Betty Ford's White House Favorites

By Hugh Sidey

THE PRESIDENCY

Betty Ford's favorite picture is Boys Crabbing, a muted oil by 19th century Genre Painter William Ranney ("I understand boys," the mother of three of them says). Mrs. William Howard Taft, whose portrait is on the wall of the Grand Staircase, is her idea "of what a First Lady should look like."

Mrs. Ford is captivated by the beautiful features of Fanny Kemble, the London actress whose picture hangs in the Queen's Room. "She is," says Mrs. Ford about Miss Kemble, "the prettiest lady in the White House. I wonder whose friend she was?" White House Curator Clem Conger has not provided an answer to that one yet.

Her favorite piece of furniture is the tambour desk in the East Sitting Hall, part of the private family quarters. It was made in Boston by John and Thomas Seymour sometime between 1790 and 1804. She sometimes caresses its inlaid mahogany as if it were a member of the family. Indeed, by now it is.

Betty Ford, who entered the White House with deep misgivings, has learned some of the special pleasures of "living a page of history." She has sorted out those paintings that have extra meaning for her (John Singleton Copley's Lady in Blue, Ferdinand Reichardt's Philadelphia, 1858, and Mary Cassatt's Young Mother and Two Children are three other favorites). She has found the times of day, the special vistas and the moody corners that deepen her enjoyment.

Sometimes she signs her mail in the Treaty Room on the massive dark walnut table that was Ulysses S. Grant's. There she feels the White House spell the most. If she could summon back scenes from other eras, she would like to see the men gathered there for

Cabinet meetings around the turn of the century, dispatches from the wireless room down the hall being hustled in and out. She would, too, like to hear the shouts of Teddy Roosevelt as he romped through corridors, get a short glimpse of Eleanor Roosevelt bustling out the front door of the White House to take a bus or walk up Connecticut Avenue like any other citizen.

Mrs. Ford is amused by the tortoise-shell wastebasket that hangs from an armchair used by Grant. She is intrigued by two sewing tables from 1810 made by Duncan Phyfe. Small and elegant when closed, they sprout drawers and shelves like magic.

Like others, she seeks out the view from the Truman Balcony. She sniffs with special pleasure the scent of magnolia blossoms that are outside her bedroom window, the tree having been planted 140 years ago by Andrew Jackson. The crack of the White House flag in the wind is a reassuring greeting on breezy days. At lunchtime, she searches for the sun in the solarium on the third floor.

"The day we said goodbye to the Nixons was the saddest day of my life," she says. "The happiest was when Liberty had her puppies. I was on the floor beside her all afternoon." She still has not found a ghost. One night the chanting of protesters in Lafayette Square filled the darkened White House and she found it "very eerie." But no apparition walked the halls. Another time a thumping on the ceiling turned out to be one of her sons dropping the end of his pool cue on the carpet.

But there still are moments when she longs for her old life. In those spells, she sits before the high-arched window of the West Hall and just watches the people hurrying along Pennsylvania Avenue.

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