by Marc Peyser
Woollcott could be plenty puckish with the First Lady, especially when he was bunking at the White House—“the best boarding house in Washington,” he called it. She recalled one particularly challenging four-day visit when Woollcott was in Washington to play Sheridan Whiteside, the houseguest-from-hell character he himself had inspired in the Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman play The Man Who Came to Dinner. He liked to order food from the White House chefs when he returned after a show, sometime around midnight. Once he invited a houseguest to spend the night in a spare bedroom. When Eleanor appeared late one afternoon in his bedroom doorway, he looked up and graciously said to her, “Welcome, Mrs. Roosevelt, come right in. I am delighted to see you. Make yourself at home.”32
Inevitably, Woollcott found himself caught in the middle of the hissing cousins. It was hard enough navigating the shifting winds of their relationship, especially as it turned into rich fodder for the Washington gossip mill. Woollcott became concerned when a nationally syndicated column called the Washington Merry-Go-Round reported on a skirmish between Eleanor and Alice. “At the annual stunt party of the National Women’s Press Club every one of the 500 women present rose when Mrs. Roosevelt was presented, except her cousin and bitter administration hater Mrs. Alice Roosevelt Longworth,” the story said. “Mrs. Longworth not only ostentatiously remained seated but talked to others near her during Mrs. Roosevelt’s little speech.”33 Like so much else written about the family (and especially about Alice over the years), the story was apocryphal, at least according to one well-placed eyewitness. “You are quite right in not believing the particular item you read in the papers about Mrs. L. The Pearson-Allen story was, quite literally, made up out of whole cloth,” Joe Alsop wrote to Woollcott. “The truth is that when Cousin Eleanor arrived at the dinner in question, Mrs. L not only rose; she also waved and smiled, and so did Cousin E.”34
Whatever really happened, there’s no question that Alice’s tolerance for her Hyde Park relatives—and their supporters—was starting to wear thin. Alsop had to come to Aleck’s defense after one particularly nettlesome radio broadcast. “I have taken the liberty of pacifying Mrs. A.L.R.L., by the way,” he wrote to Woollcott. “I know you would have in the end, or far better than I could, but the longer she has a beamer on someone, the harder it is to eradicate. You really offended her in your speech, not in the speech itself, but by saying that President [Franklin] Roosevelt was ‘the legal heir’ of her father, which she took as an unkind slap at [her brother] Ted. You know she is very Tigerous about Ted, and I don’t think you understand how religiously she takes politics.”35 He knew soon enough. In November 1940, just days before the election, Woollcott spent $3,500 ($59,000 in 2015 dollars) of his own money to buy fifteen minutes of national radio airtime to issue his endorsement for FDR’s election to a third term. On November 4, the day before the election, he spoke at a “victory meeting” at Carnegie Hall, along with Dorothy Parker, Irving Berlin, Fiorello La Guardia, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and others, to cheer for the president.36 By January 1941, Alice wanted nothing to do with him. “Alice Longworth has become such an isolationist that she no longer cares to meet me,” Woollcott told a friend. Or as the columnist Leonard Lyons explained to his readers, “Alexander Woollcott and Alice Longworth have severed diplomatic relations because of fundamental differences.” Woollcott remained close to the rest of the family, including Ted junior and his wife, Eleanor, but his friendship with Alice was finished.37
—
Eleanor was right about one thing: despite their various quarrels, the cousins sewed up their differences in times of serious stress, and the 1940s proved to be the most stressful decade of their lives. For Alice, the heart-ache began right with the new decade. On January 19, Borah died in his sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage. Although he was no longer considered a viable presidential prospect, the seventy-four-year-old Lion of Idaho was nonetheless a giant of the Senate, having pursued a unique path mixing conservative, progressive, and independent beliefs over his thirty-three years in office. In addition to being Alice’s lover and the father of her only child (his only child, too), Borah had been her political soul mate through two decades of Capitol Hill battles and one of the rare intellects for whom Alice had unqualified respect.
Alice always affected a staunch indifference toward death, flicking it away like a crumb on her dining room table. When Nick died in 1931, she had allowed his current and former paramours semi-widow status throughout the rituals leading to his burial. With Borah, her situation was reversed. Officially, she was simply the senator’s dear friend and ally. If Mary Borah ever knew the truth of her husband’s relationship with Alice, she kept up a good front. Even when she was ninety, Mary still spoke of her “Billy” in the most glowing terms. “Billy was such a strong-minded man, people just didn’t realize all his warmths and kindnesses,” she said. “He was a sweet man and a fine husband.”38 What’s more, she and Alice were good friends. They socialized frequently, often without their husbands. Mary would even telephone Alice in the morning when Borah planned to take the Senate floor on a particularly juicy topic.39 Could she have stomached that arrangement if she even suspected the extent of her husband’s entanglements with Alice and Paulina? Or maybe she was better at sharing Borah than anyone knew. She was so distraught at the passing of her allegedly devoted husband she hunkered down in a Senate antechamber throughout his official memorial service, to avoid going to pieces in public. And yet she knew that sitting in what would have been her seat in the front row of the Senate well was Alice, flanked on one side by her great friend Ruth McCormick Simms and on the other by the First Lady.
—
The funerals kept coming. Once again, Alice and Eleanor found themselves in remarkably similar situations: this time, mourning brothers who drank themselves to death. In Alice’s case, the victim was her brother Kermit. When he was only nine, Edith called her second son “odd and independent.”40 By fourteen, he’d already developed a taste for tobacco and was trading cigarettes with his twenty-one-year-old big sister, Alice. Like so many of the Roosevelt men’s addictions, Kermit’s was fed in part by a lifetime of bad health, especially a case of malaria that recurred frequently after the expedition to the Amazon with his father in 1914. (A small consolation: along with the Rio Roosevelt, named in honor of his father, the Brazilians renamed one of its tributaries the Rio Kermit.) By the late 1930s, Kermit’s shipping business, his marriage, and even his morning meals were on the rocks; according to one friend, “He was in the habit of having whiskey for breakfast.”41 Turning in desperation to the one thing Roosevelt men knew they could do well, Kermit volunteered with the British army in the early days of World War II (the United States hadn’t yet entered the war). Despite his distinguished service in the failed Norway campaign against the German invaders, his epic drinking and the resulting enlarged liver got him mustered out of the British army in early 1941. Back home in New York that June, he returned to his habit of going on benders and disappearing for days or even weeks on end, often with a mistress—just as his uncle Elliott had done fifty years before.
Kermit had always been the Oyster Bay sibling closest to the Hyde Park side (Edith was apparently right when she called him “odd and independent”). He congratulated Franklin by telegram when he became governor and, much to the dismay of Edith and company, joined the president-elect on a pre-inauguration fishing trip to the Bahamas in 1933. So when Kermit went missing shortly after returning to New York that summer, his wife, Belle, called Eleanor, not Alice. After all, Kermit’s big sister had frequently expressed little more than contempt for alcoholics. Alice had called her uncle Elliott “just a weakling” and a “drunkard” and surmised that Eleanor hated alcohol because “the riproaring example of Uncle Ellie would have been enough to turn anyone off drink for life.”42 Eleanor might have been a teetotaler (Alice was only a moderate drinker herself), but Belle knew she was never judgmental in the way the Oyster Bay women could be on the topic. The First Lady promptly cal
led in the FBI, who found Kermit on July 7 in a New York hospital where he had gone for treatment of cuts and bruises acquired in a fight with a taxi driver. The FBI file described him as syphilitic, fetid, and barely capable of walking. In a move reminiscent of Theodore’s forcing his brother, Elliott, into rehab half a century earlier, Kermit’s brother Archie had him tied to a stretcher and taken, screaming, to a sanitorium in Hartford. When he was released in the fall, he returned to his mistress and to the bottle, again just like Elliott. After Pearl Harbor, with his sons enlisted in the military and his mistress having finally deserted him, he returned to his wife. She pleaded again with her Hyde Park relatives, so FDR arranged for his entry into a U.S. Army unit based in Alaska, far enough from civilization to keep him out of trouble. Instead, Kermit sank into a deep depression. On the night of June 3, 1943, he asked a fellow soldier about his plans for the evening, and the soldier told him to get to sleep. “I wish I could sleep,” Kermit said.43 A few hours later he shot himself in the head. His cause of death was reported as heart failure, in large part to spare Edith, who, having lost Quentin in World War I, had now lost a second son on active duty.
Eleanor’s brother Hall was two years younger than his cousin Kermit, but he seemed to have suffered far longer. Hall was only a one-year-old when his mother died, two when his brother died, and three when he lost his father. Orphaned, he was shipped off with Eleanor to his maternal grandmother’s estate at Tivoli on the Hudson to share in his sister’s dreary childhood. Eleanor did her best to honor her father’s wishes and act as a surrogate parent. “I loved him deeply and longed to mean a great deal in his life,” she wrote, and for a while Hall flourished, earning a Phi Beta Kappa key and a master’s degree in electrical engineering at Harvard, launching a successful career at General Electric, and even serving briefly as the city comptroller of Detroit.
But like his father’s, Hall’s abundant charm was fortified with liquor, and it soon washed away most of what he achieved: his career, his marriages, even his home. After his second divorce, Eleanor found an apartment for him in the same building where she had an apartment in New York, but he was incapable of holding down a job for any length of time. He also almost killed his son, Daniel, in a drunk-driving accident after a party at Hyde Park. Eleanor suspected that her Val-Kill friends Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman had irresponsibly allowed him to drive when he was obviously drunk, and her anger at the incident was one of the nails in the coffin of the Val-Kill partnership. But her fury was also directed at herself and her continued inability to protect Hall, just as she had not been able to save her father from himself. Those feelings of futility sometimes made her desperate. In 1938, Hall tried to circumvent the United States’ weapons embargo on both sides in the Spanish Civil War with a convoluted and impractical scheme to get warplanes to the guerrillas fighting Franco. Eleanor couldn’t resist the opportunity to help her brother, as well as the outgunned antifascists. She reached out to William Bullitt, the American ambassador to France, to help Hall and twenty-one-year-old Daniel in any way he could. Bullitt, a career diplomat, quickly contacted the president for guidance on how to respond to the First Lady’s request that he help her and her brother break the law. FDR quickly scuttled the operation.
A year later, when Daniel died in an airplane accident, Hall’s own descent accelerated. “By the time he realized that he could not stop drinking whenever he wanted to, he had been through so much that he no longer wanted to stop,” Eleanor recalled.44 She gave him a small cottage on the Hyde Park grounds, where he lived and drank in obscurity. In September 1941, he was taken to Washington in the final stages of cirrhosis. Eleanor visited him every day, a wrenching experience she nonetheless shared with her readers: “A good part of the past few days and nights has been spent in the Walter Reed Hospital with my brother…I cannot say, however, that it is a very pleasant or easy way to spend one’s time.”45 As candid as her confession was, especially for the times, Eleanor didn’t divulge the full depth of her pain. On the night that her brilliant, long-suffering brother finally slipped away, she returned to the White House to tell Franklin. “Father struggled to her side and put his arm around her. ‘Sit down,’ he said to mother so tenderly I can still hear it,” James remembered. “And he sank down beside her and hugged her and kissed her and held her head on his chest. I do not think she cried. I think mother had forgotten how to cry. But there were times when she needed to be held, and this was one.”46
If Hall’s death cut Eleanor deeply, the same couldn’t be said of the woman who had died less than three weeks earlier: Sara. She was almost eighty-seven and had been in failing health since suffering a stroke in June 1941, though that hadn’t stopped her from spending the summer in Campobello as always. By the time she returned to Hyde Park in early September, her voice, breathing, and even her skin had become as thin and fragile as a falling autumn leaf. When Eleanor came up to help settle her in at Springwood, she took one look at her mother-in-law and called Franklin at the White House. Come as soon as you can get away, she urged him. It just so happened that the president was unusually busy. The day before, on September 4, 1941, the USS Greer, an American destroyer, engaged in a brief gun battle with a German submarine off the coast of Iceland. Though neither ship was hit and details of the engagement were still murky, members of the administration were debating whether the Greer incident amounted to a German act of war. Only a few minutes before Eleanor called, FDR had been messaging Winston Churchill, informing the British prime minister that he was planning a “fireside” radio chat on Tuesday, September 9, to update the country on the tense situation. After Eleanor’s urgent call, Franklin canceled the address, boarded his private railcar, and headed home to see his mother.
He arrived, after traveling all night, at 9:30 a.m. Sara was waiting in her room, lying on a chaise longue, propped up by pillows, and wearing her best silk housecoat and a blue ribbon in her hair. Like a drooping flower after a warm summer rain, she perked up immediately when he wheeled himself over to her. They spent the day, as they so often had in that big, rambling house, chatting about the latest news at home and in FDR’s hectic world. Sara seemed markedly better when she started to nod off toward evening, and Franklin left her to have dinner. But sometime in her sleep, around 9:30 p.m., she slipped into a coma. Franklin returned to his mother’s bedside and spent the night sitting next to her, listening to her shallow breathing. At around noon on September 7, she died.
Showing grief—or any emotion associated with weakness—is never easy for a head of state, and Franklin did his utmost to wall off his feelings. Sara’s funeral, at the family’s St. James’ Church in Hyde Park, was open only to the immediate family, very close friends, and longtime Springwood employees. The police rerouted traffic to keep the two miles of road from the church north toward Springwood clear. “President Shuts Self from World” was the New York Times headline.47 At the burial, the Associated Press reported that the president “blinked away tears,” but the story also noted his determination to maintain his composure, even after one of the Springwood laborers fainted and had to be revived with smelling salts. “He never looked toward the grave as the casket, brightened with a single spray of assorted flowers, was lowered,” the story said, “nor did he return an anxious glance cast his way by his wife.”48
Franklin remained stoic; his one concession to grief was the black band he wore on his left arm for the next year as a silent tribute to Mama. He shared his raw feelings only with Eleanor. “Mother went to father and consoled him. She stayed with him and was by his side at the funeral and through the difficult days immediately afterward,” James said. “She showed him more affection during those days than at any other time I can recall. She was the kind you could count on in a crisis, and father knew that.”49 Even the people who spent time in one of Eleanor and Franklin’s inner sanctums—the White House, Springwood, Val-Kill, Warm Springs, the town house in Manhattan—could easily have concluded that their marriage had evolved into something like th
e Longworths’. They both featured a husband who was a leading politician, a wife who was a largely independent social and political force, and a relationship that was united in public but personally detached and emotionally indifferent. But Franklin and Eleanor had held on to something that the Longworths had lost: a deep and true affection. A clasped hand, a kiss on the cheek, an absent-minded caress—the signs were subtle but real. That said, Eleanor herself could not summon much feeling for Sara. “I couldn’t feel any emotion or real grief or sense of loss, and that seems terrible after thirty-six years of fairly close association,” Eleanor said.50 Though they had mended many of the fissures in their often brittle relationship, they could never entirely overcome their own rivalries: for Franklin, for the children, and for control over their lives.
