All my love,
E.R.
After Lorena had failed to land either an agent or a publisher for her autobiography, the first lady had arranged for her to meet with Nannine Joseph, Eleanor’s new literary agent.
December 7th, 1951
Hotel de Crillon
Paris
Hick dearest, Your letter sounds a bit low but I’m glad you will see Nan-nine. Good luck, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you!20
This means I hope you can come to me [at Val-Kill] for Xmas. I’ll let you know when I get in but it won’t be before Xmas eve I fear in the morning as I can’t leave here till the 22d.
I’m sure the Democratic party has been in power too long but the alternative of [Robert] Taft21 is even worse!
The [United Nations] work is heavy now so this is just a line to send you love from Tommy & me.
Devotedly,
E.R.
This letter contains Eleanor’s first reference to another way that she helped Lorena financially. The book project ultimately evolved into a series of profiles of women political figures titled Ladies of Courage.
July 26th [1952]
Val-Kill Cottage
Dearest Hick, Harper’s [publishing house] wants a primer for women on politics. I can’t do it alone, but if you’ll do it, I’ll help & work with you & both our names can go on as co-authors. Please consider it, it is needed, but I can’t give the time to consultation with them, research & basic writing. I’ll discuss [the content] with you & write some parts & go over all of it & we’ll have fun I hope. They’ll give you an advance.
Thanks again & write soon,
E.R.
After President Eisenhower was elected in November, the new Republican administration replaced Eleanor and the other American delegates to the United Nations. Eleanor then began dividing her time between living at Val-Kill and traveling around the world to visit people she had worked with at the United Nations. Her first venture was a trip around the world, including stops in Beirut, Damascus, Tel Aviv, Karachi, and New Delhi. She then returned to Hyde Park. During this same period, Lorena was at the Little House, desperately short on money and writing furiously on the book about women in politics.
December 26th [1952]
Val-Kill Cottage
Hick dearest, I’m sad you can’t come up but I understand how rushed you are.
We had a nice Xmas & I missed you.
My love always,
E.R.
In early April, Tommy Thompson died at age sixty-six of a brain hemorrhage. She had served Eleanor for thirty years.
April 19th [1953]
Val-Kill Cottage
Hick dearest, How sweet of you to write & how nice to get it to-day before going off. You will miss Tommy, as we all will daily for she did so much for those she loved. Nevertheless we will all be happier for her constant memory.
I’ll try to get my interviews for the [Ladies of Courage] book to Nannine [Joseph] before I leave.22
My dear love & thanks again.
Devotedly,
E.R.
Eleanor had begun giving speeches on behalf of the American Association for the United Nations, an organization dedicated to building public support for world peace and cooperation. She had just returned from speaking in Hong Kong, Athens, and Zagreb.
August 19th [1953]
Val-Kill Cottage
Hick dearest, At last to-night I’ve finished reading your material [for Ladies of Courage] & it is simply swell I think. Much more interesting than I thought it could possibly be made.
All my love & your work is fine,
E.R.
October 26th [1953]
Val-Kill Cottage
Dearest Hick, I’m sending as my usual Xmas gift the money for your coal23 as you must want to put it in soon.
I do hope the eyes are holding up & the work [on Ladies of Courage] is nearly finished. Anna & Jim [Halsted]24 will be here the 5th & 6th & 8th & 9th & she may stay on a few days.
Traveling pretty steadily but here in snatches.
All my love dear,
E.R.
Besides providing financial support, ER also attempted to use her influence, as she repeatedly had in the past, to secure a job for Hick. This time, Eleanor asked New York Governor Averell Harriman, a fellow Democrat, if he might have a position for a writer. Harriman reviewed Lorena’s credentials and interviewed her, but he did not hire her. Meanwhile, Eleanor was traveling in Europe, sending the following message on a postcard from the Grand Hotel Flora in Rome.
March 12 [1955]
Dearest Hick, Good trip so far, tho’ rain & sleet this p.m. Stay well & love, E.R.
Eleanor and Lorena both were listed as authors of Ladies of Courage when it was published, but Eleanor gave all the royalties to Lorena. When Eleanor came to New York City, she stayed at an apartment she was renting on the Upper East Side.
May 19th [1955]
55 East 74th Street
New York City
Dearest Hick, Here’s a little check Nannine [Joseph] sent me but I don’t want it for you did all the work on the book so use it for odds & ends. Let me know if you are really short of money.
I’m sorry about these attacks & anxious to hear what the doctor found after your hospital check up. Do let me know.25
Have you got the money for coal or do you want it for Xmas & how much?
Much, much love,
E.R.
Eleanor was traveling on a speaking tour—she gave an average of 150 lectures a year—in California. While on the trip, Eleanor received a telephone call from Lorena’s landlady, who explained just how destitute Lorena had become. Several months behind on her rent and with nothing but rejections in response to her attempts to publish books on her own, Lorena was living solely on the money Eleanor sent her. After the phone call, the first lady dispatched her chauffeur, Tubby Curnan, to Long Island to move Lorena to the Val-Kill cottage. Lorena never saw her beloved Little House again.
August 9th [1955]
Rolling Rock Ranch
Hick dearest, Of course you will forget the sad times at the end & eventually think only of the pleasant memories. Life is like that, with ends that have to be forgotten.
The future is what I am thinking about & please let me know what you plan.
I have been riding again & thought of you & the Yosemite [vacation] many times. It is beautiful country with lovely mountain trails. We leave here Friday at 6:30 a.m.
Much love dear,
E.R.
Nannine Joseph persuaded Lorena to try a new approach in her publishing efforts, suggesting that her simple reportorial style was well suited to books for young adults. Lorena did not initially embrace the idea, but then she thought of a subject she was sure would be an inspiration to juvenile readers: Helen Keller. No one had written such a book before because the woman who had triumphed over blindness and deafness had refused to give any author a private interview; when Eleanor personally asked Keller to spend a day with Lorena, however, Keller agreed.
October 8th [1957]
55 East 74th Street
New York City
Dearest Hick, Your letter came in record time & I was happy to hear. You were sweet to think so far ahead & I’ve made no plans for I don’t intend to celebrate till I’m 75.26
What a lot you’ve had to learn about the blind!
I’m in a mad rush but it will end someday.
Much, much love & thanks again,
E.R.
Lorena living at Val-Kill worked fine when Eleanor was traveling. But when ER was at the cottage, there was so much activity that Lorena became agitated and could not concentrate on her writing. The situation was so reminiscent of Eleanor’s days in the White House that in late 1957 Lorena decided to rent her own apartment in the village of Hyde Park three miles from Val-Kill, paying her rent with the $4,000 in royalties from Ladies of Courage.
December 18th [1957]
55 East 74th Street
Ne
w York City
Dearest Hick, I’ll go to you from the train Saturday & we can go & see the apartment & then perhaps you will come back & lunch with me?
I hope you will take it as I feel you will be better off in the village. I think I can find enough furniture & buy essential kitchen things if an ice box & stove are in [the apartment already]? Anyway it is worth considering carefully.
Hope your eyes & nerves improve.
Much love dear & I’ll see you Sat.
Devotedly,
E.R.
When Eleanor wrote this letter, she was visiting the Brussels World’s Fair and planning a trip to the Soviet Union. Lorena’s biography of Helen Keller had been published, and she was busy revising her biography of Eleanor to tailor it toward a young audience.
September 6th, 1958
Metropole Hotel
Brussels
Dearest Hick, How goes it with you? The fair is interesting & fun & this city itself is attractive. My columns are full of the fair because I thought no one had told us much about it. I’m so far ahead with the columns that I don’t think I’ll have to write any at all when I’m in Russia.
My love to you & good luck with whatever you are writing.
Devotedly,
E.R.
During 1960, people close to Eleanor noticed that she was tiring more quickly, and a trip to the doctor led to a diagnosis of aplastic anemia, also known as bone-marrow failure, and an order for Eleanor to rest more. It surprised no one when she ignored the doctor’s directive. Early the next year, Eleanor attended John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in Washington and then flew to Arizona for a series of lectures.
January 23d, 1961
Arizona Inn
Tucson, Arizona
Dearest Hick, Here we are. Yesterday we had sun but to-day it is rainy & not at all like summer.
The snow last Thursday really played havoc with Washington. Traffic was snarled, cars ran out of gas or their radiators gave out, & they were abandoned in mid street adding to the chaos. I tried to get to the gala performance27 but sat 4 hours in traffic & when a break came I went home! Inauguration day itself was cold & beautiful & the ceremonies impressive. I thought the speech magnificent, didn’t you? I have reread it twice.28
I’ll see you the 30th if all goes well & the weather plays no tricks.
Much love dear,
E.R.
Eleanor was planning a reunion for the women who had covered her White House press conferences thirty years earlier. Of course she included on her invitation list the woman who had suggested the historic sessions that had been such a success—and yet had not been repeated by any of the first ladies since then.
January 4, 1962
55 East 74th Street
New York City
Dearest Hick, On February 3rd I plan to have the dinner for all the newspaper women and I wonder if you could come down and spend that night with me? Tubby [Curnan] could bring you down and take you back.
I would plan on having dinner at 7:30, and I look forward to hearing that you will come.
Much love,
E.R.
In the summer of 1962, Eleanor’s doctor feared that her anemia was on the verge of causing internal bleeding, so he gave her steroids to prevent the bleeding. Unfortunately, the steroids reactivated an old tuberculosis lesion that dated back to 1919. Because of Eleanor’s failing health, she had to dictate this letter to a secretary, who then typed it for ER’s signature.
September 14, 1962
55 East 74th Street
New York City
Dearest Hick, I was glad to get your letter and I do hope the blood sugar levelled off a little bit lower and you don’t have to take more Insulin. I am happy if talking to Walter Reuther was helpful.29 I’ll be back on Monday.
Love,
E.R.
The tuberculosis that spread rapidly through Eleanor’s body resisted all treatment. The final item in Eleanor and Lorena’s correspondence was sent by the Roosevelt family on the day after Eleanor died, at the age of seventy-eight.
[November 8, 1962]
WESTERN UNION
[to] MISS LORENA HICKOK
HYDE PARK NY
THE FAMILY OF MRS FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT INVITE YOU TO THE CHURCH SERVICE TO BE HELD AT ST JAMES EPISCOPAL CHURCH HYDE PARK NY SATURDAY NOVEMBER 10TH AT 2:00 PM AND TO THE INTERMENT SERVICE IN THE ROSE GARDEN FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT LIBRARY HYDE PARK IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING - PLEASE PRESENT THIS TELEGRAM FOR ADMISSION
EPILOGUE
The Long Way Home
Lorena chose not to attend Eleanor’s funeral. She had always hated sharing the first lady with a crowd, and this was no exception—particularly when the event was televised and the crowd included such luminaries as President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, and former Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. Only after all the other mourners had departed did Lorena craft her own private—almost eccentric—farewell.1
Her first step was to enlist the aid of the rector of St. James Episcopal Church. The courtly, white-haired Reverend Gordon Kidd already knew Lorena because Eleanor had asked him, from time to time as she was preparing to depart on a trip, to look in on Lorena while she was away. He agreed to drive Lorena to Eleanor’s grave so she could place some flowers there and say her personal goodbye. It had struck him a bit odd, however, that she insisted the visit be after dark, so no one would see her. Regardless, on the appointed night he dutifully picked up Lorena at her apartment and drove her through the gates at the Roosevelt property—the guard, recognizing Father Kidd, waved them through—and as close to the rose garden as his car was allowed. Then they began walking the several hundred feet remaining on their nocturnal pilgrimage. Overweight and hampered by both her arthritis and the intensity of her emotions, Lorena was breathing so heavily that she had to pause more than once before finally being forced to give up altogether. Then she quietly handed the cluster of goldenrod and other wild flowers to Father Kidd—it was too dark for him to see if there were tears in her eyes, but he suspected there were—so he could carry the humble bouquet the final distance and deposit it at the foot of the white marble slab.
Lorena’s failure to complete that final tribute to Eleanor was only the first of many disappointments that would define the last years of her life. Earlier it seemed that Eleanor had succeeded in placing Lorena on a financially rewarding course as an author of biographies for juvenile readers. The first lady had not only connected Lorena with her own New York literary agent, Nannine Joseph, but also had arranged Lorena’s crucial interview with Helen Keller that had virtually guaranteed the success of that first biography. By the time Eleanor had died, Lorena already had churned out four more biographies aimed at the same youthful audience—two on Franklin, one on Eleanor, and one on Anne Sullivan Macy, Keller’s teacher. It was only after Eleanor’s death that it became clear, however, that such biographies with their narrowly defined audience did not produce significant royalties. Nor did Reluctant First Lady, which focused on Eleanor’s life from 1928 to 1933, sell more than a few hundred copies. In addition, Lorena’s failing eyesight impeded her writing, preventing her from completing the biography of labor leader Walter Reuther. Still, the royalties from the Helen Keller biography and Ladies of Courage paid the modest rent on Lorena’s two-room apartment and the dollar or two a week she gave neighborhood children to go to the grocery store for her and to walk her dog Jenny, the miniature Shetland sheepdog that had been one of Eleanor’s last gifts.
Those children provided Lorena with her only human contact on many days, as she became increasingly reclusive. She wore no makeup and kept her hair cut short (she cut it herself), and she wore the same khaki trousers and men’s shirt a week straight. Never a religious person, she repeatedly turned down the offers from St. James parishioners to take her to church; on the rare occasion that she joined one of the families in the neighborhood for supper, she seemed to do so not because she was eager but because she felt obligated—if she didn’t accept an invitation on
ce in a while, maybe the parents wouldn’t let their children walk Jenny.
The other invitations Lorena found onerous were those from Ray Corry, director of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. The first friend had given a few of Eleanor’s letters to the library in 1958, stipulating that they could not be opened until ten years after her own death. After that initial deposit, Corry was relentless in his effort to obtain as much of the correspondence as possible. Corry continually wooed Lorena with elaborate dinners, complete with cocktails and wine, at his home. He told her it was her obligation to history that the letters be preserved, but she found the evenings with Corry burdensome—she preferred staying at home and listening to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio.
By the mid-1960s, Lorena was almost totally blind. Her arthritis became so bad that she was barely able to walk on her own and finally had to resort to a cane, then a walker, and finally a wheelchair. Lorena’s tobacco addiction gave her a hacking cough, and yet she persisted in smoking a pack of Camels a day even into her mid-seventies. Then, in the spring of 1968, Lorena’s doctor told her that the numbness in her toes was a result of her daily doses of insulin and that it would be necessary for him to amputate at least one of her legs, possibly both. Lorena admitted herself to the hospital in Rhinebeck, half an hour north of Hyde Park, in April, and she made it through the first of the two operations in fairly good shape. But not the second. She died on May 1, 1968, at the age of seventy-five, outliving Eleanor by five and a half years. Patricia DeVries, the member of St. James parish who was with Lorena when she died, recalled that she was delirious at the end, talking incoherently about friends and friendships from the distant past. Not once either during those final hours or during her final years, the people who knew Lorena said, did she express any resentment toward Eleanor Roosevelt.
Hick had spent a good deal of time during her final years typing and retyping her will, even though her monetary worth was minimal. She had taken great pride in maintaining a $1,000 balance at Farmers-Mattewan National Bank so she would be able to return to the Roosevelt family the exact same amount that the first lady’s will had given her. In those final difficult years, however, the vicissitudes of life had forced Lorena to dip into the account from time to time. When her will was probated, only $700 remained to be divided equally among the children of Eleanor Seagraves, the little girl Lorena had known during the White House years as “Sisty.”2
Empty Without You Page 26