The writer she hated most was Evelyn Waugh, and she hated him with a ferocity that became legendary. Waugh’s Vile Bodies, a satire on life among the Bright Young Things, was his second novel and the one that secured his fame. Published in 1930, just five years after the garrulous, slightly unhinged portrait in Lawton’s book had appeared, Vile Bodies featured a garrulous, slightly unhinged character named Lottie Crump, owner of Shepheard’s Hotel. We first meet Lottie when she ushers a new guest, Adam Symes, into her sitting room at Shepheard’s, where residents of the hotel seem to spend most of their time.
“You all know Lord Thingummy, don’t you?” said Lottie.
“Mr. Symes,” said Adam.
“Yes, dear, that’s what I said. Bless you, I knew you before you were born. How’s your father? Not dead, is he?”
“Yes, I’m afraid he is.”
“Well, I never. I could tell you some things about him. Now let me introduce you—that’s Mr. What’s-his-name, you remember him, don’t you? And over there in the corner, that’s the Major, and there’s Mr. What-d’you-call-him, and that’s an American, and there’s the King of Ruritania.”
“Alas, no longer,” said a sad, bearded man.
“Poor chap,” said Lottie Crump, who always had a weak spot for royalty even when deposed.
After Adam has been staying at the hotel for a while—and taking his meals there—he receives an invitation to lunch at a London restaurant and leaps to accept. Waugh explains why: “The food at Shepheard’s tends to be mostly game-pie—quite black inside and full of beaks and shot and inexplicable vertebrae.” Like Theodora FitzGibbon, who was still recoiling from the game pie more than a decade later, Waugh had never tasted Rosa’s signature dish when it was the pride of her table and the delight of a king, when it was praised by the discerning Newnham-Davis and sought after by all the best hostesses. Now it was a joke, and so was Rosa.
• • •
Rosa always believed she knew exactly where she stood in relation to the rich and famous, but she may not have grasped the precarious nature of her footing. She was aware that the gentlemen who dropped by the kitchen to chat with her wouldn’t have dreamed of proposing to the pretty caterer, and she understood that the ladies who gave her a cup of tea in the drawing room had no intention of including her in their “at home” afternoons, when they welcomed their real friends. Rosa and the upper classes could enjoy a good-natured game of equality precisely as long as her betters remained in the upper class and Rosa remained a cook. But she altered her part of the arrangement when she dropped the cooking. Now all she brought to the game was a decrepit hotel and the bizarre behavior she brandished about her. Food had been the passport allowing her to travel freely in and out of other social worlds. Without the food, her relationships with those she once called “the greatest people of that time” became as rickety and uncomfortable as the dusty old sofas at the Cavendish. She was like a devoted governess who had outlived her pupils and her place at the family dinner table but refused to be put aside. Fielding recalled that it was a custom among the Bright Young Things to gather at the Cavendish on their way to a royal wedding. As they piled back into their cars, Rosa would wave from the door, looking envious. She would have loved an invitation to a royal wedding. No such invitation was ever going to appear. And like many an eccentric whose charm was fading, she was getting to be a nuisance.
A letter written in 1937 by a young American woman in London suggests, discomfitingly, what it was like to maintain a connection with Rosa in her years of increasing frailty and desperation.
Isabella Gardner was twenty-two at the time and had just moved to London to study acting. She came from one of the distinguished Boston families that Rosa would have categorized approvingly as “your American aristocracy.” Her great-great-aunt was the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, and her father, George Peabody Gardner, had been a favorite of Rosa’s when he stayed at the Cavendish years earlier. Rosa loved dropping his name, and when she did it was always “Peabo,” the nickname his friends used. Despite these ties, Isabella was not staying at the Cavendish while she looked for a flat. She was writing to her parents from her room at the Hyde Park Hotel in Knightsbridge to report, guiltily, that Rosa was driving her crazy. “I wish I hadn’t but I . . . went down to see her and took her out to supper. I thought then I probably wouldn’t see her again for a month or so. But ever since she has pursued me—in the kindest way imaginable but making it terribly difficult for me. I know that she only wants me to meet the ‘best people’ and to give me fun and do the right thing by ‘Peabow’ and I can’t bear to hurt her feelings . . . but I can’t go down there except once in a great while and it’s embarrassing to have her telephone me constantly, write me incessantly—send me flowers etc.” Isabella went on to say that Rosa had discovered her one evening about to dine with friends at Prunier, a fine French restaurant, and “dragged us out of our seats and back to the Cavendish where she proceeded to tell Paul how she ’ated the ’Inchingbrookes—the Hinchinbrookes being Paul’s Aunt and Uncle that didn’t go down so well. . . .”
Isabella wasn’t creating a character for literary or sentimental purposes; she was describing somebody she knew: an old woman with an abrasive accent who couldn’t bear to make a graceful exit from other people’s lives. Rosa was surely aware that if she implored Isabella and her friends to go back to the Cavendish for champagne, they would say yes out of politeness, and she also knew it would constitute a poor victory. Underneath Isabella’s acquiescence there would have been . . . irritation? Pity? Contempt? Whatever it was, Rosa heard it, just as she could always hear her own accent.
• • •
One of the stories Rosa most enjoyed telling was about going to supper at the fashionable Berkeley Hotel with a few of her upper-crust friends during the years when food was still her calling card. “We were supposed to have duck or teal—all smothered over with orange, but it was only a damned plover. That’s all it was. You couldn’t fool me, though. I couldn’t sit down at a restaurant and be fooled at my time of life. So I sent it back and said—‘I would rather have a piece of cold ham than a fake plover any day!’ Give you a rabbit for a chicken! Not me! Not Rosa Lewis, cook!”
As long as she could proclaim her profession, she could flaunt all the contradictions of her life with glee. But no matter how desperately she tried to celebrate herself during her last decades, those who knew her best understood that they were witnessing a caricature. It took death to restore her to dignity. Rosa always wanted her funeral to be held at St. James’s, Piccadilly, where she occasionally attended Sunday services wearing a large diamond brooch. When she died at eighty-five, St. James’s presided over her farewell just as she had requested. But what would have pleased her even more was the funeral cortege, as resplendent as if she had summoned it herself, and perhaps she did. Four cars made their way majestically through Piccadilly heaped high with roses, gardenias, and orchids sent by a roster of brilliant names, including the Earl of Strathmore, the Earl of Sandwich, the Marquess and Marchioness of Bath, Lady Milbank, and—as the Daily Mail put it—“many other families who were her friends.” How gratified she would have been to read that last word.
Eleanor Roosevelt
(1884–1962)
Hot Stuffed Eggs with Tomato Sauce
Mashed Potatoes
Whole Wheat Bread and Butter
Prune Pudding
Coffee
—Lunch at the White House, March 21, 1933
Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t care what she ate. She had no palate, she wasn’t interested in food, it gave her no pleasure—or at least people have been saying these things ever since she became a public figure in the 1920s. “Victuals to her are something to inject into the body as fuel to keep it going, much as a motorist pours gasoline into an auto tank,” her son James once declared, and nobody among her friends or relatives seems to have disagreed. Eleanor herself joined
the chorus: she used to say she was incapable of enjoying food. It’s too bad, then, that she never had the chance to study her own paper trail. It’s as long and rich as you might expect from one of America’s most prominent political activists, and it would have surprised her by delivering quite a different verdict. An intense relationship with food ran right through Eleanor’s life, darting into her work, her feminism, and her deepest relationships. “I am sorry to tell you that my husband and I are very bad about food,” she wrote in response to a query from the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1929. “I do not know of any particular dish which he likes unless it is wild duck.” FDR did like wild duck; he also loved steak, lobster, heavy cream, caviar, and cocktails, but she wasn’t about to admit any of that to the Journal. Instead, she chose to lie, which was sometimes her favorite way to discuss matters of appetite—especially, as we’ll see, FDR’s appetite. But the art of the cover-up, which Eleanor practiced diligently all her life, was difficult to maintain when it came to cooking and eating. Eleanor wrote so often and so copiously about herself, in memoirs and letters and articles, that the truth had a way of spilling out. Over the years, she became a reliable source on a subject she would have insisted she knew nothing about—her own food story. And it isn’t a story about a woman with no palate for pleasure.
Still, it’s easy to see how Eleanor acquired her bleak culinary reputation. By all accounts, the food in the Roosevelt White House was the worst in the history of the presidency. Longtime White House staff began noticing a change right after FDR’s inauguration in 1933. Eyeing the luncheon buffet Eleanor had ordered, the chief butler called the table “sick-looking”—it featured two kinds of salad, bread-and-butter sandwiches, and vast quantities of milk. A few weeks later California senator Hiram Johnson was invited to dinner and told his son afterward that the most ordinary meal they had at home was “infinitely superior” to what he had been served at the White House. “We had a very indifferent chowder first, then some mutton served in slices already cut and which had become almost cold, with peas that were none too palatable, a salad of little substance and worse dressing, lemon pie, and coffee.” Mutton was not on the menu that night; Johnson had been eating dark, dry, overcooked lamb. Ernest Hemingway, invited to dinner in 1937, told his mother-in-law it was the worst meal he had ever eaten. “We had a rainwater soup followed by rubber squab, a nice wilted salad and a cake some admirer had sent in. An enthusiastic but unskilled admirer.” The visit had been arranged by the journalist Martha Gellhorn, who was a good friend of Eleanor’s and often stayed overnight at the White House. As they waited for their flight in the Newark airport, Hemingway was surprised to see Gellhorn intently eating sandwiches, three of them, and asked her what on earth she was doing. She said everyone in Washington knew the rule: When you’re invited to a meal at the White House, eat before you go.
Eleanor Roosevelt posing in her inaugural gown at the White House, January 16, 1937.
Formal dinners prompted more elaborate menus and the best White House tableware, but the same desultory cooking. “I suppose one ought to be satisfied with dining on and with a solid-gold service, but it does seem a little out of proportion to use a solid-gold knife and fork on ordinary roast mutton,” wrote Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes in his diary after the 1934 cabinet dinner. Again, he was eating lamb. Guests who had arrived in black tie and evening gowns for the first state dinner of the new administration found themselves sitting down to an early Thanksgiving. Stuffed celery, roast turkey and cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, frozen pineapple salad, and ice cream with a product called “rubyettes”—grapes that had been colored and flavored to resemble cherries—made up what The New York Times politely referred to as a “traditionally American” menu. The Washington Post was more blunt: “Gentlemen, let us adjourn to a coffee-shoppe!”
Even the return of wine to the White House table, announced for the 1934 cabinet dinner after the long drought of Prohibition, didn’t offer much by way of festivity. The American wine industry was a shambles after fourteen years of neglect, with vineyards lost and wineries ruined. French wines were available—Elizabeth Farley, the wife of the postmaster general, treated herself to a glass of imported champagne at the Mayflower Hotel before the dinner—but Eleanor didn’t want the public to think that the new administration was staging some sort of bacchanal in the midst of the Depression. She decided that two “light American wines” would be served and ordered a California sherry and a New York State sparkling wine, limiting the hospitality to one glass of each. As it turned out, overindulgence was not a problem. “The sherry was passable, but the champagne was undrinkable,” Ickes wrote in his diary. He could see Mrs. Farley reacting to her first sip: she nearly grimaced. Eleanor’s consultant on the wines had been Rexford Tugwell, the undersecretary of agriculture, who was born in upstate New York and remained loyal to its struggling vineyards. Late the next evening, Ickes and a few friends joined FDR in his study for an impromptu get-together, and the president, laughing about how awful the cabinet dinner champagne had been, ordered up a couple of bottles of the real thing. They all drank convivially until midnight. Eleanor wasn’t there.
Everyone who ate in the White House seems to have complained about the food—FDR, his aides, the family, old friends, Washington insiders. Even the women in the press corps, who flocked to the all-female press conferences Eleanor held every week and were devoted to her, whispered that a press lunch had been “abominable.” Yet now and then a positive report surfaces. Louis Adamic, for instance, a prolific writer on issues of American immigration and diversity, was invited to come for dinner with his wife one evening in January 1942. Because FDR rarely socialized outside the White House—he disliked being seen in public in his wheelchair—Eleanor made a point of bringing new people into his orbit when she thought they might interest him. Adamic said later that he had been far too nervous to pay attention to the menu, but his wife told him afterward what they had eaten: rare roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, string beans, salad, and a trifle for dessert, along with wine, champagne, and brandy. She said it was all very good, and she was probably right—since Winston Churchill had arrived unexpectedly. No wonder Adamic couldn’t focus on his plate. The original menu, planned without the prime minister in mind, had been baked fish stuffed with bread crumbs, and a marshmallow pudding.
Serving appetizing food in the White House was hardly an impossible challenge, and previous administrations had managed very well. The Hoovers, unpopular though they were, never had to field criticism about the menus or the cooking. On the contrary, Lucius Boomer, manager of the Waldorf-Astoria, had lunch at the White House after Hoover was trounced in 1932 and said he had never tasted food so delicious. (Ava Long, the housekeeper at the time, whom Eleanor replaced, pointedly included this anecdote in her reminiscences.) But the fact that a decent meal for Churchill could be summoned on such short notice makes it all the harder to understand why the typical state of White House food should be so dreary. Nobody expected the White House to serve roast beef and champagne every night during wartime, but Churchill didn’t just get a special menu, he was treated to careful cooking as well. The Roosevelts were accustomed to dry, leathery roasts; Churchill’s was properly rare.
What happened in 1933? Why did the food deteriorate so spectacularly? Most historians blame Eleanor and what they assume to be her indifference to matters of the table. After the election, according to this theory, she quickly hired a housekeeper and a kitchen staff for the White House and then threw herself into what mattered far more to her—civil rights, women’s equality, poverty, housing, employment, and the war. She was the busiest, most public, most productive First Lady in history, and complaints about dinner just didn’t register.
But this explanation ignores nearly everything else we know about Eleanor, beginning with her extraordinary talent for friendship. Warm, charismatic, genuinely sympathetic, and invariably thoughtful, she was the one who always remembered to ask
the timely question, send the flowers, write the note. All year she kept an eye out for possible Christmas presents, so she could be sure of having just the right gift ready for each person on her long list. Stories abound of guests arriving for lunch or dinner at the White House and feeling desperately nervous until Eleanor, comfortable and welcoming, drew them into the room and put them at their ease. What’s more, as she wrote in her memoir of the White House years, she was impressed early on by the awe and affection Americans felt when they visited 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, either as tourists or as invited guests. It was a powerful symbol not only of the nation, but of American hospitality, and she strongly believed that as First Lady she personified that hospitality. It’s hard to imagine that such a woman could read caustic newspaper stories about the terrible White House food and do nothing about it just because she cared more about unemployment. In truth, what was happening at the White House table didn’t reflect Eleanor’s disdain for food, it reflected a welter of complicated feelings about being First Lady at all—a job she had never wanted and the public face of a marriage that tormented her.
What She Ate Page 9