Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  “Well, of course, FDR is the president,” Bess said. “Which makes Mrs. Roosevelt an ideal topic of gossip. Lucy herself is out of the picture. She had to have a job, so she went to work. This time, though, she actually married her boss. Winthrop Rutherfurd—older, widowed with children, wealthy, a sterling catch. She might be forgiven, though, for thinking that if things had been otherwise, she would be the new First Lady.”

  Or not, I thought, if Louis Howe was right and a divorce put the presidency out of FDR’s reach. Then she would be just plain Mrs. Roosevelt. My heart thudded. And Madam would be free. But all of this had happened long ago, and things were as they were.

  I took a deep breath. “You said Mrs. R never quite took her husband back. What did you mean?”

  Bess paused as one of the reporters walked past us, jauntily whistling “Oh, You Beautiful Doll.” “The way Alice tells it, Eleanor levied a penalty for her forgiveness. She agreed to go on with the marriage as if nothing had happened, but she barred Franklin from her bed. Forever.”

  I had to clear my throat. “You’re telling me that the Roosevelts haven’t been husband and wife since…”

  Suddenly, Earl Miller’s marriage made a different kind of sense. Perhaps FDR wasn’t just silencing gossip about Eleanor, or putting Miller out of his wife’s reach—although he could very well have been doing both. Perhaps he was also getting even. Taking revenge for what his wife had done to him.

  “Well, that’s the story,” Bess said cheerily. “Of course, there’s the thing with polio, and can he or can’t he. In bed, I mean. People do wonder, especially because of that sweet little secretary who does his bidding night and day. Maybe the story about Eleanor freezing him out is just another of those poison darts that Princess Alice of Malice likes to toss.”

  Princess Alice of Malice. Franklin. Lucy. Good Lord. These people. I was struggling with a flooding sympathy. And with the awareness that there was more—and less—between Mrs. Roosevelt and her husband than I had imagined.

  Bess picked up her notebook. “These days, the affair seems to be regarded as a funny joke that Franklin and Lucy played on poor, unwitting Eleanor, who was too naive to guess what was going on. So, to answer your initial question, I’m sure the poor woman must feel positively petrified when she thinks about living in Washington. No one deserves to be publically hurt, as she must have been. Especially because Lucy Mercer was—still is, actually—such a beauty.”

  She didn’t say And Mrs. Roosevelt is decidedly not, but the unsaid words hung in the air between us.

  The knowledge of Franklin’s betrayal opened an even deeper and more urgent tenderness in me. I wanted to guard Madam against anything that might hurt her, to defend her against the ugliness of the world. I wanted to pull her to me as if she were a child, to embrace her and comfort her and let her know that I was on her side. That I was entirely for her, whatever happened. Finally, I screwed up my courage and told her all this. And for the first time, I felt able to call her by her name. Eleanor. A beautiful name.

  It happened at Val-Kill, in early December. Nancy and Marion were spending the weekend with a friend on Long Island, and Madam invited me to go to the cottage with her. We were laughing and light-hearted as we drove up from the city in her blue Buick convertible, looking forward to a weekend with nothing to do. The heater in the car didn’t work, and we were chilled to the bone when we arrived late on Friday afternoon. But the lamps were lit, a tidy fire was burning in the fireplace, and the lady who came in to cook had left a sandwich supper for two on a tray, with tomato soup to be heated on the stove and slices of apple pie for dessert.

  After supper, we took turns reading poetry aloud to one another—the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, a favorite that I had brought with me. Madam’s hair was softly haloed in the firelight, and as she read, her voice light and lilting, I couldn’t keep my eyes from her face. She seemed to fill the space with an irresistibly radiant, magnetic energy. I found myself smiling, smiling foolishly, as if I had just learned how to smile and hadn’t yet learned how to switch it off. I was smiling at the wonder that I was here, with her, alone together.

  The next morning at breakfast I told her I knew about Franklin’s affair with Lucy Mercer and guessed that it was one of the reasons she could not endure the thought of going to Washington.

  She put down her coffee cup and regarded me for a moment, her blue eyes intent. Finally, she asked, “Who told you? Tommy?”

  “I’m a journalist. I protect my sources.” I took a deep breath and went on boldly, “I’m hungry to know all that there is to know about you, all the hidden things. I want to know you entirely, as I want you to know me.” And then I was suddenly afraid that since I’d reminded her that I was a reporter, she might think I would somehow use her story. I added, urgently, “But this is only for the two of us, Eleanor, not to be shared with anyone else.” There. I had said it. Her name

  “Eleanor,” she said softly. “I love the way you say it, Hick. And I trust you not to share this.”

  I trust you not to share this. Now, as I write, I look at these words on the page and wonder if, in writing them for someone else to read, I am betraying our trust, as Franklin betrayed her with Lucy. And kept on betraying her, as I know, as she discovered, up to the very day of his death. But the story about the Mercer affair came out in a book in 1947, after the Second World War, after FDR was dead. I am sure that Joe Lash intends to retell it in his memoir and in the biography of Mrs. Roosevelt that he plans to write. Others are likely to tell it, too, so that by the time this little memoir of mine is read, after I am dead, the story of Franklin and Lucy will no doubt have become a standard chapter in the retelling of the Roosevelts’ lives.

  But all that lies in a far corner of the future, dark to both of us on that Saturday morning in the winter of 1932, when Franklin’s fifteen-year-old betrayal of his wife was yet a fresh hurt for her, rubbed more terribly raw by the knowledge that she would have to go to Washington and face the people who knew about it. When I let her know that I knew, her defenses against grief and loss and abandonment, the last walls between us, came down in a great crumbling tumble. There were tears and sobs and I heard the whole story, and more—more than Bess Furman knew, or Princess Alice, or even Franklin—and understood it all the better because I had been betrayed, too, by Ellie. I understood how utterly Eleanor had been destroyed, not just in herself and with her friends and family—the broader, Oyster Bay family—but in the unforgiving, unforgetting world that was Washington. I understood her reluctance and her fears. And understood that I would do anything, anything, to keep her from being hurt again.

  Afterward, we put on coats and wool caps and mittens and boots and walked through the leafless woods around Val-Kill, the white birch trees like pale ghosts standing watch along the little ice-bound stream. She reached for my hand and clung to it tightly, as if I were her strength in a world that was whirling her to a place she didn’t want to go. For me, it was as if the universe had been born brand new all around us, in a million dancing needles of chill December sunshine.

  Later, in front of the fire, reading aloud from Ibsen’s play The Doll’s House, we sat close together, our shoulders and hands touching. And as we said goodnight, we held each other in a pledge of intimacy that was closer than close, as lovely as love.

  And then things changed again—this time, for both of us.

  Mrs. R continued to wrap up her obligations to her various organizations and get ready for the move to Washington. I kept on doing my job, too, following her around the city, writing a story every day for the wire and stories about other news related to the change in administrations. We spent another weekend at Val-Kill, but Nancy and Marion were there, which soured the time for me. I could feel their jealousy, like hot puffs of wind off a desert, and that defiant hired-girl self of mine, goaded by their prim disapproval, made an impolite, impetuous, indecorous fool of herself. She laughed too loudly, smoked too many cigarettes, and told coarse newsroom jokes. I
could see that the two women thought of me as they did of Earl: I was rough and unmannerly, common, and socially beneath their dear Eleanor. And the sharper their disapproval, the more I acted the part.

  On the train back to the city on Sunday afternoon, I told Eleanor—I was getting used to using her name—that I would not go to Val-Kill again when Nan and Marion were there. That assertion, and its many echoes, would reverberate through the rest of our years together: my wish to have her to myself, my resentment of her other friends, their dislike of me. That was understandable, wasn’t it? I knew—and had to accept—the fact that her life would be filled by others, by clamoring legions, although I couldn’t know then just how clamorous, and how many, those legions would become. All I knew was that, in the little time we had together, I wanted both of us to be wholly together, not parceled out among others.

  “I’m sorry if I’m offending you,” I said, and added quietly, “But I care for you, Eleanor. You come first with me, and I’m selfish. I admit it. I don’t want to share you.”

  She smiled, wistful. “You sound a little bit like Earl, you know.”

  “I’m not surprised. When it comes to you, Earl and I have something in common.” I took a breath and said, very seriously, “I respect the fact that Nan and Marion are your friends, and I know that you want to spend time with them. But our time is all too short as it is. The inauguration will be here before we know it and—”

  “Don’t say that, Hick.” She put her hand over mine. “I don’t want to think about what’s ahead. I have the feeling—the terrible feeling—that these are the last weeks of freedom I’ll have for the rest of my life.”

  Now, I know that she was right. But at the time, I was thinking only of the next four years, not knowing there would be another four, and more. “Oh, come on, now,” I said soothingly. “He’s only been elected for one term, dear. It’s not a life sentence.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t know, Hick. I saw how my aunt Edith—TR’s wife—was changed by her years in the White House. I don’t want to be changed. I don’t want to become a… a public person.”

  She nodded toward a middle-aged lady on the other side of the aisle, a red knit cap pulled over her ears, her shoulders hunched inside her coat. She was reading Anna Karenina. “You see that lady? Miss Jane Doe, on her way home after an afternoon with friends in the country. If I were her, I wouldn’t have to hold press conferences or state dinners or stand in reception lines.” Her sigh was heavy with envy. “I could live in a little white house at the end of a pretty green village street and be just plain Jane Doe.”

  Could she? I wondered. Mrs. Roosevelt was used to having a maid to manage her clothes and a cook and a housekeeper to manage her household and Tommy Thompson to manage her office. Given a chance to live Miss Doe’s perfectly ordinary life, Mrs. Roosevelt might find that she didn’t like it very much.

  But I only smiled and nodded. “And I would be your next door neighbor,” I replied. “Janet Doe. We would have all the privacy we wanted, and nobody would recognize us or interfere.” I chuckled. “What do you say, dear? Shall we give it a try?”

  “Someday,” she said. “Someday we will, Hick.” I heard the promise in her voice. It was what I wanted and needed to hear and I clung to it—for longer than I should have, I know now. It was a promise she couldn’t have kept, even if she’d wanted to.

  That night, Eleanor came to Mitchell Place with me. We took Prinz for a walk in the early dark and fed him, then fixed an easy supper of a cheese omelet and toast and jelly and hot tea. She stayed with me all night, and then the next night. After she went back to the Sixty-Fifth Street house, we began each day with a telephone call. When we didn’t spend the evening together, we ended the day with a letter, a ritual that we practiced daily, almost without interruption, for the next ten years. After that, not quite as often, but with love and affection, for the rest of our lives.

  Eleanor planned to have Christmas with her family at Springwood, so we held our own private gift exchange the week before. After an evening of English Renaissance choral music at St. Luke’s, we went back to my apartment. I had put up a small tree, and we had coffee and fruitcake and exchanged presents. She gave me a filmy blue nightgown trimmed in ivory lace—“a change from your lovely striped flannel pajamas,” she said with a laugh. I gave her the sapphire and diamond ring that Madam Schumann-Heink had given to me.

  “Oh,” she whispered, as she opened the velvet-covered box. Her eyes widened. “Oh, my goodness!” And then, “But I can’t accept this, Hick. It’s much too fine. It’s—”

  “Shut up, Eleanor,” I said, mimicking Madam Schumann-Heink’s thick German accent. “I love you, I give you my ring. You be a good girl and take it.” I paused. “Wear it and think of me,” I added in my own voice. “For I do love you, you know.”

  “Oh, Hick,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Je t’aime et je t’adore. Je t’aime.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Empty Without You”

  According to tradition, the current First Lady invited the First Lady-Elect to tour the family’s White House living quarters, and as the inauguration drew closer, Mrs. Hoover asked Mrs. Roosevelt to come for a visit.

  “You’ll come with me, won’t you, Hick?” Mrs. R asked, and I sold the AP on the story—the first time there would be press coverage of this domestic ritual. I knew it would play on every woman’s page in the country.

  Mrs. R made a reservation for us at the Mayflower Hotel, five blocks from the White House. One room, she told them, would do. But when we arrived, we were shown to the tenth-floor Presidential Suite. “Much too grand,” she muttered. But she had to laugh when her friend Janet Doe confessed to being impressed by the size and magnificence of the suite, whose last occupants had been the Hoovers.

  “After all,” I said, gazing at the huge bouquet of hothouse flowers that spilled over the foyer table, “this Miss Doe grew up in South Dakota, where she scrubbed people’s floors and washed their dishes. She thinks this is incredibly swell. She intends to enjoy every minute of it.”

  “Then I will, too,” Mrs. R said firmly.

  The next morning, we were treated to a lavish breakfast, served with fine china and crystal at the damask-covered table in the suite’s dining room. Mrs. R—wanting to be as anonymous as possible—had declined Mrs. Hoover’s offer of a car, so we set off on foot up Connecticut, through a park, and across Pennsylvania. We said goodbye at the iron gate at the northwest entry to the White House and she went alone to her meeting with Mrs. Hoover, who would never have tolerated a reporter tagging along As I waited there for her, I thought of the hired girl and the incredible journey that had brought her from South Dakota to the White House gate and tried not to think about Inauguration Day. Eleanor would be the nation’s First Lady, Bess Furman would be covering her, and I would go back to New York, alone.

  That afternoon, I saw Eleanor and her son Elliott onto a small plane (no Amelia this time, however) and off to Warm Springs, where FDR was celebrating his fiftieth birthday. As I waved goodbye, I wondered—a little maliciously, I confess—if the president-elect would be getting a birthday card from Mrs. Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd or if he would invite her to his inauguration.

  Later, I would learn from the backstairs gang at the White House that FDR did in fact send a limousine for Mrs. Rutherfurd, so that she could be there when he was sworn in. The way the servants told it (they were silent witnesses to everything that went on every day at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue), Franklin saw her occasionally after the inauguration, concealing her visits not just from his wife but also from Missy LeHand. Missy, the servants said, was kept in the dark about Lucy because she was wildly jealous. Which was ironic, they thought, since the First Lady didn’t seem to be at all jealous of Missy.

  But while Eleanor made every effort to overlook Missy’s relationship with her husband, it sometimes arose in uncomfortable ways. One of the things she feared most about Washington was that she would have no work ther
e. So she approached Franklin with an offer to take over some of the president’s mail. He had given her a long, strange look, then shook his head at her offer. “Missy handles the mail, Babs. If you stepped in, she might think you were… well, interfering.”

  I heard the hurt in her voice when she told me this and remembered the letters that had precipitated the crisis of the Lucy Mercer affair. Was FDR thinking of that episode when he told his wife she wasn’t welcome to open his presidential mail?

  I remembered, too, what Reggie Davis had said about the man’s left hook and wondered whether he was being intentionally cruel by preferring his secretary to his wife. Or whether he simply thought of no one’s feelings but his own.

  Three weeks before the inaugural, the president-elect narrowly escaped assassination.

  Eleanor and I had eaten an early supper at my favorite Armenian restaurant. Later that evening, we were to catch a train to Ithaca, where she’d been invited to speak at Cornell University. On our way back uptown, the taxi dropped me off at the AP office to file the day’s story, then took her home to Sixty-Fifth Street. We were to meet later at Grand Central Station.

  I was sitting down to my typewriter when the night city editor yelled at me. “Some guy just tried to kill FDR, Hick. Where’s Mrs. Roosevelt?”

  I was reaching for my coat. “On her way back up to Sixty-Fifth Street.”

  “Get a taxi,” the editor snapped. “Get that story. Now.” He didn’t have to tell me. I was already heading for the elevator.

  The shooting had happened in Miami, where FDR had docked after two weeks fishing in the Caribbean on Vincent Astor’s yacht. He had just finished speaking to a crowd from the back of his car, when an emigrant Italian anarchist fired five bullets, hitting Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak in the chest and slightly wounding four other people. Roosevelt was unharmed, but Cermak died two days after the inauguration. His unrepentant killer, Giuseppe Zangara was executed in Florida’s electric chair two weeks later. In those days, justice was swift.