Upstairs at the Roosevelts'

by Roosevelt, Curtis;

  My mother, as they prepared to leave for Seattle, had engineered a post for herself as associate editor of the women’s page at the Post Intelligencer. Her straining to be a partner with John was her interpretation of the relationship the two of them were meant to have, never one that Popsie himself felt wholly comfortable with. This vision of their life together, however, continued to be what was presented to Sis and me. In later years, my mother admitted to me that within a year or so after John took the job as the newspaper’s publisher, she found herself having to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy propping him up. By then it seems he wanted to find a new job, perhaps one closer to being the reporter that he was when he first met my mother. As she put it to me, this constant need to support John—building up his fragile ego—dominated their relationship and continued to do so until 1947, when he was dismissed from our home due to his having had an extramarital affair in Phoenix, Arizona, where they were then living.

  During much of the period of my mother’s marriage, it was characterized as “made in heaven.” And yet it was not the case.

  As the years continued in Seattle, there was less mention of my dad—except when he occasionally wanted to make the three-thousand-mile journey to take Sis and me to visit with him for a week. My sister would put up quite a fuss. She wouldn’t go, she insisted, but our mother said she had to. Accompanied by a lot of weeping—which I found painful, and would have said so to my mother had I been older—she finally came with me to meet our father. My memory of this last visit before Dad went into the army air force was that my sister found it just as agreeable as I myself did. Still, that was not, of course, the way she recorded it for our mother’s ears. I remained in limbo, caught between my affection for my father and risking the disapproval of the all-important women in my life.

  I should mention the limited number of friendships my mother and stepfather formed during their six to seven years in Seattle. It boiled down to a few acquaintances but only one real friendship, the Donough family, whose two children were roughly the same age as Sis and me.

  My mother and John saw the Donoughs once or twice a week, with my sister and me frequently joining them. Marie Donough was a model wife whose husband, John, had lost a leg in a motorboat accident. Their son, Stanley Jr., was often called upon to assist his father, who continued to love boats. But Marie was his mainstay.

  I find it odd that my mother and John did so little socializing, only very occasionally inviting their colleagues from the newspaper to our house for dinner. My mother seemed shy and to find entertaining a daunting task. Her shyness was also fed by her worry that any friendship offered her might be because of “who she was.”

  Being the president’s daughter seemed always to be in the forefront of her mind—my sister and I inherited this inhibition, although to a lesser degree. But it was somewhat paradoxical. For my mother always made sure that people were aware of her relation to FDR. One way or another, too much recognized or too little, she would always complain. For me, “who we were” remained a prominent part of my psyche.

  In late 1942 my stepfather, as I have said, made the decision to join the army. It was not a wise one, and it was based on a false assumption, that he would soon be working as an aide to FDR, his father-in-law. By this time my new half brother, Johnny, was three or four years old and quite a handful. As long as she was employed as an associate editor of the Post Intelligencer, my mother had a nurse to take care of her youngest son, but following her husband around while he trained for a military government assignment made for a different scenario. Often my mother was on her own full time.

  Caring for little Johnny was a new occupation, one for which she was ill prepared, either through inexperience or inclination. She had a rough time but always put on a good front for her mother, which was confirmed by their correspondence. Once John Boettiger was assigned overseas, life was a bit easier. She moved back into the White House, as did Sis and I when we returned home from school for vacations. Plus, help with little Johnny was available from the White House staff. Still, with two children in boarding school and a house in Seattle to find tenants for, she was more than occupied at “keeping the home fires burning.”

  My mother had tried briefly to keep her position with the Seattle newspaper but soon felt she had to resign. Hence the Boettigers’ finances were reduced to an army captain’s salary, which meant slim pickings. Although living in the White House was free, any travel across the country was not.

  While overseas and disillusioned about not being an aide to the president, nor indeed having any of his newspaper skills exploited, my stepfather began to despair. He expressed relief when promotion to major brought with it access to the senior officers’ mess. Nonetheless, my mother still had to step in with letters trying to prop up her husband as best she could. His letters acknowledged that his enlistment had been a foolish idea and had brought upon her immense hardship.

  When he returned from overseas service and was assigned a desk job in the Pentagon, my stepfather joined my mother and little Johnny, who were living in the White House. One might have thought that such a change would have raised his spirits, but no. My mother was made to resume her role as cheerleader.

  At this point my mother’s life suddenly took an interesting turn. Her father asked her to take on, at no salary, chores for him that previously had been carried out by his longtime secretary Missy before she became ill and had to retire. Working, as I’ve said, from a card table in her bedroom, my mother soon became indispensable to her father.

  My mother was also instrumental in securing the medical examinations her father needed. The White House physician chose to belittle Anna’s concern for FDR’s deteriorating health, but as his daughter, she succeeded in bringing in a heart specialist to attend him. To this day, I believe those activities and responsibilities my mother assumed from the end of 1943 until her father’s death, in April 1945, are neither well known nor appropriately evaluated.

  The death of Franklin Roosevelt, on April 12, 1945, quickly and drastically altered the world I knew and had come to take for granted. My grandmother, my mother, my stepfather, and kid brother all had to move out of the White House within three days. An apartment at Wardman Park was found for the Boettigers, John commuting daily to the Pentagon and refusing to give any thought to a postwar career—even though the surrender of Germany was less than a month away. Still they could not reclaim their home on Mercer Island in Seattle until John could be mustered out of the service. He was discharged quickly enough after the German capitulation, and it was to Seattle that I headed home from boarding school the following June.

  The letters my mother wrote to me at this time spoke of her worries about the future and the problems facing John with the challenge of new employment. She and I later talked a good deal about that summer of 1945. She and my sister and I were delighted to be home again, but she had been right: our stepfather was depressed. He pottered around the house doing odd jobs, but could not focus on new career possibilities. It was my mother who did this by continuing to raise opportunities to be explored. My stepfather was dismissive of everything, and she warned me to be very careful of what I said to him. His fragility was apparent. My mother had to “walk on eggshells,” she reported.

  When Sis and I left to go back to school, nothing had seriously been explored for John’s future. He had found fault with every possibility in spite of, or possibly because of, my mother’s greater objectivity. In fact I feel he may have resented her “pushing” him. Perhaps because he felt all the tension in the air, little brother Johnny was extraordinarily cranky and disagreeable. Sis and I agreed that “it was not a summer to be remembered.” If she had been privy to our view, our mother would probably have agreed.

  Throughout the rest of 1945, and well into 1946, talk continued about what to do, with my stepfather continuing to be generally negative about any option. Finally a decision was made that they would start up a liberal newspaper in the American Southwest, in Pho
enix, Arizona. At the time I assumed that my stepfather, with his experience as a publisher, and my mother, who was perhaps more ideological but always sensible, would have thought through this enterprise, especially the finances. First a weekly, then a biweekly, next three times a week, and finally a daily, the Arizona Times emerged before Christmas of 1946—eating up prodigious amounts of money all the way.

  As I later learned, John Boettiger’s planning had been less than competent. Fundraising now consumed much of my mother’s time, with the pitch most often trading on the memory of Franklin Roosevelt. My mother was remarkably successful in repeatedly refinancing the Arizona Times but, having been an unrealistic pipe dream from the start, it was finally closed in the summer of 1948, with my mother selling the presses and the premises for a pittance.

  My stepfather, following an extramarital affair departed from the household. First, however, he had managed to spend the rest of what was left of the Boettiger family’s capital, leaving my mother quite penniless.

  We saw my sister married in June of that year, and I moved to Los Angeles where I had the promise of a summer job. My mother later moved there as well to edit a women’s magazine and to broadcast a radio show with her celebrated mother, Eleanor Roosevelt. She now had to depend on that mother to supplement her income.

  I have great admiration for my mother’s coping with this difficult time in her life. Her “made in heaven” marriage had blown apart and she had had to assume responsibilities well beyond her experience. What rose to the surface was her fortitude and integrity. It was a turning point in her life. For the first time she was alone, really alone, really on her own. Sis was married, and I was gone to college, though close to home. We had an apartment on the second floor of a duplex house in a nondescript area south of Hollywood. She had the radio program with her mother and her editorial job to occupy her. The income from these, unfortunately, did not enable a lifestyle anywhere close to what she had enjoyed in Seattle. Still, we had a cook-housekeeper. Mother was at home most evenings and kept up “standards” with supper served us by our cook. My kid brother—now nine years old—had been fed earlier, and after a day of school was ready for bed. My mother and I talked openly; it was then that I was “filled in” on her life with John Boettiger, who would appear occasionally to take young Johnny off for a day or two.

  As in Seattle, my mother made only a few friends in Los Angeles and I often tagged along at the weekend. But she did not appear to be lonely. In retrospect I do wonder that she wasn’t so, with her father dead, her mother three thousand miles away, and with no longer any man in her life. I was her only steady companion. Usually we had a drink together before supper. I would make her a martini and open a beer for myself.

  My mother and I talked together easily. We both followed the political events of the day. For her this was not just routine, but now essential, background for her radio program with Eleanor. Now eighteen, I had just returned from spending three months in Paris with my grandmother, who had been attending the United Nations Regular Assembly where she was one of the senior U.S. delegates.

  What was too bad was that the thirteen weeks of network funding for the radio program collapsed when no sponsor was found. To make matters worse, my mother became ill with what was finally diagnosed as “desert fever.” I wonder if the doctors didn’t make this up for lack of a more precise diagnosis. My guess is that she just collapsed from the strain of the past three years of such stress and responsibilities, and, moreover, found herself depressed with nothing specific to look forward to in the future. She had to accept $100 a month from her mother to help out financially.

  Finally, my mother moved to San Francisco for medical reasons, leaving me alone with the housekeeper and Johnny, who had recently been placed in boarding school. I got along fine with my 1939 Chevrolet to scoot me about the vast spaces of Los Angeles. I had a girlfriend and often stayed for supper with her family. My meager allowance sufficed as it covered the cost of gasoline and the occasional movie. My girlfriend’s parents were very understanding about my “short rations” and fed me regularly.

  Soon my mother’s medical treatments were extended, and she moved Johnny to San Francisco to be with her. I soon decided to give up college and go to work in New York—and also to get married at the tender age of twenty. This did mean that my mother could reduce expenses and stop having to keep up a home for me in L.A.

  As a consequence I know little about her life in San Francisco or her subsequent move back to Los Angeles, where she met and married her third husband, a physician, James Halsted. Jim had three children at home, all teenagers, so my mother was once again fully occupied with these three plus Johnny.

  With me three thousand miles away in New York, I only saw my mother occasionally over the next several years. Jim was restless as chief medical officer at various VA hospitals and kept my mother moving house. In Syracuse my mother successfully reestablished herself as an editor, only to find that Jim then intended to take a Fulbright Scholarship and spend three years in a hospital in Shiraz, Iran. Her new career went up in smoke. After stints in Kentucky and Michigan, she wound up in Washington DC, where Jim was working in the headquarters of the Department of Veterans Affairs. There was no job for his wife, Anna, but she became involved in a multiplicity of volunteer commitments, including the Washington Work and Training Opportunity Center, Americans for Democratic Action, the Capitol Area Division of the United Nations Association of the United States of America, the National Committee of Household Employment, the Wiltwyck School, and the Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation.

  When Jim reached retirement age, my mother having inherited money in her father’s will, acquired a property in Hillsdale, New York, about a half-hour drive from Hyde Park and Val-Kill. Were those retirement years at Hillsdale ones of contentment? I don’t know. Certainly when I visited they seemed to be. But then my mother had long been good at putting on a good front.

  In 1975 she became very ill with throat cancer, dying in early December in Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. She is buried in the family plot at St. James Church Cemetery in Hyde Park.

  Since her death I have thought a good deal about my legacy from her. It is a decidedly mixed bag. What did I pick up from my mother? What traits, viewpoints, tastes, and habits do I have that I can trace back to her? Or think that I can?

  Number one would be perseverance, especially the capacity to “put up with things,” which includes “making do.” But that doesn’t mean I’m unwilling to experiment.

  Although my mother was not above lying (as she regularly did to my father), she possessed a basic integrity that I really saw plainly when she was left on her own with the Arizona Times and was forced to wind down that organization—a responsibility that left her without funds. It sounds rather old-fashioned, but my mother was a very decent person. It reflected her values.

  I tilt on my mother being uncomfortable with, really unable to tolerate, criticism. She couldn’t abide it. I inherited that, but not, I think, as intensely as she was afflicted. As a child, finding my way around my mother took some ingenuity—and I became quite adept. But it was always a challenge.

  My resentment when it comes to being corrected is about average, I feel. But criticism is another thing. There I am unduly sensitive.

  Notes

  2. Hyde Park, Our Family Home

  1. Beebee, my nurse, being African American, was most unusual in our upper-class circle.

  2. The breaststroke, the backstroke, and the sidestroke were considered, I was informed, most appropriate for ladies.

  3. David McCullough writes about Sara Delano Roosevelt in Psychology Today, March 1983, 36: “She had standards, and she had the gift for making everybody want to measure up.”

  4. Geoffrey Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 48.

  3. FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt

  All quotations by Eleanor Roosevelt in this chapter are from The Autobiography of Ele
anor Roosevelt (New York: Harper Perennial, reprint edition, October 21, 2014).

  1. A book review by Seamus Perry in the Literary Review of December 2012 describes it: “the very idea of a Victorian, possessing the full mixture of suppressed turmoil, self blindness, and strenuous achievement.”

  2. See chapter 9 in this book on Eleanor Roosevelt’s “taking against” her mother-in-law.

  3. For a fuller picture of this incident, I refer the reader to Geoffrey Ward’s book A First-Class Temperament.

  4. Lash’s account is what Eleanor Roosevelt told him, hence not altogether reliable. Many of her stories to Joe—and often to the rest of us just sitting around after supper at Val-Kill—were much embroidered. Only by reading the relevant correspondence, as I had to do when writing my book, does one clearly see this. See Joseph P. Lash’s biography Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship, Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). First published 1971.

  5. Letter from Dr. Lawrence Kubie to Joseph Lash, June 7, 1964 in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library archives.

  6. Ward, First-Class Temperament, 676–77.

  7. Marion Dickerman’s autobiography emphasizes the rapport she had with FDR.

  8. Jim Farley was the chair of the Democratic National Committee.

  6. Eleanor’s Book on Etiquette

  1. See my book Too Close to the Sun (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 109–11.

  2. See chapter 4, “White House Pleasures of the Table,” in this volume.

  3. According to a recent biography of Emily Post, we learn that she had a social conscience and would probably have shared Eleanor Roosevelt’s concern for people to feel comfortable in social situations. See Laura Claridge’s Emily Post (New York: Random House, 2008).