Loving Eleanor

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  And so she was, First Lady of the World—still First Lady of my world, anyway. But I had to laugh at something that happened when I went to see her off to the Netherlands, where she was to meet the rest of the U.N. delegates. As we boarded her ship, we found a gang of eager reporters waiting on the deck. An eager young lady asked, “Mrs. Roosevelt, what’s the most important thing about being on your own?”

  Eleanor replied quickly—and honestly. “For the first time in my life, I can say anything I want, It’s simply wonderful to feel free.” When she heard what she’d said and realized what it meant, she added, “Maybe we’d better keep that off the record.”

  And then, at the disappointment on the reporter’s face, she reconsidered. “Really? You think it might make an interesting story? Well, then, leave it on the record. It’s true—I do feel free to say what I think. But we all have to be careful, of course.” She slid me a conspiratorial smile. “We never know who might be listening, do we?”

  Of course, we have to be careful. Some of the story—the part that goes on behind closed doors, in private places, in our hearts—will always be wordless and must be imagined.

  But the rest of the story must be told, and so I have.

  My story, her story, our story.

  Our story.

  A BIOGRAPHICAL AFTERWORD

  There’s more to Hick’s story, of course. She lived frugally at the Little House for another decade, supporting her island seclusion by working on ER’s papers and as a researcher, speechwriter, and ghostwriter for two of her political friends, Congresswomen Mary Norton and Helen Gahagan Douglas. She also worked frequently for the Democratic State Committee in New York City and commuted to Washington when her work or events demanded it. She started to write an autobiography, but gave it up when she began to fear that a publisher would want the same thing that her AP editors had wanted years before: the inside scoop on her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. She certainly couldn’t tell that story, and she felt that, without it, her own story wasn’t terribly interesting. She abandoned the effort.

  And then, at the suggestion of ER’s literary agent, Nannine Joseph, another project came along. In 1952, Hick undertook the writing of profiles of women in political life called Ladies of Courage, an inspiring account of women’s struggle for recognition in American public and political life since women gained the vote in 1920. ER lent the luster of her name to the book and Tommy typed the manuscript, but Hick spent the better part of two years on the research—including extensive interviews with her subjects—and the writing. Before she submitted the finished manuscript, she shared it with ER, who wrote: At last tonight I’ve finished reading your material [for Ladies of Courage] and it is simply swell I think. Much more interesting than I thought it could possibly be made.

  The book, which included profiles of Frances Perkins, Clare Boothe Luce, Helen Gahagan Douglas, and Oveta Culp Hobby, was published in 1954. Thanks to ER’s popularity, it received extensive newspaper attention, and Hick traveled around the country, speaking to women’s groups about the book and about the challenges women faced in political life. In recognition of her authorship, ER assigned her the royalties, which cumulatively amounted to about $4,000 (about $35,000 in 2015).

  Tommy Thompson did not live to see the publication of Ladies of Courage. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1953, the eight-year anniversary of FDR’s death. She was sixty-six years old. Hick and Tommy had always been friends, but they had drawn much closer after the White House years and Hick was bereft at her loss. ER was shattered. “When [Tommy] died,” she wrote, “I learned for the first time what being alone was like.”

  As a journalist, Hick had always been deeply interested in people who had stories, who met extraordinary challenges. In the profiles of the Ladies of Courage, Hick had found a narrative voice that enabled her to tell these stories. After that book was published, she began work on what would be three biographies for young readers in Grosset & Dunlap’s much-heralded Signature Books series: The Story of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1956), The Story of Helen Keller (1958), and The Story of Eleanor Roosevelt (1959). For Scholastic, Hick also wrote a biography of FDR, this one focusing on his early political life: The Road to the White House: FDR, The Pre-Presidential Years (1962).

  Of the four books for young readers, Hick’s biography of Helen Keller was the most successful. It was adopted by several school-affiliated book clubs, and sales were boosted even further by the Broadway launch of William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker and the release of the 1962 film of the same title, starring Patty Duke. When she was doing the research for the Keller biography, Hick became deeply interested in Keller’s teacher and went on to write a biography for older teens called The Touch of Magic: The Story of Helen Keller’s Great Teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy. The book was published by Dodd, Mead in 1961.

  Hick felt a special admiration for Macy. “No author ever finished a book with greater regret,” she wrote in her foreword. “During the months I worked on this book she became as real to me as a living person… I miss her.” I can’t help wondering if Hick saw something of herself and Eleanor in the relationship between Macy and her beloved pupil. Without her teacher and mentor, Helen Keller might have lived a life of dark and inarticulate silence. Without Hick—who encouraged the press conferences, supported her friend’s early efforts as a writer, and urged her to begin her newspaper column—would Eleanor have found her own powerful voice? Perhaps. But it’s a question that Hick might have asked herself.

  While Hick was working on the Macy biography, she struck up a professional friendship with Allen Klots, her editor at Dodd, Mead. When the book was finished, Hick proposed to Klots the project that became Eleanor Roosevelt, Reluctant First Lady, the book for which Hick is probably best known. It sketches the period of their most intense friendship, giving only a few clues to its intimacy. Finished in 1961, Reluctant First Lady was published just prior to ER’s death. Increasingly confident in her work, Hick pitched a third project to Klots: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Christmas Book, a collection of ER’s favorite Christmas writings, as well as a description of Christmas at Hyde Park and in the White House. Hick was working on that book when ER died. Published in 1963, it sold well and the royalties from that and her other projects provided Hick with something approaching a comfortable living. She was well along with a biography of labor leader Walter Reuther (also for Dodd, Mead) when her failing eyesight finally compelled her to stop, not long before her death in 1968. That project was completed by Jean Gould and published under the title Walter Reuther: Labor’s Rugged Individualist—with Hick’s name on the cover, as well as Gould’s. That title brought to nine the number of books Hick had produced in the last fifteen years of her life.

  A tenth book would eventually be published under Hick’s name: One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression, edited by Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley and published in 1981. It includes the passionate piece, “The Unsung Heroes of the Depression,” that Hick drafted in 1937 as an introduction to a projected publication of her reports to Harry Hopkins, at FERA. One Third of a Nation is a collection of those reports, as well as a biographical introduction and selections from Hick’s letters to ER. The reports, illustrated with photos of the period, provide us with the eyewitness view of a skilled journalist who listened with her heart to what people had to say—people like Cora, the woman she met on a Kentucky mountain and never forgot. Or the woman in Bakersfield, California: “It’s this thing of having babies. You’ve got no protection at all. You don’t have any money, you see, to buy anything at the drugstore. And there you are, surrounded by young ones you can’t support.” Or the Iowa woman who spent part of her husband’s first Civil Works Administration check for oranges because she hadn’t tasted an orange for three years. Hick became a part of their stories. She felt their despair and recorded it, so that those who came after would know what it was like to live through the terrible years of the Depression.

  As Hick grew ol
der, her activities were increasingly limited by severe diabetes. From the late 1940s, she suffered from diabetic retinopathy and often awakened in the morning to discover that she could not see out of either eye—a temporary but unsettling condition. Arthritis was beginning to slow her down, too. The Little House was expensive to heat in winter and often isolated by snow, and in the early 1950s, at ER’s invitation, she began spending the cold months at Val-Kill. In 1955, she moved there. The relocation proved to be a help because she was working on the book that would become The Story of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Val-Kill gave her easier access to the FDR Library and acquainted her with the library’s staff members, who quickly became her friends.

  Hick stayed at Val-Kill for nearly a year, but it was an uncomfortable time. After the solitude of the Little House, ER’s home was a noisy tumult of people, children, and dogs, some of whom were not compatible with Muffin, the placid successor to the irrepressible Mr. Choate. It was hard to find a quiet place and time to work on her book. As well, there were the uneasy currents of jealousy that often swirled around Eleanor. The Roosevelts generally accepted Hick or ignored her, but ER’s East Coast Establishment friends saw the former newspaper reporter as uncultured and uncouth. As for Hick, she treasured the particular friendship she and Eleanor had shared for a quarter of a century and resented those whom she considered latecomers and hangers-on. Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook were no longer around, but Hick had never liked or trusted Joseph Lash. And then there was David Gurewitsch, Eleanor’s doctor, traveling companion, and New York housemate, to whom ER developed a passionate attachment—and whom Hick must have viewed with great jealousy.

  In the fall of 1956, Hick left Val-Kill and moved to a small but comfortable motel cabin overlooking a little lake on the northern outskirts of Hyde Park, about three miles from Val-Kill. In 1958, when income from her growing list of books gave her more flexibility, she rented an apartment in the former Episcopal rectory on Park Place. She lived there until her death in 1968, two months after her seventy-fifth birthday. She seems not to have given clear instructions for the disposal of her ashes, and her sister Ruby did not take them. They were stored in an urn at a local funeral home for twenty years and then buried in an unmarked grave in Rhinebeck Cemetery in Rhinebeck, New York.

  But Hick was not forgotten. On the anniversary of her death in 2000, friends and admirers dedicated a dogwood tree to be planted near the grave, with a bluestone bench and a plaque: Lorena Hickok “Hick” AP Reporter, Author, Activist, and Friend of E.R.

  It appears that Hick may have begun donating materials to the FDR Library as early as 1958, although references in her own later letters suggest that she withheld the bulk of the correspondence—some thirty-five hundred letters—until after ER’s death in 1962. It is also possible that a substantial cache of letters was found at her death. It is reported that her sister Ruby burned a dozen or more, saying that they were “none of anybody’s business.” Hick’s donation to the library required that all the materials be sealed until ten years after her death. A description of the collection can be found in Rodger Streitmatter’s book, Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok (1998) and in Doris Faber’s1980 biography of Lorena Hickok.

  Faber had gone to the FDR Library to research a children’s biography of Mrs. Roosevelt. She arrived shortly after the Hickok collection was opened and was confronted by the mass of altogether unexpected—and, for Faber, highly disturbing—material. She describes her reactions in “A Personal Note” at the end of The Life of Lorena Hickok: E.R.’s Friend. Traumatized by what she read, “in something like a classic state of shock,” she attempted to per-suade archivist William Emerson to suppress the materials, or at least lock them away for another three or four decades. Failing in that, she was left to decide whether to go on with her original project or try instead to deal with the new material.

  With the enthusiastic encouragement of her editor at William Morrow and her husband (Harold Faber, a New York Times reporter and editor who knew a sensational story when he saw one), Faber decided to scrap the kids’ project and tackle the letters. She would write a biography of Lorena Hickok for adult readers, “one of the hardest challenges that any writer could face,” in Faber’s words; “the Everest of writing,” as her daughter described it. The Life of Lorena Hickok was published in 1980 to wide reviews and a great deal of newspaper coverage.

  The work Faber produced reflected her personal dismay at the intense love story she discovered in the boxes of letters on her desk in the serene reading room at the FDR Library. Faced with what seems to have been a profoundly unsettling glimpse into the erotic life of the nation’s most famous First Lady, she decided that the passionate language of the early letters simply did not mean “what it appears to mean” and did her best to reinterpret the material—and demean her subject. As Leila J. Rupp puts it, The Life of Lorena Hickok would make “fascinating material for a case study of homophobia.” Faber goes out of her way to present Hickok in an unflattering and unsympathetic light: undercutting or completely overlooking her many professional achievements, failing to provide an adequate historical or political context for her activities, and diminishing her work as a journalist and the professional writing she did after she left the DNC in 1945. As a biography, The Life of Lorena Hickok falls sadly short.

  Some of the damage has been undone. Blanche Wiesen Cook has helped to rescue Hick and ER from the closet where Faber put them. “They were two adult women, in the prime of their lives, committed to working out a relationship under very difficult circumstances,” Cook writes in her acclaimed and authoritative biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. “They knew the score. They appreciated the risks and the dangers…. They touched each other deeply, loved profoundly, and moved on.” And Rodger Streitmatter’s edited collection of some three hundred of the letters provides us with a broad look into the evolution of the relationship, from obvious physical intimacy to warm and enduring friendship. But we are still waiting for a serious, better prepared, less judgmental biographer who will take a longer, deeper, more open-minded look into Lorena Hickok’s many-faceted life and place her relationship to Eleanor Roosevelt in the context of Eleanor’s complex romantic relationships with FDR, Earl Miller, Joseph Lash, and David Gurewitsch.

  In the meantime, I offer my own interpretation of the intimate friendship of Hick and Eleanor—a fictional interpretation. As a novelist, I am privileged to live not only my own life but also the lives of my characters, in their times and places and with an intensity that sometimes takes me entirely out of my own world and into theirs. I have based my fiction on a reading of the women’s letters held in the FDR Library, on Hick’s writings about ER, and on the multitudinous sources available in books and online, some of which are listed in “Resources.”

  Because of the controversy surrounding the friendship of Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, I have chosen to fashion a narrative that stays close to the facts as we know them and to the intense emotional truths that are documented in the letters, most of which were written by Eleanor and reveal her inner life, so far as she was able to express it to Hick. The italicized quotations from Eleanor’s and Hick’s letters appear in the narrative at the same times and in the same contexts in which they appear in the ongoing relationship. In describing the women’s intimate relationship, I have used the letters as a guide to its depth, intensity, and sexual nature. Like a diary, they allow us to look into the inner lives of the writers, experiencing their anticipation and disappointments, their eagerness, their anxieties and fears—and especially, their feelings about each other.

  Both women’s letters tell us that during the first two-and-a-half to three years of their lengthy friendship, they longed to be physically intimate, to touch and kiss and hold one another, to spend as much time together as they could. Doris Faber protests that a woman of ER’s “stature” could not have physically expressed her love for Hick, and that when ER writes to her that she wishes she could “lie d
own beside you tonight and take you in my arms,” her feeling is maternal. The women’s relationship was essentially Victorian, she claims, innocent of our post-Freudian, twentieth-century sexual awareness.

  But Hick had lived with her dear Ellie for eight years (1918–1926) as what Rodger Streitmatter calls a “classic butch/femme couple.” She would go on to a five-year romantic and sexual relationship with Judge Marion Harron (1940–1945). She was sexually experienced, as even Faber has to acknowledge. And as Lillian Faderman points out in Surpassing the Love of Men, both Hick and Eleanor were “worldly, literate women” who lived in a post-Freudian world. They did not have “the luxury of innocence.” ER herself, before she met Hick, was close to two lesbian couples: she shared Val-Kill with Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, and she would go on to live for several years in a house owned by her life-long friends Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read.

  Blanche Wiesen Cook may have had the last word on the matter. She quotes Hick’s letter counting the days until they can be together: Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips…. “They wrote to each other exactly what they meant to write,” Cook says. After Freud, “A cigar may not always be a cigar, but the ‘north-east corner of your mouth against my lips’ is always the north-east corner.”

  For readers who want to know what’s “real” and what’s imagined in Loving Eleanor, I should point out several significant departures from the historical record. Hick’s first visit to Springwood and Val-Kill occurred in the spring of 1932, but I have imagined what she saw and did there. The events of the day after the November 1932 election (the trip to the Statue of Liberty and the flight with Amelia Earhart) are entirely fictional, as are several of the events of the interlude between the election and the inauguration. The bath maid’s tittle-tattle is also made up, but it reflects the gossip that went on among the backstairs gang, as Lillian Rogers Parks describes it in her tell-all White House memoir, The Roosevelts: A Family in Turmoil, in a chapter titled “Eleanor and Hicky.”