Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  I was about to reply that experience wasn’t much help, out there in the hinterlands, and that Cora and the mountain people were getting to me in a big way. But she lowered her voice, leaned closer, and changed the subject.

  “I heard something totally screwball a little while ago, Hick, and I think maybe you ought to know about it. A couple of months ago, a maid—Angelina, her name is—left the White House and went to work as a custodial shift supervisor over at the State Department. I know it sounds crazy, but—”

  I stopped her. “You don’t want to believe everything you hear. I never do.”

  “I don’t believe it. But some people do.” Bess chuckled nervously, but she wasn’t backing off. “Angelina is refusing to talk, to me or anybody else. But Cissy Patterson told me—in the strictest confidence—that Alice Longworth has been saying that you and Eleanor…” She frowned, biting her lip.

  I tried to conceal the rush of anxiety I felt. Since Louis Howe hadn’t objected to my returning to the White House, I had thought that the gossip—if there was any—had been safely squelched. But here it was again, rearing its ugly head like a poisonous snake that refused to die. Angelina had probably been told that her job depended on her silence. Bess Furman had too much journalistic integrity to spread idle gossip about Mrs. Roosevelt. And Cissy Patterson, the editor of the Washington Times-Herald, was the First Lady’s friend and longtime admirer. All three of them could be counted on, for different reasons.

  But if Bess and Cissy had heard the story, chances were good that other reporters had heard it, too. I glanced furtively around the room, feeling sharply paranoid. Several of the women here wrote for conservative newspapers and were critical of Mrs. Roosevelt on issues like women in the workplace and birth control. If they heard the story, they wouldn’t be able to resist using it. Not in print, surely—they would be too discreet for that. But they would use it. The question was how, and when. And how much damage it would do to the First Lady.

  Bess saw my distress and put her hand on my arm. “Please don’t think I’m suggesting that any of this is true,” she said in a low, fierce whisper. “Everybody knows that Alice Longworth hates Franklin and Eleanor and will say the most outrageous things just to cause trouble for them. In fact, since the story comes from Princess Alice, I’m sure that people discount it as one of her malicious little fictions.”

  I thought swiftly. It was true that Mrs. Longworth was so outrageously anti-FDR that what she said about Mrs. FDR was likely not to be believed. Her upcoming memoir, Crowded Hours, was said to be a notorious tell-all that sniped at all her friends, sparing none. She probably wasn’t in the best repute herself these days. Maybe the damage wasn’t so—

  At that moment, the door was flung open. Mrs. Roosevelt, with Tommy at her heels, rushed in, and a muffled gasp rippled around the room. Eleanor cut a striking figure in her tailored riding jacket, trim breeches, and polished boots. I’d bet my next month’s paycheck that she was the very first woman to have entered this august room in breeches—and under the darkly accusatory gaze of her Roosevelt grandfather, at that. It was an emancipation declaration, and I could only applaud it.

  But that wasn’t what had made everyone gasp. The right sleeve of the First Lady’s jacket was ripped from wrist to elbow, the right side of her face was scraped and bruised, her dark tie was askew, and her hair had come loose from her white bandeau.

  “So sorry to be late, ladies,” she said. “My mare had an untoward encounter with a fence, and I stayed to make sure her leg was patched up properly.” She raised her hand with a smile. “But please don’t worry. Dot is just fine, I assure you. She’s already back in her stable, enjoying a bucket of oats and looking forward to a nap.”

  Margaret Hart rolled her eyes. Margaret was a society reporter for the Washington Star, and I could guess how this little incident would play in her column. The First Lady had such disrespect for the press that she kept them waiting while she catered to her horse. Had such disdain for her position that she wore torn riding clothes to a press conference in the White House. It was the equivalent of hanging the Adams undies in the East Room. All the more reason, I thought, for Eleanor to have her own newspaper column—as a counterweight to the influence of columnists who would interpret her activities according to their own political inclinations. Press conferences were good as far as they went, but she needed to make her own voice heard.

  “But what about you, Mrs. Roosevelt?” someone else asked anxiously. “Are you all right? Was it much of a fall?”

  “Oh, I’m quite indestructible,” Eleanor said cheerfully. “I have tumbled off more horses than I can count. And you don’t need to mention this trivial affair. Let’s make it off the record, shall we?”

  There was a disappointed murmur, and she looked around the room for a moment, reconsidering. “Really? You think it might make an interesting story? Well, then, ask Tommy this afternoon and she’ll give you a couple of sentences you can use. I’m sure we can come up with something that doesn’t make me look like a complete nincompoop.”

  Amid general laughter, she looked around and spotted me in the corner. “Oh, there you are, Hick. Ladies, please welcome Miss Lorena Hickok back from her reporting assignment for Mr. Hopkins. It was Miss Hickok who introduced me to the frightful conditions in the coal mining areas. I’m very grateful, and I hope we’ll soon be able to do something about the appalling situation there.”

  Paranoia reached up and grabbed me by the throat. After what Bess had just told me, I felt like hiding under my chair. But a smattering of applause was echoing around the room and there was nothing for me to do but stand, offer a quick smile, and sit down as fast as I could.

  Mrs. Roosevelt nodded at me again and said briskly, “Well, then, ladies, are we ready? There are several things I want to tell you about this morning.”

  She didn’t start with a recital of what she had for breakfast, but she did go quickly over the upcoming week’s social calendar, which included a visit from the Canadian prime minister, a delegation from Mexico, and a tea in honor of Dame Rachel Crowdy of the League of Nations. After that, she went on to talk—in quite a persuasive way, I thought—about the Bear Mountain forest work camp for women that was a part of the new Civilian Conservation Corps program. Camp Tera (derisively called a “she-she-she” camp by its male critics) was designed to help jobless, homeless single women become more employable. There was already plenty of backlash from those who argued that real jobs, if there were any, belonged to the men. The women belonged at home.

  As I watched and listened, I felt a rush of admiration for Eleanor. There were some two million women looking for jobs across the country. If Camp Tera was successful, it could help. And the women in this room were the ones who could help get the story out, the real story of women who needed work, needed training, needed a new start. The reporters were scribbling fiercely in their notebooks and when Mrs. Roosevelt was finished, they raised their hands and began peppering her with questions. I could think of several questions, too, but I held my tongue. It was their press conference and hers, not mine. They would go back to their city rooms and write their stories and see their bylines—some of them, anyway—in newspapers across the country.

  And for several painful moments, I envied them, every single one of them. I had been the top female wire service reporter in the country, with a standing byline and tens of thousands of daily readers. I’d been a member of an important team, one of an influential group of journalists. And who was I now? An anonymous government field reporter, charged with the disagreeable task of looking at—and writing about—some of the ugliest Depression-era hellholes in the country. No byline, no acknowledgment, and readers I could count on the fingers of one hand.

  But then Eleanor looked out over the heads of the women reporters and caught my eye. She smiled with that special softening of her mouth that I knew and loved, and I reminded myself that I hadn’t given up my position as an AP front-page reporter to do Harry Hopkins’s dirty work
. I had given it up for her. She was what mattered to me now.

  And then I thought of Cora, and all the other sad, stranded people I had met in the past two months. Don’t you forget me, honey. Cora mattered, too. Her story—their stories—had to be told.

  Pay attention.

  I didn’t tell Eleanor what Bess Furman had told me—she would just have smiled and advised me not to worry. Like her cousin Alice, she was fundamentally indifferent to what other people thought. But unlike Alice, it wasn’t because she was arrogant or felt superior to others or wanted to flaunt social conventions. She was simply guided by her own moral compass. In her heart, Eleanor knew that she was doing what was right, which made her impervious to criticism.

  Nevertheless, I thought it prudent to cut my Washington stay short. I took the train to New York and began the job of putting my things in storage so the apartment could be sublet. The next day, Eleanor came up to the city and invited me—and Prinz, too—to stay with her while I was finishing up at Mitchell Place. The Sixty-Fifth Street house was rented and she was borrowing (and would later rent) a pleasant third-floor walk-up from Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read in the brownstone they owned on East Eleventh, a block east of Fifth Avenue. Madam called it her “hiding house,” away from reporters, the Secret Service, and her mother-in-law. A hiding house, I told her, was exactly what we needed. I enjoyed cooking in the well-equipped kitchen, and we spent evenings with Esther and Elizabeth, or at the theater or the opera.

  “When I’m in New York,” she said once, “I always feel that I’m an unofficial person leading a quiet life.” She wasn’t exactly anonymous, but New Yorkers are blasé about celebrities. And I was completely anonymous. Nobody ever gave me a second look, which was exactly the way I liked it.

  Being with Eleanor in New York had another important payoff, for it gave us a chance to talk, away from the White House, about the daily newspaper column I was urging her to do. We discussed it with Esther and Elizabeth over tea one afternoon, in Eleanor’s apartment. She had already put up dozens of the framed photographs that helped her make any place a home, as well as a couple of paintings I brought from my now-sublet apartment.

  “But I’m already doing the press conferences,” Eleanor protested, pouring Esther a cup of tea. She’d brought the silver tea service from Sixty-Fifth Street—the same one I remembered from that long-ago day in 1928, when we first met. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “The press conferences are good as far as they go,” Elizabeth replied. “But you’re always at the mercy of the way the reporters write your story. And you know for a fact that they don’t always tell it the way you’d like.”

  “Exactly,” I passed the plate of rugelach that I’d bought at the deli down the street—a favorite that was hard to find in Washington. “With a column, you will tell your story, Eleanor. You’ll be in control of the way people see you and your ideas.” I slid a glance at her. She was nodding.

  “You don’t have to do it right away,” Esther said. “People are just getting used to the press conferences.”

  “But certainly in the next year,” I said, “before all the hullabaloo of the 1936 presidential campaign. We don’t want people to see it as just another political thing.”

  “Do you think FDR will run?” Elizabeth asked Eleanor.

  “How should I know?” Eleanor gave a wry chuckle. “I’m only his wife. I’m always the last to know anything.” She turned to me. “The idea is a good one, Hick. But a daily column? What in the world would I write about?”

  “You’d write about what you’re doing, that’s what. You’re a woman who has her own interests, earns an independent income, and raises her own voice on issues she believes in.” I grinned. “You won’t have any problem in filling the space.”

  “I’m not sure that Franklin will like the idea,” she said slowly. “And Steve Early—”

  “Steve Early is a PR man,” I said. “He’ll see the advantages. And so will the president.”

  “I think you should do it, Eleanor,” Elizabeth said.

  “Do it,” Esther echoed emphatically. “You’ll be educating women—and men, too—to things they need to think about.”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ll help you write a few sample columns. We’ll show them to Steve and the president and get their approval. Then we can submit them to a syndicate. I think United Feature will jump at them.” I added something I knew would entice her. “And they’ll pay well.”

  She cocked her head. “How much, do you think?”

  “A couple of hundred a week,” I said. “Depending on the number of newspapers that subscribe.”

  With Elizabeth and Esther behind the idea, she agreed. “I like the thought of having more control over the way people see and hear me,” she said. “And educating women on important issues.”

  Years later, when “My Day” would appear in as many as ninety newspapers and reach tens of thousands of readers every day, we would remember the conversation and smile about her initial reluctance. And I had plenty of reason to view her column with not a little irony. “My Day” helped to create Eleanor the personage, turning her into the woman the whole world loved.

  In early September, I set out across New England on my second field inspection for Harry Hopkins. This time, though, I had a car. For my travels through coal country, I’d had to depend on guides and drivers to take me where I needed to go. An automobile would give me more flexibility and allow me to make unexpected appearances—and as every investigative reporter knows, there’s a certain advantage to catching people by surprise. That was proving to be especially true in the work I did for FERA, where too many people had things to hide.

  My little car wasn’t brand new, but she was the first one I’d ever owned and I thought she was simply splendid. She was a little blue Chevy two-door roadster, undeniably female, and when Mrs. R and I went together to pick her up, we decided to call her Bluette, after my favorite upstairs maid at the White House. I developed a great fondness for that little Chevy. She had good tires, a sound motor, and even a radio. Her top leaked when it rained and her heater wasn’t worth a plugged nickel. But Bluette and I would be fine travel companions for thousands of miles, and I loved the freedom she gave me.

  The second trip was different from the first. In the worn-out coalfields of West Virginia and Kentucky, the human pain was inescapable. It lay like an open wound across the landscape. The placid farms and villages of New England had a prosperous look, but the serene surface concealed a sense of angry betrayal and despairing loss. In New York and Massachusetts, the price of milk had plunged and dairy farmers were forced to slaughter their herds. In Vermont and New Hampshire, the timber industry had failed. In Maine, the fisheries were in deep trouble, and the shipyards—once the largest employer in most coastal towns—were idle. Throughout the Northeast, people were desperately needy, but out of pride, they hid the depths of their need. The farms and shops and factories and houses might be clean and neat, but every door opened into a world of hidden hurt.

  Back in New York City, the scale of the challenge was simply breathtaking, a tsunami of despairing poverty that threatened to sweep the entire metropolis away. One city block might house some two hundred families on relief, recent immigrants who couldn’t speak a word of English as well as lawyers and bankers and stockbrokers who had been in the highest income brackets and were now lucky to have a fifth-floor walk-up. I visited one woman who was living with three small children in a single room not much bigger than Eleanor’s White House bathroom. I found her trying to heat milk by burning newspapers under a pan. The gas in her building had been turned off and when she’d tried to use a borrowed electric grill, she’d blown the fuses. The landlord refused to have them replaced, so she had only candles for light.

  It was hard, hard, hard. My work took me out among the neediest people, and all day long, I met families—upper-, middle-, and working-class families—who had no food, no shelter, and no hope. In many areas, the Depression had de
stroyed the old comfortable class distinctions. In some ways, I thought, the poor had it easier, for they had long ago learned to cope. The upper- and middle-class families, who remembered what it was like to have more than enough of everything, now had to scrape by on next to nothing.

  Need was everywhere, everywhere, and the more I looked, the more I saw. It was now impossible for me to simply collect and consolidate details, to objectively witness, to write the day’s reports and move on. I couldn’t just go into a town or a neighborhood or a city block, get the story, and get out. By now, I had become part of the story. I spent hours every day trying to get federal relief to those who needed it most and hours every night pleading with FERA for more money, more food and blankets, more compassion. I was always glad to hear that Eleanor had handed one of my reports to FDR. It gave me hope—a thin thread of hope—to hold on to.

  For her part, Eleanor spent those autumn months trying to get houses built for the people who had been selected to settle Arthurdale, but flimsy construction created problems that would plague the project for years. She was worried about the Jewish refugees who were fleeing the German Nazis, but she couldn’t move her husband or his administration to offer help. And she was trying to get a recalcitrant Congress to clean up Washington’s festering back alleys where the mostly black residents were charged exorbitant rents to live in Dickensian squalor—a problem that even her powerful Uncle Teddy had been powerless to solve. But she was putting her heart into it—into creating Arthurdale, persuading FDR on the Jewish issue, cleaning up Washington’s squalid alleys.

  Two women, each with her own mission. Or in the First Lady’s case, missions, plural, none of them easily solved.

  Which would, in the long term, be the reef on which the two of us would founder.