Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, the Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, and I by Becker Paula & Becker Paula

Author:Becker, Paula & Becker, Paula [Becker, Paula]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

The Name’s Kettle

ON Betty’s first trip to Hollywood, the radio personality George Fisher asked her on the air if she’d ever been back to Chimacum. No, she replied, and with luck she never would. Would her former neighbors be angry, Fisher probed? It wouldn’t make any difference to them, Betty replied, because the characters in the book are largely composites. Only Pa Kettle would be immediately recognizable, and he wouldn’t care.1

Betty was wrong. On March 25, 1947, her former Chimacum neighbors, Edward and Ilah Bishop, filed a lawsuit against Betty and Don, asking for one hundred thousand dollars in damages.2 They alleged that they were the couple referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Hicks in The Egg and I; that the book was libelous and an invasion of their right to privacy; and that they had been exposed to ridicule, hatred, and contempt because of their alleged portrayal.3

The Bishops’ suit validated the fears Lippincott’s lawyers had expressed when the book was still in manuscript. At that stage Betty had given the characters she ultimately called the Kettles the name of Basket. Betty blithely told Lippincott that if basing a character on some characteristics of an actual person constituted libel, all of her characters were libelous. She ticked off characters one by one: the real Mrs. Basket was named Bishop, was deceased, and had been profane but also kind to her. Mr. Bishop lisped and borrowed from people. Maxwell Ford Jefferson was a man who’d made whiskey with Bob, but she’d made up that last name. Crowbar, Clamface, and Geoduck were Bob’s good friends Skids, Pume, and Wesel, who were Indians. The Indian picnic was an actual occurrence but had been more obscene. Since her name had been Heskett then, she concluded, the easiest way to dodge libel accusations would be to give The Egg and I’s author’s name as B. B. MacDonald.4

Betty had been willing to make whatever changes Lippincott suggested, however. “I wanted to show how magnificent the country is in comparison [with] the unsavoriness of its inhabitants,” she wrote to Bernice Baumgarten at the time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.