Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  The tour over, we went back to the cottage, which was comfortable and homey, furnished with pieces from the workshop. The bookshelves were filled with books that belonged to all three, and I noticed that their three interlaced initials, E.M.N., were embroidered on a table runner—“dear Eleanor’s work,” Nan told me when I admired it. I caught the proprietary tone, the implicit assertion of exclusivity. I was curious about Mrs. Roosevelt’s attachment to Nan and Marion, but what was their attachment to her? What claims did they make on her? I admit to being a cynical journalist, and I wondered: Was she a loved friend—or the governor’s wife and an about-to-become First Lady?

  The spring afternoon had turned chilly. Sergeant Miller had not only built a fire in the massive fieldstone fireplace, but also brewed tea and set out a tray of cookies and cake and then tactfully disappeared. As we settled down to our tea, I answered Mrs. Roosevelt’s questions about my work at the AP. I told them about the hunt for the Lindbergh baby and about the Walker investigation.

  “It’s hard,” I added. “Women journalists are pushed onto the society pages. We have to fight for the stories that mean something.”

  “We all have to fight against being pushed onto the society pages,” Mrs. Roosevelt said. With an rueful little laugh, she added, “That’s where they think our stories belong.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, struck by her remark. “And when a woman makes news, it’s because she’s an anomaly. She stands out in a crowd. Which makes some people uncomfortable.”

  “And where did you graduate college?” Marion asked, picking up her teacup.

  “I didn’t.” I gave her a straight look. “I flunked out at Lawrence College and walked out on the University of Minnesota when the dean told me I had to live in the freshman women’s dorm. You might say I got my degree from the city room, delivered with knuckles and elbows.”

  “Good for you, Hick!” Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed. Marion’s glance met Nancy’s. I intercepted the unspoken message and understood their disapproval. Was I touchy, hypersensitive? Maybe. But I’d been in the East long enough to recognize that judgment for what it was. I was out of their league—money, class, education, profession—and always would be.

  The uncomfortable silence was broken by the rattle of a teacup in the kitchen. “Oh, my goodness,” Mrs. Roosevelt exclaimed and jumped to her feet. “We didn’t ask Earl to join us! I’ll go get him.” Another glance. Marion and Nan didn’t approve of Earl, either. They’d rather he stay in the kitchen.

  Sergeant Miller’s presence altered the chemistry in the room. He sat on the sofa beside Mrs. Roosevelt. Her fingers carelessly brushed his knee, his arm lay across the sofa back behind her shoulders, and the warmth and unaffected familiarity between them was unmistakable.

  Watching, I saw a woman hungry for attention, basking in the admiration of a much younger man—a charming man—and I revised my understanding of her yet again. Something told me that it wasn’t true that they were lovers, but that she wanted it to be true, that she was pretending to herself, and to Nancy and Marion, that it was true. Why? Because she desperately needed to believe that she was admired and loved? Because being loved by another was a fantasy that sustained her in the reality of her marriage? If I had been able to hold those questions in my heart over the next few years, I might have been a wiser friend to her and to myself.

  But I hadn’t yet learned the whole story, and the future was dark and distant. Seeing the two of them together, I knew it was no wonder that the servants were gossiping, even tattling to reporters. I no longer doubted that FDR had seen the danger in the talk and moved to put a firm stop to it before the November election. Reggie Davis could well be right about that wedding.

  And Mrs. Roosevelt’s feelings? Once, just once, I caught a look in her eyes when she turned to Miller that hinted of a profound sadness, and I guessed that she was resigned to his marriage but deeply unhappy about it. Did she feel that it was unwise, this virile, experienced man and a teenager? Did she know that it was her husband’s doing and was disappointed that Miller had been so easily persuaded to take a wife? Or seeing the inevitable, had she tried to get the best package for him—not only the new job but the property as well?

  Marion and Nancy had fallen silent. They were clearly not charmed (Miller didn’t belong to their class any more than I did), and I imagined that they were relieved at the thought that his marriage was about to take him out of the picture. In any event, it wasn’t long before Marion stood up and announced that she and Nan had to catch the train back to the city. That brought Miller to his feet, since he was to see me onto the same train, and ended our little tea party—although I saw Mrs. R put her hand on Miller’s arm and heard her whisper that when he got back to the cottage, they would have supper together.

  I had plenty on my mind as I rode back to the city, but I wasn’t thinking about the color feature I would write the next morning. I was thinking instead of what I had learned: that Mrs. Roosevelt was an unhappy woman living with an ambitious and inattentive husband and a hostile and overbearing mother-in-law; that a man she cared for—how? how much?—was about to be married; and that all this was taking place dangerously close to the precinct of presidential politics. I guessed that there was a very great deal more to know. I wasn’t wrong.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Cheap Dresses, Budget Hats,

  and Dime-Store Lunches

  FDR, who liked to think of himself as a Navy man, had chosen “Anchors Aweigh” as the theme song for his campaign. But when the Democratic nominating convention got underway in Chicago in late June, Louis Howe decided that the Navy hymn sounded like a dirge. His choice: “Happy Days Are Here Again.” It was certainly a happy day for Franklin Roosevelt, who won the nomination on the fourth ballot.

  But not for the candidate’s wife. I had been at the governor’s mansion in Albany, covering the convention as it was broadcast on radio. I saw Mrs. Roosevelt early on the morning of the nomination. She was remote and silent, as if she had withdrawn deep inside herself, shrinking from the impending reality of the White House. At the press conference later that day, where the nominee and his wife were boarding the plane for Chicago, a doe-eyed woman reporter burbled, “Aren’t you simply thrilled at the possibility of living in the White House?” Mrs. Roosevelt froze her with an arctic stare and refused to answer.

  It wasn’t until much later that I learned what had happened in Chicago. The convention was taking its second ballot when Nancy Cook, working with Louis Howe and the nominating team, had received a letter—despairing, despondent, almost incoherent—from Mrs. Roosevelt. She simply couldn’t face becoming a prisoner of the White House, being forced onto the treadmill of receptions and official dinners and dedications. She wouldn’t do it. She would run away with Earl Miller, who loved her and respected her as Franklin never did. She would file suit for divorce. She…

  Louis Howe tore up the letter and went to the telephone to talk sense into Mrs. R, who in the end, of course, gave up. When FDR was nominated, she flew to Chicago with him and stood on the platform while her husband accepted the nomination and promised a “new deal for the American people.” And two months later, in the garden at Val-Kill, she stood beside her husband while Earl Miller exchanged vows with his pretty teenaged bride. Her daughter Anna and son Elliott served as attendants, and FDR, jovial and avuncular, posed for photographs with the bridal party. While the photographer was at work, Mrs. R went to the bathroom, closed the door, and gave way to wrenching sobs. When she came out, red-eyed but composed, she brushed off Marion’s question with a careless, “Why, people always cry at weddings, don’t they?”

  I know this happened because I was there, assigned to cover the wedding for the AP—coverage suggested, Bill Chapin told me, by Louis Howe, who obviously wanted to get the story out there as widely as possible. There was no follow-up story a year later, however, when the bride’s parents obtained an annulment. Their daughter, just seventeen at the time of the wedding, hadn’t asked their permi
ssion.

  But the wedding accomplished its purpose. It put Earl Miller out of Mrs. Roosevelt’s reach and put an end to the gossip about her and her handsome bodyguard.

  In September, FDR’s presidential campaign shifted into high gear, with a thirteen-thousand-mile swing around the country by train. I was one of the three AP reporters—the only woman—assigned to cover the trip. The train made fifteen or twenty whistle-stops every day, with FDR speaking from the bunting-draped rear platform of the six-car Roosevelt Special. The local mayors introduced the candidate, and the small-town bands—some of them pretty ragged—played “Happy Days Are Here Again” until everybody on the train was pretty damn sick of it.

  But those weren’t happy days, no matter how often FDR joked with the crowds, throwing back his head and laughing that great, infectious laugh, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. The Depression was biting hard into the country’s flesh and muscle and the train seemed to take us further and deeper into the people’s despair. In Michigan, we were met by a delegation of unemployed automobile workers. In Minneapolis, where food riots had broken out and stores had been looted, cardboard signs begged for food relief. And one blazing afternoon in Wichita, Kansas, I watched as a silent, sullen crowd gathered along the railroad track: grim-faced men with their hands in the pockets of grimy bib overalls; hollow-eyed women in thin cotton housedresses; scrawny kids, ragged and barefoot; all hopeless, despairing, desperate. Maybe it was my own failure of vision, but I couldn’t see how any “new deal” could help these broken people. I wondered whether FDR even noticed what the rest of us saw all too plainly. After all, he was on a train, his train, passing through on its way to another whistle-stop, to another town, to the White House. Once he got to Washington, it would be too easy to forget everything he’d seen along the way.

  But however haggard the people, the crowds were always large, and Louis Howe kept the press informed of the national polling. FDR was far ahead of Hoover, whom all the pundits had written off as a lost cause. The Roosevelt Special took us all the way to the West Coast, turned around and came back through Arizona, where Mrs. Roosevelt boarded. Under orders from Bill Chapin, I added her to my assignment—a little grudgingly. I was there to cover the candidate.

  But I was still deeply curious about his wife, and as the campaign train headed east, I found myself impressed by the easy way she dealt with people, and by her energy. FDR couldn’t get off the train, so he sent his wife out to meet and talk to people. In Nebraska, she strode swiftly across a drought-stricken cornfield as I hurried after, snagged my silk stockings on a barbed wire fence, and had to sit down to catch my breath (too many Pall Malls, I suppose) while she spoke sympathetically with the farmer about the rock-bottom price of corn. One rainy morning in Missouri, she visited a barbershop, a hospital, and a school, all before lunch. In Iowa, she ate fried chicken at a church potluck and took a big slice of chocolate cake to FDR on the train, posing for photographers. My story about that cake got a nice play on the wire.

  But energetic as the woman was, she also had a talent for catching a catnap. Bemused, I watched as, wedged between her husband and her son Jimmy in the stands at Wrigley Field, she slept soundly through Game Three of the World Series, the Yankees versus the Cubs. Babe Ruth made baseball history by calling the shot on Charlie Root’s second pitch, a curveball, for his fifth-inning homer into the centerfield bleachers. The hit brought fifty thousand screaming fans to their feet—all but FDR, who had to lock both leg braces before he could stand up, and his wife, who was still asleep. My story about Mrs. R’s unscheduled nap got a greater wire service play than any of my pieces about FDR—and got a laugh out of her, I heard later. The sports writer in me loved it, and so did Louis Howe.

  “Great story, Hick,” he said, with a gnomish grin. “Humanizes the Roosevelts. Worth a couple of thousand votes.” As a journalist, I wasn’t supposed to be in the vote-getting business, but Howe was a seasoned newspaperman himself, and I was pleased by his approval.

  Once we were back in New York, however, the story about Mrs. R’s nap got me pulled off the candidate and assigned, full time, to his wife. Bill Chapin stopped by my desk and gave me the news, with an air of apology.

  “Sorry to do this, Hick, but I can’t very well put a man on the lady, and you’re the only girl I’ve got. What’s more, your story about Mrs. R falling asleep at Wrigley Field—that was golden. I’m betting there’s more where that came from.”

  I pulled down my mouth and Bill patted my shoulder. “Cheer up, kid. It’s just from now until the election. You’ve seen the polls—FDR is primed to win in a walk. When he goes to the White House, the Washington bureau will cover her, and you’re back at Tammany.”

  “I’m billing you for those goddamned stockings,” I growled.

  I wasn’t going to let Bill Chapin see that some part of me was secretly glad to be reassigned to the candidate’s wife, even if it looked like a demotion.

  Mrs. Roosevelt wasn’t eager to have a journalist dogging her heels, and if Louis Howe hadn’t instructed her to cooperate, she might have refused. When we sat down to talk that afternoon at Democratic headquarters, I found out why.

  “You’re an important journalist, Hick. You should be assigned to the governor.” Her voice was matter-of-fact but her shoulders were hunched, the way I had seen that afternoon at Springwood. “He’s newsworthy, I’m not. Nobody will want to read your stories about me.”

  “With all due respect,” I said firmly, “you’ve got it wrong. I’ll write stories about you that people will want to read. Ergo, you will be newsworthy.” I gave her a grin. “See how that works?”

  There was a silence as she pondered. “Ah,” she said. “I see. Well, then, I suppose I shall have to do something that you’ll find interesting enough to make a story out of it.”

  “That’s the idea,” I said. “You do your job, I do mine.”

  But the most interesting thing about the woman—to me, anyway—was something I couldn’t write about, at least, not then. The day after her husband won the nomination, I had seen that she was desperately unhappy. Now that FDR was polling far ahead of Hoover and the path to the White House seemed easy, she was even unhappier, and I understood why. She was in the same situation she’d been in when I met her in 1928, except that the stakes were much higher now. She had created an identity of her own, an unconventional self she was proud of, in the gigantic shadow of her husband’s political ambitions. She was afraid of losing it. She was afraid of losing herself. She might also have been unhappy because she had lost Earl Miller, someone who had made her feel admired, desired, loved. And there was something about Washington itself—I didn’t know what, but something—that distressed her.

  In what looked to me like an effort to outrun her unhappiness, Mrs. R became a dervish of frenzied activity, rushing here, hurrying there, catching a taxi, riding a bus, taking the subway, and for the next couple of weeks, I did my level best to stay with her. I hurried after her from one place to another. I waited in the hallway while she taught her Todhunter classes or sat in the back of the room while she spoke to women’s groups in New York or Albany or Syracuse or Boston. I attended afternoon teas in the governor’s mansion, where she usually served a thick, rich chocolate cake, and I even joined the governor’s family for Sunday night supper: scrambled eggs and sausages that she stirred together in a chafing dish at the table, with cold meats for sandwiches, salad, and dessert. (The real story there was that Mrs. R didn’t know how to cook. The eggs and sausages were sent up by the kitchen, already prepared—all she did was stir them together.) There was always such a lively, intelligent discussion that somebody called those suppers “scrambled eggs with brains,” and the name stuck.

  For her weekday meals, Mrs. R spurned fancy restaurants in favor of a quick bowl of clam chowder or a BLT at the nearest soda fountain lunch counter. She liked no-frills clothes—ten-dollar off-the-rack dresses and inexpensive hats. I admit to being annoyed when another reporter wrote that her ha
ts looked as if she ran in and bought them while her bus was waiting at a stoplight. But Mrs. R laughed when Tommy showed her the clipping. Her face relaxed when she laughed, and I thought she was almost pretty. I liked her sense of humor, too, and her willingness to laugh at herself. So I wrote a story about her laughing at the story about her hats.

  My pieces about her frugal, plain-Jane choices—the cheap dresses, the budget hats, the dime-store lunches—played against FDR’s blue-blood image and got plenty of wire service attention, not just on the women’s pages, either. Meanwhile, President Hoover, always remote and inaccessible, was getting a different kind of press. In the summer, a Movietone News crew had filmed the president stiffly feeding pieces of T-bone steak to his dog. It was meant to be a down-home personality piece, but every time the newsreel was shown in a movie house, it was booed by people who hadn’t been able to afford a T-bone steak in years. And then there was the ugly Bonus Army debacle, where veterans of the Great War, camped in Washington to lobby for the early payment of their bonuses, were driven out with guns and tanks. It had been General Douglas MacArthur’s decision, but it became Hoover’s public relations nightmare. Even conservative Time magazine had to admit that Hoover—“President Reject”—was unelectable.

  But FDR’s election, now a virtual certainty, was not going to make his wife happy, and I finally thought of a way to write about it in the series of three stories scheduled for the week after the election. If Governor Roosevelt became President Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt was going to be a singularly reluctant First Lady. This storyline would command plenty of interest. It would define her, give her a unique dimension. But Louis Howe, as the Roosevelt political strategist, might feel it was too negative. I thought I ought to run it by him, so that afternoon, I dropped in at his office and pitched the idea.