Hissing Cousins

by Marc Peyser

  There were, however, two mainstays at the Longworth town house. In the summer, there was always poison ivy growing along the walkway leading to her front door. “Please, Mrs. L., couldn’t I hire a yard man to clean out that ivy?” Stewart Alsop once asked her. “You cannot,” she replied. “I like it.”49 The other fixture was a pillow embroidered with the saying “If you can’t say something good about someone sit right here by me.”

  If Alice’s game of spite and malice could be truly ugly at times, it was mitigated somewhat by her willingness to turn on herself. In 1970, when she was eighty-six, she had her second mastectomy. People didn’t talk about cancer in polite company then, and they certainly didn’t discuss female anatomy. But Alice Longworth did. She proudly proclaimed herself “Washington’s Only Topless Octogenarian.” She didn’t include “Washington” in that description by accident. No town was (and still is) more full of itself than Washington, and no one punctured pomposity better than Alice. She knew more presidents—attended parties with them, played cards with them, exchanged advice and gossip with them—than anyone in history, yet she was determined to shrug it off as something just this side of mundane. “Somebody once calculated that I had been to an average of 2.7 dinners a year at the White House over a 60-year period,” she once said. “That’s an awful lot of dinner.”50

  Alice wasn’t there for the most infamousWhite House meal in history—the day Richard Nixon ate crow. She was watching her old friend on TV on August 9, 1974, when he addressed the White House staff just after resigning from office. Ironically, Nixon’s televised remarks that day did more to feed Alice’s soul than any state dinner she ever attended. Ever the survivor, the now ex-president wanted his staff—and the world—to know that even this moment of abject humiliation and failure wouldn’t defeat him. To make his point, he read an extended excerpt from the diary of another president who had faced the darkest of times and yet managed to come through them. “This quote is about a young man,” Nixon explained by way of introduction.

  He was a young lawyer in New York. He’d married a beautiful girl. And they had a lovely daughter. And then suddenly, she died. And this was what he wrote. This was in his diary. He said, “She was beautiful in face and form and lovelier still in spirit. As a flower she grew and as a fair young flower she died. Her life had been always in the sunshine. There had never come to her a single great sorrow. None ever knew her who did not love and revere her for her bright and sunny temper and her saintly unselfishness. Fair, pure, and joyous as a maiden, loving tender and happy as a young wife. When she had just become a mother, when her life seemed to be just begun, and when the years seemed so bright before her, then by strange and terrible fate death came to her. And when my heart’s dearest died, the light went from my life forever.”

  Sitting at home, Alice realized that the man Nixon was quoting was her own father, lamenting the loss of her mother. She had never heard any of this before. “Father never mentioned my mother’s name to me, not once in my life. Just put her out of his mind, I thought,” Alice said. Suddenly a light went on in the darkness—Alice’s darkness. She could finally accept that her father had loved her mother. That, in turn, helped fill a gaping hole in her relationship with TR. “Listening to that part of the diary,” Alice told the New York Times columnist William Safire when he came to her house for tea, “was like revealing a mystery.”51

  Alice had one other source of fulfillment in her sunset years: Joanna, the only child of her only child, the orphan Alice took in for her second chance at motherhood. Like Eleanor, who ultimately became a doting and beloved grandmother of twenty-four, Alice proved to be far more successful in her relationship with Joanna than she ever had been with Paulina. Alice and Joanna remained a tight-knit and intensely private family unit. As Alice aged into her tenth decade, Joanna subtly morphed from ward to caregiver. “Joanna, when did I start losing my memory?” Alice asked her when Safire was visiting. “You only began to get soft in the head about a year ago, Grandmother,” she replied. “Wonderful child—irreverent, like me,” the delighted Alice said.52 When Safire remarked on how well Alice looked, she said, “I’m getting thin, but it’s better to shrivel than to swell.”53

  Alice made her last visit to the White House as a guest of Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, in the summer of 1976. Queen Elizabeth II was visiting the United States for the bicentennial, and Alice, who had met just about every British royal of the twentieth century, was a natural addition to the guest list. While Alice chatted with the queen about her memories of dining with Elizabeth’s great-grandfather, Edward VII, she was carrying a diamond-rimmed purse that he had given her as a wedding present seventy years before. Alice also spotted Lady Bird Johnson across the room. “Shall I ask her how Lyndon is?” she inquired of her escort. “You can’t do that, because he’s dead,” he replied. Even with her fading, ninety-two-year-old memory, Alice was still as quick as most folks can ever hope to be. “Oh, then,” she said. “I shall ask her how Lyndon was.”54

  —

  The month of February loomed large in Alice Longworth’s life. It was the month of her birth, and, of course, of her mother’s and grandmother’s deaths. It was the month in which she was married and the month when Paulina was born. Fittingly, it was also when Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth died, on February 20, 1980, eight days after her ninety-sixth birthday. There were numerous places she might have been buried: next to her husband in Cincinnati, her mother and grandmother in Brooklyn, or her father and stepmother in Oyster Bay. She chose a plot next to Paulina, in the heart of the city she adopted and adored. Washington’s Rock Creek Church Yard sits less than five miles from the U.S. Capitol, which made it an ideal spot for the city’s powerful men and women to pay their respects to “Washington’s Other Monument.” Except, perhaps for the first time, Alice didn’t want their company. At the end of her life, she finally got the one thing that would have made her cousin Eleanor truly jealous: a burial service so private the date wasn’t even publicized. There was no memorial, no visit from the president (which was just as well, given that the Democrat Jimmy Carter was hardly her type and was the first president in nine decades that Alice hadn’t met). She didn’t even have any last words. Her granddaughter, Joanna, who was at Alice’s bedside when she died in her Massachusetts Avenue home, said that instead her grandmother issued a final gesture: she stuck out her tongue. Alice Roosevelt Longworth was defiant to the very end.

  —

  They were born in the same year and neighborhood, shared the same friends, lived in the same houses (including the White one), married the same types of men. They were arguably the most famous women in the country, if not the world, for extended periods of their lives, important enough to command audiences with presidents and kings. They were writers and lecturers, terrible mothers but beloved grandmothers. Above all, they were politicians. Even though they never ran for office, few women waded as deeply into the issues of the day. One of them whispered behind the scenes and one of them spoke to audiences around the world, but they both made their voices heard—and count. Even for a family knit into an extraordinarily tight cloth, Alice and Eleanor stopped at a remarkable number of the same milestones in their long and eventful lives.

  It’s tempting, because they shared so much yet ended up as political rivals, to choose sides between the sugar-and-spice cousins. Pitting Alice and Eleanor against each other was a favorite Washington parlor game for most of their later lives, a sort of Capitol Hill version of “Roosevelt Family Feud.” To both women’s credit, the partisans didn’t always line up behind the expected choice. Arthur Schlesinger, JFK’s close adviser, once remarked in his journal how he was surprised by “my reluctant recognition that I would rather spend an evening with Alice Longworth than with Eleanor Roosevelt. Politics, I came to conclude, is not everything.”55

  There’s no question that Eleanor was more empathetic or that Alice was probably more fierce (even if Eleanor intimidated the hell out of JFK). Eleanor certainly accomplis
hed more, both as the First Lady and as a United Nations delegate. But Alice changed history in her own ways, breaking social taboos and converting her celebrity into political access more effectively than any twenty-first-century PR genius could. Then again, meek Eleanor learned to love the limelight, too. She was even the first—and perhaps still the only—wife of a president to turn up on a TV game show: What’s My Line in 1953. She tried to fool the blindfolded panelists about her identity. She failed.

  There is certainly one way in which Eleanor triumphed over her cousin. She is still beloved, almost deified in some quarters, more than fifty years after her death. Alice outlived her by almost two decades, yet when she’s remembered at all, it’s for a cutting quip that she denied coining in the first place. Eleanor is historic. Alice is receding into a footnote. Why? In large part because Alice couldn’t be bothered with the kind of “important” work required to earn a place in history. She didn’t care much for work at all. It was, after “bore,” second on her list of four-letter words, something to be avoided at all costs, like a quiet dinner followed by knitting. Alice lived in the moment and for her own amusement, an understandable attitude for a girl whose mother and grandmother died two days after she was born. Life is short. Enjoy it while you can. “The key to eternal youth,” she liked to say, “is arrested development.” The only problem with that carpe diem philosophy, as far as posterity is concerned, is that it’s not all that concerned with posterity. The most blunt evidence of that is written right on Alice’s death certificate. In the space asking for her occupation, the word that’s been filled in is “gadfly.”56

  Some people would consider that line of work a disappointment, if not an outright failure. Eleanor certainly did. “Her life gave me a feeling of dreariness & waste,” she’d said about her cousin. The feeling was mutual. While Alice ultimately gave Eleanor credit for her significant achievements, she never really thought that the First Lady was fulfilled. How could she be? Eleanor once said in a My Day column that there were three “fundamentals for human happiness”: work, love, and faith—in that order. None of those would have made Alice’s three-item short list. Like so many quotes attributed to her, there’s no proof that she actually said, “I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches,” but it’s an apt (and fittingly ribald) distillation of her do-it-if-it-feels-good credo. In a way, the cousins were reverse role models for each other, examples of how not to live. They spent a good deal of their lives looking over their shoulders at each other and running as fast as they could in the opposite direction. It’s hard to blame them. Princess Alice was Washington royalty for almost eighty years. Eleanor became the First Lady of the World. Who would want to compete with either of them?

  —

  But focusing on the differences between Mrs. Republican and Mrs. Democrat shouldn’t distract from their unique bond. For a country that has so thoroughly embraced a republican form of government, America has produced a surprising number of political dynasties. The Adamses, Harrisons, and Bushes each produced two presidents, and the Kennedys filled a remarkable number of elective offices at all levels. By some measures, the Roosevelts were the most successful of them all. In the first half of the twentieth century, either Theodore or Franklin was on a national ticket for eight of the twelve presidential elections between 1900 and 1944. What’s more, no other political family dominated two political parties—three, if you include TR’s short-lived Progressives. And no other family produced two women who dominated the national conversation as thoroughly as Alice Longworth and Eleanor Roosevelt. Collectively, their names appeared on the front page of the New York Times more than four hundred times, on matters trivial to international. Between them, they lived in the White House for more than twenty years. They met countless heads of state, over a span of eight decades and representing countries on every continent save Antarctica. “Intellectually, spiritually, the city is dominated by the last good thing said by Alice Longworth,” said the British author Rebecca West after touring the United States in 1935, just as Eleanor was reaching the height of her influence during the FDR administration.

  For all their prominence, it’s hard not to wonder how much more these two fearless and determined female Roosevelts would have accomplished if they hadn’t been pushing against gender barriers at almost every turn. Despite their refusal to abide by many of society’s taboos, Alice and Eleanor couldn’t help but be conscious of, and to some extent restrained by, them. Certainly, few men would have so consistently underplayed their accomplishments, their experience, and the clout that accrues from rubbing elbows with the most powerful people in the country. Yet Eleanor spent most of her life denying she had any real influence, over either her husband or the world at large.*6 Alice would argue the same about her ability to sway her father, her husband, her lover, or any of the politicians who went out of their way to seek her counsel for the better part of fifty years. “I knew what was going on, and I enjoyed talking to people, but I never exerted influence intentionally,” Alice said in 1967. “Women may have influence but not political influence.”57 Maybe she believed that, or maybe she thought ladies shouldn’t brag. In either case, she was clearly selling herself short. Alice had enough “influence” to generate regular bursts of enthusiasm to draft her as a senatorial or vice presidential candidate. A similar Eleanor-for-VP bubble formed in 1948. Even Truman didn’t have the nerve to shoot down the idea. Eleanor took care of that herself.

  And yet despite their social, political, and personal handicaps, their passions have proven to be both resilient and timeless. The issues they fought over so fiercely—the role of government in helping the poor or righting the economy, the role of America on the world stage—have reclaimed the debate with a force not seen since Franklin’s administration. Many of Alice’s rants against the New Deal would sound utterly current in twenty-first-century America; so would Eleanor’s laments about social and economic inequality. In fact, their feuding itself seems of the moment, right down to the multimedia mudslinging that is a bitter hallmark of America’s deeply divided, red-blue political landscape. Bickering politicians often seem like a big dysfunctional family. Given that the Roosevelts were a big dysfunctional family, the hissing cousins may offer valuable lessons for today.

  It’s easy to forget that Alice’s and Eleanor’s larger ideas flowed from the same political headwater: Theodore Roosevelt. A brilliant man, a canny politician, and a larger-than-life personality, he sat astride the American consciousness as surely as he and his neighbors, Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson, gaze out from Mount Rushmore.*7 Roosevelt’s views on war and peace, regulating corporate America, protecting the environment, social justice, government spending, and more were complex and at times confounding enough that both his daughter and his niece could legitimately claim to be carrying on his legacy, even as they followed it along vastly different paths. Maybe that’s why Alice and Eleanor fought like kids on the school yard yet never forgot they were playing for the same American team. They could still occasionally eat dinner together or attend a wedding—or a funeral. In times of crisis—whether it was Pearl Harbor or the death of Paulina—they managed to call a truce, at least for a time. “Fundamental Roosevelt characteristics gravitate toward each other in times of stress,”58 Eleanor wrote optimistically in My Day. And when the crisis had passed or the dinner was done, in the true spirit of TR, the battle was joined anew.

  * * *

  *1 Although My Day maintained its chatty, diary-like feel, once she was no longer First Lady, Eleanor was more comfortable in being overtly political in her column.

  *2 As usual, Alice was unbelievably well sourced to make such a comparison. She actually knew some of the Bonapartes. Her father’s attorney general had been Charles Joseph Bonaparte, grandnephew of the French emperor.

  *3 On the day the Senate voted 67–22 to censure McCarthy, then-senator Kennedy was in a New York hospital undergoing an operation on his spine. When he went back to wor
k and reporters asked how he would have voted, Kennedy begged off by saying, “Oh, that was a long time ago.”

  *4 The commission’s most significant recommendation was that women deserved equal economic and civil rights, still a radical notion in the early 1960s. One relatively immediate result was that each of the fifty states established its own committee to study the question of gender equality. Unfortunately, Eleanor never got to see those seeds take root. She died before the commission’s final report was presented to President Kennedy on October 11, 1963, a date chosen because it would have been her seventy-ninth birthday.

  *5 Her final piece, dated September 26, 1962, starts by discussing a prominent New York City murder case before segueing into a call for school desegregation.

  *6 “I was often supposed to be a great influence on my husband politically,” Eleanor wrote in The Autobiography. “Frances Perkins’s appointment to the Cabinet is a case in point. As a matter of fact, I never even suggested her. She had worked with Franklin in New York State and was his choice” (132). What she conveniently forgets to mention was that she lobbied hard to get Franklin to appoint Perkins the labor commissioner in New York State and kept close tabs on Perkins’s progress throughout her years working with FDR. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin, 323.

  *7 It said much about his stature and impact that the decision to include Theodore Roosevelt with the nation’s three most revered presidents on Mount Rushmore attracted little controversy, even though he had been dead less than ten years.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ..........................................