“Poor Eleanor,” Matt said. “I wouldn’t want to join that party.”
There was no escaping her mother-in-law. As a wedding present, Sara built the couple a town house in Manhattan. However, this was one of those “gifts” where you give a family member a present you really want for yourself, knowing you’ll have full access to it. For she’d also bought the plot of land next door and built an adjacent town house for herself that connected to theirs through sliding doors on several floors.
“You were never quite sure when she would appear night or day,” Eleanor glumly recalled.
“It looks so . . . presidential,” Matt said, gazing up at Springwood from the driveway. We had just strolled through a vast apple orchard and were standing in front of a colonial revival mansion with a tour group of forty Caucasians in casual sportswear. Our guide, a pink-complected woman named Meg, who was dressed like a park ranger, positioned herself on the stairs before the columned portico entrance.
“Franklin stood in this very spot after all four elections to greet the crowd that had come to congratulate him on his victory,” she told us. “Since Hyde Park was a Republican district, he joked, ‘I know you didn’t vote for me, but I am glad to see you anyway.’ ” The crowd chuckled dutifully as we followed her into the shadowy foyer.
Franklin was a collector, according to Meg. His stamp collection totaled over a million. He and his mother displayed his acquisitions proudly in the entrance hall. A group of framed political cartoons he found amusing hung neatly on the far wall. Nineteenth-century naval paintings adorned another. (“He served as assistant secretary of the navy for seven years,” Meg reminded us.) Next to the door was a flock of stuffed birds Franklin shot as a boy. They were posed in flight to look like they were alive, which always struck me as missing the point; stranger still, his mother forbid the servants from touching them, tending to the dusting herself. If Franklin had died before her, I suspected she would’ve had him stuffed and then propped him up in a wingback chair. Instead she did the next best thing. Seated in front of the birds was a life-size bronze statue of Franklin that Sara commissioned when he was elected to the state senate at age twenty-nine.
Matt and I shuffled down the hallway behind the other tourists. The rooms were cordoned off with small gates, but you could peer into them as if it were a life-size dollhouse. We waited our turn to read the plaques explaining what room we were looking at and its significance. On our left was a cave of a den Sara called her “snuggery” where she conducted the business of the house. The furniture was too large for the space and, like Sara herself, had a way of making people feel small. One person, of course, took the brunt.
“Your mother only bore you,” Sara once told Eleanor’s son Jimmy. “I am more your mother than your mother is.”
Add to that the occasional public insult, such as announcing to Eleanor during a dinner party, “If you’d just run your comb through your hair, dear, you’d look so much nicer.”
Everything you need to know about the Roosevelt family dynamic can be found in the seating arrangements. Sara and Franklin sat at the heads of the dinner table. In the imposing wood-paneled library, a pair of matching, handsomely upholstered chairs sat on either side of the fireplace. One was for Franklin, the other for Sara. God knows where Eleanor sat, probably on the banks of the Hudson River trying not to throw herself in.
“For almost forty years, I was only a visitor there,” she later wrote of Springwood.
In 1918, Franklin returned from a trip stricken with pneumonia, so Eleanor unpacked his bags for him. Inside she found a bundle of love letters addressed to Franklin. She recognized the handwriting instantly. They were from a woman named Lucy Mercer, Eleanor’s secretary. It was yet another example of Franklin’s audaciousness. It’s one thing to cheat on your wife with your secretary, but someone who cheats on his wife with his wife’s secretary is clearly operating on a different level. At that point he and Eleanor were thirteen years into their marriage; she’d borne him six children (one died as an infant). Eleanor offered to grant Franklin a divorce, but Sara intervened, knowing that such a scandal would ruin her son’s political career. She threatened to disinherit Franklin if he went through with it. The Roosevelts decided to stay together on two conditions set forth by Eleanor: Franklin had to break off his relationship with Lucy Mercer immediately, and he could never share his wife’s bed again. Ironically, only after that did Eleanor feel secure enough in her marriage to finally assert herself with Sara. She started, awesomely, by blocking the sliding doors connecting the twin town houses with all the heavy furniture she could find.
The Roosevelts spent the summer of 1921 at their summer home on Campobello Island off the coast of northern Maine. One afternoon, Franklin returned from a swim complaining of chills and back pain and went to bed early. “By the next morning, he could hardly stand, and by the next day, he could not stand at all,” Eleanor remembered. She slept on a couch in his room and nursed him for nearly three weeks, but nothing could be done. Franklin had contracted polio and was paralyzed from the waist down.
Back at Springwood, portable ramps were placed throughout the house and pulled up before guests arrived. Franklin hid his paralysis in public to avoid seeming weak, sometimes even wearing leg braces that locked at the knee, which allowed him to stand upright. He gave the illusion he could walk by using a cane or leaning on someone’s arm while using his hips to swing one leg forward at a time. Even during his presidency, he kept up appearances. When leaders came for meetings, he was already settled in his chair and stayed seated until they left. The media knew he was confined to a wheelchair, of course, but didn’t feel it was appropriate to “out” the president on a personal matter. They only photographed him when he was sitting in a car, behind a desk, or leaning against a railing while delivering a speech.
He thoroughly charmed the press corps with his quick wit and naughty boy personality. At cocktail hour he corralled reporters and staff members in the cloakroom beneath the stairs because Sara disapproved of drinking in her house.
“It was made into fun,” one journalist later recalled. “With shrieks of laughter we’d gather with the President of the United States, the coats hanging up on the wall, he in his wheelchair whipping up the martinis and drinking as if we were all bad children having a feast in the dormitory at night.”
Having fully explored the first floor, our group drifted back to the main staircase where we took turns peeking in Franklin’s hand-powered elevator, originally installed so the servants could haul the Roosevelts’ heavy trunks upstairs after trips overseas. Franklin disliked standard wheelchairs so he designed his own, a regular wooden chair with wheels at the base of the legs. One of these sat inside the elevator taking up most of the compartment.
“Good thing he wasn’t claustrophobic!” a dad guffawed loudly from beneath his baseball cap.
“It operates on a rope pulley system,” Meg explained. “Franklin used his arm strength to raise and lower himself.” As I looked inside, I was reminded of one of Franklin’s most famous quotes: “When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”
“Couldn’t he afford a motorized one?” the dad asked.
“FDR refused to have an electric elevator installed. He feared that in the event of a fire, the power would be shut off and he’d be trapped and burn alive. Fire was the one thing he feared because he couldn’t run from it.”
Meg divided the group so we could tramp upstairs in shifts to the second floor. Matt and I maneuvered ourselves in front of a family with six young children. This mansion should have been airy with its glossy white walls and soaring ceilings, but the navy carpet sucked in the light. It was stifling in spite of its thirty-five rooms and nine baths. We were all a little creeped out by the Birth Room, which still housed the bed where Franklin was delivered. Sara’s deathbed request was that the room be rearranged to look exactly as it had when he was born in 1882. We hurri
ed on to his sizable suite at the end of the hall. The bedroom was left intact after his final visit two weeks before he died. The customized phone with a direct line to the White House waited expectantly on the bedside table. Franklin’s books and magazines remained strewn about the room where he’d left them. It was an eerie sight, like viewing the scene of a crime. I tried to imagine what my room would look like if I’d died suddenly and Meg started giving tours through my apartment. (“As you can see, her Chia Pet and the ass print on her sofa cushion are exactly as she left them . . .”)
There was very little to see when I stuck my head into Eleanor’s minuscule quarters next door, a converted dressing room. It was startling in its bareness, just a daybed, no private bathroom to call its own.
The third floor was closed to the public, so Matt and I ventured out onto the veranda and admired the view. The house sits on a hill, looking haughtily over the estate’s six hundred acres. We lumbered down the outside staircase and back to the front of the house where Meg was waiting. Eleanor once noted that Franklin’s polio was “a blessing in disguise, for it gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest lesson of all—infinite patience and never-ending persistence.”
As if to illustrate the point, before seeing everyone off, Meg pointed down the lengthy driveway. “If you want to know what it takes to be president, consider this,” she said. “FDR came out here every day on his crutches and tried to make his way a quarter mile down the driveway to the main road. He felt that if he could make it to the end unassisted, one day he’d be able to walk again. If he fell, he’d lie facedown in the road until someone happened upon him and helped him back up. He never made it the whole way, but he still tried.”
Most of the group headed back toward the presidential library, but Matt and I wandered through the orchard, enjoying the late fall sun.
After a few minutes, Matt stopped and looked around. “So which way to Eleanor’s house?”
“We should probably drive, considering she lives two and a half miles away.”
“Two and a half miles?” he repeated as we headed toward the parking lot. “Not exactly subtle.”
When Franklin was stricken with polio, he’d been in politics for ten years as a state senator and the assistant secretary of the navy and had a failed bid at the White House as the Democratic vice presidential candidate in the 1920 election. He refused to accept that he was paralyzed and spent much of the 1920s doing physical therapy. To keep Franklin active in politics, Eleanor had to be his legs and his voice. She became active in organizations, made speeches. While volunteering for the women’s division of the Democratic Party, she became best friends with longtime lovers and political activists Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook. Franklin liked the couple too. One day, while the foursome picnicked by Fall Kill Creek, he proposed building a cottage on-site where the women could live full time.
“That’s a little”—Matt paused before easing the Buick onto the main road—“unorthodox, isn’t it?”
“He knew she needed to escape from Sara. I’ll bet he was sick of the tension in the house himself.”
He hired an architect, and by 1925 the women had a one-and-a-half-story fieldstone house overlooking the creek. Franklin even put in a dam to redirect the water into a swimming pool. Eleanor referred to Stone Cottage as their “love nest.” The women traded everything from bathing suits to lipstick. They monogrammed their initials—EMN—on the linens and towels.
“I can honestly say I’ve never looked at any of my guy friends and thought, ‘Let’s make this official in terry cloth,’ ” Matt joked.
I told him how the women built a second structure on the property, Val-Kill Cottage, and started a furniture factory so unemployed locals could earn a supplemental income. Nan supervised the business while Eleanor taught literature, drama, and American history at a school in Manhattan where Marion was vice principal.
“And do those who monogram together stay together?” Matt asked.
“Not exactly. The factory went under in ’37. Then one night when Marion was in Europe, Eleanor and Nancy had a terrible argument. Eleanor immediately moved out of Stone Cottage, and Marion and Nan later moved to Connecticut.”
“What was the fight about?”
“No one knows. Though Marion later said it involved ‘things that should not have been said.’ ”
“So?” Matt prompted. “Was she or wasn’t she?”
“I honestly don’t know. She did have a number of close lesbian friends . . .” People had been gossiping about this question since the 1920s and 1930s. Eleanor’s own cousin, the mischievous Alice Roosevelt, once commented loudly in a chic Washington restaurant, “I don’t care what you say, I simply cannot believe Eleanor Roosevelt is a lesbian.”
I told Matt that in 1978, the staff at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library opened eighteen boxes containing sixteen thousand pages of letters between Eleanor and Lorena Hickok, a thirty-five-year-old gay Associated Press reporter who smoked cigars and wore flannel shirts and trousers that brought to mind a lumberjack. Hick was assigned to cover Eleanor but became her confidante. She gave Eleanor a sapphire ring, which she wore at Franklin’s 1933 inauguration. Eleanor sent her note after the ceremony that read, “Hick darling, I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and I think she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it.”
Hick wrote to Eleanor, “I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips.”
“Okay, hold up,” Matt said. “Is there really a question here?”
I shrugged. “Not necessarily. Historians have pointed out that Victorian women wrote love letters to platonic friends because they were so starved for romance. Besides, some of Eleanor and Hick’s letters suggest the feeling wasn’t mutual.”
In 1937, Eleanor wrote to Hick, “I know you have a feeling for me which for one reason or another I may not return in kind, but I love you just the same.”
Matt followed a sign for the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site and pulled the car into the parking lot.
“My feeling is, who gives a shit if she was a lesbian?” I said, closing the car door behind me. “Why does that matter? The woman ditched her harping live-in mother-in-law, built her dream house, and brought along her favorite gays. Personally, I think that’s kind of awesome.” Eleanor was ahead of her time. Back in 1925, she wrote in her diary, “No form of love is to be despised.”
From the parking lot, we followed the curved path through the trees and came to a brook with a wooden plank bridge. Below, Fall Kill Creek murmured over the rocks. On the other side there was a pond, glass still and lined with bushy trees that left their reflection imprinted on the water.
This time our guide was a librarian type in regular, non-ranger clothing.
“A lot of people ask where Val-Kill got its name. Don’t worry, we’re not a bunch of murderers up here!” She tittered, and I suspected she’d said this line hundreds of times. “This area was settled by the Dutch and ‘kill’ means ‘little stream.’ ”
If Springwood was a twenty-thousand-square-foot thirty-five-bedroom fortress, Val-Kill Cottage was a bungalow. Its seven rooms were tacked on over the years, giving it a hodgepodge feel, as if an architect let all five of his multiple personalities have a go. Shaped like a bent arm, the front door was tucked into the crook.
“Visitors always thought that the front door was the back door,” the tour guide noted as our group of ten traversed the threshold. The interior was encased in wood paneling, but a few screen porches kept it from feeling stuffy.
“When the weather was agreeable, Eleanor bunked on a sleeping porch upstairs,” the guide informs, “where she liked having ‘only the stars to look at, just because it gives one a
feeling of taking in.’ ” I tried to imagine her lying there on this bed, waking up in the fresh air (she woke up at eight A.M. every day, no matter what time she’d gone to sleep). But whenever I toured historical homes, I could never picture their famous owners puttering around in them.
The rooms were, like Eleanor, welcoming and informal. The First Lady’s official bedroom was a twin bed with a simple chenille bedspread, but with more photos and personal items than its Springwood counterpart. Springwood had been released to the government after Franklin’s death in 1945 and Eleanor had returned to Val-Kill. For almost twenty years, dignitaries still called on her and sat around on the cushy chintz chairs in the living room to knock around ideas about affairs of state.
“Eleanor entertained the likes of Winston Churchill and Gandhi here,” the guide said as we crowded in front of the roped-off casual dining room. “She often served them herself from this here side table.” Winston also swam in the backyard pool while smoking a cigar, which made me like him even more.
My Year with Eleanor Page 12
