by Marc Peyser
The coming-out party itself was relatively modest. Edith and Theodore were always strapped for money—he made notoriously bad investments, especially in livestock—and the family couldn’t afford a proper, debutante-laden cotillion. Alice did wear a perfectly lovely white taffeta and chiffon gown edged with white roses to greet her five hundred or so guests, who included “a generous contingent of gentlemen from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton universities.”18 In the Blue, Red, Green, and East Rooms, the mantels, columns, windows, and chandeliers were stuffed with flowers: six hundred roses, eight hundred hyacinths, and twelve hundred ferns, supplied by the Department of Agriculture (and distributed the next day to hospitals around Washington “to gladden the eyes of the less fortunate”). 19 The music was courtesy of the Marine Band and the Artillery Corps Band, which played during the Marine Band’s breaks.
But compared with coming-out parties in New York and Boston for other girls in the “400,” the affair came off, in the discriminating eyes of the New York Times, as “extremely simple,” much to the displeasure of the evening’s honoree. The fact that punch was served in lieu of champagne was a “horrid blow to my pride,” Alice said.20 She also complained that the East Room lacked a proper wooden dance floor. Edith had told her if she wanted one, she’d have to charm Representative Joseph Cannon, the Speaker of the House, into appropriating the money for it. “I worked every ploy I knew on him,” Alice said, “but to no avail. The floor was still unwooded when the dance took place.”21 When it was all over, Alice issued this verdict: “I myself enjoyed it moderately.” On the other hand, her cousin Franklin, one of the Harvard “gentlemen” who took the train to Washington to attend the event, reported to his parents that “from start to finish it was glorious.”22
Fortunately for Alice, the party turned out to be only the appetizer. The main course, the meal that nourished her then and for the rest of her life, was the post-party publicity. The next day, Alice Roosevelt was front-page news across the country. In part, that was because Americans were ready to stop mourning President McKinley. In part, it was because Alice was a rarity, the first glamorous young woman to live in the White House since Ulysses S. Grant’s daughter, Nellie, took up residence in 1869. Whatever the reason, most reporters—either less discriminating than the New York Times or more eager to curry favor with the White House—gushed over her evening as if they’d just seen the first production of La bohème. Her dress was “rarely beautiful” and her hair “a profusion of very pretty blond.” The menu was “one of the finest ever furnished even by a president.” “To the long and varied record of a century of social events at the White House, the very beautiful ball given last evening must be added and given a place all its own in the annals of the historic old mansion,” wrote the Washington Post, under the headline “A Brilliant Gathering Greets Miss Alice Roosevelt.”23 For a girl who long felt overlooked by her ambitious father and chilly stepmother, here was a miracle drug: fame.
It didn’t take long for the press-savvy president to recognize the advantages of having another, prettier media darling in the family, someone to play the carrot to his sticklike personality. He sent her on a charm offensive: lunch with the congressmen’s wives, meet and greets with foreign athletes, and more. Her first really big assignment was to christen a yacht being built for Germany’s kaiser, Wilhelm, on Staten Island. Like many of her First Daughter assignments to come, the christening was less ceremonial than it seemed. The president wanted to cozy up to the Germans as a sort of attention-getting move, a way to snap his towel at the British—Germany’s chief military rival—and show them they shouldn’t take American support for granted.
Alice certainly got the Brits’ attention, along with everyone else’s. The papers produced yet more bushels of stories on her. One asserted that the kaiser planned to pay Alice the “pretty compliment” of naming the ship Alice (in fact, Wilhelm named it Meteor, as he had with two previous boats). Another touted “the first up-to-date photographs” of Alice “as she really looks,” along with three carefully posed pictures and a small text block that described her as “about 5 feet 5 inches tall, is straight and slender in build, but supple and graceful.”24 The Germans themselves were reportedly delighted by the “splendid effect” her reflected glamour had on their international standing.25 In fact, a few weeks before the christening the news broke that the British, eager to keep up with the Germans, had invited Alice to Edward VII’s coronation in London planned for that June. President Roosevelt, fearing that his daughter’s presence would give the rough-riding First Family an inappropriate air of royal remove, vetoed the plan. He was right to be concerned. Papers across the country were starting to call her Princess Alice. She hated the name almost as much as she hated her father at the time for canceling her trip to Westminster Abbey.*3
The kaiser, however, could not have been more pleased. He had sent his brother Prince Henry of Prussia to collect the Meteor from its shipyard. Henry seemed nervous, and perhaps a little cold, on that rainy February morning. On the other hand, Alice—“radiant in blue velvet”—seemed entirely in her element. She chatted with the prince in German, smiled at some of her girlfriends in the crowd, and enlisted Edith as her handmaiden. “Here, Mamma, take my muff,” she announced before grabbing the bottle of champagne and smashing it into the Meteor’s gleaming white hull with all the confidence of Cy Young on opening day. “Miss Roosevelt,” said the New York Times, “was the most self-possessed person on the stand.”26 When the deed was done and the Roosevelt party was whisked away to a private lunch with the Germans, Prince Henry handed her a token of his brother’s appreciation: a gold bracelet embossed with the kaiser’s portrait—made out of diamonds. Cousin Eleanor would surely not have approved.
Fortunately, Eleanor missed the coronation of Alice. With a little help from a beseeching letter to Grandmother Hall from Mlle Souvestre (“Eleanor has had the most admirable influence on the school,” she wrote. “To me personally I feel I lose a dear friend in her”), Eleanor had been allowed to return to Allenswood for a third triumphant year.27 She was treated a little like royalty herself. “When I arrived she was everything at the school, she was beloved by everybody,” said Corinne Robinson, who overlapped with Eleanor during her cousin’s last semester in England. “Saturdays we were allowed a sortie when we went to Putney, which had stores with flowers, books, etc. Girls had crushes and you bought violets or a book and you left them in the room of the girl you adored. Eleanor’s room every Saturday would be decorated with flowers.”28
She had to give all that up in the spring of 1902. With her eighteenth birthday approaching in October, her grandmother insisted that Eleanor return to New York and prepare for her own coming out. Alice had engineered her debut to fall in January, when she had the stage to herself; Eleanor’s would come in December, when she would be part of a traditional grouping of young women who were presented together and attended each other’s functions. In fact, the cotillion class of 1902 included no fewer than five Roosevelt cousins: Eleanor, Christine (daughter of Theodore’s first cousin Emlen), Elfrida (from Alfred, another first cousin), Dorothy (Hilborne, first cousin once removed), and Alice, who was technically still a deb and therefore attended many of the biggest balls, where she was sometimes billed as a “special guest.” Some newspapers called the Roosevelt ladies “The Magic Five,” perhaps because they couldn’t always tell one from the other. “One of the Miss Roosevelts wore a fillet in her hair, and another, Miss Dorothy, had yellow orchids,” was the reporting from the prestigious Assembly Ball, which was thrown at the Waldorf-Astoria by none other than Mrs. Astor.29
In fact, Eleanor left the Assembly Ball early, declaring the evening “utter agony.” Like Alice’s lukewarm verdict on her own triumphant affair, Eleanor was clearly overreacting. In later years, she would claim that she didn’t know any of the girls at the ball and had felt like a stranger, which couldn’t have been true given the sheer number of Roosevelt cousins alongside her. She might not have been the most
popular deb at the ball, but she had her share of dancing partners, led by Auntie Bye’s old Scottish friend Bob Ferguson and his circle of buddies in attendance. The truth was, she had never felt comfortable in social situations. Whatever confidence she stockpiled at her all-girls school evaporated in the face of coed interaction and expectation. “I imagine that I was well dressed, but there was absolutely nothing about me to attract anybody’s attention,” said Eleanor, who had her dresses for the season made in Paris. “I was homely. I was taller than a good many of the boys. And I still did not dance well.”30 Coming out, when a young woman was supposed to glitter and be gay in the harsh light of formal society, was hard enough for most girls. Eleanor was forced to shine in two considerable shadows: the one cast by her mother, who had been a legendary 1881 debutante; and the other by Alice, who was already the most famous deb in the country, if not in history.
And yet, the glamour gap didn’t seem to affect the cousins’ relationship with each other. Just after the frenzy created by her own coming out, Alice made a coed list of about two dozen names in her diary that she labeled “Those with whom I would like to go into seclusion with at a convent or a ranch.” The first name on the list: Eleanor. During the full-blown cotillion season in December, the cousins were together almost every day. Alice sometimes stayed with Eleanor at the Halls’ home on West Thirty-Seventh Street when she was in New York, and they were often together at meals, having tea with Aunt Bye, going to the theater, visiting friends, and embarking on various teenage-girl adventures. “Lunch at Eleanor’s,” Alice wrote in her diary on December 17, 1902. “She and I hunted around for a fortune teller this afternoon.”31
There was one confidence, however, that the cousins did not share. Earlier that summer, Eleanor had been sitting quietly with a history book on the train from New York to Tivoli when a familiar voice interrupted her. “Hello, Eleanor,” said her cousin Franklin. He was on his way home to Hyde Park, just twenty miles south of Grandmother Hall’s house at Tivoli. “Hello, Franklin,” she replied. “So you remember me,” he said.32 They hadn’t seen each other since Alice pushed them together at Aunt Corinne’s Christmas dance in 1898, when Eleanor was fourteen. But like two long-lost school pals who had run into each other on vacation, they fell into a warm conversation—other than the awkward moment when Eleanor asked after his parents, only to have Franklin report that his father died almost two years earlier. They spent more than an hour catching up before Franklin remembered that he’d left his mother sitting alone in the dining car.33 “Won’t you come and meet her?” he asked.34
Sara Roosevelt looked even more imperial, and intimidating, than usual, dressed in black from the top of her hat to the floor-length veils that signaled she was still in mourning for her husband. But she was delighted to see Eleanor. After all, she had been very fond of Eleanor’s father—FDR’s godfather—Elliott. They chatted amiably. Sara even remembered watching young Eleanor learn to waltz and polka in Mr. Dodsworth’s dance class when she was fourteen. When the train stopped at Hyde Park, Franklin and his mother got up to leave. “You must come and visit us,” said Sara, more brightly than you’d expect from a woman dressed in full mourning attire.
Eleanor did drop by Springwood, about a year later in the summer of 1903, but by then her visit carried more emotional freight than Franklin’s protective mother could have imagined. Eleanor and Franklin saw each other off and on during her debutante season in the winter of 1902–1903: at the coming-out affairs of their cousins Christine and Dorothy; at Franklin’s twenty-first birthday party, thrown by his half brother, Rosy; and at the big horse show at Madison Square Garden, where he was Rosy’s guest and Eleanor was with Rosy’s daughter, Helen. They were also both invited to spend New Year’s with the president and the extended Roosevelt family at the newly renovated White House. Eleanor took the train from New York to Washington with Alice and a group of friends and stayed at the White House, while Franklin bunked at Aunt Bye’s. On New Year’s Day, they watched the president greet his guests in the Blue Room, had tea with him and the family, and then lunch in the State Dining Room. That evening, the younger set went to the theater. “Sat near Eleanor,” FDR wrote in his diary. “Very interesting day.”35
Many of these were casual, unromantic encounters; the Roosevelt cousins were, after all, spokes in the same gleaming social wheel. But Franklin and Eleanor were clearly smitten with each other, even if she didn’t entirely realize it at first. Two years older and a sophomore in college, Franklin already had a few romances under his belt, including an almost engagement earlier that year to a Boston beauty named Alice Sohier. Eleanor had no hormone-charged experience to draw from. In the spring of 1903, Franklin dropped by a children’s dance and movement class that she was teaching in the housing projects of the Lower East Side, part of the social outreach program spearheaded by a new group of debutantes calling themselves the Junior League for the Promotion of the Settlement Movement. After meeting the tall, dapper man with the easy smile, Eleanor’s schoolgirls began “demanding to know if he was my ‘feller,’ an expression that, believe it or not, had to be explained to me!” she said. “When I understood what it meant, I was amused, for I had not yet begun to think of Franklin that way.”36
Still, she and her “feller” knew enough to tread lightly when it came to their uniquely blended families. If Grandmother Hall was overly protective of Eleanor, Sara was downright possessive of Franklin, and always had been. When he turned twelve, Sara refused to let him leave for Groton preparatory school, and as a result he always felt like a bit of an outsider among his classmates. When Franklin was sixteen and came down with a case of scarlet fever, his doctors told Sara she had to leave him alone to rest. Instead, she walked outside and climbed a ladder to his second-floor infirmary window, where she perched for hours reading, chatting, and fussing over him like a mother bird tending to her nesting chick.37 She never liked being kept away from her boy. The pattern repeated itself when he left for college. Sara couldn’t rightly refuse to let Franklin attend Harvard, so she went with him, renting an apartment in Boston for a few months in the winters. They ate dinner together often, and he occasionally spent the night with her in town.38 She insisted later that she merely wanted to be “near enough to the University to be on hand should he want me and far enough removed not to interfere with his college life,” though that apparently didn’t preclude her from helping Franklin with his homework. (Franklin didn’t seem to mind.)39 Nor did it stop her from strongly advising him to break up with a young woman named Frances Dana, the granddaughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She was unsuitable, Mama informed him. After all, she was Catholic.
So it’s not surprising that Franklin and Eleanor kept their growing relationship a secret for almost a year. Once, when he was out shopping in New York before Christmas, he hastily delivered his mother to her apartment in the Renaissance Hotel so that he could duck out for tea with Eleanor at 3:30.40 He rarely even mentioned her by name in his diary. “E is an angel,” he wrote after a cozy dinner cruise—with his mother and her nurse-chaperone in attendance, of course—on his sailboat, the Half-Moon.41 Later still, FDR resorted to writing in full-blown code, with the numbers 1 to 6 in place of the vowels A to Y and bits of each consonant snipped off, so that a snoop would, in a sense, have to read between the missing lines to decipher the entry. On November 22, 1903, the translated code read, AFTER LUNCH I HAVE A NEVER TO BE FORGOTTEN WALK WITH MY DARLING.
It was on that walk, during a visit to Groton to check on her kid brother Hall, that Franklin proposed. One week later, right after Thanksgiving dinner with the Delano family, he broke the news to Mama. She was clearly not pleased. “Franklin gave me quite a startling announcement,” she wrote in her journal.42 They were too young, she told him. He still had to finish college, then law school. He listened but wouldn’t bend. Five days later, Sara had Franklin deliver Eleanor to her in New York. “I had a long talk with the dear child,” Sara wrote, which really meant that she laid down ground r
ules limiting Eleanor’s trips to Boston.43 She also threw a Hail Mary pass: she insisted that the love birds keep their engagement a secret for a year. Franklin, keenly aware that his mother controlled his inheritance, could not object. Eleanor, ever allergic to confrontation, wrote Sara a limp note the next day that sounded as if she were apologizing for breaking a piece of expensive china, which in a sense she had. She had shattered Sara’s fantasy of keeping Franklin to herself. “I must write you and thank you for being so good to me yesterday. I know just how you feel & how hard it must be, but I do so want you to learn to love me a little,” she said. “You must know that I will always try to do what you wish for I have grown to love you very dearly during the past summer.”44
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By the end of 1903, Alice had been engaged three or four times, at least according to the newspapers. Princess Alice was now the object of national, even international, fascination, ogled, emulated, and gossiped about unlike any young woman alive. Presidential children occasionally attracted attention, but Alice’s moment in the spotlight was evolving into something larger. “The Horse Show in Chicago, which closed last Saturday night, came nearer being an Alice Roosevelt Show than anything else,” a gossip rag called Town Topics reported more than a year after her grand White House debut. “Never did Chicago rudeness manifest itself more forcefully than in the gawking throng that paraded around the tanbark inclosure and, open-mouthed, paused and gazed out of countenance Exhibit A (Miss Roosevelt) in the Preston Gibson box. The increased financial success of this year’s Show can be credited to the presence of the President’s daughter.”45
It helped that she was beautiful and poised, with high cheekbones, perfect posture, and angular eyes that looked as if they had been carved from a shiny, cool piece of Wedgwood china. The Alice-hungry press soon transformed that particular shade of blue-gray into “Alice Blue,” which in turn became a favorite color for women’s dresses. It was still popular more than a decade later, when the 1919 Broadway musical Irene featured a hit song called “Alice Blue Gown,” in which a working-class girl sings about how she suddenly catches everyone’s eye on the street when she wears her Alice Blue dress.
