Those who remembered Eleanor’s debut as a speaker at Nan’s 1922 fund-raiser found the difference in her self-confidence remarkable. By the end of FDR’s four years as governor she had earned a life—teaching, meeting, writing, and speaking. Even before she realized it herself, her friends had begun to note changes in her—she was less available. As FDR’s presidential campaign began to heat up, Eleanor realized that her life was going to change in ways she did not want. By the time Louis Howe and FDR had put together FDR’s first run for the presidency in 1932, however—a story that others have told many times in many places—Eleanor was a central player in a game she had mastered, making political connections for FDR wherever she went. She insisted that she was doing it only for FDR, but she loved the opportunities it gave her to do the things she wanted to do. Nevertheless, when she actually faced being First Lady, she certainly had qualms about living under the relentless scrutiny of the public. She would compensate for what she viewed as her confinement by having frequent overnight guests to the White House and by traveling a great deal in behalf of causes to make better the lives of the least, and by not paying much attention to her critics. There was never a First Lady with the energy, courage, and determination of Eleanor Roosevelt, and perhaps there never will be. She was not captive to the title, and her own personal suffering made her more sensitive to the lives of others she hoped to represent.
Marion and Nan may have believed that the transition into public life was going to be seamless for them and that the friendship would remain unchanged. They loved being part of FDR’s inner circle. When FDR and Howe made them members of the select Cuff Links gang (each initiate received a pair of gold cufflinks for having worked in FDR’s 1920 vice-presidential campaign), they knew they were consummate insiders. They hosted annual anniversary dinners for the group and celebrated FDR’s fifty-first birthday in January 1933, before his first presidential inauguration. The birthday party was held in the big room at the cottage in an extravagant affair planned by Howe with cocktail “glasses, glasses, glasses,” Marion remembered.3
During the week leading up to the 1932 Democratic Convention in Chicago, as FDR was preparing to win the nomination, Marion and Nan had been party to one of the best-kept secrets in Eleanor’s history—one Marion revealed many years after Eleanor’s death.4 Eleanor wrote a letter to Nan saying that she would not give up her personal life so that FDR could be president. Nan was to give the letter to Howe when she saw him before the convention. When Howe read the letter, he was dumbfounded. He tore it in shreds and told Nan that she was never to speak of the contents. In telling Kenneth Davis about the incident many years later, Marion reported that Eleanor had said she would marry Earl Miller, but Marion asked Davis not to use his name. He did not mention Miller when relating the incident in Invincible Summer, but he did name him in FDR: The New York Years, which was published after Marion had died. Whatever the truth of that threat, Eleanor had made clear to Marion and Nan that she was frightened at the prospect of being First Lady. They, on the other hand, gloried in the triumph of the long campaign to make FDR president. Perhaps they had not anticipated that as Eleanor changed the environment that she found inhospitable and put her own stamp on the White House, she would also change her inner circle. Perhaps Marion and Nan were willing to give up the quiet evenings by the fire at Val-Kill in exchange for evenings at the White House, near the center of political power. However, as the intimate circle of Eleanor, Marion, Nan, and Franklin changed and many other friends and associates became constant visitors, more and more Marion and Nan were on the fringes.
The differences among Eleanor and Marion and Nan widened after the Roosevelts moved to Washington, and Eleanor was swept along by her own advice to her students to learn new things and see with new eyes. The Roosevelt White House was a welcoming place to family, friends, and visitors of every kind, and when Eleanor invited them, they showed up—even strangers she had met on the street. It was just as FDR and Eleanor wanted it, like the fun-filled, family-filled White House during the Theodore Roosevelt years. Although FDR would often yearn to go home to the Hudson Valley, he also had advantages in the White House: a large staff to wait on him, a new regulation swimming pool in the basement, an operated elevator, large living quarters with a private office upstairs, and Missy LeHand, called the “gatekeeper” for controlling access to FDR, available always when he needed her. There were guest rooms for friends, some of them permanent guests (Louis Howe; Harry Hopkins, FDR’s director of New Deal relief programs and a security adviser during World War II; and Lorena Hickok); a place to watch movies and be entertained at home by invited artists (Lily Pons gave the first concert; Cornelia Otis Skinner performed a monologue); and when his friends sent him gifts of foods he loved (wild game especially), he could avoid the bland fare of Henrietta Nesbitt’s kitchen. FDR’s second-floor office with its cluttered desk was a comfortable place where Missy invited guests to sit on sofas and chairs while FDR filled their drink orders and leaned back and talked and laughed. Eleanor was sometimes included, sometimes not, and often she was out with her own friends. Or Missy could have supper brought in for her and “Eff Dee,” as she called FDR, or for a small group of close friends.5 In good weather lunch was served downstairs on the south porch for Franklin and Eleanor and guests, and picnics were held on the lawn, when the U.S. Marine Band played on special occasions.
The Roosevelt children took advantage of everything (including their parents)—and if they bridled when asked for identification when they first came to the White House, it wasn’t long before the staff recognized them, their husbands and girl friends and wives, their children, and their friends. They received favored treatment and were indulged. On New Year’s Day 1936, two of FDR’s sons studying at Harvard invited two of their professors to discuss politics and spend the night in the White House, and Eleanor reported on it in a “My Day” column. For her part, Eleanor showed her boys how to raid the icebox (and also showed Amelia Earhart, who was embarrassed to have been quoted as saying she had gone hungry staying overnight at the White House).
For the rest of their lives some of the Roosevelt grandchildren would remember inaugurations, birthdays, Christmases, and long stays of every kind in the White House. Their grandfather was president of the United States, but he still read aloud to them from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and handed out their Christmas presents. And they could look enviously at all the things he kept on his desk—a clutter of the useful (pens, clocks) and the useless (Democratic donkey and Republican elephant figures)—but they were Papa’s toys, an intriguing notion to a young child.
However, the White House cramped the style of Eleanor Roosevelt, who called it a “museum.” She had been developing toward the moment when she could exert her independence, and now it seemed about to be taken away from her. She didn’t want to be shadowed by the Secret Service, and she wanted to drive her own car, take herself up and down on the elevator, rearrange her own furniture, and come and go as she pleased without being checked in and checked out, her whereabouts recorded in a daily log. She also liked to carry her own bag and to travel anonymously. She was interested in everything, she wanted to represent those who had no representation, and she wanted to be free. Being FDR’s “eyes and ears”—as was often said about her usefulness for a man confined to a wheelchair—to get out and see how Americans were faring during the Great Depression was a built-in reason to do all those things. And those reports from his “Missus” gave FDR a way of keeping up with people and places in America and with Eleanor, and he didn’t seem to mind that she set her own schedule. In fact, he welcomed not having her always insisting upon her causes. After 1935, friends who saw her less could read in her “My Day” column what she was up to. She invited guests to the White House to be taken care of by the staff whether she was in residence or not. In the White House or on the road, she often had Hick as her closest companion. Unlike Marion and Nan, Hick did not court favor with the president, which was perhaps one of her attr
actions for Eleanor.
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Mrs. Roosevelt told her followers what she thought of living in the White House. For readers of her 7 January 1936 “My Day” column, she explained,
There is, however, one consolation to any one who lives in the public eye, namely, that while it may be most difficult to keep the world from knowing where you dine and what you eat and what you wear, so much interest is focused on these somewhat unimportant things, that you are really left completely free to live your own inner life as you wish. And, thank God, few people are so poor that they do not have an inner life which feeds the real springs of thought and action. So if I may offer a thought in consolation to others who for a time have to live in a “gold-fish bowl,” it is: “Don’t worry because people know all that you do, for the really important things about anyone is what they are and what they think and feel and the more you live in a ‘gold-fish bowl,’ the less people really know about you!”
Not everything had changed, however, for Eleanor, moving into the White House had been akin in one way to moving into the New York governor’s mansion: Marion and Nan showed up to help settle her in. After the 1933 presidential inauguration, Marion returned to Todhunter and Nan stayed another week. A story in the Washington newspaper reported that Mrs. Roosevelt had been seen wandering through the inaugural grandstand (it had rained) looking for Miss Dickerman and Miss Cook to make sure they had good seats. Although Eleanor had many guests to look after that day, she had invited all the faculty and students from Todhunter as well, even though she was not still their teacher.
Nan helped Eleanor dismantle the Hoover White House and decided what had to go and what Eleanor needed: a long bed for FDR, which she would design and have made in the Val-Kill shop, as well as a bed for Eleanor and other pieces of Val-Kill furniture. She helped to hang some of the hundreds of framed photographs that Eleanor had in her bedroom and sitting room, to position her desk and table where Eleanor and Tommy could work, and to make a comfortable place before the fire to read or listen to the radio (there were seven fireplaces in the White House). And she left an uncluttered view out the window to the Washington Monument, where a blinking red light at night was a beacon of comfort for Eleanor. Marion’s and Nan’s names regularly turn up in official White House records as overnight houseguests, as do many others. They did not all know or like one another, but they didn’t have to. Eleanor was an impresario when it came to managing her guests.
The White House, in fact, became the Roosevelts’ grand hotel, with every bed filled, visitors standing in line for receptions, FDR’s children and grandchildren vying for his attention, and the White House staff trying to adjust to the changes. Eleanor met with them all—the reception crowds and the intimate dinners. As her interests and responsibilities changed, she saw less and less of Marion and Nan. She attended many public occasions, and Hick was consuming most of her private time. Over the next year they even talked of sharing a house, perhaps a reflection of Eleanor having learned how to live at Stone Cottage with Marion and Nan. And not long after the Roosevelts moved into the White House Hick gave up her journalism career to be close to Eleanor when she realized that she had lost her objectivity in reporting on the First Lady. On Eleanor’s recommendation, she was given a federal job traveling across the country to report to Harry Hopkins on conditions during the Great Depression.
Although Eleanor invited Hick to Val-Kill, she seldom went and then only when Marion and Nan were not there. Hick was very possessive, and so were Marion and Nan. They vied for Eleanor’s time and attention, and Hick was winning. Hick is missing in most photographs, one indication that at least some family members, perhaps, did not want her in the picture. Her friendship with Eleanor is not mentioned in any of Marion’s and Nan’s letters during the period. The written evidence that Eleanor continued her separate friendships with the three women, especially during FDR’s first term, however, is in the official White House record, which shows how closely their visits overlapped.
When Eleanor reached the White House, Hick advised her about meeting the media and the public: she proposed that the First Lady host her own ladies-only press conferences, and Eleanor’s letters to her about her activities became the basis for her “My Day” columns. The column became enormously popular and, not insignificantly, earned Eleanor some money. Eleanor rapidly developed political allies—and critics—among FDR’s associates, and she spent so many nights away from the White House that it became a joke with reporters. She and Tommy, who had worked with her since 1922, traveled together an estimated 40,000 miles annually during FDR’s first two terms. On the rare times when Eleanor traveled without Tommy, she often wrote. After years of building trust, Eleanor once advised Tommy, “Remember also that if you think anyone should be hired or fired you have my entire confidence, and I want you to act as you think wise.”6 Tommy was indispensable to Eleanor: “The person who makes life possible for me.”7 Together they answered the letters that poured in daily when Mrs. Roosevelt invited Americans to “write to me.” She carried her letter bags everywhere, dictating on trains and planes, still at work at her desk until the early hours of the morning. In addition to her official correspondence—and she wanted every letter answered, if not by her then by someone to whom she forwarded it—she kept up a huge correspondence with her family and friends. Her letters to Marion and Nan became hastily dictated business notes, such as those that arranged for Marion to bring Todhunter students and faculty to the White House or ordered Val-Kill items to be made and sent as wedding gifts. Tommy knew that Esther and Elizabeth, Tommy’s favorites, made no demands and offered their estate at Salt Meadow in Westport, Connecticut, as a sanctuary; Marion and Nan wanted Eleanor to themselves.
Stone Cottage changed in accord with Eleanor’s new life. Marion and Nan had to adapt to remain part of FDR’s inner circle in Washington politics. Eleanor saw how useful Nan could be in planning picnics at Val-Kill for FDR’s political cronies. And Nan, for her part, found hosting picnics for the president and his friends heady, but exhausting. Now, when FDR and Eleanor came to Hyde Park from Washington, they brought crowds of visitors, many of them important presidential allies. Nan and Marion took care of many of the arrangements. Nan made a small portable grill to put by Franklin’s chair so that he could cook meats the way he liked them (rare). She also became expert at preparing meals for large crowds. They counted on “Roosevelt weather”—the sunshine that often accompanied the president’s visits and enabled them to have picnics. Nan planned the menus, ordered the food, and cooked. Eleanor admired the way Nan was able to do it all on a small budget.
Nan deserves special recognition for the role she played in organizing presidential picnics at Val-Kill for FDR and his friends, and Eleanor depended upon her to do it. When reporters wanted to know about the president’s parties, they interviewed Nan, who relished the attention. She enjoyed describing the favorite dishes: pitchers of iced tea served with lemon and fresh mint, and fresh tomato juice; hot dogs (boiled or steamed the day before so they were ready to be broiled), hamburgers (mixed with a little salt pork), and steaks cooked on an outdoor grill; baked beans (soaked overnight); and, in early spring and fall, fish chowder. Her desserts included summer watermelon, ice cream, and Nelly Johannesen’s cake with strawberries or chocolate sauce. “Miss Cook’s cottage kitchen is her special pride,” a local reporter noted, making no mention of either Marion or Eleanor, which must have been bracing to Nan.8 Marion was also a well-prepared hostess—when Winston Churchill asked for whiskey, she was able to produce a bottle.
While Marion and Nan were proud to host such important occasions, they also became weary from Eleanor taking for granted that she could invite as many others as she chose. There was a price to be paid for being close to Eleanor and FDR: Marion and Nan increasingly were marginalized by very large, noisy, often jealous crowds of those with real power to influence the president and those who were just angling for it, often through Eleanor. Some of Eleanor’s friends thought she wa
s very discerning about people; others thought she could never spot a phony. Increasingly, Tommy ran interference for Mrs. R, whom she regarded as “just about the biggest person in the world. Anything I can do to help her—no matter what—justifies my existence.”9 At first Tommy liked Marion and Nan well enough, until they began to treat her as an obstacle to getting to Eleanor. Jealousies exploded. The dynamics of the friendship were changing. The friendship’s base on the Val-Kill was wobbling, and harsh words lay in store for the “Three Graces.”
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FDR’s election as president of the United States changed the private lives of everyone around him. Some were able to make the personal sacrifices that friendship with the Roosevelts required; some were not. Until his death in 1936 Louis Howe sacrificed his own personal life for theirs, able to befriend both FDR and Eleanor. With his death, each lost a wise adviser and a personal link that had brought them together. Missy’s health suffered under the constancy of her long days and nights with FDR, and in 1941 she had a series of strokes that left her unable to work and deeply depressed. She died in July 1944—it was Eleanor, not Franklin, who visited her during her last terrible months; FDR apparently could not face it. Tommy Thompson gave up any personal life she may have wanted in order to serve Eleanor: her marriage to Frank Scheider ended in divorce in 1938 on grounds of voluntary separation (she was rarely home), and she never married her friend Henry Osthagen, though he was a frequent visitor at Val-Kill. Marion and Nan, on the other hand, were not prepared to sacrifice their own happiness.
The Three Graces of Val-Kill Page 13