Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  Hick’s success as a journalist didn’t carry over into her personal life. She had other brief affairs after the breakup with Ellie. But there were times when, in her loneliness, she misjudged the situation, as happened with fellow journalist Katherine Beebe. The two women were both working at the AP at the time, sharing a room as they covered the Lindbergh kidnapping. Hick was ill and Beebe took care of her. Then, to Beebe’s surprise, Hick “made for me.”

  “It knocked me off my base,” Beebe remembered. When Hick realized her mistake, she apologized. “You were just so sweet to me that it undid me,” she explained. She went on to talk about her “tendency.”

  Beebe confessed she didn’t know “what women do.”

  Hick answered, “No, and you don’t want to know.”

  They remained friends but “never another word was said about it.”

  Hick maintained friendships with a wide array of journalists, theater people, and politicians from various phases of her life. But after Ellie, she lived most of the time alone, except for Prinz. One year, she sent her friends a Christmas card with a perky drawing of a young Prinz, with one ear cocked, above the greeting “A Very Merry Christmas to You and Yours from Me and Mine.” Now she was in love once more, with the woman who was about to become First Lady.

  —

  FOR THE MOST PART, FDR felt the same way about Hick that he did about Eleanor’s other women friends. As long as the press and public didn’t notice anything irregular—and it is remarkable that they almost never did—he was happy to have Eleanor go about her own separate life, just as he went about his. He also appreciated Hick’s coverage, which depicted his wife as charmingly, rather than shockingly, unconventional.

  In December 1932, when she took the 3:18 a.m. train from Albany to New York City to greet her son Elliott’s new baby, Mrs. Roosevelt had to borrow pocket money from the Secret Service man. In January, when she traveled to Washington to visit Mrs. Hoover, she turned down a limousine in order to walk over from the Mayflower Hotel to the White House. In February, Mrs. Roosevelt chose her wardrobe for the inauguration in one afternoon—everything in blue for mixing and matching, and removable sleeves to allow one dress to be used on more than one occasion. Someone decided to call the shade she chose “Eleanor blue,” in a nod to the tradition of First Ladies as fashion trendsetters.

  FDR found nothing to object to in any of this coverage. But on February 13, a story appeared that enraged him: WIFE OF NEXT PRESIDENT TO DRIVE ALONE TO CAPITAL read the headline. “Accompanied by her two dogs, Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt plans on March 3 to drive her own car, a roadster, to Washington, where the next day she will begin her career in the White House.” Mrs. Roosevelt explained that someone would have to take the dogs—a Scottish terrier named Meggie and a police dog named Major. She liked to drive, and it gave her a chance to get away. “These first few weeks in Washington are going to be strenuous,” she pointed out. What she didn’t say in the article, authored of course by Hick, was that Hick was going to be at her side.

  FDR strenuously objected. It was the only time, Roosevelt adviser Raymond Moley said, that he heard FDR complain about his wife’s independence. It was a matter of appearances: he wanted the entire family to travel together to Washington, on the train. Eleanor acceded to his wishes. In typical Roosevelt style, the train party numbered in the dozens: the whole family, of course, including mother Sara, as well as FDR’s cabinet designates, political advisers, and close friends. Eleanor also brought her retinue: Hick came along and watched over the dogs, as did Nan Cook, Marion Dickerman, Earl Miller, and several others.

  But as soon as the Roosevelt party arrived at Union Station, Eleanor returned to her previous plan—to be alone with Hick as she faced the ordeal of her return. Before they separated at the train station in Washington, Eleanor made sure Hick would come to the side entrance of the Mayflower Hotel early the next morning. She wanted to take her along on a pilgrimage “to something that used to mean a very great deal to me when we were in Washington before.”

  As soon as Hick’s cab pulled up the next morning, Eleanor slipped quickly out the door of the Mayflower and told the driver to go to Rock Creek Cemetery, directing him, when they arrived, through a maze of narrow roads to a semicircle of small shrubs surrounding a hexagonal plot. She led the way to a stone bench facing a towering bronze figure, so heavily shrouded that its face was almost hidden in darkness.

  After a long silence, Eleanor said, “In the old days, when we lived here, I was much younger and not so very wise. Sometimes I’d be very unhappy and sorry for myself. When I was feeling that way, if I could manage it, I’d come out here, alone, and sit and look at that woman. And I’d always come away somehow feeling better. And stronger. I’ve been here many, many times.”

  The spectral figure was created as a memorial to Henry Adams’s wife, Clover, who committed suicide in a particularly terrible way, by ingesting the chemicals she otherwise used in her work as a photographer. The sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, called the work The Mystery of the Hereafter and the Peace of God That Passeth Understanding, but it is more often referred to as Grief. Eleanor had visited the statue alone in the past, obeying her grandmother’s dictum that strong emotions should only be expressed in private. Bringing Hick along to see the statue was an act of great trust and affection.

  Saint-Gaudens used both men and women as models for the sculpture, and the stoic face, with its cast-down eyes, transcends gender. “All the sorrow humanity had ever had to endure was expressed in that face,” Hick wrote afterward. “I could almost feel the hot, stinging unshed tears behind the lowered eyelids.”

  Later that day, back at her hotel, Hick got another call from Eleanor. Franklin was tied up, she told Hick, working with James on the final draft of his acceptance speech. “The other children are all out, and I’m alone. Would you mind coming over and dining with me?”

  At the Mayflower, Hick made her way through a lobby swarming with reporters eager for small bits of information. But she was no longer part of the melee. The Secret Service men were expecting her, and showed her to a special elevator that whisked her up to the Presidential Suite. Neither Eleanor nor Hick had much appetite for dinner that night, knowing as they did that the fate of the nation depended on Franklin Roosevelt, who was working on his speech in the sitting room next door.

  In recent days, the financial crisis had gotten still worse. The wealthy feared that FDR would ruin them, and were fleeing the market. Everyone else hoped the new president would rescue them from financial ruin. Days before the inauguration, banks closed in waves—first in Ohio, then New Jersey, Arkansas, and Maryland. Late that night, as FDR honed the draft of his speech, governors in New York and Illinois decided to close down their banking systems. By the next day, thirty-four out of forty-eight states had shut down their banks. People couldn’t buy milk or bread or gasoline. Cars were abandoned, out of gas, in the middle of the road. Riots seemed imminent in several cities. Everything now depended on FDR’s ability to calm a situation bordering on mass hysteria.

  Late in the evening, FDR sent the final draft of his speech next door to his wife. Eleanor read it aloud to Hick. Eleanor thought it “a good speech, a courageous speech.” As Hick listened to the now-famous words “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” it occurred to her that she was right in the middle of what, that night, was the biggest story in the world. She could have slipped out to the telephone and given the AP the essence of it, with a few choice quotations. If she had, it would have been the biggest scoop of her career. But she didn’t slip out. Instead, she slipped off her dress and shoes and put on the dressing gown Eleanor handed her. By the time Eleanor returned from saying good night to her husband, Hick was asleep in the bedroom of her friend, who had become more important to her than any scoop.

  The next day, Hick became the first reporter to interview a First Lady at the White House on Inauguration Day—a rare opportunity t
hat infuriated the Washington press corps. But Hick didn’t feel at all triumphant: in fact, she reverted in her story to an old, self-mocking persona she had assumed in her cub reporter days. An usher appeared and told her that Mrs. Roosevelt wanted to meet with her in the sitting room. “Stepping out of the elevator, I slipped on the waxed floor, turned an ankle, and nearly fell. . . . Limping, but on tiptoe, I followed the usher.” Hick never managed to describe much beyond her awe and discomfort at being in the White House, in the presence of the president and First Lady at a historic moment. The story is long and overinflated—completely unlike Hick’s earlier writing about Eleanor.

  Years later, Hick would claim that she “ceased to be a reporter” on inauguration eve, when she heard FDR’s entire speech and didn’t do a thing about it. But in fact, her reporter role had begun to erode months before, fading as her affection for Eleanor Roosevelt grew. She continued to work for the AP for another three and a half months, covering the tax-fraud trial of banker Charles E. Mitchell, because she understood it better than anyone else at the bureau. Occasionally she wrote a light feature piece about the First Lady.

  Increasingly, however, her name appeared in the body of the stories rather than in the byline. She was “Miss Lorena Hickok of New York,” accompanying Eleanor Roosevelt as “a friend” or “a companion.” In June, she resigned from the AP. On July 26, she was identified in one story as “Miss Lorena Hickok, a former New York newspaperwoman.”

  It had taken Hick seventeen years to move from the society pages of the Milwaukee Sentinel to a top spot in the New York offices of the Associated Press, where she had “achieved standing . . . that no other woman had matched.” It was slowly dawning on her, and on Eleanor too, that all of that was now in jeopardy.

  Late Monday night, after Hick had left for New York following the inauguration, Eleanor sat down to write her a letter: “Hick, my dearest,” it began, “I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you . . . you have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you even though I’m busy every minute.”

  The letter ended, “O! darling, I hope on the whole you will be happier for my friendship. I felt I had brought you so much discomfort and hardship today and almost more heartache than you could bear and I don’t want to make you unhappy. All my love and I shall be saying to you over thought waves in a few minutes—

  “Good night my dear one

  Angels guard thee

  God protect thee

  My love enfold thee

  All the night through.”

  The letter, the first of thousands that Eleanor and Hick would exchange over a lifetime, was dated March 5, 1933. Two days later, Hick would turn forty. Her old life as a newspaper reporter was over. As of that moment, she had no idea how she would live her new one. But she knew she wanted to live it with Eleanor Roosevelt.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  LORENA

  IN 1907, WHEN LORENA HICKOK was fourteen, she went to work in a bindery in the little town of Bowdle, South Dakota. The job lasted only a few days, because she couldn’t master the machine. But the forelady, trying to teach her how to use it, addressed her as “my dear.” Those words worked their magic on the motherless Lorena. “I can still feel the warm glow that suffused my lonely, adolescent heart,” she remembered years later. “But at quitting time she fired me!”

  Hick told this story in her autobiography to illustrate that she learned early in life “never to expect love or affection from anyone.” But the truth was that she never ceased to melt when she was treated kindly. Despite many rejections, and the cruelty she experienced through much of her childhood, she hung on to the hope of a different future.

  Never once did her father beat her, Hick remembered, “when I didn’t mutter, inaudibly behind my gritted teeth: ‘You wouldn’t dare do this to me if I were as big as you are.’” By the time she was fifteen, Lorena had vowed that she was “not always going to be an underdog.” In 1932, as a respected national reporter, Hick was no longer an underdog—in fact, she was closer to being a top dog. But Eleanor’s affection touched a longing even more powerful than her determination to succeed in her career.

  Alice Lorena Hickok was born on March 7, 1893, in the little town of East Troy, Wisconsin. Her mother, Anna Waite, was already thirty-seven when she married Addison Hickok, a buttermaker in rich dairy country. Anna’s family had a thriving farm, and she herself was not without resources: she was working as a seamstress at the time. The family disapproved of the marriage from the start—a fact that no doubt stiffened Anna’s resolve to make it work.

  Hick’s happiest memories were of life on the farm, and especially of farm animals. “I cannot remember when I decided that I liked animals better than people,” she wrote years later, “but all my life I have felt more at ease with them.” She put her doll in the pig trough so it could eat along with the piglets, and she spent time trying to figure out what the hens were saying to each other in the chicken coop. “That animals could and did talk among themselves I had not the slightest doubt. It never even occurred to me that they couldn’t.” She sensed that animals’ judgment was “based on something deeper than what you look like, how you are dressed or how you rate with your fellow humans.”

  When Lorena was eight, the family left farm life behind, and her father began a desperate odyssey, trying and failing at one job after another in the small prairie towns of northeastern South Dakota. Lorena’s childhood became “a confusing, kaleidoscopic series of strange neighborhoods, different schools, new teachers to get acquainted with, playmates whom I never got to know very well.”

  South Dakota had its own kind of treeless beauty. The ceaseless wind created great snowbanks during the harsh winters and rippled the wheat in summer. The vast open plain, stretching to the horizon in all directions, made everything seem possible. Hick would fondly remember the glorious sunsets of South Dakota all her life. But the little towns were dreary places, by-products of Milwaukee’s railroad drive westward. Most consisted of one main street of single-story wood houses, no more than a few blocks long, with saloons that rowdy cowboys came to on Saturday night to get drunk. Shooting stray cats was a favorite pastime of the locals.

  The wheat farmers, German-speaking refugees from Russian lands, were a tamer lot than the cowboys. Hick and her friends were fascinated by the “Russian” women, who would sit along the edge of the board sidewalk and nurse their babies. But her mother, and the other settlers from “back East,” strongly disapproved of such unrefined behavior.

  Hick described her father as “the most undisciplined person I ever knew”—a mild way of characterizing a man who seemed to go through life in a permanent rage. “He was always losing his temper and whipping horses, beating us children—especially me—getting into fights with his employers and losing his job.” One of her early memories was of her father thrusting the tips of her fingers into her mouth and making her bite them, “holding my jaws together with his big, strong hands, until the tears rolled down my cheeks,” supposedly to cure her of biting her nails.

  Another time, her mother took her into the bedroom and held her on her lap, weeping. “From without came whistling, crackling sounds and yelps of pain from my puppy.” Hick’s puppy Mayno had been chasing wagons, and her father was beating him with a horsewhip. It was the first time Hick remembered being angry herself. When she and her two younger sisters dawdled one morning with a new kitten, their father took the kitten and dashed its brains out by throwing it against the barn, where they would pass the remains on the way to school. Later that day, Lorena returned to bury it in a shallow grave.

  Lorena’s mother wept a great deal, but didn’t seem able to stand up to her husband. Once, after he beat Lorena with the stave from a butter keg, leaving black-and-blue marks all over her back and legs, she heard her mother objecting. Another time, when he knocked her down, her mother asked, “Do you mean to kill the child?” But Hick learned earl
y on “not to look to my mother for protection from my father.”

  Reading became young Lorena’s salvation. She loved strong heroes like Jesse James. Ben Hur “thundered triumphantly into the world of my imagination, followed rapidly by an assortment of strange, colorful, and incongruous characters.” Once, she got to see a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. “I got so excited when Little Eva, a child about my own age, with long, golden curls, went up to heaven in her little white nightie . . . all the slaves moaning in the background, that I became ill and had to be dragged out to the washroom.” Lorena’s lifelong passion for the theater may have been born that night.

  Music was a companion from early on. “Ever since I can remember,” Hick wrote in her unpublished autobiography, “through almost every waking hour, music has run through me, somewhere in the back of my throat.” Unfortunately, Lorena’s contralto voice, which seemed made for church solos, was the source of one of her worst conflicts with her father as she approached adolescence. Tall for her age, and convinced she was “hopelessly ugly,” she hated to perform in public. Her stubbornness about performing infuriated her father. He gave her one of his worst whippings because she refused to sing a solo one evening in church.

  Life was especially hard for Hick’s mother in the dusty little towns along the rail line in South Dakota, so far from the green dairy country of her Wisconsin past. Hick remembers one excursion with her mother to what was supposed to be a lake but turned out to be “a mud hole filled with rushes and surrounded by a grove of dusty cottonwoods.” Hick’s mother sat in the surrey, the reins in her hands, and “cried as though her heart were breaking.”