by Susan Quinn
Hick’s ability to get the real story served her well once again when she was assigned to cover Eleanor Roosevelt. But then, paradoxically, that same ability began to get her in trouble with her bosses. As she and Eleanor grew closer and closer, she began to know too much. It hobbled her at every turn. Eleanor had told her, for instance, of the havoc alcohol had wreaked in her immediate family. Her father and two of her uncles destroyed themselves with drink, and her brother was well on his way to doing the same. It was the reason, she explained to Hick, that she couldn’t even bear the smell of alcohol. It was the reason she had been until recently a strong supporter of Prohibition.
But other reporters, not knowing this, completely misinterpreted a comment Eleanor made about Prohibition on the campaign trail. Eleanor noted that the law was so widely disregarded as to be a joke, adding that “nowadays a girl who goes out with a boy needs to know how to handle her gin.” It was an attempt to sound nonchalant about something she didn’t feel at all nonchalant about.
Eleanor was roundly criticized in the press for having a cavalier attitude toward drinking. Hick’s bosses criticized her, in turn, for not writing a follow-up story about the comment. They even docked her pay. “I’ve been in a devil of a mess here,” Hick confided to fellow reporter Bess Furman, “over getting beaten on a story. . . . Trouble with this outfit is that they’re spoiled. Think they have to have a beat on every story.”
Bess Furman and her fellow reporters knew by that time that Hick was leaving the AP because she was in love with Eleanor Roosevelt. “Well, it won’t be long now,” Hick wrote Bess, “before she’ll be yours to worry about, not mine.”
CHAPTER FIVE
ELEANOR
WHEN SHE WAS YOUNG, Eleanor always listened for the door to open when her father arrived home, then slid down two flights of banisters into his waiting arms. “With my father,” she remembered, “I was perfectly happy.” She remembered dancing with him, “intoxicated by the pure joy of motion, twirling round and round until he would pick me up and throw me into the air and tell me I made him dizzy!”
Elliott Roosevelt adored his “pretty, companionable little daughter.” He called her “Little Nell”—a nickname that Eleanor believed he took from Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. But Elliott Roosevelt himself was called “Nell” within the family, so his Little Nell also shared her father’s name.
When her father was away, Eleanor daydreamed about him and awaited his return. She worked hard to live up to his expectations—practicing riding with the pony he sent, and trying, because she knew it would please him, to get along with Mademoiselle, the French governess she despised. She remembered for the rest of her life the times she disappointed him. Once, in Italy, when they were riding donkeys down a steep path, she became frightened and refused to follow him. She never forgot his reproach. In the Roosevelt family, lack of courage was a badge of shame.
When he was young, Elliott Roosevelt had sometimes outshone his older brother, Theodore, in the ongoing athletic competition that characterized family life at Sagamore Hill. But as they grew older, the brothers’ paths diverged. Theodore left for Harvard and embarked on a career in politics. Elliott, always seen in the family as the sweeter and gentler brother, began to have fainting spells and proved unable to compete academically. His father sent him off to ride and hunt on the Texas range. After that, he continued a life of adventure by hunting big game all around the world. When he returned home, he took up polo and began spending his time in New York Society—spelled, as Eleanor noted in her memoir, with a capital S. Alice Hall, who could trace her lineage to signers of the Declaration of Independence, was one of the most beautiful women in her social set: the poet Robert Browning asked to simply gaze upon her when she was having her portrait painted. She and Elliott married in 1883; within a year, she gave birth to their first child, a daughter named Anna Eleanor.
Eleanor’s mother came to consider her daughter a disappointment, since she had neither the beauty nor the personality to succeed in Society. “She is such a funny child,” her mother said in her presence, “so old-fashioned, that we always call her ‘Granny.’” It was a comment that made Eleanor want to “sink through the floor in shame.” Her mother’s disapproval made Eleanor long for her father’s loving arms.
But the father she adored was rarely present. Due to his alcoholism and erratic behavior, he was forbidden by family fiat from living at home during much of Eleanor’s childhood. In his absence, her loyalty to him only intensified. She knew nothing until much later of the other women in his life, and of the family’s alarm about the possibility of scandal when his mistress bore a child. Eleanor even refused for some time to believe that her father was an alcoholic. Even when she edited and published his letters, around the time she became First Lady, she claimed that his illnesses, and the pain from a polo injury, had led him to drink.
Hunting Big Game in the Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt, Sportsman was Eleanor Roosevelt’s attempt to rehabilitate the man she loved so much. Elliott’s tender side does come out in the letters to his Little Nell. But there is cruelty as well in his description of his adventures with other children during his exile in Virginia, riding over the broad fields at sunrise with horses, ponies, and fox terriers. “We rarely fail to secure some kind of game, and never return without roses in the cheeks of those I call now, my children.” He added, “Do you continue to ride? Learn the right way so I will not have to teach you all over again.”
No wonder Eleanor continued to ride horseback during her years in the White House. No wonder, too, that she often expressed her strongest emotions in letters, to Hick and to others she loved. During those long periods when her father was forbidden to visit her, his letters were her sustenance.
Hunting game, first out west and then in the Far East, seems to be the one passion Elliott Roosevelt hung on to through all the turmoil of his life. He wrote his mother proudly from Ceylon that he had “got two elephants,” and made a present to her of “my big tiger skin.” Eleanor proudly wore an oversized and clunky necklace of tiger’s teeth brought back by her father from his adventures.
When Eleanor saw her father again, at age eight, after her mother died, he told her that now that her mother was gone, “he and I must keep close together. . . . Somehow it was always he and I. I did not understand whether my brothers were to be our children. . . . There started in me . . . a feeling which never left me—that he and I were very close together, and some day would have a life of our own together.”
It must have been during this period that Eleanor developed the ability to walk at a clip that left others in the dust. She remembered walking with governesses, French maids, and German maids who were always trying to talk with her. “I walked them off their feet. . . . I wished to be left alone to live in a dream world in which I was the heroine and my father the hero. Into this world I retired as soon as I went to bed and as soon as I woke in the morning, all the time I was walking or when anyone bored me.” Her father died two years after her mother, from complications of alcoholism. Eleanor refused for some time to accept that he was gone.
Eleanor’s dream world was much warmer than the place she actually inhabited after her mother died: her maternal grandmother’s mansion on the Hudson, north of Hyde Park in Tivoli, New York. Eleanor’s grandmother was a severe Victorian who “so often said ‘no’ that I built up a defense of saying I did not want things in order to forestall her refusals and keep down my disappointments.” Grandmother Hall strived to maintain the routine set by her late husband: family prayers morning and evening and religious reading on the weekends. Young Eleanor remembered having her weekday book taken away from her and replaced with a “Sunday book” after church, only to have that one taken away on Monday until the following Sunday. She also had to teach Sunday school each week to the coachman’s daughter, and recite the hymn and collect to her grandmother.
Some of her happiest memories were of t
imes spent with servants in the house: ironing hankies and napkins alongside the “cheerful woman” who did the laundry, or lingering in the butler’s quarters with Victor, who was kind to her and taught her how to wash dishes. When she was sent to bed without dinner for some infraction, the maid sometimes managed to send up a tray of food for her. Perhaps these happy times explain in part her attraction to rough-edged working-class types like Lorena Hickok and Earl Miller later in life.
She also took refuge in the third-floor rooms of her two young aunts, who were caught up in romances and gossip about their social set. But she had almost no playmates her own age, and she lived in fear of her governess Madeleine, who punished her cruelly for small misdemeanors: if her darning was imperfect, Madeleine would cut it out and make her do it over again. At night, Madeleine took out her resentment on Eleanor by pulling her hair mercilessly as she brushed it.
Meanwhile, her two Hall uncles, Eddie and Val, were becoming wild and erratic alcoholics. Eddie once fired a shotgun out an upstairs window at guests visiting Tivoli. There is no way of knowing if her uncles’ behavior ever became physically dangerous or sexually abusive to Eleanor. But according to a friend of the family, three strong locks appeared on Eleanor’s door during the time she lived in Tivoli. She later wrote that this experience of her unpredictable uncles led her to “an almost exaggerated idea of the necessity of keeping all of one’s desires under complete subjugation.”
If it had been up to her grandmother, Eleanor might never have escaped from Tivoli. But Auntie Bye, her father’s independent sister, encouraged Grandmother Hall to send Eleanor to a school near London called Allenswood, run by a remarkable Frenchwoman named Marie Souvestre.
Auntie Bye was an important role model for Eleanor. Unlike her mother, Bye was not a beauty or a candidate for high society; she had a spinal deformity that made her lame and very thick through the shoulders. But she was highly intelligent and animated, always the center of any group she socialized with. Her house in Washington was a political and social magnet during her brother Theodore Roosevelt’s administration.
Auntie Bye had been a student at the school of Mademoiselle Souvestre when it had been based in Paris. It was that family history that convinced Eleanor’s grandmother to send Eleanor, at age fifteen, to Allenswood, where Souvestre had reestablished her school after escaping the turmoil of the Franco-Prussian War.
Had Eleanor’s grandmother looked into the credentials of Mademoiselle Souvestre, she might have kept her granddaughter at home. Souvestre, daughter of the French novelist Émile Souvestre, was a professed atheist and a progressive who sided with the Dreyfusards against anti-Semitism and even dared to criticize the imperialist excesses of the British during the Boer War. She was also a lesbian: her life’s companion was the school’s Italian teacher, Mademoiselle Samaia, who waited on her hand and foot, and tended to be jealous of Mademoiselle Souvestre’s favorite pupils. Most important, Souvestre was a feminist who expected girls to think for themselves.
Marie Souvestre’s wavy hair was white by the time Eleanor met her, and pulled tightly back from her handsome face. She had a high-domed forehead and beautiful eyes that could, as Eleanor wrote, “look through you.” “She always knew more than she was told.” Her judgment could be severe: Eleanor remembered her taking a girl’s paper and tearing it in half in disgust because the work was “shoddy.” Many of her students found Souvestre formidable. But one remembered that she had an “infectious ardor” that was “the secret of her success as a schoolmistress. . . . She communicated a Promethean fire which warmed and coloured their whole lives.”
Surprisingly, though she had often been intimidated in the past, Eleanor was completely unafraid of her new teacher. Fluent in French, she became an immediate favorite of Mademoiselle Souvestre’s and was soon sitting across from her at dinner—a prized position—and listening in on the lively talk of the headmistress’s visitors. Beatrice Webb, a Fabian socialist who sparred with Mademoiselle Souvestre on a visit to the school, described the way “every idea is brought under a sort of hammering logic, and broken into pieces unless it be of very sound metal.”
Mademoiselle Souvestre came to adore Eleanor, whom she called “Totty.” In a letter to her grandmother, Souvestre praised Eleanor’s “purity of heart, the nobleness of her thought,” her “intelligent interest in everything,” and her ability to influence others “in the right direction.”
At Allenswood, Eleanor made the first team in field hockey, danced, played games, and developed strong friendships. When one of her closest friends, a girl she called Jane in her autobiography, threw an inkstand at a teacher and was about to be expelled, Eleanor even exploded in a fit of temper—a rare loss of control that was, given her past inhibitions, a sign of progress.
Her new confidence extended to her looks: she dared, with Souvestre’s encouragement, to have a Parisian dressmaker fashion a dress for her. “I still remember my joy,” she wrote years later, “in that dark red dress.” For Eleanor, whose own mother had found her a disappointment, the motherly affection of Mademoiselle Souvestre was a great gift.
It seems unlikely that Eleanor’s relationship with the seventy-year-old Souvestre went beyond warm hugs and kisses. But another student, who attended Allenswood thirty years earlier, wrote a roman à clef about falling in love with a younger Mademoiselle Souvestre—not, she insisted, just a schoolgirl crush but a true powerful physical and emotional passion for another woman. Olivia was written in 1933 and published anonymously sixteen years later by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. It was later revealed to be the work of Dorothy Strachey Bussy, who was bisexual. She had been a student at the school, and was a teacher of Shakespeare there in Eleanor’s time. Bussy presents a conversation, in Olivia, between an exemplary student, a girl named Laura and another girl, Olivia. The two talk about the beloved headmistress.
“Do you love her?” Olivia asks her admirable friend Laura.
“Oh,” replies Laura, “you know I do. She has been the best part of my life.”
“And tell me this, Laura. Does your heart beat when you go into the room where she is? Does it stand still when you touch her hand? Does your voice dry up in your throat when you speak to her? Do you hardly dare raise your eyes to look at her, and yet not succeed in turning them away?”
“No,” said Laura. “None of that.”
Was Eleanor more like Laura, admiring and adoring her teacher without the passion Olivia describes? Or did she experience the erotic feelings that consumed Dorothy Bussy’s stand-in, Olivia, despite Mademoiselle Souvestre’s advanced age? When Olivia was published, nearly fifty years after their schooldays together at Allenswood, Eleanor and her schoolmates seemed to take Bussy’s homoerotic re-creation of the school in stride. “I am glad you liked Olivia,” classmate and lifelong friend Marjorie Bennett Vaughn wrote after hearing from Eleanor about the book. “It seemed to take me back so far.”
Eleanor may have had her share of passionate crushes on other girls at the school—the intensity of her defense of the wayward “Jane” suggests that that might have been one. “There were perhaps eight other girls in our class,” she wrote years later, “but as far as I was concerned there was no one but Jane. . . . Her glamour . . . is still with me, so that I would give much to see her walk into my room today.”
Eleanor was also the object of others’ crushes. Her cousin Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, who followed her to Allenswood, remembered the Saturday ritual of going into the nearby town of Putney and buying books and flowers. “Young girls have crushes,” she wrote, “and you bought violets or a book and left them in the room of the girl you were idolizing. Eleanor’s room would be full of flowers because she was so admired.”
Eleanor accompanied Mademoiselle Souvestre to Europe on three different occasions. They visited Florence, Rome, Pisa, Marseilles, Biarritz, and Paris together. Souvestre asked Eleanor to take charge of all the train scheduling and to
pack and unpack the bags. She encouraged her young acolyte to take her Baedeker and go out alone to explore Florence and Paris. “I really marvel now at myself,” Eleanor wrote years later. “I was totally without fear in this new phase of my life.”
Souvestre was spontaneous: she once made a split-second decision to get off a train in Italy to visit a friend. “We simply fell off onto the platform,” Eleanor remembered, “bag and baggage, just before the train started on its way. I was aghast, for my grandmother, who was far from Mlle. Souvestre’s seventy years . . . would never have thought of changing her plans once she was on the train.”
Eleanor would have thrived in college. But her old-fashioned grandmother believed that higher education was a liability in the all-important task of marrying well. Eleanor almost had to leave Allenswood after two years, because her grandmother got a report that she had been seen walking unchaperoned in a European city. Eleanor managed to appease her by finding a woman chaperone to sail back to England with her for a third year at the school.
Then it was over: Grandmother Hall insisted that she leave school and “come out” as a debutante, like her mother and aunts before her. It was wrenching for both student and teacher. Mademoiselle Souvestre “had become one of the people whom I cared most for in the world,” Eleanor wrote, “and the thought of the long separation seemed very hard to bear.” Souvestre, for her part, wrote to Eleanor, “I miss you every day of my life.”
There can be no doubt that Marie Souvestre was Eleanor Roosevelt’s second great love, after her father. She kept Souvestre’s portrait on her desk for the rest of her life.
After Allenswood, Eleanor’s coming out in New York Society proved to be “utter agony.” She still felt “deeply ashamed” that she was “the first girl in my mother’s family who was not a belle.” She much preferred teaching dancing and exercises to young girls at the settlement house on Rivington Street, where she didn’t need to worry about filling her dance card.