Empty Without You

by Roger Streitmatter

  In 1920, FDR was nominated for vice president, propelling the Roosevelts into the national spotlight for the first time. On the Democratic ticket behind Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, Franklin added youthful vitality to the ticket that, from the outset, was clearly the underdog to a Warren G. Harding/Calvin Coolidge pairing that promised to end international involvement and “Let business be business.” On Election Day, the Republicans won a decisive victory.

  Franklin’s political career suffered a far more serious setback a year later when he contracted polio. While FDR devoted his energies to the challenge of relearning how to function without the use of his legs and to develop a physical rehabilitation center in Warm Springs, Georgia, Eleanor was free to redefine herself, at least to some degree, as an entity separate from her husband.

  Her initial step was to develop a network of independent women friends to provide the stimulus she craved. First among them were Elizabeth Read and Esther Lape; second, Nan Cook and Marion Dickerman. Although ER’s close friendships with these two same-sex couples inevitably led to gossip—her acid-tongued cousin Alice Roosevelt Long-worth remarked loudly in a fashionable Washington restaurant, “I don’t care what they say, I simply cannot believe that Eleanor Roosevelt is a lesbian.”1—they served as the conduit through which Eleanor moved into the community of politically astute women who were effecting social reform. ER began devoting her considerable talent and energy to organizing conferences, serving on committees, and raising money for the Democratic Party.

  In 1928, the party asked her to help lead Al Smith’s campaign for president. Although the land-rush prosperity of the Republican administration virtually guaranteed that Herbert Hoover would win the White House, Eleanor worked diligently behind the scenes as co-director of the party’s National Women’s Committee, keeping things running smoothly at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in New York City.

  Lorena Hickok’s route to that very same location had begun in South Dakota and then had taken her to newspaper jobs in Michigan and Wisconsin before she arrived at the Minneapolis Tribune in 1918. Along the way, Lorena matured into a first-rate reporter while also adopting the unseemly habits of the newsroom—smoking too many Camel cigarettes, eating too many rich foods, drinking too many whiskeys straight up. Hick efficiently wrote the trial and government meeting stories that are the bread and butter of daily journalism, while also spotting the occasional off-beat feature for page one. She scored on the sports page as well, securing the coveted job of covering college football in a state that considered what happened on the gridiron to be serious business.

  It was also during her Minnesota years that Lorena lived in a relatively stable same-sex relationship with Ellie Morse. The one problem they struggled with was Hick’s emotional volatility. A perfectionist in her work, Lorena erupted whenever she thought she had either made a mistake in a story or committed a violation of journalistic ethics. Whenever Lorena got either idea in her head, she flailed herself unmercifully for days on end, as Ellie tried everything she could to pull her temperamental partner back onto an even keel.

  In 1926 when Ellie finally persuaded Lorena to consult a doctor, he discovered high blood sugar and diagnosed an early stage of diabetes, recommending that Hick not work so hard. When Ellie’s father died, leaving her the family fortune, she proposed that she and Lorena move to San Francisco, with Lorena shifting from the frenetic pace of chasing the news to the slower one of writing fiction. Lorena agreed, and the couple headed west.

  The move was a disaster. Quickly discovering that her talent for news didn’t translate into fiction, Lorena spent days on end at the typewriter crumpling up page after page of turgid prose while cursing her work—and herself. No longer having daily bylines to bolster her spirits, she careened out of control—blowing up at minor problems, becoming so depressed that she slept two and three days straight. Eager to escape Lorena’s emotional turmoil, Ellie renewed her acquaintance with a childhood friend from a Minneapolis dance class twenty years earlier and then eloped with him.

  Lorena, with both her career and her relationship in shambles, boarded a train for New York, the huge city so many people turn to in times of despair. After a brief stint reporting crime news tabloid-style for William Randolph Hearst’s Daily Mirror, Lorena joined the handful of women working for the Associated Press, the largest news network in the country. Once again driven not merely to achieve but to overachieve, she threw every ounce of her energy into getting her stories first and best—ignoring the doctor’s warning not to overwork. The only other woman working in the AP office in New York, Kay Beebe, later recalled, “She was a big sort of masculine type, and she could play poker and swear and smoke and drink with the best of ’em.” Being resolutely determined did not mean, however, that Lorena was unpopular with her co-workers, as Beebe said flatly, “Everybody liked Lorena.”2

  Now that Lorena was writing major stories every day—one of them even won her the distinction of being the first woman to have her byline appear on the front page of the New York Times—she decided the time was right to move into the news beat she had always coveted but that the male reporters who dominated the Fourth Estate had continued to hold tight in their grip: politics. Lorena’s strategy was to focus on the Democratic National Committee headquarters a few blocks from AP’s New York office. It was the fall of 1928 and the Democrats were finally giving Al Smith, despite his Catholic background and New York accent, a shot at the White House. The timing, Lorena figured, was perfect.3

  In September 1928, the lady met the reporter.

  By no means, though, was it love at first sight. Lorena later wrote in Reluctant First Lady that she was unimpressed with ER’s physical appearance. For although Hick was no beauty herself, she had the reporter’s critical eye for assessing others: “She was very plain,” she wrote of Eleanor. Lorena also was determined to hold fast to her rule, as a woman news reporter, to avoid what she derisively called “women’s page stuff,” such as stories about the wife of the Democratic candidate for governor of New York, that would push her off the front page. So throughout the campaign, Lorena steadfastly avoided writing stories about Eleanor.4

  When the votes were counted in November, on the national level the Democrats, as expected, got trounced. FDR bucked the trend, however, and won his race for the Governor’s Mansion in Albany.

  From 1928 to 1932, Hick covered Governor Roosevelt whenever he visited New York City, but she continued to keep her distance from the missus. Lorena’s refusal to write about Eleanor was not easy, as New York’s first lady was a highly newsworthy subject. Having broken free of many of the shackles that previously had constrained her, ER was working hard not to allow her husband’s success in public life to push her back into subjugation. Each Sunday afternoon she left Albany and traveled to New York City to teach at Todhunter School for the next three days, spending the evenings with one of the couples who had grown so important in her life, either Elizabeth and Esther or Nan and Marion. Each Wednesday afternoon, ER returned to Albany just in time to preside over midweek tea, the beginning of the non-stop whirl of social events that composed the second half of her week.

  In the meantime, Lorena’s social life was virtually nonexistent. Because she enjoyed her work, she didn’t mind the long days and demanding pace. But still, when she came home at night and when she had a free weekend, she longed for someone to share her life. In an effort to fill the void, Hick acquired a German shepherd puppy. Prinz then became her constant companion, even accompanying his mistress to the office on the Sundays that it was her turn to make sure the Associated Press didn’t miss any breaking news. Lorena became so attached to Prinz, in fact, that some of her friends and colleagues began describing the relationship as “weird” or “eccentric”—some even mentioned the adjective “unnatural.” One year Lorena’s Christmas card featured a photo of Prinz in the way parents showcase their children; under the photo, Lorena wrote “Merry Christmas to You and Yours from Me and Mine.” Lorena also
stunned her friends when she began arriving at dinner parties with Prinz in tow, calling him her date.5

  But Hick’s most desperate effort to find companionship involved not a dog, but a female co-worker. In early 1932, Lorena and Kay Beebe were among several reporters sent out of town on a big story. Being the only two women in the group, they shared a hotel room. Late that night, Kay recalled fifty years later, Lorena made unwelcome and uninvited physical advances: “She made for me.” More specifically, Lorena lunged for Kay and tried to embrace her in the manner that a lesbian would embrace another lesbian. “She wanted to hug me, and it wasn’t good.” After Kay pulled back, Lorena apologized and never tried to touch her co-worker again.6

  On a professional level, Hick avoided contact with Eleanor until June 1932. That was the month that the Democratic Party decided that FDR was the man who, after the stock market crash in 1929 on the Republican watch, could retake the White House. Lorena recognized that ER could be a major story; never before had the wife of a presidential nominee been not merely an appendage to her husband, but a woman with her own career (as a teacher and furniture plant owner) and political track record (as a national campaign staff member). When Lorena recommended that a reporter be assigned, for the first time, to a candidate’s wife, her editors agreed. Still leery of having her stories land in the women’s page ghetto, though, Lorena turned down the new beat that was then passed to Kay Beebe. Lorena, meanwhile, won a plum assignment as one of three AP reporters covering FDR’s national campaign—the only woman in the country on that prestigious beat.

  Part of Lorena’s job was to report changes in the Roosevelt campaign strategy, and that meant talking to Eleanor, because the candidate’s wife also had evolved into one of his most trusted political advisers. The first time Hick interviewed Eleanor, the usually hard-boiled reporter was bedazzled. When she returned from the session, one of her male colleagues had to remind her, for the first time in her twenty years as a reporter, “Don’t get too close to your sources.”7

  Lorena no longer had the option of distancing herself from Eleanor. By early fall, Lorena’s role had changed from a reporter pursuing a source to a reporter being pursued by a source. Time and time again, Eleanor plucked Hick from the gaggle of reporters. During a stop in Arizona, Eleanor invited Lorena to accompany her on a social call to see her childhood friend Isabella Selmes Greenway. Another time, Eleanor asked Lorena—and Lorena only—to ride alone with her in a private car as she inspected the site of a proposed dam on the St. Lawrence River. ER next made a point of coming to talk to Lorena—just the two of them—in a parked car, and, soon after that, playfully challenging Lorena to keep up with her as she maneuvered through an Iowa cornfield (Eleanor glided gracefully through the stalks; Hick got tangled up in a barbed wire fence). In upstate New York, Eleanor even invited Lorena to have breakfast alone with her in her hotel room.8

  Then the fates took a hand. During the summer and early fall, Kay Beebe had written only a couple stories about Eleanor—Beebe wasn’t really interested in politics. Then in October 1932, Beebe transferred from AP’s New York office to the one in San Francisco to get married. Because it had been Hick’s idea to assign a reporter to Eleanor in the first place and now she was the only woman left on the AP news staff in New York, she was automatically assigned the beat. City editor Bill Chaplin was unknowingly prescient when he launched Lorena on her new assignment to cover the would-be first lady—“She’s all yours, Hickok. Have fun!”9

  By this point, both women were, in fact, delighted to share each other’s company. And on a political level, Eleanor also was getting a major boost from the relationship that was gradually shifting from professional to personal. Lorena was presenting the American public with a resolutely flattering portrait of their soon-to-be first lady. Lorena was still the only reporter in the country paying attention to the woman who, she told her readers, had “the energy of a dynamo” and was “an outstanding civic and welfare leader.” At the same time, the adroit reporter made sure Eleanor came across as modest and frugal, describing her as a woman who was “embarrassed when she is recognized” and who lived “a truly Spartan life”—wearing ten-dollar dresses, eschewing taxis for city buses, eating lunch at drug store soda fountains. In short, after Eleanor had been buffed, fluffed, and puffed through the magic of Hick’s typewriter, she appeared before the public as a 1930s version of the modern-day Superwoman.10

  That Lorena was by this stage infatuated with Eleanor also was clear from her willingness to violate the ethical standards of her profession. Specifically, Lorena sent her articles to her editors in New York only after they passed inspection by Louis Howe, the former newsman who was running the Roosevelt campaign. Allowing Howe to see her dispatches was such a blatant breach of journalistic tenets that if her editors had known about it, Lorena would have been fired on the spot. Earlier in her career, Lorena had done all she could to succeed in the male-dominated world of journalism—working untold hours without overtime pay, even though the pace endangered her health. As the presidential campaign moved into its final laps, a new agenda had taken precedence over her long-standing desire to see her byline on page one: She wanted to help the woman she loved.

  Two weeks before the election, the campaign train was passing through Albany when the mother of FDR’s personal secretary, Missy LeHand, died in far northern New York state. Concerned that the distraught young woman was in no condition to travel by herself, Eleanor offered to accompany Missy on her trip home. They would both take the train to Potsdam for the funeral, then Missy would stay with her family while Eleanor returned to Albany. Not eager to make the return trip alone, Eleanor asked Lorena to join her, and Lorena readily agreed.

  On the cold and rainy evening of October 30, 1932, the two women left Potsdam on the overnight train that sped southward into the frosty night. Eleanor had booked a private drawing room with only a lower berth and a long, narrow couch across from it. After they closed the drawing room door and with the funeral still weighing heavily on Eleanor’s mind, the two women began to share childhood memories. Eleanor spoke of her mother’s death when she was only eight, followed the next year by her younger brother’s death, then her father’s. Hick shared details of her life that were no less tragic; her mother died when she was thirteen, and a year later when her father remarried, he threw her into the street.

  Eleanor and Lorena talked well into the night, and their conversation proved to be an epiphany as to just how much, on an emotional level, the refined lady and the streetwise reporter had in common—losing their mothers at an early age, growing up too quickly, being betrayed by the men in their lives, considering themselves unattractive and unloved, trying to compensate for their low self-esteem by overachieving in their careers. In the most poignant moment of the conversation, Lorena told Eleanor of a childhood trauma that she had suppressed tight inside herself for many years. For Lorena’s cruel and tyrannical father had not only psychologically abused and physically beaten his adolescent daughter, but he also had performed the ungodly act of raping her.

  When Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman of infinite sensitivity and compassion, heard that shocking revelation, she instinctively reached out to the poor, unfortunate victim who, twenty-five years later, was sharing the same tiny room with her. Eleanor’s long, graceful arms embraced and comforted Lorena—assuring her that she was safe, showing her that she was loved. Neither woman got much sleep that night, Lorena later wrote, but by the next morning their relationship had reached what the reporter called a new level of intimacy.11

  After FDR’s landslide victory, Eleanor and Lorena grew ever closer. With both of them now in New York (the Roosevelts had kept a town-house there throughout their marriage), several nights a week they attended plays, concerts, and operas before dining late either in one of Manhattan’s out-of-the way restaurants—one favorite was an Armenian cafe far downtown—or, more likely, in the privacy of Hick’s one-room apartment in midtown. Lorena usually did the cooking; her specialty w
as thick steaks slathered with catsup and baked in the oven. And on the mornings that the two women didn’t wake up in the same room, Eleanor dialed Hick’s telephone number—WI2-6131—first thing.

  Christmas of 1932 was a special time, as it was the occasion when Lorena presented Eleanor with an extravagant sapphire and diamond ring. The gift was far too expensive for a news reporter to have purchased; Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink had pressed the magnificent piece of jewelry into Lorena’s hand in 1916 after the young reporter had written a flattering story about the grand diva. Eleanor protested that the gift was too precious for Lorena to part with, but eventually she slipped the ring onto her left hand where it would remain for the next four years.

  During the first two months of 1933, Eleanor and Lorena continued to spend as many hours together as possible. Hick asked to be transferred to the Associated Press bureau in Washington when the new first lady took up residence in the White House, but her editors said AP already had one woman in Washington, Bess Furman, who could cover the woman’s angle. In a note to Furman, Lorena only hinted at how disappointed she was that she would no longer be covering ER—“I shall miss her terribly.”12

  Eleanor and Hick’s most enjoyable getaways were to the Dutch colonial cottage at Val-Kill. They spent the daylight hours meandering through the woods thick with red pines and sugar maples, their evenings close to the stone fireplace in the cozy living room with its knotty pine walls and overstuffed furniture. One of their favorite activities during these serene times together, outdoors or in, was reading poetry and historical biographies; they took turns reading out loud to each other so they could share the experience.