Empty Without You

by Roger Streitmatter

  Ever devotedly,

  E.R.

  [February 12]

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Washington

  Hick darling, A quiet day, which was just as well! Lots of work, & at 10:30 a visit from Gov. [Paul] Pearson of the Virgin Islands. He’s doing a swell job & I think we’ll fly over for a day with him [during the Puerto Rico trip]!

  The Rector [from Harvard] wrote me to-day that John had an attack, very mild appendisitis [sic] so he’ll probably have to be operated on in this vacation. I hope he gets no acute attack before that.

  I lunched to-day with the “little Cabinet”49 & returned to work till 4 when I went to lay a wreath with F.D.R. on the Lincoln Memorial then home & a bunch for tea & then the last big dinner & music.

  I love you dear one deeply & tenderly & it is going to be a joy to be to-gether again, just a week now. I can’t tell you how precious every minute with you seems both in retrospect & in prospect. I look at you long as I write—the photograph has an expression I love, soft & a little whimsical but then I adore every expression. Bless you darling.

  A world of love,

  E.R.

  And will you be my valentine?

  MARCH 1934

  A Holiday Gone Bad

  As Lorena was driving toward Washington to rendezvous with Eleanor and prepare for their trip to the Caribbean, Time magazine dealt her a crushing blow. The story as a whole was positive, complete with a flattering cover photo of Harry Hopkins and an equally flattering one of Lorena on an inside page. The lengthy paragraph about the country’s chief investigator of relief programs, however, was not so complimentary: “His [Hopkins’s] chief field representative and investigator is Miss Lorena Hickok, who for eight years worked for the Associated Press. She is a rotund lady with a husky voice, a peremptory manner, baggy clothes. In her day one of the country’s best female newshawks, she was assigned to Albany to cover the New York Executive Mansion where she became fast friends with Mrs. Roosevelt. Since then she has gone around a lot with the first lady, up to New Brunswick and down to Warm Springs. Last July Mr. Hopkins, who is a great admirer of Mrs. Roosevelt, hired Miss Hickok and now she travels all over the country using her nose-for-news to report on relief conditions. Last week when it was announced that Mrs. Roosevelt planned to visit Puerto Rico in March, it became known that Miss Hickok would also go along to look into relief work there.”1

  Lorena was livid. As an old-style newswoman, she could not understand what her girth had to do with the country’s relief work—or her voice, or her manner, or her wardrobe. She also was concerned what the Washington harpies might do with the suggestion that she and Eleanor were fast friends—whatever that meant. And besides, the magazine couldn’t even get its basic facts right—she’d worked for AP for five years, not eight; she’d been assigned to go to Puerto Rico first, so Eleanor actually “would go along” with her. The article unleashed a verbal tirade from Hick. Her first attacks were on the relief administrators she blamed for passing on the details to the magazine. “Believe me,” she wrote Hopkins, “the next state administrator who lets out any publicity on me is going to get his head cracked!” She had strong words for journalists as well. “I’m so fed up with publicity I want to kick every reporter I see,” she raged to Hopkins’s secretary. “I suppose I am ‘a rotund lady with a husky voice’ and ‘baggy clothes,’ but I honestly don’t believe my manner is ‘peremptory.’ Why the Hell CAN’T they leave me alone?”2

  The article put the emotionally volatile Lorena into a decidedly foul mood by the time she and the first lady began their trip—Eleanor going to the Caribbean to show the administration’s commitment to Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, Lorena going to investigate relief programs. Nor was the first friend’s attitude helped by the fact that what she and Eleanor originally had envisioned as a reprise of the idyllic vacation of the previous summer had evaporated; four women reporters would now join Eleanor and Lorena to provide daily news coverage of the first lady’s activities. A good sense of how Lorena was feeling about the trip emerged in a letter that Eleanor wrote her daughter on the first day of the trip. The first lady had booked a private drawing room for Hick and herself on the midnight train from Washington to Miami where they would depart for Puerto Rico. The conductor asked if the first lady would autograph a timetable for him, and Eleanor graciously agreed. But according to Eleanor’s letter to Anna, as the conductor closed the door to the compartment, Lorena barked—not the least bit graciously—“I hope he chokes.”3

  By the time they reached the Caribbean, however, Lorena had cooled off. Her mood may have changed at least partly because of the view that opened up to the women as they looked out the window of their Pan American bi-plane; the tranquil setting would have soothed any soul. The dazzling blue sky, an azure sandbar protruding gently from the crystal clear water, reefs in shades of lavender, rose, and turquoise just below the surface of the shimmering Caribbean—a seascape straight out of paradise. To make the moment complete, one of the reporters later would recall, as the shadow of the clipper scudded across the water below, a fire-fish leaped from the sea to catch the glint from the early morning sun.4

  Once on land, the first lady did all she could to see that the official trip doubled as a tropical holiday in celebration of Lorena’s forty-first birthday. In San Juan, Eleanor arranged for the two of them to stay in a private bedroom in the magnificent seventeenth century La Fortaleza mansion (complete with marble floors, gold-encrusted ceilings, and mahogany staircases); in St. Thomas, Eleanor arranged that she and Hick slept on the third floor of the nineteenth century Government House palace. In both cities, the four reporters stayed in hotels far away from Eleanor and Lorena. The first lady found other ways to spend time alone with her friend as well—dining privately in their room on several evenings, swimming in the ocean, and skipping rope on the beach in the early morning while the reporters were still sleeping.

  Only when Eleanor wanted the reporters for her own purposes (often with Lorena’s counsel) were they summoned to appear and document specific activities. On the flight from Miami to San Juan, for example, Lorena suggested that Eleanor add another notch to her ever-lengthening belt of press innovations by conducting what the reporter-cum-publicist dubbed “the first ocean-flying press conference” in the history of American journalism. The reporters obediently accommodated, turning the event into a story that American newspapers trumpeted across page one the next morning.5

  On another occasion, the reporters dutifully cooperated when the first lady suddenly saw the chance to create an impromptu photo opportunity. She had insisted on seeing the worst slum in all of San Juan, and as she walked through the narrow streets, a crowd of clamoring men, women, and children began to form behind her—calling out “La Presidenta! La Presidenta!”—with a few barking dogs and snorting pigs following on the fringes. Suddenly Eleanor stopped beside a muddy rut and puddle of stagnant water in the middle of the street, swarming with flies. She huddled with the reporters for a moment, asking if she could direct their photographer—all four of their news organizations had sent one man, Sam Schulman, to take photos that they all shared—to document the scene. When the reporters agreed, Eleanor called out, “Sammy, I want you to take a photo of this. I want the American people to see what it’s really like here!” Later that day, Schulman sent his film on a flight back to Miami, and the next morning newspapers all over the country showed not only the squalor of Puerto Rico but also the first lady, in a crisp white dress, standing smack dab in the middle of the filth, the sludge, and the human suffering.6

  Those were only two of a continuing stream of events that ultimately turned the first lady’s trip into a public relations bonanza. The New York Herald Tribune, for one, carried stories about Eleanor fifteen days solid, with most of them on the front page and several accompanied by photos—ER conducting her in-flight press conference, ER visiting a thatch-roofed school, ER addressing the first mass meeting of women in the history of the Virgin Islands
. With Lorena on hand to help with the writing, Eleanor also crafted several public statements that portrayed her husband in a glowing light; one front-page story quoted her as saying to the people of San Juan, “As long as my husband is in office, you have a friend in Washington.” Also with Lorena’s counsel, Eleanor adroitly—though sometimes disingenuously—dodged tough questions; when asked to comment on the dicey issue (then as well as today) of Puerto Rican independence, Eleanor said, “I make no recommendations. I leave politics to my husband.”7

  On a personal level, however, Eleanor and Lorena’s trip to the Caribbean ultimately fell far short of a triumph—at least for the more temperamental woman. What propelled Lorena into an emotional whirlwind was, as so often in the past, the press coverage.

  For most of the trip, Lorena had successfully avoided being in the public eye. But on the return trip from San Juan to Miami, a tropical storm forced the Pan American airliner to land in Haiti. When reporting on the bumpy flight, Emma Bugbee of the Herald Tribune wrote—in a page-one story—that Eleanor was unperturbed but that Lorena became so “squeamish” and “nervous” that the first lady had to put down her knitting and “play a guessing game” with her friend—as if Hick were a child. Lorena was not only irritated by that reference but also by the fact that Bugbee repeatedly referred to her as “Mrs. Hickok.” Seeing the story as another in a long series of instances when the press focused more attention on her than she wanted or deserved, Lorena began to sulk.8

  Lorena’s frustration escalated into rage after the trip ended. Spending the last week of her respite in Washington, Lorena looked through the stack of newspapers at the White House to see exactly how the national press had covered the trip. Lorena soon discovered the single image that the newspapers had found most compelling was the one of Eleanor standing amid the squalor of the San Juan slum. Showcasing the first lady reaching out to the Puerto Rican peasants was important because it focused public attention on the economic deprivation on the island, Lorena knew, but what she also realized when she saw the stack of newspapers was that the photo captured not only the first lady—but also the first friend. That meant that the photo of her spread all over the country would alert thousands of people to her friendship with Eleanor—exactly what Lorena did not want! Nor did it help that Hick’s image was not exactly flattering. Eleanor stood tall and pristine in her long-sleeved white dress, white hat, white shoes, white stockings, white purse, and white gloves. Slumped to one side, Lorena was not only bareheaded, bare-armed, and bare-legged but also wearing a dress that had a flamboyant tie flowing down the front—the more newspapers Lorena saw it in, the more that tie looked like something a clown would wear to the circus rather than something an official of the United States government should have been wearing on the job. Lorena grew angrier and angrier as she started to count up how many papers had published the photo. There she was standing within arm’s length of the first lady (none of the newspaper women was anywhere to be seen) in the Washington Herald and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Birmingham News and Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle. And the proliferation of this particular image could not be attributed to some Time magazine reporter or to Emma Bugbee or to any of those other irresponsible reporters who, in Lorena’s estimation, were now dominating the American press. This time the blame rested solely on the shoulders of the first lady herself. Eleanor was the one, after all, who had gone out of her way to instruct Sammy Schulman to take the photo, even though she knew full well—indeed, better than anyone else on Earth—how much Lorena absolutely loathed being in the public eye.

  So as Lorena’s mind churned over the consequences of the trip, she saw the Eleanor–Lorena scorecard as far from even. Because Lorena had suggested that the first lady join her on the trip to the Caribbean, Eleanor had received a surfeit of positive press that would further enhance her public image. In return, because Eleanor had suggested that Schulman take the photo in the San Juan slum, Lorena would have to struggle even harder to shed the public mantle of the first lady’s “fast friend” from which she, for more than a year now, had been desperately attempting to distance herself.

  In short, by the end of the Caribbean trip, Lorena did not see it as anything remotely close to the tropical getaway that she had envisioned in celebration of her birthday. Nor would she soon forget the disappointment. Although the biography that she would write about Eleanor three decades later contained thirteen pages on their 1933 holiday to French Canada, it did not so much as mention the trip to the Caribbean.

  Four

  MARCH–JULY 1934

  “To Put My Arms Around You”

  The four months that followed Eleanor and Lorena’s ill-fated holiday in the Caribbean were marked by a dizzying mixture of highs and lows. On the one hand, Eleanor repeatedly spoke of longing to kiss and hold Lorena in her arms; the first lady even pressed a rose inside one letter before sending it. This also was the period during which Eleanor spoke wistfully of spending her old age with Lorena and of wanting to buy a special corner cupboard to furnish the home that she dreamed that they would someday share.

  On the other hand, the correspondence during these same months was dotted with references to Lorena’s struggle with emotional instability—brought on partly by physical exhaustion and a near-fatal automobile accident, but clearly influenced as well by the simmering uncertainty regarding the future of her relationship with Eleanor. In April, Lorena cried, “Oh my dear, love me a lot! I need it!” The next month, Eleanor hinted that she was finding Hick’s volatile nature to be discomfiting, saying that she was tiring of the “bad things” that Lorena’s temperamental nature did to her. The frequency of such unsettling comments accelerated in the early summer, with Lorena pleading, “I must pull myself up. But how?” and Eleanor cautioning Hick to be weary of the “mental and emotional depression” that habitually plagued her.

  As Lorena and Eleanor prepared to meet for the West Coast holiday that ultimately would prove to be even more disquieting than the one in the Caribbean, Lorena’s words suggested that her emotional state had escalated beyond depression and that she was teetering on the edge of suicide. “I wonder if it will be like this when I die—a feeling of remoteness from everything,” Lorena wrote. “Oh, my dear, I’m so sick of the whole miserable business!”

  As Lorena struggled with the emotional demons raging inside of her, it was left to Eleanor to provide stability to the relationship. In keeping with that role, the first lady ended more than one of her letters by expressing her longing “to put my arms around you.”

  Lorena’s destination after the Caribbean trip was the Deep South, followed by a trip across Texas and into New Mexico and Arizona.

  [March 26]

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Washington

  Hick darling, I believe it gets harder to let you go each time, but that is because you grow closer. It seems as though you belonged near me, but even if we lived to-gether we would have to separate sometimes & just now what you do is of such value to the country that we ought not to complain, only that doesn’t make me miss you less or feel less lonely!

  After you left I took Tommy to the amaryllis show. Then went to see John,1 had a peace conference which was dull, lunched & spoke for the National Symphony Orchestra[,] went back to see John & came home with F.D.R. I spoke to him about CWA2 & he says the delay is mostly in state & locality but he thinks when he gets back another $50,000,000 will have to be allocated to H.H. [Harry Hopkins] to continue CWA thro’ May, but this of course you must not mention.

  Darling, I ache for you & wish I could be expecting you later. I will call you for I do feel as if those I loved were very far away—& always much love dear one,

  E.R.

  [March 29]

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Washington

  Hick darling, I am getting that hunted feeling—so much to do & no time in which to do it.

  Well, the opera was like a musical comedy last night & we all enjoyed it. Your boss was very fit
& more cheerful. Didn’t F. get walloped in both the House & Senate?3 Anna says F. was wild over the House vote. Louis just says “a defeat will be good for the young man” & “he must see more of the heads of committees”!

  My desk is piled high & I have to do articles to-morrow & speeches!

  Darling, I’d be a horrid companion if you were here but I wish you were. I miss you very much & love you very much, more & more deeply as the weeks roll on.

  Good night sweet, a world of love—

  E.R.

  [March 30]

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  Washington

  Hick darling, Having just taken an aspirin to beat a headache which has hung over me all day, I’ll busy myself thinking about pleasant things till it works so I’ll write to you! Sorry you had such a hard day.

  The day has been busy but not quite so bad! Spent 3/4 of an hour with a lady about the [cherry] blossom festival, then a photograph with Easter lilies, then mail till lunch. At 2:30 was presented with an invitation to attend the opening of some park & visit a girls’ camp & they gave me a lovely piece of homespun [handwoven] material! Isabella [Selmes Greenway] came at 2:15 & we talked over a difficult situation. [Speaker of the House of Representatives Henry] Rainey had been in & told Louis [Howe] she was the greatest influence against the administration & Louis stormed in to me & said if she wanted to defeat F. she could & would be responsible for his downfall.4 I laughed & said it was flattering that they felt a woman had gained that much influence in so short a time. She came in to tell me Rainey had said this to her plus the statement that F. was the greatest man who had ever lived & everyone must do just as he said on every subject! Doesn’t it seem unbelievable? Well I took her in & let her talk to Louis & then at 3:15 I took them for a drive & let him tell me all his worries. Since 4 I’ve worked, had tea & now I need to dress.