Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  “I’m sure the FDR Library would be interested,” he said, not quite able to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Shall I mention them to Elizabeth?”

  “If you like,” Hick said, pretending indifference. But she felt she had taken the first step on a journey with an inevitable destination, and she was frightened. That night, she took a box of letters to bed with her and read until she fell asleep. Giving them up would be like giving up Eleanor herself. But the next morning, putting the box away again, she knew she had to do something. If she had died in the night…

  Two days later, Ray came for dinner: pork chops Marsala with wild rice and fresh asparagus, which Hick could still prepare with confidence. Like a small boy with a secret, he brought up the letters the moment they sat down to eat. “Elizabeth says she’d be delighted to have them for the library.” He gave a special emphasis to “delighted.”

  “Well,” Hick said, with a feeling of resignation, “it’s something to think about. Help yourself to rice. Oh, and tell me, please—how is Esther’s project coming along?” Eleanor’s longtime friend, Esther Lape, was possessed by the idea of getting the Nobel Committee to posthumously award the Peace Prize to ER, and everybody at the library was pitching in to help her compile the dossier.

  “Esther’s working hard,” Ray said, “although, of course, it’s a massive job. Likely to take years.” He paused. “But I wonder—have you heard that Alice Longworth…”

  Ray’s light-hearted recital of Roosevelt gossip carried them through dinner to their coffee and dessert. They were enjoying pears flambé with crushed gingersnaps and ice cream when he propped his elbows on the table and went back to the letters.

  “You know, Hick, if you’re concerned that there’s anything… well, a little too personal in them, you can have them sealed. Personal about yourself, I mean.”

  “Sealed?” Hick asked, and immediately wondered why she hadn’t thought of that herself.

  “Sure. That happens all the time with sensitive material. Just tell Elizabeth that you’d like them locked up for a period after your death—ten years, twenty, thirty. She’ll see that the items are properly accessed and conserved but won’t make them available to researchers until the date you’ve named.”

  “Ah,” Hick murmured, with relish. “Of course.” She would love to see Joe Lash’s face when he discovered that he could have access to the letters—ten years after she was gone.

  Ray smiled. “I’ve read your new book, Reluctant First Lady. It’s quite charming, and, of course, it’s now part of the collection as well. I believe we have two copies.” He gave her a direct look. “But like your little biography of Mrs. R, it was written for young readers. I’m sure it tells only a part of the story.”

  Hick nodded. Yes, only a part of the story, a small part. The rest of the story, the real story, had to be left out—although if someone were to study the letters, the real story could be easily inferred. Neither she nor Eleanor had been very discreet.

  Ray put down his coffee cup. “Both Elizabeth and I think it would be helpful if you could write a memoir to accompany the letters. Something that might fill a few gaps in the record.”

  Fill a few gaps in the record. She thought about that for a moment. “The memoir. It could be sealed, too?”

  “Of course. For as long as the letters are sealed or longer, if that seems right to you. As to length, that would be entirely up to you. But your relationship with Mrs. R goes back before FDR’s first term as governor. And you are a writer, a damned good one, too. If you feel like it, you could write about the whole course of your friendship. A kind of intimate perspective. Later researchers might find that interesting.”

  I’ll just bet they would, Hick thought, and picked up the coffee pot. “Would you like another cup of coffee?”

  A week later, she sat down at her typewriter.

  Part One

  1928

  CHAPTER ONE

  Hello

  I met Mrs. Roosevelt in 1928, the year that Herbert Hoover beat the pants off Al Smith.

  I was the only woman reporter working for the Associated Press in the New York bureau that year, and I’d been handed a plum assignment: the Democratic ticket. (Not the plum assignment: that was Hoover, who was a sure bet to win but about as remarkable as a dead fish.) The wire services didn’t fall all over themselves to hire women, but after we got the franchise in 1920 and the political parties began to lobby for the women’s vote, the AP did what they had to do. They hired one woman. Me.

  At first, the guys in the AP newsroom on the sixth floor at 383 Madison Avenue made me feel as welcome as a stone in a shoe. If they could’ve, they would’ve parked me on the society pages. But I had sixteen years of reporting experience to my credit—the Minneapolis Tribune, the Milwaukee Sentinel, the Battle Creek Journal, the New-York Tribune, the New York Daily Mirror—and I wasn’t shy about slugging it out for news assignments. I had spent the previous year at the Mirror, stirring the usual tabloid stew of sin, sex, and sensationalism, so when Bill Chapin, the AP day city editor, assigned me to the Democrats and Tammany Hall, it was like coming home. I got out my notebook, put on my walking shoes, and went to work.

  I was thirty-five that year, and in my prime. I was tall for a woman (five-foot-eight), deep-voiced, broad-shouldered, hefty. At work, I wore dark skirts and jackets, with white blouses (sometimes maybe a little rumpled or coffee-stained), bright silk scarves, low heels. An AP colleague once described me as “a big girl in a casual raincoat with a wide tailored hat, with translucent blue eyes and a mouth vivid with lipstick,” adding that I managed to be “hard-boiled and soft-hearted at the same time.”

  That was cute. But yes, that was me: hard-boiled, soft-hearted. I could crack wise with the guys, but I liked nothing better than a human interest story with plenty of heart. And on the Democrat beat, Mrs. Roosevelt was the story with heart.

  It went this way. New York’s four-term governor Al Smith, the “Happy Warrior,” was the Democratic candidate for president, and a political featherweight named Franklin Delano Roosevelt was aiming at the governorship. But Herbert Hoover was campaigning to the triumphant drumbeat of Republican prosperity, promising a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage—just what the American voter, always a sucker for a slogan, wanted to hear. The smart money was on Hoover.

  In the state race, Roosevelt wasn’t raising many hopes, either. He was a rich kid from Groton and Harvard with aristocratic good looks, a mellifluous voice, and sterling connections by blood and marriage to Teddy Roosevelt. The word around the AP office was that Roosevelt had idolized his Cousin Teddy and planned to follow his road to the White House, even going so far as to marry Eleanor, TR’s favorite niece but definitely no ravishing beauty. FDR (as he was called) had served as assistant secretary of the Navy under Wilson and enjoyed a brief flurry of celebrity in 1920, on another doomed Democratic ticket: James Cox for president, FDR for vice president. FDR might’ve been a candidate for the presidency in 1924, but that golden dream dimmed when he was crippled by polio. Now, he wore ten-pound metal leg braces and spent months of every year paddling around at Warm Springs, a derelict health resort he’d bought in Georgia. The boys in the AP newsroom, usually pretty good judges of character, wrote him off as a well-heeled dilettante who had a boatload of charm but lacked the political muscle to steer the ship.

  But Roosevelt was Al Smith’s fair-haired boy and a Tammany Hall candidate, which made him very interesting copy, especially when you added in the connections to TR and the Oyster Bay Republican Roosevelts. So I spent my days loitering in the lobby at the Democratic Party headquarters in the General Motors Building at Broadway and Fifty-Seventh, picking through the flotsam and jetsam of corridor gossip. And the more I heard, the more my gut told me that the story behind this story was the candidate’s wife, who was doing something political wives just didn’t do. She was campaigning for the ticket. Openly, with enthusiasm.

  Which, all by itself, was news. In Albany, Mrs. Al Smi
th hid behind her tea table in the governor’s mansion and was off limits to the press. In Washington, Mrs. Calvin Coolidge (formerly a teacher in a school for the deaf) had been ordered by her husband not to talk to reporters. Urged to speak at a press luncheon, the story went, she had resorted to sign language—a perfect metaphor for muzzled political wives who were told to smile and keep their mouths shut.

  Mrs. Roosevelt was an anomaly, and as a reporter, I loved anomalies, especially when the anomaly was a woman doing something that made her stand out as something other than a wife, a mother, and a clotheshorse. This woman went out on the campaign trail, edited the Women’s Democratic News, wrote magazine articles on women in politics, taught at an exclusive girls’ school, and, with two friends, owned a furniture factory on the Roosevelt estate. A furniture factory? Now, there was an anomaly for you. But she had a conventional side, as well: she was the mother of four boys and a girl, grown or away at school, and a grandmother.

  It had been my experience that the fastest way to a candidate was through the candidate’s secretary. In this case, the candidate’s wife had a secretary—Malvina Thompson—so I knocked on her door and invited her for a late-afternoon coffee and sweet.

  We met at Veniero’s, on East Eleventh between First and Second Avenue, over a slice of Italian cheesecake for her and a Napoleon for me. (I knew even then that I was diabetic but didn’t quite believe it. Yet.) I had stumbled onto Veniero’s a decade before, during a short-lived stint on the old New-York Tribune during the uneasy days before the United States entered the war in 1917. I had come to the Tribune from the Milwaukee Sentinel, fired with the hope of getting credentialed as a foreign war correspondent and heading for France and the front. That’s where the action was. That’s where I wanted to be.

  But the Trib editor laughed at me when I told him what I wanted to do. “Just who the hell do you think you are?” he demanded, loud enough to be heard across the newsroom. “Stick to your knittin’, girlie. Females don’t cover wars.” Laughter stuttered from one typewriter to another as the reporters, male to a man, shared the joke.

  In my anger at yet more evidence of bias against female journalists, I spouted off to the editor and got the boot for insubordination. But I had found Veniero’s. When I returned to the Minneapolis Tribune, I missed its Napoleons. Now, a decade later, I was glad to be back.

  Malvina Thompson was a dark-haired, firm-jawed woman in her mid-thirties, well-informed and politically savvy. By the time our order appeared, we were Tommy and Hick, trading Tammany Hall gossip and shaking our heads over Mayor Jimmy Walker’s latest grubby, greed-stained scandal. I asked a few wary questions about what was going on at Democratic headquarters, using her answers like channel markers showing whether she’d give me access or block my way. It didn’t take me long to decide that Mrs. Roosevelt’s secretary knew the score, all of them. She was a source worth investing in.

  Tommy asked me questions, too—where I’d been before I got to the AP, how I felt about women in politics, how I felt about the ticket, about FDR, about Mrs. R. Before I finished my Napoleon, I’d realized that she was sizing me up, vetting me in order to decide just how much access I should have. Each of us was using the other in the way we had learned to operate in the political universe. Neither of us could know, then, that we would be steadfast friends for as long as we lived, Tommy loving and defending her boss in one way while I loved and defended her in quite another.

  Sweets finished, we both lit cigarettes and leaned back, regarding each other while the conversations from nearby tables eddied around us like smoke and the rumble of the Second Avenue El rippled the coffee in our cups.

  “I think,” Tommy said finally, “that you ought to meet the Boss.”

  The Boss. I had to smile at that. “You think so?” I didn’t want to seem too eager.

  She was slightly miffed. “Hey, she’s doing good things. Those are her editorials you’ve been reading in the Women’s Democratic News.” She narrowed her eyes. “You have been reading them, haven’t you? And her Redbook article? You need to read that, if you want to know what she stands for.”

  “I read it,” I said. The article was titled “Women Must Learn to Play the Game as Men Do.” Not even Mrs. Roosevelt’s stiff, pedantic style could mask her fuming outrage. “I agree with her basic premise. Women in politics are being exploited.” Women were wooed into politics, Mrs. Roosevelt had written, because men needed their organizational talents and coveted their votes. But the minute a woman reached for real political power, her hands were slapped and she was sent back to her kitchen. Mrs. Roosevelt was not a good writer, by any measure. But she had plenty of passion and the chutzpah to go with it. That was what I admired.

  “It goes beyond politics, of course,” Tommy said. “Mrs. R is committed to ending exploitation for all women. An eight-hour day, better working conditions, the right to strike—”

  “How many hours a day do you work for her?” I countered, amused. I’d heard the stories. “Twelve? Fourteen? Nights? Weekends?” Tommy was rumored to be married to a high school teacher named Frank Schneider. But nobody had ever seen her husband and she never seemed to leave the office before nine or ten at night. He was widely believed to be a fiction.

  She had the grace to chuckle. “I do it because I want to. Because I believe in her.” She became earnest. “You’ll see, Hick. The Boss is just about the biggest woman in the world. Big dreams. Big heart.”

  I shrugged with a practiced show-me cynicism. “If you say so. When?”

  “I’ll set it up.”

  “Exclusive?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  “Before the election,” I said firmly. Because the Happy Warrior and Franklin Roosevelt were going to lose the election. There would be no point in talking to FDR’s wife after the Democratic ticket was shot down. And if he won (he wouldn’t), she would be the governor-elect’s wife. Muzzled, off-limits, out of the picture. If she had anything to say, she’d have to learn sign language. I had no idea then how wrong I was. How could I? She was an anomaly. There had never been anyone like her before.

  “I’ll give you a call,” Tommy said and stubbed out her cigarette.

  The AP political reporter and the Democratic political operative smiled at each other with a cautious respect. Then we gathered our things and went back out into the noise and hubbub and hurly-burly that was East Eleventh Street.

  Ah, New York, New York, how I loved it!

  At the end of the Twenties, the Big Apple had it all. Wheeling and dealing on Wall Street, Park Avenue for puttin’ on the Ritz, Delmonico’s for cocktails and dinner, followed by the theater on Broadway or the Cotton Club and the Apollo and the Savoy in Harlem. The Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park, the Plaza Hotel and Carnegie Hall and the Met. Yankee Stadium and Ebbets Field for baseball and Greenwich Village for intimate parties, where we played phonograph records of Bessie Smith’s blues and sang Ma Rainey’s “Prove It On Me”: Went out last night with a crowd of my friends. They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men.

  But it was also the Bowery and Chinatown and the Lower East Side and Mulberry Bend and Penitentiary Row and Bandits’ Roost. And sweatshop workers and street urchins and prostitutes, all dolled up, and drunken bums on the down-and-out. Prohibition had been the law since 1920, but the Volstead Act was a joke. All it took was a bottle and two chairs to make a speakeasy, and there were thirty thousand of them in the city, all under the great, greasy Democratic thumb of Tammany Hall. The good thing was that booze was as easy to get as water. The bad thing was that you never knew what the hell you were drinking. You could order Dewar’s or Gordon’s at one of the dollar-a-glass clubs with brass rails and crystal chandeliers and get pretty much the same poison you got at the dime-a-shot dumps along the wharfs.

  As a working reporter, I saw it all, every day, every night, and there was plenty to see, plenty to love, plenty to hate. Which suited me, because I loved and hated with equal passion and had a t
ough time observing the AP’s cardinal rule: Stay out of the story. I had grown up in tiny railroad towns on the featureless prairies of South Dakota, where the wind-worn people talked only of crops and the weather and never saw a new face or heard a strange voice from one end of the month to the other.

  In New York, I sometimes simply stood and gawked. The city’s energies were hectic, electric, frenetic, chaotic. The cacophonous streets were packed curb to curb with automobiles and taxis, bicycles weaving crazily among the electric trolleys and double-decker busses. The Empire State Building was pushing up the sky at Fifth Avenue and West Thirty-Fourth, and the New York Central Building would soon straddle Park Avenue like a gray stone colossus capped with glowing gold and copper. In the Times Square district, Paramount had recently opened its thirty-six-hundred-seat movie palace, with a grand Wurlitzer theater organ that shivered my bones and turned my insides to a quivering jelly.

  Those rip-roaring days were good for women, and I’ve always had a yen for women who aren’t afraid to go for broke. The year before, Leonora Speyer had won the Pulitzer for poetry, following Amy Lowell and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Helen Wills would hold the Number One world ranking in women’s tennis for eight years, not losing a set from 1927 to 1933. Fourteen-year-old ice skater Sonja Henie won her first Olympic gold in 1928. That same year, seventeen-year-old daredevil Elinor Smith became the first pilot—the only one still, so far as I know—to fly a plane under all four East River bridges. Amelia Earhart went farther and faster, becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, as a passenger in a Fokker piloted by two men. When I interviewed her, she set her jaw and said firmly, “Next time, I’m gonna do it myself. Alone”

  I set my own records in those days, too, and I was proud of them. I was the first woman reporter in the AP’s flagship office. I was the first woman political journalist in the country. I was the first woman bylined on the front page of the New York Times, with a story about the sinking of the steamship Vestris. (I beat all the guys to the dock and got a survivor’s story before the others figured out what was happening.) I was the first AP reporter assigned to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and the only woman. What’s more, my stories were carried around the country via the wire service’s nearly fourteen hundred subscriber newspapers. On any given day, a quarter to a third of them would be carrying a story with my byline. “The AP’s front-page girl,” they called me. I resented “girl,” but I damn well earned the praise and the raise—to sixty-five dollars a week—that came with it. People knew my name. Lorena Hickok was somebody.