From her mother Eleanor received the indelible impression that she was plain to the point of ugliness. As a young woman Anna had been captivatingly beautiful, her face and head so classic in outline that artists had begged to paint her. Anna had been, a friend of the family said, “a little gentlewoman.” Eleanor, in her anxiety for people to do right, was more the little schoolmistress, saved from primness only by her grave blue eyes and the sweetness with which she admonished the grownups. To paraphrase Carlyle, who was speaking of the founder of one of the world’s great religions, she was one of those who “cannot but be in earnest; whom Nature herself has appointed to be sincere.” She is so “old-fashioned,” her mother said apologetically. Eleanor, who sensed her mother’s disappointment in her, considered this a reproach, but behind the reproach was a mother’s bafflement over her little girl’s precocious sense of right and wrong and the sadness in her appraising eyes. But these same traits amused and charmed her father, who called her his “little golden hair.”
My father was always devoted to me, however, and as soon as I could talk, I went into his dressing room every morning and chattered to him often shaking my finger at him as you can see in the portrait of me at the age of five which we still have. I even danced for him, intoxicated by the pure joy of motion, twisting round and round until he would pick me up and throw me into the air and tell me I made him dizzy.5
Eleanor’s first nurse was French. “My mother had a conviction that it was essential to study languages, so when I was a baby, she had a French nurse for me, and I spoke French before I spoke English.” What this nurse was like, Eleanor nowhere said, but in later life she spoke French as fluently as English, which suggests that this first nurse had the baby’s confidence.
While Eleanor’s own warmest memories of her early childhood years were all associated with her father, that attractive man was, in fact, putting his little family through a grim ordeal. Nervous and moody, he spent much of his time with the Meadow Brook men, often in reckless escapades and drinking sprees that worried his family and mortified Anna. In the spring of 1887, dissatisfied with himself and his business prospects, he gave up his partnership in the Ludlow firm. Anna prevailed upon him not to risk another Long Island summer. An extended stay in Europe, away from his cronies, she hoped, would enable him to get hold of himself and regain his health. So, on May 19, the Elliott Roosevelt family, a nurse for two-and-a-half-year-old Eleanor, and Anna’s sister Tissie sailed for Europe on the Britannic.
One day out, the Britannic was rammed by the incoming Celtic in a fog. “The strain for a few minutes,” Anna wrote Bamie, “when we all thought we were sinking was fearful though there were no screams and no milling about. Everyone was perfectly quiet. We were among those taken on life boats to the Celtic.” Eleanor’s recollection of “wild confusion” was significantly different, and closer to reality.
As passengers described the collision to newspapermen, the prow of the Celtic struck the Britannic a slanting blow, glanced off and then struck again, her nose entering the Britannic’s side fully ten feet. Several passengers were killed, a child beheaded, and many injured. The sea foamed, iron bars and belts snapped, and above the din could be heard the moans of the dying and injured. Grownups panicked. Stokers and boiler men emerging from the depths of the Britannic made a wild rush for the lifeboats until the captain forced them back at the point of his revolver. The air was filled with “cries of terror,” Eleanor’s among them. She clung frantically to the men who were trying to drop her over the steep side of the ship into the outstretched arms of her father, who stood in a lifeboat below. Although the sea was calm, the lifeboats were pitching, and the distance seemed vast to Eleanor. The transfer was finally completed despite Eleanor’s struggles, and they were rowed to the Celtic, which took them back to New York.6
Anna and Elliott decided to go through with their plans, because Elliott’s health depended on it. But Eleanor, in terror, refused to go and remained unmoved even by her father’s endearments and pleas. The puzzled young parents turned to the Gracies, and Eleanor was left to spend the summer with them. “We took a cab,” Aunt Gracie wrote to Corinne,
and called for our sweet little Eleanor and brought her out here with us. She was so little and gentle & had made such a narrow escape out of the great ocean that it made her seem doubly helpless & pathetic to us. . . . She asked two or three times in the train coming out here, where her “dear Mamma was, & where her Papa was, & where is Aunt Tissie?” I told her “They have gone to Europe.” She said “where is baby’s home now?” I said “baby’s home is Gracewood with Uncle Bunkle & Aunt Gracie,” which seemed to entirely satisfy the sweet little darling. But as we came near the Bay driving by Mrs. Swan’s she said to her uncle in an anxious alarmed way “Baby does not want to go into the water. Not in a boat.” It is really touching. . . .
Aunt Gracie’s hopeful interpretation of Eleanor’s acquiescence may have calmed her own anxiety but showed little real understanding of the ordeal the two-and-a-half-year-old child was going through in numb silence. She had not been able to overcome her terror of the sea. She had disgraced her parents, and as a punishment they had deserted her and she had lost her home.
This violent experience made an indelible impression on Eleanor. She never lost her fear of the sea. Throughout her life she felt the need to prove that she could overcome her physical timidity by feats of special courage. Desertion of the young and defenseless remained an ever present theme—in her reading and her compositions for school; the mere suspicion that someone she loved might have turned away from her always caused the same taut, hopeless bewilderment.
Anna remained uneasy about the separation, “I do so long for her,” she wrote from Paris, “but know it was wiser to leave her.” And even if Anna had understood how seriously the child was being hurt, she could not have acted differently, because her troubled husband needed his wife’s reassuring presence and love if he was to get well.
By August he was “a thousand times better,” but he did not wish to risk exposure to his family until he was “really strong and fit to work hard.” They returned to New York after six months and Elliott, full of good intentions, joined his Uncle Gracie’s banking and brokerage firm. But he also rejoined the hard-drinking, hard-riding Meadow Brook crowd. In spite of his family’s misgivings he began to build a large, handsome house in Hempstead, L.I. Polo and hunting became more the center of his life than ever, and he became an ever more reckless rider. One day the hunt started from the Mineola Fair Grounds, the hounds streaking across the Jackson and Titus farms. Forty started out but by the time they were taking the fences of the Titus place only Elliott was following the huntsman. He could hear his companions shouting “don’t follow that Irishman, you will be killed” when he was thrown at the third fence and broke his collar bone. On another occasion he arranged a hair-raising midnight steeplechase. “Your father was one of the greatest sports I ever knew,” Joe Murphy, the Meadow Brook huntsman, later wrote.7
Anna and Eleanor shared Elliott’s excitement about the new house in Hempstead—Anna because she hoped it might steady him, Eleanor because it meant she would spend more time with her father. The family rented a cottage nearby to be able to supervise the construction. “Anna is wonderfully well, enjoys everything . . . even the moving and looks the beautiful girl she is. Little Eleanor is as happy as the day is long, plays with her kitten, the puppy & the chickens all the time & is very dirty as a general rule. . . . Baby Eleanor goes up to look after it [the house] every day and calls it hers,” a delighted Elliott informed Bamie.
The idyll was brief. In June, 1888, Elliott, exhausted by his hectic life, became seriously ill, and though he rallied miraculously, his family was far from reassured. “Elliott is very much better,” Theodore wrote. “I lunched with him Wednesday, and he is now able to go out driving. I wonder if it would do any good to talk to him about his imprudence! I suppose not. I wish he would come to me for a little while; but I guess Oyster Bay would p
rove insufferably dull, not only for Elliott but for Anna.” Soon Elliott was back on his feet, playing polo with Theodore in Oyster Bay. “I know we shall be beaten,” Anna confided to her sister-in-law, “since Elliott can barely stay on his pony.” Elliott’s team lost. “We have great fun here at polo,” Theodore wrote Cabot Lodge. Theodore worked and played strenuously, but he found the pace set by Anna and Elliott too frantic and ultimately meaningless. “I do hate his Hempstead life,” he confided to Bye. “I don’t know whether he [Elliott] could get along without the excitement now, but it is certainly very unhealthy, and it leads to nothing.”
For Eleanor, Hempstead was a happy place. She was not too far away from her cousin Alice, with whom she loved to play. “She and Eleanor are too funny together,” Anna reported. They both went to Aunt Gracie’s for lessons every morning. “Alice is looking so splendidly and plays so beautifully with Eleanor,” was the report. But when Elliott left to go cruising on the Mayflower, the 100-foot sloop that had won the America’s Cup several years before, Anna made a point of letting him know that “Baby is well but very fiendish.” Eleanor’s anger did not last, however. Soon she was caught up again in the excitement of her full summer life. “Eleanor is on the piazza building a house with blocks and seems very well and happy,” Anna wrote in her next report. “She won’t hear of going home as she says, she would not have Alice any more. Aunty and Uncle Bunkle took Alice and Eleanor sailing yesterday. They did enjoy it so much. They are coming over from Sagamore Hill to lunch, and tonight we tea there.”
The relationship between Alice and Eleanor, both born in 1884, may not have been as serene as their elders assumed. The two cousins were very different. Though a frail child, “Baby Lee” was as proud, self-assured, and competitive as her father. Golden-curled and saucy, her blue eyes flashed an endless challenge, while Eleanor was gentle, docile, shy, and already painfully aware of her ungainliness. For two years Eleanor wore a steel brace to correct a curvature of the spine, “a very uncomfortable brace.” Alice, like Eleanor, idolized her father, and also felt rebuffed and neglected by her mother—in her case, her stepmother. Her response was to rebel, to turn tomboy, which she knew annoyed her stepmother, while Eleanor, much as she would have liked to imitate Alice, withdrew into injured melancholy. Alice seemed “older and cleverer,” she said much later, “and while I always admired her I was always afraid of her.”
The summer of 1888 had been a time of closeness to her parents and happiness for Eleanor, who was going on four. “The funny little tot had a happy little birthday,” her father wrote to Bamie, thanking her for Eleanor’s birthday present, “and ended by telling me, when saying good night (after Anna had heard her say her prayers) that she ‘loved everybody and everybody loved her.’ Was it not cunning?”
That fall and winter were to be the last time Anna, Elliott, and Eleanor enjoyed life as a family. By late spring, 1889, they were finally and fully settled in their “country seat,” which they called “½-way Nirvana.” Anna was pregnant again and expected to spend a quiet summer.
It was only a few weeks later that Elliott, rehearsing with friends for an amateur circus to be staged at the Waterbury place in Pelham, fractured his ankle in turning a double somersault. The break was incorrectly diagnosed as a sprain, and he was in agony for two weeks after the plaster had been broken off. There were days of such pain “that he could eat nothing and at night he would sob for hours.” His leg had to be rebroken and reset. He told Eleanor what the doctors were going to do. She gave him courage and comfort, but it was a thoughtless act, considering that she was not quite five. He did not complain, but Eleanor, being a child of amazing sensitivity, did not have to be told; as leaves moved to the wind, she stirred to the thought of others in pain. If a playmate was injured she wept, and her father was the person she most loved in the world. Her eyes brimmed with tears as he pulled himself on crutches out to the waiting doctors. Eleanor never forgot this experience.
Elliott Jr. was born October 1, 1889, and this event evoked the first letter, dictated to Pussie, from Eleanor, who had been sent to Tivoli to stay with her grandmother.
Dear Father:
I hope you are very well and Mother too. I hope little brother doesn’t cry and if he does tell the nurse to give him a tap tap. How does he look? Some people tell me he looks like an elephant and some say he is like a bunny. I told Aunt Pussie today she would be very unhappy if she were a man because his wife would send her down downtown every day she could only come home on Sunday and then she would have to go to church. Goodby now dear Father, write me soon another letter. I love you very much and Mother and Brother too, if he has blue eyes.
Your precious little
Eleanor.
“And,” added Pussie, “Totty [the name by which her Hall aunts called her] is flourishing. She has quite a color and tell Anna the French lessons are progressing, although I am afraid the pupil knows more than the teacher.”
“Eleanor is so proud of her baby brother and talks of nothing else,” was the next report from Tivoli.
Elliott and Anna were equally pleased. The birth of their first son was the fulfillment of “their hearts’ desire.” Elliott, in spite of his continuing pain, doted on “Baby Joss,” as the new arrival was called. But even though Elliott was with his new son, Eleanor sensed no change in her father’s attitude toward her. She never doubted that she was first in his heart.
With her mother, however, the birth of little Ellie and a year later of Hall did make a difference. Forty years later, in 1929, Eleanor wrote a story for a magazine whose fictional heroine, Sally, was obviously herself.
Her forty-fifth birthday. . . . As she looked [into the fire] pictures formed in the dancing flames, first, there was a blue-eyed rather ugly little girl standing in the door of a cozy library looking in at a very beautiful woman holding, oh so lovingly, in her lap a little fair-haired boy. Through Sally’s heart passed the old sensation, the curious dread of the cold glance which would precede the kindly and indifferent “Come in Sally, and bring your book.”
In her autobiography, published in 1937, she was more explicit about her feelings of being left out when her mother was with the two little boys, Ellie and Hall. Her mother did not consciously exclude her; she read to Eleanor and had Eleanor read to her and recite her poems, and Eleanor was allowed to stay after the boys had been sent off to bed. But what Eleanor emphasized was standing in the door, “very often with my finger in my mouth,” and her mother bidding her “Come in, Granny,” with that voice and look of kind indifference. Child psychologists had not yet discovered the connection between the “finger in the mouth” and the hunger for affection. To visitors her mother would explain that she called Eleanor “Granny” because she was “so old-fashioned.”
“I wanted to sink through the floor in shame, and I felt I was apart from the boys.”8
To Eleanor her mother’s sigh and exasperated voice were further proof that only her father understood and loved her. And her father was leaving her again. His foot had to be stretched every day to prevent its shortening. He had begun to take laudanum and morphine and to drink ever more heavily to kill the excruciating pain in his foot. When his behavior became hostile even to those he loved most and he threatened suicide, the doctors prescribed a complete rest, and at the end of December, 1889, he embarked on a trip to the South—without saying good-by to his wife and children. His wife desperately tried to reach him through his love for the children. “Eleanor came rushing down when she heard the postman to know if there was a letter from you and what you said. I told her you would not be here for two weeks and she seemed awfully disappointed, but was quite satisfied when I told her you were getting well.”
Eleanor’s whole life was spent waiting for her father. “Eleanor lunched with us yesterday,” wrote Tissie; “she rushed to the stairs every time the bell rang to see if it was her Papa. I shall be so glad to see my dear Father, she kept saying. She certainly adores you.”
4.THE CRACK-UP<
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THE SOUTHERN CURE DID NOT WORK. ELLIOTT’S DRUNKEN SPREES became more violent and dissipated. In 1890, in a final desperate effort to hold the family together, they decided to lease their houses in town and Hempstead, sell their horses, and go abroad for a tour of mountain resorts and watering places. Anna declined the Gracies’ offer to leave the children with them, and Eleanor, almost six, and baby Elliott accompanied their parents on a restless, troubled journey that ended in disaster.
They went directly to Berlin, and Anna’s first extended report to Bamie was bright and hopeful. Count Bismarck got them “splendid places” for the parade of the garrison. Count Sierstorff took them to see the cavalry drill. And the only moment of danger came when Buffalo Bill, who was also in Berlin, offered Elliott whiskey to drink to his health. Sierstorff was wonderful, Anna reported, took the glass out of Elliott’s hand, and told Buffalo Bill it was against doctor’s orders.
From Berlin they proceeded to Reichenhall, in Bavaria, where the Germans were “all of a class that no one would think of meeting,” Anna wrote. But Elliott took the baths and drank the waters and except for “awful attacks of depression” was sleeping well and his foot had stopped hurting.
“Elliott is really studying German now,” she added, “and I hope he will take some interest in it. Eleanor is beginning to speak a little but teaching her to read is hopeless. She is as good as gold.”
After a month in Reichenhall they went on to Munich and then to Oberammergau for the Passion play before heading for Vienna and Italy. Their expenses, lamented Anna, seemed enormous. “I don’t know how it is, but we don’t seem to be able to travel under $1,500 a month,” even though they were not buying things. On the way to Vienna they stopped to visit the estate of Count Arco, and that was a disaster. “Elliott was an angel up to Wednesday night. Then I think he drank champagne for dinner, though he denies it.” Anna was ill and had to stay in bed, but she tried to accompany Elliott everywhere, “excepting when they were shooting.” Elliott, however, finally eluded her, and she found him drinking brandy and water. “I was furious and said so. It affected him at once. . . . I am sure it is the first alcohol he has touched in two months.”
Eleanor and Franklin Page 6