by Marc Peyser
It wasn’t long before Bye found herself paddling the family lifeboat again. Elliott returned from Europe that November much improved—no longer drinking and now working at Uncle Gracie’s brokerage firm. But the old demons crept back. By 1890, his alcohol-fueled mood swings became so debilitating that Anna insisted they go back to Europe for serious medical treatment. This time the children—Eleanor’s brother, Elliott junior, was born in 1889—went along, traveling with their parents to Italy, France, Austria, Switzerland, and Germany. Some stops went better than others. In Berlin, they ran into Theodore’s pal Buffalo Bill Cody, who promptly offered Elliott a shot of whiskey, which he managed to decline. But as time went on, Elliott weakened. Anna, who tailed her husband most everywhere and monitored his drinking like a seasoned AA sponsor, could no longer keep up. She was pregnant with their third child. So in January 1891, she wrote to New York and summoned Bye.
But the case was now beyond even Bye’s ability to salvage. Elliott would wander off on a bender and not return for days. He had an affair with a married expatriate woman from Detroit, just as word came from the States of a lawsuit filed by one of Anna’s former servants, alleging that he was the father of her soon-to-be-born child. (He denied fathering the child at first, then said he “couldn’t remember” if he’d been intimate with her. Given his near-constant state of inebriation, that might well have been true.) Bye spent eight months with the family in Europe, even living for a time with Elliott at a detox facility in Graz, Austria. Nothing helped. In fact, the birth of his second son, Gracie Hall, on June 28, 1891, in Paris, seemed to push Elliott further down his black hole. Make that his third son. About three months earlier the servant had given birth to a boy. She called him Elliott Roosevelt Mann, which meant that the older Elliott now had two sons named Elliott.
By the end of July 1891, Theodore and Bye had had their brother committed to an asylum just outside Paris. In August, word of Elliott’s situation reached the States: “Elliott Roosevelt Mad” was the headline in the New York Herald.31 The story detailed the previous year’s attacks of “mental derangement,” including claims that Elliott had threatened suicide three times. It also cited court testimony from both Bye and Theodore, who said that Elliott “has been of unsound mind for some time and is now unable to take care of himself.” Theodore was insisting that his brother relinquish any claim on his estate, which he valued at $175,000 in real estate, stock, and bonds. Elliott responded by firing a letter back to the Herald. “I wish emphatically to state that my brother Theodore is taking no steps to have a commission pass on my sanity with or without my wife’s approval,” he wrote—from the asylum. “I am in Paris taking the cure at an establissement hydrotherapeutique, which my nerves, shaken by several severe accidents in the hunting field, made necessary.”32 By then, Elliott’s protest didn’t matter much. The week before, Bye had taken Anna and the children back home.
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The Elliott Roosevelts never lived together again after Anna’s return to New York in late 1891. She and the children moved into a house on East Sixty-First Street, a block from Aunt Bye. Anna tried to make the most of her meager maternal instincts. She converted the top floor of their home to a school, where Eleanor and other well-bred girls were tutored. She also made a point of reading to and playing with her three children, particularly in the evenings from 6:00 to 7:00. “If anyone comes to see me during that hour, they must understand they are welcome, but the children are of the first importance then, and my attention must be given to them,” she told Bye.33 But Eleanor still felt like an interloper in her mother’s world, the girl who didn’t know where her home was. “My little brother Ellie adored her and was so good he never had to be reproved. The baby Hall was always called Josh and was too small to do anything but sit upon her lap contentedly. I felt a curious barrier between myself and these three,” Eleanor said. “If a visitor was there she might turn and say, ‘She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned that we always call her Granny.’ I wanted to sink through the floor in shame.”34
It didn’t help that her mother was just as miserable, like a child whose friends frolicked outside her window while she was punished in her room. Beautiful Anna Hall hadn’t been raised to be a homebody. Fashionable folks would come over for tea and dinners, but tea hardly satisfied a woman with champagne tastes. She longed to go out in the world—and she did take a trip with Eleanor to ritzy Newport, to visit some family—but in the real-life Age of Innocence a married woman didn’t dare kick up her heels without her husband. “One feels desperately lonely and wildly furious with the world at large,” she wrote to Bye.35 Anna spent hours and hours in her room, frequently with Eleanor at her bedside to massage her throbbing head. “People have since told me that I have good hands for rubbing,” Eleanor said.36
The rare moments when “Granny” was free to have fun were away from her needy mother. Eleanor spent as much time as she could at Aunt Bye’s house, drinking tea and nibbling cookies in the maid’s sewing room. “You always had a sense of the closeness of family feeling,” said Eleanor. “She went to a great deal of trouble to see that [we] had a good time, but actually you wanted to be with her.”37 Eleanor saw a lot of Alice there, and their bond began to strengthen. “Much of her shyness and sense of insecurity stemmed from her enforced separation from [Elliott] and the unhappiness it created,” Alice said. “I understood that from a fairly early age. In a way, we both suffered from being deprived of a parent. She had an idealized image of her father and I had one of my mother.”38
The girls also had something of a standing date on Saturdays with Aunt Gracie. She would take them on the rounds of doctor and dentist appointments in the morning, then they’d play tourist, sightseeing around the city at places of culture high and low. “Mrs. Jorley’s wax works I first saw with her!” Eleanor remembered.39 Rainy days, when the group hunkered down at Aunt Gracie’s home, seemed to please Eleanor just as much. Grandmother Martha and her sister, Gracie, grew up in Roswell, Georgia. Their brothers actually fought for the South in the Civil War and afterward fled to England rather than capitulate. Gracie delighted in sharing her heritage with the children, who would eat southern food (pecan pie was a favorite) while playing games or listening to her nostalgic stories about life on a plantation. For Elliot’s daughter, a vicariously happy childhood was better than no childhood at all.
Eleanor’s other sanctuary was Sagamore Hill. Her summer trips there were, relatively speaking, blissful. Uncle Ted was the perfect antidote for a mother who loved her sparingly and a father who was out of reach. Theodore had come to adore children and childishness of any kind: he could never resist a good pillow fight, even when he was living in the White House. But he was especially taken with Eleanor. “Eleanor was always my brother Ted’s favorite niece,” Corinne recalled. “She is more like him than any of his children.”40 When she would arrive for a visit, her uncle would practically tackle her. “He was a bear,” Edith said after the time her husband hugged Eleanor so tightly that he “tore all the gathers out of Eleanor’s frock and both buttonholes out of her petticoat.”41
Theodore was a lightning bolt with a mustache, someone who could send jolts of energy through everyone around him, even an unnaturally solemn little girl. Eleanor never considered herself athletic, but around Uncle Ted and his rambunctious brood she rose to the challenge, just as young Teedie used feats of stamina to push back against his asthma. One day might be spent on a lengthy hike and bird-watching jaunt. Another might feature relay races outside the barn or rowing to a picnic spot along the shore. Sometimes the kids would gather upstairs in the “gun room,” where Theodore hung his rifles and the stuffed prizes he’d bagged with them, and listen to him recite reams of poetry.
Almost every summer day involved a quarter-mile hike (the youngest children got to ride in a donkey cart) to the Long Island Sound. “I can see my father at Sagamore shouting to me from the water, ‘Dive, Alicy, dive,’ ” Alice recalled. “And there I was, trembling on the bank saying
through tears, ‘Yes, Father,’ to this sea monster who was flailing away in the water, peering near-sightedly at me without glasses and with his mustache glistening wet in the sunlight. It was pathetic. My cousin Eleanor was always so fine about that sort of thing. She hated it as much as I did but was much more unprotesting. I was not. I cried. I snarled. I hated.”42
The family used to say that after a diving lesson, Alice’s copious tears caused a perceptible rise in the tide. But she was right about Eleanor, who not only made the best of it but turned the experience into yet another feat of goody-two-shoes stoicism. “Occasionally, he [Uncle Ted] would take us on a picnic or camping trip and taught us many valuable lessons [such as] that camping was a good way to find out people’s characters,” Eleanor recalled. “Those who were selfish showed it very soon, in that they wanted the best bed or the best food, and they did not want to do their share of the work.”43 No wonder Alice came to find her cousin’s sanctimony about as appealing as diving practice. She made Alice look bad. Alice preferred to spend time in Sagamore’s small apple orchard, which she “owned” by virtue of being the oldest. The other children paid “rent” by climbing one of the trees when Alice ordered them to.
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It wasn’t really the sporting life that Alice resisted. She might have lost her mother, but she blamed her father for abandoning her, too. After all, he had effectively tried to give her away to Bye, only to destroy that stability when Edith insisted on reclaiming her—over his objections. “I had a great affection for him but tended to worship from afar,” she said. “I don’t think he had any special affection for me.”44 He certainly had little time for her. He had campaigned throughout the West for the Republican Benjamin Harrison in the presidential election of 1888 and was rewarded with an appointment to the Civil Service Commission, requiring the family to move to Washington. When she was six, Alice got to meet the president, a feat she would repeat sixteen times over the next eight decades. “[Harrison] appeared to me to be a gnarled, bearded, gnome of a man gloomily ensconced in a corner of the red room at the White House,” she said.45 But Alice saw relatively little of her father. Theodore Roosevelt served with such distinction that he was reappointed to the same post when the Democrat Grover Cleveland won the election of 1892, despite Theodore’s having supported Harrison’s reelection. He returned to New York in 1895, becoming president of the board of New York City Police Commissioners, where he shook up the establishment and made a name for himself as an honest, energetic, and hardworking public servant. In his spare time, he wrote books on the War of 1812, the history of New York, the life of Thomas Hart Benton, hunting trips of a ranchman, and more.
As a result, Alice could be almost as unhappy in her family as Eleanor was in hers. Her stepmother, Edith, began having children almost immediately after she was married. Ted junior was born exactly nine months and eleven days after his parents’ wedding, and he was followed by four more little Roosevelts over the next ten years.*4 Just as Eleanor felt left out of the relationship between her mother and her brothers, Alice could never get over being the only child in the family with a stepmother. She liked to claim that she shrugged off self-pity, but she carried a lifelong grudge over Ted junior’s teasing her about having a wet nurse: “So this horrid little cross-eyed boy of about five would go around to all and sundry exclaiming: ‘Sissy had a sweat nurse! Sissy had a sweat nurse!’ It was frightfully wounding to the character.”46
It didn’t help that Edith was about as warm as February in the Badlands. Her own father’s slide into alcoholism drove his family into the dreaded middle class, and like many children of alcoholics (including Eleanor) Edith clung to order and propriety as if her life depended on it. “Both Aunt Bye and my mother-in-law [Theodore and Bye’s sister, Corinne Roosevelt] were a little bit afraid of her, which always amused me because they weren’t afraid of anybody, ever,” said Helen Roosevelt Robinson, Corinne’s daughter-in-law. “They were watching their p’s and q’s a little bit when they were with her.”47 Stern and cool, she was unemotional almost to the point of comedy. When the sixty-foot windmill at Sagamore Hill got stuck one summer, Theodore grabbed an oilcan and shimmied up the support pole to the jammed turbine. He reached the top easily enough, but as he did, the wind shifted and the blades started spinning on their own—one of them slicing off a good chunk of his scalp. With blood leaking into his eyes and onto his shoulders, he climbed down and staggered into the house, where he was met by Edith in the front hall. Most wives would have screamed or at least hurried to help. Not stoic, orderly Edith. “Theodore,” she said, her exasperation dripping along with his head, “I wish you’d do your bleeding in the bathroom. You are spoiling every rug in the house.”48
None of which made Edith a bad mother, or even an uncaring one. She worried about her stepdaughter’s education, her friends, even her clothes. “I got Alice a beautiful dress at Stern’s, dark large plaid with navy blue velour, but how much do you think it cost? Forty-two dollars,” she wrote to her sister, Emily. “Mrs. Lee [Alice’s maternal grandmother] wishes it, and I am glad as Alice is a child who needs good clothes, and would look quite forlorn as Eleanor in makeshifts.”49 But Alice only reluctantly gave her stepmother credit for her thoughtful upbringing. When Alice was eight, she had to get braces on her legs, to straighten them after what might have been a mild case of polio. Edith painstakingly stretched Alice’s Achilles tendons to make sure they grew properly: five minutes on one leg, seven and a half on the other, every night. Alice’s response? “My stepmother made an enormous effort with me as a child,” she said, “but I think she was bored by doing so.”50
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Elliott, on the other hand, was desperate to return to his family, but it would come with conditions. Theodore wouldn’t sign the release from the French asylum unless Elliott agreed to continue treatment in the States. He also demanded, with Anna’s backing, that Elliott keep away from his family for a year, to prove that he could stay sober and employed. Arriving back in the United States in February 1892, Elliott spent five weeks taking the renowned Dr. Keeley’s Bichloride of Gold Cure*5 in Dwight, Illinois, then went to work tending to his brother-in-law’s real estate holdings in Virginia.51 After only a few months there, Elliott began a sort of letter-writing campaign, begging Anna, Bye, even Anna’s mother to allow him to return to the fold in New York. Elliott reached out to Eleanor, too. “Because father is not with you is not because he doesn’t love you. For I love you tenderly and dearly. And maybe soon I’ll come back all well and strong and we will have such good times together, like we used to have,” he wrote two days before her eighth birthday.52 He also sent her a pony. As her present to him, she learned to recite much of Longfellow’s poem “The Song of Hiawatha” by heart—“because that happened to be a favorite poem of his,” she said.53
Unfortunately for Eleanor, she was the only one who responded to her father’s overtures: “Sometimes I woke up when my mother and her sisters were talking at bed time, and many a conversation which was not meant for my ears was listened to with great avidity. I acquired a strange and garbled idea of the troubles which were going on around me. Something was wrong with my father, and from my point of view nothing could be wrong with him.”54 When Anna became ill and needed to go to the hospital in November 1892, her mother sent Elliott a telegram that said plainly, “Do not come.” “It is most horrible and full of awe to me that my wife not only does not want me near her in sickness or trouble but fears me,” he telegraphed back to Mrs. Hall. “If Anna cares for it give her my love.”55 The note was dated December 7, 1892. Anna died, of diphtheria, that day. It’s a measure of Eleanor’s blind adoration of Elliott that even when she wrote about her mother’s death years later, she still couldn’t summon any sadness. “She was very sweet to me, and I must have known that something terrible had happened,” she said. “Death meant nothing to me, and one fact wiped out everything else—my father was back and I would see him very soon.”56
To no one’s surprise except
perhaps Eleanor’s, her father failed to make her world better. Anna’s will left the three children in custody of her mother, Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall, and Elliott was in no condition to fight back. He visited them infrequently when they were at their grandmother’s Manhattan residence, drifting in and out of New York amid sporadic letters overflowing with unfulfilled promises. One time when he did collect Eleanor for a walk, he arrived with a large collection of hunting dogs, which had become his steadiest companions (besides his drinking partners at his men’s club). “He took me and three of his fox terriers and left us with the doorman at the Knickerbocker Club,” Eleanor said. “When he failed to return after six hours, the doorman took me home.”57
From there, things actually got worse. In May 1893, just five months after their mother’s death, both of Eleanor’s little brothers came down with scarlet fever. Elliott was in Virginia working for his brother-in-law, and he rushed back to New York, but three-year-old Elliott junior died within days. Motherless Eleanor had already begun to assume the role of a parent, even to her own father. “We must remember Ellie is going to be safe in heaven and to be with Mother who is waiting there and our Lord wants Ellie boy with him now, we must be happy and do God’s will and we must cheer others who feel it too,” she wrote to Elliott. “You are alright I hope.”58
Elliott was as far from “alright” as he could be. He continued to tell his family that he was receiving his mail at the Knickerbocker Club, but he had secretly moved into an apartment on New York’s very unfashionable West 102nd Street, where he lived with a new mistress named Mrs. Evans. He also occasionally snuck away to visit the Detroit expatriate with whom he had cavorted in Europe. Theodore wrote to Bye that their brother was now “drinking whole bottles of anisette and green mint—besides whole bottles of raw brandy and of champagne, sometimes half a dozen a morning.”59 Elliott was thrown from his carriage after drunkenly driving it into a lamppost, and he burned himself badly after tipping over a reading lamp. He could only manage sporadic contact with Eleanor, writing her letters equally full of apology and self-pity: “What must you think of your father who has not written in so long.” On August 13, 1894, he wrote and tried to explain himself: “I have after all been very busy, quite ill, at intervals not able to move from my bed for days,” he said. “Kiss Baby Brudie for me and never forget I love you.”60
