Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  Some had suggested that this marriage, which began to go sour very quickly, was a sham, staged only to put off the gossips and protect the woman Miller called “Lady.” Later, there was a second unsuccessful marriage. That time there was a threat that Eleanor Roosevelt would be named as a co-respondent in divorce proceedings. Miller’s special friendship with Eleanor might have become a scandal if it got the attention of the wrong people. Once again, Hick was witness to a potentially damaging family secret; once again, she kept it to herself.

  Eleanor had no sooner returned from her New York State tour than she learned that FDR’s personal secretary for the last twelve years, Marguerite LeHand, known as Missy, had lost her mother. Immediately she made plans to get back on the train and accompany Missy all the way to the mother’s home in Potsdam, New York, up near the Canadian border, for the funeral. Hick came along, of course.

  On the long train ride to Potsdam, Hick learned about yet another unusual aspect of the complicated emotional landscape of the Roosevelt marriage. Missy was not just a personal secretary to FDR. She had become in fact a sort of second wife. She had lived in the governor’s mansion for the previous four years, and she would go on to live in the White House for much of Roosevelt’s presidency. A tall, stylish woman in her thirties, with gray eyes and a long face, Missy was a highly efficient secretary completely devoted to carrying out “Effdee’s” wishes. She was also the one who kept FDR company, who listened to his jokes and shared in his cocktail hour, the one who came into his bedroom in the morning to plan for the day, and who sometimes could be seen sitting on his lap when work was done. She might have been a lover.

  Quite understandably, there were times when Eleanor resented Missy, especially since she was not the first personal secretary to become her husband’s intimate companion. Nonetheless, Eleanor insisted that she was very fond of Missy. This fact says not only a great deal about Eleanor, who tried hard to love almost everybody, but also about the evolution of the Roosevelt marriage. Certainly, Eleanor no longer wanted to play the role that Missy did in her husband’s life. Some months before, in a magazine piece entitled “Ten Rules for a Successful Marriage,” she had observed that a husband “may have many other helpers besides his wife, particularly if his interests are varied and broad.”

  It would be hard to imagine a man with more varied and broad interests than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a lover of people of all kinds. He relished politics and was a brilliant player of the game. But he loved many other things as well: every kind of boat, including those he sailed and the boat models he constructed out of tiny pieces of wood; trees of all kinds, including the virgin timber and the new spruces he nurtured on his eleven-hundred-acre estate at Hyde Park; his stamp collection, which he fussed over in quiet moments; the pleasure of a good stiff drink, preferably mixed by his own hand. FDR liked to enjoy all of these things without fear of disapproval, in the company of an agreeable woman. Missy, though she had her own opinions, was such a woman. Eleanor, though she may have tried to fulfill that role in the early years of her marriage, most certainly was not.

  One thing became clear to Hick during her weeks as Eleanor Roosevelt’s constant companion: the complete story of her life couldn’t be told without hurting her and her family. It was going to take a skilled and careful hand to introduce this unusual woman to the public. Lorena Hickok, who had her own secrets, was ideally suited to the job.

  At some point during their journeys, Eleanor must have sensed this. By the time the two of them returned from Potsdam on the train, Eleanor was no longer treating Hick as a dangerous journalist. In fact, she was beginning to see her in an entirely different light: as the person who might be able to fulfill her longing for affection and understanding at a daunting moment in her life.

  There was only one room for the two of them on the train, a drawing room with a single berth and a long narrow couch. Eleanor insisted on giving Hick the berth and taking the couch for herself. “I’m longer than you are,” she explained. “And,” she added with a smile, “not quite so broad.”

  They talked long into the night, sharing stories of their childhoods—seemingly so different but alike in their misery. Hick told Eleanor about her violent and abusive father and her teenage years as a maid in other people’s houses. Eleanor told Hick about her disapproving mother, about the tragic death of her father, whom she adored, about life in the home of her strict grandmother, and about the aunts who called her “the ugly duckling.”

  Hick asked, “May I write some of that?”

  Eleanor replied, “If you like. I trust you.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ELEANOR ACCORDING TO HICK

  MOST DAYS, LORENA HICKOK banged out her stories in a sea of noise, in the wide-open newsroom of the AP bureau in midtown Manhattan. The clackety-clack of the teletype machine was constant, overlaid with the voices and chattering typewriters of several dozen writers and editors. Sunday watch was the exception. When Hick drew that assignment, she could bring her favorite companion, a large German shepherd named Prinz, along with her. Hick was always happier with Prinz by her side. Her return to him after a day at the office precipitated an orgy of baby talk and slobbery dog kisses.

  Hick lived at 10 Mitchell Place, near the East River in Manhattan, in a new building, a thirteen-story apartment house in Tudor Revival style, with herringbone brickwork, diamond-shaped leaded windows, and a big welcoming fireplace in the mahogany-paneled lobby. It stood as a kind of defiant challenge to its grim surroundings. The Turtle Bay neighborhood around it was the underbelly of the city: a maze of breweries, laundries, and slaughterhouses that made it the sootiest district of Manhattan. As the Depression deepened, a shantytown developed along the river, not far from Hick’s door. Sometimes she would walk down there with Prinz and chat with the inhabitants.

  But when Hick drew Sunday watch, she and Prinz emerged together into the gritty neighborhood, crossed under the shadow of the elevated trains at Second and Third Avenues, and made their way west to the cleaner and brighter world of Madison Avenue and the AP. There, they took the freight elevator to the sixth floor and the nearly deserted pressroom. While Hick worked, Prinz roamed, pausing occasionally to flop down near her desk.

  A young reporter named Gardner Bridge once shared Sunday watch with Hick, and remembered encountering Prinz. He also remembered, after FDR was elected, how quickly and easily Hick seemed to turn out her profile of Eleanor Roosevelt while he, writing a parallel six-part series about FDR, had to do research before he could even begin. “Hick batted out her three pieces with hardly any recourse to the files—she knew her subject that well. I had to spend a day in the library before I could even start writing.” Hick, of course, had spent time too: those many hours with Eleanor on the train, gaining her subject’s trust.

  The portraits of Franklin and Eleanor that went out on the AP wire reflect the difference. Bridge, if he interviewed FDR at all, accepted the president’s upbeat version of events without question. In general, he told FDR’s story as a journey from triumph to triumph in six episodes, starting with Franklin’s privileged birth, moving on to his first memory of surviving a shipwreck at sea, followed by an idyllic childhood at Hyde Park climbing trees and shooting birds for his collection. In Bridge’s account, FDR was a sportsman at Groton, where he quickly made friends, and a very successful student at Harvard, where he edited the Harvard Crimson.

  The reality was much different: FDR came late to Groton, and didn’t fit in easily with the established cliques. Nor was he much of an athlete: he wound up managing the baseball team rather than playing on it. His rejection from the exclusive Porcellian Club at Harvard left a permanent scar.

  Bridge continued his triumphal version of the story: FDR successfully challenged Tammany as a New York State legislator, then followed in his uncle Theodore Roosevelt’s footsteps as assistant secretary of the Navy. Here, it is suggested, Roosevelt often had to take charge. In fact, FDR’s
boss, Josephus Daniels, was unusually forgiving of his young acolyte, who took some questionable liberties. The defeat of the Cox/Roosevelt presidential ticket in 1920 merited only a paragraph. As for polio, which FDR contracted in 1921 and which deprived him of the use of his legs, “neither Roosevelt nor any member of his family has ever publicly acknowledged his condition to be affliction [sic]. Rather they have taken the attitude that it makes him better fitted for desk work.”

  The upbeat presentation of FDR’s polio and paralysis was the one thing on which Eleanor and FDR were in lockstep: “He was grand about his illness you know,” Eleanor told Hick. “In fact, never once have I heard him say that what happened to him was hard, or disagreeable, or out of the ordinary.”

  Such astonishing cheerfulness in the face of a bleak reality may have been what Americans needed in 1932. Like the theme song of the campaign, “Happy Days Are Here Again,” it carried denial to new heights.

  Aside from its rosy presentation of FDR’s life, the most striking thing about the Gardner Bridge series is Eleanor Roosevelt’s absence. She comes up only once, and then in the context of her being a Roosevelt marrying a Roosevelt, at a wedding presided over by her uncle Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the United States. TR is quoted as saying, “Well Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family.”

  Bridge’s six-part series on FDR made for dull reading when compared to Hickok’s on Eleanor. Hick’s articles managed to keep Eleanor’s important secrets while still revealing the unhappiness Hick had observed during the campaign. In Hick’s pieces, the separate lives of Eleanor and FDR became even more obvious. FDR was mentioned only twice: once in reference to his polio, and once in describing the late-night meetings at the governor’s mansion, which filled the library with so much smoke that she had to move the children’s room to another part of the house.

  “If I wanted to be selfish,” said Eleanor in Part I, “I could wish he had not been elected.” She “never wanted to be a President’s wife, and I don’t want it now. . . . For him, of course, I’m glad—sincerely, I couldn’t have wanted it to go the other way. . . . Being a Democrat, I believe this change is for the better.”

  “And now,” she concluded, “I shall have to work out my own salvation.”

  Throughout her career, Hick specialized in grabbing the reader with the unexpected. This was no exception. The new First Lady was not going to be satisfied with the role of helpmeet, cheering her husband on? She was pleased with his victory as a Democrat, not as a wife? She was looking for a separate life, for her “own salvation”? Such an independent attitude in a First Lady was heresy.

  In fact, Eleanor went on to insist, she wasn’t going to be a First Lady at all, but “plain ordinary Mrs. Roosevelt.” Here was part two of Eleanor Roosevelt’s one-two punch. She was going to be independent. But she was also going to be humble.

  With clear delight, Hick elaborated on this second dimension: “The next mistress of the White House,” she wrote, “thinks people are going to get used to her ways, even though she does edit a magazine, wear $10 dresses and drive her own car.” She ate at drugstore counters, unless she was taking someone to lunch. Also, Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t really own her own automobile—only a third of one. The blue roadster belonged to the “furniture factory” of which she was one-third owner. “Sometimes she borrows it and she loves to drive it—fast.”

  In general, she was a “whirlwind” who got along on six hours’ sleep and walked with a “long swinging stride” that made her hard to keep up with, even when she was in heels. Hick was writing from firsthand experience. When they were together at Hyde Park, Eleanor sometimes wore golf shoes. When that happened, Hick found it “practically impossible” to keep up with her.

  “I had an odd sort of childhood really,” Eleanor said. She told of losing her mother when she was eight, her father when she was ten, of being raised strictly by her maternal grandmother, before going off to a boarding school in London, where she got her first taste of freedom under the enlightened tutelage of a French woman of letters, Marie Souvestre.

  Not long after her return and her debut, she married. “For the next ten years it never occurred to me to do anything outside my own home. My children were born—six in ten years.” Revealing her privileged background, she noted that she kept the same trained nurse for all of them, and learned from her that “work could be fun,” adding, “I still love to make a bed.”

  During World War I, Eleanor discovered volunteer work she loved, and she continued—with an interruption during FDR’s polio crisis—to volunteer. In recent years she had become very involved with the Democratic women’s organization in New York; she was also doing a series of radio broadcasts, teaching a class at Todhunter, a girls’ school in New York, and editing a parenting advice magazine called Babies, Just Babies.

  She took up these activities because she needed to make money. This in itself was controversial: a wife, and especially one from a privileged background, was not supposed to work for money. Her husband did that.

  The question of whether a woman should work after marriage would come up over and over again in Eleanor’s ongoing dialogue with the women of America. Later, Eleanor would defend married women’s right to pursue their own fulfillment in work. But at this early stage, Hick’s profile provided Eleanor with a good justification for making her own money. She wasn’t earning for her own needs, but because she liked to have it in order to give it away. “I don’t know where it goes exactly,” she said with an amused expression in her eyes, “but I have a lot of fun doing things with money.’”

  Now that FDR had won, Eleanor Roosevelt was going to have to give up some of the work she loved most and spend more time in a ceremonial role, doing what she and Hick came to refer to as “being Mrs. R.”

  “Sometimes,” she told Hick, “I daresay I shall feel a little as one of my boys—after I had lectured him on the responsibilities incumbent on the sons of a man in public life—felt when he said: ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to do things just because you wanted to do them?’”

  Hick’s AP series managed to give the public a taste of a woman who was going to do things differently, while also lovingly protecting Eleanor from those who might do her harm. Hick’s admiration for her subject permeates the stories. But so does her well-honed understanding of conventional expectations. There is no mention of the fact that Eleanor’s father drank himself to death. Of course there is no mention of any problems in the Roosevelt marriage, or of the looming divorce of daughter Anna.

  Nothing is mentioned either of the oppressive reign of Eleanor Roosevelt’s mother-in-law, Sara, at the big house at Hyde Park, nor of the unconventional lifestyle of many of Eleanor’s closest women friends. The Val-Kill cottage at Hyde Park, for instance, was a hideaway created and used by Eleanor and life partners Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, with only occasional visits from the rest of the Roosevelt family. Yet according to Hick’s story, Eleanor and Franklin built the Val-Kill cottage “in order that the children might learn to live without servants.”

  Hick’s AP series was not untruthful—merely selective. It was an act of devotion.

  —

  ON NOVEMBER 8, 1932, Franklin Roosevelt won the presidency with 57.4 percent of the vote, carrying forty-two of forty-eight states. Many saw the victory coming long before election day. But Eleanor insisted on hanging on to her freedom right up to the very last minute.

  On the night before the election, she played her wifely role at Hyde Park as FDR addressed a friendly hometown crowd. “With your help and your patience,” he told his constituents at a rally in Poughkeepsie, “and your generous goodwill, we will do what we can to mend the torn fabric of our common life.”

  As the Roosevelt party left the event, Eleanor announced that she was going to drive to New York City so that she could be on hand early the next day to teach her class at the Todhunter School. Eleanor told an interviewer
she “liked teaching better than anything else I do.” She was cofounder and an associate principal of Todhunter, working alongside Marion Dickerman, who was principal. In the four years since the school opened, she had become a lively and beloved teacher of history and current affairs. One of her courses, aptly named “Happenings,” required the girls, all from privileged backgrounds, to visit Ellis Island and model tenements, and to read periodicals instead of textbooks.

  FDR was generally supportive of Eleanor’s independent undertakings. But on this night, he objected. It was raining out. The roads would be slippery, and it would take several hours to make the seventy-five-mile trip. Eleanor persisted, determined to go on with her life despite the looming victory. Finally FDR agreed when it turned out that Hick, who was never far from Eleanor’s side, could go along “to keep you awake.” Having won that battle, Eleanor promptly faced another: a woman reporter from a competing press association wanted to come along.

  “I’m sorry, but there isn’t room,” said Eleanor.

  The reporter pressed on, asking to ride in the rumble seat.

  Eleanor was adamant. “And off we went,” Hick remembered, “leaving the woman in the parking lot.”

  In the car that night, Hick lectured Eleanor on press relations. “You aren’t going to be able to do that sort of thing after tomorrow,” she told her. “That girl is furious and I can’t say I blame her.”

  “I couldn’t crowd her in here with us,” Eleanor declared. “It’s not a very good night for driving, and I’ll need elbow room.

  “And besides,” she added, “what makes you so sure Franklin is going to be elected?”