Empty Without You

by Roger Streitmatter

  I really think the papers have been fairly decent about Anna but she did get caught in one interview & she was very tired & writes Sisty & Buzzie kept her awake most of the night. I hope she is getting rested.

  Also floods in the drouht [sic] area are ironic but so like us as a nation, we always deal in extremes. Poor man, who lost his cattle, that was [a] tragedy! I hope you will think as little as I do of the sugar beet industry.41 I forgot you’d never seen those conditions. I saw them years ago in the 1920 campaign trip.

  I’m so sorry about the teeth & hope your mouth got well. It is a bad sign to grind your teeth like that, you must be less intense!

  Mama when in London is going to stay with the King & Queen of England, Lord, how I would hate it & how she will love it!42

  Now dear one good night. Bless you, I love you always & I wish my arms were around you.

  Devotedly,

  E.R.

  July 3rd

  HOTEL BARBARA WORTH

  El Centro, California

  Dear You:

  Phooie, but it’s hot here! Someone said it was 128 yesterday, and I believe it.

  This valley43 is the damnedest place I ever saw—except Southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky. There is the same suspicion and bitterness all through the place. An unreasoning, blind fear of “Communist agitators.” If you don’t agree with them, you are a Communist, of course.

  They have no use for the Administration. One of the leading citizens told the state field man for the relief administration that he’d like to lead the pack & give [Assistant Secretary of Agriculture] Rex Tugwell a beating if he “ever showed his face around here.” He was here last summer, as a matter of fact, but they were never aware of it. And they call Harry Hopkins a Communist.

  You, Washington, the apartment in New York, Prinz—they all seem very far away this morning. I wonder if it will be like this when I die—a feeling of remoteness from everything. Oh, my dear, I’m so sick of the whole miserable business!

  Goodbye for now—

  H

  Eleanor wrote this letter while visiting her brother Hall in Chicago. It suggests that Eleanor sensed that her upcoming vacation with Lorena might be less than idyllic.

  July 10th

  The Blackstone

  Chicago

  Hick dearest, This probably won’t reach you before you leave for Sacramento—but it will be there for the record! I went to the [Chicago] Art Institute, & walked home followed by camera men & then stayed in all day. Had some friends of Hall’s to lunch, worked, had more friends to tea & went to dine. I was followed, they [the photographers] waited for me & saw me home. I just pray I may get out to-morrow but!

  I can’t quite understand why you are so worried dear, why can’t you just be natural? Of course we are going to have a good time to-gether & neither of us is going to be upset.

  Good night dear one & bless you,

  E.R.

  AUGUST 1934

  Another Holiday Disrupted

  As Eleanor and Lorena moved along their individual routes toward the Sacramento hotel room where they would meet, their respective paths were separated not only by hundreds of miles but also by two very different sets of needs and commitments. Since she had reluctantly accepted the mantle of first lady sixteen months earlier, Eleanor had rewritten the job description. Initially with Lorena’s counsel and assistance but increasingly on her own, the first lady had found ways to use her position to advance her own social and political agenda—her own vision, her own destiny. After a lifetime of starts and stops caused by the decisions and the needs of other people, Eleanor was finally establishing a life that reflected her own values and priorities—and on her own terms. She had the potential, in other words, of doing precisely what she had been endeavoring to do for forty years: She could make a difference in the world.

  Lorena was in a very different place. Her accomplishments had come early, though certainly not easily, when she had proven during her teenage years that she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself. During her twenties, her combination of raw talent and even rawer grit had helped to change the world of journalism, transforming an all-male profession into one in which a woman, at least a few of them, could carve out a niche. During her thirties, she had grown still more, emerging as one of the most admired journalists—male or female—in the country, becoming a top political reporter assigned to the most sought-after of news beats. Her path had changed abruptly when she had fallen in love with Eleanor, but once again she had proven herself by adapting to the situation and becoming the best relief investigator anyone could ask for, while at the same time serving as the behind-the-scenes adviser who helped reinvent the position of first lady. Now in her early forties and with so many achievements to her credit, Lorena had set her sights on a very different goal. She had found the love of her life, and she was ready to settle down into a quiet and peaceful existence with her.

  Eleanor was poised to change the world; Lorena was ready to retreat from it. Eleanor was eager to commit her energies to humanity; Lorena was eager to focus her energies on a single person. Was it possible for two such dichotomous sets of priorities to survive in a single relationship? When Lorena wrote the chapter in her book that described the West Coast trip, she rephrased that very question with her choice of a title—“Last Attempt.”

  By early August of 1934 when the two women would again part, the question would be answered. But first, Eleanor and Lorena would complete the twenty-two-day Western trip that would be the same length, to the day, as their French Canadian adventure of the previous summer. This time, though, their travels would bear scant resemblance to a blissful holiday but would provide an experience more like an emotional roller-coaster ride neither woman would soon forget—nor wish to remember.

  From the outset, the getaway was troubled by press coverage, as on this trip the first lady was not inside the protective bubble provided by her press “girls.” Eleanor and Hick tried to keep their rendezvous point—the Hotel Senator in Sacramento, an out-of-the-way hotel chosen in hopes of avoiding attention—a secret, but when Lorena arrived to spend the night before Eleanor arrived the following morning, she found a gaggle of reporters waiting in the lobby. Lorena later wrote, “Somebody—I suspected the airline press agent—had broken the secret and released the name of the hotel to the press. I then proceeded to do the silliest thing I ever did in my life. As the reporters undoubtedly put it, I tried to ‘out-smart’ them.” By the time Lorena wrote those words in 1962, she had calmed down. But in 1934 when it seemed like her private holiday with Eleanor was about to be transformed into a media event, Lorena was furious.1

  Newspaper coverage of the activities that followed eventually captured a sense of that fury. But first they described Lorena’s effort to evade the reporters; the scheme read like the script of a spy movie. Enlisting the help of the state troopers assigned to travel with the president’s wife, Lorena had the District of Columbia license plates on her new Plymouth convertible removed and replaced with California plates. (She ultimately had decided on a Plymouth rather than the Buick that Eleanor had wanted her to buy.) Then she parked the car outside the back door of the hotel. On the morning that Eleanor arrived in Sacramento, Hick took a cab to the airport—with a crowd of reporters on her heels. As soon as Eleanor disembarked from the United Airlines plane, Lorena hustled her into the cab, and when they arrived back at the hotel, Lorena got out of the car to run interference. “I used to be a newspaperman myself,” she told the reporters. “I know you want to interview Mrs. Roosevelt, but she’s just finished a long, overnight flight and she’s feeling grimy. Would you please let her wash her face first before you talk to her and take her picture?” The reporters agreed. The first friend then led the first lady into the lobby and onto the elevator. Instead of going up to their room, however, the two women headed down to Lorena’s car where a trooper was waiting to whisk them away. They threw their bags into the rumble seat and took off.2

  “It wa
s a swell scheme,” the Sacramento Union wrote in a page-one story the next day, “except that one pair of reporters had thought she would do just what was done to elude them.” The two reporters hopped in their car and raced after Lorena’s, while the trooper tried his best to outrun the reporters by putting, as Lorena later wrote, “a heavy foot on the accelerator, and with dismay I watched the speedometer go up and up and up—50, 55, 60, 75, 77 miles an hour.” But Lorena’s car wasn’t built for racing. So after fifteen miles, the trooper finally had to pull off to the side of the road.3

  On the details that followed, Lorena’s and the Union’s accounts differed significantly. She wrote in her book that Eleanor graciously invited the reporters to interview her over breakfast at a restaurant in the tiny town of Roseville—“Jim’s Coffee Shop, Booths for Ladies,” the sign read. The news stories, on the other hand, described an agitated Lorena shaking her fist at the reporters and shouting “You’re a pair of bum sports!” (Those were about the saltiest words that newspapers were allowed to publish in 1934.) Lorena remained angry throughout the meal—at least according to the paper. ER initially ordered orange juice with her coffee and toast, but then, when reminded that peaches were in season in California, changed her order to peaches and cream. Lorena was not so conciliatory. “Miss Hickok was too mad at the interview to change over to peaches,” the Union reported. “She lit a cigarette. Mrs. Roosevelt did not smoke.”4

  The newspaper stories that appeared for the next two days—the Associated Press picked up the novel story of the first lady trying to elude the press and distributed it nationwide—were decidedly complimentary to Eleanor. One began “Merry Mrs. Roosevelt,” others described her as “smiling” and “laughing,” and still others talked about her “being gracious toward” and “playing hide and seek with” the reporters. Nevertheless, the first lady’s press adviser was anything but pleased. Maybe the president’s wife flying to California was newsworthy, Lorena acknowledged, but did the whole country really need to know—on page one, no less—that the investigator of the nation’s relief programs had shouted at a pack of reporters and had opted not to eat California peaches? Adding to Lorena’s frustration was the fact that one story incorrectly stated that she wrote her reports for the first lady. As with Lorena’s earlier portrayals in newsprint, there was also a characterization that she simply didn’t understand; in this case, the paper said she had “a police-woman complex.” Maybe that was supposed to be something like her being peremptory, Lorena wasn’t sure. One thing she was sure of, though: It wasn’t a compliment. And finally, Lorena shrieked, was it really anyone’s business that she smoked cigarettes or that she and the first lady were, as the San Francisco Examiner—William Randolph Hearst’s notorious voice of sensationalism—characterized them, “intimate friends”?5

  The next few days of the trip were more successful, as the pair of reporters—after getting their exclusive interview—agreed to let the women be on their way. Eleanor and Lorena visited Ellie and Roy Dickinson in Colfax, just north of Sacramento. Then they traversed Donner Pass in the High Sierras and continued north and west into Nevada to visit Anna and her hosts, Bill and Ella Dana, on their huge and wonderfully isolated ranch. Next, Eleanor and Lorena drove into Yosemite National Park just across the California state line and spent their first night at the Ahwanee Hotel, the mountain lodge built from stone and sugar-pine logs against the backdrop of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Lorena gasped in awe when she entered the grand lounge and solarium with its thirty-foot-high, trestle-beamed ceiling and its twinkling chandeliers; it would be the last time she would use the adjective “beautiful” to describe any aspect of Yosemite.6

  Eleanor had been in charge of planning their three days in the park, but as the details of the outdoor adventure came to light, Lorena began to realize that what she had envisioned as three sublime days and nights of quiet walks in the woods and long evenings holed up in a rustic cabin for two was going to be three exhausting days of hiking and riding horses over hazardous trails followed by cold nights of sleeping in crude campsites set up for seven! For when the first lady had written in advance asking the park’s chief forest ranger, Billy Nelson, to plan a visit for her and a friend, she didn’t realize that Nelson and four other rangers would be joining the women—the chief ranger wasn’t about to take a chance of the president’s wife getting injured in his park. Though Eleanor hadn’t specifically asked Nelson and the other rangers to come along and she, too, was surprised that they kept so close, she was too gracious to tell them to go away.

  Hick became even more irritated when the high altitude made it difficult for her to breathe—and angrier still when the first lady, accustomed to exercise because when in Washington she rode her horse almost daily, bluntly pointed out “If you didn’t insist on smoking so much, you wouldn’t be so short of breath.” Another detail that added to Lorena’s growing anger was the fact that Eleanor and the rangers found it exhilarating to dash down to a nearby lake every morning to bathe in the ice cold water, while Lorena tried that experience only on the first day and then spent the other mornings grinding her teeth as she lay in her sleeping bag furious that she would have to endure yet another day without a bath and wearing the one set of jeans and shirt that she’d brought along.7

  The worst moment of all came not at the highest elevation (they eventually climbed to 8,000 feet) but at the lowest. Eleanor, Lorena, and their male escorts had ridden their horses down into a valley when they came upon a river they had to cross. When Eleanor had written Nelson, she had specified that “Miss Hickok will require a quiet, gentle horse, since she has not ridden for some time”—phrasing that, when Nelson read it to Lorena, she found so patronizing that she became even angrier with the first lady. Still, Lorena’s little mare had her frisky moments. When Lorena attempted to cross the river, she somehow lost her balance and slipped off her horse and fell backward. The next thing she knew, she was sitting in water up to her chin while Eleanor and the rangers stared from atop their horses—one of the men reflexively chuckling at the sight of the woman plopped down in the middle of the river. Lorena was not hurt physically, but she was humiliated—and irate. She tried so hard to wipe the incident from her memory, in fact, that she did not mention it in her book. The only account of the accident that was preserved is one Nelson later wrote in a note to Eleanor expressing his hope that she would visit Yosemite again. As part of that note—one that Lorena undoubtedly wished had joined the other letters she burned—Nelson wrote, “Tell Miss Hickok that I am wondering if she still dives backwards from her horse into rivers.”8

  Eleanor experienced her own embarrassing moment toward the end of the Yosemite visit. The incident was not the doing of a frisky horse and chuckling forest ranger, however, but of a reluctant outdoors-woman who finally found a release for her pent-up anger. Throughout the three days of camping, the first lady and first friend had been accompanied not only by rangers but also by vacationers. “We couldn’t get away from the tourists,” Lorena wrote irritably in her book. “They followed us everywhere, in droves.” After having thirty years to reflect on her own behavior during that long-ago trip, Lorena also admitted

  “And there were times when I behaved badly and embarrassed Mrs. Roosevelt.”9

  The particular incident Lorena was recalling began when she and Eleanor spotted a little village of chipmunks so tame that they ate out of a person’s hand. “They were charming little creatures, and it was a delightful experience to have one of them perch on your wrist, daintily picking crumbs out of your hand.” What Lorena did not find delightful, though, was looking up from the chipmunks to find a crowd of tourists, many of them with cameras in hand, surrounding her and Eleanor—and not taking pictures of the chipmunks. Lorena’s mood was made no more pleasant by the fact that she wasn’t exactly looking at her peak. After three days without washing her hair or changing her clothes, she was in no condition to have her picture taken. Even worse, most of the tourists had decided they could get their
best photos of the first lady by stationing themselves to the rear of Lorena, thereby filling their frames with that quite broad behind of hers that was still splattered with mud from her river bed mishap of the previous day.10

  Lorena lost it. Lashing out not only at the rudeness of the tourists but also letting loose much of the repressed resentment after the nights sleeping on the cold ground … and the sweltering hot days of hiking … and Eleanor’s patronizing comments about her smoking and horse-riding ability … and always being surrounded by that entourage of forest rangers, Lorena turned downright surly and started stalking around like a wild animal as she screamed at the tourists to stop snapping pictures and start minding their own God-damned business! The expletives that came streaming out of Lorena’s mouth were so colorful—all those years in the newsroom had taught her more than just how to write a news story—that Eleanor finally had to “shush” her and physically pull her away from the stunned assembly of slack-jawed sightseers who stared dumfounded. Eleanor was of a social class that had been trained never to lose one’s poise in public, and never in half a century had she succumbed to an emotional outburst; now for her friend to go quite utterly mad in the presence of a whole gallery of the American middle class—the very voters who would decide the fate of her husband’s revolutionary New Deal initiatives—was simply beyond what the first lady could possibly find acceptable. Eleanor was not merely embarrassed; she was ashamed.11

  After Lorena’s explosion in front of the tourists, the summer holiday was in shambles. Eleanor herself could endure the wrath of Lorena’s temper, but she absolutely could not stand by and allow it to be inflicted on innocent people. The price for maintaining her intense relationship with Lorena was simply too high.