On the last day of the Jerry Ford administration, Betty was walking through the White House with David Kennerly, the White House photographer.

Kennerly, 29, had grown close to the Fords during Jerry's administration. He was, in the words of William Booth, bearded, funny, loyal, profane, and talented.

"You know, I've always wanted to dance on the cabinet room table," Betty said. Kennerly said, "Well, nobody's around." There was a Secret Service agent discreetly outside the door.

She took off her shoes, hopped up there, and struck a pose. "I just think I'm going to do this," Kennerly remembers her saying, and then she's on the table. "She's a tiny woman, really, in very good shape. Very graceful, as a former dancer with the Martha Graham company. She got up there."

Kennerly says he doesn't know why she danced up there, but he has a guess. Very few women have had a seat at that table. "Knowing her support for the Equal Rights Amendment" - she endorsed it - "she was tap-dancing in the middle of this male bastion."

"It was a wonderful and whimsical ending," Betty Ford recently wrote, "to that magical time I spent as first lady."

Normally, Kennerly would see contact sheets of everything he shot, but by the time the film was developed, it was the Carter administration, and he was out of a job. He didn't see the images for a decade and a half.

Betty Ford had a drinking problem. Hell's bells, let's be as honest as Betty would be: she was an alcoholic. Kennerly was hesitant to publish the picture, because people might conclude she was drunk, which wasn't the case at all.

In 1994, he showed the picture to Jerry, and the former president's eyes bulged out, as in a cartoon. "Oh, Betty isn't going to like this," Jerry said, but she came in, saw the picture and started laughing. "Oh, I forgot all about this. That is so great!" So Kennerly asks her, so you don't mind, and Betty said, "No! It's a terrific picture."

Jerry said, "Well, Betty, you never told me you did that." She smiled at him, and said, "There's a lot of things I haven't told you, Jerry."

I recently read "Write It When I'm Gone", Thomas D. DeFrank's memoir of Jerry Ford. DeFrank was an untested journalist, who had been stuck with the low-profile job of covering Jerry Ford - and then Ford became Vice-President, and then President. DeFrank rode the escalator to the top.

Ford and DeFrank liked each other, which meant that DeFrank was unlikely to hardball Ford with tough questions, but that Ford often was forthcoming with details nobody else would get - provided that DeFrank waited to publish them. That makes for an interesting book. The publisher says Ford reveals a profoundly different side of himself: funny, reflective, gossipy, strikingly candid - and the stuff of headlines.

I grew up in NW Ohio, not too far from Grand Rapids, Michigan, so I was probably more familiar with Ford while he was still in the House than most Americans were, but the book took me by surprise, too.

I knew he wasn't the stupid guy that the news made him out to be - but DeFrank revealed him to be, in some ways, petty and insecure. I'm not sure I like that; I'd prefer to think of Jerry as being more noble than that.

The picture of Betty, though, endears her to me. I don't remember her making much of an impact as first lady, except that someone asked her about sleeping with the President, and she said she did, every chance she could. I thought that said a lot about her - and about him. Sometimes, I wonder that there aren't more Eliot Spitzers, who turn to hired help or to interns because the wife doesn't want to come anywhere near.

I didn't know she was a professional dancer. I thought, at the time, that it took incredible courage for her to start the Betty Ford Clinic, and especially to attach her own name to it, as if to say, "I am who I am. If you want someone else, find someone else." Louis L'Amour would have said she was a woman to ride the river with, a woman who had sand.

I've never seen a beauty pageant where they crown the winner based on her courage - but when push comes to shove, courage beats the hell out of a trim figure, big hooters, and a Pepsodent smile. Jerry appears to have been a lucky man.

Other Bloggers On These Subjects:
alcoholic - Betty Ford - Thomas D. DeFrank - Eliot Spitzer - Jerry Ford - David Kennerly - Louis L'Amour - Martha Graham