Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  And a few days later, finally settled into her new home, she wrote, My pictures are nearly all up and I have you in my sitting room where I can look at you most of my waking hours! I can’t kiss you so I kiss your picture good-night and good-morning. Don’t laugh!

  Laugh? Now, really. Of course, I could not laugh. I cried easily and often, missing her, wanting to be together. Her letters and our telephone calls were an oasis, but the nights without her were a black well of loneliness. I was glad for the company of friends. Eva Le Gallienne’s production of The Cherry Orchard had just opened at the New Amsterdam, with Josephine Hutchinson playing Anya, and I was invited to the glittering party on opening night. Jean Dixon, who had been in Hollywood to star in The Kiss Before the Mirror, was back in the city and helped to take my mind off the separation.

  And there was work, of course. The Mitchell case was coming to trial, and Tammany Hall was in the news with another scandal of sex and corruption. I was back on my beat.

  Toward the end of March, Bess Furman invited me to be her guest at a dinner given at the Hotel Willard by the Women’s National Press Club. I took the train down and stayed at the White House. Eleanor had arranged for me to have the room across the hall from her whenever I was in town. But the house was full of guests that week. It gave her an excuse to have the Val-Kill daybed in her suite made up for me (which inspired another ripple of gossip among the backstairs gang). I had a handsome new dress for the Press Club dinner, a long black silk that swirled around my ankles and threatened to trip me as I went down the stairs. Eleanor enjoyed giving me a lesson in how to walk in it. Tommy and Mabel said I looked “stunning.” Looking at herself in the mirror, the hired girl was amazed.

  Perhaps it was the hired girl who made such an immediate connection with Mabel Haley, Mrs. R’s personal maid. Mabel had worked for the Roosevelts when they lived on R Street years before, and she already knew the family secrets—including the Lucy Mercer affair. Mabel, who was the soul of discretion, did everything for Mrs. R: maintained her wardrobe, made her bed, packed and unpacked, and even shopped and ran errands. Over the next several months, while I was still a regular guest in the White House, she also did my mending and personal laundry.

  Mabel introduced me to the other staff who worked on the second floor: Mrs. Maggie Rogers, the “First Maid,” who had served every president since Taft; Mrs. Rogers’s daughter Little Lillian, who did the sewing and (a polio victim) walked with a crutch under one arm and quickly became a favorite of FDR’s; Lizzie McDuffie, a household maid whose husband Irvin was one of FDR’s two full-time valets, on duty around the clock; Bluette Pannell, who kept everybody moving in the right direction; and Angelina Walton, the bath maid, whose tongue wagged at both ends, as Mabel said disapprovingly. Angelina, no angel, would cause me—and the First Lady—a great deal of grief in the months ahead.

  The maids wore white uniforms with black shoes for daytime, and for evening, black taffeta uniforms with white collar and cuffs and an embroidered organdy apron. Most of the staff lived out, although a few (the McDuffies and Bluette) had sleeping rooms on the third floor, where Missy LeHand also had a small apartment. Everyone seemed to be loyal to their new master and mistress and I never picked up any special animosities, except for their understandable grumbling about the number of guests the Roosevelts entertained and the extra work created by the frequent comings and goings of the ever-expanding Roosevelt clan, which included in-laws, grandchildren, and even the children’s nurses.

  But it wasn’t just family. Throughout the first term, Mrs. R’s old friends—Nan and Marion, Elizabeth and Esther—came often, and at least once a year, Marion would bring a dozen Todhunter students. During FDR’s second term, Mrs. Roosevelt would become involved with various student and political groups and impulsively bring people home with her for overnights or a weekend. Later, in the war years, heads of state, visiting royalty, and their entourages often stayed for two weeks or a month at a time. The White House often had the look of a busy hotel, with arriving guests waiting with their luggage in the hall while the departing guests were still packing and the maids were hurrying to ready the rooms, which had to be swept and dusted, and the linens and towels replaced.

  And like a fine hotel, each guest room was provided with a vase of fresh flowers every day. The flowers were exchanged for a bowl of fresh fruit in the evening, when the maids turned down the beds. Ah, yes, those were the days—and for me that first year, when I was Eleanor’s guest at the White House, happy days. Very happy days.

  But back in New York, I had come smack up against the biggest dilemma of my professional life. I had realized that I couldn’t be the First Lady’s first friend and a responsible AP staff reporter. Now, it was becoming apparent to Bill Chapin.

  If I had cared less deeply for Eleanor, I might have simply avoided the issue, as I tried to do for as long as I could. But it got harder and harder. On one occasion, my pay was docked because I withheld a story about an awkward gaffe of hers that was caught—and reported—by a UP journalist. At other times, Bill would ask me for specific information about what she planned to do, where she was going, and with whom. I would reply that my official coverage of the First Lady had ended and remind him that Bess Furman was covering her out of the Washington bureau. I couldn’t refuse to cover her New York activities, however, and as it turned out, the First Lady spent about half of her time in New York that spring. She had given up teaching, but she continued to meet with various women’s groups, work at her Democratic office, and spend most of the evenings with me. Under pressure from Bill, I filed brief, factual pieces about her daytime activities in the city—our evenings were off the record, of course.

  I was also frequently quizzed about the continuing marital misadventures of the Roosevelts’ daughter Anna and son Elliot, both of whom were on their way to the divorce courts. Divorces in prominent families were headline news in those days, and divorce in the First Family would produce hundreds of column inches in newspapers all over the country. But I refused to spy for the AP. As far as I was concerned, the whole family was off the record.

  It was an increasingly uncomfortable situation, and I knew that sooner or later, I would have to make a choice. I could give up my friendship with Mrs. R, which seemed utterly impossible, or I could give up my job.

  But how could I do that? I was at the top of the AP pyramid and I’d worked damned hard to get there. My byline, which was my connection with my colleagues and readers, was vital to me. My job was my professional identity. Apart from Eleanor, it was all I had, it was all I was, all I had ever wanted to be. That was what made it such an important sacrifice. If I left the AP, it would be a declaration to Eleanor: I choose to give up my profession for you, my work, my job, my identity. I am taking a pledge, making a statement, asserting a truth. My old life is over, my new life is ahead. I’ll accept whatever that life brings, wherever it takes me, as long as we are together.

  So it was settled, and I began to look for other work. I was hoping, of course, to find work that I could be proud of, where I could feel I was making some sort of difference in the world. I’m a realist, however, and I understood the situation. I needed a salary that would let me keep the Mitchell Place apartment, and I had to be based in Washington or New York so that Eleanor and I could be together. But the nation was in the fourth year of the worst depression in its history. Reporters were being let go everywhere, and positions for forty-year-old women were as scarce as hen’s teeth. Another reporting job, assuming I could find one, would put me in the same uncomfortable box vis-à-vis the Roosevelts. Editors everywhere are alike. What they want, all they want, is the story. I would still be asked to provide the inside dope on what was going on with Mrs. R, with her children, even with the president. “Off the record” would not be an acceptable answer.

  Eleanor appreciated my dilemma and tried to be comforting, but she didn’t understand all the issues. “Well, if you don’t feel comfortable with another reporting job,” she said, “ho
w about writing for the magazines? You’re such a good writer, my dear—I’m sure they’d snap up anything you sent them.”

  I could try, yes. But for the most part, my writing had always been fact-based and crisply reportorial. I’m not very lyrical and I couldn’t create the breezy, soft-edged style that most of the magazines wanted. As for fiction—well, I’d tried that, when Ellie and I were living in San Francisco. That episode taught me that I was a journalist, not a novelist or a short story writer, and that my writing had to be anchored to real people, to the real world.

  “Well, then, write about me,” the First Lady said, quite reasonably. But I couldn’t do that, for the same reason I couldn’t write about her for the AP. I wouldn’t trade on her friendship. So I muddled along, trying to find other options, until what had been merely awkward and uncomfortable suddenly became exceedingly difficult.

  I learned that I had become persona non grata at the White House. Eleanor and I had been found out, and there was hell to pay.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Left Hook

  It was Angelina Walton, the bath maid, who let the cat out of the bag. At least, that’s what Louis Howe told me.

  From the beginning, I’d had concerns. I was engaged in an intimate friendship with a very visible lady who—when her heart was touched—was not always discreet. She was charmingly warm and impulsive and she often said (and wrote) the first thing that came to her mind, without thinking that someone might be listening, or might pick up one of her letters. She could be shrewd and politically astute in one moment, and in the next, almost child-like in her expressions of affection and in her need for touch: a tender caress, fond fingers to the cheek, a brushing kiss.

  I’m no psychologist, but I understood the reasons for Eleanor’s almost desperate need to be touched. Her mother had rarely embraced her when she was a child, her father was mostly unavailable, and her Grandmother Hall, with whom she lived until she was sent to school, was an austere, undemonstrative Victorian. In her letters to her husband, Mrs. R called him “Dearest Honey,” but the two of them rarely touched. Her children never hugged her; in fact, the boys (as many young men do) made a show of keeping their mother at arm’s length. Earl Miller would gladly return her playful touch when it was offered, but he was out of reach now, and while she and Tommy were devoted, they came together over work. Their relationship was brisk and businesslike. Eleanor was starved for touch, physically isolated from almost everyone on earth.

  But not from me. Eleanor often said that what she loved about me was my ability to feel deeply and passionately. Touch—compassionate, caring, trusting touch—was simply the physical expression of that. She could feel deeply too, when she could temporarily stop being a Roosevelt by blood and by marriage and become just a woman with ordinary human needs: the need to be held, to be comforted, to be loved. She once told me that as a child, she felt most useful when her mother had a headache and she was allowed to stroke her forehead. And there are a great many instances in her letters to me when she lovingly recalls or looks forward to a touch, an embrace, to moments when we could lie close together. Touching was what she wanted, what she needed, and I wanted and needed it, too, very much.

  But there were dangers, and if she wasn’t mindful of them, I had to be, for both of us.

  My first concern, of course, was for the president. Not long after the election, I asked Eleanor how much he knew, or imagined, about our friendship. She didn’t answer my question. Instead, she let me know, in that casually dismissive way of hers, that when it came to us, she didn’t care what he thought.

  “Whatever is between us is ours, Hick, dear, not his. Franklin understands that I have my own life to lead, and my own friends, just as he has his.” She didn’t mention Missy, but I knew she was thinking of her. “I don’t ask for his approval,” she added, with a toss of her head, “and he doesn’t ask for mine.”

  With that encouragement, naive or not, I tried to set aside my concerns. This had been easier in the four months between the election and the inauguration, when both Eleanor and I were in New York and FDR was someplace else—usually accompanied by Missy—for days or even weeks at a time. But after the inauguration, he and Eleanor were living in the same house, the White House. When I visited, I was his guest as well as hers. And he was the president, for Pete’s sake. Of America. Of the most powerful nation in the world. Of course I was apprehensive.

  So I insisted on discretion, especially where the servants were concerned. When I was in the house, I kept to myself, in the small bedroom Mrs. R had assigned to me. Her suite was across the hall, so it was easy to visit one another whenever we wished. A quick glance down the hall would tell us that the coast was clear.

  But the young bath maid, Angelina, apparently witnessed a careless embrace or overheard a indiscreet conversation and talked about it to her cousin Minnie, who was Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s upstairs maid. Minnie didn’t waste a moment in telling the story to Mrs. Longworth (whom Bess Furman had called Princess Alice of Malice). Mrs. Longworth, an Oyster Bay Roosevelt, was delighted to whisper it to Eleanor’s Oyster Bay cousin Corinne, who passed it along to her son Joseph Alsop, a bright young journalist working for the New York Herald Tribune (the Republican rival of the New York Times), who ran into Louis Howe at a New York press corps dinner and took him aside for a private word.

  “I’m not being malicious, you understand,” Joe told Louis, although, of course, he was. (Joe would later write a bitter book about his cousin Franklin’s campaign to pack the Supreme Court.) “Neither my mother nor Cousin Alice think there’s a shred of truth in it. The very idea of dear Eleanor—” He giggled nervously. “Well, it’s just preposterous. But if it’s being whispered among the servants, God only knows who else is talking. I thought you should know.”

  “Thank you,” Louis said. “I appreciate it.” Good political operative that he was, he recounted the incident to the president at their next staff meeting.

  And then Louis recounted it to me, several weekends after the inauguration, when I was staying at the White House. That Saturday had been warm and rainy. Mrs. Roosevelt had gone riding in Rock Creek Park with Elinor Morgenthau, then attended a luncheon at the Mayflower and after that, a meeting of Democratic women. When she returned, she had brought me an armful of white cherry blossoms, now in a vase on the little mahogany writing desk in my room, where I was working. I was penciling edits on Mrs. R’s first-draft chapters for a book that would be titled It’s Up to the Women. It was quite a subversive book, I thought, for all its homely examples.

  I had helped her with the other two books she was working on that spring—a collection of her father’s letters and a little book for children called When You Grow Up to Vote. Mrs. R wasn’t yet the skilled writer she would become in later years. But she had a clear idea about what she wanted to say, she was passionate, and she was willing to use the Roosevelt name to push her passions. She also saw her writing as a potential source of independent income in the future, and I knew that with a little help, she was going to do very well as a writer.

  There was a tap on the door, and when I called out “Come in,” I looked up to see that it was Louis. Over the past few weeks, we had shared train rides to and from New York and I had occasionally bumped into him in the White House. It was hard to be friends with Louis, but I thought we were almost there.

  Now, he was holding two scotches, and he handed one to me. Then he lit a cigarette, kicked off his shoes, and lay down on my bed. Sipping on his scotch, he launched into the story Joe Alsop had told him in New York—the tale Angelina had told to her cousin, who told it to Princess Alice of Malice, who told it to Corinne, who told it to Joe. And which he had that afternoon relayed to FDR.

  According to Louis, the president heard it in silence, but his first remark was heavy with sarcasm: “Well, I’d say our Joe doesn’t have much room to talk.” Alsop made no secret of his sexual preferences. Even Alice Longworth had been heard to remark that “dear Joe” was “qu
eer as a plaid rabbit.”

  “What did the president say next?” I sat back in my chair, knowing I didn’t want to hear the answer to that question.

  Louis gave me a straight look. “He said, ‘You know, once Corinne and Alice sink their teeth into a juicy secret, it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or false. It will be all over town. For the record, I have no wish to forbid any friendship my missus might want to have with Lorena Hickok or anybody else. What she does behind closed doors is her own business. And I can’t tell Hick what to do, either. I’m just the president, not a dictator. Not yet, anyway.’”

  “That’s comforting,” I said.

  Louis turned his glass in his fingers. “You may remember the Earl Miller affair.”

  I lit a cigarette, then got up and opened the window. My Pall Malls were nothing compared to the foulness of Louis’s Sweet Caporals. I stood for a moment, looking out the window. In the rainy twilight, people hunched under umbrellas were hurrying along the sidewalk, and a bus was letting off passengers at the corner of Pennsylvania and Seventeenth, with a belch of purple exhaust smoke.

  “I remember.” I turned. “The marriage, the Hyde Park property, the job.”

  Louis nodded. “The president has the same worries about you and Eleanor that he had about Eleanor and Earl—attempted blackmail, by some third party. But in your case, he’s more concerned about this thing getting into the press, since you are who you are.” Leaving that ambiguous assertion hanging in the air between us, he lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one he’d been smoking. Ashes drifted down from his cigarette onto my coverlet.

  I came back to my chair and my scotch. “I doubt that’s an issue,” I said, with greater conviction than I felt. “The press won’t—”

  Louis interrupted. “The responsible press won’t be direct, but they’ll suggest. ‘The First Lady’s First Friend,’ that sort of thing. They’ll leave it to people to take the hint. The tabloids, though, will milk the story for all it’s worth.” He squinted at me through the smoke. “The president knows that. And you do, too.”