by Susan Quinn
The Roosevelts had a more casual attitude toward the White House than many of its previous inhabitants. “There was a sense of cluttered, natural comfort and democratic hospitality,” Marion Dickerman remembered. Since they were aristocrats themselves, Martha Gellhorn noted, both of the Roosevelts were quite used to big houses. “It was one of the most pleasing and easy-going, amusing places you could possibly be in.” The White House was also an ancestral home of sorts, familiar to Eleanor and Franklin from the presidential term of their uncle/cousin Theodore.
Eleanor rearranged the second-floor living space in a way that helped humanize the oversized rooms, with their tall ceilings and grand windows. At one end of the vast central hall, she replaced Mrs. Hoover’s palms, bamboo furniture, and canary cages with big sofas and chairs slip-covered in cotton—not unlike those in the library at the big house in Hyde Park—and closed it off with folding screens. That space became the West Hall breakfast nook, where Eleanor launched the day—with Hick if she was in town between field trips. Breakfast was a more bountiful meal than most at the Roosevelt White House: juice, eggs, muffins, popovers, bacon. The president’s little dog Fala was always on hand, ready to do his tricks in exchange for a few bites of toast from Eleanor. After that, the First Lady would retreat behind the New York Times.
Eleanor ate sparingly, Hick remembered. “Fala and I did not.” Fala would come around to her side of the table and beg every crumb of bacon he could get. “I think he always thought of me as ‘the bacon woman.’”
Eleanor would pour café au lait—a drink she had learned to love as a schoolgirl in England—out of two pots, one in either hand. It was a “remarkably deft performance.” Hick always drank hers in a big blue-and-white willow ware cup.
Mrs. Hoover had carefully redone the Monroe Room, with Monroe-era replicas of fine French furniture. But this too Eleanor undid, turning it into another sitting room, furnished with her own blue velvet chairs and sofas. It was there that she passed out candied fruit and useful information to the “news gals,” comfortably ensconced on chairs, sofas, and, when necessary, the floor. The replica chairs were dispersed to other parts of the house.
The Oval Room, which sat like a large button right in the middle of the classic rectangular layout, had served as a sitting room with a grand piano in the Hoover era. Now it became FDR’s study—stuffed with the objects of an inveterate collector. A British visitor who kept a diary described it as “a delightful oval room . . . and one of the most untidy rooms I have ever seen. It is full of junk. Half-opened parcels, souvenirs, books, papers, knick-knacks, and all kinds of miscellaneous articles lie about every-where, on tables, on chairs, and on the floor.”
Nautical prints and ship models covered the walls, along with portraits of FDR’s mother and wife. A herd of ceramic pigs, and at least one donkey, were part of the crowd on his large desk. Conveniently, the Oval Room adjoined FDR’s bedroom and bath. From his bed, he had a fine view of the Washington Monument out the south-facing window.
There were sliding doors connecting FDR’s bedroom to Eleanor’s suite of rooms next door, but at some point he had them blocked with a large seven-drawer highboy. Nonetheless, Eleanor visited FDR most mornings as he breakfasted and planned out his day.
Eleanor also enjoyed a view of the Washington Monument from her southwest corner suite, and wrote in “My Day” that she always looked at it first thing in the morning and just before she went to bed at night. “It would be impossible to live in the White House and forget the Father of our country, for his monument is the one thing you never lose sight of if you look out of any of the south windows.”
Eleanor used the large room as an office, and the small adjoining room (probably designed originally for a valet) as her bedroom. This too resembled the arrangement at the big house in Hyde Park, where FDR had the big bedroom and Eleanor occupied a spartan cot in a room next door. Eleanor’s overnight guests usually stayed in the bedroom at the northwest corner of the building, which contained Lincoln’s bed.
Hick, who lived in the White House off and on throughout the Roosevelt presidency, stayed in the little room adjoining the one with the Lincoln bed. Her budget was tight, and it cost nothing to stay at the White House when she was in Washington. “But that wasn’t the only reason I stayed on at the White House, although I never told Mrs. Roosevelt,” Hick confessed in her unpublished autobiography. “I couldn’t bear the idea of being in Washington and hardly ever seeing her. And with her schedule as heavy as it was, I was certain that that was the way it would be. Even staying in the house I used to think I did not see very much of her—but at that I think I fared better than most of her friends.”
Often when she was in town, Hick would get in at 10:30 or 11:00 at night and stop by Eleanor’s sitting room, where Eleanor was usually buried in mail. If Eleanor was out for the evening, she would sometimes come into Hick’s room when she got home and sit on the end of the bed to talk.
Hick’s little room at the White House wasn’t fancy. The furniture—a bed, a dressing table, a desk that jiggled, a rocking chair—was painted gray. A commode served as a night table, and there was a reading lamp on it that had a tendency to blink on and off. There was a dangerously small ashtray. Hick replaced it with a larger one from the dime store after a cigarette rolled off and burned a hole in the lace cover. There was also a comfortable green-and-brown overstuffed chair.
What made the room special, however, was the fireplace. “It was so placed that I could look into the fire only while in bed. But I never knew any greater comfort or luxury than lying in the bed with the flu . . . looking into that fire.” What’s more, someone came in twice a day with logs, poked up the fire, and swept the ashes.
Once, when the exiled king of the Serbs visited, Hick moved to the third floor so that his valet could stay next to him. It was one of the rare occasions on which the bedroom plan fulfilled the eighteenth-century architect’s intentions. After the king left, Hick found one of his collar buttons in the corner of a dresser drawer and kept it as a souvenir.
There were some things Eleanor especially appreciated about the White House. She and FDR made good use of the swimming pool, which was added during their time. Eleanor was also, as she wrote in her “My Day” column, grateful to Mrs. Coolidge for installing a sun parlor on the third floor where the grandchildren could play and guests could recuperate. She loved having her family occupying the third floor, which was really “a little household with a kitchen of its own.” It was “very amusing to go up at noon into the sun parlor and see the babies in their carriages and the older ones sitting at the table with their nurses, each one trying to show how proficient they are in table manners.”
Missy’s room was on the third floor, as were the servants’ rooms and the room the Roosevelts called the “Chamber of Horrors,” repository of all the many peculiar and unusable gifts that arrived at the Roosevelt doorstep. There too was Eleanor’s Christmas closet: a room she filled with gifts throughout the year, and kept well supplied with wrapping paper and ribbon. Eleanor managed to give thoughtful presents to an astoundingly long list of acquaintances; she kept a record of each year’s gifts in a thick alphabetized notebook. In her letters to Hick, she often mentioned that she’d been working on her Christmas list or in her Christmas closet.
Holidays were the times when Eleanor seemed to enjoy the White House most. She avoided the nightly “children’s hour,” where FDR poured drinks and joked with his entourage. That kind of gathering, which required everyone to laugh at FDR’s stories and put up with his teasing, made her uncomfortable. But she was an entirely different person on special occasions like FDR’s birthday and the annual Gridiron roastings, when parody and outrageous costumes were the order of the day. When there was a big inclusive celebration, with a planned program, she lost her usual inhibitions and took part with something close to abandon.
Even though Hick lived in the White House whenever she was in
Washington, she retreated to her New York life when friends and family of the Roosevelts descended for special occasions. She was happy to have her private Christmas celebration with Eleanor, usually in New York, and hear about the White House festivities from Eleanor after it was over.
Christmas was the biggest White House occasion by far during the Roosevelt years. That was when FDR read Dickens’s Christmas Carol aloud, doing all the voices, to the family. That was when all those presents piling up in the locked Christmas closet on the third floor finally came tumbling out and into the hands of friends and relatives. That was when, as Eleanor’s grandson Curtis Roosevelt recalled so touchingly in his memoir Too Close to the Sun, his grandmother’s “normal reserve” broke down. “All the preparations and festive merrymaking were permeated with a feeling of gaiety, and everyone, especially my grandmother, embraced the old-fashioned yuletide spirit.” Along with everyone else in the family, she spent hours decorating the private, twenty-foot tall Christmas tree in the East Hall, placing real candles on all the branches to add to the excitement. The six-foot tall Roosevelt sons had the job of climbing up to light the highest ones.
Christmas morning, the stockings were hung in FDR’s bedroom, and the children waited impatiently for the adults to appear. “While waiting, we would have identified our particular stocking, overstuffed with presents—truly overflowing because my grandmother always liked to add just one more small item to an already full stocking.” Later in the day, there would be a few bigger presents to open under the tree.
Often when the Roosevelt children got together, the discussions were so heated that outsiders were alarmed. “What I loved about this Christmas ritual,” Curtis wrote many years later, “was the sense of our family gathered together—a rare occasion when the usual conflicts and tensions were subdued and less competitiveness was on display.”
Being together at Christmastime meant a lot to Eleanor too. In 1935, when Anna and her family stayed on the West Coast, she wrote that she and the dogs “felt very sad every time we passed your door it was hard to decorate the tree or get things distributed at the afternoon party without you and I dread dinner tomorrow night . . . and if anyone says much I shall weep for I’ve had a queer feeling in my throat whenever I thought of you. Kiss Sis and Buzz and tell them . . . we miss them very much.”
Despite her efforts, however, the White House was never going to be the home Eleanor had sought for much of her life. Val-Kill had been her first attempt to create a home of her own. For ten years, starting in 1926, it was indeed a simple and pleasing retreat, away from the big house. But Val-Kill was shared with Marion Dickerman and Nan Cook. It would become entirely her own in the end, but only after a prolonged and difficult negotiation.
The very first place Eleanor could truly call her own was her apartment at 20 East 11th Street, in Greenwich Village. She began renting it in October 1935, just as she was turning fifty-one, midway through FDR’s first term in the White House. Everything about her “little apartment,” as she always called it, was liberating—beginning with the midnight train ride she usually took to get there from D.C.
“I really feel quite at home in the little room on that train,” Eleanor confided in “My Day.” The porter didn’t even have to ask her what time she wanted to be awakened. Once in New York, the days were never long enough: there was Christmas shopping always, there were fittings for clothes at Arnold Constable or Milgrim, lunches and teas out with friends, and many, many evenings at the theater.
The apartment was a floor-through third-floor walk-up in an elegant brick town house owned by Esther Lape and her partner, Elizabeth Read. Eleanor had visited Esther and Lizzie there often in the 1920s, and her friendship with them was an important part of what she later called “the intensive education of Eleanor.” In fact, the very first entry in the FBI’s large file on Eleanor Roosevelt, accumulated over her years of activism, concerns the work she did with Lape and Read, along with Narcissa Cox Vanderlip, in 1924, on the effort to establish a World Court.
Nan Cook and Marian Dickerman had an apartment only a few blocks away from Eleanor’s, on West 12th Street. Just across the hall from them lived Molly Dewson, a key player in the Democratic Party who became a great friend, along with her partner, Polly Porter. The books on their shelves were stamped “Porter-Dewson.”
None of these women used the word “lesbian,” but those in their circle, including Eleanor, understood that they were lovers and partners for life. In the Village, they could live without constant fear of disapproval.
“The easy unconventionality,” observed the writer of The WPA Guide to New York City, “the charming old houses, comfortable as an old shoe, still invite the Villager, emerging from the subway after a visit to more formal neighborhoods, to drag off his or her hat and swing along home.”
The freer atmosphere of the Village attracted some of New York’s most important writers and thinkers. Willa Cather, whose work both Hick and Eleanor admired, lived there for twenty-one years with her companion, Edith Lewis, and hosted a salon on Fridays, with delicacies prepared by her French cook. Ida Tarbell, who brought down Standard Oil with her two-volume exposé, lived on 9th Street. Mabel Dodge, who inspired a prose poem by Gertrude Stein and a sculpture by Jo Davidson, attracted those in the know to her stunning all-white living room on the second floor at 23 Fifth Avenue. The Provincetown Players made MacDougal Street their winter home, and from there launched the career of one of America’s most important playwrights, Eugene O’Neill.
Many of these inhabitants of the Village were quite conventional. Marianne Moore and Willa Cather were, as critic Alfred Kazin noted, “about as rakish as Calvin Coolidge.” But a much wilder world existed a few blocks away, around Sheridan Square, where there were tearooms and restaurants owned and openly enjoyed by a more daring gay crowd. Such places no doubt inspired the 1936 article in Current Psychology and Psychoanalysis entitled “Degenerates of Greenwich Village,” which described the Village as a “mecca for exhibitionists and perverts of all kinds.” More benign stereotypes surfaced in the 1932 Clara Bow film Call Her Savage, in which the actress visits a dive where male couples and female couples sit with their arms around each other, and young men wait tables wearing frilly white aprons and maid’s caps.
Eleanor’s apartment was in the elegant part of the Village, just a few blocks from Washington Square, at an address even her mother-in-law would approve of. Yet when she came there, the Secret Service, the press, and the general public left her, miraculously, alone. For Eleanor, who hated being watched and followed, this was a great gift. It meant she could walk the streets and interact with other people, unencumbered by the distancing barrier of fame.
In her letters and in her column, Eleanor always describes the apartment as a happy place. “Now I am here and I am unpacked and feeling very content,” she wrote Hick. Eleanor had a copy made of Hick’s photo, to keep at West 11th Street. “This is a haven.” It was a “hideaway,” she told her “My Day” readers, a place where she could wake up after a good night’s sleep and enjoy “a cheerful breakfast by the open fire.” It was a place where she could stretch summer into October, lunching on her porch when “the sun was shining in so brightly it was almost too warm.” It was a place she loved to come to and hated to leave.
The greatest advantage of the apartment was that it allowed Eleanor to dictate who would come when, without having to contend with all the competing demands and jealousies that surrounded her at Hyde Park and the White House. When Hick was in New York, she and Eleanor often met for dinner and the theater. When that happened, Eleanor would invite Hick to bring a robe and stay with her at the place that felt most like home.
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FOR HICK, who had been kicked out of her own home at fourteen and spent many of her subsequent years trying to belong in an unwelcoming world, the idea of being allowed to stay at the White House was thrilling and intimidating all at once. The first night she stayed
there, and was urged by Eleanor to “go say goodnight to the President,” she was suddenly “scared stiff” of FDR, “a man with whom I had joked and laughed with complete ease when he was governor of New York.”
Hick was deeply embarrassed one summer night after she unknowingly opened the windows and caused the room humidifier to overflow, soaking the rug and even seeping into the president’s bedroom. No permanent damage was done, but for several days afterward she snuck into the state dining room immediately below to make sure there were no water stains on the ceiling.
FDR teased Hick about the incident for some time afterward. “It seems to me, Hick,” he would say at lunch or dinner, “that Washington is a little less humid than it was.” Then he would turn his gaze toward her. “What do you think, Hick?”
“I think you are right, Mr. President,” she would answer meekly.
Hick worked hard to make herself inconspicuous when she stayed at the White House. If she heard the bell sound announcing that FDR was about to use the clumsy elevator, she would slip back into the adjoining room and wait until he had passed by in his wheelchair. The president even remarked once to Eleanor that he never knew when Hick was around.
Awed though she was, Hick took advantage of many of the perks the White House offered. When she was on the road working for Harry Hopkins, she sent her laundry back to the place she and Eleanor both referred to as her home. When she was in town, the White House seamstress, Frankie, refitted Eleanor’s hand-me-down dresses so Hick could wear them. “The dresses are going to be perfect,” Hick reported to Eleanor. “The black one really needs very little alteration—just moving some fasteners and shortening the skirt and sleeves! And the evening gown can be fixed quite easily, too. Thank you—and I shall love wearing them.”