Empty Without You

by Roger Streitmatter

  Six months later, in November 1933, Eleanor wrote that the capital city was abuzz with gossip about her daughter Anna’s affair with John Boettiger. Anna and John were both married at the time—but not to each other—and Eleanor told Hick that Washington wags were taking bets on exactly how soon after John’s divorce became final that Anna would begin the proceedings for hers. The first lady noted, “One cannot hide things in this world, can one?” And then: “How lucky you are not a man!” If Lorena was not a woman, Eleanor clearly was saying, those same wags would have been gossiping about her relationship with her first friend.11

  Later that same month, Eleanor made clear her longing for physical intimacy. Eleanor and her friend Tiny Chaney had been cleaning and decorating a mutual friend’s new home in upstate New York. “Sunday morning we worked till 1 a.m. but slept well. Tiny & I in her big double bed which was comfortable in the guest room only I wished it was you.”12

  Additional evidence that the relationship was far more than a casual friendship came from a series of references that Eleanor and Lorena made to their plans to unite, at some point in the future, to blend their separate lives into one. Some of the comments came from Lorena; consoling herself about being hundreds of miles away from the first lady, she wrote, “We’ll have our time together later on.” But more often the comments came from Eleanor. After they weren’t able to spend as much time alone together during a visit as they had hoped, Eleanor wrote, “We’ll have years of happy times so bad times will be forgotten.” On another occasion, this time after visiting an aging friend, she said, “It is sad to be helpless & poor & old, isn’t it? I hope you & I to-gether have enough to make it gracious & attractive!” The most concrete of the references came in the spring of 1934, when Eleanor was in New York City and had just returned from looking at the models for the new pieces of furniture coming from the Val-Kill factory. “One corner cupboard I long to have for our camp or cottage or house, which is it to be? I’ve always thought of it in the country but I don’t think we ever decided on the variety of abode nor the furniture. We probably won’t argue!”13

  Other testimony to the intimate nature of the relationship comes from looking at how Hick altered the correspondence that creates the core of this book. In 1936, she began retrieving the letters she had written to Eleanor; between that year and 1968 when Lorena died (having stipulated that the Roosevelt Library could not open the letters until ten years after her death), she purposely destroyed hundreds of letters. In 1966, Lorena confided in Anna why she had done so: “Your Mother wasn’t always so very discreet in her letters to me.” Lorena burned the most explicit of the letters, dramatically dropping them, one by one, into the flames of a fireplace.14

  We can only imagine what has been lost. Because Lorena destroyed all of her own letters and most of Eleanor’s from the first half of 1933, for example, the reader is left with only eight letters—all from Eleanor and one of them incomplete—from that crucial period. In addition, whenever Eleanor and Lorena spent time together—sometimes for long weekends, other times for vacations that extended for several weeks—they obviously had no reason to write letters. What’s more, they often talked to each other by telephone. So the correspondence contains myriad statements of eager anticipation (even the counting down of days) before a particular rendezvous, followed only by vague references to what they did during their precious days together. On three occasions, these times together had such significant impact on their relationship that I have supplemented the letters with material from other sources in an attempt to fill these gaps. These summaries, like the letters, allow Eleanor and Lorena to speak for themselves, as they draw heavily from Reluctant First Lady, the biography of Eleanor that Lorena wrote in 1962, as well as Eleanor’s own autobiography.15

  The biography that Lorena wrote about Eleanor is a major source for the prologue that describes how Eleanor and Hick crossed paths for the first time in 1928 and how their friendship escalated when Lorena was assigned to cover the soon-to-be first lady during the 1932 presidential campaign. That prologue carries the reader up to the day the correspondence begins in March 1933.

  While I acknowledge that the question of whether the first lady and first friend’s relationship was a sexual one is highly titillating, I believe that ultimately the far more important question is: What impact did the relationship have on each woman?

  By the time Eleanor and Lorena began corresponding, they both had recognized that their emotional similarities, no matter the differences in their backgrounds, were striking. Eleanor and Hick were both strong-willed and built of sturdy intellectual timber, both possessed a zealous and passionate nature, both were endowed with enormous physical vitality (though Lorena squandered much of hers by smoking, drinking, and eating too much, while the abstemious Eleanor resolutely did not), both were intuitively compassionate and responsive to the moods and sorrows of others, both had been deeply scarred by past betrayals of male sexuality and yet still longed to give and receive a totality of emotional and physical commitment. For all these reasons, by the spring of 1933 Eleanor and Lorena’s bond had grown so strong that it would stand firm for the rest of their lives.

  At the time that their correspondence began, Eleanor was at one of the lowest points in her life. Although detached observers assumed that any woman would be delighted to become first lady, Eleanor was, in reality, deeply depressed. She feared, and with good reason, that moving into the White House would force her to abandon the social and political agenda that she had committed her energies to for the last fifteen years and, instead, to accept the frightfully limited role of the demure hostess whose most momentous decision of the day was whether lunch would consist of sandwiches filled with cucumbers—or watercress.

  Lorena not only empathized with Eleanor’s fears in a way that most people could not, but she also was a self-made woman who possessed the stunning combination of innate drive, professional expertise, and political sophistication. That combination enabled her to help Eleanor transform an ineffectual role that ER detested into a position of influence and impact far beyond anything that the thirty-three first ladies before her had ever imagined it could be. Lorena recognized that ER was poised to do great things, for herself as well as for American women writ large, so the hard-driving reporter became the behind-the-scenes catalyst helping to shape ER’s decisions and activities that ultimately revolutionized the relationship between the first lady and the public. In matters of media coverage as in so many others that would evolve in the next several years, Lorena was, in short, the woman behind the woman. When Eleanor wrote Lorena that her life would be “empty without you,” the most eminent American woman of the twentieth century was speaking not only of an emotional void but also of a substantive one.

  It was Lorena who, much like the White House handlers who earn six-figure salaries for creating positive public images of their candidates today, introduced Eleanor to the American public by writing stories in decidedly rose-colored hues. Hick painted that flattering portrait while she was still on the Associated Press payroll, thereby violating journalistic standards of professionalism.

  It was Lorena who persuaded Eleanor to become the only first lady in history to conduct weekly press conferences. Those sessions provided ER with a public venue to promote the social and political agenda that she had feared she would have to abandon. During a daunting 348 press conferences, Eleanor championed everything from establishing a minimum wage to capping the number of hours in a workweek and from enlarging the role of women to expending public funds for housing, education, and programs for the handicapped.

  It was Lorena who suggested a way that Eleanor could finally achieve the sense of personal fulfillment and financial independence that she had desperately craved for many years; ER could attain that elusive goal, Lorena counseled, by writing magazine articles (which the former reporter spent hours on end editing before Eleanor actually submitted them) for the country’s largest and best-paying magazines.

  It was
Lorena who helped Eleanor grow into one of history’s most legendary humanitarians by giving this woman born to wealth and privilege a close-up view of the plight of the poor and the powerless; Lorena took ER to the West Virginia coal mines in the fall of 1933, propelling the first lady to become the point person for the government’s subsistence homestead project that soon evolved into “Eleanor’s Baby.”

  It was Lorena who suggested that Eleanor publish a syndicated newspaper column to communicate her vision for humanity to the entire country on a daily basis. “My Day” began in 1935 and continued until Eleanor died in 1962, allowing her to speak her mind in the form of a phenomenal 8,000 columns published in scores of American newspapers.

  More important than all of these tangible contributions combined, it was Lorena who provided unflagging emotional support. Early in their relationship, Lorena offered Eleanor a love that was complete and absolute. Never before and never again would Eleanor, despite her social stature and her myriad accomplishments, feel the sense of being loved exclusively. On the strength of that love, Eleanor blossomed and thrived, grew and flourished—took flight. “Every woman wants to be first to someone in her life,” Eleanor would later write. For Eleanor, being first in Lorena’s life allowed her to transform the conventional role of president’s wife into a public figure in her own right. Lorena’s love allowed Eleanor to construct the kind of life she wanted even while living in the public fishbowl known as the White House. “Believe me,” she wrote Lorena at Christmas 1933, “you’ve taught me more and meant more to me than you know.” The next year, Eleanor expanded that sentiment, “You’ve made of me so much more of a person just to be worthy of you—Je t’aime et je t’adore.”16

  For the remaining thirty years of her remarkable life, Eleanor lived according to a code of her own design, following the rhythms of her own needs and desires. She reinvented herself, she established a new paradigm for the American woman, and she stepped boldly onto the world stage to confront the most controversial issues of the day with a sense of honor and principle that has remained a model for the generations that have come after her. But if it had not been for the unconditional love and steadfast emotional support that Lorena had bestowed on Eleanor in those early months of her tenure at the White House, none of it may have happened.

  Unfortunately, the profound role that the relationship played in Lorena’s life proved not to be nearly so enriching. The euphoria that her relationship with Eleanor had initially brought soon turned to anguish. Soon after Eleanor moved to the White House, Lorena realized she could not abide the constant activity and public nature of living close to the first lady—Hick was an independent soul, an appendage to no one. So she accepted a job, which Eleanor secured for her, as chief investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, traversing the country to gauge the effectiveness of the nation’s relief programs and then writing detailed reports on her findings. The major advantage of the job was that, between trips, it allowed Lorena to return to Eleanor and sleep in the White House within a matter of feet from the first lady. Still, the nomadic lifestyle was far from ideal. As Hick’s letters from one lonely hotel room after another testify, when she was not with Eleanor, she felt restless and unhappy; the government work failed to give her the personal gratification that journalism had. Unwittingly, Lorena had allowed herself to slip into a role where she lost her sense of self, becoming emotionally (and eventually financially) dependent on Eleanor. No longer a successful journalist herself, she found it degrading when reporters described her solely in relation to the first lady, as if she were some pathetic sycophant. “I’m so fed up with publicity I want to kick every reporter I see,” she raged in February 1934. “Why the Hell CAN’T they leave me alone?”17

  Ironically, as Eleanor was growing into the new type of first lady that Hick had helped her envision, the intensity of their relationship diminished. Because Eleanor now was embraced by the love and admiration of thousands, she no longer needed the private reassurance and emotional nourishment from Lorena that had sustained her in the anxious days before and immediately after she moved to the White House. Early in the relationship, it had been Eleanor who desperately needed support and encouragement from Lorena, a successful career woman who had accomplished so much in the world. But as Eleanor took flight, Lorena began to become not so much an inspiration as an albatross.

  Sensing that she had sacrificed a career that she loved for a woman who was, each day, drifting further and further from her, Lorena became increasingly moody and sullen, demanding time alone with Eleanor away from the first lady’s family, friends, and commitments. The loyal Eleanor tried to accommodate her first friend, but she repeatedly found herself apologizing to Lorena for including other people in their plans. “Anna said to-day she might want to go with us [to Puerto Rico]. I’d rather go alone with you but I can’t hurt her feelings.” Besides ER’s daughter to consider, there were her many friends such as the women reporters who gathered adoringly around her each Monday morning for the weekly press conferences and the lunches that often followed, plus several feminist friends the querulous Hick refused to be in the same room with, and all the people the first lady worked with on her various social issues and political campaigns, plus her four sons—not to mention the president, who increasingly relied upon Eleanor’s political instincts and affable nature to further his agenda. “You told me once it was hard to let go,” Eleanor wrote Lorena, “but I found it was harder to let go & yet hold on. Love as much & yet share.” Still, each time that the first lady disappointed Lorena, she felt guilty. “I went to sleep saying a little prayer, ‘God give me depth enough not to hurt Hick again.’ Darling, I know I’m not up to you in many ways but I love you dearly.” By 1934, whenever either woman wrote of her love for the other, it seemed to be in the context of pain rather than pleasure. In February, Eleanor wrote, “Love is a queer thing, it hurts one but it gives one so much more in return!”18

  During the three remaining decades that the first lady and first friend would continue to correspond, they would experience many more ups and downs in their relationship—including a disastrous holiday on the West Coast in July 1934. But throughout those years, both women remained steadfastly concerned about the other’s well-being, offering constant support and reassurance—a safe harbor whenever outside forces threatened them. Eleanor sometimes used Lorena to blow off steam, especially about her husband; when an incident with one of their sons angered the first lady to the point that she, at least momentarily, considered leaving her husband, she expressed her rage to Hick but then, in her next letter, acknowledged that divorce was out of the question—“I know I’ve got to stick. I know I’ll never make an open break.” For Lorena, the correspondence provided a venue for her to complain about her job—actually, a series of jobs, none of which came anywhere close to providing her with the sense of fulfillment she had known as a pioneering newswoman.19

  In the final years, the only point on which Eleanor and Lorena consistently seemed to disagree involved whose fault it was that the intensity of their relationship had not been sustained; each woman insisted on blaming herself. Eleanor wrote, “I never meant to hurt you in any way, but that is no excuse for having done it. Such cruelty & stupidity is unpardonable when you reach my age.” Hick countered, “It would be so much better, wouldn’t it, if I didn’t love you so much.” Perhaps the best coda to the relationship was written by Lorena in a letter in late 1940. “I’d never have believed it possible for a woman to develop after 50 as you have in the last six years,” she said. “My trouble, I suspect, has always been that I’ve been so much more interested in the person than in the personage. I still prefer the person, but I admire and respect the personage with all my heart!”20

  PROLOGUE

  The Lady and the Reporter

  For Eleanor, a crucial step on the path that ultimately led to her relationship with Lorena can be traced to September of 1918. It was then—ten years before she laid eyes on the hard-driving reporter
and fifteen years before they began corresponding—that Eleanor suddenly veered from the course of dutiful wife that, until that moment, had defined her life. For when Eleanor stumbled upon a packet of lightly scented letters that documented her husband of thirteen years had been having an affair with the very young and very beautiful Lucy Page Mercer, the bottom dropped out of her life. The man she had loved, trusted, obeyed, and honored had betrayed her, had made love to her very own social secretary. Even though Eleanor was concerned about her five small children (then aged two to twelve) growing up without their father in the house, she was so opposed to a loveless marriage that she offered her husband a divorce. But Franklin quickly informed her that he didn’t want the marriage to end. (FDR’s widowed mother, Sara Delano Roosevelt, told her only child that if he left his wife and children, he’d never see another cent of the Roosevelt fortune; FDR’s political mentor, Louis Howe, warned that if he kissed his marriage goodbye, he’d be doing the same to his political career.) So Eleanor agreed to continue the marriage because she didn’t want her children to endure life without a father, as she had. Franklin promised never to see Lucy Mercer again (a promise he would later break repeatedly) and acquiesced to his wife’s demand that their marriage no longer include a sexual dimension.

  Eleanor’s discovery of her husband’s infidelity signaled, after a severe bout with depression followed by a long and painful process of introspection, a turning point in her life. No longer willing to define herself solely in terms of the needs of an unfaithful husband, she began to reassess exactly what Eleanor Roosevelt might make of her life.