Showtime’s depiction of my mom, Betty Ford, was tough to watch
By Susan Ford Bales
NOTE: This was originally published for the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation’s monthly Recovery Advocacy Update. If you’d like to receive our advocacy emails, subscribe today.
Watching Showtime’s recently canceled series The First Lady as Betty Ford — my mom — stumbled drunkenly around our Virginia home, and then the White House, was painful. Not because I am her daughter, or because it revisited a difficult time for me, but because it didn’t ring true.
Though my mother was very open about her struggles with prescription painkillers and alcohol, she did not spend those years in a cliché-infused-alcoholic haze. As my friend, former chief White House photographer David Hume Kennerly, put it: “She wasn’t prancing around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue plastered.”
To be sure, our family felt the confusion, frustration and pain addiction brings. I don’t want to sugarcoat this chronic, progressive and too-often fatal health condition that has killed a million Americans over the past 20 years.
Yet, my mother was also the exceptional parent and First Lady you would expect. Addiction was something she had at the time, but it wasn’t who she was, and it wasn’t even evident to most. In fact, the world was surprised to hear in 1978 that she had sought professional help for her disease — and that she announced it so transparently.
Generally speaking, I appreciate every opportunity to elevate awareness about substance use disorder and recovery. But when addiction is routinely sensationalized — when stigma and stereotypes run freely in place of specificity and truth-telling — there are consequences. The mom watching at home and struggling quietly on the inside, and the family that doesn’t see her crashing through windows, causing public scenes or the dancing all the way to “rock bottom,” — may not relate, and may not seek help — because, “at least I’m not that bad.”
It’s true that many folks relate to the experience in the stereotypes, too, but there’s real value in sticking to the truth, whatever it is. And The First Lady not only embellished my mom’s addiction story but contained numerous other important inaccuracies — among them false portrayals of her disagreeing with my father’s pardon of President Nixon and of dad’s top aides Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney constantly seeking to suppress my mother’s voice.
Despite all of the dramatic licenses taken, I heard positive feedback about the Betty Ford portion of the series and the talents of Michelle Pfeiffer, who portrayed my mother. It is gratifying to see a new generation clued in to the force for good that my mother was, and I hope many will pursue more informative missives into her life, including her own moving autobiographies. And I am grateful for those who called the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation (where I serve on the board) helpline that Showtime displayed after one episode.
But with the United States facing our worst addiction crisis ever, I only wish the producers had consulted me and others who were there when the real story unfolded. The public needs and deserves hope without the trope, and together, we might have accomplished that.
Susan Ford Bales is a Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation trustee and the daughter of President Gerald Ford and First Lady Betty Ford. She lives in Texas.
