Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard about “Eleanor’s friends,” though. Nancy Cook was the executive secretary of the Women’s Division of the New York State Democratic Committee, where Mrs. Roosevelt worked as a volunteer. Cook lived with Marion Dickerman, who was the principal at Todhunter, where Mrs. Roosevelt taught. And there was another pair. Elizabeth Read was Eleanor’s personal lawyer; Read’s life partner Esther Lape (whom I had met and liked very much) was the founder of the League of Women Voters. Read and Lape shared a house on East Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village. “Female impersonators,” somebody had called them snidely. In the AP newsroom, male eyebrows went up at the mention of their names and waggled significantly when Mrs. Roosevelt’s name was added.

  Somebody put a nickel in the juke box, and the sandpaper sound of Louis Armstrong singing “You Rascal You” scraped through the crowd noise.

  “There’s a guy, too.” Reggie pursed his lips. “A real guy, I mean. A he-man.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I lifted my beer. This I hadn’t heard. “Who?”

  “Earl Miller. Sergeant Earl Miller. You go to the estate, you’re likely to run into him.”

  Sergeant Miller. “Military?”

  “State trooper. He was a guard at the mansion when the Happy Warrior was governor, and Roosevelt assigned him to Eleanor as driver and bodyguard. Big guy, Olympic boxer, circus acrobat, expert marksman. Reputation as a Casanova. Self-impressed, kind of a loudmouth.” He blew out a smoke ring. “I hear Eleanor is sweet on him.”

  “You’re kidding.” It sounded like there was a story here—one the wire services wouldn’t touch, of course. Which made it all the more tempting to the tabloids, as I knew from my days on the Mirror. I was even more intrigued. Whatever Mrs. Roosevelt was up to, I hoped for her sake that she was discreet.

  “Swear to God, Hick.” Reggie assumed an earnest expression. “Seen ’em together myself, his hand on her shoulder, friendly as you please. Miller lives in the governor’s mansion when the family is in Albany, goes down to Hyde Park with them on weekends, eats at the family table. Drives Eleanor on weekend trips, sometimes just the two of them. He’s some fifteen years younger than she is, and athletic. Goes horseback riding with her, teaches her to swim and shoot.” He leaned closer, confidential. “Servants like to talk, you know. They’re told to stay away from the press but that doesn’t keep them from handing out a little tittle-tattle now and then. They think the Roosevelt marriage is on the rocks. The two of them don’t sleep together, you know. Eleanor’s got this trooper guy and the governor’s got Missy LeHand.” He gave me an evil grin. “LeHand. Get it?”

  I got it.

  “And they’re all one big happy family.” He smirked. “Eleanor loves Missy like a sister, FDR likes having Earl around. Which makes it look innocent, if you know what I mean. Anyway, like I said, FDR’s got Missy, Eleanor’s got this trooper guy. Sauce for the gander, goose gets some, too.”

  There was a clatter of glasses at the bar and a couple of boozy male voices chimed in with Armstrong’s. I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you.

  “The tabloids would kill for that story,” I said. “Especially now, with the nominating convention coming up.”

  “Oh, you bet. There’s more, too.” Reggie leaned forward. “One of the maids in the mansion told me that FDR set Earl up with Missy, romance-wise, figuring he could kill two birds with one stone. Shoot down the rumors about himself and Missy and Earl and Eleanor, both at the same time. But Missy wouldn’t play, so he came up with another plan.” He leaned back, sucking on his cigarette. “Miller’s being married off. To his first wife’s cousin.”

  I stared at him.

  “Yeah, weird, you bet. The girl is seventeen, would you believe? Half Miller’s age, at least. The wedding will be at Val-Kill. And for a wedding present, FDR is giving Miller a piece of property next to Springwood.” He grinned and hoisted his beer. “How d’ya like them apples, Hick? A little quid for the old pro quo.”

  “Come on, now,” I scoffed. “I’ve heard that the governor likes to play games, but surely even he wouldn’t arrange a marriage just to quash a few nasty rumors.”

  Reggie turned serious. “Don’t you bet on it, Hick. Roosevelt may look like a lightweight, but the man is devious as the devil—and he’s got a sharp left hook. Comes out of nowhere when you’re not looking for it. When he hits, he hurts.”

  I would run into that sharp left later. It would come out of nowhere, too. And it would hurt. It would hurt like bloody hell.

  You rascal you.

  When I got off the train at the Hyde Park station the following weekend, I was met by a strikingly handsome, well-built state trooper wearing a dashing uniform, polished boots, and the name Sgt. Miller on his breast pocket. His dark hair was parted down the middle, Hollywood style, and Brylcreemed flat to his scalp. Not my cup of tea, but as he deftly installed me in the back seat of the state car, I could see why Mrs. Roosevelt might find the man attractive—if she did.

  “I understand that congratulations are in order,” I said casually as we turned onto the Albany Post Road.

  Startled, the sergeant glanced at me in the rear view mirror. “You heard?” He had a deep voice that resonated from somewhere in his chest.

  “One of my Albany newspaper friends told me.”

  “Figures. You guys are all over everything.” He chuckled. “Happy to say it’s a big step up.”

  I blinked. “Pardon?”

  “A big step up for me. Five prisons, two reformatories, three hundred-plus guards.” He grinned at me in the mirror. “Not that I can’t handle it. But it’s quite a change from driving the governor and the lady here and there.”

  “Ah,” I said, understanding. “A new job.” A new job and a marriage. Plus a piece of property. The idea of FDR as master of ceremonies suddenly seemed a lot more credible.

  He looked at me again, dark eyebrows raised. “Yeah. Director of Personnel, Department of Corrections. What’d you think?”

  “I thought it was a wedding. Aren’t you getting married?”

  “Christ.” His mouth tightened. “How’d you find out about that?”

  “Supposed to be a secret?” I countered.

  “From you reporters,” he growled. After a moment, he added, “Keep it under your hat, okay? Off the record. Completely.”

  “If you say so,” I said. And that’s all I could get out of him for the rest of the trip.

  A little later, we were turning between a pair of brownstone gateposts and down a long, maple-lined drive. At the end stood an impressive Georgian mansion with a semicircular porch, surrounded by a velvety green lawn that sloped down to a fringe of woods above the wide Hudson River. I felt an eclipsing sense of awe, tinged with a shadowy resentment. If the Depression had visited here, it had come and gone and left no signs of its passing. These Roosevelts, I thought, born to wealth and power and defined by their privilege and entitlement. Anything, everything they want is within easy reach, while the rest of us, we ordinary mortals, have to swim against the currents of fate.

  But as I got out of the car, I reminded myself that I was a reporter, not a moral philosopher. I was not part of the story. I was there to write a color feature, and that was that.

  We had tea in the dark-paneled, book-lined living room, which boasted two ornate marble fireplaces, each topped by a gilt-framed Roosevelt ancestor. Several photographs of Teddy Roosevelt were prominently displayed on a shelf, an elaborate parquet floor was covered with lush Oriental rugs, and the room commanded an imposing view of the Hudson. But the rich setting wasn’t what captured my attention as the hour went on. It was the relationship among the three Roosevelts that I found so fascinating. Domestic bliss? Forget about it.

  The governor was seated in the leather-backed chair to the left of the fireplace, Camel cigarette jauntily canted toward the ceiling in a nicotine-stained holder. Debonair and lively, he was full of questions about the Lindbergh kidnapping case I was currently covering and brimming
with political gossip about the investigation of New York’s dapper playboy mayor, Jimmy Walker. The special counsel the governor had appointed had returned fifteen specific counts of corruption in the mayor’s office, and it was shaping up to be a factor in the nominating process. FDR was under a great deal of pressure to remove Mayor Walker in the next month, before the Chicago Democratic convention.

  But if he did, he stood to lose the support of New York’s convention delegates, which he needed to win the nomination. I was covering the Walker investigation for the Associated Press, which—it now occurred to me—might be one of the reasons Louis Howe had invited me to Springwood. The governor had a hard choice to make, and it wouldn’t hurt to have the AP’s “front-page girl” in his pocket. But I had earned a reputation for being carefully objective when it came to my political reporting. I didn’t intend to give it up in return for a cup of tea and a dollop of FDR’s famous patronage.

  The governor’s mother was seated in a chair to the right of the fireplace, a silver-haired, imperial grande dame in a gray dress with a white lace collar and a single long rope of carefully graduated pearls. She offered me her hand with a faint smile and an air of noblesse oblige, letting me know that she was not in the habit of entertaining reporters but was making a special exception in my case.

  Mrs. Roosevelt came in a few moments after I sat down. She was neatly dressed in a blue sweater and beige corduroy skirt, her golden-brown hair snugged loosely back under a blue headband—and no hairnet. She greeted me with a warm smile and a low-voiced “Hello again, Miss Hickok.” She sat down on the sofa with her knitting—a child’s sweater, it looked like—occasionally glancing at me.

  But that was the last time she spoke. The conversation was entirely managed by her husband with an occasional assist from his mother, who presided over the sumptuous silver tea tray and chimed in now and then with choice bits of Roosevelt family lore. Some of what the elder Mrs. Roosevelt said was clearly designed to illustrate the political prowess of her son, on whom she obviously doted, but some just as clearly was meant to disparage her daughter-in-law.

  “If you’d take off that band and run a comb through your hair, dear, you’d look ever so much nicer,” she said, in a bladed whisper. And then, with a small smile, she regretted aloud that I couldn’t spend more time touring the Big House instead of driving over to see Val-Kill, the cottage that Mrs. Roosevelt shared with friends who smoked and wore neckties and trousers, quite the done thing in New York, she was sure, but just a little… oh, one might say, avant garde, here in Hyde Park, where the outlook was more… well, conservative.

  The younger Mrs. Roosevelt kept her eyes on her knitting, but her shoulders were hunched against the assault and I could see the flush climbing her cheeks. In her place, I would have fired back, but whatever her feelings, she kept them to herself. Still, the tension was uncomfortable enough—painful enough, really—to make me squirm, and I felt deeply sorry for her. She certainly wasn’t getting any help from FDR, who paid no attention to his mother’s poisoned darts, airily smiling and chatting, chatting and smiling, until at last he put down his teacup, rubbed his hands together, and announced that it was time for a tour of the estate.

  “We’ll do this together, Hick,” he said genially. “Just the two of us.”

  As if at a signal, Sergeant Miller and another man came into the room, made a sling of their joined arms, and carried FDR out to his specially built hand-operated Ford. I followed and climbed in beside him and we were off, followed by a second car, a blue convertible roadster driven by Mrs. Roosevelt, with Sergeant Miller beside her. Until they turned off on a different route, I could see them deep in conversation, and—by now deeply curious—I wondered.

  Was there now, had there ever been, anything serious, anything romantic, between them? Was Miller’s marriage the work of the governor, or perhaps of Louis Howe? What about that property, the wedding gift? And the supervisory job, which, as Miller himself put it, was a big step up? All designed to sweeten the pot? Good questions, the kind any experienced reporter would ask. And the tabloids had plenty of experienced reporters who knew how to craft a story out of gossip and hints and innuendo. If they began asking, there could be hell to pay.

  Behind the wheel, the governor was dee-lighted! (an exclamation, like his pince-nez, copied from his presidential cousin Teddy) by everything he saw. In the driver’s seat, his disability was invisible. He reveled in the power and mobility the car gave him, driving fast and expertly down the narrow lanes of the eleven-hundred-acre estate, proudly showing off his reforestation project, his soil conservation efforts, the farm fields that had been his father’s great pleasure, even the long, steep hill he had sledded down when he was a boy. Clearly, I was meant to be impressed by these wonders and to include them in my story.

  “Isn’t it grand?” he exulted, over and over, a boy’s gay glint in his eye. “Isn’t it all just grand, Hick?”

  Bemused, I echoed: “Grand, just grand, sir,” trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. I was remembering the misery I saw daily on the wretched faces of the jobless, the homeless, in the railroad yards, on the dirty streets of New York City. Looking around at the rolling landscape, the woods and rich fields, I thought that this landed patrician, whom I had just seen behaving with utter insensitivity toward his wife, could never fathom the depths of their poverty. How could a man with so much ever be the president of all the people at a time when so many had so little?

  At last we arrived at Val-Kill Cottage. It was a small, gray fieldstone house with white shutters and gables, set at the top of a gently sloping bank above a small stream and surrounded by a lawn and lovely woods. The cottage itself, Dutch Colonial, had the look of the last century, but as we drove over the log bridge and stopped next to the house, FDR told me with some pride that he had built it himself in 1926.

  “Did it for my Missis,” he said, “so she and her friends would have a place to get away from the city.” When the cottage was finished, he had handed it and several acres over to the “girls,” his wife and her two best friends, Nancy and Marion. “Now, they’ve built their furniture factory here.” He jerked a thumb at a building behind the cottage and shot me a grin. “Keeps ’em busy, y’know.” His chuckle was patronizing. “Keeps ’em off the streets and out of trouble. When my wife is here, I know where she is.” The little speech was more revealing than he’d intended it to be, I thought, remembering that his mother had given the newlyweds a townhouse adjoining hers. He had given Val-Kill to his wife and her friends. The two gifts might seem different, but were they?

  The governor left me and drove off. Mrs. Roosevelt came out to greet me, and I was struck by the remarkable change in her appearance. At the Big House, she had been stiff and sober-faced, clearly discomfited, even humiliated, by her mother-in-law’s barbed thrusts. Here, her face was lit by a wide smile that was reflected in her large, lovely eyes, their blue heightened by the blue of her headband. All at once she seemed young and eager, almost a different person.

  “Miss Hickok!” she cried, as if my arrival were a sudden surprise. “How good of you to come to the cottage! I want you to meet my very best friends, Nan and Marion. Ladies, this is Lorena Hickok. I’m sure you’ve seen her byline in the newspapers. She has a very long reach, you know. Her stories appear all over the country.”

  There was a subdued murmur of recognition and a round of handshaking. In trousers, a white shirt, and yes, a necktie, Nancy Cook was boyish, slender, and athletic-looking, with crisp brown hair and a come-and-go smile. She was a Jill of all trades, Mrs. Roosevelt said: a cabinetmaker and woodworker, a potter, a photographer, a jeweler. Marion Dickerman, tall and upright, mannish, was a study in opposites, in a dark suit and silk blouse, with severely cut dark hair, deep-set eyes, and a melancholy expression.

  Nancy and Marion had been in an exclusive relationship for more than a decade, I had heard, and I caught the subtle signs of their feeling for each other, the shoulders touching, the quick sidelong glance
, the secret smile. And yet Mrs. Roosevelt was clearly relaxed and comfortable, even quite happy in their company. When she was with this couple, I wondered, did she ever feel like a third wheel? Or was she the center around which the other two revolved? Did she enjoy her attachment to the two women because they were so strongly attached to each other or because they included her in their attachment? Interesting, intriguing questions that probably didn’t have any answers. And weren’t my business, anyway.

  Mrs. Roosevelt held out her hand. “Come, Hick,” she invited. “We want you to see our project.” Liking the sound of my name, I took her hand and went with her into the large building.

  The tables, chairs, desks, and cupboards made in the Val-Kill Industries (the name of their jointly owned business) were replicas of colonial American pieces, hand-constructed of local cherry and walnut and oak and beautifully hand-finished. I admired them with an unaffected enthusiasm and approved of the progressive scheme of employing local craftsmen who otherwise would be out of a job. A good idea, although I wondered whether the workers saw it as a bit of Roosevelt noblesse oblige.

  But the prices put the furnishings far out of my reach—and out of the reach of all but the Roosevelts’ moneyed friends, I guessed. The $125 price tag on a handsome drop-leaf dining table would buy groceries for a family of four for ten weeks. A tall secretary desk was priced at $525, when the average worker brought in $25 a week, if he had a job. Luxury items, and I felt uncomfortably out of my class—my social and economic class.

  And more: as Mrs. Roosevelt seemed to go out of her way to interest me in their project, the other two women almost imperceptibly pulled back, and I sensed something, faint but clear to me, of their disapproval, perhaps even their suspicion. Perhaps it was only that I was a reporter, here to collect material for a story. Maybe they feared that I might write something about their venture, or about the three of them, that they wouldn’t like. Or perhaps it was something else—the first small feelings of jealousy that would become such a painful difficulty for the four of us later.