Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  Hick thought she detected “something almost like a note of hope” in her voice.

  With Hick in attendance, Eleanor taught her classes in history and current events at Todhunter, making no mention of the election. Toward the end of class, a student piped up, “We think it’s grand to have the wife of the President for our teacher.”

  “But I’m not the wife of the President yet,” she replied.

  After the class, Eleanor drove back up to Hyde Park and voted at Town Hall, then rode with her husband down the Albany Post Road to New York City to await the final returns. Hick was riding behind the Roosevelts in the cavalcade of press cars. But in New York City, she joined the couple’s inner circle at a buffet supper at their home on 65th Street. As always with the Roosevelts, it was a large inner circle, including their many relatives and friends, as well as some newspaper people. Hick arrived with the handful of women who had now been assigned to cover the First Lady.

  Eleanor greeted the newswomen at the door. “When I came in,” Hick remembered, “she kissed me and said softly, ‘It’s good to have you around tonight, Hick.’”

  —

  LORENA HICKOK AND ELEANOR ROOSEVELT had grown up believing they were homely women, admiring inordinately the beauty and glamour of others. Lorena, at fifteen, was enchanted by the daughter of the local hotel owner in Aberdeen, South Dakota: she had beautiful dresses, with hair ribbons to match, and she was “the first person ever to become an inmate of . . . my imagination.” The first sentence of Eleanor’s memoir of her childhood describes her mother as “one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.” Eleanor considered it a great privilege to spend time in her mother’s bedroom, watching her prepare for a triumphant evening out in New York society.

  “Attention and admiration were the things through all my childhood which I wanted,” Eleanor wrote, “because I was made to feel so conscious of the fact that nothing about me would attract attention or would bring me admiration!”

  On this night, in Lorena Hickok’s eyes, Eleanor Roosevelt became one of the beautiful ones, the object of the attention and admiration she had longed for. It was the first time Hick had seen Eleanor in evening clothes, and she was stunned by the change in her appearance. She stood beautifully tall, slender and erect in a long white gown, “made of some soft material like chiffon,” with a short train. Hick thought Eleanor looked like a queen.

  Later that night, the Roosevelt contingent moved on to the Hotel Biltmore to wait for the election results. Special telephone and telegraph wires had been installed to bring the latest news to the Roosevelt suite. The grand ballroom on another floor was overflowing with supporters watching a big board flash the returns as they came in. As the night wore on and victory seemed assured, the excitement built: the corridors were filled with celebrants shouting and congratulating one another. A great clamor arose for Eleanor to give a press conference, and she reluctantly agreed, only to be barraged with too many questions. “Through it all,” Hick remembered, “she kept smiling, but once she looked directly at me. She shook her head, ever so slightly, and the expression in her eyes was miserable.

  “I was reminded of a fox,” Hick wrote, “surrounded by a pack of baying hounds.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  JE T’AIME ET JE T’ADORE

  WITH STRONG MAJORITIES in both houses of Congress, FDR had a mandate to quickly and decisively address the economic crisis facing the nation. Unfortunately, he was constrained by an antiquated law: inauguration wouldn’t take place until March.

  During the four-month interregnum, the national emergency escalated to new heights. But lame-duck president Herbert Hoover lacked power and imagination, and the incoming one refused to be associated with Hoover’s ideas or to reveal many of his own. Neither seemed to have solutions commensurate with the desperation of ordinary people, chronicled daily in newspaper headlines and bleak photographs.

  That December, eight thousand men showed up every day at the New York docks looking for work—which was unavailable because there was almost no foreign trade. Over a thousand hunger marchers threatened to occupy Cumberland, Maryland, and were held back by troops and vigilantes. When it snowed in New York, twenty thousand men came looking for a few days’ work shoveling; at one site, thousands lined up for eighty-one jobs. On December 25, William Borah of Idaho, Republican dean of the U.S. Senate, declared that “this Christmas belongs to the poor, the needy. For unnumbered millions it is a season of severe privation, of deep anxiety.”

  Roosevelt’s public pronouncements sounded the right notes. At Thanksgiving, he issued a governor’s proclamation urging citizens to remember the “destitute, homeless or forgotten of their fellow men.” In December he declared that the inaugural ceremonies would be simple, in keeping with the times. But most of the headlines concerned FDR’s refusal to endorse the sitting president’s ideas, particularly on the issue of repayment of European debt, which Hoover viewed as central to economic recovery: ROOSEVELT NONCOMMITTAL IN PARLEY; ROOSEVELT OPPOSES DEBT COMMISSION; ROOSEVELT BARS BIPARTISAN DEBT ACTION, DECLINES TO COOPERATE IN NAMING BOARD, and so on.

  When Hoover and his advisers met with FDR, they came away unimpressed. Hoover himself refused to be photographed with FDR, declaring he had “too much respect for myself.”

  Press treatment wasn’t much kinder. Arthur Krock reported in the New York Times in December that prominent Democratic members of Congress were worried about FDR’s inaction, feeling it was “high time to begin.” It was starting to look as though Walter Lippmann had been right when he described FDR during the campaign as “a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be president.”

  On February 3, FDR added fuel to the critics’ fire by leaving for an eleven-day fishing trip on board the Nourmahal, one of the largest private yachts in the world, in the company of its owner, his friend Vincent Astor, one of the richest men in the world. The symbolism could not have been worse. For the next twelve days, FDR demonstrated his remarkable ability to pursue pleasure in the midst of a world of trouble.

  Meanwhile, Eleanor and Hick were engaged in their own voyage of discovery, venturing into each other’s very different New York worlds. Probably they saw a play or two together—Eleanor never missed a chance to go to the theater when she was in New York. Hick visited the Georgian mansion on 65th Street off Fifth Avenue, the Roosevelts’ New York City home in the years since they married. It was, as Hick learned, a shared arrangement: two six-story town houses, one for Sara Roosevelt and one for her son and his wife, built and furnished by Sara as a gift to the newlyweds. Sliding doors connected the two, and Eleanor never knew when to expect a surprise visit from “Mama.”

  One night, Hick took Eleanor to one of her favorite restaurants, an Armenian place downtown. Afterward, they shared a cab. Hick got off in midtown at the AP offices, and Eleanor continued to her town house on 65th Street. But as soon as Hick arrived at the AP, the night editor shouted, “Where’s Mrs. Roosevelt?”

  “On her way home in a cab,” Hick replied.

  The editor told Hick to get up to her place in a hurry. “Some crackpot in Miami just tried to shoot her husband!”

  FDR had sailed into Biscayne Bay earlier that day on the Nourmahal and made a brief appearance at a Miami park before traveling back to New York. He spoke for less than a minute to the small crowd, then greeted Chicago mayor Anton Cermak, who happened to be in Miami on vacation.

  Giuseppe Zangara was a thirty-two-year-old unemployed bricklayer from New Jersey who had been attempting for years to assassinate someone important: once it had been the king of Italy, later it was President Hoover. That night it was Roosevelt.

  When Hick arrived at the town house, she found Eleanor sitting at the foot of her husband’s bed, looking pale. “This is what it’s like to be in public life, Hick,” she said. Louis Howe was there too, trying to get through to Miami. Finally the phone
rang. FDR himself was on the other end of the line, assuring them that he was fine, though he had a few sore ribs from being sat on by his large bodyguard, Gus Gennerich. He asked Eleanor to pass on the news to his mother.

  Zangara had fired five shots. One hit the convertible, inches away from Roosevelt, several wounded bystanders, and one hit Mayor Cermak. FDR was unharmed, but he took Cermak into his car and held him and talked to him all the way to the hospital, stayed with him for two hours, and displayed the unruffled fearlessness that was a Roosevelt tradition.

  Tragic as the evening was for Cermak, who ultimately died of complications from his wound, it set a new tone for the administration-in-waiting and particularly for Roosevelt himself. “To a man,” wrote Time, “his country rose to applaud his cool courage in the face of death. He is a martyr president at the start of his term.”

  Eleanor had been dismayed by Franklin’s decision to go sailing with his rich friend in such hard times. But now she gave him credit for courage. “That drive to the hospital must have been awfully hard on Franklin,” she told Hick. “He hates the sight of blood.”

  —

  AFTER THE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT, FDR urged his wife to travel with bodyguards. But she refused, insisting, “I’m not that important.” She announced that she would be taking the train that night to Ithaca, as planned, to keep a speaking engagement the next day at Cornell. She would be, the New York Times reported, “accompanied only by her maid.” The “maid,” as it turned out, was Lorena Hickok. Hick must have enjoyed the immense irony of being called the maid: she had worked as a “hired girl” for much of her adolescence, and hated every minute of it.

  Yet the Times reporter’s confusion was understandable. It was becoming increasingly unclear—to other reporters, to her bosses, and to Hick herself—what exactly her role was. She was still an AP reporter covering Eleanor Roosevelt, but it was more and more obvious to everyone that she had special status. When Eleanor held a press conference with the women who would be covering her over the next four years, Hick was not among them. Because she and Eleanor had become “very good friends,” as Hick explained, she always knew Eleanor’s plans in advance and met her alone before or after the meeting with the rest of the press.

  “Very good friends” is an understatement: Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok were falling in love. In the beginning, Hick had stuck close to Eleanor because she was a dogged and determined reporter. But Eleanor now wanted Hick by her side—always. A secret intimacy had developed between them. When they had to part, their final words to each other were “je t’aime et je t’adore.”

  Their loving feelings may have originated that night on the train, when Eleanor took the long narrow bed and Lorena took the wide one. Eleanor had given Hick a small part of her story then, and she already knew a little about Hick’s painful childhood from Tommy. Over the next four months, as they traveled together, dined together at each other’s homes, went to the theater together, they had begun to share the hidden parts of themselves—the parts they couldn’t tell anyone else.

  Both Eleanor and Hick had painful secrets—Hick because she was a lesbian, in a time when her kind of love was considered immoral and shameful, and Eleanor because she had to pretend she was happily married. Hick now dared to tell Eleanor about Ellie, the Minneapolis woman who had been, until she met Eleanor, the great love of her life. Eleanor listened with the tenderness that was her special gift. She in turn told Hick how unloved she felt in her marriage and how disappointed she was in the “great man” everyone else idolized. It was a reckless act on her part: Hick was, after all, a reporter still. But by this time Eleanor understood that Hick loved her too much to betray her. In their many hours together, she told Hick the story that explained, more than any other, her dread of Washington. Her return there evoked painful memories of the injury she could not forgive or forget: Franklin’s affair with Lucy Mercer.

  Life had improved for Eleanor during the years FDR served in the state legislature in Albany, where her mother-in-law no longer ruled the roost. When she and Franklin were apart, they exchanged affectionate letters. “I do wish you were here,” Franklin wrote her from a sailing trip in the Bahamas shortly before the move to Washington. “It is hard enough to be away from the chicks, but with you away from me I feel too very much alone and lost. I hereby solemnly declare that I refuse to go away the next time without you. . . . I can’t tell you how I long to see you again.”

  After Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1912, FDR was rewarded for his political support with an appointment to the position of assistant secretary of the Navy—a post previously held by his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, and eminently suited to a man who loved the sea. Eleanor packed up the family and moved to Washington.

  Though she was still in her childbearing phase—FDR Jr. was born in August 1914, and John, the last child, in March 1916—Eleanor succeeded in becoming an exemplary Washington wife. On the advice of her elders—particularly Theodore Roosevelt’s sister, the politically savvy Auntie Bye—she made hundreds of calls on the wives of congressmen, cabinet members, and Supreme Court justices. She was a star at diplomatic affairs, where her language skills allowed her to converse and translate. She hosted frequent dinners and impromptu lunches at the Washington house the Roosevelts inherited from Auntie Bye. The tall and willowy Eleanor, with her beautiful hair stacked high on her head, and her handsome and charming husband, Franklin, were seen as an attractive couple with a promising future in national politics.

  Assisting Eleanor in her various endeavors, starting in 1914, was a young Washington belle named Lucy Mercer, a social secretary who seemed ideal for the position: she was pretty, efficient, willing to work overtime, and good at anticipating what needed to be done. She got along splendidly with the Roosevelt children as well.

  But within a couple of years of the Roosevelts’ arrival in Washington, evidence began to accumulate that FDR, a notorious flirt, was focusing more than casual attention on his wife’s young and beautiful secretary. FDR was seen on several occasions in the company of Lucy Mercer. He even went to dinner with her at the home of Eleanor’s devilish cousin, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who was envious of her father Theodore’s affection for Eleanor and liked to make trouble when she could.

  For a long time, Eleanor tried to look the other way. But when FDR returned home from an official trip to Europe ill with flu, she discovered packets of love letters from Lucy Mercer in his suitcase. She could keep silent no longer.

  Eleanor offered Franklin his freedom. But divorce would have been political suicide in 1918, as FDR’s political mentor Louis Howe pointed out. Sara Roosevelt threatened to cut her son off altogether if he deserted his wife and children for another woman. It was, in her view, simply not done. So Eleanor and Franklin settled on the alternative. FDR promised never to see Lucy Mercer again, and he and Eleanor agreed to live amicably, if not passionately, side by side.

  Eleanor never fully recovered from this betrayal. She held on to her resentment for the rest of Franklin’s life. Her growing confidence suffered a severe setback. There would be other flirtations and affairs—even after FDR was struck with polio—but none wounded her in the way that first one did.

  Coming back to Washington, fifteen years later, brought back that most painful of memories. It may also have aroused the suspicion, which proved to be justified, that Franklin would attempt to see Lucy again, despite their agreement and despite Lucy’s marriage to Winthrop Rutherfurd, a wealthy older man.

  Hick, whose emotions were always close to the surface, listened to this story with indignation. Conventional marriage, happy or unhappy, had never been an option for her—though she once wondered, in a letter to Eleanor, whether her life might have been easier if she had been capable of it.

  But during her years at the Minneapolis Tribune, Hick had been as good as married, to Ella Morse, the woman she called “Ellie” and who called her, in return, “Hickey Doodles.�
� Ellie was tiny, with a soft voice, gray-blue eyes, and a shy manner. She had a passion for great literature and a gift for friendship. She also had a defective heart, but that didn’t seem to affect her love of a good time. “Friends,” Hick explained, “were as necessary to her as the oxygen that pumped the blood through her labored, valiant heart.”

  Ellie’s father, a wheat and real estate baron, provided his daughter and her special friend Hick with an apartment at the modern Hotel Leamington in Minneapolis. It was the first time in Hick’s life that she could claim to have a happy home. Ellie learned to cook to please Hick. The couple adopted a stray cat and named him François Villon, after the fifteenth-century poet, thief, and vagabond. Hick could be found polishing the Morse family’s heavy silver as Ellie read Shakespeare aloud. Ellie, who attended Smith, loved Charles Dickens, and was inclined to quote passages from Alice in Wonderland. She and Hick, also an autodidact, gave parties together to celebrate Dickens’s birthday.

  After Ellie received her inheritance and Hick was diagnosed with diabetes, they decided to move to California together. The climate might be healthier there, and Hick could perhaps turn herself into a novelist. What happened instead was that Ellie fulfilled her own lifetime ambition of finding a husband. She left Hick, after eight years, to marry a high school friend. Hick was devastated.

  It would have been too painful to return to Minneapolis, with all its happy memories, though Hick surely could have gotten her job back at the Minneapolis Tribune. Instead, she took the train across the country to New York City, where she went to work for the New York Daily Mirror, a tabloid owned by the notorious William Randolph Hearst. It was 1928, and Al Smith was running for president on the Democratic ticket. Hearst’s editors, willing to do anything to defeat Smith, hit upon (or created) the story of the kidnapping of a Smith College student named Frances St. John Smith. The kidnapping had nothing to do with Al Smith’s presidential campaign. But it generated the desired headlines: SMITH TERROR, SMITH HIJINKS, SMITH SCANDAL. Hick was sent to Smith College to look for stories that could generate more Smith headlines. Fortunately, she was soon able to move on from the Mirror to the Associated Press, a trusted national reporting service for member papers all over the country. In the beginning, her boss at the AP referred to her as “that girl” and sent her off to cover the unexciting deliberations of the Democratic National Committee. But over the next three years, she worked her way up to important assignments, including the genuinely sensational kidnapping of the baby of aviator Charles Lindbergh.