Upstairs at the Roosevelts'

by Roosevelt, Curtis;

  Their children, Joan, Robert (Bob), and Henry III, were more my mother and uncles’ generation but I did become friendly with Henry III when living as a young adult in New York. Joan went on to become a doctor and I saw little of her. Bob had a brilliant war record, including having his ship torpedoed under him and spending days in a small life raft before being rescued. Later he became district attorney of New York and was elected over and over again, not retiring until he was about ninety years old.

  But during my childhood, living in the White House, I knew only that Aunt Elinor was a very close friend of my grandmother. They regularly rode horseback together and she was one of the very few people who called “Mrs. Roosevelt” Eleanor. My grandmother really grieved when she died in August 1949.

  Uncle Henry and Aunt Elinor couldn’t have been more different from each other. He always had a nice word for me and was enjoyable to be with. She was dour, with a stern face, apparently having serious things on her mind most of the time. She and my grandmother regularly discussed the issues of the day.

  As I’ve mentioned, Uncle Henry had a rather limited sense of humor, which allowed my grandfather to have fun with him. But even when FDR would tease him relentlessly, he took it well. However, during cabinet meetings they would share scribbled cryptic comments about other cabinet members, such as sly remarks about Mrs. Perkins’s new hat (or her rather big feet!), or one of the others sitting there who would take too long in making a point.

  When I went to the just-established State of Israel in the autumn of 1948, my grandmother put me under the protective wing of Uncle Henry. (I’ve written a separate essay about this trip, “Eyewitness in Israel: 1948,” and chapter 13 of this book describes the experience as well. I was an extraordinary adventure for an eighteen-year-old.) Henry Morgenthau was the new chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, the organization founded the year before to raise money in America to help support the new country, not yet six months old. Uncle Henry and several other U.S. Jewish leaders were making their first visit there, with Israel had providing the plane, the first craft for the new airline El Al. (It was a clapped-out DC4 that had been bought from surplus, the pilot told me.) I was on my own as a guest of the Israeli government, although Uncle Henry did take me to meet Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion before I left to rejoin my grandmother in Paris. Not my chaperone exactly—I was making trips around the country with escorts provided by the Israelis—he nonetheless felt a responsibility for me there.

  After my grandfather died, I saw Uncle Henry only when I was visiting my grandmother at Val-Kill. He had a new wife, a Frenchwoman, Marcelle Puthon Hirsch, quite different from my Aunt Elinor. What I remember most about Marcelle were the extraordinarily thick glasses she wore owing to her very poor eyesight. Uncle Henry adored her.

  Margaret Suckley, better known as Cousin Daisy, may well have been my grandfather’s favorite lady after Missy LeHand died. She was with him in Warm Springs, along with Cousin Polly and Lucy Mercer (and Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who was painting the president’s portrait) when he died on April 12, 1945. And she usually accompanied him when he went to the Top Cottage.

  The family saw her as FDR’s “gofer.” As my grandmother put it, she was grateful to Cousin Daisy for keeping Franklin company during his brief but frequent visits to Hyde Park. She fetched this and that, picked up his pencil when it dropped and rolled out of his reach, and she pushed him in his wheelchair when he needed to be moved.

  What we didn’t notice was the intimate sympathy between the two of them. The fact of it was not brought clearly into the light until Geoffrey Ward edited the exchange of letters between them, found in her possession after her death in 1991, aged ninety-nine. Ward’s book, titled Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley, was published in 1995. Sadly, and stupidly, a film later was made (the script originally had been a radio play on the BBC), and I was invited to a private screening in London, Here is my review:

  The film Hyde Park on Hudson may not make as much money for its producers as they expected, considering the awful reviews they have had from the critics. Just desserts, I feel. After viewing the film it was obvious to me that making money must have been its sole objective.

  Even if not a big box-office success it reveals what an appetite we have for sex—and what disregard we have for historical accuracy. Historical novels, plays, and cinema are my favorites. But there has to be some reasonable engagement with real history behind them. This film has none.

  11

  The Chaste Eleanor Roosevelt

  After four years as governor of New York State, FDR moved from Albany to Washington and took up the residency he had always wanted—the White House. Contemplating being first lady, my grandmother was not all that pleased: quite dismayed, in fact. She had had firsthand observations of the dutifully prescribed roles of Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. What she wondered was whether she would be able to be more than a hostess, free to move beyond her White House social obligations.

  Soon she had help formulating an answer. Lorena Hickok, a seasoned reporter assigned by the Associated Press to cover the new first lady, entered Eleanor’s life and quickly become instrumental in the making of her new identity as “Mrs. Roosevelt.” First off, Hickok suggested Eleanor begin holding her own press conferences, and for women reporters only—in sharp contrast to the president’s traditional all-male press corps. This practice proved a great success. As Hick anticipated, they brought invitations from across America, to visit and talk to groups, and to give both press and radio interviews. Next Mrs. Roosevelt began her daily newspaper column. Soon this new sort of first lady was on the go from morning to night. While one could see her fatigue from this strenuous schedule, it was plain that my grandmother wouldn’t have it any other way! The president approved and encouraged the emergence of his wife’s new identity. It was, of course, a useful one, and a boon for him.

  Lorena Hickok and Eleanor became close friends. My grandmother was very responsive to “Hick.” (This is what we all, young and old, called her.) Their letters show an unusually close relationship. My grandmother needed the love that Hick offered, and at the same time, she recognized in Hick someone who very much needed her. Hick, with little money of her own and ill from diabetes, now moved into the White House, at Eleanor’s behest. As Lash writes: “She had learned to compensate for her inability to let herself go by doing things for her friends.”1

  But my grandmother drew the line—as she always had—at physical intimacy. Hick, after having had an active lesbian partner, most likely wanted to pursue that course. As Eleanor’s infatuation waned, she recognized Hick’s continued yearning and loneliness. She even wrote to her urging her to get married and have a family. It is on the basis of their correspondence from the early days of their friendship that—to this day—Eleanor is still thought to have been sexually engaged with Hickok.

  However, what I believe people ignore is that such passionate exchanges through letters was a time-honored form of women’s communication—a vestige of centuries past and much practiced in the Victorian era, before Sigmund Freud made these chaste relationships too difficult to imagine. We forget, or have no conception of, how a wife used to be tied, legally and practically, to her husband. He was pretty much free to do what he wanted, but she was bound to church-derived discipline and the vows that marriage laws imposed. Hence writing letters to express their passions was one of the few avenues open to married women.

  After Hick, it wasn’t too long before my grandmother developed another close relationship (I guess we could even say, “fell in love again”). Joseph P. Lash was a young man who was obviously very bright, very sincere, and very devoted to Eleanor Roosevelt. And, like all his predecessors, he needed her, just as she, in turn, needed him. He was a staunch ideological socialist—typical of his time, a Brooklyn Jewish intellectual. Eleanor’s letters to Joe were equally as passionate as the ones she had written to Lorena Hickok.
Just as she had encouraged Hick to find someone to marry, so she urged Joe—pushed, I would say, from reading my grandmother’s letters—into a courtship and marriage with Trude Pratt, a longtime friend of Eleanor’s and another person who craved Eleanor’s attentions just as much as Joe Lash did.

  At the end of World War II, David Gurewitsch had become Eleanor Roosevelt’s doctor in New York; he had been introduced to her by Trude Lash. A year later, when Gurewitsch needed to go to Switzerland to be cured of tuberculosis, air travel was nearly impossible to arrange so Eleanor, as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations, made him her “companion” in order to get him a plane reservation. Stranded for two days in Dublin by bad weather, Eleanor nursed David. They sat together and talked and talked, my grandmother reported. Perhaps during this quiet period their mutual understanding became obvious to both of them. Certainly, their companionship was plain to me when I met Dr. Gurewitsch in Paris the following year. My grandmother had found yet another person to whom she could dedicate her passion for unsullied love.

  My impression of David was of a person who had all the attributes my grandmother would have liked to find in her own sons. Soft-spoken, thoughtful, courteous, occasionally mischievous, David had an effete quality, a sophistication, which I associated with well-mannered European men. Coming from Vienna, he spoke English with a cultured accent. My uncles felt his manner “foreign,” insinuating that he might well be homosexual. To the contrary, as I later learned, the charming David avidly pursued the ladies of New York—a genuine man about town, rivaling anything my uncles might have achieved. But David was discreet, and my grandmother knew little, if anything, of that part of his life.

  After his marriage to Edna Perkel in 1958, I noticed David’s passion waning, although my grandmother’s did not. According to Edna, Eleanor continued her passionate outpouring of love letters, and David remained my grandmother’s particular friend as well as her medical physician until her death in 1962. In recognition of the fact that she had never once received a medical bill from him, my grandmother’s will left to David and Edna the top half of the townhouse on East Seventy-fourth Street, which they had shared in New York City for many years. There is a plaque identifying their residence.

  I have but scratched the surface in my brief sketches of the men and women with whom Eleanor Roosevelt engaged in her search for love. Much more could be written about each of these relationships. All of her intimate friends were interesting people. As I have noted, I have the advantage of having known them all, some quite well. But when I review them together I see no pattern, no particular similarity among them. Except for one thing: none of my grandmother’s “crushes” were for people of her own social class. And what they had in common was that they all, in some way, needed her.

  There was never anything clandestine about my grandmother’s passionate friendships with both men and women. It is not by accident that I was acquainted with the lot of them; they were part of my extended family. They were often to be found at our dining table, either at Hyde Park or the White House. Within the family we may have gossiped about the latest arrival, but the remarks I heard, while often catty, were open and freely exchanged. My grandfather always welcomed warmly the latest of his wife’s “flames.”

  So how did Eleanor Roosevelt—ever in the public eye—remain free of scandal? She did it by maintaining a chaste relationship with all these close friends. In fact, she took as gospel that lust was a sin, a descent into disaster—“down the slippery slope” was the phrase to which I was introduced as a child. My grandmother’s particular fear of sex—indeed, fear of any physical closeness—was applied not only to herself but also to her children. All I ever received from her was a pat on the head indicating approval. If she had lived to hear of the description “touchy-feely” she would have shuddered. (As a child my mother’s hands had been tied to the sides of her bed to make sure she “didn’t touch herself.”) However, toward the end of her life Eleanor seemed to find it easier to pick up babies and express her pleasure in holding them.

  Drinking too much was the same story. All intemperate behavior, particularly when habitual, meant being out of control. Loss of control was something she feared, something she dreaded for herself as well as for others. And from observations of my grandmother’s feelings, loss of control was potentially a loss of personal integrity. She wrote, “Anyone who does not have self-control to live within the bounds of moderation is a slave in the very truest sense of the word.”2 This could mean just the slurred voice after one too many cocktails or her brother, Hall, arriving uninvited for supper at the White House—dead drunk.

  From conversations with my mother, I learned that both Eleanor Roosevelt and Sara Delano Roosevelt identified with those Victorian women who considered sharing the marital bed to be a duty, for procreation, nothing more. Blanche Cook, author of a three-volume biography of Eleanor, belittles this view, but Eleanor grew up with and retained throughout her life many restraints and inhibitions now considered old-fashioned. If you were around her it was very apparent. My grandmother emphasized to me, usually through stories, that personal and societal restraints were useful as behavioral guidelines. Without them one would “stray” and become “lost” (words right out of Sunday’s lessons). From her father to her brother and then to her sons, she observed with sorrow where indulgence had led them in life.

  Eleanor’s religious background was very influential in forming her keen sense of morality. The General Confession from the Book of Common Prayer, which she regularly used, begins thus:

  Almighty and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.

  Though she never talked much about God or the saints, it seems to me that my grandmother searched for a purity in life that was right out of the teachings of Jesus. She sought the ideal. In her daily life she relied heavily on her integrity to guide her, as well as her strongly rooted sense of duty. For example, whenever FDR went home to Hyde Park for the weekend, Eleanor always moved from Val-Kill back into her small bedroom next to that of her husband in the Big House. She said she felt it was her duty to do so.

  So, Eleanor wanted nothing but to love and to be loved? Simple? Yes. In theory, that is, if not in practice. For my grandmother, what was most important—indeed an imperative for her—was the opportunity to apply her spiritual beliefs in her daily life. And she worked at it, often with a puritanical zeal. It was not uncommon to find my grandmother still at her desk dealing with correspondence at two o’clock in the morning. So many of those letters were from people who needed her!

  One final anecdote should be shared, one that further illustrates the unrealistic idealism of my grandmother. Stepping aside from the sequence of Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal series of romantic episodes I turn to my grandmother’s promotion of the ideal marriage—that of my mother and John Boettiger, my stepfather. Eleanor set the pace, the ideal, and promoted it. She was behind it, I know, one hundred percent.

  I was barely two years old when my mother separated from my father, Curtis Dall. On FDR’s campaign train in 1932 she met my future stepfather. He was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, a major newspaper owned and run by the archconservative Col. Robert McCormick. It was said that they “fell in love” on the train and began to see each other even before we moved into the White House the following year.

  From the very beginning, my mother and her own mother were closely entwined in the new romance, mine basking in her mother’s support. Eleanor saw John as different. She approved of his not being from “society” (as all of her then daughters-in-law were), and being a newspaper reporter distanced him from Wall Street or other traditional professions. Eleanor Roosevelt was like a fairy godmother, even arranging that her cottage at Val-Kill be vacant so
that “Anna and John” might have a private place for trysts. When my sister and I joined my mother in Washington, my mother’s affair with John was already in full swing, openly accepted. (After FDR’s election John was assigned to the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau.)

  My grandmother had taken John Boettiger under her wing. She frequently invited him for supper at the White House. He became such a regular that the guards and ushers knew him well. He learned to ride horseback so that he could join my grandmother and mother, going with them to the White House stables at Fort Meyer. In effect my grandmother recognized John as her future son-in-law. She held her daughter and her fiancé to be very special, a couple whose love was to endure forever. All that was needed were arrangements for the divorces, for both my mother and for John.

  My mother wanted to move quickly, but her younger brother Elliott jumped in with his own divorce plans and took priority. My grandfather suggested that two divorces in the family in the first year of his presidency was a bit much and asked my mother to delay hers, which she agreed to do. I feel that FDR also wanted to give his daughter another year before remarrying. But any sensible thoughts on my grandfather’s part were more than mitigated by my grandmother’s strong support for John Boettiger. John began writing to his future mother-in-law as “Dear LL,” the LL standing for Lovely Lady. When my mother and stepfather wrote to each other, they referred to themselves as “US.”

  The special relationship Eleanor Roosevelt fostered for my mother and future stepfather was to be a love that was unique, indeed unlike other marriages. Continual devotion was to be the hallmark. My sister quickly sensed this exceptional romance and was fully supportive, indeed quite demonstrative. I remained less than responsive, counting flies on the wall whenever the mushy stuff got too much for me. But I quickly sensed that John was, in the minds of my mother and grandmother, to be an antidote to my being without a resident father. That my actual dad, very much banished to the sidelines, continued to be condemned with such open hostility was puzzling for me. Perhaps it was one reason why I never grew close to my stepfather.3