Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  As it happened, I knew just who to ask for advice: my old friend Mark Sainsbury, who had worked out of the New York AP office when I was there and who was now covering the Italian-Ethiopian conflict for the wire service. Mark knew my work and offered to help me get credentialed.

  “It’s true that all the world’s a stage,” he told me that spring, “and we’re all just goddamned bit players. But this particular stage has a lot more action than most, and there’s plenty of room for walk-ons. You’d love it, Hick. And you’d be good at it. Very good.”

  In the beginning, Eleanor hadn’t liked the idea, but when the Spanish conflict became more heated, she wrote, I think the war idea is a good one, and offered to speak to Roy Howard, one of the owners of the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate.

  “Of course,” I told her. “Please do.” And I began to think seriously about getting back into the business as a war correspondent.

  But before that could happen, something else did—something beyond my control. I had just left on another investigative assignment in the Midwest when I found myself suddenly slammed flat, barely able to summon the energy to get dressed. When I got to a doctor, I was disheartened to hear that the diabetes I had been living with for the past decade was going to require not just diet control, but insulin. Not the kind of thing I could pack in a suitcase and take to war-torn Spain. I was disconsolate, but in the end I had to accept it. Diabetes was going to limit my options.

  So I would finish out the year for FERA and then look into a possibility that Tommy had suggested, a job on the World’s Fair publicity staff. That appealed to me because I could work and live in New York. And the World’s Fair was one of the more exciting things going on at the time, with its “I Have Seen the Future” theme and its portrayal of science as the bridge between the past doleful decade and an exciting tomorrow.

  But in the meantime, something else happened. Or rather, someone.

  Her name was Alicent Holt, and she had been my favorite teacher at Battle Creek High School, twenty-five years earlier. I was working in Michigan for FERA in the spring of 1936, and when I heard that Miss Holt was recuperating from surgery in a hospital in Grand Rapids, I dropped in to see her. Her delighted, open-arm welcome quite took me aback. She remembered my school-girl nickname, Rena—short for Lorena—and she saw “her” Rena as having created an impressively successful professional life. Seeing Rena through her eyes, I could be a little impressed as well, which lifted my spirits and (I confess) made me regard her with a greater interest.

  From my teenaged perspective, Miss Holt had been a sophisticated older woman, and I had been silently, secretly smitten by her intelligence and experience. But, in fact, she was only five years older than I, with a fragile, delicate prettiness and quiet confidence that age only underscored. Alix (as she soon began signing her letters to me) had never married and was still teaching English. When I sent her white roses on her birthday a couple of months after seeing her in Grand Rapids, she was thrilled. It was, she said, the first time she had ever been remembered in such a tender way.

  Looking back, I think now that tenderness was the mooring of our friendship, which gave me what I most needed in those uncertain months—and what Alix needed, too. For in the lovely weekends and longer holidays that we spent together, we were not quite ourselves, or rather, I should say, we were somewhat more. Alix was more adventuresome and funnier and more flirtatious than Alicent. And Rena—Carissima, as I soon became in her letters—was more tender and observant, less eager to take offense, less argumentative than I. Alix and Carissima took care of one another, each with an attentive awareness of the other’s needs. Alix would write: We will do all we can for each other, and be happy in this good friendship of ours… Dear, I love you a very great deal, and need you and your love more than that!

  There it was again, loving and needing. It felt very good to know that Alix needed me, for Eleanor needed me less. When we first came together, I had been the one—the only one—who bolstered her, supported her, made her feel strong and competent, admired and even adored. Now, there were others around her who could satisfy almost all those needs. And I didn’t have to share Alix, which was a boon. When we set aside time to spend together, we made each other the center of attention, not letting anything or anyone else intervene—a relief to me, after the infinite distractions that pursued Eleanor.

  But we both knew, without saying so, that this friendship had its limitations and that it might not last long. While Alix was well read, she had little experience of the world outside her Midwestern classroom. Beyond books and music—and our relationship—we shared only a few common interests. I could almost see the end of our affair in its beginning, and she understood. I suspect I shall love you, she wrote with a wry understanding, as long as you do me, at least, and perhaps a little bit longer.

  That was the summer of the 1936 presidential campaign, and I was traveling in the Midwest for FERA. Remembering the California debacle, I didn’t even try to arrange a vacation with Eleanor, who would be constantly on the telephone, writing letters, or working on her daily “My Day” column, for which she was now earning $1,000 a month. Instead, Alix and I spent a week at a resort on the shore of Lake Superior. It was exactly what I needed, as I wrote to Eleanor, rubbing it in just a little: “So quiet. So very, very restful…”

  Eleanor’s response to my friendship with Alix was interesting. While I was in Minnesota, she wrote me wistfully, I miss you, dear, and often wish I were Alix. I did, too, but I refused to tell her so. When I couldn’t accept her last-minute invitation for a weekend in Chicago because Alix and I had already planned to drive up-country, she replied with asperity, Are you taking the absent treatment because it helps? And when I skipped writing for several days, she sent me a snappish note: I shall be glad to get some letters from you tonight! I’m not accustomed to being so long without news and I don’t like it. That one, I thought, sounded more like the First Lady than Eleanor.

  But while there might be someone else in my life, loving Eleanor was still at the center of it. Our daily letters continued to be a comfort to me, and to her as well. The campaign that ramped up in the summer and fall of 1936 was much nastier than the 1932 campaign, and our friendship became a refuge for her. We were together for a week at Val-Kill at the end of August—Nan and Marion were gone—but the cottage was no longer the relaxing retreat it had once been for her. These days, she never seemed to stop working. Tommy had come to Val-Kill with her so the two of them could manage her correspondence and her column. Hours we might have spent reading and walking through the woods vanished into her work.

  And there was the vexed issue of her fraying relationship with Nan Cook and Marion Dickerman. The furniture factory had never been a paying concern, and the three women finally closed the business. Eleanor took over the large workshop behind the cottage and renovated it into a home for herself, with an apartment for Tommy and plenty of space for guests. The next year, there would be an irrevocable break that would shatter their fifteen-year friendship. Nan and Marion would keep the cottage for a while, living uncomfortably on the fringe of the Roosevelt activities, then sell it to Eleanor and move to Connecticut.

  Even more calamitously, Louis Howe was dead. He had been sidelined by illness during the last two years of FDR’s first term and died in April. If he had been in charge of the 1936 campaign, the First Lady would have played an active role. But her outspokenness had made her the target of a vicious press, and the president’s new advisers kept her under wraps. The loudest criticisms had come from Southern newspapers after the White House garden party she had hosted for students of the National Industrial School, all girls, all black. Even friendly newspapers, like the New York Times, wrote that she was “both an asset and a liability” to the campaign. And a Republican campaign button declared, “We don’t want Eleanor, either!”

  As a result, her role in the campaign was reduced to standing behind the president, a smile pasted across her face. To me, she wrote, H
ow I hate being a show, adding with a wry self-approval, but I’m doing it so nicely. In her memoir, This Is My Story, she remarked, “It is as though you lived two lives, one of your own and the other which belonged to the circumstances that surround you.” To a reporter who asked about her future plans, she said bleakly, “My dear, I don’t know. I go where the president goes.”

  The president went back to the White House, riding on a landslide of 62 percent of the popular vote. Eleanor would be in Washington for another four years. Shortly after, FDR celebrated by sailing to Samoa and Hawaii on the USS Indianapolis, while Madam and I enjoyed the vacation we had missed in the summer. We spent several very quiet days together at the White House, then drove, alone, to Arthurdale. We stopped on the way back to visit friends in Virginia and had only a few minor skirmishes with the press. For me, it was a wonderful time. The erotic passions of my obsession with Madam had ebbed. I was finding it easier now to love Eleanor, and to include the First Lady in that love.

  A week after the election, I was interviewed by Grover Whalen, the chairman of the 1939 World’s Fair planning committee. When he offered me a publicist’s job at $5,200 a year, I took it. But I wouldn’t start until early in 1937, so I spent the two intervening months on a book project.

  Harry Hopkins and Mrs. R had both encouraged me to organize my FERA reports into a book about the Depression. Eleanor’s literary agent, George Bye, thought it was a “grand idea” and encouraged me to get started on it. Staying at the White House, I settled down to several weeks of writing and reading, not just my reports to Harry, but my letters to Eleanor, which also contained a great many details about the places I’d been and the things I had seen.

  Ah, there they are again, the letters. She had kept them all, and I stumbled onto a small packet of the earliest ones, written during the four months between the 1932 election and her move to the White House. Reading them made me weep for what we had shared, and even though the passion may have diminished (even the hottest, brightest blaze burns itself out, sooner or later), I knew that love still endured. Dear, I wrote to her, whatever may have happened since—whatever may happen in the future—I was certainly happy those days, much happier, I believe than many people ever are in all their lives. You gave me that, and I’m deeply grateful… I love you—now and always.

  Aside from what the letters revealed about the course of our love affair, they also contained a great deal of important information about the lives of two energetic women, each engaged in important work during one of the most difficult periods in America’s history. But I never wrote the book about the Depression. George Bye shook his head when he read the sample manuscript. “It’s too depressing,” he said. “It’ll never sell.” Perhaps he was right—or perhaps not. If I had been smart, I would have given the manuscript to a couple of other agents for a look. But I had a demanding new job and very little time to write anything of my own.

  There would come a time when Americans would be too ironic about themselves to take a World’s Fair seriously. But at the end of the Thirties, people turned to the Fair to lift them out of their personal depressions. For many, it was a cheering landmark in an otherwise bleak decade. It was for me, too. While I wasn’t exactly challenged by public relations work and the office politics were often tiresome, I was glad to be relieved of the constant traveling and, of course, grateful for the paycheck.

  And I loved being back in New York. I was working in the Empire State Building, where the World’s Fair Corporation had its temporary offices, and then later, in the new administration building at Flushing Meadows. There, my office had a view of the twelve-hundred-acre site, where the spire of the Trylon and the enormous globe of the Perisphere seemed to fill the sky. And on my desk were all the astonishments the Fair would offer when it opened in the spring of 1939.

  There would be fluorescent lights, nylon stockings, and artificially generated bolts of lightning. There would be a twelve-foot-high electric shaver, electronic milking machines, and robots with movable fingers and their own intentions. In one pavilion, an aproned “Mrs. Drudge” would plod through her kitchen chores the old-fashioned way, while “Mrs. Modern” (wearing a revealing red cocktail dress and a stylish perm) would fry an egg in thirty seconds in her revolutionary microwave oven and breeze through the kitchen chores with her amazing Westinghouse electric dishwasher. In the same pavilion, a strange new semicircular sofa would transform the Living Room of Tomorrow into a home theater, so the American family could watch the greatest miracle of all, the RCA television set.

  Everybody who left the Fair would wear an “I Have Seen the Future” button and believe that they had been afforded a dazzling glimpse of the world that was to come. Back home in their world, things weren’t all that good yet—some would even find it difficult to come up with the seventy-five-cent entrance fee. But the material promises of the Fair would give them the hope that things would be better and brighter someday, and that hope might help them endure the unhappiness that clouded their lives today. I might sometimes feel that the Fair’s promises were trivial and even false, and that electric dishwashers and sofas would not guarantee a better world. But I was paid to do a job, and I did it as well as I could.

  In the meantime, something every bit as wonderful and amazing as the World’s Fair had happened for me, a surprising gift of that otherwise disastrous California trip. After leaving Eleanor in Portland, I had driven back east, stopping at the Arrowhead D and spending a few days getting better acquainted with Bill and Ella Dana. A month or two after I began working at the Fair, they telephoned me. They had left the ranch and were back home at the family estate on the Atlantic side of Long Island, near the village of Mastic. Would I come for the weekend? Of course I would.

  The huge Dana estate—called Moss Lots, on the Forge River estuary, along Poospatuck Creek—was only two hours by car from the city. Built by Bill’s grandfather in the 1890s, the sprawling house was reached by a lane that wound through dense pine and coastal oak forest, then opened onto a sloping seaside meadow and a heart-stopping view of the great, gray Atlantic. Bill had inherited the estate and the Nevada ranch from his wealthy publisher father, along with the Financial Chronicle, a well-known Wall Street journal. But he preferred boats, horses, and dogs to a publisher’s desk and rarely went into the city. Ella was lovely, generous, and impulsive. From her parents, she had inherited the neighboring Floyd estate and joked that Bill had married the girl next door.

  The three of us got along famously. They invited me for a weekend, and then another and another, and before I quite understood what was happening, Ella had offered to rent me a house—the Little House—on the Floyd estate. Small only by comparison to the Danas’ baronial mansion, it was surrounded by own three secluded acres. The living area was filled with sunshine, the pine-walled kitchen was large and convenient, and the dining room ceiling was beamed with dark oak. There was an upstairs deck, two screened porches, three brick fireplaces, four gabled bedrooms, and a library.

  A library! with built-in bookshelves, polished pine floors, and its very own fireplace. I loved it. The house would be furnished, Ella said (she had lots of furniture in her attic), and newly painted (she loved to decorate, and this house would be a special treat for her). Clarence Ross, their handyman and caretaker, lived nearby with Annie, his wife. Ella would have him do a little landscaping, mow the grass, and tidy up the garden—if only I would agree to come and live there on weekends.

  I tried to refuse. The Little House—furnished, painted, and landscaped—was a dream, so much more wonderful than anything the hired girl and I could have imagined for ourselves. But Ella wouldn’t take no for an answer. The place desperately needed to be lived in, she said, but she wanted to rent it to someone who would appreciate the seclusion. There was no telephone, which made it even more appealing to me. It would be a perfect weekend retreat. It would give me the peace and quiet I needed as a refuge from the city and the stress of the work at the World’s Fair.

  Because
we were friends, Ella was asking only thirty-five dollars a month, half what I was paying for Mitchell Place and much less than she would get if she advertised the place. But I had taken a pay cut to work at the Fair and I wasn’t sure I could swing it alone. The rent would be much more manageable if I could share it with someone. And since the Little House was certainly large enough for two, sharing it would also be quite practical. As it happened, I knew exactly who to ask. Howard Haycraft, whom I had known since my days with the Associated Press.

  A fellow Minnesotan and a dozen years my junior, Howard was like a younger brother. He worked as an editor at the Wilson publishing company and in his spare time was writing a book called Murder for Pleasure. (It would be published in 1941 and hailed, as time went on, as one of the very best histories of the mystery genre.) He and his girlfriend, Molly, and I had dinner together at least once a week and the two of us—Howard and I—often spent Sunday afternoons listening to Mahler and Wagner recordings. The previous summer, he and Molly and I had shared a week at a cottage at Oak Beach.

  Howard and I went out to the Little House for a weekend in March. He and Bill went fishing; I helped Ella hang new drapes and cook the fish the guys brought home. Howard liked the place just as much as I did, and before we went back to the city, we had agreed to share the Little House. It would be my personal paradise for the next eighteen years.

  But still and always in those months, there was Eleanor. Our letters continued, four or five, even six a week. We saw one another whenever she was in New York and could break free of the infinite succession of things—her endless list of places to go, people to see, causes to support. “Eleanor Everywhere,” some wag called her, and the name stuck. One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons of the time shows two miners, shoveling coal in a mine shaft. One looks up and says, “For gosh sakes, here comes Mrs. Roosevelt!” Another cartoon showed her on a magic carpet, her typewriter on her lap, flying around a spinning globe. Her stamina seemed boundless, her energies had become the stuff of legend. Even Tommy—who looked older and more frazzled every time I saw her—confessed that she simply couldn’t keep up with “the Boss.” Loving Eleanor came with a price tag, and Tommy (whose husband would divorce her the next year on grounds of “voluntary separation”) was paying a heavy cost.