15: DRIFTING APART AND A TRAGIC TALK
I am glad to have been honest at last.—Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor’s decision to withdraw from Val-Kill Industries in May 1936 had caused a major disruption in the friends’ relationship and ended the continuation of the business. She and her family and friends had accounted for many of the purchases, and she was responsible for most of the marketing. Her orders, her receptions at the Roosevelt house in New York on East 65th Street to show off the furniture, her appearances at department store sales, and her name on brochures and in news stories carried the enterprise. But Marion and Nan had reason to resent the fact that news reporters gave credit for the business to Eleanor Roosevelt. Nan bore the stress of running the business, and with her Democratic Party work and travel back and forth to Arthurdale, she was worn out. Val-Kill Industries had been a point of great pride for the women; now it was a problem to be dealt with, although Eleanor avoided keeping Nan and Marion up-to-date about her changing priorities.
Eleanor handled the change badly, publicly announcing the closing in a one-page press release: “Miss Nancy Cook, President of Val-Kill, who has conducted the shop since its founding, finds the various crafts projects have grown to such an extent that she can no longer give them her personal attention.”1 Otto Berge would take over the machinery for his own shop, and Nelly Johannesen, the weaving. Eleanor and Nan were interested in trying to help the people who had worked for them start their own businesses and gave them equipment to make that possible. Marion and Nan knew that Eleanor’s interest had waned and that problems with the shop had increased: there were fewer orders and less respect for Nan’s authority in Eleanor’s absence. But Eleanor’s announcement was nevertheless a shock. Listening to Marion talk about it, historian Kenneth Davis gave it his own interpretation: “The dry, matter-of-fact words told nothing of the heartache this meant to Nancy Cook, who had invented this enterprise and for whom it had been the center, the essence of creative self-expression.”2
In the summer of 1936, as Eleanor took steps to close down the shop the following year, she also began to step back from her commitment to Todhunter. Tensions mounted between her and Marion and Nan. Friends who become business partners often find that their friendship suffers, but apparently the three women had not anticipated any problems. “When it became necessary for us to give up the Val-Kill Industries,” Marion said, “Eleanor took over the shop and made it a home of her own. This was understood and accepted for she wished to entertain more than had been possible at the cottage. Ownership at first did not become a vital point.”3 Yet it seemed they could no longer agree on anything. They disagreed about how to divide up what they had so happily owned jointly, including a school fund into which they had put profits. Franklin was invited to weigh in, and he apparently reassured each of the women that she was right (a notable FDR characteristic). Marion explained years later, “See, our arrangement was with Franklin when he gave us the land, that it belonged to the three of us.”
Eleanor and Tommy were staying in the renovated house next door when Tommy wrote Eleanor’s daughter, Anna, that Marion and Nan, deeply unhappy with the loss of their closeness to Eleanor, had been rude to her. Perhaps they did not say so, but they had lost her not just to new friends but to a huge American audience: in 1938 Time magazine had named Eleanor Roosevelt the greatest living American woman. In addition to the separation of their households, Nan had lost the furniture factory and Marion had lost Eleanor’s partnership at Todhunter. Life on the Val-Kill had begun in tenderness, and Eleanor had evolved in that supportive environment; now she was ready to declare her personal independence. In describing Eleanor’s refusal to meet with her to talk things over, Marion said, “She could be very hard, and sometimes cruel.”4 When Eleanor had refused to accept Val-Kill Industries picture frames that she thought were faulty, Nan said she was unkind. What had happened to the “Three Graces” who had loved one another for more than fifteen years?
Eleanor became more attentive to the needs of her grown children and her grandchildren, and their needs began to define Val-Kill—the pool with a diving board, a large fieldstone fireplace for outdoor cooking, the lawns, the swing set and seesaw for the grandchildren, who adored their grandmother. They liked to swim, they enjoyed the picnics and afternoon teas on the lawn, and they sat and listened while Grandmère read to them from Kipling’s Just So Stories. The Roosevelts—as the Kennedys would be a generation later—were a large, active, and boisterous lot, and the grandchildren got along well together. The granddaughters thought of Marion and Nan as affectionate “great-aunts.” Eleanor’s granddaughter Nina remembers that Grandmère always had a varied group of friends. “Val-Kill was a place of complete acceptance.”5 (Eleanor’s sons and grandsons cultivated Franklin’s attention but were not as admiring of Eleanor’s friends as her daughter Anna and her granddaughters were.) Nina helps account for the feeling both family and friends had: “My mother said you always felt that you were the most important person in the world to Eleanor Roosevelt.”6 Marion and Nan had felt that way for a long time, but after a decade of having Eleanor much to themselves, they felt pushed out.
Eleanor’s big family now had the run of the place. Grandchildren trampled on Nan’s gardens, and Marion’s dog, Dean, bit visitors. The three women disagreed about keeping the leaves raked and paying the bills. The divine peace was like a balloon floating farther and farther away, until one day Marion and Nan looked up and it was gone.
A tragic disagreement among the three friends came to a head over the summer of 1938. On 28 June Marion left Nan behind in the cottage to spend the better part of the summer as one of a nine-member American presidential commission sent to study industrial relations in Britain and Sweden. Eleanor celebrated Marion’s appointment by sending flowers and a check to her cabin. Tommy commented that Marion’s trip abroad “leaves Nan high and dry and very lonesome and forlorn looking.”7 While Marion was away, the delicate balance in the three women’s relationship was shattered during a heart-to-heart talk in the cottage between Eleanor and Nan. Nan was lonely and unprotected by Marion. Eleanor was not a vindictive person, and yet something transpired in that conversation that hurt her so badly that she struck back.
Marion recounted in an interview more than thirty years later that when she returned from Europe on 18 August 1938, Nan met her at the dock in near hysterics, her eyes red from weeping. Marion was stunned by the way Nan looked. Biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook believes that Nan had been drinking to assuage her loneliness. If Nan told Marion the cause of her tears, Marion did not report it in her interview with Kenneth Davis. All Nan was able to say at the time was that she and Eleanor “had a tragic talk during which things were said which never should have been said.”8 In an exchange of letters (retained by both women in their papers) we learn from Eleanor what it was.
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For some context: Eleanor had spent most of the summer of 1938 at Hyde Park. Earlier in the year she had confessed to Lorena Hickok that she was “pulling myself back in all my contacts now.”9 Hick knew what that felt like: after the first intense years, Eleanor had changed the terms of their relationship as well, finally admitting that she no longer wanted an exclusive relationship with Hick. Although Eleanor always tried to keep her nearby, she had added many other friends to her circle, especially young people. Among the most important of these was thirty-year-old liberal activist Joseph Lash, who had introduced her to the American Youth Congress (AYC).
In August 1938 the AYC was meeting with the World Congress at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, and some of the delegates came early to Val-Kill to talk with Mrs. Roosevelt. Eleanor was so enthusiastic about meeting with them that she had given up her chance to join FDR in Canada. The prospect of seeing some of the seven hundred young people from foreign countries whose advocacy for peace she believed was the most imperative need in the world excited her tremendously. The AYC was not an interest that Eleanor shared with Marion and Nan. In fact, Marion did not l
ike the group at all, and she thought the young people merely flattered Eleanor. Moreover, she thought Eleanor should have been offended by their rude behavior.
Earl Miller, constant in his attentions and always available when Eleanor needed him, was sometimes at Val-Kill, too. After long days of hearing the AYC presentations at Vassar, Eleanor returned in the evening to spend time with Earl, whom Marion tolerated at best because they were old friends and he seemed to make Eleanor happy. The twelve-year age difference between the two did not seem to matter to either of them. Eleanor rushed from the students at Vassar home to her cottage to see Earl.
At about this time Eleanor wrote Hick that things were not going happily on the Val-Kill. Nan seemed forlorn and complained that she had not seen enough of her. Life had gotten too complicated. Eleanor wanted to simplify her relationships. She explained in an August letter to her daughter, Anna:
I’ve been a bit upset over Nan and her attitude here and after I got back [from visiting Hick on Long Island] a little thing precipitated a scene; so today I went over and had a calm talk explaining why my feeling had changed toward them both and that we must have a business like arrangement. I added that we could have a friendly, agreeable relationship but my old trust and respect was gone and could not be recovered and I thought they probably felt the same way and were quite certainly as justified as I was. I told her to tell Marion of our talk and now I await the latter’s return on the 18th. . . . I am glad to have been honest at last.10
This letter to Anna raises an important question: why was Eleanor’s old trust and respect in Marion and Nan gone? Although Eleanor eventually explained to Marion what she had found offensive in her conversation with Nan that August evening before Marion’s return, she never said what had led up to her change of heart. She told Anna that Nan’s “attitude” was causing problems at Val-Kill. Eleanor had always defended Nan’s management of the Democratic Women’s office when others complained, but perhaps now workers in the Val-Kill shop were complaining that they found her hard to get along with—she required that they follow her specific directions and fill out time sheets, and she made them redo work when she found it inferior. The workmen had begun to have their own pride in the shop. Eleanor recognized that her many guests were an intrusion on Marion and Nan’s life, but she ignored the complications, an ingrained habit in the Roosevelt household.
Tommy reported to Anna and to Esther and Elizabeth that Nan sometimes refused to speak. By that time Eleanor had made an apartment for Tommy in her house, and Tommy had become her closest companion—as much friend as secretary. They worked long hours, traveled together, and lived under the same roof. (Even when Tommy had her own apartment in Washington, she spent most of her time in the White House.) For her part, Tommy was willing to do anything for Mrs. R. Tommy was tireless, witty, candid, undemanding, and totally loyal. At various times she wrote to Esther and Elizabeth, with whom she felt a special closeness, wishing that Mrs. R would not travel so much and that she would invite fewer guests home and be less generous to those who asked for favors, but Tommy was just letting off steam when life got so complicated. Mrs. R could do whatever suited her needs, and Tommy would back her up.
Perhaps Nan’s “attitude” was her jealousy, her possessiveness? But loss of trust and respect? It is impossible to know the answer to that question. If Eleanor was looking for reasons to change her living arrangement at Val-Kill, she found them.
If what Eleanor described to Anna as a “calm talk” was what left Nan in tears, Eleanor had badly misjudged Nan’s response at the time. Months later Eleanor wrote a series of letters to Marion that laid out her grievances. The long typed letters were detailed, stern, and litigious. They reveal a different side of Eleanor, a woman relentlessly arguing in her own defense. She did not flinch from saying harsh things—a dramatic demonstration of how far she had come from the days of submitting to her mother-in-law. It had taken a long time for Eleanor to recognize that she no longer trusted Marion and Nan, but when she did, she said so in no uncertain terms. It didn’t matter what they or other friends might say about her. She now stood up for herself. During her White House years, when critics wrote vicious things about her, she was mostly successful in ignoring them. As she once said to Lorena Hickok when gossips talked about them, “I care so little what ‘they’ say.”11 During the Val-Kill years, put to the test when she felt insulted by friends, Eleanor had become a tough and determined woman.
This imperfect interregnum lasted from 1936 to 1938, a time when Marion and Nan lived a few hundred yards from Eleanor, and although Eleanor continued to invite them to family occasions and Nan continued to be in charge of picnics, they were wary of setting off a new round of disagreements—whether over raking the leaves, or leashing the dogs, or paying the bills. Anger and hurt were so mixed up in each of them that making peace seemed to require more energy than anyone had left to give. These were years in which a dark cloud settled over the paradise that had been Val-Kill, and nothing was ever going to be the same.
16: AN EXCHANGE OF LETTERS
I am unable to live a life based on an illusion.—Eleanor Roosevelt
The summer of 1938 lay like a stone in the hearts of Eleanor, Marion, and Nan, and what had been times of pleasure on the banks of the Val-Kill became awkward moments of avoiding one another. Tommy and Eleanor returned to Washington in the fall, and Eleanor threw herself into a round of meetings and travel, but she could no longer ignore what was bothering her. One weekend in October when she and Tommy had escaped the White House to spend a few days in her apartment in the Greenwich Village brownstone owned by Esther and Elizabeth, she took to her bed. Tommy was so upset that she called Esther and Elizabeth to tell them that Eleanor had “turned her face to the wall” and would not speak. She had descended into one of her black moods. Even Franklin was so concerned that he was making no other appointments, waiting to hear that Eleanor was well again. Esther said that Tommy’s call had driven them to “despair.”1 Esther and Elizabeth had seen Eleanor in one of her dark moods before, but this was unexpected. In a few days Eleanor appeared at their apartment to explain her behavior. Years later, Esther reported what Eleanor had said: “I know it is your dinner time and I have guests waiting, but there is something I must tell you. I know you think I have been very ill. I have not. You know I have always been aware that people anxious to gain my interest were really hoping thereby for a link with Franklin. I have known this but there is one person of whom this did not seem to me to be true. Don’t ask how I could make such a fundamental error. I simply did. I have recovered from my disappointment. That, after all, is based on my own weakness. . . . I simply had to let you know that all is now well. I am unable to lead a life based on an illusion.”2 Eleanor had always been able to talk to Esther and Elizabeth, who were good listeners, intelligent and stable women, and utterly devoted to her. “I am overcome now and then by the shameless way in which I tell you all the little things of life,” she wrote to Esther, “but then they do make up the major part of our existence, don’t they?”3 A burden had been shared, and Eleanor was ready to confront Marion and Nan.
A letter from Eleanor to Marion and Nan, written on White House stationery, laid out her version of their history. In it, she reveals how something Nan had said the evening of their talk cut her to the quick.
If you will look back, I think you will realize that in all of our relationship I have never before wanted anything, nor suggested anything about the cottage or the school, and therefore it is entirely natural that we have had no difficulties in previous years. This was quite easy for me because I had no objection to acceding to your wishes. . . .
I have decided to turn over to you now, instead of at my death, my entire interest in the cottage, the shop building and the other buildings, exclusive of the stable which was built entirely with my money. . . .
I shall, of course, take everything out of the building which I have paid for and store it until I build somewhere else. If I had had any idea of how
you both felt when I planned the remodeling of the building [how they felt we do not know], I would never have spent the many thousands of dollars which I have spent. . . .
This has been a very costly lesson both financially and spiritually, but it is good for me to know that one can never know how any other person reasons or what motivates them.
All of her life Eleanor had borne hurt in silence by turning inward. Now she minced no words, although she had not yet clearly explained the cause of her hurt. She returned to the business of breaking up her association with Todhunter:
In view of what has happened I feel that I wish also to withdraw entirely from the school. I will give you both with great pleasure my share of the school fund which has been held in my name and on which I have paid income tax every year. I do not expect you to take my name off the letter head this year if that will cause you any embarrassment. I am sure however, that you will prosper better without any connection with the name.
I shall only come to Hyde Park when the President is at the big house and I will stay at the big house.4
In a letter written to Marion a few weeks later she came to the heart of the matter:
[Nan] told me, for instance, that while we were working in the [Women’s Democratic] committee, in the school, and in the industries together, you had both always felt that whatever was done was done for the sole purpose of building me up. My whole conception was entirely different. I went into the industries because I felt that Nan was fulfilling something which she had long wanted to do. I would never have done it alone. I had neither the knowledge nor the background nor the interest.
I went into the school because I had an interest in education and in young people and being fond of you I was anxious to help you in what you wanted to do. It gave me an opportunity for regular work which I was anxious to have. I went into the political work because Louis was anxious to have me do something to keep up Franklin’s interest in a field which he eventually hoped Franklin would return to. I had no personal ambitions of any kind and I have none today.5
The Three Graces of Val-Kill Page 15