Empty Without You
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36 The House Un-American Activities Committee had accused the American Youth Congress of being a Communist-front organization, largely because its youthful members held liberal—sometimes radical—beliefs. Eleanor steadfastly defended the organization.
37 Lorena hosted her sister and brother-in-law for Christmas dinner.
38 Eleanor had sent both items to Lorena for her dinner.
39 Eleanor, at Lorena’s request, had urged Bureau of the Census officials to hire Julian Claff.
1 Lorena kept the fact that she lived at the White House a secret, fearing that her bosses at the Democratic National Committee would expect her to produce favors for them if they realized she was living with the first family. So even though Lorena was, in reality, sleeping no more than twenty feet from the president, she pretended that she was living at the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue five blocks from the White House. If someone insisted on taking Lorena home after work or dinner, she would direct her escort to the hotel and wave goodbye as she entered the lobby. As soon as the friend was out of sight, Lorena would leave the hotel and walk to the White House.
2 Ardent conservatives and isolationists were so dissatisfied with both major political parties that they were seriously considering organizing a third party.
3 Bernard Baruch was an international financier Eleanor had known since her girlhood.
4 Paul McNutt from Indiana was hoping to win the Democratic nomination for president.
5 Eleanor proposed to Norman Davis, chairman of the American Red Cross, that she go to Europe and help with the refugee relief effort by administering first aid, providing hot meals, and delivering medical supplies in cities that had been bombed. The president rejected his wife’s proposal point blank—far too dangerous.
6 Eleanor consistently misspelled Wendell Willkie’s name throughout the campaign, even though Lorena repeatedly spelled the name correctly.
7 Lorena was planning to attend the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
8 Eleanor referred to her speeches with the same casual phrasing that many of the people asking her to give them did when requesting her to say a “few words.”
9 Dorothy Cruger was a co-worker of Lorena’s at the Democratic National Committee.
10 The Beekman Tower was an office and residential building at 3 Mitchell Place very near Lorena’s apartment building.
11 When the Nazis invaded Austria in March 1938, members of the aristocracy fled.
12 Lorena took Eleanor up on her offer. Hick insisted that she needed a maid only during the work week, however, and not on the weekends when she was at the Little House.
13 The New York World-Telegram columnist criticized James Roosevelt—Pegler called him “the Eaglet of the New Deal Dynasty”—for using his position as the president’s son to gain publicity for the vending machine business he was involved in.
14 Charlie Michelson was an official at the Democratic National Committee.
15 The United Press reporter’s biography of Eleanor, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Biography, had been published the previous month.
16 Eddie Flynn was a Democratic National Committee official.
17 Eleanor’s friend Molly Dewson had directed the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee in the past.
18 Like her father, Eleanor’s brother Hall suffered from alcoholism and the emotional upheavals that often accompany that disease. On this particular occasion, Hall had collapsed and been taken to Vassar Hospital in Poughkeepsie.
19 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was staying at the White House to strategize with FDR about the war.
20 Marion Harron had come to New York to spend several days with Lorena.
21 Hopkins, whose wife Barbara had died four years earlier, had married the beautiful socialite Louise Macy.
22 Hopkins, at fifty-two, had been rendered gaunt and pallid by the cancer eating away at his stomach.
23 With the phrase “kitty-kitty,” Lorena was acknowledging that she was being catty about Hopkins and his young and beautiful new wife.
24 Chevy Chase is an upscale neighborhood in the northwest section of Washington, adjacent to the suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland.
25 Queen Elizabeth was the wife of King George VI and the mother of today’s Queen Elizabeth II.
26 The “bit” included a photo of Eleanor eating a donut with an American soldier and a story about soldiers cheering the first lady because she had not even flinched when an air-raid siren had begun to wail.
27 Eleanor had urged mothers and fathers, when writing to their sons overseas, not to complain about gasoline and coffee rationing, as it made the soldiers worry about conditions on the homefront.
28 The Office of Price Administration was a new federal agency designed to prevent profiteering and unjustified price increases.
29 Hick was not the only career woman who was becoming clothes conscious. At Lorena’s urging, Marion began having her business suits made by the same New York tailor who made many of Eleanor’s clothes. Lorena also persuaded Marion to let Eleanor’s hairdresser give the judge a less severe coiffure.
30 Annie Ross was Lorena’s neighbor who had taken care of Prinz during the week when Lorena was not at the Little House.
31 FDR had written General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral William Halsey that his wife was “anxious” to visit the battlefront on the island of Guadalcanal, but he left the final decision in the hands of the military leaders. They initially refused her request, but after the first lady’s tireless visits to hospitals and Red Cross clubs boosted troop morale beyond anyone’s expectations, Admiral Halsey reversed his position and allowed her to travel to Guadalcanal. During that visit, ER spent an evening with Joe Lash, whose being stationed on the island was part of her eagerness for wanting to visit it.
32 Leone Crowlie was a co-worker of Lorena’s at the Democratic National Committee.
33 Marion to Lorena, 11 December 1943.
34 Marion to Lorena, 5 January 1944.
35 Almost immediately after Elliott and Ruth divorced, they both remarried.
36 When foreign leaders were in attendance, FDR did not include Eleanor in policy-making sessions.
37 Lorena opted to visit Hyde Park despite the commotion that FDR and Churchill’s presence would bring. In the end, Lorena enjoyed meeting the prime minister, later considering it one of the highlights of her life.
38 Marion was trying to persuade Lorena to leave her job so the two women could set up housekeeping together in Washington.
39 In hopes of persuading Lorena to live with her, Marion had moved out of her mother’s house in Chevy Chase and was renting an apartment in downtown Washington.
40 Lorena had agreed to move in with Marion on a trial basis for one month, with the possibility of making the arrangement permanent.
41 Franklin Jr. and Elliott led the pack with five marriages apiece, followed by James with four, Anna with three, and John with two.
1 The fighting in Europe was almost at an end. Hitler would commit suicide on April 30, and Germany would surrender on May 8.
2 Eleanor had promised Bess Truman that she would vacate the White House on April 20—only eight days after FDR had died.
3 When Eleanor arrived at her Washington Square apartment the next night, Lorena was busy arranging the numerous boxes of flowers that had been sent there.
4 Mr. Choate was the English setter that Eleanor gave Lorena after Prinz died.
5 Franklin Jr. and John had both been at the front when their father died and had not been able to return for his funeral.
6 Eleanor had given Lorena a subscription to the New York World-Telegram.
7 After FDR died, Eleanor took the president’s Scottish terrier to live with her.
8 Lorena was meeting Eleanor at the Washington Square apartment.
9 Marion Harron was coming to the Little House to spend her two-week summer vacation with Lorena.
10 Lorena was forty-one when she had her emotio
nal outburst during the Yosemite trip.
11 Eleanor was writing the second volume of her autobiography, covering the years 1920 to 1945.
12 In the first draft of her autobiography, Eleanor had written that she had given Lorena a private interview on Inauguration Day in 1933, adding: “Later I came to realize that in the White House one must not play favorites.” When Lorena read the draft, her pride was hurt. “I didn’t get that story because I was anybody’s pet reporter,” she wrote Tommy Thompson. “In those days I was somebody in my own right. I was just about the top gal reporter in the country.” Eleanor then rephrased the statement to read: “Soon after the inauguration ceremonies Lorena Hickok, to whom I had promised an interview, came up to my sitting room. Both my husband and Louis Howe had agreed to the interview because she was the outstanding woman reporter for the Associated Press and they both had known her and recognized her ability.” See Lorena to Tommy Thompson, 23 July 1947, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers; Roosevelt, This I Remember, 78.
13 Ed Flynn was an official of the Democratic National Committee.
14 Alben Barkley of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, was the Democratic candidate for vice president.
15 Associated Press reporter Bess Furman was writing her autobiographical Washington ByLine.
16 Eleanor had publicly endorsed Truman.
17 Johnny was Anna and John Boettiger’s son.
18 In 1946, John Boettiger had purchased a newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona, but by this point both the newspaper and the Boettiger marriage were failing.
19 On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly accepted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Eleanor had been the leading force in creating.
20 The publisher that Nannine Joseph persuaded to look at Lorena’s autobiography rejected it, saying the four sample chapters that Lorena had written “lacked the breath of life.”
21 Conservative Robert Taft of Ohio was a serious contender for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination, although moderate Dwight Eisenhower ultimately became the nominee.
22 Japanese officials had asked ER to make a series of speeches in their country to encourage Japanese women to enter public life.
23 Heating the Little House during the winter had become Lorena’s biggest expense.
24 Anna and John Boettiger had divorced in 1949, and she married Dr. James Halsted in 1953.
25 The doctor diagnosed the recurring pain in Lorena’s legs as arthritis, which became increasingly severe in the next few years.
26 Eleanor’s seventy-third birthday was only three days away.
27 The Inaugural Gala at the National Guard Armory included readings by actor Sir Laurence Olivier and musical numbers by singer Frank Sinatra.
28 A single line in Kennedy’s speech became the hallmark of his administration: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”
29 Eleanor had arranged for Lorena to interview labor leader Walter Reuther, the subject of Hick’s next juvenile biography.
1 The description of Lorena’s life after Eleanor died is based on interviews with people who knew Lorena during this period. Those people are Gloria Kidd Gordon, the daughter of the Reverend Gordon Kidd; John Gordon, Gloria Kidd Gordon’s husband and Lorena’s landlord for ten years; Eileen DeVries, who did secretarial work for Lorena; Sandra DeVries, who walked Lorena’s dog; and Hitze DeVries, Eileen and Sandra DeVries’s father, who often talked with Lorena and who, along with his wife, Patricia, had Lorena to dinner at the DeVries home. The interviews were conducted in Hyde Park during August 1997.
2 File 59691, Surrogate’s Court, Dutchess County Courthouse, Poughkeepsie, New York.
3 Author’s interview with Eleanor Seagraves, 24 October 1997, in Washington, D.C.