Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  When I talked to Louis about it, he seemed to think that the tempest in the gossip teapot had blown over. (Which made me wonder if it hadn’t been blown out of proportion in the first place, just to get me out of town.) He gave me a measuring look and said, “I don’t see any problem with your being around for a week or ten days at a time, Hick—now that you’re officially on the job at FERA.” He added another drift of cigarette ashes to his already ash-covered vest. “But you might want to make yourself scarce around the president, at least for now.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. Avoiding FDR would be easy. The Roosevelts’ territories had been staked out from their first week in the White House, and—according to the backstairs gang—the two might as well be on separate planets. The First Lady had screened off the hall in front of her sitting room and bedroom, turning it into an informal dining and conversation area. It was cozy with comfortable cretonne-covered sofa and chairs, a walnut Val-Kill dining table, a radio, and bowls and vases of fresh flowers. This was where Eleanor ate her breakfast, glanced through the papers (before Tommy sent them off to be clipped), held morning meetings with her staff, and relaxed over late afternoon tea or an informal supper with her friends and guests.

  The center and east end of the hall belonged to FDR. After a day in his West Wing office, he presided over evening cocktails in his study with his friends and guests. Unless he had to attend an official dinner, he usually had supper sent up on trays and ate with Missy and an advisor or two. Afterward, he and Missy worked on his stamp collection or, with family and staff, watched a movie on a screen set up in the center hall, with Missy operating the 16-mm projector that Bell and Howell had given the president. It was reported that he disliked films that were too long or too sad and that he was especially fond of Mickey Mouse cartoons and Myrna Loy. His favorite was a movie produced by media mogul William Randolph Hearst called Gabriel Over the White House, about an American president who assumes dictatorial powers to end an economic crisis. He and his friends and colleagues almost never ventured down to the First Lady’s end of the hall, and she and her friends and guests rarely joined him. I didn’t especially like his choice of movies and preferred to eat with the backstairs gang when Eleanor wasn’t available.

  Tommy filled my glass with orange juice from a pitcher on the table and handed me a plate of buttered toast. “The Boss asked me to remind you that today is Monday. Since you’re here, she would love to have you attend this morning’s press conference.” She smiled. “Your press conferences have given her a job to do, you know.”

  “I have an idea for another one.” I took a piece of toast. “I think she should write a newspaper column.”

  Tommy rolled her eyes. “Don’t suggest it, please, Hick. She’s already working eighteen-hour days. Anyway, what would she write about? Politics? FDR would never let her do that.”

  “She can write about what she does,” I said. “Not what the president does. She could call it ‘My Day.’ People will be amazed when they read about the First Lady’s doings—consequential things, not just society page stuff.”

  Before the inauguration, Eleanor had often confided to me her greatest concern: that, once in the White House, she would have nothing to do but stand in reception lines. She had obviously been mistaken. Now, some six months into her husband’s term of office, there wasn’t a single empty moment in her days. Not one.

  Her morning began with an early, hour-long horseback ride with her friend Elinor Morgenthau at Rock Creek Park. (She was still riding Dot, the mare Earl Miller had given her. The horse was stabled at Fort Meyer and saddled and driven to the park every morning.) Back at the White House by eight-thirty, she had breakfast and then met appointments all morning, with brief breaks to attack her correspondence. One morning a week, she met the women’s press corps, and one afternoon a week she had lunch with Frances Perkins, secretary of labor (and the first female cabinet member), and a few other influential women. On other days, she gave talks, visited hospitals, and met with women’s groups. When the Senate was in session, she often attended debates and hearings. She held formal teas for various groups on most afternoons, and there were official receptions and dinners in the evenings.

  Eleanor’s heart was in the right place, I knew. Or places, rather—too many of them, I thought. Loving Eleanor meant sharing her with multitudes. But when I tallied the hours she gave away to others, my jealousy was tinged with guilt. The First Lady’s causes were so important and deserving that I really couldn’t wish that she would neglect any of them. Just squeeze them a little, maybe, to make room for us.

  Because her days were crammed full, late nights were our best times together. Her sitting room was cozy, with a fire, a pot of hot chocolate, and a tray of cookies—and if Lincoln’s ghost wisped through the room, envying us our comfort, I never saw it. I read or wrote letters while she worked on her correspondence and we shared a few moments of quiet relaxation before bedtime, often not until one or two in the morning. But I could see that if we were ever to spend any significant amount of time together, it wouldn’t be at the White House, where the First Lady was on the job—as she defined it—from six in the morning to well past midnight. She was tireless. I wasn’t.

  Tommy reached for a cigarette as the uniformed maid picked up her empty plate and poured her another cup of coffee. “The idea of another project for the Boss makes me shudder,” she said. “But I have to admit, that the press conferences have been very good for her. I’m glad you came up with the idea, Hick. I don’t think she would have accepted the suggestion from anybody else. Until you came along and showed her how she could use the press, she had the feeling that they were all out to get her.”

  “They probably were,” I said, only half joking. “The press is a predatory bunch. How’s she doing? Is she less nervous than she was?”

  The First Lady’s first press conference had been held in the Red Room just two days after FDR’s inauguration—and two days before his first press conference. Steve Early had credentialed forty women from the Washington press corps, and they all showed up. Forty questioning pairs of eyes, forty notebooks, forty scribbling pencils. It must have been a daunting prospect for Eleanor. Tommy had told me that she was so nervous that her hands were trembling, her voice had gone squeaky, and she’d forgotten how she’d meant to begin.

  “She’s getting better at it,” Tommy said. She flicked her lighter to her cigarette. “She’s begun to realize how important these women are to her.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “They are important—if they’re used right.” The press conferences might be risky, but they gave the First Lady the ability to shape the way the press saw her, which in turn shaped the way she—and the Roosevelt administration—would be presented to their readers all around the country. If any of the previous first ladies had understood this, their husbands had not.

  But the Washington women’s press corps, like women’s right to vote, was a recent phenomenon, and if earlier First Ladies had dared to meet the press, the press would have been male, to a man. I shuddered to think how those fellows would have presented Mrs. Hoover, or Grace Coolidge, or Florence Harding—and especially Edith Wilson, who stood in for her husband Woodrow after he suffered a severe stroke. One editorial called Mrs. Wilson the “Presidentress” who had “promoted herself from First Lady to Acting First Man.” If she had held a press conference, they would have made hamburger out of her.

  Tommy waited until the maid had freshened my coffee and left, then lowered her voice. “The Boss is doing okay, but it’s not always easy for her. She tries to avoid controversial subjects and won’t answer anything she thinks is too political. I attend every conference and take down all the questions and answers in shorthand, so there’s no mistake about what’s said. But sometimes she says things that…” She gave a helpless little shrug. “You know.”

  “Like that unfortunate business about the inaugural ball,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  That little ruck
us had happened several weeks before the inauguration, when Eleanor had questioned the wisdom of holding an elaborate, expensive ball when so many people were going hungry. “I would think that this would be a good year to dispense with the ball,” she’d said to a reporter, who immediately rushed to her typewriter and made a headline of it. Mrs. Roosevelt Advises ‘Cancel the Ball!’

  Privately, I was on Mrs. Roosevelt’s side, but it wasn’t the thing to say in public. There had been a chorus of wounded howls—in print—from everybody who stood to profit from the ball: dress designers and dressmakers, men’s clothiers, hairdressers, florists, musicians, waiters, and especially from the Shoreham Hotel, where the ball was to be held. The loudest were the anguished wails from the society page reporters. For them, the ball was the most important story of the year, bigger even than the inauguration. The First Lady’s “dispense with the ball” smacked of “surrender the Alamo.”

  Tommy tapped her cigarette into the ashtray on the table. “She’s getting better at it, though. She’s less nervous, more sure of herself. And I think most of the newspaperwomen like her very much. They’re perfectly aware that without the press conferences, some of them would lose their jobs, so if she makes a little mistake, they don’t jump all over her. Even Steve Early has to admit that she puts the White House on the women’s pages every week. Which is something dear Missy can’t do for the president.” She gave me a mischievous glance. “See what you’ve done?”

  “Well, if I’ve helped Mrs. Roosevelt demonstrate that she can do something for her husband that his secretary can’t, I’m delighted,” I said cattily and went back to the buffet for a second helping of scrambled eggs and another of Mrs. Nesbitt’s biscuits.

  Ah, Mrs. Nesbitt. From the beginning, there had been nothing but complaints about the White House food, a litany that would only grow louder over the next twelve years. The villain of the piece was the White House housekeeper, Mrs. Henrietta Nesbitt, a small-town housewife and Hyde Park neighbor of the Roosevelts who had set herself up as a home-kitchen baker when her husband lost his job selling barrels after the Crash. Mrs. Roosevelt had been her most enthusiastic customer, and when FDR went to the White House, the First Lady invited Mrs. Nesbitt to come to Washington.

  I had to feel sorry for poor Henrietta, who had none of the management skills needed to handle a kitchen full of cooks and a housekeeping staff of more than thirty—and was an inexperienced, sadly uninspired cook, to boot. The president grumbled about her food, the Roosevelts’ sons made snide remarks about it, and cabinet members advised each other to eat before they came to dinner. In Henrietta’s defense, I have to say that the First Lady made a tough job even tougher by insisting that the menus should set an example in hard times by being simple and almost impossibly cheap, like the humble seven-and-a-half-cent-per-person luncheon she had served on not-so-humble White House china. I wasn’t there, but I read about it in Katherine Brooks’s society column in the Washington Star: deviled eggs covered thinly with tomato sauce, served hot with mashed potatoes, whole wheat bread, prune pudding, and coffee—hardly haute cuisine.

  But the First Lady and the White House cook were caught between a rock and a hard place. If they gave their guests something extra nice, somebody in the press would criticize them as extravagant. If they pinched pennies, they weren’t living up to White House culinary traditions. And whenever the press got wind of a rumor that the president had refused to eat his boiled spinach or take another mouthful of Mrs. Nesbitt’s sweetbreads, they played it to the hilt.

  I sat down and buttered the biscuit. Mrs. Nesbitt’s boiled beef might be boring, her vegetables might be mush, and I didn’t blame people for griping when chipped beef or broiled kidneys put in their second or third luncheon appearance of the week. But her biscuits were simply unbeatable.

  And on the heels of that thought came the image of Cora, the woman on the mountain. Cora, who would have been astonished by the silver chafing dishes of scrambled eggs and bacon, the crystal plate of butter, the pretty jars of sparkling jellies, jams, and marmalades, the pitcher of orange juice and pot of hot coffee, the bowl of sugar, the pitcher of cream. Who would have been thrilled to the bone by chipped beef or broiled kidneys on toast, no matter how often they appeared on her table.

  I put down my biscuit, my appetite suddenly flagging. Don’t you forget me, honey, Cora had said. Here she was, damn it, joining me for breakfast and bringing with her all the sad, sick women and men and children I’d met out there in the mountains. Pay attention, they were crying, all together, all at once. Pay attention!

  CHAPTER TEN

  “It’s a Good Thing You’re Not a Man”

  The press conference got off to a noisy start.

  The reporters—thirty-seven of them—gathered in the Green Parlor downstairs, chattering and buzzing. When the usher gave the signal, they threw decorum to the wind and raced up the grand staircase, jostling to claim the front row of straight chairs in the Monroe Room. I waited until it was nearly filled, then slipped in and found a seat in a corner. Most of the reporters knew me, of course, and there was a flurry of hello, Hick and good-to-see-you greetings that made me feel almost like one of the press corps again. Almost. I wasn’t, and I knew it—and the awareness was unnervingly painful.

  After a few moments, the light chatter hushed under the weight of the stodgy formality of the Monroe Room. The room had been used for cabinet meetings under several presidents, and the presence of women here was a departure from a wholly masculine tradition. The declaration, “Here the Treaty with Spain was signed,” was carved into the marble mantel, and an immense painting of the 1898 treaty ceremony occupied pride of place on the opposite wall. Over the mantel hung a gilt-framed portrait of Mrs. Roosevelt’s grandfather, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., looking remarkably like General Grant. A hint of cigar smoke lingered on the air like a gentlemanly ghost reluctant to leave, mixed now with the blended scents of the women’s perfumes and the music of their female voices, which seemed to me an omen of change.

  Bess Furman dashed in late and dropped breathlessly into the chair next to me. Plump and perspiring, she was wearing a navy jacket and skirt, a red blouse with pearls, silk stockings, and shiny patent pumps—a city reporter’s working clothes. She sat down and rummaged in her large navy handbag, pulling out her notebook.

  “Oh, hello, Hick.” She brushed her hair off her forehead and fanned herself with her notebook. “When did you get back from your trip? Are you going out again?”

  “Late last week,” I said. “And yes, I’m going out again, although I don’t know where yet. I have to go back to New York first, though. I’ve sublet my apartment and I need to move my stuff.”

  Since I was going to be on the road for at least the next twelve months, I could save a great deal of money by letting one of my AP friends have the Mitchell Place apartment. Prinz had been staying with another friend while I was in the coalfields, but I had located an excellent kennel for him and was anxious to see him settled where he could have room to run.

  “Mrs. R read us a few paragraphs from your report about the West Virginia situation.” Bess blew a stray strand of hair out of her eyes. “It sounded like a pretty tough slog. Especially having to see those dilapidated shanties and all the sick, malnourished people.” She shuddered. “I’m not sure I have the stomach for that kind of reporting, Hick.”

  “You’d do it if you had to, Bess,” I replied. And then I thought (but didn’t say), no, Bess, you wouldn’t. Not in those patent pumps and silk stockings, anyway. In the coalfields, style was the least of anyone’s worries. Cora and her people needed three square meals a day. The children needed shoes and winter coats. The women needed contraceptives. The men needed jobs.

  “Well, maybe I could, but I wouldn’t want to.” Bess was back in her purse again, scrabbling for a pencil. “At least, not the way you’re doing it. Mrs. R says the physical effort is exhausting.”

  She was missing the point. It wasn’t how hard it was to do the work, it w
as how painful it was to look at what I had come to see. But I couldn’t correct her. “It’s brutal,” I said.

  “And yet you’re going back for more?” Bess favored me with a bright smile. “Hick, dear, I swear to God, you are hungry for punishment.”

  Was I? I looked around at the nicely coiffed, well-dressed professional women, sitting in comfortable chairs in an ornate room in the house at the heart of the government of the most powerful nation on earth. Suddenly, I heard Cora’s voice and saw her stooped figure as clearly as if she had hobbled into the room on her bare, gnarled feet. She stood in front of me and thumped her walking stick on the floor.

  Don’t you forget me, honey. You go back where you come from and tell ’em what you seen.

  Tell them? I could tell them, and they might listen, but would they hear? Could they hear? Or would their pleasant surroundings so muffle the message that hearing was impossible?

  And then, just for a moment, I saw this world—the self-important world of the White House, the political world of the Roosevelt administration, the hurly-burly carnival of the press—through different eyes, through Cora’s eyes. I had thought that this world was real. It wasn’t. The real world was out there in the coalfields, the mountain hollows, the poverty-stricken villages along the polluted creeks. The real world was filled with hungry, cold, sick people, and I was suddenly struck, as if by a blow, by the despairing sense that—New Deal or not—nothing that went on here could possibly change the situation out there. And yet the government had to try, for to do nothing was to admit that nothing could be done, and that was even more unthinkable.

  Business-like now, Bess stuck her pencil behind her ear and opened her notebook. “Well, if somebody’s got to go out there and find out what’s happening in the hinterlands, I’m glad it’s you, Hick. You’re more experienced than the rest of us.” She waved her hand at the women in the room. “You can handle that kind of stuff without letting it get to you.”