Hissing Cousins
Page 34
Alice didn’t entirely leave Eleanor in peace. One of the more sensational Capitol Hill hearings of 1947 happened to feature Franklin and Eleanor’s second son, Elliott. A former air force colonel, he was accused of having accepted numerous gifts from Hughes Aircraft to lobby his father for a $70 million order of experimental spy planes. Elliott admitted to the Senate War Investigating Committee that Hughes had paid exactly $576.83 (about $6,000 in 2015 dollars) for his sixteen-day honeymoon stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel and that John W. Meyer, a publicity manager for Hughes, had actually given Elliott’s (third) wife away at the 1944 wedding ceremony. But he called the graft charges “complete nonsense,” adding that he’d never even spoken to his father about Hughes and, besides, the president had “more important matters” on his mind in 1944.39
If these hearings set off an echo of the nepotism charges leveled against Ted junior and Archie Roosevelt during the 1924 Teapot Dome hearings, it wasn’t lost on Alice. She turned up regularly at the Senate War Committee room, beaming for the cameras in her trademark broad-brimmed hats. As usual, she landed herself a prime seat, right next to Myrtle Ferguson, whose husband, Homer, was the Republican chairman of the Senate War Investigation Subcommittee. Alice kept up a running commentary with Mrs. Ferguson, primarily complaining that her husband wasn’t being tough enough on the witnesses. At one point, Alice became so agitated that her stage whispers threatened to drown out the testimony. “Senator Walsh or Burt Wheeler would never have allowed a witness to get away with that,” Alice was overheard declaring to Mrs. Ferguson. “Your husband isn’t being firm enough.” At which point Mrs. Ferguson stood up from her seat, walked over to her husband, and scolded him: “Homer, can’t you be firmer?” Apparently, he could. “The Senator reacted a short time later by laying down the law to Howard Hughes,” reported one newspaper. “He was so firm that Claude Pepper, the Florida Democrat, protested he was too tough.”40 Eleanor didn’t attend the hearings, but she was clearly aware of them, and she could not have been happy about Alice’s antics. “I saw Mrs. Roosevelt angry only once and that was over one of her children,” said Eleanor’s friend Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas. “It was at breakfast, early as usual. She started to read the newspaper. On the front page, there was a story about one of her boys. An incident greatly exaggerated and but for the fact that he was the son of the President of the United States, it would have received no attention at all. I can hear Mrs. Roosevelt say, ‘Someday I will write the story of what is done to the children of those in public life.’ ”41
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Still, even icebergs thaw around the edges, and Alice could occasionally let go of her old fighting spirit. She had said as much in 1944, at the Republican National Convention, which she deemed unconscionably tepid compared with the bad old days of, say, 1912. “Then—then, one really felt violent,” said Alice, with nineteen-year-old Paulina at her side in Chicago. “It was a bath of hate and fury. There hasn’t been anything like it since. Oh, it was wonderful.”42
Feeding her own torpor was a case of the Alice blues. She had long expected that once FDR was deposed, the Republicans would rise again. Instead, Truman narrowly held on to the White House in 1948, and Alice herself deserved at least part of the blame for sinking his opponent, Thomas Dewey. Dewey had also run for president in 1944 against FDR, and she was unimpressed. With the kind of life-threatening paper cut that only Alice could administer, she dismissed the stiff, short, mustached Dewey as looking like “the bridegroom on a wedding cake.” When Dewey returned to face Truman in 1948, Alice’s epithet stuck to him like heavy butter-cream frosting. Many voters looked at him and saw a charisma-challenged man devoid of stature in almost every way—the little man on the cake. The candidate saw it too. “Dewey has quit wincing at these jabs, but he is still cautious about anything that might bring criticism,” said the columnist Drew Pearson.43 While much of the political world, and an embarrassed newspaper or two, were proclaiming, “Dewey Defeats Truman,” Alice was one of the few who knew better and predicted the worst.
If her political world looked bleak, the 1940s turned into an especially dark personal time for Alice. In 1943, her brother Kermit committed suicide after years of depression and alcoholism. In 1944, Ted junior died on the battlefield in France. Shortly after that, her closest friend and partner in political high jinks, Ruth Hanna McCormick, died of pancreatitis on New Year’s Eve. Their fathers had been Republican sparring partners, and the two women had known each other for decades; it had been to Ruth that Alice turned when she found herself pregnant with Borah’s child in 1924. In 1948, her eighty-seven-year-old stepmother, Edith, died at Sagamore Hill. They were never close, at least from Alice’s point of view. Alice couldn’t get over feeling like a second-class member of the family, and the fact that Edith’s will divided her estate equally among her biological children while leaving Alice a token $1,000 couldn’t have helped. Edith’s reasoning was that Alice still had an income from the Lee side of her family. Besides, she threw in the sketch of the White House drawn for Alice by John Singer Sargent. But the loss of the only mother she had ever known was real, even for a woman who believed that mourning was about as useful as voting for a Democrat.
And in the 1940s, Alice’s daughter, Paulina, continued on her roller-coaster ride through life. Paulina seemed to be on the upswing on July 9, 1946, when she gave birth to Joanna Sturm, in New York City. Grandma’s stature was such that news of Joanna’s birth and a smattering of baby pictures made their way into the newspapers, and Alice rushed to New York to meet the child. But her relationship with Paulina and her husband, Alex, was strained at best. Alice saw her daughter infrequently, either at the Sturms’ home in Connecticut or on those occasions when the mother could press her daughter into political service, such as attending the 1948 GOP convention in Philadelphia, where Paulina worked for a group called Twenties-for-Taft.44 Their relationship became even more fraught in November 1951. Alex Sturm, who long had a drinking problem, died in a Connecticut hospital of hepatitis-related illness. He was twenty-eight. His daughter was five.
Unhappy and occasionally unstable, Paulina became a widow and a single mother at twenty-six. She reacted badly. Within months, a maid at her Manhattan hotel-apartment found her lying unconscious on the floor. The police report blamed a “sudden illness,” but given her suicide attempt in college and Alice’s own explanation that her daughter was going through “a difficult period of readjustment” since Alex’s death, it seemed more likely that a bottle of pills or liquor was to blame.45 Paulina and Joanna then moved back to Washington, to a house in Georgetown about a mile from Alice. It was something of a mixed blessing. Alice knew her daughter needed help, but she also knew she didn’t really know how to provide it. “She said to me once that she was so glad that Paulina was coming to live in Washington, but of course she couldn’t live with her,” said Hermann Hagedorn, a Roosevelt family biographer and friend.46
Instead, Paulina gravitated toward Roman Catholicism to soothe her grief. The solitude of prayer appealed to her, as did the opportunity to lose herself in the good work done at Catholic hospitals and with the progressive Catholic Worker movement. “There was always something child-like and shy about Paulina, but she was valiant too,” said Dorothy Day, the founder of the movement. When Day was arrested for civil disobedience in 1956, it was Paulina who put up the $1,000 bail.47 It’s hard not to wonder whether Paulina’s Christian activism wasn’t its own sort of disobedience against her mother. After all, Alice had long equated being “frightfully good” with being “frightfully boring,” at least as far as Eleanor was concerned. For Paulina, using rectitude as her weapon against her notoriously rebellious mother would have been a delicious irony (as would the fact that she spent time working on New York’s seedy Lower East Side, where Eleanor’s own community-service work began).
But religion proved to be a Band-Aid that covered only Paulina’s most superficial wounds. She continued to suffer from debilitating headaches and had difficulty
sleeping. The Washington Post contacted Alice in February 1953, a little more than a year after Alex’s death, to see how she and her daughter would be celebrating their birthdays. Alice was born on February 12; Paulina, born on February 14, lived in her mother’s shadow yet again—and again every February. The Post story was called “2 Birthdays but Not 1 Celebration,” and in it Alice explained that no one in the Longworth family felt much like celebrating yet. “If we all survive,” she said, “a year from now I shall be 70 and that WILL be something to celebrate.”48
They all did survive that year, but Alice’s morbid premonition played itself out soon enough. Just before dinnertime on January 27, 1957, ten-year-old Joanna walked into the living room of the Sturms’ small house in Georgetown and found her mother lying unconscious on the couch, barely breathing but alive, with an empty bottle of pills nearby. She called a neighbor who called an ambulance, but Paulina died on the way to the hospital. Some newspapers hinted that she had finally succeeded in killing herself, a serious enough charge to prompt the Washington coroner to perform an autopsy. For some reason, he took more than a month to deliver his verdict: heart failure, caused by a combination of prescription drugs and alcohol. Even more curious: the coroner ruled her death to be an accident, despite noting that Paulina had bought a bottle of twelve barbiturates and a bottle of forty-eight tranquilizers the day before, and both were now empty. Could Alice have exerted her significant influence to avoid the stigma of a suicide? On the other hand, would a newly devout Roman Catholic such as Paulina have ever considered such a thing? Washington whispered about various possibilities, but Paulina was laid to rest with dignity. In fact, one of her pallbearers was Vice President Richard Nixon.
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At the time of Paulina’s death, Alice and Eleanor were rarely in contact. Eisenhower was in the White House, and Eleanor had no official duties in Washington. The days of dinner and birthday invitations were long over, though they did bump into each other at the occasional society party or in some other unexpected location. Several years before, it was a chance meeting on a train. “Came up in the train this morning,” Eleanor wrote to her friend Joe Lash in 1943, “and [Alice] had to sit with us as the train was full & I enjoyed her. She is a vivid & amusing creature no matter how unkind at times! She remarked that no matter ‘how much we differed politically there was always a tribal feeling between us’!”49 Now that tragedy had visited the family, that tribal feeling pulled the distant cousins toward each other again. Eleanor immediately wrote Alice a short, earnest letter, dated the day after Paulina’s death:
My dear Alice:
Though we do not often meet, I was happy to see you at Agnes’*1 party. I am shocked that this great grief has come to you, and I am glad you have the small grandchild. If there is anything I can ever do for you, please let me know.
With my deepest sympathy.
Affectionately,
Eleanor50
It’s perhaps not surprising that the sensitive, ever-thoughtful Eleanor reached out to Alice. She was always at her best when someone was in need, and in this case there was an extra tug on her heart. Even though she barely knew Paulina and had never met Joanna, the pain of burying a child was all too real, forty-eight years after the death of the first Franklin junior.
More surprising—even shocking—was Alice’s response. If the conventional wisdom had been correct, cruel Alice would have snubbed her cousin’s heartfelt overture as if it were an invitation to a second-rate party. Even some of the people closest to the Roosevelts bought that story line. “Mrs. R. made a lovely gesture of friendship toward Mrs. Longworth when her daughter committed suicide,” said Maureen Corr, who took over from Tommy Thompson as Eleanor’s personal secretary. “Mrs. R. told me of Alice’s malice (but said) ‘even so, I must write her.’ Even said we must see each other some time. Alice L never answered.”51
But she did answer. It took Alice five months to reply to Eleanor, but the reasons for the delay had nothing to do with callousness, as the letter itself makes painfully clear:
Dear Eleanor
For months after Paulina died whenever I tried to write I simply crumpled. I do hope you understand, because I want you to know how touched I was by your thoughts, your telegram, the spring blossoms on your letter. Joanna is with me now. We leave in a few days for a couple of months on a ranch in Wyoming. Perhaps some time when you are in town you would let me know and we could have a “family” moment together. I should so much like to have Joanna know you, and for me it would be a pleasure, as it was to have a glimpse of you at the Meyers’ party.
Affectionately,
Alice52
Crumpled. It’s hard to imagine the redoubtable Alice Roosevelt Longworth crumpling under any circumstances. And yet it’s hard to think of a time when she seemed more vulnerable than in this letter. Even her use of “affectionately” seems uncharacteristically soft and warm. She was, by all accounts, destroyed by Paulina’s death. “It nearly killed her. It really did,” said Marian Christie, one of Alice’s friends.53 If she didn’t exactly blame herself for her daughter’s years of unhappiness, she was more aware than ever that her own conspicuous persona—the “bride at every wedding, corpse at every funeral” temperament she inherited from her father—had not served shy, sweet Paulina well.
Yet Alice was determined to atone for her maternal missteps. Naturally, she opted for the most dramatic gesture imaginable. She insisted on retaining custody of ten-year-old Joanna. “I remember everyone was very upset, very shocked and flabbergasted at a sister who had decided to take over raising of this very young child,” said Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Alice’s brother Kermit. “All sorts of people predicted a very short attention span given to it, she’ll never be able to relate to the child, et cetera.”54 Alice still had difficulty relating to children. She tended to forget that what was interesting to a grande dame might not amuse a teenage girl. “She had the strangest idea about children,” said Ruth Tankersley, the daughter of Alice’s best friend, Ruth McCormick. “I remember one birthday, when Joanna was about thirteen, the other guests were Vice President Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. Not exactly people that would interrelate with a thirteen-year-old child.”55 But Alice knew enough about her shortcomings to make allowances for them. Joanna spent most days after school playing at her friend Kristie Tankersley’s house, doing her homework and riding horses before being picked up in Alice’s chauffeur-driven car. The ranch trip to Wyoming that Alice mentioned to Eleanor became a regular grandmother-granddaughter bonding ritual, even though one year, when Alice was seventy-six, she was thrown from her horse and broke a foot (and kept right on going with the vacation).56 By the same token, she didn’t try to force-feed Joanna the same all-politics diet she inflicted on Paulina. “Quite to the surprise of a lot of people, she turned out to be an extraordinarily good mother to Joanna, far better than she had been to her own daughter,” said Kermit.57 Alice ultimately came to the same conclusion. “I should have been a grandmother, not a mother,” Gore Vidal remembered her saying.58
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Eleanor’s battles weren’t of the same magnitude, but as was the case with Alice, her failings as a mother dominated her personal life. Having been absent or overwhelmed or marginalized by her mother-in-law for most of the children’s youth and early adulthood, she became determined to make it up to them however she could. Money was often their chief concern, whether it was to start a new business, finance another campaign, or pay for a vacation. Eleanor was hardly destitute, what with the family money and a steady stream of income from her lectures, articles, and books; she wrote six in her lifetime, including a Christmas book and an advice book for teenagers, and that doesn’t include the collections of her essays and letters. But the children always seemed to have their hands out, ready for a deposit from Mother R. When they came to New York, they stayed at her apartment and left her with the bills. Even the phone cost her a small fortune. “Her bill for this month was $205 [$2,180 in 2015 dollars],” her assista
nt Dorothy Dow wrote. “Mostly unnecessary, too. Elliott just sits here and calls Los Angeles, San Diego, St. Louis, Washington, time after time, and it’s senseless. None of it is pressing business. I think it makes him feel like a big shot.”59
Mother didn’t only hold the purse strings. The siblings all knew that her most valuable asset—and theirs—was the Roosevelt family name. They each wanted, at some point, to leverage it for their own gain, and as the matriarch and Franklin’s widow she had the power to decide which child could manage which piece of the family heritage. More often than not, she was forced to choose among the children in ways that would have made Solomon dizzy. Elliott, a high school graduate in a family of Ivy Leaguers, was by far the neediest, forever wandering off in search of a new venture that invariably failed. But because he was the least likely to succeed—it seemed like fate that Elliott was named for Eleanor’s own fragile father—she supported most everything he tried. There were some doozies: Christmas tree and dairy farms at Hyde Park, wholesale pharmaceuticals in Batista’s Cuba, boat rentals in Miami (or as he billed them “A Roosevelt Yacht”). In 1952, he sold Top Cottage, Franklin’s getaway in Hyde Park and the setting for the famous barbecue with the king and queen of England, apparently without informing his mother. She read about the sale in the New York Times.