12/10/2025
Volume 4, Issue 3 December 2025
FLARE Focus on Betty Ford’s Dance with Vulnerability and Leadership
Jamey Grisham
Editor’s Note: Jamey Grisham is a multidisciplinary artist with a body of work that spans six continents and more than 100 productions and venues worldwide. A professional dancer and choreographer, he serves in national governance for the Actors’ Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA and is a two-time Stage Directors and Choreographers Society Foundation Fellow. He is an Assistant Professor of Musical Theatre in the Conservatory for the Performing Arts at Stephens College and Director of Theatre for the Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts School.
“Betty Bloomer Ford’s vivid performance as our most candid first lady has made her memorable,” observes first daughter Margaret Truman.[1] Although much scholarship centers on Ford’s advocacy for breast cancer awareness and substance abuse, comparatively little has probed the influence of her early years as a professional dancer. Before her White House tenure, Ford trained rigorously in modern dance—a discipline that deeply informed her lifelong commitment to authenticity and empathy. In contrast to ballet’s rigid conventions, modern dance values genuine emotion and physical expressiveness. This distinction is key. Martha Graham, Ford’s renowned teacher and mentor, insisted that performers draw from personal experience, embracing both struggle and transformation as essential to artistic growth. As Graham asserted, “I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some action of vision, of faith, of desire.”[2] This ethos was central to Graham’s teaching and deeply shaped her students. It likely encouraged Ford to persist and adapt in the face of challenges throughout her term as first lady and beyond.
“Dance was my happiness,” stated Ford, and Martha Graham was her “goddess.”[3] Her devotion to dance meant moving through discomfort and seeing vulnerability as a form of strength. Modern dance’s focus on honest expression and rejection of artificiality provided Ford with a framework for empathy. President Ford said Graham taught “self-discipline is not an obstacle to creativity, but a vehicle,” and encouraged her pupils, Betty Bloomer included, to “meet a situation with courage and complete honesty.” Indeed, First Lady Betty Ford met the challenge of a breast cancer diagnosis by going public, and subsequently saved women’s lives through a national conversation on women’s health and breast cancer prevention.
Through dance, Ford learned that only hard work and a willingness to confront uncertainty can foster authenticity, which was an outlook that helped her form deep bonds with people from all walks of life. Well acquainted with the stage, Ford understood her office’s ceremonial demands, once telling first ladies scholar Myra Gutin, “‘A good bit’ of the First Lady’s job is still ceremonial.”[4] Her early dance training likely equipped her for unexpected challenges. One of the most notable instances occurred at a 1976 Bicentennial celebration, when Rabbi Maurice Sage suffered a heart attack during a Jewish National Fund dinner. Ford, comfortable in the spotlight and in crisis, guided the gathering in prayer. Her steady presence anchored the moment, demonstrating leadership rooted in vulnerability and grace. Like an understudy stepping in at a moment’s notice, Ford offered support and calm in a moment of fear. She later remarked, “. . . I was very fond of Dr. Sage, I felt that something had to be done and at that point nobody was doing anything. . . . I did go to the microphone . . . I certainly didn’t plan it, it was something that happened.”'[5]
In her Medal of Freedom acceptance speech, Graham herself reflected, “Those of us who are dancers have contributed toward a singing voice that will go on for a long time,” a sentiment Ford lived out in public life. As Graham observed, “time does not stand still”—and Ford’s ability to respond to crisis with poise and humanity, drawn from Graham’s belief in artistry as both discipline and compassion, allowed her to navigate high-pressure appearances with rare composure and heart. Whether advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment, navigating difficult press encounters such as the controversial 60 Minutes interview with Morley Safer, or spontaneously joining a Chinese dance troupe in Beijing during a 1975 state visit, the First Lady displayed poise in her role performance rooted in her modern dance training. Photographs of Mrs. Ford in the White House often show her dancing at state dinners as she brought joy to guests and opened lines of communication with spontaneity and focus on others. Most famously, the photograph of her striking a dance pose on the Cabinet Room table taken on her last day at the White House is a visual metaphor for Betty Ford herself—authentic, agile, and full of creative resilience. Ford’s approach to public life reflects the lessons of the modern dance studio as much as her experience as a political wife. By embracing the vulnerability and rigor Martha Graham championed, Ford redefined service as First Lady: blending grace with candor, tradition with personal courage, and ceremony with emotional truth. Ford’s artistry is central to her legacy and raises interesting questions about the way first ladies are prepared for the role through their own avocations and personal pursuits.
[1] Margaret Truman, First Ladies: An Intimate Portrait of White House Wives (New York: Random House, 1995), 131.
[2] Graham as cited in Alexandra Carter and Janet O’Shea, eds., The Routledge Dance Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1998), 96.
[3] Betty Ford, The Times of My Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 17, 24.
[4] Myra Gutin, The President’s Partner: The First Lady in the Twentieth Century (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 137.
[5] Betty Ford as cited in Gutin, 138.
Photo credit:
Mrs. Ford in the Cabinet Room of the White House on January 19, 1977.
Photograph by David Kennerly. Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.