Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

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  ELEANOR’S SPEAKING TOUR of the Midwest after the election was followed several months later by a longer tour of the South and West. Huge crowds greeted her wherever she went: ordinary citizens, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, marching bands, and, of course, reporters. After she visited a college in Oklahoma, the students who saw her off at the train station brought fifty-four boxes of flowers with them in tribute.

  Eleanor was uncomfortable as usual with all the attention and attributed it, in her “My Day” column, to the president’s popularity. But she was not very convincing. She had to know by this time that she was an attraction in her own right.

  Hick watched it all—sometimes anxiously, sometimes longingly—from her new perch in the Empire State Building, where she was now working in public relations for the World’s Fair. Hick worried about Eleanor’s bruising schedule: “Really this trip of yours sounds rather appalling,” she wrote. “Why so many speeches every day?”

  When Eleanor visited Milwaukee and Minneapolis, Hick’s old stomping grounds, Hick agonized about Eleanor meeting her old friends. She wanted it to happen, but she worried about burdening Eleanor. On the other hand, she worried that her friends would be deeply hurt and blame her if they didn’t have the chance to meet the First Lady. “Why must I be such a damned fool!” she lamented to Eleanor, when she realized all her obsessing was for naught. Of course Eleanor looked up Hick’s friends, pleasing all parties.

  In “My Day,” Eleanor wrote only the good news about the New Deal out in the country. In Kansas City, one WPA sewing room employed nineteen hundred women and occupied six floors of an office building. In Chicago, she watched out-of-work artisans, subsidized by the government, honing new skills at the Field Museum, restoring ancient vases and meticulously reconstructing animal skeletons. The museum director told her that the WPA workers had become indispensable, and in some cases gone from relief work to jobs on the staff. “There isn’t any useless boondoggling at the Field Museum,” he told her.

  Eleanor’s reports in her column provided good publicity for the New Deal at a time when the administration needed friends. Her private reports to FDR undoubtedly gave him more balanced information. She couldn’t go behind the scenes in the same way that Hick had, but she was now doing a version of the same job Hick had done during FDR’s first term. The multiple ironies of the situation could not have been lost on Hick. She had been the professional writer, earning a good living with a top job at the AP. Now it was Eleanor who was earning a much better living from her writing than Hick ever could have. Moreover, it was now Eleanor who was, as Hick noted, leading the adventurous life, traveling around the country and reporting back to Washington. Hick, on the other hand, was stuck behind a desk, trying to get the public excited about a manufactured event, the 1939 World’s Fair. What’s more, she was now working at a job that involved tact, something Eleanor excelled at but that she herself achieved only with great difficulty.

  The contentment Hick and Eleanor had achieved some months earlier seemed to evaporate as Hick took on the World’s Fair job. She wrote Eleanor frequently about how little she cared about anything, about how old she felt, though she was only forty-four. She was completely unfit to be an executive, she told Eleanor. “All day I ‘sit on myself,’ so to speak, disciplining myself, trying to control my impatience, my natural irascibility, my loathing of friction and disorder. By night I’m exhausted.”

  Hick was sounding like a more strident version of Eleanor, who was herself feeling more trapped than ever in the wrong job. “Why can’t someone have this job who’d like it & do something worth while with it?” she had complained to Hick after FDR was reelected.

  Despite her still-frequent letters, Hick was trying not to rely so much on her relationship with Eleanor. She invited old lovers to visit her in New York: Alicent Holt came from Michigan, but Hick found she couldn’t “give Alicent what she wants—which is a lot of affection and consideration.” She felt “all dried up inside.” When she learned in February that Ellie, her first love, was having difficulty in her marriage, she told her she should come back “whenever she wants.” But when Ellie did come, four months later, for an extended visit, Hick was miserable much of the time. Ellie was a dear, Hick reported to Eleanor, and the “most painless house guest imaginable.” Yet Hick often wanted to be alone, got low and disagreeable, and then couldn’t explain why. Still, she thought she’d done “fairly well” hosting Ellie, “with one or two notable and pretty tragic exceptions.”

  At work, Hick disliked the innuendo she detected from people about her friendship with Eleanor—the “sidelong glances” and the comments about her “connections.” But the deeper reason for her despair surfaced when she and Eleanor had a talk about their relationship one evening in September at the Village apartment. “It’s this drifting—or seeming to drift—apart that bothers me so,” Hick wrote afterward. What got her down and discouraged was “the thought of seeing you—or trying to see you—when you didn’t want to see me.”

  Eleanor wrote back, “I didn’t realize you thought we were drifting apart. I just take it for granted that can’t happen.”

  After that, Hick and Eleanor managed some very happy New York encounters. Eleanor was pleased that they could have such a good time doing the things she did with other friends—going out to dinner and the theater. “Yes, I had a good time too, last night—a heavenly time,” Hick replied.

  They made plans to exchange presents at the Village apartment a few days before Christmas. “Don’t dress,” Eleanor instructed. “Just bring your wrapper and pyjamas and be comfortable for the evening.” The next day, Hick wrote Eleanor that it was “a lovely ‘Christmas’ last night—one of the nicest I can remember. . . . Dearest one—still, and always, dearest one—you made me very, very happy, and I thank you.”

  What did happen between Hick and Eleanor on these intimate occasions? It is possible, as Eleanor’s grandson Curtis Roosevelt has claimed, that his grandmother’s “visceral dislike of physical contact” confined the bodily expression of their love to kissing, cuddling, and tickling. It’s also possible that Eleanor’s wish to please allowed Hick to lead her further into sensual pleasures that she avoided at other times. There is no answer. But Hick’s gratitude suggests that she, at least, continued to derive a deep and important satisfaction from these intimate times together.

  As long as Eleanor was present in her life, Hick could maintain her equilibrium. But the problem, as both she and Eleanor now knew well, was that Eleanor was spread too thin to satisfy her longings. And when Eleanor wasn’t available, Hick could quickly go into a tailspin. “I’m being perfectly honest,” she wrote Eleanor on one of these occasions, “when I say I’ll be relieved when it’s over. . . . You are always horrified when I say that I wish it had happened when I had that automobile accident out in Arizona. . . . I’d have died happy, as happy as I’ve ever been in my life.”

  Characteristically, Eleanor blamed herself for Hick’s unhappiness, believing that their relationship had forced Hick to give up the old life and work she loved. “It won’t help you any but I’ll never do to anyone else what I did to you. I’m pulling myself back in all my contacts now. I’ve always done it with the children and why I didn’t know I couldn’t give you (or anyone else who wanted and needed what you did) any real food I can’t now understand. Such cruelty and stupidity is unpardonable when you reach my age.”

  Hick assured her that “never in your life have you deliberately done anything to hurt me or hinder me professionally.” On the contrary, Eleanor had given her help “many, many times.” “As I look back on these last five years—I don’t think anyone ever tried harder to make another human being happy and contented than you have tried with me.”

  It must have been difficult at times for Eleanor to gauge just how unhappy Hick was. Within a single letter, she was capable of going from suicidal to matter-of-fact with astonishing ease.

 
Just a week after she and Eleanor spent a blissful time together, Hick was so unhappy at work that she was ready to end it all. “WHY can’t I be better adjusted to life?” she lamented. “God knows, I try. But about 90 per cent of the time I’m out of step with life and miserable. I’ll not try to step out of it. . . . But it’s been a miserably uncomfortable business, most of it, and I’m tired of it all and bored with past, present, and future.”

  This long paragraph of lament was followed by two brief ones:

  “There, there, Hickok!”

  And then: “I must powder my nose and get going. Much love, dear.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THIS PLACE!

  STARTING IN 1937, Hick counted on a country place on Long Island she named the Little House to help her recover in difficult times. She would often say in ensuing years that there were only three things she cared about in the world: Eleanor Roosevelt, her dog Prinz, and the Little House.

  It was Hick’s alternative to Val-Kill, a place teeming with rivals for Eleanor’s attention. Although she accepted, on most days, that she would never have Eleanor to herself in a little cottage for two, she was excited when Eleanor agreed to join her at the Little House for a few days that first year of Roosevelt’s second term. “If you like it one-tenth as much as I do, I’ll be satisfied,” she wrote.

  What Hick loved about the Little House was not just the house itself, with its fireplace and cozy rooms and sunny porches, or the setting in the woods, not far from the ocean, but also the atmosphere of casual friendliness created by owners Bill and Ella Dana. The Danas were a wealthy couple whom Hick had first met at their Nevada ranch, during the California trip she had taken with Eleanor several years before. They lived in the grand house on the Long Island property. But there were several farmhouses and outbuildings around the place, occupied by people of modest means, all of whom were to become Hick’s friends. Ella Dana, once she understood how much Hick loved the place, offered to fix up yet another house for her and rent it to her for $35 a month.

  Hick was thrilled. But in order to afford it she needed a partner. She invited Howard Haycraft, a friend from Minnesota twelve years her junior, to come for a trial visit. Haycraft shared Hick’s passion for opera, politics, good food and drink, and Minnesota football. They liked being together.

  When they weren’t listening to music, Howard and Hick loved to argue. They had a “perfectly joyous argument” one night about FDR’s proposal for enlarging the Supreme Court. Howard argued for changing the Court through a constitutional amendment.

  Hick stood up in the middle of the apartment and declaimed, “Here and now, Howard Haycraft, I say to Hell with the Constitution! And I warn you that, if you have your state conventions, that may very likely be the attitude of your delegates, and you don’t know what kind of goofy amendment you’ll get!”

  Howard grinned and promised to use her argument the next day against every Tory he ran into.

  “He’s such fun,” Hick wrote Eleanor, “but in an argument so damnably logical.”

  Like Hick, Howard was a wordsmith with a job to match: he spent his workdays editing literary anthologies of various kinds for H.W. Wilson Co. His great love, however, was the detective story, which he described as “the one dependable and unfailing anodyne in a world so realistically murderous that fictive murder becomes refuge and retreat.” Haycraft was the first to write critically and in depth about the detective story. When he died at age eighty in 1991, an aficionado told the New York Times that Haycraft’s 1941 book Murder for Pleasure was the “most insightful, perceptive and fair-minded book ever written on the subject.”

  Hick’s partnership with Haycraft in the Little House was a satisfying variant of traditional homemaking. Hick and Howard seemed to enjoy cooking for each other when they were there together. Hick fed Howard what she called “gruel” when his stomach took a bad turn, and made the beds—just as Eleanor did at Campobello—in anticipation of his arrival. It turned out that Howard loved the place as much as Hick did, waking up early to go hawk shooting with Bill Dana or spending days sailing with him in the bay.

  Bill Dana was the other person who made the Little House special for Hick. Both he and Ella lived on inherited wealth. Ella, who was a Floyd by birth, still traveled in privileged circles: she was one of the elite group of women who lent their names to the World’s Fair Women’s Committee, headed up by Mrs. Vincent Astor. But it was Bill, a World War I vet who loved to hang out with the local fishermen, who became Hick’s boon companion. They would walk and talk together in the woods by the hour, their dogs bounding about them.

  Hick didn’t herself hunt, but admired Bill’s prowess. When he presented her with two fox skins, she had them made into a stole and proudly told admirers that her friend “Daniel Boone” Dana had bagged them. When she was at the Little House, though, her favorite attire resembled Bill’s: corduroy riding breeches, plaid shirts, and boots from L.L. Bean.

  The Little House in spring with the apple trees in bloom was especially wonderful. There were lilacs and tulips around the Dana house and wisteria embracing it. Hick delighted in the birdsong and the whistling of the quail. “Golly—this place!” she wrote Eleanor.

  Eleanor visited during Hick’s first fall at the Little House, and wrote with genuine enthusiasm in her column about her “brief visit with a friend.” The house was “far away from the world,” at the end of a drive through untouched woods. There were game birds, occasional deer, and very few strangers. There was also an unforgettable sunset at the end of an evening boat ride. “When we started back in the little motor boat the sky was red, but gradually sky and water seemed to merge in color until the water looked iridescent as it reflected every shade of green, purple, blue and scarlet, streaming across the sky.”

  Sunsets were special to Hick and Eleanor. They wrote often of missing each other as they watched a beautiful sunset, and they remembered the ones they shared on their trips in New England and California. Hick, reading about the sunset in “My Day,” would have recognized the description as a private note in a public place.

  The next August, Eleanor kept a promise to Hick and returned to the Little House. Hick wrote excitedly to her about this—maybe it would be an alternative to the trips they used to take together! It could also provide Eleanor with a much-needed rest away from the relentless demands of the mail—Eleanor tried to answer every letter—and the schedule. But Eleanor’s second visit didn’t work out nearly as well as the first. Eleanor assured Hick that she had had “a grand week.” But then she added, “I wish the mosquitoes had let us walk in the woods.”

  Eleanor confided to others that the visit was more duty than pleasure. “I wouldn’t live on Long Island for all the world!” she wrote Franklin, who was on the USS Houston in the Galápagos. “Everything sticks and I don’t want to move!”

  In “My Day,” Eleanor wrote of a “personal triumph” she achieved on the visit: producing a readable version of her column on her portable typewriter. But the truth was that she missed Tommy’s secretarial skills. Nor did she care much for the isolation. “There is no telephone in this house to disturb us,” she wrote, “and I know that I should be taking advantage of such unusual peace to think out some really important problem.” She resolved to “vegetate” and “knit” instead, and “take part in some of the daily tasks which form the pattern of most women’s lives.” In the end, she explained to her readers, she needed to find a telephone. “A kind friend spent all day yesterday trying to get me to a telephone and I finally went to a neighboring house this morning and called in answer to several urgent messages.” The best part of her visit was seeing that kind friend, Hick, in a place where she was so content. But the Little House was not for her.

  When she returned from Long Island to Val-Kill, Eleanor was greeted with Nan Cook’s reproaches about being unavailable, no doubt heightened by jealousy about Eleanor’s spending a whole week with Hick. The con
frontation made Eleanor realize that Val-Kill was no longer a happy place for her either.

  For several years, tensions had been growing between Nan and Marion on one side and Eleanor on the other. It began with the decision in 1936 to move Val-Kill Industries off the property. Eleanor seemed to believe it was a mutual and uncomplicated decision. She wrote in “My Day” that “we have turned over our various industries at Hyde Park to the workers,” since they are now able to run them themselves. She claimed it was “a pleasant experience.”

  Nan must have found Eleanor’s blasé attitude maddening. For her, the move was devastating: the shop had been a creative touchstone and the source of her connection to many Roosevelt projects, including Arthurdale and Warm Springs.

  The new arrangement had allowed Eleanor, along with Tommy and their many guests, to use the factory building as their place, leaving the original cottage to Nan and Marion. Eleanor was clearly pleased to have her own house at last. A window placed over her desk was a great joy, looking out over the swamp, still bright with purple loosestrife. She looked forward to autumn, when she could sit and work and look out at the trees as they turned red, gold, and brown.

  Tommy, who kept Anna Roosevelt apprised of events at Val-Kill, reported that Nan was defiantly spending money on the cottage “like a drunken sailor,” but still hadn’t entirely accepted Eleanor’s claim to the factory building. When Tommy moved in with her boss, and referred to her part of the factory building as “my house,” Nan “turned on me in a real fury and said it didn’t belong to me, that she and Marion had much more money in this building than Mrs. R and Mrs. R could not give me any of it so I could say ‘mine.’” Tommy told Nan that she would refer to it from then on as “the place where I live and sleep.” Eleanor was sitting next to Tommy and witnessed the entire exchange.

  On another occasion, according to Tommy, Nan reproached Eleanor for being slow to greet one of her guests, pointing out that she and Marion had entertained all of Eleanor’s guests at great expense for years.