The Three Graces of Val-Kill

by Emily Herring Wilson

  Memories of many years of happiness and achievement could not be erased. How could the women move past the bitter disappointments? Marion and Nan were family. Forgiveness is not easily come by in a family quarrel; things are best left unsaid. Unfortunately, all three of them began to talk about their troubles, although what more was said remains shrouded in shadows.

  Before Thanksgiving in 1938 Eleanor announced curtly that, having signed the final agreement, she was moving ahead and would be installing a new furnace in the cottage. She suggested that Otto Berge be allowed to take the remaining lumber in the cellar. Loose ends were tied up; exchanges continued. In January 1940 Eleanor was not able to accommodate Marion and Nan for more than one night at the White House for the Conference on Children, nor could she make a place for them at the dinner, which had been reduced to twenty-two, mostly officials who had to be included. She observed that there were many people attending the meetings who wanted to meet with her. FDR’s attention was riveted to the war news, and the White House was no longer a place to have a good time. A few weeks later Eleanor wrote Marion to explain that she was not inviting the usual people to FDR’s considerably changed birthday party January 30; there would be no stunts or speeches or gifts. In February, however, Eleanor made arrangements for the Todhunter girls to spend a week in the White House when Marion brought them to Washington. Then in May Eleanor declined to give the Todhunter commencement speech, refusing all year-end invitations except the one from Arthurdale.

  The year 1941 was tumultuous personally for the Roosevelts: after a period of declining health, Sara Delano Roosevelt died on 7 September. Hours later a huge oak suddenly crashed to the ground in front of Springwood; Franklin sat on the lawn and grieved to himself. Days later when he was going through some of his mother’s papers he discovered that she had saved in an envelope some of his boyhood curls, and he asked to be alone, to weep. Eleanor confessed that she felt “no deep affection or sense of loss.”4 On the same day she had sat by the bedside watching the slow and agonizing death of her brother, Hall, who had been like a son to her and whose brilliance had been dissipated in a life of alcohol. How had she failed to save him? It was a question the family had asked about her own father, also dead from alcoholism. She plunged deeper into work, putting America’s needs first, a salve for her soul. The year turned outward toward the battlefields.

  From America’s entry into the war in December 1941 until the war ended in September 1945, Eleanor asked what she could do as a mother, not only to support her own four sons who now were in uniform (and Anna’s husband John Boettiger) but also to reach out to other families in her travels. Although life always goes on, there is no question but that, as Eleanor, Marion, and Nan struggled to resolve their personal differences, the public lives of President and Mrs. Roosevelt were all-consuming. The compelling news shifted away from the domestic front to overseas, and FDR was absorbed in trying to chart a course for America, the history of which has been told many times. What it meant on a personal level for Eleanor, Marion, and Nan was that a quiet life on the Val-Kill had been made all the more impossible by world events.

  But an event that shook the world was President Roosevelt’s death 12 April 1945. Although he had returned from Yalta looking gravely ill, Eleanor and his family hoped that he would revive by going immediately to rest at Warm Springs. Eleanor remained in Washington, going on with a meeting as she had promised. In Warm Springs, unknown to Eleanor, Franklin had a special guest, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd (Winthrop Rutherfurd had died in 1944). Lucy had brought artist Madam Elizabeth Shoumatoff to Warm Springs to paint FDR’s portrait. Other guests included his cousins Laura Delano and Margaret Suckley and his secretary, Grace Tully. Henry Morgenthau Jr. had been at dinner with them the evening before. But even the sight of old friends did not restore him to health. He was stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage and died almost immediately. Eleanor was called back to the White House to receive the news she feared, and to notify the children, before flying to Warm Springs. There she received the news that Lucy had been with him at the time of his death. It was another broken promise, aided by their daughter Anna, but Eleanor seemed to draw from some deep well of inner resolve and would forgive Anna and recover her will to serve, though not immediately. At first she had to deal with family problems. After Franklin’s death, Elliott Roosevelt moved to Top Cottage, evicted Moses Smith as his father’s tenant (which Marion described as “a heartbreaking performance”), and began selling off properties. Elliott and his mother started a farming operation together and built a “tremendous chicken house,” but they were never successful in any business. Eleanor always felt “a special solicitude for Elliott” and expected that Marion and Nan would accept the new arrangement. “This was not possible,” Marion remembered.5

  The sanctity of Val-Kill had been destroyed for them—Marion and Nan knew that they could not stay. But it was not easy to pull up stakes and move away after some nineteen years of living at Val-Kill. Furthermore, they couldn’t discuss the separation—it was “too charged with emotion”—and they had the president’s lawyer work out the arrangements. There were so many distractions as the Roosevelt children decided what they wanted to do with the properties, and Marion and Nan were no part of the discussions. They had to stay in their cottage and wait to be told what was going to happen.

  Marion and Nan were at the cottage when funeral preparations were made for FDR’s burial in his mother’s rose garden, according to his wishes. The Roosevelts’ longtime superintendent of the Hyde Park estate, William Plog, was assigned the responsibility of laying out the plot where the president was to be buried. When Marion went over to ask if there was anything she could do to help, he said, “Come with me and we’ll pace out the place together.” And it was done. The president’s “own men” from Hyde Park, not the undertaker who came from Poughkeepsie, dug the grave.6 The Roosevelt children and grandchildren hurried to Hyde Park to join the family, but there was little consensus about how they might help their mother. Elliott and his wife, Faye Emerson, were ready to move into Top Cottage, and Elliott wanted to make other changes that dramatically threatened to end Marion’s and Nan’s quiet life at Stone Cottage. After 1945 Marion and Nan realized they could no longer live at Val-Kill; the signed agreement that each of the three women could live there for the rest of their lives meant nothing when all around them the Roosevelt family was making changes. Soon after FDR’s death, Eleanor turned over the Big House to the United States, in accordance with her husband’s wishes. She made her home at Val-Kill and purchased additional land from the Roosevelt estate. Her son John and his family later lived in Stone Cottage, and her son Elliott and his wife moved to Top Cottage.

  For two years after Franklin’s death, uncertain about what to do, Marion and Nan remained in Stone Cottage. It was an awkward and hurtful time, each of them mourning the loss of the man who had been at the center of their lives and the nation’s for so long and unable to suffer with Eleanor, who was surrounded by quarreling children. The Allies were poised to make the final assault to win the war that FDR had so long contemplated. There would be no more Fireside Chats, no announcement of the peace. FDR was dead.

  Val-Kill was also changed. No one had realized how much they had depended on FDR to hold the world together. Eleanor quickly moved out of the White House and divided up family furnishings with the children. Nan was unwell; Marion needed to make a living for the two of them. Every day presented some new problem—trying to look after the cottage and property. Marion and Nan were desperate to move away from the center of such change and conflict. When Marion was hired to work at the Marine Museum in Mystic, Connecticut—present-day Mystic Seaport—she saw a way to support herself and Nan. They now decided to sell their interest in Val-Kill to Eleanor. On 2 October 1947 they moved to make their home in New Canaan, Connecticut, to begin a new stage of their lives. They left the keys to the cottage on the table with a note wishing Eleanor well, and they drove away from Val-Kill, in grief for what they
were leaving behind and with grave uncertainty about starting over. Nan was sixty-three years old; Marion, fifty-seven. Where had the time gone? Suddenly, they were feeling old and turned out. Marion took charge—they bought an attractive house in New Canaan, and Nan made a new garden. The neighbors welcomed them, curious to hear about their Roosevelt connections. They talked freely of their admiration for FDR and the many family occasions they had attended. If we can believe the interviews Marion gave after Eleanor’s and Nan’s deaths, she said little about her work with Eleanor. Now she was celebrated as an “intimate” of the greatest American president. Surrounded by furnishings they had brought from Val-Kill, Marion and Nan made a remarkable recovery of their confidence and their determination to make a new life for themselves.

  It had been a hasty departure. Although Marion indicated in a letter written in July 1947 to Henry Hackett, the Roosevelts’ lawyer in Poughkeepsie, that she and Nan would like to be allowed eighteen to twenty-four months to leave Stone Cottage, in fact they were ready in October. They asked to be allowed to take with them the kitchen equipment they had purchased for themselves. For the new gardens Nan would make, they took garden implements, a picket fence, and shrubs and plants that had been given to them by their good friend Bernard Baruch; these included taxus, azaleas, euonymus, viburnum, various perennials, asparagus, raspberries, and strawberries. Nan abandoned dresses in favor of sturdy work pants, friends reported that she sometimes used colorful language when she pleased, and she spent hours working in her gardens in Connecticut and showing them off to friends and neighbors. She especially enjoyed comparing notes with other members of the New Canaan Garden Club.

  Marion and Nan made a lovely home for themselves on Sunset Hill Road in New Canaan, filling it with their treasures: a portrait of FDR hung over a Val-Kill chest, Val-Kill pewter candlesticks and a bowl on top of the chest, and over the fireplace a marble plaque from the White House dining room. Marion became an important member of the staff at the Marine Museum, organizing educational activities and the first corps of volunteers and hostesses. She also led efforts to create the Junior Museum and wrote a number of publications about the founders of Mystic Seaport. She took special pride in suggesting that the museum acquire FDR’s boat, the Vireo, and in raising the funds to bring it to the museum for permanent exhibition.

  When Eleanor had renovated the shop next door and made it her home, she had not insisted that Marion and Nan move from the cottage, nor did she go far away when she left it. She made her home next door because she was part owner and because she loved Val-Kill, but perhaps she also did not want to go so far from Marion and Nan and risk not seeing them again. She only had to look out from her sleeping porch to see the cottage. After Marion’s and Nan’s move to Connecticut, Marion came back to Val-Kill from time to time, but Nan never did. Eleanor more often went to them, sometimes driving herself, sometimes driven from Val-Kill by “Tubby” Curnan, her chauffeur. Nan’s health worsened after she broke her hip, and Marion began a long period of trying to look after her at home with some outside help. Eleanor came “as much as she could . . . [but] it wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be the same.” But still, Marion comforted herself to remember, “There was never any break threatening [the friendship].”7 Eleanor continued giving generous gifts, including checks.

  When the Roosevelt family gathered at Springwood for Christmas 1944, it was to be their last. Three of the sons—James, Franklin Jr., and John—were overseas on military assignments. Only Elliott and Anna’s husband, John Boettiger, were home on leave. Two days later Eleanor wrote readers of her “My Day” column, “I try to remember what an old friend of my grandmother’s used to say: ‘Enjoy every minute you have with those you love, my dear, for no one can take joy that is past away from you. It will be there in our heart to live on when the dark days come.’”8

  After FDR’s death, Eleanor began to make another life for herself. Her closest personal relationship in the last years of her life was with David Gurewitsch, who became her doctor and friend in 1945, and the woman he married, Edna Perkel. In 1959 she bought a New York City brownstone on East 74th Street with the Gurewitsches and lived there until she died. Joe and Trude Lash and their son and David and Edna Gurewitsch and their daughters were frequent visitors on Val-Kill weekends. In both cases Eleanor first formed an intimate friendship with the man—Joe as a young American radical; David was her mature, cultured European travel companion—and when they married she loved their wives and children. There was a definite romantic overtone to Eleanor’s feelings for David. She wrote him, “You know without my telling you that I love you as I love and have never loved anyone else.”9 Perhaps she had at last met the man she could love. The fact that it was impossible to think of him as a potential husband freed her to express her own feelings. He loved Mrs. Roosevelt, but not in a romantic way. Eleanor’s romance may have been, after all, with America.

  •

  As Eleanor began her work with the United Nations—she was chosen by President Truman to be an American representative—and traveled the world, sometimes with friends and grandchildren, she did not forget the joy of Val-Kill. Amidst all the changes and her greatly expanded role as First Lady of the World, as Truman called her, she took pains to stay in touch with her old friends. Now letters to Marion and Nan followed exchanges of gifts and occasional visits to New Canaan and Hyde Park. There are several dozen letters of this kind in the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers in the archives of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, mostly from the 1950s, some from Marion to Eleanor and many from Eleanor to Marion and Nan. Many of the letters were written in response to the ritual exchange of presents at birthdays, Easter, and Christmas. Marion’s are handwritten; most of Eleanor’s were typed by Tommy. In order not to miss a special date when she was traveling abroad, Eleanor sent cards and gifts ahead of the occasion. A sampling of these letters suggests the constancy of the women’s efforts to stay in touch. When Marion and Nan moved out of the cottage, Marion was concerned about Nan’s physical frailty, but within a few months Marion wrote to say, “Nan is improved.” In the fall of 1951 Eleanor longed to see pictures of the new house and garden in New Canaan. She wrote to Nan on 6 January 1954, “Do let me know when you can come to lunch with me and ask Marion if she would care to come,” wanting them to see her new apartment at 211 East 62nd Street. Nan quickly accepted. By December, however, Eleanor’s letters expressed alarm about Nan, who has been in the hospital suffering from shingles and other physical weaknesses. Nan’s health continued to concern Marion—“Nan has had a dreadful time”—and in the spring of 1956 Eleanor wrote to say that she was glad that “Nan can get out a little.”

  In the summer of 1957 Eleanor drove to see Marion and Nan in New Canaan; in the fall Marion took three New Canaan friends to have lunch with Eleanor at Val-Kill. They arranged another visit in February 1958. Marion wrote to Eleanor, “One of the results of being famous is that often your friends are alerted to your plans. The fact that you are speaking in Stamford on April 24th is a case in point. Nan and I do hope you will plan to have luncheon with us that day. I can easily pick you up in Stamford as I did before. It will mean so much to Nan to have a chance to visit with you—even for a little while. . . . Her morale is and has been wonderful.” In April, having just seen the play Sunrise at Campobello in New Haven, Marion wrote Eleanor asking if there was any way that she could get tickets for the New York performance (Marion was willing to pay any price) so that she could give them to a high school student who had visited them at Val-Kill. Eleanor appended a note for Tommy: “See if you can get four matinee tickets for April 30th.” In November Eleanor set up a luncheon at Hyde Park to talk with Marion, four of Marion’s friends, and Esther Lape about a U.S. Senate campaign.

  Nan’s health continued to be up and down, and in May 1960 Eleanor returned to New Canaan. Marion reported on the quiet pleasures she had missed at Val-Kill, “The sun is warm and Nan and I have been sitting on the south terrace.”

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nbsp; Finally, after seeking Eleanor’s advice in telephone calls and letters about Nan’s various hospital stays and difficulties at home, Marion moved her to St. Joseph’s Manor in Trumbull, Connecticut. Marion thanked Eleanor for her help, although it isn’t clear if she helped have her admitted to St. Joseph’s, paid some of the costs, or both. In April 1962, some months before Nan’s death and her own, Eleanor visited Nan at St. Joseph’s and they were photographed with one of the Carmelite sisters (see page 102).

  In April 1961 Marion and Nan were deeply concerned to read in the paper that Eleanor was ill, apparently their first knowledge of her serious health issues, though Eleanor’s letters were filled with concerns about Nan’s declining health. By May, however, Eleanor was clearly unwell, battling acute aplastic anemia, a complication from the spread of infection from an earlier incident of tuberculosis, which for a long time had been inactive.10 She kept up her schedule the best she could, depending more and more on Edna and David Gurewitsch at home but also unable to persuade David, her doctor, to stop looking for ways to keep her going. In the midst of her own obvious decline, Eleanor arranged for Tubby Curnan to drive her to help Marion with Nan, who was in and out of the hospital. In April and June 1962 Eleanor visited Nan in the nursing home. Nan died at St. Joseph’s on 16 August. Eleanor wrote at once to express her condolences, urging Marion to remember that Nan would not have wanted to go on suffering. In October Eleanor wrote to thank Marion for her birthday call and bed jacket, confessing, “I have been miserable since July.” It was their last exchange of letters. On 7 November, Eleanor died at her home in New York City.