And Lorena Hickok was having the time of her life. My AP colleagues and I hung out after work at Lindy’s, Leo Lindemann’s restaurant and deli on Broadway just below Fiftieth. Lindy’s—known for its cheesecake—was the headquarters of gangster Big Arnie Rothstein, remembered by F. Scott Fitzgerald as Meyer Wolfschein, who fixed the 1919 World Series. Big Arnie collected his booty at a table in the farthest corner, where he could keep his back to the wall—but that was then. One dark night, somebody gunned him down on Seventh Avenue, where he died in a puddle of blood. For a long time, nobody would sit at his table.
Damon Runyon, then a columnist for the Hearst papers, claimed his table by Lindy’s front door, where he collected characters like baseball cards—The Seldom Seen Kid, Harry the Horse, Dream Street Rose, Nicely Nicely. And big-mouthed vaudeville comedian Milton Berle, Uncle Milty even then, bounced from table to table, collecting laughs from the bit players, actors, and journalists who drank there. Lindy’s didn’t sell booze, but friends and friends of friends passed their flasks under the table, so we were always well served.
I shared my friends and my apartment with Prinz, my German shepherd and companion. At seventy-five dollars a month, Mitchell Place was pricey. But it was new and midtown, just off First Avenue and Forty-Ninth, and roomy enough for the two of us, with a little kitchen where I could practice cookery and a balcony where Prinz could stretch out and lust after the pigeons and seagulls winging it over the East River. Evenings and Saturdays, Prinz and I ran together along the river. On the Sundays when it was my turn to monitor the AP news ticker, he went to the office with me and curled up under my desk. On off-duty Sundays, when my AP friends came over for a brunch of bacon and eggs and croissants and my notorious Stingers, Prinz played the ham, clowning for my friends’ attention.
Yes, friends, my friends—women and a few men, too, passing through my days and nights. I was young then, and I had a young person’s passions, a young person’s desires. But I was often lonely, and in those days, before Eleanor filled the emptiness of my heart, I was lonely for Ellie Morse.
Oh, Ellie, Ellie. We lived together for eight years back in Minneapolis, where both of us worked at the Tribune and shared a three-room apartment on the top floor of the swank Hotel Leamington, on Ellie’s wealthy father’s tab. The war was over, the times were good and getting better. At the time, Tom Dillon was the Trib’s managing editor. He started me on night rewrite, then moved me to the copyedit desk, and then to news and features. Mr. Dillon—the Old Man, we called him—liked my smart mouth and my moxie and assigned me to crime and politics, strong stuff for women in those days. Sports, too. I was the first woman in the country to cover a major college football team—the Minnesota Gophers. I loved the noisy crowds, the crazy excitement, the brute force of bodies against bodies. I loved being out at the field, a woman covering a man’s game, a woman journalist making the news in a man’s business.
And I loved coming home to Ellie. My Ellie, a wispy thing, thin, fair-haired, not at all pretty, but whose large and generous affections erased all the losses in my life. My mother had died when I was thirteen, Ellie’s mother had died giving birth to her, and we two motherless daughters learned to mother one another. My alcoholic father had abused me, but Ellie’s father was extravagantly loving. She shared his lavish gifts with me, so that both of us were fathered (although I’m sure that the dear, good man had no idea of the nature of our relationship). When he died and left her a potful of money, she proposed that we spend a year in San Francisco.
“You can write your novel and get a nice rest,” she said. “And when that’s done, we can go to Europe and have a grand romantic adventure.”
“But my newspaper job,” I protested. “I’ve invested eight years in the Trib and—”
Ellie might be wispy, but she knew her mind. “The doctor says stress is bad for you, Hick. If we were living a quieter life, maybe your moods wouldn’t be so…” She hesitated, then put it diplomatically. “So up and down.”
I had just been diagnosed as diabetic, which explained my moods. Stress pumped me up, then brought me crashing down. I hated leaving my newspaper work, but I loved Ellie, I wanted to try my hand at a novel, and the idea of San Francisco was tempting. So I took a year’s leave of absence and we went.
It didn’t last. Ellie had never stopped liking men and she married one of them, damn it. She didn’t have the nerve to tell me what she was doing—just eloped to Yuma with Roy Dickenson, a widower she had met years before at dancing class in Minneapolis. They had their grand European adventure together, leaving me to scrabble up the pieces of my broken heart. The disaster was total, for I couldn’t make myself work on the novel, which probably wouldn’t have been worth much anyway. I’m a teller of true stories, and fiction feels flabby to me. I finally gave up trying.
But I couldn’t face the idea of moving back to Minneapolis without Ellie, where our friends would know how utterly I had been betrayed. I needed to fill my life with new work and new people in a new place, so I took the train to the Big Apple, fast-talked myself into a job on Hearst’s tabloid Daily Mirror, and after six or eight months, moved up to the AP. I allowed myself to be lonely now and again—who isn’t? But I had Prinz and good friends and good work. If there was any lingering self-pity, I blotted it out with a romantic fling or two, and by the afternoon Tommy Thompson and I had our little talk at Veniero’s, I was back on track again.
Funny thing. The day I met Eleanor Roosevelt was the first day of the rest of my life, and she would be at the very center of it. But if there was any hint of that future, I completely missed it. No beating heart, no sweaty palms, no swooning awareness. If I felt anything at that pivotal moment, it was pity.
I had heard that Mrs. Roosevelt was no beauty—“homely as a barn door,” one of my AP colleagues said—and when Tommy introduced us, I saw why. She was nearly six feet tall, her shoulders sloped, and her hands flapped at the ends of her long arms as if they were hinged. Like her Uncle Teddy’s, her unfortunate front teeth protruded. Her chin was severely retrograde. Her voice was high-pitched and unpredictably fluting. She wore a hairnet—a hairnet!—over her hair and a flat black pancake of a hat tilted precariously over one eyebrow. Her black skirt was six inches too long to be stylish and her moss green silk tunic made her look like a two-day-old corpse. No great beauty myself, I’ve always felt a comradely affiliation with unbeautiful women. This time, I felt only a subterranean compassion.
But when I followed the lady to the women’s luncheon where she was scheduled to speak, I forgot about the fluty voice and the buck teeth and that fatally green tunic. I watched from the back of the room as her audience stirred, quieted, then leaned forward to listen as she talked, not about the campaign or the candidates—she mentioned neither her husband nor Governor Smith—but about issues, serious issues. About shorter hours and better pay for women, about the responsibility to vote. She talked to them as if they were her neighbors, sisters, friends. She was informed, engaged, engaging.
Impressive, I thought, agreeably surprised. And I was suddenly interested in Mrs. Roosevelt, not as FDR’s political wife or TR’s favorite niece, but as herself: editor, writer, teacher, factory owner, mother, grandmother. There was a story here. She was the story, and I found her on my mind several times a day. But the interview Tommy had promised me was delayed and then delayed again, and I was beginning to think it wouldn’t happen—until the day before the election, when Tommy telephoned to schedule it for the day after.
Bad timing, I thought. “Maybe we ought to put it off for a week or two,” I suggested tactfully. I wanted to interview the lady, but she was going to be pretty raw on the day after her husband’s defeat. Out of respect for her feelings—
“It’s already on the calendar,” Tommy said cheerfully and gave me the address of the Roosevelts’ townhouse on East Sixty-Fifth. The interview was to take place there, rather than the office. “Fewer interruptions,” she explained, when I expressed my surprise.
There was no question about the outcome of the 1928 presidential election. The Happy Warrior was a progressive Wet in a conservative nation that liked to pretend it was Dry, and rumors flew that he was an alcoholic who had promised to name a bootlegger as secretary of the treasury. Worse, he was a devout Irish Catholic who aroused the righteous ire of Protestant preachers who told their flocks that a vote for Smith was a vote for the pope and the devil disguised as the Democratic candidate. It was a dirty campaign, a smear campaign, and everybody knew that the ticket was going down.
On election night, I went to the Democratic national headquarters in the Park Avenue Armory to watch the presidential returns being posted on the big board. As predicted, the tally—Smith’s trivial 87 electoral votes to Hoover’s 444—was humiliating. “The time hasn’t come yet when a man can say his beads in the White House,” Smith growled. He clapped his brown derby on his head and stalked out. The next day at Lindy’s, Uncle Milty joked that the Happy Warrior had sent the pope a one-word telegram that morning: “Unpack.”
With the national GOP landslide, everybody expected that the Republican candidate would take the governor’s race as well, and by the time I got to the state election headquarters at the Biltmore, Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt had already gone home. But those of us who waited it out heard some remarkable news, along about four a.m. It was a squeaker, but when the upstate returns finally came in, Franklin Roosevelt was the state’s new governor.
Bleary-eyed, I shared an early morning cigarette and a cup of black coffee with Elton Fay, AP’s capital bureau chief. “Shocker, huh?” I said. “Must’ve been plenty of split-ticket voting.”
Fay rubbed his stubbled chin. “Chalk this one up to FDR’s campaign manager. Louis Howe planted Roosevelt stories in every upstate weekly. He mailed fliers to farmers and businessmen, and hounded the hell out of precinct chairmen.” He squinted against the smoke of his cigarette. “But you gotta give it to FDR, you know? He stuck that battered old felt hat on his head—somebody said he wore it in the 1920 campaign, before the polio—got in an open car, and barnstormed all around the state. If anybody noticed that he’s a cripple, they were too polite to say so. That wife of his helped, too, although the street says she wasn’t any too eager for him to run.”
“Is that so?” I said and put out my cigarette in my coffee cup. “Well, I hope she takes that hairnet off before she moves into the governor’s mansion.”
Fay laughed. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
I filed my story, went home, took Prinz for a quick walk, and caught a couple of hours of sleep. Under the circumstances, I expected my interview with the state’s new First Lady to be canceled. But when I called Tommy to check, it was still on. I wasn’t getting excited, though. I figured that now that Mrs. Roosevelt was a political wife, even the AP’s front-page girl would have to resign herself to a backgrounder, with no direct quotes.
There were two residences behind the single front door of the dignified four-story brick Neo-Georgian house on East Sixty-Fifth. The Franklin Roosevelts lived at Number 49; his mother, Mrs. Sara Roosevelt, lived at Number 47. Built and furnished twenty years before by the elder Mrs. Roosevelt, the townhouse had been a Christmas gift for her son and his bride—except that it wasn’t a gift, for Mrs. Roosevelt had kept her son’s house in her name. There were two drawing rooms, two dining rooms, two kitchens, two butler’s pantries—two separate houses, but like conjoined twins, fatally fused at each floor by communicating doors that allowed the senior Mrs. Roosevelt to come and go, unannounced, at any time she wished, into the kitchen, the sitting room, the bedrooms, the nursery. As I was to learn later, the junior Mrs. Roosevelt viewed the house as a metaphor for her mother-in-law’s domination of the family’s life. She hated it.
But for now, all I knew was that Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt—dressed in a charming lace-trimmed hostess gown (but still wearing that appalling hairnet pulled halfway down her forehead)—was seated in a plum velvet wing chair in her elegant, flower-filled drawing room, pouring tea from a handsome silver tea service. Her black Scotty, Meggie, lay at her feet.
I’m cynical by nature and my experience as a reporter has only nurtured that natural inclination. Later that day, as I was turning my notes into newspaper copy, I would suspect that this particular presentation of the First Lady of the state of New York had been carefully staged for an audience of one—me. But at the moment, I was absorbed in the lady herself. As I watched her, I saw something. And then I saw something else.
I saw, and envied, the comfortable assurance that hovers like a smug ghost on the shoulders of those who have always had more than enough of everything. I recognized that easily, because for most of my young life, I never had nearly enough of anything. My father was a drunken dairyman who rarely held the same job for more than a few months at a time and moved his wife and children—two pretty daughters and me, tall and bulky for my age and strikingly unpretty—from one bleak prairie village to another. My mother may have loved me, but she was an ineffectual woman who wept when my father beat me but never lifted a hand to stop him. Until she died of a stroke when I was thirteen, I felt only a kind of bewildered resentment toward her. Did she fail to protect me because I wasn’t pretty? Or because I wasn’t as compliant as my sisters?
Yes, perhaps that was it—my defiance. I couldn’t yield, somehow. I simply could not yield. My sister Ruby, younger by two years, played up sweetly to our father and later, to our stepmother. She told me that life would be easier if I did, too—if I could be submissive, if I could be meek.
“Bend a little to him,” Ruby said, practical even then. “It doesn’t cost anything to bend, you know.”
I knew, but I couldn’t. When I felt something wasn’t true, I couldn’t say it. When I felt it wasn’t right, I couldn’t do it. Perhaps I was afflicted with the moral arrogance of the young, or perhaps I knew as a child what I know as an adult: that to give in to circumstance is to fail to live fully. I refused to respect those who had not earned my respect, not even to save myself from being beaten. A year after my mother’s death, my father married our housekeeper, who—sensing perhaps her new husband’s incestuous interest in his daughter’s maturing body, or simply tired of my rebellious obstinacy—told me to pack my things and get out.
So at an age when Miss Eleanor Roosevelt was curling her hair and going to dancing classes, I became a hired girl on the dusty Dakota plains, cooking and washing dishes, emptying chamber pots, and scrubbing floors in other people’s houses. It was demeaning, spirit-destroying work, but I was protected from a fatal self-pity by the very un-girlish gift of irony. When I began to take my situation too seriously—when I hoped too much or wanted too much or even hated too much—I could hear a droll, self-mocking voice poking fun at my situation. To this day, that voice has been a strong defense against despair, for as long as I can hear it, I know there is a part of me that stands for my self.
I think it was that part of me that glimpsed the fearful, wistful, half-hopeful sadness and uncertainty in Eleanor Roosevelt, the deep self-doubt that gave the lie to her outward social assurance. I had come to interview a woman who seemed to be creating a place for herself, and for other women, in the male stronghold of Democratic politics. But what I saw was a diffident, lonely woman who wasn’t sure who she was. This recognition touched my news-hardened heart, and as I took out my notebook and pencil, I found myself wanting to know her real story, the story of her real life, behind and beneath all the clamor—the opposing Roosevelt clans, the party politics, her husband’s expanding ambitions. That wasn’t the story the AP wanted, or would print. That was the story I wanted.
But I wasn’t going to get it. What I got instead was the AP’s story, which she rehearsed for me in that wavering, high-pitched soprano that fluttered like a lost bird somewhere above the window cornices. The story of her work, beginning with the Red Cross canteens during the Great War and continuing into her recent political activity. Her teaching—American history, literature, and public affairs—
at Todhunter, a prominent private school for upper-class girls in New York. The furniture factory, a crafts workshop that she co-owned with two friends at Val-Kill Cottage, on the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park. Her children, too: Anna, married to a Wall Street stockbroker and the mother of a baby girl; James at Harvard; the three younger boys at Groton.
She answered my questions without hesitation, speaking about the children with a mother’s practiced fondness. About her political work, about the Val-Kill crafts workshop, and especially about teaching, she spoke with a different enthusiasm, her voice and face animated.
“I love teaching,” she said. “It’s my life.”
About the presidential campaign and Al Smith’s defeat, she was indignant: “It was the religious issue, of course. Hoover’s campaign shamelessly exploited people’s fears—and their ignorance. A woman told me, quite seriously, that she couldn’t vote for Smith because he intended to appoint all the pope’s sons to his cabinet. Can you imagine the idiocy?”
“What did you tell her?” I asked.
“I asked her how many sons she thought the pope had,” she said and relaxed into a laugh so infectious and real that I had to join her.
Loving Eleanor Page 3