Empty Without You

by Roger Streitmatter

  [March 10]

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Washington

  Hick darling, The air mail, special delivery letter has never come, but the next one came this morning & my dear I was glad. Remember one thing always, no one is just what you are to me. I’d rather be writing this minute than anything else & yet I love many other people & some often can do things for me probably better than you could, but I’ve never enjoyed being with anyone the way I enjoy being with you.

  Diary March 10th 8:30 a.m. out with Meggie. A cold, clear, beautiful day. Breakfast in the west sitting room (hall) much brighter than downstairs, Louis & Missy & I. 9:30 Mrs. [Henrietta] Nesbitt, 10:10 Mr. [Ike] Hoover,25 10:30 picture hangers & furniture movers. 11:25 went off from back door in my car & picked John [Boettiger] up at the Washington [Hotel]. He drove out to Elton Fay’s for me as I wanted to leave some candy & tangerines.26 Back in time for lunch. Then Tommy & I moved books & furniture till four when we drove to the Congressional Club to meet the new Congressmen’s wives & then I dashed in to see Elinor Morgenthau.27 Back here at five. F.D.R. appeared about 5:30. The rooms begin to look homelike! 6:30 dressed & dined 7:30 just ourselves & had a movie of F.D.R… .

  The preserved copy of this letter ends abruptly in mid-sentence.

  The second from the last paragraph of this letter contains one of the many sensual passages that Eleanor wrote to Lorena.

  [March 11]

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Washington

  Hick my dear, The missing letter is still missing but I rejoiced over the Thursday evening one this morning. It is hard to decide what we shall read but let’s try the essays. You can give them to me Wednesday.

  We could lunch at the house Tuesday if Anna is out or if you don’t mind having her with us but I thought you’d rather be alone in a crowd than have anyone else to talk to. It shall be just as you say dear. Stick to your diet, lose twenty pounds more & you’ll forget you are forty & please go see the doctor next week.28

  Last night after I finished writing they called about Los Angeles29 & I woke & F.D.R., Louis [Howe] & finally poor Steve Early [Franklin’s press secretary]. What a bad time the West Coast does have!

  Diary. 8:30 Missy [LeHand] & I out with Meggie. A note announcing Forbes Amory & his brother30 downstairs so I reluctantly order 2 more places for breakfast making us five when the table only holds 4 comfortably. It finally is disclosed that Harry Amory wants to be an assistant Sec. of Commerce & I undertake to hide F.D.R. & get him out of seeing them! 9:30 Mrs. [Henrietta] Nesbitt. 10 Ike Hoover, then got most of F.D.R.’s pictures hung. 11 hair & nails done,31 signed old mail. Missy & I alone at lunch, more pictures hung, signed mail till 3, dressed, went to see Sen. [Thomas] Walsh’s widow. She’s much more composed & I like her. She told me all about this “romance,” poor things!32 Four p.m. arrived at D.A.R. [Daughters of the American Revolution] building for my first go at the Girl Scouts (E.R. not in uniform!). Said a few words, lighted their cake, was photographed & left, got back at 4:20 to find numerous carriages already lined up [for the diplomatic dinner at the White House that night]. Then all Ambassadors & ministers being lined up according to precedence in the East Room. We were notified—Tommy & Missy rushed down & sat at their seats to pour tea & chocolate in the big dining room & we stood in the Blue Room F.D.R., E.R., the Sec. of State [Cordell Hull], Mrs. Hull, William Phillips, who is undersecretary. They shook hands & went on in for tea & then we went in & F.D.R. sat down & every ambassador was taken up to talk to him & the ministers & I walked all around the room & said sweet nothings to them. I think they enjoyed it, though it was stiff. You can’t be anything else with complete strangers, can you? Tommy came through with flying colours [sic]! At six I was back in my room writing to you when Louis & Steve Early appeared, so I sat down & knit & chatted for an hour & now Tommy & I are dining alone by my fire. F.D.R. & Louis go to the newspaper correspondents dinner. I shall sign mail all evening or dictate to Tommy.

  I miss you greatly dear. The nicest time of the day is when I write to you. You have a stormier time than I do but I miss you as much, I think. I couldn’t bear to think of you crying yourself to sleep. Oh! how I wanted to put my arms around you in reality instead of in spirit. I went & kissed your photograph instead & the tears were in my eyes. Please keep most of your heart in Washington as long as I’m here for most of mine is with you!

  A world of love & good night my dear one,

  E.R.

  Eleanor and Tommy had flown to New York City on March 15 and had seen Lorena while they were there.

  [March 16]

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Washington

  Hick Darling, I’ve just said “goodnight” & you are right we should not do it [talk on the telephone] every night. So I’ll put a “special” on this [letter] & not call you to-morrow in the hope that I won’t mind not hearing your voice when I know I’m going to hear it on Saturday. Oh! dear, I can hardly wait!

  Well, we had a very bumpy trip but I was fine & poor Tommy suffered all day.

  I had [Secretary of Labor] Frances Perkins, Elinor Morgenthau & Mary Miller33 to lunch. Saw a man about the welfare of mountain children, took Maude [Gray, Eleanor’s aunt] to the Senate & heard some dull speeches on beer & listened to F’s message on farm relief. It’s not very profitable for me to go to the Senate or Congress as I hear so badly. Got home, dressed & received the Supreme Court & I think they enjoyed their tea. Had a talk with John Boettiger on the telephone, did some mail, dressed for dinner. Fred Hale (Senator from Maine [a Republican] & an old friend of Maude’s) and Steve Early [came] to dinner and then were given a private showing of the movie “Gabriel Over the White House.”34 Some of it is raw & silly but oh! some of it is swell & I have so much more faith in the people than the Fred Hale type [does]. He’d have the soldiers out if a million unemployed marched on Washington & I’d do what the President does in the picture!35 Some agreed & I finally took the dogs for their evening walk & we are going to bed after a good night to you.

  I love you & seeing you again [yesterday] was such a joy. Bless you my dearest,

  E.R.

  JULY 1933

  A Perfect Holiday

  After living in separate cities from March to June 1933, Eleanor and Lorena arranged their schedules so they could go on a road trip together in July. They had no reason to write to each other during their shared holiday, but the biography the first friend later wrote about the first lady included detailed descriptions of the remarkable holiday. The adjective remarkable applies not because of any particular event that occurred during those three weeks but because absolutely no major events occurred; just two middle-aged women motoring through the northern United States and French Canada—unaccompanied and (even though one of them was by this time one of the most-photographed women in the world) unrecognized. Their vehicle was well beyond the ordinary, too, because Eleanor had selected as her personal automobile not a somber black Cadillac or Lincoln, like Grace Coolidge and Lou Henry Hoover before her, but a sporty light blue Buick roadster with a white convertible top. Complete with chrome headlights, chrome bumper, and chrome grill in the front and a jaunty rumble seat on the back, the car raised (with the Depression still holding the country tight in its grip) many a Washington eyebrow.

  After spending the Fourth of July weekend at Val-Kill, the two women drove north and spent several leisurely days in the secluded woods of Vermont and New Hampshire. Eleanor next spoiled Lorena by picking up the tab for four glorious nights at the Chateau Frontenac, the majestic castellated hotel inside the old stone city of Quebec. After indulging in manicures, facials, and massages by the hotel staff and exquisite meals of escargot, vichyssoise, chateaubriand, and crepes from the hotel’s world-class chef—this was a vacation, price be damned!—they proceeded north along the banks of the St. Lawrence. Finally they reached their destination proper: the rugged Gaspé Peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic beyond the northern tip of Maine. For the next week, they meandered along the 500-
mile coastline with its breathtaking scenery and charming French villages. Then they stopped at the Roosevelt summer home on Campobello Island in New Brunswick before spending a few final days along the Maine coastline—where, for the only time on the trip, the first lady drew a crowd.

  It wasn’t the landmarks along the way or the number of days spent at each stop that the women remembered most, though, but a series of magical moments that blended humor and pathos and romance that they would treasure for the next thirty years. The first of the moments erupted the instant that Eleanor announced that she and Lorena were taking an extended motor trip—by themselves. When the head of the Secret Service, Bill Moran, got wind of the plan, he exploded. “The Lindbergh baby was kidnapped only a little more than a year ago,” Moran barked. “I will not allow such a thing to happen to the president’s wife—not on my watch.” But ER barked back: “We’re not infants.” And then, without taking a breath, she adeptly turned the whole idea of an abduction into a joke. “If someone tried to kidnap us, where could they possibly hide us? They certainly couldn’t cram us into the trunk of a car!” Lorena quickly chimed in. “The idea of anyone trying to kidnap two grown women, one nearly six feet tall and the other weighing almost 200 pounds, is ludicrous.”1

  With ER and Moran at loggerheads, the issue was passed on to higher authority. And in this case, that meant high authority indeed. FDR ultimately was swayed neither by his wife nor the head of his security network, but by Lorena. For in addition to trusting and enjoying the company of the woman who had become the first lady’s intimate friend, he had complete faith in the robust woman’s ability to protect his wife as well as any bodyguard could. Case closed.

  Though Bill Moran had no choice but to accept FDR’s decision, he persuaded Eleanor at least to carry a revolver along with her. Details about that gun, however, would remain Eleanor and Lorena’s secret. For Lorena admitted years later that, throughout the entire trip, the gun remained locked in its case “which in turn was locked in the glove compartment,” unloaded and with no bullets anywhere in the car. If Moran had known exactly where ER kept the gun and that without bullets it offered her no protection whatsoever, he would have been furious—but probably not surprised.2

  Another memorable moment played out as the women were driving through the picturesque Adirondack Mountains in upper New York state. The resolutely disciplined Eleanor had decided, because this was a holiday, to give herself permission to adopt a trait that she previously had only read about; she was going to be impetuous. She’d been totally responsible for forty-nine years—why not? So even though her plan for the first day of the trip was to drive to Lake Placid and spend the night in a proper hotel there, when dusk came and she passed a cottage in the woods with a sign on the fence stating “Tourists Welcome,” she slammed on the brakes. “Let’s go back and try it. I’ve always wanted to stay in one of those places.” For a woman accustomed to the finest accommodations that America and Europe had to offer, the novelty of spending a night in a private house by the side of the road was seductive.3

  The young couple who owned the cottage immediately admitted to their guests that the plumbing wasn’t fully installed yet so there would only be enough hot water for one bath. It didn’t matter, the travelers assured them. In her book, Lorena recalled telling Eleanor, after they retired to their tiny bedroom with its lone double bed, “You’re the first lady, so you get the bath.” Lorena then described a playful scene that readers familiar only with the public persona of Eleanor Roosevelt may have trouble envisioning. “Mrs. Roosevelt started thrusting her long, slender fingers in my direction. I was so ticklish that all she had to do to reduce me to a quivering mass of pulp was to point her fingers at me.” A few moments later, the first lady, still in an impetuous mood, had Lorena “writhing out of control” among the pillows and blankets.4

  Another memorable moment evolved when Eleanor and Lorena stopped at the Shrine of Sainte Anne de Beaupré, the Roman Catholic memorial known for the mountain of crutches and canes left behind by the legions of pilgrims who have gone there in search of healing miracles. But when Eleanor and Lorena tried to enter the church, they hit a snag. To enter the Romanesque basilica, women had to have their heads covered; Eleanor happened to have wrapped a white silk scarf around her hair that day, but Lorena was bareheaded. Hick had a hat in the roadster, but they were a mile away from the parking lot and none too eager to walk that distance, and back again, just to get a hat. When she couldn’t think of an immediate solution, Lorena became frustrated—this was precisely the kind of incident that could send her into an emotional tailspin. Fortunately, Eleanor reacted very differently. Like a magician, the first lady—with a playfully theatrical flair—extracted a white lace handkerchief from the depths of her huge pocket book and adroitly tied knots in each of the four corners and, with a fanciful flourish of her hands and a coquettish grin on her face, produced a few hairpins to secure the makeshift hat on the top of Lorena’s head. Voila! Problem solved. In addition to getting the women into the church, ER’s whimsical creation also produced a memorable image that neither woman would soon forget; Lorena finished her telling of the anecdote by focusing on Eleanor: “I must have looked funny, for I can still see her, laughing until she cried!”5

  When the roadster reached the Gaspé Peninsula, looped by a scenic highway where beetling precipices alternate with craggy beaches, the motorists felt like they’d stepped halfway around the world. “The whole landscape and atmosphere were those of a French countryside,” Eleanor wrote in her memoirs. “The only road was dirt, frequented by comparatively few people.” Neither woman had any complaints about the sense of isolation, though, as they both were pleased to have a respite from the crowds they were used to in New York and Washington. Basking in their temporary freedom, they picnicked in the woods, swam on secluded beaches, and took walks in the twilight. Another of their daily rituals was to lie in bed reading aloud from the books they had brought along.6

  Just how remote the peninsula was came home to them when they stopped to admire a tiny church along the road and accepted the parish priest’s invitation to join him for lunch. It was only after they had consumed the freshly caught trout that the generous cleric asked his guests their names. The first lady later wrote, “When I gave my name as Eleanor Roosevelt, he asked: ‘Are you relation to Theodore Roosevelt? I was a great admirer of his.’” Eleanor smiled and said, “‘Yes, I am his niece.’” The fact that another Roosevelt was now residing in the White House—and that he had quite an adventurous wife—had not yet penetrated this part of the continent, and ER saw no need to inform him of that fact.7

  In several French Canadian villages, indeed it was not Eleanor who attracted attention, but her car. “My Buick convertible was so much admired that when I came out of church one Sunday,” Eleanor later wrote, “most of the male population of the village was patting it and even the old curé came up and asked me about it and seemed awed at the idea that any woman should own anything so expensive and beautiful.” The men were so eager to examine and admire the car, in fact, that none of them bothered to ask just who that female car owner might be—or who she was married to.8

  Only when Eleanor and Lorena crossed the border into Maine at Presque Isle did their idyllic getaway come to an end. ER wrote that, “To our horror, word of our coming had preceded us.” For two travelers intent upon maintaining their privacy, that afternoon’s “horror” came in the form of the townspeople putting together an impromptu parade. For as the roadster—with its convertible top down—entered town and moved unwittingly down the main street with a sunburned Eleanor behind the wheel and an equally sunburned Lorena sitting next to her, crowds of children suddenly appeared on the sidewalks, waving flags and cheering as if the women were conquering heroines returning from the Crusades.9

  So much for anonymity.

  As soon as the roadster pulled inside the White House gates on July 28, Franklin immediately scheduled a private dinner with Eleanor and Hick so he, in his
wife’s words, “could hear the whole story while it was fresh and not dulled by repetition.” It’s hard to say who enjoyed that reunion dinner more—the returning adventurers or the president himself. Certainly Eleanor and Lorena relished reliving the magical moments of their carefree holiday. Eleanor’s favorite anecdote was about the priest not knowing the name of America’s new president; Lorena’s was the first lady getting such a kick out of spending the night in a private “tourist home.” That latter tale became FDR’s anecdote of choice as well, Lorena writing, “Oh, how he enjoyed that story!” That wasn’t the only time that evening that FDR threw back his great leonine head and laughed uproariously; Lorena wrote, “Several times the president’s great, booming laugh filled the dining room.”10

  Although the amusing moments were sheer delight that the women savored for the rest of their lives, the aspect of their escapade that elevated it from a pleasurable getaway to a personal triumph was the anonymity that the secluded northern woods and isolated beaches had offered them. For Eleanor, the trip proved her contention that she still could, with some thought and planning (she had replaced her District of Columbia license tags with New York ones for the trip), remain independent and even preserve a measure of true privacy; for Lorena, the enormous value she placed on their successfully evading both the public and the press was poignantly captured in how she chose to title the chapter that she wrote about the holiday: “Incognito.”

  Two

  SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1933

  “Deeply & Tenderly”

  After the Roosevelt administration was in place, editors at the Associated Press continually pressed Lorena to provide them with inside information about the first lady and the president, even though she was no longer assigned to cover Washington. Not willing to jeopardize her friendship with Eleanor, Lorena refused to produce the information that her editors demanded. When Eleanor saw the pressure that Lorena was under (and realizing it would grow even more intense when Anna’s troubled marriage and romantic relationship with John Boettiger became public knowledge), she contacted her close friend Harry Hopkins, head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and persuaded him to offer Lorena a job as chief investigator for the agency.