by Marc Peyser
Though Irene had nothing to do with the real-life Alice, that song captured something of her situation. From the moment she moved into the White House, Alice recognized that people were interested not in her but in something far more superficial. “Lunch at Mrs. Congressman Jays, given in my honor,” she wrote in her diary in January 1902, “or rather to give the wives and daughters of the congressmen the keen pleasure of meeting (not me, but) the ‘President’s daughter.’ ”46
And yet, she was more than happy to play the part, as long as she could do it on her own terms. Alice wasn’t only the First Daughter; she was the First Teenager, hell-bent on raising adolescent defiance to a new level. She knew how much the press attention irked her parents—only semi-disreputable young women, such as actresses, got their names in the papers—so Alice hoarded publicity as if it were water in the desert. “Do not like the advertisements of your appearing at portrait show,” her father telegrammed from Washington in November 1903, when he opened the morning paper and saw that she planned to appear at a charity event to benefit the New York Orthopaedic Hospital. “They distinctly convey the impression that any person who wishes to pay five dollars may be served with tea by you and Ethel Barrymore. I cannot consent to such use of your name and must ask you not to serve tea.”47 That was Ethel Barrymore, the actress, and Alice’s fast friend. They served the tea as scheduled. “The family were always telling me, ‘Beware of publicity!’ And there was publicity hitting me in the face every day,” she said. “And once the stories got out, or were invented, I was accused of courting publicity. I destroyed a savage letter on the subject from my father because I was so furious with him. There he was, one of the greatest experts in publicity there ever was, accusing me of trying to steal his limelight.”48
Which was, of course, exactly what she was trying to do. Alice was right about one thing: the papers had a field day inventing stories about her, especially about her love life. At eighteen, finding a suitable husband was Job One of every proper young lady, and the nation followed the First Daughter with red-blooded gusto worthy of a Roosevelt big-game hunt. Never mind that her alleged fiancés were usually men she never even dated. The press got her hitched to a prominent army lieutenant in July 1902, one former Rough Rider in October, and another in February 1903.49 They also reported at length on a fight with a childhood friend over the attention of the Earl of Yarmouth and the rivalry of two men (a Belgian versus a Bostonian) for her attention.50 “Had a foolish temper fight with mother this morning,” she wrote in her diary. “A newspaper saying [two men] in love with me.”51 Not long after, when the gossip had turned to talk of her making a trip across the Atlantic, a French magazine put her on its cover surrounded by the crown prince of Sweden, the prince of Greece, and two of the sons of the German emperor—the continent’s most eligible bachelors.52
Alice never commented on any of these alleged liaisons (though at one point the president felt compelled to deny “in somewhat strenuous terms” that she was engaged to a Lieutenant Peter Sterling Clark).53 They were really nothing more than the low-hanging fruit in her personal PR offensive, almost too easily dangled in front of gossipmongers. In order for Alice to establish her own identity in her father’s shadow—for people to see beyond her Alice Blue gown—she needed to pioneer new rebel territory. Cigarettes gave her one outlet. At the turn of the century, proper women didn’t smoke, so Alice did. “Father had said I was to never smoke under his roof, but I remember circumventing that rule by kneeling by the fireplace and puffing up the chimney,” she said. “I also sat on the roof of the White House, smoking.”54 The Washington Mirror not only wrote an editorial taking Alice to task for lighting up in public but also blamed her personally for a spike in cigarette sales in the city.55
Young, independent women didn’t have many role models at the turn of the twentieth century, but Alice was becoming one. After she took to carrying a walking stick—bamboo, with a silver handle, and monogrammed with her initials—the papers predicted that the new style “can hardly fail to be widely copied.”56 To a country with one foot in the Victorian era and the other on the cusp of a new century, Alice deftly bridged the gap. She could, when she chose, perfume herself with poise, as she did at the Meteor launching. But she never failed to punctuate her presence with a knowing, devil-may-care smirk. “Miss Alice Roosevelt, the charming daughter of the president, called by some dyspeptic scribblers ‘Princess Alice,’ is unquestionably one of the most lovable girls of her age in the capital,” wrote the Washington Bee in an editorial titled “Public Likes Miss Alice.” “If the women who criticize her would just think for a moment of their own young womanhood, with its illusions and self-consciousness, they would be more charitable and quite ready to admit that Miss Alice, everything considered, is displaying a remarkable amount of tact.”57
As that editorial implied, Alice’s exploits did earn her a good number of detractors. When she and her friend Ellen Drexel Paul drove unchaperoned from Newport to Boston at breakneck speeds approaching twenty-five miles per hour, the country was scandalized by the fast young women—in both senses of the word. “Miss Roosevelt Loses Her Way,” the New York Herald snarled.58 Alice was delighted. For her next trick, she drove alone from Newport to Washington, then attempted to buy her own car, with $2,500 from her mother’s inheritance money (roughly $63,000 in 2015). “Hopes have been entertained by Miss Roosevelt’s family that her infatuation for the auto was only a passing fancy,” said the Los Angeles Times. “Even now it is doubtful if they know that she allowed a machine to be built especially for her with the belief she would buy it, and even selected the trimmings and upholstery for it.”59 Thanks to the Los Angeles Times, they knew now. Her father demanded that Alice cancel her car.
The Times reported that the president’s dislike for Alice’s auto fixation stemmed from his passion for horses, which was true. He also had a love-hate relationship with technology.*4 What angered him about cars, however, was their association with the nouveau riche, the only people who could afford to drive, not to mention to hire the de rigueur chauffeur. If Alice was spending her time motoring around the country, then she’d have to be rubbing elbows with a very unsavory crowd. “Alice has been at home very little—spending most of her time in Newport and elsewhere, associating with the Four Hundred—individuals with whom the other members of her family have exceedingly few affiliations,” he wrote to his sister Corinne.60 “He minded the idle rich. He considered them vulgar,” Alice said. “But they were tribal friends, and they were the only people with big houses and big dances.”61
Alice’s introduction to the car culture came via Countess Marguerite Cassini, the glamorously reckless daughter of the czar’s ambassador and, according to Motor Age magazine, “one of the most noted automobilists in Washington.”62 Cassini drove a four-cylinder, bright red convertible; when she wasn’t joyriding with eligible young men, she lent it to Alice.63 Maggie did everything fast, and with the First Daughter as her wing woman, they became the toast of Washington and beyond. One admirer, the inventor George Westinghouse, told the pair he’d throw a ball for as many invitees as they wished. Their list was so long he had to build an extension on his ballroom. But when the hundreds of orchids attached to the walls as decorations began to wilt forlornly, the ungrateful honorees skipped out early. “Our friendship had the violence of a bomb,” Cassini wrote in her memoirs. “We were two badly spoiled girls set only on their own pleasure.”64 James Hazen Hyde, whom the Chicago Tribune called one of “the seven most eligible bachelors in the United States,” spent $100,000 on a Versailles-themed soiree in New York for the girls, complete with the corps de ballet from the Metropolitan Opera. On the morning before the party, however, Maggie and Alice received an invitation to dine at the private club of another stud in the Tribune’s Top 7: a dashing young congressman from Ohio named Nicholas Longworth. The girls sent Hyde a short telegram with their last-minute regrets and stayed in Washington with Longworth. (Franklin, however, did attend, though without El
eanor.)65
Cassini might have been her prime partner in crime, but Alice had another potent role model—or, rather, anti-model. While Alice was busy joyriding her way through the East Coast establishment, Eleanor was back in New York, devoting herself to a growing list of social causes. She volunteered with the National Consumers League, inspecting the working conditions—even the bathrooms—in garment sweatshops and department stores. She also took a “practical sociology” class because she thought it would help her understand the impoverished people she worked with at the Rivington Street settlement on the Lower East Side.66 Eleanor was enormously proud of her work there. She brought Franklin along a few times, including once when they visited a student’s tenement apartment. “When we got out on the street afterward he drew a long breath of air,” Eleanor remembered. “ ‘My God,’ he said, aghast. ‘I didn’t know people lived like that!’ ”67 Her friend Jean Reid worked with her, playing the piano while Eleanor taught the girls to dance, but they almost always arrived and left separately. Jean traveled by private carriage; Eleanor insisted on taking the elevated train or the Fourth Avenue streetcar, followed by a walk across the Bowery, one of the most unsavory streets in New York. “Needless to say, the streets filled me with a certain amount of terror and I often waited on a corner for a car, watching, with a great deal of trepidation, men come out of the saloons or shabby hotels nearby,” she said. “But the children interested me enormously.”68
Not everyone in her family approved of Eleanor’s good works. Her cousin Susie Parish, with whom she lived now when she was in the city, was deathly afraid that Eleanor would contract some kind of disease from the children or from the teeming masses who used public transportation. Franklin’s mother, Sara, had similar fears, and before long she persuaded Eleanor to give up her work at the Rivington settlement.*5
But no one disapproved of Eleanor’s charity work as much as Alice. She’d long ago vowed to shrug off sympathy—or any tender emotion, really—associated with losing a mother. Eleanor veered in the opposite direction, spreading self-righteousness on top of a good deed as if it were icing on a cake. Hence her insistence on taking the streetcar. “Poor Eleanor! She took everything—most of all herself—so tremendously seriously. If only she had allowed a little levity into her life,” Alice said. “Whereas she responded to her insecurity by being do-goody and virtuous I did by being boisterous and showing off.”69
Her cousin’s saintliness was only half her issue with Eleanor. The bigger problem was that Alice had hardened herself because that’s what she believed her tough-minded father wanted; after all, he never even mentioned Alice’s mother’s name after she died. But Theodore not only accepted Eleanor’s bleeding heart; he threw it back at Alice as evidence of his daughter’s faults. “My father was always taking me to task for gallivanting with ‘society,’ ” she said, “and for not knowing more people like my cousin Eleanor.” Alice was becoming her own worst enemy. She acted out to get her father’s attention, not to reinforce her feelings of being an outsider in the family. Yet it was Eleanor who was the do-gooder chip off her uncle’s block, a fact that clearly pained Alice. “The same sort of thing was said about my cousin Eleanor being more like my father’s daughter than I was,” Alice said. “Odious comparisons that added nothing to family solidarity!”70 Eleanor wasn’t above laying it on thick either, such as the time she wrote to Franklin about running across Alice in New York “looking well but crazier than ever. I saw her this morning in Bobbie Goelet’s auto quite alone with three other men! I wonder how you would like my tearing around like that.”71 Theodore couldn’t have said it better himself. As a matter of fact, Gore Vidal, a friend of both Alice’s and Eleanor’s, later wrote that Eleanor and her uncle sounded alike: “His high-pitched voice and upper-class accent proved to be a joy for imitators, just as his niece Eleanor’s voice—so very like his—was a staple of mimics for fifty years.” And so the seeds of a rivalry were planted, plucked from not one but two classic story lines: daughters competing for the patriarch’s love, and the good girl versus the bad girl.
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Needless to say, saintly Eleanor (and Franklin) followed Sara’s orders to keep their relationship a secret, despite socializing together at family weddings, in Hyde Park, and on Campobello, the small Canadian island just off the northern coast of Maine that served as the family’s summer retreat. “Eleanor and I went to Caroline Drayton’s for lunch,” Aunt Corinne’s daughter, Corinne Robinson, wrote in her diary on July 18, 1904, seven months into the engagement that dared not speak its name. “Franklin Roosevelt arrived in the morning and it was very nice to see him again. I cannot decide whether it filled Eleanor with joy or not. I think he is very crazy about her, but she not about him. It is truly pathetic.”72 (Eleanor’s faux cold shoulder might not have been the only cause of Corinne’s confusion. Two months earlier, Corinne had recorded a “very warm day at Groton and what fun it all was. After tea, I went into Warren Robbins study with Franklin Roosevelt. Very naughty.”)73
When the happy couple did finally reveal themselves to the world in November 1904, the Oyster Bay faction seemed genuinely delighted to reunite the two branches of the family in holy matrimony. (Make that re-reunite. That June, Franklin’s half niece, Rosy’s daughter Helen Roosevelt, had married Aunt Corinne’s son Theodore Robinson at St. James’ Church in Hyde Park. Alice and Eleanor were both bridesmaids.)74 Franklin and Eleanor received gushing letters from the president, Edith, Auntie Bye, Aunt Corinne, and Alice, who wrote on White House stationery, “Oh! dearest Eleanor—it is simply too nice to be true you old fox not to tell me before. I can’t begin to say how much I wish you the very very best of everything.”75
Eleanor and Franklin had planned to marry in New York at her cousin Susie’s house, and she asked if Uncle Ted would give her away. He had a better idea: Why not get married at the White House? “He feels that on that day he stands in your father’s place and would like to have your marriage under his roof,” Edith wrote to Eleanor. “We wish you to know how very glad we should be to do for you as we should do for Alice.”76 Eleanor declined the offer but agreed to schedule the ceremony for March 17, when the president would be in town to lead New York’s big St. Patrick’s Day Parade. (It was also, as luck would have it, her mother’s birthday.) Eleanor asked Alice to stand with her at the ceremony. “You angel to ask me to be your bridesmaid. I should love to above anything. It will be too wonderful.”77
But first the family had an even bigger party to attend: President Roosevelt’s inauguration, on March 4, 1905. Theodore Roosevelt had won reelection by a margin of 2.5 million votes, the landslide erasing his fear of going down in history as the “accidental president” who succeeded only because McKinley died in office. Even Franklin, the lifelong Democrat, crossed party lines to vote for Uncle Ted. The soon-to-be-married couple stayed at Auntie Bye’s, arriving at the White House at 9:00 a.m. to wish the president good luck on his big day. They rode in the Roosevelt family procession to the Capitol, sitting just a few rows behind the president on the steps to watch the swearing-in ceremony, though the speech (most famous for the line “Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us”) made very little impression on either Eleanor or Alice. Eleanor was overwhelmed by the events of the day. “I was very excited, but politics still meant little to me,” she said. “So although I can remember the forceful manner in which Uncle Ted delivered his speech, I have no recollection of what he said.”78 Alice was, as usual, just interested in Alice. She wore a white toile dress and a white hat edged in black satin that looked, thanks to its army of decorative ostrich feathers saluting in the breeze, “the size of a not-so-small wheel,” she said.79 She sat—or stood, mostly—right behind her father on the viewing stand. “I was chided by him because I was waving to my friends and I said, ‘Well, you do it. Why shouldn’t I?’ ” she remembered. “And he said something to the effect of, ‘But this is my inauguration.’ ”80
Upstaging one another wa
s fast becoming a Roosevelt family sport. Two weeks later, the family made the trip north for Eleanor and Franklin’s wedding in New York. The bride, by all accounts, looked truly lovely in a heavy white silk dress with a long train and capped sleeves, her grandmother Hall’s rose-point Belgium lace veil, and a pearl collar necklace from her mother-in-law, Sara (by way of Tiffany, where it cost $4,000, or about $100,000 in 2015 dollars).81 Even Alice approved. “I saw a picture of Eleanor at her wedding the other day and thought it was a picture of me at mine,” she later recalled. “We looked so much alike.”82 Alice and the five other taffeta-wrapped bridesmaids led the wedding procession through the hundred guests lining the aisle in cousin Susie’s town house; Franklin stood waiting at the altar in the drawing room with the officiant, his Groton mentor, Endicott Peabody. When Eleanor arrived at his side, she handed her wedding bouquet of lilies to Alice, standing beside her.83 But it was the surrogate father of the bride who stole the show. Having made the 3:30 p.m. wedding a pit stop in the middle of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the president had left the Ancient Hibernians wanting more. The crowd loitered outside on East Seventy-Sixth Street shouting, “We want Teddy!” occasionally drowning out Peabody.84 When the bride had been kissed, Theodore turned to the groom and said, “Well, Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family!” Then he beat a path to the reception in the library—followed closely by every single guest. Franklin and Eleanor were left standing alone, like the proverbial bridesmaids at their own wedding.85 “My father,” Alice said with a sneer, “lived up to his reputation of being the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.”86
