by Marc Peyser
And so more and more, Franklin took on the aura of the Roosevelt heir apparent. He wasn’t just stealing from the Colonel’s playbook (while sitting at his old desk in the Navy Department). He was stealing from his illustrious cousin’s life. Franklin tried to speak like his idol (“I’d like it bully well!”) and look like him, having long ago taken to wearing Roosevelt’s signature gold-rimmed pince-nez glasses. He lived in the same house that Theodore first occupied in Washington. In March 1916, Eleanor gave birth for the sixth and final time (though one child, the first Franklin junior, had died in infancy). That was not a coincidence. Ever since he was young, Franklin said he wanted to someday have six children, just like Uncle Ted. It’s not entirely unreasonable to wonder if handsome, wealthy Franklin was initially attracted to dowdy Eleanor in part because she would open the door, and the bloodline, to her uncle. “By marrying Eleanor, whom TR himself called ‘my favorite niece,’ Franklin hoped to gain the instant access to the presidential family that distant kinship had always denied him,” wrote FDR’s biographer Geoffrey C. Ward. “His love for Eleanor was real, but her closeness to the immediate family of the man he admired most on earth must have been an important part of her dowry.”26
During his first stint in Washington, Franklin developed another, and far more surprising, bridge to Oyster Bay. Alice might have complained about the menu at FDR’s house, but she savored spending time with him. “I liked Franklin rather more than the rest of the family did,” she said. “One could always have fun with him. And he was great to tease.”27 Franklin and Alice were very compatible: fun loving and social, quick-witted and a little ostentatious. (It was Alice who gave Franklin the first of what would become an FDR trademark: a Bakelite cigarette holder.)28 She’d enjoyed him ever since they were teenagers, when they’d danced at Aunt Corinne’s parties and she wrote him flirtatious notes. Now that they were neighbors after all these years, she knew how to get him to let his hair down. “Both Eleanor and Franklin could be very boring together, but not when he was without her,” Alice said. “Then he asserted himself.”29
They had plenty of alone time. Franklin often dined at Alice’s place without Eleanor, who was so busy having children, running the household, and making her calls that in 1914 she’d hired a social secretary three days a week to handle her correspondence and schedule. The secretary’s name was Lucy Mercer. At twenty-two, Lucy was an exceptionally poised and pretty young woman with sapphire-blue eyes and the smoky voice of a jazz singer. She’d come from a wealthy local family whose alcoholic father lost their respectability and their fortune. Aunt Bye once lived down the block from the Mercers, and when Eleanor needed help, she recommended Lucy, who was now supporting her mother and was only too glad to earn $30 a week lending a hand to a prominent family. Lucy proved to be a whiz at organizing Eleanor’s life, sitting on the Roosevelts’ living room floor surrounded by piles of invitations, letters, and bills.30 Thanks to her Social Register lineage, she was also an ideal “extra” woman at social functions where the hostess feared that an unattached single man could turn into the jacket-and-tie equivalent of a rutting ram set loose in a herd. Even Mama liked Lucy. “Miss Mercer is here,” Sara wrote to Eleanor when she joined Franklin on a navy trip to the West Coast. “She is so sweet and attractive, and she adores you, Eleanor.”31
Lucy’s unique combination of skills came in especially handy in the summers. Eleanor and the children routinely escaped from the sticky Washington heat to Campobello. Franklin would visit when he could (sometimes hitching a ride north on a navy destroyer), but he spent extended periods alone in Washington. In the summer of 1916, Eleanor and the “chicks” (as their parents called their children) were away well into September as a polio epidemic swept through the Northeast and the Roosevelts were desperate to keep the children out of harm’s way. “The infantile paralysis in N.Y. and vicinity is appalling,” Franklin wrote to Eleanor in July. “Please kill all the flies I left. I think it is really important.”32 In the meantime, Lucy was able to keep the Washington house in order as well as pitch in to help FDR. Apparently, she did that part of her job a little too well. Even the overwhelmed Eleanor noticed the chemistry between her husband and the flirtatious Miss Mercer. In the summer of 1917, as Eleanor was preparing to take the family back to Campobello for several weeks, she fired Lucy. The official explanation was that wartime left Eleanor with fewer social obligations and therefore less need for a social secretary. But no one was fooled by that, least of all Franklin. Only five days after Lucy lost her job with Eleanor, she found another—as Yeoman Third Class Mercer, posted to the office of the assistant secretary of the navy.33
Eleanor was understandably furious; she even considered canceling the Campobello trip. Of course, that would have looked suspicious and required some kind of explanation, not least to Mama. Besides, Franklin assured ER that she had nothing to worry about. “I really can’t stand that house all alone without you, and you were a goosy girl to think or even pretend to think that I don’t want you here all summer, because you know I do!” he protested the day after she and the children left Washington. “But honestly, you ought to have six weeks straight at Campo, just as I ought to, only you can and I can’t.”34 To prove that he had nothing to hide, the next week Franklin wrote to her about a working-weekend cruise he threw together on the Sylph, the 124-foot presidential yacht. He had set sail for Hampton Roads, where he could review the fleet and explore the battleship Arkansas, as well as squeeze in a little swimming and al fresco dining along the way. The guests were President Wilson’s personal physician (and his wife), one of Franklin’s old Harvard buddies (and his wife), and a British diplomat named Nigel Law (who didn’t have a wife). Guess who filled in as the “single” woman? “Such a funny party, but it worked out wonderfully!” Franklin wrote.35 He didn’t mention that Lucy looked fetching in her swimsuit.36
Franklin also neglected to tell Eleanor about another dinner party he had attended with Lucy, at Alice’s house. Dinner at the Longworths’ was an event, a performance, and a feast for the ears. As Eleanor said, everyone wanted to meet Alice. Alice, however, was mainly interested in visitors who were both acclaimed and capable of surviving the thrust and parry of the arena known as her dining room. “Whereas other Washington hostesses draw up their guest lists for compatibility, Mrs. Longworth chooses her guests for conflict,” one writer observed. “A southern conservative will find himself seated next to a northern liberal, a dove next to a hawk. The food, the wine, the service, all have a turn-of-the-century elegance, but, like the perfection of the matador’s costume, they presage the spilling of blood.”37 If that wasn’t meant as a compliment, it should have been. Having grown up in a highly verbal and intellectually curious family, Alice found herself living in a town that was often allergic to conflict and controversy. Where was the challenge, the stimulation, in an evening with predictable politicians? If Aunt Bye kept books beside her bed as “mental manure,” Alice did something similar with her dinner companions. Over the years, she would host the likes of Charles Lindbergh, Lady Astor, Lord Balfour, and Billy Sunday in their primes. Always the voracious reader, she especially stocked up on writers: Will Rogers was a favorite, as was Booth Tarkington. (Alice used to say that the characters in his novel The Magnificent Ambersons reminded her of another faded midwestern dynasty: the Longworths.) Dinner at Alice’s wasn’t unlike lunch with an equally quick-witted woman and her literary chums in New York: Dorothy Parker. Except the Algonquin crew really just amused each other. Alice also wanted to push her powerful Capitol Hill neighbors to open their minds a bit. No one else in town was doing that, which made dinner at Alice’s a kind of golden meal ticket, despite the conversational quicksand. “As Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. once said in a press dispatch about a dinner invitation of Alice Longworth’s, such a thing is ‘anent unto a command,’ ” said Alexander Woollcott, another Longworth regular.38
Tarkington happened to be at table one night in the summer of 1916 when cousin Franklin came to dinner
.39 Franklin, a rising star for the opposition Democrats, fit perfectly into Alice’s pugilistic party plans. Except Alice’s motives for inviting her cousin that particular night were naughtier than usual. Like many Washington insiders, she had heard that his relationship with Lucy mixed a good deal of pleasure with business. One day when she was out for a drive in the Virginia hills, she got her proof. She passed Franklin and Lucy in a car—alone. Naturally, Alice called to tease him as soon as she could. “I saw you 20 miles out in the country,” she told him. “You didn’t see me. Your hands were on the wheel but your eyes were on that perfectly lovely lady.” Franklin somewhat cheekily replied, “Isn’t she perfectly lovely?”40
Looking back, Alice claimed she didn’t really believe anything untoward was happening between Franklin and Lucy. “It wasn’t much of an affair, as good old Washington went,” she said. “In those days in the summer, politicians bundled their families off to the mountains or seashore for the summer months and it was the usual thing for the paterfamilias to accumulate something attractive.”41 It might not have been the most innocent arrangement, but it wasn’t necessarily sexual. And maybe it wasn’t—yet. Would Franklin have given his notoriously loose-lipped cousin such a flip reply if he had anything to hide? (In fact, whenever Mercer arrived at the Roosevelts’ home for a day’s work, he would greet her by saying, “Ah, the lovely Lucy.”)42 “I do not think anything ever happened,” Alice told Eleanor’s friend and biographer Joseph Lash, adding that Lash should “put that in capitals.”43
Whatever the truth, Alice’s motives were hardly benign where her Hyde Park cousins were concerned. She’d never told Franklin that he’d have a date for the evening; when he arrived at the Longworths’, Lucy was already there. It was sort of a purity test. If Franklin blanched, Alice would know the lusty truth. If he (and Lucy) played it cool, she’d at least have added an entertaining dash of tension to the meal. She’d have her dessert, too. People would undoubtedly gossip about the evening’s most unconventional pair, and Alice knew that even a whiff of impropriety would sting puritanical Eleanor. Her most famous explanation for inviting Lucy and Franklin that night made it clear she wanted to hurt her first cousin: “He deserved a good time. After all, he was married to Eleanor.”44
The big question, then, is why? Retribution, perhaps, for her fusty, do-gooder cousin’s habit of making Alice look bad to her father, the one person she wanted most to impress. Or maybe Alice had another reason to envy Eleanor. Over the years, some Roosevelt relatives claimed that young Alice herself had been in love with Franklin and never fully recovered from having lost him to her less glamorous cousin. “Of course [Alice] denied it. But she was the one that was flirting with him long before my grandmother came on the scene,” said Nina Roosevelt Gibson, one of Eleanor’s granddaughters. “As they then grew older and she realized the impact that FDR was making—and Alice loved the spotlight—I’m sure in Alice’s head she very well may have thought, ooh, if I’d only…”45 Eleanor herself sometimes seemed leery of Alice’s intentions toward her husband. “I don’t think Eleanor quite approved of my friendship with Franklin,” Alice said.
I remember running into him once shortly after they were married. It was in the lobby of a hotel in Boston where I was staying overnight and I asked him up to my room for a drink. Actually, it wasn’t really my room. We just sat on a trunk in an alcove nearby and drummed our heels happily on it like leprechauns on a roof. Somehow Eleanor got to hear of it and was very annoyed and said to Franklin, “No one would know that you were her cousin. You were seen going to a woman’s room. I think it would be a good idea if you and Alice didn’t see each other for some time.”46
That said, Alice scoffed when an interviewer first confronted her with the idea that she had been in love with Franklin. “She looked startled, incredulous, a little delighted, a little as if she were thinking what was she going to do with this,” Lash wrote. But she quickly came up with a reply. “I liked him of course, but he was a good little mama’s boy,” she said. “The sort of boy who was asked to the dance but not to the dinner.”47
It’s certainly true that Alice’s taste never ran to good boys, as she was forced to acknowledge on a regular basis. Nick never did give up the hunt for other women. In fact, he did everything short of leaving the bedroom curtains open to flaunt his conquests. One day when he was sitting in the House chamber, a political foe walked by with what he thought was the perfect insult. He caressed Nick’s bald head and said, “Feels just like my wife’s bottom.” Nick rubbed his own head and replied, “By golly it does, doesn’t it?”48 He had a habit of strolling away from his own dinner parties with a pretty lady and not returning for an extended period of time. It happened once with Nick’s old flame Cissy Patterson, who, in the fog of fornication, made the mistake of leaving the Longworths’ without her purse. The next day, Alice sent it back to Cissy with an appropriately caustic message. Cissy replied with a thank-you note—and a question. Had Alice also happened to find her silk stockings, which Patterson had stuffed between the couch cushions in the library, or the chewing gum that she stuck under the fireplace mantel?49
Alice got a measure of revenge via a wartime affair of her own, with a Cincinnati lawyer named Joe Graydon. No one has ever proven that they were unfaithful to their respective spouses; Alice and Graydon spent much of their time discussing philosophy, poetry, and religion. But the relationship, which lasted from about 1915 to 1919, was clearly inappropriate by the day’s standards, as well as by their own. “I have been forced to the conclusion that it were best I should not visit in Washington in absence of affairs requiring my presence there,” Graydon wrote to Alice in early 1918. “Please do not think I should not like to—or that I am unappreciative of your asking me: nor must you think any other whatsoever suspicious or horrid things as the cause why I am, I hope, disappointing you.”50
Still, it must have been galling to watch her marriage wither while prim and proper Eleanor remained blissfully ignorant of her own husband’s dalliance. Washington had already enabled Eleanor’s weakness for grandly noble gestures. Alice was finding the temptation to stick a pin in her cousin’s righteousness all the more irresistible. She was especially fond of retelling a story about a ball Franklin and Eleanor attended around this time at the Chevy Chase Country Club, along with his cousins Warren and Irene Robbins. Franklin and the Robbinses were having a wonderful evening drinking and dancing. Eleanor was not, and she wanted to make sure Franklin knew it. At about midnight, she announced that she was going to catch a cab and leave, but Franklin should stay and enjoy himself if he wanted. Franklin, refusing to go on his wife’s guilt trip, partied on. He finally arrived home at around 5:00 a.m., opened the front door, and found someone sleeping in the vestibule—Eleanor. “Darling,” Franklin asked, “what are you doing here?” In Alice’s telling of the tale, Eleanor stood up like a “string bean that had been raised in a cellar” and explained that she had forgotten her key.51 Why hadn’t she come back to get his or gone to a neighbor? Franklin asked. “I knew you all were having such a glorious time,” she explained, “and I didn’t want to spoil the fun.”52 Eleanor got her guilt trip, and Alice got something more, the perfect epitaph for her killjoy cousin: Here lies Eleanor Roosevelt, literally a human doormat.
If Eleanor was aware of Alice’s jabs—or, conversely, if Alice knew that her punches hit their mark—neither let on. But they clearly kept tabs on each other. “I saw Alice & had as satisfactory a talk with her as one is apt to have. Filled with noisy exuberance & no reality,” Isabella Greenway wrote to Eleanor in the spring of 1916. “She was nevertheless refreshing & unchanged (after not seeing her for eight years!) I had looked for stout dignity from numerous tales—but met old time lightness. She seemed to appreciate that you do your job in Washington a little bit better than anyone else.”53 Eleanor replied with just the sort of testy lecture that fed Alice’s vengeance in the first place:
Ethel told me you had seen Alice. Of course she isn’t a bit changed
& it is always entertaining to see her but now that I am older & have my own values fixed a little I can only say what little I saw of her life gave me a feeling of dreariness & waste. Her house is charming, her entertainment delightful. She’s a born hostess & has an extraordinary mind but as for real friendship & what it means she hasn’t a conception of any depth in any feeling or so it seems. Life seems to be one long pursuit of pleasure & excitement & rather little real happiness either given or taken on the way, the “bluebird” always to be searched for in some new & novel way. I sometimes think that the lives of many burdens are not really to be pitied for at least they live deeply & from their sorrows spring up flowers, but an empty life is really dreadful!54
Only six months earlier, Eleanor told Isabella Greenway that Alice had been “nice.” With her sudden bitterness and emphasis on Alice’s lack of “real friendship & what it means” and “depth in any feeling,” it’s hard not to wonder if Eleanor had become privy to more of her cousin’s shenanigans than she let on.
—
Whatever ill will might have germinated in the family plot was quickly tamped down by something far bigger—the war. The United States formally entered World War I on April 6, 1917, and few families committed themselves more enthusiastically than the Roosevelts. All four of Alice’s brothers enlisted. The baby, nineteen-year-old Quentin, went to sign up with his cousin Hall, Eleanor’s brother. Neither of them could see well enough to enter the air force, though that’s the branch they joined. “I think both Hall and Quentin must have memorized the card for the eye test,” Eleanor said.55 Theodore couldn’t have cared less about how they got into the fight, as long as they got in. “I am more proud of you and of the other three boys than I can possibly put into words,” he wrote to Archie. To prove his point, he bought a flag with a bold red border and four blue stars, one for each son fighting for his country, and hung it outside at Sagamore.56
