Although over seventy-five, she retained a freshness of vision that was always on the lookout for excellence, a spirit of compassion that inevitably made her the ally of the victim, and an unspoiled goodness of heart that was especially responsive to integrity and courage. A Negro poet seeking a publisher suddenly discovered that he had Mrs. Roosevelt acting as his literary agent; a mimeographed petition reaching her through the mails on behalf of some Communists who had been jailed too long was returned with her signature; a vituperative racist received a courteous and reasoned reply in the hope of touching some chord of humanity in him. One day on her way to a charity meeting in Greenwich Village at her hairdresser François’, a Negro youth carelessly backed a station wagon into her and knocked her down as she was crossing Eighth Street. She told him to leave quickly, before people gathered and he got into trouble, limped to François’, and although in considerable pain, made her speech. Later David Gurewitsch taped up her leg, but despite torn ligaments, she insisted on going through with the rest of her engagements for the day, ending up at 10:00 p.m. at the Waldorf-Astoria, where she apologized to her audience for making her speech seated on a high pillow. “People saw that I was in pain and we raised more money,” she later told David, who had not wanted her to go.
Anna Halsted, who was in Shiraz, Iran, with her husband and had seen a news item about her mother being knocked down, wrote anxiously to David Gurewitsch. Mother was doing “far too much. . . .If there was something specific about her health on which you could base the essentiality of her cutting down on her activities, then I think she will cooperate—particularly if she realizes that cutting down now will prolong her total years of activity—activity which is so much needed in today’s world.”
Mrs. Roosevelt was now living in a house on East Seventy-fourth Street. She had liked her small duplex on East Sixty-second, with its garden and easy access of her AAUN office, but then the landlord had demanded a large rent increase, so back she moved to the Park Sheraton. Later, she and the David Gurewitsches were able to locate the East Seventy-fourth Street house, which they divided and occupied together.
But “home” continued to be her cottage at Val-Kill. She enjoyed her drives through the countryside, with glimpses of the Berkshires on one side and the Catskills on the other, and with the farms fat and prosperous, a result, she felt, of New Deal programs. She looked forward to the flowering of the dogwood beneath her bedroom window and to the first June week end when the swimming pool could be used and luncheon served on its fringes. When she went off on a trip, it was to her cottage and her dogs that she said good-by. “It is always a wrench to leave home and try to explain to wistful little Scotties that I am not deserting them for good.”
After Tommy’s death she had taken over her part of the cottage, converting Tommy’s living room into her workroom and the two bedrooms into additional guest rooms. When the telephone rang, she often answered herself, and then, remembering that it might expose her to some wild petition, said, “Mrs. Roosevelt’s secretary.” She insisted, however, that she was the world’s “most reluctant telephone user.” She definitely disassociated herself from the people for whom telephoning was a way of life. “When I have to take a call, I say what needs to be said and hang up.” Writing a letter was a much more satisfactory form of communication, especially with family and friends, she maintained. She was a faithful and tireless correspondent when away from home and the first to telephone when she returned. She often lent the Val-Kill grounds, fronting down to the pond, for picnics to groups in which she was interested, provided them with refreshments, and, sitting on a log by the outdoor fireplace, answered questions. Filed away under the Wiltwyck School for troubled boys, a card read, “400 hot dogs, 200 rolls, 200 cup cakes, 50 quarts milk, 25 quarts ice cream, 100 comic books, 100 bars candy, potato salad, mustard.” As she had helped her father serve the newsboys at Thanksgiving, so she was delighted to have John and her favorite niece Ellie and their children help her at these picnics. Afterward, everyone, grownups as well as young, fell silent and listened to her reading of Kipling’s Just So Stories, especially the Wiltwyck boys’ favorites—“How the Elephant Got His Trunk” and “The Butterfly That Stamped.”
Once as she was greeting the boys one of them stopped in front of her and said: “Mrs. Roosevelt, do you remember me?”
“Yes,” she answered, “I remember all of you. I have seen you at school and many of you were here last year. Of course, I remember you.”
That did not satisfy the little boy. “Mrs. Roosevelt, what’s my name?” he persisted. There were one hundred boys, she explained, and she could not possibly remember all their names. She was an old lady and her memory was not as good as it once was, she added.
The boy then told her his name. But he was so anxious to be identified by someone, Mrs. Roosevelt noted, that within five minutes he was back again: “Mrs. Roosevelt, what’s my name?”
“To have a friend who knows you by name gives you a sense that you are not alone in the world,” she commented. To the end of her life, her own “very miserable childhood,” her wanting to be loved, especially by her father, gave her a profound sense of kinship with all lonely, deprived, and excluded youngsters. Whether they were the Wiltwyck boys or the children about whom the Citizens Committee for Children was concerned, the youths in the Encampment for Citizenship or the students of the Hudson Shore Labor School, the girls at the Women’s House of Detention or those in the Junior League, young people were a special object of her solicitude.
Her lack of pretense remained a continuing source of wonderment to those around her. She entertained two raw-boned young Mormon “elders” who had knocked at her door as readily as she did the queen of Nepal, who listened one night at Hyde Park, her eyes widening in amazement, as Mrs. Roosevelt and her son John lustily debated the merits of the right-to-work laws.
She campaigned on street corners and in living rooms and spoke to audiences of fifteen with the same intensity as to those of 1,500. “She never asked how many people were going to be present,” said Richard Brown, director of the Committee of Democratic Voters. “Herbert Lehman might.” She was as solicitous of her neighbors and friends in Hyde Park as of the diplomats and statesmen who thronged the United Nations, as content to work with her neighbor Dorothy Bourne on a project to improve the health of the children of Dutchess County as with Maurice Pate of UNICEF to improve the health of the children of the world. She appeared before the New York City Planning Commission to argue against tampering with Washington Square and before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to warn against tampering with the UN Charter. “She did everything because it was worth doing,” said Adlai Stevenson. “She did nothing because it would help to enhance her own role. Of that she seemed simply to be unconscious.”
Why do you bother with the small groups? she was sometimes asked. “But nobody else will go,” she replied. “It’s important they should know someone cares.”
Occasionally “Tubby” Curnan came down from Hyde Park to chauffeur Mrs. Roosevelt around town in the small Jaguar she had acquired from Franklin Jr. At other times, especially when she was going to the theater or the airport, she rented a limousine driven by Roosevelt Zanders, the head of an auto rental agency. Sometimes she went by subway, but mostly in her final years she used taxis. Once she told a cabbie with sixty cents on his meter to wait for her while she stopped for a minute to shop. But when she came out, he was gone. “I cheated that driver out of sixty cents, plus a tip, and I feel guilty,” she advertised in her column.
So, I would be grateful if, on the chance that particular driver sees this item of confession, he would send me a note telling me where I could reimburse him.
Gentlemen, seeing her on the curb looking for a taxi, would stop and offer to turn over theirs. If she accepted, she insisted they both make use of it.
She was a little late with her Christmas shopping, she confessed to a reporter when she was seventy-seven. “I have a long list—such a long list.
” She smiled. “I have 20 grandchildren now, and 13 great-grandchildren.”8 A large black loose-leaf Christmas book listed what she had given people from 1935 on. The last entries were in a wavering hand. She sent royalty maple sugar, her newspaper friends cheeses, her ex-daughters-in-law perfume. She sent out innumerable checks.
Each friend, especially those about whom she really cared, answered some deep need in her, but she was the one who gave the most. During her White House years she made a special Christmas for the friends who were almost family—Tommy, Hick, Earl, and a few others. For each of them she filled a stocking to open Christmas morning, got together beforehand for a little dinner or celebration, and then called them on Christmas Day. After her White House years she tried to combine family and friends into one sparkling Christmas celebration at Hyde Park.
She loved to celebrate the birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and other special occasions of those close to her. She listed these anniversaries in a little black birthday book. Until Grace (Mrs. Louis) Howe’s death in 1955, she always sent her flowers on Louis’s birthday. No relationship was ever terminated because of her neglect or thoughtlessness. If the other person was forgetful, she was careful, in reminding him, not to make him feel guilty. She carried on and remembered where others had long left off. She arranged her travel itineraries so that during the year she saw not only the children and grandchildren, who were scattered throughout the country, but Tiny (Mrs. Hershey) Martin in California, Esther Lape in Westbrook, her old newspaper friends in Washington, and June Rhodes and Earl Miller in Florida.
The other person’s interests took precedence over her own. She asked a friend what play she would like to see on her birthday. How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying was the answer. Mrs. Roosevelt promised to get the tickets. Later the friend learned that Mrs. Roosevelt had already seen that play and suggested they go to something else. Knowing her friend wanted to see How to Succeed. . ., Mrs. Roosevelt would not countenance any change in plans, but to make her feel less uncomfortable, said, “I have forgotten it anyway, so it will be like a new play.”
But if she enjoyed celebrating her friends’ birthdays, she discouraged them from making a fuss about her own. One day would be ruled out for a party because she could not have the people she wanted, another because there would be people she wanted, another because there would be people present she did not want. In the face of outraged protests, she finally settled on her seventy-seventh birthday for a quiet dinner with the Gurewitsches, a luncheon with her children, an exchange of toasts with the Lashes, and some little ceremony with Maureen and Hick.
To the very end she entertained extensively. Old friends came to dinner regularly—Harry Hooker, soft-spoken Belle (Mrs. Kermit) Roosevelt, Dutchess County neighbors like Mrs. Olin Dows, Mrs. Gerald Morgan, and Laura Delano.
Most of the “river” people admired her, even if a little resignedly, when it came to her public activities. “Once Eleanor invited Helen [Mrs. Theodore Douglas Robinson] and myself over to Val-Kill for lunch,” recalled Mrs. Gerald Morgan, who, as Mary Newbold, had once canoed on the Hudson with Franklin. “We thought it would be a nice small intimate party and give us a chance to talk with Eleanor. Before we knew it, a delegation of two hundred ladies arrived—colored. That was the way it usually was in the last years.” But Mrs. Morgan also remembered “a very pleasant evening. My younger boy was interested in the Clarion Concert Society and we asked her to dine and hear about it. It was like old times. We had no great discussion about the Peace Corps or anything like that. We discussed old friends. Helen Robinson was there, and she was most kind about the concerts, taking subscriptions.”9
One river lady was unreconciled to Eleanor Roosevelt, the social reformer. Mrs. John Henry Livingston, who occupied Clermont, considered herself the “Lady of the Manor,” and even her neighbors called her “Lady Alice.” Once she spotted Mrs. Roosevelt picnicking with some friends on her grounds. They were asked to leave. “Why, I was wiped off the face of the earth,” Mrs. Roosevelt later said in talking about the incident.10
A former Dutchess County neighbor whom Mrs. Roosevelt saw frequently was Geraldine (Mrs. Lewis) Thompson. One of the Morgan sisters of Staatsburgh, she was now a New Jersey Republican of such determination that even though she was in her eighties, when she decided Mrs. Roosevelt had to help her on some welfare or prison reform project, it was difficult to say no. Mrs. Roosevelt rarely turned her down and was happy to go to a dinner in her honor given by the New Jersey Board of Control of Social Institutions. In the midst of the toastmaster’s introductory remarks, his voice began to thicken, and he was led away from the table, suffering, it was later learned, from a stroke. There was a great buzz at the tables. Mrs. Roosevelt calmly took charge of the proceedings and went on to introduce Roger Baldwin, “who will tell us of Mrs. Thompson’s lifelong interest in birds.”11
Old friends like Baruch dropped in, as did new friends like Charles Purcell, a young actor who never quite made it on Broadway but who made her laugh; Allard Lowenstein, a crusading young liberal whose projects she assisted; the Reverend William Turner Levy, whose talk about religion and poetry interested her as did his fervent solicitude for his mother; and Ray West, a lonely Arkansas boy trying to make good in the big city.
She was indulgent toward her young friends, more so, often, than toward her own children. Al Lowenstein was frequently late and sometimes turned up with acquaintances whom he had not asked whether he could bring. She had a double standard, Maureen gently complained—stern in these matters with her children, easygoing with people like Al. “By now, Maureen,” she said, twinkling, “you ought to know me well enough to know that I like young men.”12
Associates of New Deal days dined with her—David Lilienthal, Anna Hoffman, William Benton, Chester Bowles, Frank Graham, Aubrey Williams—as well as the younger generation of reform politicians. Father Ford, “the priest maverick” and premature ecumenicist, whose courage and sparkle she admired, came as did vivid Nila Magidoff and Justine Polier, a woman of luminous intelligence, business tycoons like C. R. Smith and Lansdell Christie, and artistic people like Harry Belafonte and Leonard Bernstein. Once or twice a year she had lunch for “the cousins,” children of her Hall aunts and uncle (those on her mother’s side).
Her relationships to people about whom she cared followed a pattern. At first there was a kind of rosy glow as she saw them as she wanted them to be, but as time went on, she knew them for what they really were. When Maureen remarked that someone who had asked to see her did not want anything, she replied, “Everybody wants something.” She did not hold it against them. That was her vocation—to be helpful. “What other single human being,” Adlai Stevenson said later, “has touched and transformed the existence of so many others? What better measure is there of the impact of anyone’s life?”13
There was a special place for ailing Henry Morgenthau, whom she often visited at his Fishkill farm, and for his children. On the anniversary of Elinor Morgenthau’s death she sent roses to Morgenthau’s eldest son, Henry, and one of her last political acts was to use her influence with the reform movement on behalf of the gubernatorial candidacy of Robert Morgenthau. She also sent him messages from her sickbed on how to “humanize” his campaign as well as a $500 contribution.
She had a vivid sense of American history and the Roosevelt contribution to it and a strong feeling for tradition which she enjoyed passing on to her grandchildren. At her last Thanksgiving dinner, before Franklin Jr. and John began their competition as to who could carve the two turkeys as elegantly as their father, she read FDR’s 1933 Thanksgiving Day proclamation. Memorial Day, 1961, when the Roosevelt Home Club conducted its annual ceremony in the rose garden, she arranged for Mayor Robert Wagner to speak, entertained him, and had her cottage bursting at the seam with New Dealers, family, and friends.
On New Year’s Eve, 1961, at midnight, as on every preceding New Year’s Eve, she proposed a toast “to the United States of America” as the president had
done in the White House, and followed it with a toast “to absent family and friends.” And then the company toasted her.
She was in gay spirits, that last New Year’s Day, taking a long walk through the snow with Trude and Maureen out to the Harritys’. On the way back she stopped to watch John teach his new retriever his duties. At dinner there was much banter and uproarious Roosevelt laughter.
On July 4, there was the usual picnic lunch at the pool outside the stone cottage that she, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman had built in 1925 and that now was occupied by the John Roosevelts. Afterward, she read aloud the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. On that last July 4 before she died, besides sundry children belonging to Franklin and John and to her niece Ellie, the company that grouped itself around her included the Soviet cultural attaché and his young wife and ninety-two-year-old Uncle David. When Mrs. Roosevelt had finished her reading, noting for the benefit of the younger ones the signatories who were among their ancestors, Uncle David’s voice was heard accusing her of “trying to indoctrinate” her Russian guests.
“You should have put fingers in your ears,” he said, turning to the somewhat embarrassed Soviet couple.
“No, no, David,” she interrupted. “I was only trying to indoctrinate my grandchildren.”14
David Gray stayed with her most of the summer. He was a man of elegance, wit, and good manners, who still wore country tweeds made for him before World War I. He was sharp-tongued and a favorite of the old Hudson River families. “I am her wicked uncle,” he had introduced himself to Khrushchev during his visit to Hyde Park. At his age he had a right to say what he thought, Mrs. Roosevelt maintained, but she, too, gasped at one of Uncle David’s sallies during a Soviet medical group’s visit to Hyde Park. The group’s leader had just finished a little speech to “dear Mrs. Roosevelt” about how much they appreciated her hospitality and how highly regarded she was by the Soviet people, when suddenly Uncle David’s voice was heard: “And when you get ready to drop that atom bomb on us, I hope you will think of dear Mrs. Roosevelt.” There was a moment of shocked silence. Fortunately the Russians understood that they were being teased.15
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