A Love like Friendship: Betty Byers
“A friendship that like love is warm; A love like friendship, steady.”
—Thomas Moore
From Kansas City to Aspen, Puerto Vallarta, North and South America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and last stop San Antonio, we were explorers.
When Robbie and I lived in Kansas City on Cherokee Drive there was a park in back of our home. Kitty-cornered across the park lived, unbeknownst to us, Betty and George Byers. A few years after we moved, Betty and George bought the house next to us at Lake Lotawana. (The former owners of the house had been excellent friends with my parents and had built a common dock.) We quickly became great friends.
Betty and two of her relatives were all interior designers and had opened a store in the Westport area of Kansas City called Byers Three Interiors. Robbie and I hired Betty to help with the interiors of our Kansas City home, and after moving to Aspen, hired her to do the interiors of all 48 units in the Château Chaumont and Château Dumont.
After Buddy Wallen and I split up, I went into partnership with George and Betty to build the Château Eau Claire, and, again, Betty did the interiors. George was a fabulous individual and we had become best friends. George, Betty, Robbie and I went on multiple trips to Europe together.
George developed leukemia and died in 1972 at the MD Anderson Hospital in Houston. Before his death, we had bought property in Aspen to build another condominium. Betty did not want to go ahead with this project, and we sold it. Probably a big mistake since that is where the Clarendon townhomes are today. Robbie and I divorced in 1975.
Betty had developed an Aspen clientele and opened an interior design studio on Main Street. She helped me with the interiors of a duplex I had developed in the Oklahoma Flats area.
By this time, our relationship had turned romantic, and Betty moved into the duplex with me. In 1977, we were married at John Gardner's tennis ranch in Scottsdale and began 34 years of traveling adventures.
Betty was a creative interior designer with an artistic eye for beauty. She taught me about beauty, lines, colors, textures, balance, and how to choose artwork. She was a talented floral designer and worked with the Getty’s professional flower arranger when we were in San Francisco.
We had great fun decorating our homes and properties. During our travels, we were always looking for that perfect piece. Some of Betty’s most creative projects were homes in Mexico, featured in both Veranda and Architectural Digest.
Cassoulet! Betty liked to try new things. She loved finding an undiscovered restaurant. When we were traveling in France, she wanted to try all of the Michelin Guides Red R Restaurants. These are the restaurants that are typical of the region yet reasonable. That is how we discovered cassoulet. We tried many Red R eateries, and they were wonderful, but we never quite got to eat at all of them.
Betty's only sailing experience had been as a crew at Lake Lotawana, but she took readily to the cruising life and, for 12 years, we would spend as much as eight months at a time cruising Mexico and the Caribbean. She was equally crazy about traveling by RV and we went through a whole series of motorhomes starting with a VW Pop-Top and eventually traveling in a 36-foot Class A motorhome. Betty was just as happy, maybe more so, camping in a motorhome as she was living in our 20,000 square-foot home in Puerto Vallarta with a staff of 10.
We were living in Aspen at 8000 feet and Betty was going to have to be on oxygen full-time if we stayed so we moved to San Antonio near her son, George, and to be at a much lower altitude. She was a smoker and caught pneumonia and was told that if she did not stop smoking it would kill her. Remember, I have been trying to get her to stop for 20 years. A week after she quit, I asked her, “Was it very hard stopping?”
“No, if I had known it would be this easy, I would have stopped years ago!”
Our wonderful 34 years of marriage ended sadly when Betty developed leukemia and passed away on July 5, 2014.