Hissing Cousins

by Marc Peyser

  I could not help smiling to myself over a headline in the paper, as we were driving up to church, my husband sitting beside me without a coat, while the rest of us pulled our coats closer around us. The headline: “His mollycoddle philosophy is called typical of Roosevelt.” The Roosevelt, of course, is my husband and below his philosophy of security, and so-called popularization of dependency and an easy life, was contrasted with Theodore Roosevelt’s philosophy of the “strenuous life.” No one who really knew both men could have made that contrast. Theodore Roosevelt always preached the strenuous life to keep yourself fit physically, mentally and spiritually…

  No man who has brought himself back from what might have been an entire life of invalidism to strength, and activity, physical and mental and spiritual can ever be accused of preaching or exemplifying a mollycoddle philosophy.42

  Eleanor’s anger, not to mention her uttering the word “invalidism,” was rare enough to startle her readers, then and now. The “mollycoddle” article to which Eleanor was reacting had Alice’s stylistic signature all over it, and almost every biographer of either woman cites this column as an example of Alice’s cruelty and Eleanor’s unusual willingness to bite back. In fact, Alice had nothing to do with the “mollycoddle” story. It was actually written by a more distant Roosevelt cousin, Nicholas, in the New York Herald Tribune. Eleanor, who never mentioned the article’s author in her riposte, clearly knew that. It’s fair to assume that if Alice had been the person who wrote the article, Eleanor wouldn’t have responded at all. She never—ever—chastised Alice publicly for the unkind things her cousin said about her and Franklin. It was as if Eleanor didn’t take Alice’s cruelty seriously, as if she said to herself, Oh, that’s just Alice trying to be contrary and conspicuous again. She doesn’t really mean it. Eleanor seemed to understand Alice, and because of that she forgave her.

  But the fact that the rest of the world jumped to a different conclusion showed how deeply the Alice-Eleanor feud had penetrated the public’s perceptions. Those preconceptions were totally understandable. Alice expressed her own “mollycoddle” theory often enough in private, such as in a letter she wrote to her father’s friend and fellow Rough Rider Arthur Hamilton Lee: “He has the cripple’s psychology…he puts his disability out of his mind and makes the most of what is left to him. He treats the American people in the same way, distracting them with anything he thinks will keep them happy for the moment, but without any deep thought behind it.”43 Not surprisingly, Alice never disavowed the misattributed “mollycoddle” remark. By now, she considered what she called “detached malevolence” to be her stock-in-trade. “I am trying terribly hard to be impartial and malevolent at the same time,” she told Newsweek when her column debuted, “but when I think of Frank and Eleanor in the White House I could grind my teeth to powder and blow them out my nose.”44

  —

  Alice was perhaps the only woman on the planet who referred to the president as Frank. Naturally, she was more formal to his face. “I called him ‘Franklin,’ ” she said. “He used to wince, as if he’d prefer me to call him ‘Mr. President.’ That would annoy him, you see. But we had a very good time together.”45 Which is to say, she had long enjoyed needling him, and he tolerated—and maybe even appreciated—her outrageous sense of humor. She certainly rarely pulled her punches. For instance, she attacked the administration relentlessly over its plan to take the United States off the gold standard. She saw it as yet another example of Franklin’s power-mongering—in her columns she took to referring to him as an “economic royalist.”46 Alice lost that argument; President Roosevelt signed the Gold Reserve Act into law in January 1934. “Had the pleasure of sitting by Mrs. Alice Longworth in the Senate gallery when the gold bill was passed,” Will Rogers wrote to a friend. “Alice, due to the Roosevelt tradition, took it right on the chin and smiled.”47 But she also had the last laugh once again. A few days later, on her next visit to a formal White House function, she showed up wearing a blue velvet gown along with an unusually large collection of accessories, all made of the same precious metal. “From her ears to her shoulders and below dangled gold Hindu earrings, shaped somewhat like horns of plenty. About her neck was a heavy chain of red gold, from which dangled a Chiriqui Indian frog in green gold. Her watch-bracelet was white gold. She even wore amber-golden sidecombs in her hair.”48

  Around this same time, Alice’s gift for mimicry became the talk of the town with her imitations of her cousin Eleanor. Lampooning both the sound of her voice and what Alice saw as the trite and decorous things her cousin said, Alice’s little act was soon infamous enough that Washington gossip columnists would report whenever she added new features to it. Marion Dickerman recalled being at a White House luncheon when Eleanor asked Alice an awkward question: “Alice, why don’t you give one of your impersonations of me now?”49 Dickerman recalled that the always self-assured Alice seemed, briefly, uneasy before performing the routine that had been generating guffaws at parties across the capital. Eleanor obligingly laughed along with the other guests that afternoon, but those who knew her well claimed to recognize the wounded look that appeared on Eleanor’s face. If she was hurt, she didn’t give Alice the satisfaction of responding in kind. “The most helpful criticism I ever received,” Eleanor wrote in a Democratic Party newspaper, “was a takeoff of me on the radio done by my cousin, Alice Longworth. She did it for me one afternoon and I could not help being amused and realizing that it was a truthful picture, and that I had many things to correct.”50

  Always hungry for bitter fruit, the Washington chattering class started predicting Alice’s exile from the White House once and for all. The story became such a hot topic that the reporters at one of Eleanor’s weekly press conferences asked if it were true. They even questioned her about a note that the First Lady allegedly sent to her cousin suggesting Alice would no longer be invited to the White House. Eleanor denied it all categorically: “There is nothing to that. Long ago I told all those, including Alice, to whom invitations to all White House functions go regularly as a matter of routine, that I wanted them all to feel under no compulsion to accept all of them. But this alleged conversation with, or note to, Alice simply never happened.”51 Alice herself told a different story. Years later, she insisted that Eleanor dropped a series of hints to stay away:

  When Eleanor came to the White House, she said to me, “You are always welcome here but you must never feel that you have to come.” So, [I went] with great alacrity and enthusiasm and had a lovely, malicious time. Then a little while later I had another communication from Eleanor. “I’m told that you are bored at coming to the White House, and I never want you to be that, so…” So I wrote her a very cheerful reply, saying, “How disagreeable people are, trying to make more trouble than there already is between us, and of course I love coming to the White House. It couldn’t be more fun and I have always enjoyed myself immensely, etc., etc.” Needless to say, she never asked me there again.52

  It was true that Alice could test the limits of her cousins’ tolerance. When James Roosevelt proposed that his father appoint Alice to some unnamed government commission, FDR’s reply, “which I shall censor somewhat,” Eleanor told a friend, “was: ‘I don’t want anything to do with that woman!’ ”53 But the invitations to the White House kept coming. Several newspapers reported that Franklin and Eleanor had Alice to the White House on February 12, 1934. That was Alice’s fiftieth birthday, and Eleanor knew that her cousin would enjoy celebrating the landmark at her old home. The warm feelings could run in the other direction, too. On the day that they sat together in the Senate gallery to see the gold standard bill passed, Will Rogers noted a considerably more empathetic Alice. “She sincerely believes that no President ever carried the faith of as many people as this distant relative,” Rogers said.54 It was as if the cousins—and especially Alice—were playing the role of hissing cousins much more than they felt it. There was, after all, plenty of truly bad blood flowing through the extended family. Wh
en a friend suggested that Eleanor publicly acknowledge her aunt’s tenacity and grit in light of a broken hip, Eleanor demurred. “I am afraid that Aunt Edith would not appreciate being mentioned in my column,” she replied. “There is no love lost on that side of the family for this side of it.”55 In the fall of 1936, Eleanor Butler Roosevelt, Ted junior’s wife, was scheduled to speak at the Fort Worth Town Hall on her experiences as the wife of the governor of the Philippines. Just days before her lecture, she learned that Franklin and Eleanor’s son Elliott, who happened to be living in Fort Worth, had been asked to introduce her at the meeting. Ted’s Eleanor was appalled. She quickly wrote him a letter, making it clear she wanted him to have no part in the event. Because her husband’s politics “differed in every respect to those of your father, the President,” Ted’s Eleanor insisted that the family’s conflicting political views “would make it embarrassing for all concerned for you to appear at the lecture.”56 She suggested that Elliott inform the organizers that he would be out of town and unable to perform the courtesy introduction he’d already agreed to make. Elliott agreed to bow out, but he made Eleanor Butler pay for his capitulation. He released her petulant letter to the press. When they asked her about the squabble during a pre-lecture interview, she replied tersely. “I have written no letter to the Roosevelt family,” she said, “for publication.”57

  The First Lady only heard about the flap in the next day’s newspapers. She once again found herself bemoaning her family’s differences while appreciating those bonds that hadn’t ruptured under the strain. “You are a grand political enemy to have,” she wrote to her cousin Corinne Alsop, “because you do not carry it into your personal relationship, and as I don’t either it is a great relief to find it in other members of the family! At the moment I happen to be a little distressed by a newspaper story about Eleanor, Ted’s wife, refusing to be introduced by Elliott at a meeting in Fort Worth, Texas. It seems to me unfortunate to harbor that kind of political feeling in personal relationships.”58 It had always been Eleanor’s nature to try to smooth over disagreements that might rattle family harmony. She’d been doing that since her parents’ marriage started to crumble. But she could easily have abandoned her peacekeeper role and instead expected the family to fall in line behind her. After all, she was the one now sitting in the White House. She was the one whose column had become a success nationwide, appearing in sixty-two papers by 1938. On the other hand, by June 1937 Alice’s career as a columnist was put to bed, eighteen months after it began. “The evening papers announced last night that this would be the final week for Mrs. Longworth’s syndicated column,” the general manager of Eleanor’s syndicate wrote to the First Lady upon the cancellation of What Alice Thinks. “I make this report I hope without malice but I always knew what would happen to Alice.”59

  To be fair to Alice, Eleanor had enjoyed an advantage in the cousins’ personal newspaper war. The First Lady received considerable mentoring from a top-notch journalist who had also become a very close friend. Lorena Hickok started covering Franklin for the Associated Press when he ran for governor of New York in 1928. She wasn’t much interested in Mrs. Roosevelt at the time; Eleanor wasn’t the story, and she fled Albany whenever she could anyway. “I don’t remember anything Mrs. Roosevelt said at that first meeting. It must have been brief and formal. She was very plain—she would have used the word ‘homely’—with prominent front teeth like her uncle Ted’s. She wore her light brown hair tightly tucked under a hair net that even covered part of her forehead. Her clothes were unbecoming. I got the impression that she didn’t care much how she looked, so long as she was tidy.”60

  But when Franklin began his campaign for the White House in 1932, Hickok was a savvy enough reporter to see that plain Mrs. Roosevelt could well blossom into a newsworthy person in her own right. Hickok badgered her bosses at the AP to let her cover Eleanor full-time, and one month before the general election they relented despite their doubts. “She’s all yours now, Hickok. Have fun!” said her boss, Bill Chaplin.61 Eleanor was equally skeptical about the idea when Hickok informed her. “Mrs. Roosevelt frowned a little, looked at me commiseratingly, sighed and shook her head. ‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘that you won’t have much to write about. I’ll not be doing anything very interesting.’ ”62 In the world of dead-wrong political predictions, Eleanor’s was right up there with “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

  Yet Eleanor understood that Hickok had a job to do and respected how difficult it must have been for her to succeed in the macho newspaper world. Grudgingly, she allowed her personal reporter to put a toe inside her inner circle. When the mother of Missy LeHand, Franklin’s indispensable personal secretary, died in far-upstate New York, Eleanor invited Lorena to go to the funeral with her. Over the next few days of long train trips and intensely personal time together, Eleanor let down her guard. She talked about her beloved yet doomed father, her mother’s crazed and cruel siblings, her cold grandmother. “May I write some of that?” Lorena asked one night when they shared a sleeping cabin on a train, Eleanor in the top bunk, Lorena on the lower. “If you like,” Eleanor replied. “I trust you.”63

  After that, their relationship—some strange hybrid of an intense new friendship and a mutual crush on a co-worker—deepened. When Hickok arrived at the twin Roosevelt town houses on election night, Eleanor kissed her sweetly and said, “It’s good to have you around tonight, Hick.”64 On the night when news broke of FDR’s being shot at in Miami, the two women had just left each other after dining at an Armenian restaurant in New York. Lorena jumped in a cab to Eleanor’s house on Sixty-Fifth Street and made front-page news with her report on the First Lady elect’s remarkable composure. Two and a half weeks later at the inauguration, Eleanor was wearing a sapphire ring that Hickok had given her. Eleanor still had the ring on her finger three days later, on March 7, which was Lorena’s fortieth birthday. By then, Lorena had resigned from her job at the AP, realizing that she had become too close to her source to cover her objectively. Eleanor got her a job as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which required Hickok to travel around the country to evaluate various New Deal poverty programs such as the one in Arthurdale, West Virginia. Though she would generally stay at the White House when she wasn’t on the road, Hickok’s distance from Eleanor quickly affected their relationship. “Hick darling, All day I’ve thought of you & another birthday I will be with you. Oh 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 think she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it.”65 In response, Lorena complained that she was crying herself to sleep because she missed Eleanor. Eleanor wrote back,

  I miss you greatly my dear. The nicest time of the day is when I write to you. You have a stormier time than I do but I miss you as much, I think. I couldn’t bear to think of you crying yourself to sleep. Oh! How I wanted to put my arms around you in reality instead of in spirit. I went & kissed your photograph instead & the tears were in my eyes. Please keep most of your heart in Washington as long as I’m here for most of mine is with you. A world of love & good night my dear one.66

  There are many, many letters like those—three thousand or more between the two of them. Lorena had suggested that Eleanor write to her daily, to form a sort of a diary that could later be transformed into a biography. As with every challenge she took on, Eleanor threw herself into the task, sometimes writing twice a day. That discipline and eye for detail helped make My Day an almost effortless success. (In fact, Hickok had strongly encouraged Eleanor to write a syndicated column.) Along the way, Hickok became the First Lady’s sounding board, someone to unburden herself to about politics, her marriage, even her children. “I don’t seem to be able to shake the feeling of responsibility for Elliott and Anna,” Eleanor wrote to Lorena. “I guess I was a pretty unwise teacher as to how to go about living. Too late to do anything now, however, and I am rather disgusted with myself. I feel soiled, but you won’t understand that.”6
7

  But the most revealing—yet confounding—topic of their letters was their feelings toward each other. It’s unclear when Eleanor realized that Lorena was a lesbian, but she certainly knew early in their friendship. Lorena made no attempt to hide behind fictitious boyfriends or empty marriages. She had lived romantically with a woman for eight years in Minnesota before she began covering FDR. Eleanor wouldn’t have cared much about Lorena’s sexual orientation. Most of the First Lady’s closest female friends were lesbians. The question is whether Lorena and Eleanor were themselves lovers. Divining the answer has become something of a homoerotic Rorschach test.

  The evidence in favor is certainly powerful. Many of their letters are overripe with longing, physical as well as emotional. Eleanor wrote: “Gee! What wouldn’t I give to talk to you & hear you now, oh, dear one, it is all the little things, tones in your voice, the feel of your hair, gestures, these are the things I think about & long for. I am trying not to think about your next trip. You will seem so far away.”68 If Eleanor was effusive, Hickok could be passionate. During an extended cross-country trip that kept them apart for two months, Lorena seemed to be almost counting the minutes until they would be reunited:

  Only eight more days. Twenty-four hours from now it will only be seven more—a week! I’ve been trying today to bring back your face—to remember just how you look. Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips. I wonder what we’ll do when we meet—what we’ll say…Good night, dear one. I want to put my arms around you and kiss you at the corner of your mouth. And in a little more than a week, I shall!69