a woman at peace. Her home in the desert is a serene oasis of greens and whites. A transplanted Easterner who didn’t know about winter chill in the desert, she says, “I thought it was going to be hot here and I felt these colors would be cool.”

But the summer house in Colorado, built on four levels around a great central staircase, is in complete contrast, furnished in warm blues and reds.

“I love both places” and would hate to choose between them, though “I suppose some day, if we live to be that old and can’t travel, we’ll have to,” she says. “I’ll put that off . . . I’m like Scarlett.”

At Rancho Mirage, a book of Karsh portraits shares space on a parrot-green coffee table with a volume entitled “America’s Great Golf Courses.” But she says that President Ford, at 75, is so busy “he doesn’t play as much golf as he used to.” His involvements range from board seats to civic contributions and, she adds, he is a “great supporter” of the center.

Will Receive Award

On Feb. 24, the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce will recognize the Fords’ contributions to the desert community when it honors them with its “Citizen of the Year” award.

Mrs. Ford speaks of her husband’s continuing passion for politics. “We’re very enthusiastic about the Bushes. . . .” With the Bush presidency, she adds, “I think everybody feels that the problems our country has are going to get a new look and, hopefully, some new solutions.”

The Fords will not be in Washington but in Rancho Mirage during the inaugural. “We think inaugurations are for the people who are being sworn into office,” she explains.

In their living room, a glass menagerie of animals includes a quartet of chubby crystal elephants (Republican elephants, she notes.) An end wall is dominated by a larger-than-life portrait of her painted by John Ulbrkht to hang in the office of then-Vice President Ford.

“Before it ever got done, he was already in the White House,” she says, and ultimately it was hung on the second floor at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. She laughs and says it has a place of honor in the living room in Rancho Mirage largely because Laura Mako, their decorator, needed something in compatible colors to cover a lot of blank wall.

“I quite like it,” she says of the portrait, though her husband thinks it makes her look a bit “like a peasant.”

As Betty Ford sees her guests to the door, a taffy-colored cocker spaniel returns from an outing and leaps on her exuberantly. She introduces Happy (short for Happy Birthday, a gift from the Ford children) as the world’s most spoiled pet, the successor to Liberty, the golden retriever, now dead, that lived in the Ford White House.

There is little resemblance between Betty Ford and the woman she was in 1978, a woman she herself has described on reflection as “this nice dopey pill-pusher, sitting around nodding.”

Sharing with others who are recovering is, she knows, both “very rewarding” and insurance against backtracking. Since “coming out” as an alcoholic, she quipped in her book, “Betty: A Glad Awakening,” she has talked so much about it that “there may be people who wish I’d go back in.”

That’s not likely. Nor is she resting on any laurels. Always, Betty Ford reminds herself and others, “you have to win again tomorrow,” to keep “showing up for life.”

During the Ford presidency, Betty Ford had a reputation for being, as she puts it, “rather outspoken. I decided right in the beginning that it would be better to answer questions directly rather than beat around the bush, because sooner or later I’d be met at the other side.”

She is unchanged in that respect. And she is no dilettante do-gooder, lending her name but little else to a cause. Her commitment to the Betty Ford Center is such that she spends about three days a week on its 14-acre “campus,” often talking one-on-one with patients. She also serves as president of the board, a job she intends to keep “until they kick me out.”

The center has her imprint, down to the soft desert colors in the residential units. The desert, she says, is “an ideal place for people . . . to sit back and take at look at their life and where they’ve come from and where they’re hoping to go, what they’ve done and what they hope to do.”

In short, to do just as she has.

Have Twin Addiction

Patients come from nationwide and foreign countries, most have twin addictions (alcohol and another drug) and 50% are female, though only a third of Americans who seek help for alcoholism are women.

Mrs. Ford acknowledges a special rapport with women alcoholics, who, she believes, are quick to negate their own worth and to see themselves as failures in the traditional role society has dictated for them and tend to have more emotional and physical problems attributable to their addiction.

Although there has been heated debate recently over whether alcoholism is indeed a disease--or whether, as some have suggested, it is willful conduct and treatment has become a self-perpetuating big business--the disease concept is not even debatable in Betty Ford’s view.

“There’s no question in my mind,” she says, that she has a disease, probably precipitated by “a genetic factor in my makeup.” She cites studies of twins, separated at birth, who both become alcoholics, studies of young men showing “a different brain makeup in the children of the alcoholic male.”

No Franchise Operation

In the drug treatment field, the center’s reputation is such that offers have come from 25 cities to establish satellite Betty Ford Centers.

But, she has told the staff, she does not want to see “Kentucky Fried Betty Fords,” franchise operations in which she would have little hands-on involvement.

More recently, another First Lady, Nancy Reagan, has become a champion of the anti-drug crusade with her “Just Say No” campaign and has told of her intentions to be actively involved in the Nancy Reagan Center for drug treatment, scheduled to open this summer near Pacoima.

No, Mrs. Ford says, they will not be rivals--”I see no reason that we would ever be in competition in any way, particularly in the field of treating drug and alcohol problems. The hospital that she is planning to head up is for adolescents and young adults. Our program addresses those 18 and over. I would hope we could work together and be helpful to each other.”

At the Betty Ford Center, a $9.6-million facility that was funded entirely by founders-benefactors, patient fees cover operating costs. But private fund-raising and gifts support special programs and projects.

Expansion of the center, which with 80 beds, runs at capacity year-round, is a possibility, perhaps with outpatient facilities in Los Angeles and Orange counties, where most of its clients live. If that happens, Mrs. Ford notes, “Our primary focus would be women.”

Coming Jan. 28 will be “Liza Minnelli in Concert,” a black-tie benefit at the McCallum Theatre, Bob Hope Cultural Center, Palm Desert, with proceeds to be split between the Eisenhower Medical Center Auxiliary and the Betty Ford Center, where the money will assist patients who otherwise could not afford its care. Minnelli, an “alumna” of the center and a good friend of the Fords, is donating her talent.

(Minnelli and Betty Ford both studied under choreographer Martha Graham; they first met backstage 15 years ago after a benefit Minnelli concert in Washington).

Fraction Rich and Famous

Minnelli is one of many celebrities who have been treated at the center, including Chevy Chase, Mary Tyler Moore, Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum.

Betty Ford is quick to note that only a fraction of the patients are the rich and famous. Those who check in thinking they’re at a spa are quickly disabused of that notion, as every patient is assigned therapeutic duty, such as dusting or vacuuming; beds are allocated on an as-available basis, two or four to a room.

The center is nonprofit, and Betty Ford says she hopes to get out the message: Chemical dependency treatment programs do not have to break the bank. A typical 28-day chemical dependency treatment at Rancho Mirage costs $6,000, half or less of what is charged by many units that are part of acute-care hospitals with attendant overheads.

She and Mrs. Reagan, who has also undergone a mastectomy for breast cancer, also share a commitment to raising awareness of that disease and ways women can protect themselves.

Susan Ford Vance gives talks on the importance of early breast cancer detection and is backing federal legislation to require medical insurance to cover the cost of mammograms for women over a certain age.

Know Medical Risks

She has ensured, Mrs. Ford says, that all four of her children know the medical risks that are part of their heritage. Besides her cancer, there is diabetes on President Ford’s side of the family, her arthritis, and, of course, alcoholism, which afflicted her father and a brother.

It was, perhaps, typical of Betty Ford that, when the center was in planning stages, she went to her children and asked if they had any misgivings about it being called the Betty Ford Center.

“I did not think it should have any more impact on the children than necessary, and certainly I didn’t want to embarrass the grandchildren,” she says.

It has not turned out to be a problem, she says--”Our children have been quite explicit in saying grandma was sick and she took a lot of medicine and she drank and it made her sicker and people shouldn’t do that.”