It was disingenuous for the best-known American woman in public life to insist that she had no personal ambition and to fall back on her frequently stated wish to help others. One more revealing phrase, however, does leap out: Eleanor was insulted by Nan’s having said that she and Marion were in partnership with her “for the sole purpose of building me up.” Eleanor knew how hard she had worked to get where she was. And she knew how much she had loved Nan and Marion and felt loved by them. It was a poisonous phrase.
Marion was temperate in her response: “First I was no part of your talk & Nan’s last summer and feel that I should be allowed to speak for myself. I do not know where this ‘building up’ idea came from. . . . I have never used the expression nor entertained the idea. . . . Unless you wish to refer to this matter again I shall consider it closed for I have found nothing in it but disillusionment and unhappiness.”6
In a letter to Hick at the end of the summer, Eleanor revealed another aspect of her quarrel with Marion that she had brought up in her “tragic talk” in the cottage with Nan. Eleanor was hosting a picnic for one hundred guests when, unknown to her, her brother Hall showed up—drunk again. He went over to sit on the patio with Nan and Marion, who gave him a drink, probably more than one. When he returned to the picnic he was in a reckless mood and tossed his son, Danny, into the air. He lost control and dropped the boy, who fell to the ground, injured. It was agreed that he needed to be driven immediately to the hospital. Hall got behind the wheel of his car, and Marion got in with Danny. As they were leaving, Hall drove into a ditch; a state trooper had to drive them to the hospital. After they arrived and Danny was being treated for a broken collarbone, Marion called to tell Eleanor what had happened. Eleanor erupted in a storm of accusations directed at Marion, who she insisted must have driven the car. Although Marion protested her innocence, Eleanor would not hear anything further. When they arrived back at Val-Kill and Marion went to her room, distraught, FDR sent her a note saying that he knew she had not been the driver and she should not blame herself. All of this came to light only in May 1939 when Marion chose to tell the story after Eleanor had initiated her earlier letters. Marion wrote:
Since I returned [from the 1938 trip to Europe] I have never had a chance to talk to you about anything. The only instance in which I am conscious of having displeased you was on the night I went to the hospital with Danny. My judgment in that instance may not have been wise. My motive however was a kindly one. I have never understood why you spoke to me that night as you did. . . . Three times I asked to see you in order to talk matters over. Each time you refused. I know nothing of what has brought this on my head save the incident to which I refer, [which] unless far more was implicated than I know of, seems rather out of proportion to all that went before.7
Marion thought Eleanor had overreacted. Eleanor responded that Marion should have let her know that Hall was drinking. Once more she referred to her “long and illuminating talk with Nan.” Marion denied having been a part of the conversation. Suddenly, Marion and Nan were crossed up in their friendship with Eleanor. Perhaps this was an exception; at least, we have found no other evidence of a disagreement between Marion and Nan.
Even these exchanges do not fully explain the complexities of the impasse they had gotten themselves into, however, and there is a missing piece to the puzzle concerning Marion, as we shall see in the next chapter, that no other biographer has considered: the first discovered example of a rift between Marion and Nan, in which, it would seem, the balance between the two women may have been upended when Marion tipped the scales further toward FDR, with the help of a new friend, and Nan was left out in the cold. It is mere conjecture to suppose that Marion realized that she had not looked after Nan, as Eleanor always said she must, and that this failure gave Marion a reason to try to make up for it—realizing her mistake, being more protective of Nan, and intensifying her disagreements with Eleanor. It is an example in which jealousy may have come between them all, and although observers recognized that Eleanor’s friends were a jealous lot, biographers have not found evidence that Marion and Nan were ever separated in their relations with Eleanor.
17: MISSING EVIDENCE
[Marion] did want to have some attention paid to her.—Frances Perkins
A long oral history interview with Frances Perkins, FDR’s four-term secretary of labor, yields unexamined information about the weekend when Nan and Eleanor had their tragic talk and reveals buried details about Marion’s absence from the cottage when it occurred.1
Perkins had an incisive mind, and she saw her associates often and at close hand. She understood Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in ways that perhaps could be best described by a woman of controlled emotional detachment and intellectual toughness. Perkins appreciated the close relationship Eleanor and Franklin forged for the good of the country, and she also knew they respected each other. She often depended on Mrs. Roosevelt to help present government recommendations to FDR and was especially appreciative of Eleanor’s efforts to give her and Franklin private time together in Albany or Hyde Park so that she could have his close attention. She was less perceptive and generous in understanding Eleanor’s friendship with Marion and Nan. Perkins had made it in a man’s world (she was the first female cabinet secretary), and that may explain why she was dismissive of the importance of Val-Kill in Eleanor’s life.2
Perkins recalled a time at the New York governor’s mansion in Albany when Eleanor had told her that she did not mind sharing her room overnight with her because it wasn’t really her home; in fact, she had never had a home of her own (the intimacy of the confession, which Eleanor later included in her autobiography, embarrassed Perkins). Then Perkins observed: “Of course, she had sometime or other fixed up that little Val-Kill cottage over by the swimming pool on the grounds that it was theoretically to be a house which she, Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman had together. Nancy was to run the Val Kill factory and live over there, but the property, I think, stood in Mrs. Roosevelt’s name. Anyhow, she had a part in it. It was a very informal affair, all finished off with rough boards. But it was hers.” Perkins perhaps was confusing Stone Cottage with the renovated furniture factory with knotty pine walls, which Nan helped Eleanor achieve and which Eleanor so admired. At any rate, Perkins’s taste ran to something more formal.
Perkins (living apart from her husband), with her daughter Susanna, shared a beautiful Georgetown house with the wealthy widow Mary Harriman Rumsey. After Rumsey died, Perkins made her Washington home with Caroline O’Day, another wealthy widow and a New York congresswoman, who was also a close friend of Marion Dickerman. Caroline, the widow of Daniel T. O’Day, heir to a Standard Oil fortune, was fifty years old and had grown children and a house of her own in Rye, New York. Because Perkins was so guarded, we cannot really know what role women played in her private life. More important for our purpose is that Perkins’s interview includes missing pieces of the puzzle of what happened after Marion returned home.
For weeks Marion had lobbied Franklin to be included in the American commission studying industrial relations in Britain and Sweden. She had talked it over with FDR’s close adviser, Bernard Baruch, who had taken on Marion as one of the women he felt needed looking after, especially in managing their business interests. On hearing of Marion’s desire to be on the commission, he urged FDR to send her. FDR was persuaded and told Perkins to include her. Perkins was incredulous, arguing that Marion was little more than an ordinary schoolteacher and did not deserve to be in the group. In fact, Marion had been studying American labor issues, especially as they affected women, for most of her adult life, though at a lower level certainly than Perkins. FDR finally insisted that Perkins would just have to include her. Although she thought it was an absurd idea, Perkins did. Already in Europe herself, Perkins cabled Marion that she was on the commission, and Marion began at once to get her travel plans in order. Perhaps Perkins had never before expressed her anger at having been forced to make such an unsuitable choice—not to F
DR or to anyone else—and when she said so in the interview years later, she really let her hair down.
At some length Perkins demeaned Marion’s qualifications to be a delegate, and then she described in detail Marion’s flamboyant behavior once she got to Europe. Anna Rosenberg, a prominent New York businesswoman, political insider, and the only other woman on the commission, had taken Marion in hand and encouraged her to have a good time. Anna was hard to ignore—she was “quick as a cat and plenty smart”—and she had made herself useful to FDR and would do the same with later presidents. Anna took Marion to the best shops, and Marion bought a new dress. Marion had her hair done, flirted with the men, danced, and generally, Perkins said, made a fool of herself. It was a cruel depiction of Marion as a spinster who “had always been stuck in a corner, who did want to be noticed, did want to have some attention paid to her. . . . It would boost her stock in her school, her standing in New York.” Marion often asked for favors from those who could help her: she asked Eleanor to speak at many public occasions, for her own events and on behalf of others; she asked to attend White House affairs and to stay overnight; she asked to be given New York theater tickets; and she asked Eleanor for personal letters from Eleanor to Todhunter students and parents and to host her school groups and friends in Washington. Perkins, having negotiated politics all her adult life on her own merits, in Albany and then in Washington, must have found Marion’s methods especially unacceptable.
In the week after they returned from Europe, Anna Rosenberg sent Marion copies of the commission’s report and added a personal note that confirms Marion’s willingness to ask for what she wanted: “I am also enclosing the wallet which you asked me to get for you. I hope you like it.” The closing, “Cordially,” was struck out, and Anna wrote “Love” instead.3 In Europe, according to Perkins, Marion and Anna played while the other members of the study commission did the work. At night Anna rounded up two men whose wives were not with them and took them dancing with her and Marion. Perkins and some of the wives agreed that their behavior was outrageous, though no impropriety seems to have occurred. Aboard ship coming home, the men went to work to prepare a report to hand in to President Roosevelt as soon as they returned; one of them went to his own New York office on Sunday to meet his secretary to prepare a finished document. Before disembarking, Anna asked for and received a copy of the rough draft.
We then learn from the Perkins interview a vital missing piece in Marion’s story of what happened next: at some point before the ship docked in New York on 18 August, Marion had invited Anna to come home with her to stay in the Val-Kill cottage, and Anna had accepted. When Nan met the ship in New York, Marion, accompanied by the dashing Anna Rosenberg, was in high spirits—she had never had such a time! Exactly what transpired at the reunion on the dock is unknown. While Anna and Marion gathered all their European baggage to transport to the cottage, did Marion, ignoring Nan’s overwrought condition, whisper to her to please hurry ahead and get things ready in the guest room? It seems likely. Certainly it was something Nan often did when Eleanor had unexpected guests. And then off they went to Val-Kill, where Marion showed off the cottage—and its proximity to Springwood—to Anna.
When Marion discovered that FDR was at Springwood, she immediately asked Eleanor to take her and Anna to see him in order to give him a firsthand report of the commission’s work. When they met with the president, Marion gave all the credit for the work to Anna and regaled Franklin with stories of the adventure, the details he was eager to hear. He, as Frances knew, loved gossip. They talked and he laughed. When a commission member tried to set up a meeting after the president had returned to Washington, FDR said there was no need—he already had the report. Frances cautioned him that he had better soft-pedal that news and give credit to the commission for the work.
And that was that, although what the commission actually accomplished is missing from Perkins’s interview, and apparently from FDR’s interests. He took no action on the report when it was finally sent to him as the handiwork of the commission.
It was a setup for a perfect storm: Marion’s high spirits when she returned to the States with Anna, Nan’s near hysteria after her talk with Eleanor, Marion’s immediate defection from the cottage to take Anna to see FDR at Springwood. And the next day, Marion had to pick up the pieces and defend Nan. She left no record of thoughts on how her own neglect may have affected her partner’s feelings. Both Nan and Eleanor had said more than they meant to in their talk. Perhaps Marion was feeling guilty about her grand holiday without Nan. Marion and Nan had weathered other storms, and they would not let this one weaken their partnership. The fragile relationship of E M N, however, was about to succumb to forces of human nature.
Perhaps only a philosopher such as Pascal provides an insight missing in the discussion (words known to Eleanor, fluent in French): Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point.
18: AFTER THE STORM
Bless you and all my love.—Nan
Before lawyers in 1938 finally drafted the Val-Kill legal settlement to dissolve the partnership, softening qualities in Eleanor, Marion, and Nan returned to the fore. A letter to Eleanor from Nan, written after Eleanor had moved out of the cottage and was living next door, began by using Eleanor’s sons’ nickname for her.
Dear Muddie:
This is just a reminder for you to look up and see if you have a free day. It could be on Wednesday or Thursday, which would probably be better for you, sometime the latter part of May or the first of June, for the Annual State Meeting of the Women’s Division.
It was nice seeing you at Hyde Park, and it looks as though this weather was going to keep up. Marion hopes to get to Hyde Park this weekend. She hasn’t been up for a long time.
I ordered the seeds for the herbs, and Clifford will plant them in my new hot box, so I am in hopes that you and Tommy will have good seasoning for your soups next summer. Too bad I can’t raise the beef in the hot box also. . . .
Bless you and all my love.1
In her own handwriting Nan added, “with a kiss.” Eleanor appended a handwritten note at the bottom of Nan’s letter for Tommy to let Nan know she could come June first or second.
Then after many months of silences and delays, a legal agreement was drawn up in November in which Eleanor bought out Marion’s and Nan’s interest in the cottage and paid them for what they had invested in the shop building she was about to own outright to turn into her home. They gave up investments they had made in the shop and agreed to give the equipment to employees, who would open businesses at other sites. Eleanor’s friends, informed by Tommy about the proceedings, considered that she had been too generous, especially in turning over the Todhunter School fund that had accumulated modest profits, but she insisted that she wanted to ease Marion’s and Nan’s fear about their future if she could. The financial settlement was complicated, and who had paid for what is inexact, but a price tag could not be put on Marion’s and Nan’s greatest investment: making a new life possible for Eleanor. Nan had been a tireless worker in the shop and the gardens, and she and Marion had hosted countless picnics for Eleanor and FDR. There had not been a lot of money made and lost. It had not been a costly experiment despite the failure of the furniture industry. As First Lady Eleanor began making significant money writing and lecturing (and advertising consumer products on her radio program), and generous by nature, she could afford to be generous now.
The years of the breakup also came at a very difficult time: Nan had unspecified health problems, or maybe she was tired and feeling old.2 There was so much for Eleanor to worry about privately: the children’s hasty marriages and divorces. But World War II cast the darkest shadow over America, and it was on everybody’s mind, especially FDR and his cabinet as he contemplated the buildup to the war from 1939 until America’s entry in 1941. Eleanor was alarmed that at home New Deal programs and social justice issues were being forgotten. During the worst of the Depression years Americans by the thousands had wr
itten letters to Mrs. Roosevelt asking for her help.
Then on Sunday, 7 December 1941, “the day that shall live in infamy,” the Japanese bombing of American ships docked at Pearl Harbor gave the president and the Congress the reason to declare war and the country reason to give up isolationism. Eleanor was entertaining guests at a large luncheon at the White House and did not hear the news—from one of the ushers—until midafternoon. Only after Franklin had finished meetings with his military advisers and congressional leaders did Eleanor have a chance to visit with him privately in his room. She found him “more serene” now that the decision to go to war had been made.3 Apparently Marion and Nan were in the cottage at Val-Kill, desperately out of touch with Eleanor and Franklin. Friends who are separated in times of national peril often feel especially frightened. This news must have intensified their need to speak with their old friends.
When America entered World War II, Eleanor’s correspondence shifted to letters from desperate women asking for news of their sons, husbands, and boyfriends. Eleanor traveled to the South Pacific to see American women and men in uniform, included Jose Lash, and returned home to contact families of those she had seen in hospitals. At home she helped publicize war bonds and other ways for ordinary citizens to support the war. Her work took her far from Hyde Park, where her visits were infrequent, and then she kept company with Franklin when he tried to get away for some rest at Springwood. It was not a time for Eleanor to see Marion and Nan, who were dealing with their own problems—Nan’s health and Marion’s difficulties at trying to keep Todhunter operating. They had their own efforts for America. A victory garden at Val-Kill was but a small way of supporting the war effort (and Eleanor had a White House Victory Garden). Marion continued to attend labor relations conferences in Washington, D.C. For Eleanor, trying to work her way through her personal difficulties with Marion and Nan on top of everything else was asking a lot. But they all tried, and time was not on their side.
The Three Graces of Val-Kill Page 16