by Susan Quinn
The first six months of FDR’s first term had been an unsettling time for both Eleanor and Hick. Eleanor had worries about her children, which she related in detail to Hick. Hick, for her part, was distressed about leaving the AP and worried about her professional future.
“Poor Hick,” Eleanor had written in June, “I know how you hate to leave the life. I do hope there will be enough interest in the next years to compensate.” There was talk of Eleanor’s agent signing Hick up to write some articles for McCall’s, or a profile of the White House butler, Ike Hoover. But such assignments couldn’t make up for what Hick was leaving behind: the news business was the closest thing to a true home she had ever had.
It isn’t surprising, given how much newspapering had meant to her, that Hick felt tearful after she left Eleanor to go back to her job in New York. It must have been easier, when she and Eleanor were together, to convince herself that she was doing the right thing in leaving it all behind.
“I couldn’t bear to think of you crying yourself to sleep,” Eleanor wrote five days after Hick left her in Washington. “Oh! how I wanted to put my arms around you in reality instead of in spirit. I went and kissed your photograph instead and the tears were in my eyes. Please keep your heart in Washington as long as I’m here for most of mine is with you!”
It was Eleanor who finally engineered a solution of sorts for Hick: a job with Harry Hopkins, head of New Deal relief programs. The new job would take care of money worries, which were never far away in Hick’s life, and, most important, allow her to be near Eleanor in the White House between her field trips.
The Roosevelt White House was an astonishingly hospitable place. FDR’s close adviser Louis Howe lived there until nearly his dying day, and later, when Harry Hopkins assumed many of Howe’s duties, he too moved into the White House, with his daughter Diana. After Hopkins remarried, in a ceremony in the Oval Office, his new wife moved in too. Missy lived on the third floor. Now Hick was going to become another of what the staff referred to as “permanent guests.” Eleanor and Franklin invited many others as well, to stay for a night or two. Hick’s aunt Ella, who had rescued her and watched over her education, was invited to spend a weekend with her family at the White House, including a dinner with the president. Eleanor gave her husband explicit instructions to “behave” himself with Hick’s “Republican relatives” from Illinois. “Don’t you say anything to shock them,” she told him. Aunt Ella, who was in her seventies, was usually shy and soft-spoken. So Hick was amazed to see her aunt, who was seated next to the president, laughing and “having a grand time.” “Never in all the years I knew him did I see Franklin Roosevelt put forth more charm than he did that evening,” Hick wrote.
Alexander Woollcott, the actor and bon vivant who inspired a comedy called The Man Who Came to Dinner, actually stayed at the Roosevelt White House while he was playing the role of a guest who comes to dinner and never leaves. After seeing the play, Eleanor insisted in her newspaper column that “Mr. Woollcott is one of my favorite guests and I hope he will always consider himself not only welcome, but sought after.” This warmth defined the early days of the Roosevelt presidency.
The chance to live near Eleanor and even to work with her on the problems she encountered was what made the job with Harry Hopkins appealing to Hick. But there were things about it that were going to be difficult. She was going to have to put her beloved Prinz in a kennel and embark on a strenuous travel schedule, all while raising doubts, in her own mind most of all, about whether she was only getting the job because of her relationship with the First Lady. What’s more, she didn’t know how she was going to get around, since she didn’t drive. Trains and buses could only take her so far. To really examine and report on ordinary people’s lives outside the cities, she was going to need a car, driven by her or someone else.
Hick’s consolation as she faced this daunting new challenge was the conviction that she was loved—and needed. “Remember no one is just what you are to me,” Eleanor wrote Hick around this time, and “I’ve never enjoyed being with anyone the way I enjoy being with you.”
Eleanor’s love for Hick had freed her to express herself with unprecedented boldness. Though she cared a great deal about her children, she had never been good at showing it. Hugging and kissing didn’t come easily to her, and she was not very sympathetic with their ailments. Illness, in her view, was something to be got over, as quickly as possible.
But Eleanor lavished her concern and affection on Hick in a way she never had been able to do with her own family. She worried about Hick’s diabetes, her teeth, her minor illnesses. “I am so glad your cold is better,” she wrote her that spring. “You are sadly mistaken if you think I’d let you have the ‘flu’ without me!”
There were spontaneous hugs too, as never before. “My dear if you meet me, may I forget there are other reporters present,” she asked Hick, “or must I behave? I shall want to hug you to death. I can hardly wait.”
Most important, she wrote and talked to Hick about everything—no holds barred. “I never talked to anyone,” she confided. “Perhaps that was why it all ate into my soul.”
Hick, who had never married nor borne children, who had no pedigree and no family legacy to carry on, was now the person to whom Eleanor told all her worries about her unhappy and troubled children, about her flirtatious and vacillating husband, about her out-of-control brother, and about her struggles with “Mama,” her domineering mother-in-law, and with Aunt Susie and all the Hall and Roosevelt relatives who were so quick to judge her.
In her letters to Hick, Eleanor fretted about Anna, who was trying to escape her unhappy marriage. “Poor kid, blind faith in a kindly providence keeps her up, but I fear a break.” FDR rather poignantly urged Anna to go slow with ending her marriage, telling her that many people who were in love saw each other rarely and “got on very well in the end without love.” Eleanor, on the other hand, was cheering for Anna and her new love, John Boettiger.
No doubt both Franklin and Eleanor had the Lucy Mercer affair in the back of their minds. For Eleanor, it was a good reason to divorce rather than stay in an unhappy marriage. FDR, on the other hand, thought it was possible to keep up appearances and manage a love affair on the side, as he had done.
More painful to Eleanor than Anna’s complicated personal life was the irresponsible behavior of the Roosevelts’ second son, Elliott, who suddenly announced that March that he was taking off for the Texas range to find himself, leaving his wife, Betty, and five-month-old baby behind and demanding that his mother talk to Betty about a divorce. “I’m to talk to Betty and find out their future,” she wrote Hick. “Oh, dear! I’d like to run to you. I want to lean on you.”
Elliott did finally meet Betty face-to-face, after FDR told him he must, and Eleanor traveled out to Phoenix to confront him and at the same time meet the woman he now planned to marry. “I went over everything with Elliott—finances, business, drinking,” she wrote Hick in one of her many communications on the subject. But Elliott’s behavior forced the parents to pick up the pieces, depositing money in his overdrawn bank account and taking Betty and the baby into the White House. Eleanor assured her daughter-in-law that she was welcome to stay and that Bill was “our grandchild, whatever happened.” Betty was self-controlled, but very pale and unhappy. “My heart aches,” Eleanor wrote Hick.
Around the same time, family friends came to see Eleanor to talk with her about her brother Hall’s escalating alcoholism. “I am acutely conscious of it,” she wrote Hick, “but impotent to do a thing, for he is another of life’s undisciplined souls.”
All of this left Eleanor deeply unhappy. She felt responsible, she confided to Hick, for Anna’s and Elliott’s problems, and accused herself of being “a pretty unwise teacher.” Five days later, she wrote that her “zest in life is rather gone for the time being. If anyone looks at me, I want to weep.”
The great escape in the Buick r
oadster could not have come at a better time. For Hick, it was a pause before the momentous change in her life’s direction, not to mention a chance to be with the woman she now cared for so deeply. For Eleanor, it was an opportunity to escape from all her worries about her children and go on a lark with the woman she loved to be with. It was something she had rarely been able to do in her duty-bound life.
Right at the start, however, it looked as though the whole trip was going to be spoiled by security issues. The Secret Service wanted to come along. They feared the two women might be kidnapped, just as the Lindbergh baby had been not long before. But Eleanor and Hick made a joke of the idea: where would the kidnappers put the two of them—one nearly six feet tall and the other weighing nearly two hundred pounds? They wouldn’t fit into any trunk. Besides, they’d been looking forward to their private getaway for months: they weren’t about to bring along a Secret Service agent. Eleanor agreed to keep a gun in the glove compartment. Since she didn’t load it, the weapon was more or less useless.
Thirty years later, Hick remembered the immense pleasure of that road trip: the spontaneous sleepover at a farmhouse in the woods, the beautiful drive down the chain of islands in Lake Champlain, and, above all, the laughter. In Quebec, when a religious shrine required a head covering, Eleanor knotted the four corners of her hanky and pinned it on Hick’s bare head. “I must have looked funny,” Hick remembered, “for I can still see her, laughing until she cried!” When Eleanor wanted her way, she would threaten to tickle Hick. “I was so ticklish that all she had to do to reduce me to a quivering mass of pulp was to point her fingers at me.”
As it turned out, the Secret Service needn’t have worried about the First Lady’s safety. For the first and last time, Eleanor and Hick enjoyed anonymity for nearly their entire trip. In the small French-speaking towns of the Gaspé Peninsula especially, no one seemed to have received the news that Franklin Roosevelt was the new president of the United States. People were more interested in Eleanor’s roadster than they were in its driver and her passenger. That was fine with Eleanor: she was pleased with the car herself.
Eleanor was a careful, frugal manager who worked to reduce White House expenditures by 25 percent, and spent as little time and money on clothes as possible. She even advised women to follow her practice of “try[ing] on all of last year’s things so as to ascertain whether they will still be sufficiently in fashion to keep . . . from being conspicuous in wearing them.” When it came to choosing her own personal car, however, Eleanor broke her own rules. Her sporty light blue Buick convertible, with chrome bumpers, chrome grille, and rumble seat, was a dashing—and conspicuous—symbol of independence, and a dramatic departure from the somber black limousines of First Ladies past.
The automobile set Hick and Eleanor free, just as it had loving women before them. Eleanor’s good friend Molly Dewson, a savvy Democratic political operative, might have been the model. She and her life partner, Polly Porter, were enthusiastic car travelers, shipping their Willys-Knight across the ocean to explore the Dutch and French countryside one summer, motoring through Tunis and Algiers another. Eleanor and Hick had more modest plans. But there was pleasure in simple things, because they were doing them together.
Evenings were spent with John Brown’s Body, an epic poem about the Civil War by Stephen Vincent Benét, with a large cast of characters: slaves, rebels, Yankees, Abraham Lincoln, and of course John Brown, the visionary who was hanged for attempting an insurrection to free the slaves. Eleanor read and Hick listened adoringly: Hick always maintained that Eleanor read poetry better than anyone else she’d ever known. Then, since John Brown’s New York farmstead wasn’t far off their route, they paid a visit to his grave.
Eleanor had learned to drive in her early thirties, under the guidance of the family chauffeur. An early swipe of a Hyde Park gatepost and a backward roll into the woods made her the butt of jokes from the men in the family. But she applied the same determination to learning to drive that she did to swimming and diving, horseback riding, and speaking in public. When she and Hick arrived late at the famous toll road up to the top of Mount Mansfield in Vermont, she defiantly took it on—despite a dire warning from a policeman that it was dangerous to drive the zigzagging, steep, mostly unpaved road in the dark. In the morning, the two of them rose early at their small hotel and watched with special satisfaction as the sun spread over the mountaintop while all below were still in darkness.
Late in the journey, as they passed through a small Maine town, someone recognized Eleanor and a crowd began to gather. Hick, who had gone without a hat for the whole trip, was sunburned and slathered in white cream. Eleanor’s lower lip had gotten burned and swollen to twice its size. Neither of them had any wish to be greeted by the crowds lining up along the main street. Evasive action was required. Eleanor, confused and desperate, ran into a traffic standard and came out with an exasperated “Damn!” Hick was astonished: “It is a word I had never heard her use before, nor did I ever again in all the years we were friends.” With some “highly skilled maneuvering around several corners,” Eleanor escaped the crowd and got out of town fast, driving into the potato country of Aroostook County.
It was getting dark by then, so they stopped at a pristine white farmhouse with a sign welcoming tourists. When the lady of the house learned they were not just any tourists but Mrs. Roosevelt and a friend, she seemed distressed. “You can be sure of one thing,” Eleanor told Hick when they went out for a walk. “Those people did not vote for Franklin!”
A little later that evening, as Hick and Eleanor sat on the front porch swing, the farmer came out to sit on the steps. Hick watched in astonishment as Eleanor, who had spent only a few moments going through the Maine newspaper that morning, began to recite potato prices and discuss potato crops with the farmer “as easily and confidently as though she had spent her whole life raising potatoes in Aroostook County, Maine!” The farmer and his wife ended the evening as their great friends, sharing doughnuts and milk with the two of them in the kitchen.
Hick and Eleanor’s private adventure ended with an important public event: a speech by Eleanor before seven thousand women of the Chautauqua Women’s Club in the Amphitheater at Chautauqua, New York, the original site of the eponymous movement, which brought culture and entertainment to gatherings around the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Mrs. Roosevelt, according to a local report, pulled up at the wheel of her blue roadster, with Miss Lorena Hickok in the passenger seat. She carried her own two bags, and one of them had knitting needles sticking out. The Home Book of Verse was tucked under her arm, and Hick was by her side. Hick was described as a “personal friend of Mrs. Roosevelt,” formerly an AP reporter and now an employee of the federal government.
Eleanor Roosevelt never wrote out her speeches. But she and Hick must have talked about this one as they made their way west from New England to New York. It was a bold speech, calling for a “new social order” in which women and men would work cooperatively. “I feel that we should all enlist in the army of peace,” she told the congregants. The rise of Hitler was unspoken, but was a growing concern among women she had worked with in the suffrage and peace movements in the past. Though she emphasized that men’s and women’s organizations should cooperate “until our interests merge,” she also suggested that women would “set new values and give to us a new social justice, a wider mental and spiritual outlook.”
Back at the White House after the trip, Eleanor and Hick told FDR all about their great adventure at a three-person dinner. Hick, who had already observed Eleanor at work with the potato farmer and his wife, now saw how well practiced she was at serving as her husband’s eyes and ears. Eleanor observed things that Hick hadn’t noticed at all. She guessed at the prosperity of a family, for instance, by looking at the washing hanging on a line in the backyard.
The job that Eleanor had been doing for years for her husband was about to be Hick’s job as
well. Hopkins’s charge was to “go around the country and look this thing over.” He didn’t want “the social-worker angle,” and he didn’t want statistics. He just wanted Hick’s own reaction, “as an ordinary citizen. . . . Tell me what you see and hear. Don’t ever pull your punches.”
Hick’s other audience was going to be Eleanor, who would see all the reports as well as the detailed letters Hick wrote to accompany them. Eleanor’s reactions would influence Hick’s reports from the field. At the same time, Hick would become Eleanor’s best adviser in dealing with the press and public. Increasingly their lives were becoming intertwined—not just on vacation but during all the days in between.
PART II
BECOMING A TEAM
CHAPTER SEVEN
PARTNERSHIP
NOTHING IN LORENA HICKOK’S impoverished childhood prepared her for the mining camps of West Virginia, where she traveled on her first assignment for Harry Hopkins in August 1933. In South Dakota, her family lived for a summer on potatoes and tomato gravy while her father was away looking for work. But poverty in the vast open spaces of South Dakota, where the sun shone and the sky was blue, didn’t compare with the hopelessness she felt in the dark hollows of West Virginia, on the edge of steep mountains.
The worst conditions were in the coal camps along the narrow Scotts Run valley, not far from Morgantown, where filthy water ran down gutters along what passed for a street. It was the same water that was used for drinking, cooking, and washing. Ramshackle houses, black with coal dust, crowded either side. Rats scampered around in the night. Children went to sleep hungry every night on piles of “bug-infested rags” spread out on the floor.
