by Susan Quinn
CHAPTER NINE
GETTING AWAY WITH IT
HICK AND ELEANOR had been exchanging letters for months about their West Coast trip, imagining quiet and seclusion in beautiful places. But when Hick walked into the lobby of the hotel in Sacramento where they were to meet, she encountered a swarm of reporters and photographers clamoring for a story about Eleanor. Thanks in part to Hick, Eleanor was now a darling of the press—celebrated for her astounding energy and ability to turn up here, there, and everywhere. Time alone together was going to be hard to come by. But Hick had a plan.
The next day, she picked Eleanor up at the Sacramento airport and shepherded her quickly through the crush of reporters in the hotel lobby, explaining that the First Lady needed to freshen up before any interviews. As a former reporter, Hick told them, she understood their situation. They agreed, for the moment.
Unbeknownst to the reporters, Hick had arranged for a state trooper to drive her newly acquired small convertible to the rear entrance of the hotel and wait for the two of them to emerge. They took the front elevator up, then another elevator down to the rear entrance, threw their bags in the rumble seat, jumped in, and started off, with the trooper at the wheel. The Secret Service, which Eleanor usually treated as the enemy, had helped out by changing Hick’s D.C. plates for California ones.
It was no use. They hadn’t even gotten out of the city before they discovered that they were being followed. The state trooper was game and stepped on the gas pedal. Another trooper swung around in front of their car and put on his flashing red lights. Hick was worried: her little Plymouth, an inexpensive replacement for Bluette, hadn’t been broken in yet and the trooper was taking it up to higher and higher speeds.
It was Eleanor who finally called a halt to the chase. “It’s no use. Let’s stop.” She thanked the state troopers and sent them on their way. “We’ll have to find some other way out of this business.”
The reporters who crowded around the two women had one main question: where were they going? Eleanor refused to answer. “This is my vacation,” she told them, “and I expect to be treated as any other tourist would be treated.” She pulled her knitting from the backseat and announced that she would sit there all day before she told them where she was going.
Finally, they all agreed to retreat to a nearby roadside restaurant, where the reporters got a story of sorts. Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, said one account, was trying to “lose herself” and “get away from being the President’s wife.”
The two were characterized in a stereotyped way: Eleanor ladylike, Hick large and tough. Eleanor ordered only a toasted cheese sandwich and black coffee, while her companion, a “buxom businesslike individual,” who was “presumably her secretary,” ordered barbecue, beans, and buttermilk, “with utter disregard for the effect on the girth.” Then both, as a goodwill gesture, finished off with a slice of the Windmill Restaurant’s homemade apple pie à la mode. Mrs. Roosevelt’s companion, according to the restaurant owner, “looked as though she might pack quite a wallop with either the tongue or the fist.” Hick and Eleanor sped off, leaving the reporters guessing.
They were going to Colfax, California, a tiny town near the Nevada border where Ella Morse Dickinson now lived. It had been six years since Ella and Hick traveled together to California, and since Ella met and married Ray Dickinson. Even though she was devastated at the time, her friendship with “Ellie” had survived, and they still exchanged frequent letters.
Long before the visit, Eleanor had been nervous about Hick’s reconnecting with Ellie. “I’ll be glad when Ella can be with you,” she had written Hick. “I’ll dread that too just a little.” The reunion with Ellie raised questions for Hick too. She wondered, in her letters to Eleanor, if she would have been more stable if she’d married, as Ellie had.
Eleanor had answered, “Yes, dear, I think you will remember that I once told you I wished you had been happy with a man or that it might still be, I rather think that the lack of that relationship does create emotional instability but people do seem to weather it in time and who knows what the future holds. In the meantime Ellie and I will try to do a little stabilizing or at least help you to do it!”
Something like a marriage, a lifelong partnership, might have been possible with someone like Ellie. But Hick’s relationship with Eleanor could never be that. Even if Eleanor had dared to leave FDR and live openly with a woman, she was not able or willing to devote herself to just one other person. She was always going to be tied not only to a husband but to bonds of duty and friendship with many others. This was a painful realization that had grown on Hick in the years since she had met and fallen in love with her. It made this time alone together especially precious.
Eleanor had been thinking about what might have been in her own marriage. Driving with Franklin on the small roads around the Hyde Park estate, she “kept thinking of the mess we had made of our young lives here and how strange it was that I return here as indifferent and uninterested as a stranger.” She doubted that the children felt any differently, since nothing at Hyde Park had ever been their own. “It is a pity one cannot live one’s life once again,” she wrote Hick, “but at least we can try to keep one’s children from making the same mistakes.”
The children’s marriages were very much on her mind that summer. Everyone, including Hick, seemed to like Elliott’s new wife, Ruth, and were hopeful this second marriage would last. Eleanor had great hopes too for Anna’s second marriage to John Boettiger. At that moment Anna was in Reno, Nevada, fulfilling the residency requirements for a divorce from her first husband, Curtis Dall. The press had been in wild pursuit from the moment Anna arrived—to everyone’s horror, one reporter had been killed, in fact, in a car chase. The whole thing was making Eleanor “boil.”
For Eleanor, the visit with Ellie was a welcome respite from public life. For Ellie, it was a once-in-a-lifetime event—the First Lady and Hick, her former lover, stopping by for a few days on their romantic getaway out west. There were quiet dinners, picnics in the mountains, and evenings of reading aloud—things all three women loved. Eleanor read to them from Ellie’s well-thumbed edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse.
Eleanor had insisted they would do a lot of “resting and reading” on their vacation. She had also mentioned, in passing, her idea of taking a little camping trip in the mountains. Now Hick discovered that there was an elaborate plan to explore Yosemite on horseback, riding up to a lakeside camp in the High Sierras, eleven thousand feet above sea level.
“How could you do this to me?” Hick protested.
“Oh, you’ll manage,” Eleanor replied casually.
Hick had no riding experience. In fact, her first published essay, for the Lawrence College literary magazine, had described her failed attempt to stay on a horse when she was thirteen. Nor was she in any shape for such a trip: she smoked too much, and she had gained weight during her months on the road. “Long busy days,” she wrote Eleanor defensively at one point. “Lady, I get hungry.”
Eleanor surely believed she was doing Hick a favor with her Yosemite plan. She worried about Hick’s smoking and eating. She even suggested she take up knitting at one point, to cut down on cigarettes, and she wanted her to lose weight, because of her diabetes. Eleanor was following in the tradition of her uncle Theodore Roosevelt, who once threw her into the water to teach her to swim. Uncle Theodore advocated “the strenuous life” in which one “does not shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil.” A vigorous ride up the mountain would no doubt do Hick good.
For Eleanor, it was an exhilarating adventure. No longer was she the frightened little girl, reproached by her father for fearing to ride her donkey down a steep trail. Or the timid young bride on her honeymoon, left behind in the Dolomites while FDR took off up the mountain with a flirtatious rival. Now, at fifty, she was as fit and able as the rangers who guided them up the mountain. Later she would admit that the Yosem
ite plan might have been a wrong choice for Hick. “I learned that nobody who smokes a great deal and whose heart is not strong should try to camp above 10,000 feet. She more or less panted throughout the days we were there.” It did not seem to occur to Eleanor at the time that Hick was now the one she used to be, struggling not to be left behind.
Nonetheless, both Eleanor and Hick had happy memories of the trip. Hick, who loved animals, developed an attachment to her little brown mare, who knew how to maintain her footing on the steep narrow trails. The camping was comfortable: a ranger cooked flapjacks and fresh-caught trout over a fire, and she and Eleanor slept on the ground outside their tent. “It’s a wonderful experience to lie, warm and snug in a sleeping bag, high up in the mountains, and look at the stars,” Hick wrote. Eleanor remembered that “the first rays of morning light over the mountain peaks were almost as lovely as the moon light.”
Hick marveled at Eleanor’s ability to plunge into the icy lake: she tried it once and thought she would never again catch her breath. When Eleanor decided to climb higher with one of the rangers, Hick stayed behind. “When they came down, I thought that Ranger was going to have a stroke. His face was purple.” Eleanor, on the other hand, looked as though she had “come in from a stroll in Central Park.”
But as long as they could be together, without the prying eyes of press and public, Hick was content. Even when her little mare decided to take a swim and dumped her in a creek, she was only embarrassed and amused. What infuriated her were the tourists who suddenly recognized Eleanor one day when the two of them came upon some tame chipmunks. They had just started to feed the animals when they noticed that people had surrounded them and were pointing their cameras at their rear ends. Hick exploded, employing some choice profanities. The two women left in a hurry, with Eleanor trying to shush her.
The rest of the vacation followed the same pattern. There were happy times in Hick’s beloved San Francisco: a delicious evening at her favorite restaurant, Pierre New Frank’s, followed by a cable car ride to the top of Russian Hill, where she had lived with Ellie. There was a quiet talk in the moonlight looking out over the bay. But the peace of that moment was followed by the shock of their return to a hotel lobby crowded with reporters and flashing cameras.
Over and over again, their private moments were interrupted. Finally they decided to get out of San Francisco ahead of schedule and head up the coast. When they got in Hick’s Plymouth for the escape they discovered that it had been stripped bare by souvenir hunters. Even the Saint Christopher medal, which Eleanor had given Hick to protect her on her travels, was gone. On their final night together, at a hotel restaurant in Bend, Oregon, with a spectacular view of snowcapped mountains, they emerged to find yet another crowded lobby packed with curious townspeople, including the mayor.
Eleanor silently handed Hick the keys—she knew by now that Hick was likely to behave badly under such circumstances. Hick went up to their room, leaving Eleanor to deal with the crowd.
Eleanor arrived a half hour later, slamming the door behind her. “Franklin was right,” she declared. “He said I’d never get away with it, and I can’t.
“From now on I shall travel as I’m supposed to travel, as the President’s wife, and try to do what is expected of me.”
When they got back to Portland, where Eleanor was scheduled to meet FDR’s ship, returning from Hawaii, the sitting room was filled with flowers sent by the First Lady’s admirers—more flowers than either of them had ever seen in one place. To Hick, the flowers represented the future; the intimate life she and Eleanor had hoped for was simply impossible. “All you need,” she declared, looking around at the extravagant display, “is a corpse.”
Eleanor stayed on in Portland to greet FDR and her two youngest sons, Franklin Jr. and John, after their monthlong vacation on the tropical seas. “Elaborate preparations for welcoming the chief executive were receiving final approval,” the AP reported the day before his arrival. There would be bands, large crowds, dignitaries, naval officers, and several cabinet members, along with Mrs. Roosevelt and her oldest son, James.
As she prepared to resume her official role, Eleanor told the Berkeley Daily Gazette that she should have a right to privacy when on vacation. Then she added a piece of ironic advice about catching the gangster John Dillinger, who was currently on the lam. “If I had charge of the Dillinger case,” Eleanor told the reporter, “I would call off the police and send reporters after him. They would find him.”
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“DARLING, HOW I HATED to have you go,” Eleanor wrote Hick after they parted in Portland. “It is still a pretty bad ache and I’ve thought of you all day, especially as we drove along the road we had covered yesterday.”
Hick had gone on to San Francisco, where she met with the mayor to discuss the longshoremen’s strike. “There have been times,” she wrote Eleanor, “when I’ve missed you so much that it has been like a physical pain, and at those times I’ve hated San Francisco because you were not there.”
What made it harder was the realization that there was no easy solution to their longing. “I’m afraid,” Eleanor observed, “you and I are always going to have times when we ache for each other and yet we are not always going to be happy when we are together.”
After she arrived at Campobello, Eleanor received an apologetic note from Hick. “I hope you are having a happy, restful time at camp—a happier, more peaceful time than you had with me. Oh, I’m bad, my dear, but I love you so. At times it becomes just one long, dreary ache for you. But I’m trying to be happy and contented.”
Eleanor acknowledged that she was partly to blame for the tensions in the relationship. Hick might have been too demanding, but she was too restrained, too unable to express her needs. She admitted to giving everyone the feeling that “I don’t need anything from them.” Then, when they resented it, she wondered why. “I can’t help it,” she explained, “something locked me up and I can’t unlock!” It was easier for Eleanor to express her concern for the other person than her own needs. She fretted when Hick developed a stomach illness, brought on by bad water. “Oh dear one,” she wrote, “what wouldn’t I give to have you here with me to-night & know just how you are & be able to take care of you.” She worried too about “Stepchild,” the unreliable Plymouth that had replaced the wrecked Bluette.
The truth was, however, that Eleanor was more carefree at Campobello than she had been with Hick. “Yes, I am happy here,” she wrote her. Partly it was because she felt “needed and wanted.” Her adoring friend Earl Miller was there, as was Nan Cook. Eleanor’s German shepherd, Major, who had been exiled from the White House, was there too. But partly it was also “the place” that made her happy—a place that must have seemed even more precious now that privacy was so hard to come by. Campobello, a rocky island covered with pointed firs, was accessible only by boat in those days. The year-round population of sardine fishermen lived in small houses with picket fences and well-tended flower gardens. In the summer, wealthy families, including the Roosevelts, arrived to escape the summer heat on the mainland.
Eleanor and Franklin had spent a happy August in the Roosevelts’ thirty-four-room “cottage” on the island in 1904, before their marriage. In 1908 they had moved into a house of their own, thanks to a neighbor who offered it for sale to the family in her will. The furniture and dishes came with the house, but Eleanor spent many pleasure-filled hours rearranging things the way she wanted them. She loved the place, even in the fog, and Franklin did too.
“Franklin was always on vacation when he came to Campobello,” she remembered, “and many of the children’s happiest times were with him there.” Even after the terrifying days in August 1921, when FDR lay paralyzed and marooned on the island with an undiagnosed illness, Eleanor continued to love Campobello.
She described a happy moment there to Hick: “The sun is out, and the fog is rolling out to sea, and I’m sitting in the bottom of t
he boat, sniffing salt air and every now and then looking over the water to my green islands and grey rocky shores.”
Hick had visited Campobello once, during the car trip she and Eleanor took together into Canada. That was one of the rare occasions when the place was unpopulated. But for Eleanor, Campobello had always been somewhere to welcome and entertain friends—not just one special friend. Campo was never going to be the quiet cottage for two that Hick dreamed of.
At times, Eleanor had gone along with Hick’s fantasy. Earlier that year, at an exhibit of furniture made at the Val-Kill factory, she had written her about “one corner cupboard I long to have for our camp or cottage or house, which is it to be? I’ve always thought of it as in the country but I don’t think we ever decided on the variety of abode nor the furniture.” She added that “we probably won’t agree.”
By the fall of 1934, both Eleanor and Hick knew that dream had died. Hick was learning to accept, with varying degrees of success, that she wasn’t going to get all of Eleanor, as she had somehow imagined when she left the AP, but was going to have to share her with a whole host of others. There were her husband and children, of course—that went without saying. But there was also Earl, whose attentions were important and flattering, and Nan Cook, and also Louis Howe, whose support had been so critical at difficult times in the past. Louis was living at the White House, slowly dying of emphysema. When she was in town, Eleanor took him out for a drive almost every day. Most of all, there was Eleanor’s work. At night she worked on her mail until the wee hours. During the day, Tommy was constantly by her side taking dictation. Hick was still fond of Tommy, but she had learned never to hope for Eleanor’s attention when she was around: the two of them never stopped. “My real trouble is not that I don’t care enough,” Eleanor once acknowledged to Hick, “but that for so many years I’ve let my work engulf me . . . it has become my master!”
Hick understood that she was either going to have to share Eleanor Roosevelt with her work and with the rest of the world or lose her altogether. She acknowledged that she was “the worst of the lot” in asking and expecting too much from her beloved Eleanor. But she insisted she was trying not to be that way anymore. She added and underlined, “I’m going to succeed.”