by Marc Peyser
On that August night, he began acting more strangely than usual. His valet said he collected his dogs and proceeded to introduce them all to Elliott, his dead son. At one point he ran up to the fourth floor of his apartment house and knocked on a neighbor’s door and asked “if Miss Eleanor Roosevelt were at home.” No, the neighbor said, she wasn’t. “Tell her her father is so sorry not to see her,” Elliott replied.61 He then started running up and down the stairs like a rabid dog. When he tired of that, he jumped out the parlor-floor window. His valet got him into bed, but he started to have convulsions. He finally fell asleep some time before 10:00 p.m. By the morning he was dead.
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Dead to the world—all the major New York papers wrote news stories about him—but of course not dead to his daughter. It was as if she lived in some kind of shiny, happy fantasyland. She would later admit that she survived those bleak and bereft years by retreating to “my dream world.” “My grandmother decided that we children should not go to the funeral, and so I had no tangible thing to make death real to me,” Eleanor said. “From that time on I knew in my mind that my father was dead, and yet I lived with him more closely, probably, than I had when he was alive.”62
In less than two years, Eleanor had lost her mother, her brother, and her father. Nonetheless, Grandmother Hall now decided to keep ten-year-old Eleanor and three-year-old Hall away from their paternal relatives as much as possible. Though her grandmother’s New York house, on West Thirty-Seventh Street, was only about a mile from her devoted aunts Corinne and Bye, Eleanor rarely saw them in the wake of Elliott’s death. “Perhaps she feared we might slip away from her control if we were too much with our dynamic Roosevelt relatives,” she reasoned.63 She was probably right, given the bleak condition of Eleanor’s latest temporary home. “I was sent by my mother for supper with Eleanor,” said her cousin Corinne Robinson Alsop. “I say advisedly that I was sent, because I never wanted to go. In her own words Eleanor has pictured her distressingly grim childhood, and I can only reinforce her statements by confessing my own horror at the atmosphere of the brownstone house with the narrow dark hall lit by a gas jet, the formal, uninviting drawing room, the room back of the drawing room that was even darker than the hall, and the frigid looking dining room where we had our supper in solemn silence as we were all affected by the unbroken gloom.”64
Eleanor’s time at the family’s country house north of the city was even worse. Mrs. Hall’s five surviving children still lived with her at Tivoli, the family’s baroque estate on the Hudson, and they were already more than she could manage. Eleanor’s uncle Vallie was a particular nightmare. Another in the long line of alcoholic men in Eleanor’s family tree, he liked to sit in his second-floor window and shoot his rifle at unsuspecting passersby (though he invariably missed them because he was invariably too drunk to shoot straight).*6, 65 Mrs. Hall felt compelled to put a lock on Eleanor’s bedroom door to keep Vallie out. Or was it to keep Eleanor in?
Alice’s experience with her maternal grandparents, the Lees, could hardly have been more different: “There never were such kind, indulgent, affectionate grandparents—four aunts and an uncle as well—who let me have my way until I ought to have been spanked.”66 Alice escaped to their home in Massachusetts for several weeks each spring and fall. Unlike dour and overwhelmed Mrs. Hall, the Lees were delighted to indulge their firstborn grandchild. Mr. Lee, a successful banker, had already set up a trust fund for Alice upon her mother’s death, and the grandparents yielded to her every whim. “Everything belonged to me,” Alice remembered. “I would come in and jump up and down on the sofa, hoping the springs would break, and they would merely smile indulgently.”67
Edith was just as wary of Elliott’s children as Mrs. Hall was of Theodore’s, especially considering the blotch Elliott had attached to the Roosevelt name. “As you know I never wished Alice to associate with Eleanor so shall not try to keep up any friendship between them,” Edith wrote to her own mother.68 With Elliott’s death she closed the door further, allowing only a brief visit or two in the summer. She wasn’t all that gracious then, either. “Eleanor has been here too—poor little soul; she is very plain,” Edith wrote to Bye. “Her mouth and teeth seem to have no future but as mother (always said)…the ugly duckling may turn into a swan.”69
To top it off, Alice and Eleanor then lost their mutual anchor: Aunt Bye. James “Rosy” Roosevelt, Franklin’s older half brother, was serving as the first secretary at the American embassy in London when his wife, the former Helen Astor, died unexpectedly. Rosy, a somewhat aimless and decidedly foppish playboy who made liberal use of the Astor money, found himself stranded abroad with no one to care for his family, fifteen-year-old James and thirteen-year-old Helen. Rosy cared deeply for his children; he just had no idea how to care for them.*7 So despite the awkward fact that Bye had rejected Rosy’s father’s marriage proposal two decades earlier, she moved to London to care for yet more neglected Roosevelt children. She lived off and on with Rosy and the children for the next two years. Nannie Lodge, wife of Henry Cabot Lodge and an old family friend, wrote, “You are an angel, as usual, to go and take care of the poor forlorn things of the world.”70
Bye did her best to keep Alice and Eleanor connected from afar, writing to each about the other, even sending them identical sets of Shakespeare for Christmas. But the girls no longer had any neutral territory in the city where they could sip tea and find sympathy. “I am so glad Alice is going to be in town this winter,” Eleanor wrote to Bye. “I wish she went to school with me then I would see her every morning.”71 It was left to Aunt Corinne to pick up the slack. A somewhat softer touch than Bye—she was the family poet and resident Sunday school teacher, and she could still turn a dandy cartwheel—Corinne had her own bond with her nieces. She was in the house on Fifty-Seventh Street when Alice was born, and Elliott had introduced her to his business partner, Douglas Robinson, whom she later married. The Robinsons lived on a seventy-acre estate in Orange, New Jersey, called Overlook, which was where Corinne gathered the family each year just after Christmas for skating on Mitchell’s Pond, riding one of their fourteen horses, and other feats of Rooseveltian exertion.
The highlight of the annual family reunion in Orange was a grand dance, held at the Essex County Country Club. Corinne was perhaps the most popular and easygoing of the Roosevelts—she even got along with stony Edith—and the cousins came from far and wide. It was one of the few times that Mrs. Hall allowed Eleanor free rein with her father’s family. It was also the only social occasion where the budding teen could mingle with kids her own age—and she hated it. Trapped in gothic seclusion by her grandmother, Eleanor knew more about the love life of the Romantic poets than she did about acting like a teenager. The clothes, the jargon, the latest dances—it was all lost on her. One year she showed up wearing the same blue dress as the year before, now several inches too short. Another time she wore long black stockings and a white organdy dress that stopped above the knee, giving her a pre–What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? look. “No one, young or old, wore very short skirts in those days, even for sports, but her grandmother bought her a dress that could have been for a five-year-old,” said Corinne Alsop.72 “She was,” said Augusta Tilney, a friend of Corinne’s, “a living freak.”73
Alice attended these gatherings, too, and the differences between her and Eleanor were becoming as glaring as those black stockings. Dressed in elegant clothes purchased with her grandparents’ limitless funds, Alice was the center of attention, surrounded by young men who wanted to dance with her or just watch her hold court. “[She was] so much more sophisticated and grown up that I was in great awe of her,” Eleanor said. “She was better at sports, and my having so few companions my own age put me at great disadvantage with other young people.”74 In later years, Alice would scoff at Eleanor’s feelings of inadequacy. “She was always making herself out to be an ugly duckling but she was really rather attractive. Tall, rather coltish-looking, with masses of pale, gold hair ri
ppling to below her waist, and really lovely blue eyes,” Alice said. “It’s true that her chin went in a bit, which wouldn’t have been so noticeable if only her hateful grandmother had fixed her teeth. I think Eleanor today would have been considered a beauty.”75
It’s easy to chalk up Alice’s backhanded compliment to her growing determination to be contrary at all costs, a desire to be kind, only to be cruel. But Alice truly cared for her cousin. One fateful evening in Orange, she not only confirmed her warmest feelings for Eleanor; she also—to borrow Edith’s callous phrase—helped turn the duckling into a swan. The orchestra was playing a polka, and as usual Eleanor was on the sidelines, staring at the ceiling, fidgeting with her dress, and generally trying to disappear into the wallpaper, while Alice and the others were kicking up their heels. When the music stopped, Alice and her handsome partner stood together laughing. She whispered something in his ear, and he suddenly looked over in Eleanor’s direction. Alice had suggested that he walk across the room to talk to her cousin, and so he did. “Eleanor, may I have the next dance with you?” asked the tall young man with a radiant smile. “Oh, Franklin,” she replied. “I’d love to.”76
Oh, Franklin indeed. For the rest of their lives, he would form a sort of dividing line between the cousins. It wasn’t that they fought over him. Alice vehemently denied ever having romantic designs on Franklin; in fact, she said her family always thought he was an intellectual lightweight: they joked that the initials “FD” stood for “Feather Duster.” But he stood between them, less like a net on a Ping-Pong table than the ball itself, bouncing from Alice’s side to Eleanor’s, and often in ways that underscored how far apart the cousins stood politically, socially, even morally.
The Orange dance revealed just how differently the two young women had matured. Eleanor and Franklin had been occasional playmates through the years. He gave her a piggyback ride on her first visit to Hyde Park—she was two, and he was four—and they would later spend a few days in the summer among the extended family at Sagamore Hill. But their meeting in 1898, when they were now fourteen and sixteen, was the first where hormones played a part. Alice, however, had been flirting with Franklin for months. The year before, when she and Franklin’s half-niece, Helen, were staying at Aunt Bye’s, they co-wrote Franklin a note in which Alice asked teasingly, “I want to know the name of the girl James told me you were stuck on instead of me,” she said. “Please write and tell us her name as we are very anxious to know.” A few months later, Helen wrote to Franklin alone, “Alice Lee Roosevelt is certainly a very silly and decidedly vain young lady, and I agree with James, the less we have to do with her the better. ‘Flirtatious girls’ may be attractive at first sight but I think one soon discovers their true qualities, don’t you?”77
Certainly Edith and Theodore had long had their hands full with Alice. She had always been willful, as Alice herself was the first to admit, and needed a strong hand more than ever as she became a teenager. Unfortunately for the cause of discipline, the Republicans returned to the White House with the election of 1896, and President McKinley appointed Roosevelt assistant secretary of the navy. He moved his family back to Washington (though they still summered at Sagamore Hill) and became absorbed in his new job. Before his political career, Theodore had won acclaim for his first book, The Naval War of 1812. Now he delighted in occasionally borrowing a torpedo boat to visit the family on vacation in Newport. Edith was busy with the ever-growing family; she gave birth to her fifth child, Quentin, in November 1897. And so thirteen-year-old Alice became, in her father’s words, a “guttersnipe.” She soon teamed up with a group of eight neighborhood boys who liked to “run riot” around the city, racing their bikes down Connecticut Avenue from Dupont Circle and sneaking out of the house whenever they could. “We met in a stable loft and the boys would come dressed in their sisters’ clothes in order to deceive their parents,” she said. “My father opened the door once on a petrified boy struggling to adjust one of his sister’s dresses. They must have looked at each other with mutual consternation.”78
Fortunately for all concerned, Aunt Bye had recently returned from London to live in New York. Much to everyone’s shock, she arrived with a husband, a naval officer named William Cowles, though with his sea-dog mustache and ample belly Bye liked to call him “Mr. Bearo.” At the time of her wedding, she was forty; Cowles was forty-nine. “We were,” said Alice, “absolutely flabbergasted.”79
But at least she was home, and she was more than ready to resume her role as family fixer. When Edith became ill after giving birth to Quentin, Theodore sent Alice and Ted junior to live with Bye. Alice said, somewhat bitterly, that she had been “expelled.” It didn’t help that her parents informed her of her impending banishment on her fourteenth birthday, then shipped her off the very next day. Nor was Alice thrilled by Bye’s house strictures: “Now darling, I am too happy you are coming, but, there will be a few rules and regulations,” she wrote to her niece, having heard about Alice’s guttersnipe tendencies.80
Yet Alice was obviously a girl who needed to be watched, in the sense of both oversight and plain old parental attention. Even though she was a newlywed, ever-adoring Aunt Bye provided just the kind of audience Alice required. Theodore himself noticed the change in the “interesting and amusing” letters that Alice wrote to her parents. “You are doing her a world of good and giving her exactly what she needed,” he wrote to Bye from Washington. “I am sure she really does love Edith and the children and me; it was only that running riot with the boys and girls here for the moment drives everything else out of her head.”81
New York also provided a far tamer circle of peers—her extended family of patrician cousins. Once again, Bye’s Madison Avenue home became a central meeting place for the younger generation, and once again Eleanor became a somewhat regular companion, at least when Mrs. Hall would let her get away. If the dances at Aunt Corinne’s began to show how quickly the cousins were growing apart, their time at Bye’s added an exclamation point. Nowhere were their differences more pronounced than when they began to gossip, as teenage girls do, about sex. Alice remembered a particularly fraught afternoon holed up with Eleanor in a bedroom at Bye’s house:
By the age of fifteen I knew quite a bit from the Bible and from my rabbits and guinea pigs. Living in the country as I did, you take those things for granted. [My parents] wouldn’t admit that the Bible was a good place to learn the facts of life but I did just that. However, when I tried to pass some of the information on to my cousin Eleanor, I almost came to grief. She suddenly leapt on me and tried to sit on my head and smother me with a pillow, saying I was being blasphemous. So I shut up and I think she probably went to her wedding not knowing anything about the subject at all. It was that kind of difference between us from the start.82
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Those differences were becoming more pronounced by the minute, though they were triggered by events far from their gilded corner of the world. Only two days after Alice arrived in New York, in February 1898, the Spanish navy sank the American battleship Maine in Havana harbor (or so William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, the grandfathers of yellow journalism, reported in their sensationally pugnacious newspapers).*8 Assistant Secretary Roosevelt had long been an advocate—head cheerleader, really—for war against Spain. Now he got his wish. In April, he resigned from his job and gathered an unlikely collection of Ivy-educated blue bloods and Wild West sharpshooters into Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and headed for Cuba. In July, Colonel Roosevelt rode his chestnut-colored quarter horse, Little Texas, into the Battle of San Juan Hill and emerged as a bona fide war hero. In November, he was elected governor of New York. Within two years, he would become vice president of the United States.
Alice did not wear her father’s ballooning fame well. It played to her worst impulses: her lifelong need for attention and her adolescent desire to defy her parents. “Being the offspring of a very conspicuous parent, I wasn’t going to let him get the better of me,” she said.
I valued my independence from an early age and was always something of an individualist. Well, a show-off anyway. One of the only things I remember about the Forsyte Saga [a series of satiric novels about a nouveau riche British family] was when the little dog comes in and wanders around. Nobody pays any attention to it. It goes to the middle of the floor and throws up, so the lady calls the butler to take it away and to wipe up the mess. As he leaves the room the butler says, “The little animal likes to make itself felt, madam.”83
Though Alice supported her father’s war exploits like the proudest of daughters, it’s no coincidence that she picked the summer of his great war victory to make her biggest stink to date. Like most of the Roosevelt children, Alice had been primarily schooled at home by tutors. Edith, always mindful of propriety, decided that it was time for her to receive a formal education. Clara Spence had founded a boarding school for girls only six years earlier in New York. Miss Spence’s School had already become the place for the daughters of the rich and powerful to be groomed; Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick both sent their daughters. And so Edith enrolled Alice, the daughter of one of the most famous men in America.
Alice Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with it. She threw a tantrum almost every day and went running up to her room in tears. “I had seen Miss Spence’s scholars marching two by two in their daily walks and the thought of becoming one of them shriveled me,” she said.84 Edith resisted. As the school linens and uniforms arrived and were readied for packing, Alice turned up the drama. “I said that if the family insisted and sent me, I would do something disgraceful. I will humiliate you. I’ll shame you. You will see.”85 And then, at the last minute, Edith gave in. She sent back the uniforms and hired a governess. Alice did not attend Spence. No one wanted to call her bluff. Not surprisingly, in later years Alice also became an excellent poker player.
